“Aren’t they? You were. I can remember looking out of the navigator’s window and seeing the church steeples go by.”
Silk was silent. His shoulders were hunched and his mouth was compressed. Painful memories. Painful because he could remember the happiness of living a blink away from death.
“Forget it, Silko. That was then and now is now,” Freddy said. “Air Ministry is looking for serious, mature aircrew with big flying hours, counted by the thousand. We want great experience, proven flying skills, self-discipline, balance, solidity. Good health, obviously.”
“All right,” Silk said cautiously. “Suppose I did a tour. I see more of Zoë, but when the tour’s over you post me to Hong Kong. She won’t live in Hong Kong.”
“It’s a five-year tour. All part of the policy. We keep the same crew together, on the same base, for five years. Think of it. Bags of flying, and Zoë nearby, for five long years.”
Silk studied the photograph. “Big beast, isn’t she?”
“Handles like a Spitfire with twice the speed, and one sortie can do more damage than the whole of Bomber Command managed in the entire war... Now I really must go.”
“What are those engines?”
“Bristol Olympus jet turbines. Twenty thousand pounds of thrust each. Noise like a volcano. Kick like an earthquake. Don’t get up. The Vulcan leads the world, Silko. Think of that. And Zoë, of course.”
“Tell me one thing.” Silk said. “If it’s so damn special, how come you need new crews so badly?”
“A couple of bad prangs,” Freddy said. “And the odd suicide. We’ll talk tomorrow, shall we?” He strode away.
2
It was a long and strenuous medical. First he met the Chief Medical Officer, a wing commander. “I don’t smoke, I drink the occasional beer, and I swim half a mile every day if I can find a pool,” Silk told him. “No venereal disease, and no insanity in the family.”
“All pilots are slightly mad,” the CMO said.
“Not this one.”
“Well, that’s what you said once. It’s down here, in your records.” He held up a typed page. “Must be true. Take your clothes off.”
All day, men in white coats tested his health and strength, his stamina and resilience. They made him toil at a series of machines until his legs cramped and his lungs burned and sparks raced across his eyeballs. They measured his reactions. They looked deep into his eyes and ears and throat. They seemed obsessed with his blood pressure and his pulse. Finally they said he could get dressed. “Thank God that’s over,” he said.
“It’s only just begun.”
They strapped him to the end of a centrifuge forty feet long, and spun it at increasing speeds until his eyes greyed out and finally blacked out.
“G forces,” he said. “Tremendous fun.” They said nothing.
Next day began with sea survival training: several hours, dressed in flying kit, with or without a lifejacket, in an indoor pool where artificial waves fought to keep him out of a rubber dinghy. Then – wet, cold and hungry – he was put in a flight simulator. Nobody told him that the controls and the instruments were all reversed. To bank right, you had to steer left. The altimeter revolved the wrong way. Green meant red. Ten years with Air America’s mongrel fleet helped Silk here. He adjusted rapidly, even when some hidden bastard pressed a switch and reversed the reverse. It was a game. They tired of it before he did, and sent him to the decompression chamber to see how his heart and lungs liked going up to and coming down from great height. That was definitely not fun; but he came through it, went back to the white coats, gave blood and urine samples, even had a cup of tea and a biscuit. “What did I score?” he asked.
“Score? There is no score.” Which made him think.
Next day was very relaxed. A few x-rays, some hearing and eyesight tests, a good lunch, a long wait in a room where the armchairs were comfortable. An army officer came in: a colonel, fiftyish, red moustache, three rows of medal ribbons, clipboard. “Milk?” he barked. “Flying Officer Milk?”
“No, sir. Silk. Flight Lieutenant.”
“Damn.” The colonel took a pencil from behind his ear and altered the sheet on the clipboard. “Bloody admin orderlies... Makes no difference. You’ve got the chop, Silk. Blown it. Flunked, as the Yanks say. Down the pan.” He rapped the clipboard with his knuckles. “If this is the best you can do, you’re not fit to drive a Naafi van.”
“That’s... disappointing, sir.”
“What? It’s bloody unpatriotic.” He advanced on Silk and poked him in the chest with the pencil. “You thought you could bullshit your way into Bomber Command! Look at these fucking pathetic scores! What? What have you got to say?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“A gentlemen would apologise!” The pencil-prodding got harder. “Damned insolence! Damned arrogance! Don’t try to deny it. To think we fought two wars for the shoddy, shabby likes of you.” Spots of saliva were reaching Silk’s tunic.
“Three wars, sir.” Silk pointed at one of the colonel’s medal ribbons. “Isn’t that the Boer War medal? Sixty years ago. You must have been jolly young.”
The colonel’s face turned red. He began to shout. He damned and insulted Silk, cursed him for a sponger and a wastrel and a fraud, and stamped out.
Ten minutes later an orderly arrived and escorted Silk to the Chief Medical Officer. “Boer War gong,” he said. “How did you know?”
“My uncle won it. Used to wear it every Armistice Day. Anyway, what’s a pongo colonel doing in Bomber Command?”
“Testing your self-control, see if you would crack. It’s a bloody silly idea, but just occasionally it draws blood... Anyway, you’re medically fit to fly Vulcans.” He signed a form. “You have the heart and stomach of a sixteen-year-old boy. Pass it on to me when you’ve done with it.”
“You’ll have to lose thirty pounds first.”
The CMO added the date to the form. A five looked slightly unstable, so he straightened it. “You’ve been out of the Service for a long time, flight lieutenant. You have forgotten the courtesy due to senior rank.” He looked up, his eyes wide open; and Silk’s toes curled.
“Yes, sir.”
“Group Captain Evans is in Room 800. Do not joke with Group Captain Evans.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Silk found Room 800. Evans told him to take a seat. He was a big man, almost completely bald, with a permanent frown. Silk suddenly worried about his taxes. He’d left all that stuff to Barney Knox.
Evans leafed through a thick file. He closed it, and said: “You’re a bloody mercenary, flight lieutenant.” It was true. Silk stayed silent. “A whore of the skies, that’s you,” Evans said. “What?” Silk frowned, as if thinking. “Scum rises to the top, flight lieutenant. That’s your story too, isn’t it?” Evans whacked the file. “What?” No reply.
Evans went back into the file. He found a tattered page that briefly made him hold his breath. “Christ Almighty,” he muttered. “You could go to jail for this.” He read it again. “Didn’t anybody...? No, of course not. They gave you the saw and sent you up the tree, and watched you cut off the branch you were sitting on. Now look at you: stark bollock naked. What?”
Silk chewed his lip and studied the group captain’s face. Large wart on the left cheek. Must make shaving tricky.
“Air America,” Evans said. “Cowboys paid by crooks. CIA pulls the strings, Mafia makes a killing.” He tossed a reporter’s notebook at Silk, then a ballpen. “Come clean, flight lieutenant. Full confessions, and I mean full. It’s your only hope.” He went out. A key turned in the lock.
Evans came back five hours later. It was dusk; a lamp burned on the desk. Silk gave him the notebook.
“1835 hours,” Evans read aloud. “Urinated in waste-paper bin. Appears to be watertight. 1907 hours: telephoned Officers Mess, spoke to Duty Officer. 1920 hours: airman opened door with master key. 1930 hours: Mess servant delivered dinner on tray with half-bottle of claret. 2015-2050 hours: took a nap
. 2100 hours: discussed football with office cleaner.”
“He emptied your waste-paper bin,” Silk said. “I gave him ten shillings.”
Evans grunted. “Extravagant. Five bob would have done. And I’m not paying for your wine.” He sat at his desk. “You’ve read your file?” Silk nodded. “Anything to add?” Silk shook his head. “Thank God,” Evans said. “You’ve been okayed by MI5, Special Branch, the FBI and the Dagenham Girl Pipers. Also, it didn’t hurt that President Eisenhower invited your titled wife to dinner at the White House.”
“Did he really, sir?” Zoë’s not titled, Silk thought: “She never told me,” he said.
“Amazing. Why on earth d’you want to join Bomber Command again?”
The honest answer was To be near Zoë. Silk briefly considered To help defend the West. He said, “To fly the Vulcan, sir. Finest aircraft in the world.”
“It’s a nuclear weapon with wings. Killing a quarter of a million Russians doesn’t bother you?”
Silk thought of all the Germans he must have killed in two tours. “Not if it doesn’t bother you, sir.”
Evans got up and walked to the window. “Britain’s not a bad country, you know. I’d certainly kill to save it. When you think of the Hitler war, of the huge pressures we put bomber crews under... They wouldn’t have been human if they hadn’t gone on the razzle, got drunk, got laid, got into fights...”
“It helped, sir.”
“Not now, Silk. Not in the Cold War. Too dangerous. A Vulcan crew is the closest thing to God hurling down thunderbolts. The crew can never relax. On duty, all day every day, for five years. Hell of a burden. If you’ve got a weakness, flight lieutenant, it will find you out, it will break you and you will crack, you will fall apart, collapse, kill someone, probably yourself, anything to escape the nightmare of being God, not the God who allegedly created the world but the God who exists to destroy it. If you find that weakness, come and tell me.”
“Yes, sir.” Silk relaxed. He was in. He was flying. He had no weakness. “Thank you, sir.”
POOR RUMPTY AND TUMPTY
1
By the time he rejoined Bomber Command, Silk had flown more than sixty types of aircraft; and the more he flew, the more he admired birds. Gulls especially. He marvelled at the way they did so much, so easily. Gulls could soar and wheel, and search and hunt, and call or scream, and all with such grace. He watched, and sometimes daydreamed about flying an aircraft with a performance better than any bird. When this came true it resembled a fish. The Vulcan looked like a sting ray.
He had joined an Operational Conversion Unit, and an instructor was showing him around the bomber. “Not quite a perfect triangle,” the instructor said. “Slight kink in the leading edges. Helps airflow, which makes the boffins happy. Big fin, keeps her nice and stable. No tailplane, of course, because the wings do that job. In fact the wings do just about everything. The Vulcan’s a flying wing, with a nose up front for the crew to sit in.”
They walked underneath. Silk raised an arm and could not reach the wings. The undercarriage struts were massive. Each unit had eight wheels. “What does she weigh?” Silk asked.
“Depends on the fuel load. All tanks full, something like a hundred and twenty tons.”
Silk tried to remember what a Lanc with a full bombload had weighed. Twenty-something tons came to mind. “I’m glad to see we’ve got runways to match.”
“Yes.” The instructor was ten years younger than Silk and he had respect for a double DFC, so he didn’t smile. “Actually, we need less than half the runway for take-off. The Vulcan doesn’t hang about. She rather likes the direction of up.”
They climbed the ladder in front of the nose wheel and squeezed into the cockpit: side-by-side seats for the pilot and co-pilot, each with duplicated controls. Silk fingered the stubby joystick. “Very sporty,” he said.
“It suits the Vulcan’s style. This is a bomber that thinks it’s a fighter. You’ll see.”
Silk’s first flight was on a sunny day. The instructor made a low-level pass over the airfield. Silk glanced to his right and saw their shadow ghosting below: a giant sting ray skimming the ocean bed. All his previous flying had been a preparation for this. Silk and the Vulcan were made for each other. “Now see how she climbs,” the instructor said. He stood the Vulcan on its tail and they went up as if somebody up there was hauling them in, hand over fist.
2
The Frazer-Nash two-seater was long gone; now he had a rakish Citroën with running boards, as seen in all the worst French cop movies. During leave from Air America, he taught Laura how to drive. She liked that, and liked him for it; they became friends. Then she went to America, to Radcliffe. Ivy League: nothing but the best. He was surprised how much he missed her.
Weekends were free. Zoë’s office told him where she expected to be – the Albany apartment, the Lincolnshire cottage, or the lodge in Scotland – and he drove there on Friday evening. This weekend it was the cottage, only a quick seventy miles from the Operational Conversion Unit. He was there by six.
He opened the door and called her name. No answer. He went in and she was sitting at a table, asleep, her head resting on a scattering of typed papers and open books. She had been holding a fountain pen and it was still touching a letter. A pool of blue ink had spread.
“Wake up, fathead,” he said. He took the pen from her fingers. “That is, assuming you’re not dead.”
She groaned, and sat up, slowly, feeling her neck where it ached. Her hair was tangled and one side of her face was creased. Her eyes flickered, hating the light. “Not dead,” she said. “Bit shattered.”
“All this bumf-shuffling will kill you.”
She yawned and stretched. “We’ve been here for days. Arguing over...” Another yawn seized her.
“Is it politics?”
“Obviously.”
“Then I’m not interested. And who’s we?”
“John and Debby. They’re upstairs.”
Silk went upstairs two at a time. Within ten seconds he came clattering down again. “No they’re not,” he said.
“What?” She stopped brushing her hair. “Oh. Sorry. Forgot. They went back to London.”
“Good for them. You need a hot bath. Brush your teeth while you’re at it, and I might consider giving you a kiss.”
He strolled around the garden, pulling weeds, talking to the birds, while steam drifted out of the bathroom window. Half an hour later Zoë came out with two large gin-and-tonics. She was transformed: new face, clean hair, black sweater and white slacks. “Give that lady a gong,” he said.
“Darling Silko... Have you had a good week?”
“Steady progress.”
“Good. Don’t crash, will you, or the Chancellor will have to put twopence on income tax. Either that, or cancel a battleship. Let’s go to the cinema.”
They drove into Lincoln and saw a so-so Western. As they came away, Silk said: “The bad guys never shoot straight. Every time there’s a gunfight, the bad guys always miss the good guys.”
“That’s because they wear such awful black hats.”
“Russians wear black hats. Does that make them bad shots?”
“Who said Russians are the bad guys?”
His mental shutters crashed down. Change of subject. “Are you hungry? What d’you fancy?”
“Fish and chips. Just like during the war. Go to the flicks and then have fish and chips.”
They ate as they strolled. “Only difference between now and then is no blackout,” Silk said. “I must have walked into every lamppost in Lincoln.”
“I think I’ll definitely sell the cottage.”
After all these years, nothing Zoë said or did came as a total surprise. But the cottage was his only home, and he felt a small kick in the stomach. “Definitely?” he said. “I didn’t know you were even thinking of it.”
“Not enough space. There’s a manor house coming on the market soon, not far away, good size.” She talked about its rooms,
its grounds, its suitability for holding seminars, what with all the catering and car parking. “It has a lake. You can swim.”
He dumped the remains of his fish and chips in a litter bin. “Well, it’s your money. You know best. I don’t suppose you’d rent me the cottage?”
“Too late, darling. I’ve got a buyer.”
They walked to the car. Now Silk didn’t want to go back to the cottage that he couldn’t call his home. A subversive memory slid into his mind. “Chap I met told me you got invited to the White House.”
“Me and twenty others.”
“This chap said you were titled.”
Zoë groaned. “That again. It’s all so boring. Mother married Lord Shapland, twenty years ago, fucked him to death. You met her, didn’t you?”
“I did. Unforgettable cocktail party. She was drinking battery acid.”
“Yes, she was tough, and that’s about all. Eventually she married an American senator. Arizona, I think. He didn’t last long. She died last year. Didn’t I tell you? I thought I told you. Anyway, I got everything. The lawyers are still counting the money. Do I inherit the title or am I just a sad and pathetic Honourable? Frankly, sweetheart, I don’t care a damn.”
“Haven’t you got a brother? In Rhodesia?”
“Dead too. Spencer Herrick-Herrick. He had fifty thousand acres of beef ranch. Tried to ride a steer, for a bet, and broke his neck. The only thing he didn’t leave me was his hyphen.” She screwed up her fish-and-chip wrapper and gave it to him. It was a greasy mess.
“Thanks awfully. That’s all I am to you, isn’t it? Just a rich woman’s plaything.”
“You’re so good at it, darling.”
“Well, you’re not the only pebble on the beach, you know. Ginger Rogers wanted to marry me.”
“Have you got her number? Ask her to stay. The manor house has a ballroom. You and Ginger could jitterbug the night away. Is she Democrat or Republican?”
“I’ve no idea. We didn’t discuss politics.”
“Oh dear. Deadly dull.”
As they drove home, Silk wondered if he was dull. Just because he was training to fly a Vulcan didn’t make him personally interesting. He had known plenty of pilots, hot stuff in the air, boring as old boots on the ground. Tommy Flynn: nothing ever went right for him. His bitching, gentle but endless, could empty a Mess like the smell of bad drains. So Flynn was dull. Not as bad as Bob Rossi, who thought he was funny, told tedious jokes, nobody laughed except Bob. “I’ve got a thousand like that,” he said, and told another. And another. Imagine sharing a room with Bob. Imagine sharing a life. What a bore. And that fat navigator, Jenks or Tonks or something, did his sums with the speed of light in the kite, but off duty he couldn’t decide anything in less than an hour and a half. Ask him he felt like a drink and he’d think hard and say he wasn’t sure. Amusing at first. Then boring. Bloody boring. “You think I’m a bit dull, don’t you?” he asked Zoë.
Hullo Russia, Goodbye England Page 7
