That’s smart, Silk thought. That’s clever. Now he’s softened us up, here comes the sucker punch.
“You have the best, and the worst, job in the world,” Pulvertaft said. “You have the Vulcan, incomparably the finest bomber. That’s the best bit. Your job is to fly to the Soviet Union and destroy cities. That’s the worst bit. Why? Because, for the first time in Britain’s history, the army can’t save us and neither can the navy. If Moscow decides to go berserk, Soviet bombers can attack us with nuclear weapons. Say we destroy ninety per cent. Ten percent will get through, enough to turn these islands into a smoking wasteland.” He tugged his ear. Routine speech, Silk thought. Given it a hundred times.
“And of course there would be a hail of incoming nuclear missiles,” Pulvertaft said. “Nothing could stop them. Only one thing can deter Moscow, and that is fear. If Moscow decides to obliterate Britain, it does so in the sure and certain knowledge that Britain will obliterate Moscow and simultaneously two dozen cities from Leningrad to Stalingrad. You will do that. And be in no doubt: you will do it. No turning back. Any doubt, any hesitation, is suicidal. The maniac in Moscow cannot be allowed to think we do not mean what we say.” He let that sink in. “Any questions so far?”
Silk raised a hand. “So it’s crucial that the Moscow maniac knows we exist, sir.”
“We know he knows.”
“But not everything, presumably.”
“Just the bare facts. If he discovers anything more, it’s a chink in our armour.” Pulvertaft paused. “A metaphor from the medieval battlefield. Meaning?”
“A knife in the ribs?” a navigator said.
“Yes. For Bomber Command, security is ten-tenths of the battle. We keep the enemy guessing. Outside your squadron, say nothing. Inside your squadron, say no more than the other person needs to know. Never allow yourself to become vulnerable to outsiders. Last week I got rid of a highly competent sergeant armourer. All his pay went on dogs and horses. Compulsive gambling is a weakness, a vulnerability, a chink in the armour. He was groundcrew. Imagine how much higher your standards must be.”
2
Silk had to show his pass three times before he found his pilot in a room in the sprawling Operations block. He was Squadron Leader Quinlan: DSO and DFC, taller than average, thick black moustache, wide grey eyes. He was looking at a wall map of Eastern Europe and Russia. It covered the whole wall.
“Glad to see you,” Quinlan said. “We’ve got a training exercise this afternoon, and I hate borrowing crew. I suppose you’ve had the station commander’s standard speech?”
“Scare Moscow, and keep your nose clean.”
“You’re married, as are we all. So that removes one major problem. What’s left? Drink, drugs, politics, religious mania? Nude leapfrog? Playing the ukulele? You’ve been cleared by Special Branch. Don’t bend the aeroplane, and you should have five happy years here.”
“That would make a nice change.”
“And if at any time you get a funny feeling that someone’s watching you, don’t panic, because somebody is. Always.”
Silk wrinkled his nose and shuffled his feet. “I’m not supposed to tell you this, sir, but... I’m here to watch you.”
Quinlan was only half-amused. “Jokes like that are in bad taste, Silko. We live in each other’s pockets, week in, month out. A Vulcan crew can get twitchy. You play silly buggers with someone like Tom Tucker, my nav radar, and he’ll deck you.” Quinlan threw a punch that stopped an inch from Silk’s nose. “And when you’re lying there, stunned and bleeding all over the carpet, don’t come running to me for sympathy.”
“I withdraw my confession,” Silk said. “Not watching anyone. Never even saw them. What should I know about this exercise?”
Quinlan turned to the map and found a town about 150 miles north of Moscow. “Jaroslavl. That’s our target.”
“Not very big, is it?”
“And considerably smaller by the time we’ve finished.”
3
The whole point of having the Vulcan was being able to get your retaliation airborne before the Russian nuclear weapon hit the ground. Silk had learned all about this from lectures at his Operational Conversion Unit. Four minutes was the maximum warning time that Bomber Command could expect. “You haven’t got four minutes,” the lecturer had said. “You haven’t got two minutes. If your bomber has not come unstuck and begun climbing like a rocket within two minutes of scramble, the blast from the nuclear explosion will get you and fling you far out over the Irish Sea, where you will descend in tiny burning fragments. You won’t like the Irish Sea, gentlemen. It is cold and rough, like my first wife. Not recommended.”
The RAF had boiled the answer down to three words: Quick Reaction Alert, or QRA. Quinlan’s training exercise began with a practice QRA. The crew moved into a caravan that was parked at the end of the runway near their aircraft.
Silk had already met the other three men, all flight lieutenants. “Nav plotter,” Quinlan said. “Jack Hallett.” He was short and stocky, with a round and happy face; he looked more like a farmer. “Jack drives the bus. We just sit in front and look brave.”
“Damn right,” Hallett said.
“Nav radar: Tom Tucker.” This was the man with the short fuse. He shook hands and did not smile. Quinlan said: “If we ever drop the thunderflash, it’ll be Tom’s finger on the button.” Tucker displayed the finger: right index. He said nothing.
“Air Electronics Officer, Nat Dando,” Quinlan said. “AEO stands for Any Old Excuse. They got the letters wrong, like everything else. I don’t know what he does, but it smells of sulphur.”
“I bamboozle Ivan’s defences.” Dando was as sleek as a bandleader. “I baffle him with wizardry. The navs couldn’t baffle a pussy-cat with a kipper.”
“A kipper,” Silk said. “Heavens above. And here’s me thinking you used a mackerel.”
“I didn’t understand any of that,” Quinlan said, “and I’m grateful for my ignorance. Everyone been briefed? No questions? Good. Here’s my briefing: It’s a long flight, so empty your bladders.”
“He always says that,” Hallett told Silk.
“It’s not a Lanc,” Quinlan said. “You can’t go for a stroll down the fuselage and pee in the Elsan, because there’s no fuselage and no Elsan. And I don’t like plastic bottles of piss in my aeroplane. Unprofessional.”
4
They waited in the aircrew caravan, wearing flying kit, for almost an hour. “No room for ballroom dancing in a Vulcan,” Quinlan told Silk, “so on word of command, we sprint to the kite in strict order of charm and ability. First me, then you – up the ladder and into the cockpit – followed by nav plotter, nav radar and AEO. Door shut, engines fire, wheels roll, goodbye Mother Earth in one minute fortyish.”
“And be sure to take your lucky Cornish pixie,” Dando said, “because he won’t let you go back for it.” He showed Silk a tiny coin. “George the Third farthing. Life insurance. Cheap at the price.”
“I thought all that superstitious stuff went out with the war.”
Hallett fished a tattered ace of spades from an inside pocket. “Trumps,” he said. “It got me through a tour on Hampdens in 1940.”
Silk looked at Tucker. “You too?” But Tucker yawned.
“Tom’s not superstitious,” Quinlan said. “All the same, he hasn’t changed his underpants since his first op. February ’42, wasn’t it?”
“Hamburg,” Tucker said. “Bloody dump.”
“Somebody gave me a lucky greyhound once,” Silk said. “Bequeathed it, actually. Nice dog, but not quick enough. Got flattened by the CO’s car.”
“Luck ran out,” Hallett said.
“Not necessarily,” Dando said. “Dog’s dead, Silko isn’t.”
A klaxon blared. “Into battle!” Quinlan was running for the door. “Go go go!” Silk was still tightening his straps when the Vulcan turned onto the runway and Quinlan opened the throttles. By now Silk was accustomed to the sudden charge, as if the bomber we
re racing down a slope. In a fully loaded Lancaster, the take-off run had been toil; and with the roar of engines alongside the cockpit, it had been deafening toil. Now the Vulcan accelerated with the zeal of a fighter, and its engines created their thunder far to the rear. Silk checked dials and gauges, and thought: One hundred and twenty tons. Quinlan eased the stick back and they were airborne. He touched the brakes to check the wheelspin, and then retracted the undercarriage. It took eight seconds for the bays to swallow the gear. Now smooth as a swallow, the Vulcan stood on its tail and climbed.
Quinlan levelled out at fifty-five thousand feet. There was nothing to see but blue sky so dazzling it was nearly white, and not much of that: the windscreen was narrow and it gave only a forward view. The cockpit roof was solid canopy. Small portholes to left and right added little.
“Not much to look at, is there?” Quinlan said.
“I had a sports car with a bigger windscreen,” Silk said.
“There’s nothing to see up here but thermonuclear explosions. See one, you’ve seen ’em all. Fix the blackout.”
Silk closed the anti-flash screens on the windshield and the portholes. Quinlan flew blind to the Baltic and back again, on courses given by the navigators. Silk’s main job was to make sure the fourteen fuel tanks were used in the correct sequence, and to stir the sugar in Quinlan’s coffee. After four hours of sitting in near-darkness he opened the screen as Quinlan made his approach to Kindrick. It was dusk.
They taxied to a hardstanding and gave the bomber to the groundcrew. “Enjoy yourself?” Quinlan asked.
“I have a strange feeling that we went nowhere, and we did nothing.” Silk said.
“Oh, we went somewhere. Not Jaroslavl. Not this time. Jaroslavl would have been the next stop on the line. But we got close enough to have Soviet radar breathing hard. I bet they scrambled a few MiGs, in case we pushed our luck too far.”
“With their anti-flash screens closed?”
“Possibly.”
“Like two blind boxers.”
“It’s a little more complex than that.”
5
The crew went to debriefing. It was a sober business, far removed from the wartime sessions that Silk remembered, when some men were all noise and bad jokes while others couldn’t speak of what they’d seen, and everyone was weary and hungry for bacon and eggs. This was different. This was experts discussing technical problems. Their talk was spiced with jargon; Silk half-understood about half of it. After a while he got up to stretch his legs and saw a face that made a fool of time and place and rushed him back to 409 Squadron, and Kindrick, and 1942.
Silk didn’t think. The jolt of astonishment made the decision for him and he walked across the room. The man was talking to another officer. “Skull,” Silk said.
“Not now, old boy,” the man said, without even looking around, and went on talking. Silk backed away. He felt a rush of blood to his ears: he had been snubbed; put in his place like a thoughtless servant. By Skull, for Christ’s sake. He looked again. Skull was a wing commander, talking to an air commodore. Some things never changed in Bomber Command and rank was one. In the RAF, a blunder was known as a ‘black’. Silk had just put up a black. What rankled was that Skull had caused it. In the war, Skull had put up more blacks than God made little green apples. Never bothered him then. Now he couldn’t bring himself to look around when he told Silk to push off. What a sod.
6
Skelton had been a young Cambridge don (Tudor history, with special reference to the northern Puritan sects) when he fell in love, disastrously, and joined the University Air Squadron on the rebound. It was a reckless act. Hitler was chucking his weight about, everyone said war was inevitable, Skelton thought that maybe he would die a glorious, sacrificial death, and then she’d be sorry. There was never any risk of this. By now she was in Kenya, happily married to a man who hadn’t read a book since he left school; and the RAF knew at once that, even in the direst national emergency, it could never make a pilot out of Skelton. They could straighten his academic stoop and teach him to salute; they could even cram his lanky body into a cockpit; but his spectacles were as thick as clamshells and without them he couldn’t see worth a damn. Forget aircrew.
“My word, this is our lucky day,” the University Air Squadron adjutant said to him. “We badly need an Intelligence Officer, and you’re splendidly qualified.”
War came. Skelton was posted to a Fighter Command, to a Hurricane squadron. On his first day he got his nickname. His forehead bulged, his cheeks narrowed, his nose was boney, he had to be Skull.
He learned his trade by on-the-job training. If he had a fault it was his brain. The Cambridge don in him could not ignore the truth, and sometimes he challenged the official view of the war. Commanding officers resented critical comment from a man who didn’t fly and therefore couldn’t know what he was talking about. At the height of the Battle of Britain he infuriated an air vice-marshal by pointing out an awkward truth. It was a black too many. Skull got sacked.
He was posted to a training airfield in a remote and drab corner of Scotland. “We make our own entertainment here,” a flying instructor told him. “Ping-pong and funerals, mainly.” Skull avoided the funerals. He did a lot of trout fishing, put up no blacks, and was quietly living out the war when he was suddenly ordered south, to join 409 Squadron of Bomber Command, which was flying Wellingtons. That was where he met Silk. They had little in common, but sometimes opposites attract. Two years of war, and war’s cock-ups, had made sceptics of them both. Bomber Command claimed to be hammering Germany. Skull saw the intelligence reports and did not believe them. Silk saw the burning incendiaries and knew they had missed the target; often they had missed the city; sometimes they hit the wrong city. Nobody else agreed. Naturally, Skull and Silk formed a connection. It was not a friendship. All the friends Silk had known when war broke out were dead, and he didn’t expect to live much longer. No point in manufacturing grief: that was Silk’s opinion. He amused Skull. Few pilots were so candid about faults and failures when senior officers were listening. Skull felt encouraged to speak his mind, and he put up a fresh series of blacks. Silk was a valuable pilot; he became 409’s joker in the pack, too good to lose. Skull was an intelligence officer, a penguin, a flightless bird, and he got the sack. Kicked out of Bomber Command and into the Desert Air Force.
“The bad news is there’s nothing in Libya but sand and camel dung,” he told Silk before he left. “The good news is you can have as much as you like.” Silk made a gentle belch. “Not a funny joke,” Skull said. “Not even a joke, actually.” That was the last Silk heard of him. Until now.
7
An airman tapped on Silk’s door, presented Wing Commander Skelton’s compliments, and asked if Flight Lieutenant Silk was free to dine tonight. If so, the car would be outside at 1930 hours.
It was a Lagonda. The tyres alone cost more than Silk’s Citroën. The leather upholstery smelled like the tearoom of the House of Lords. The engine had a soft growl that belonged in the Brazilian jungle. “Load of junk,” Silk said. “Piece of piss. You had this bloody tractor in 1942.”
“Regular maintenance is the key,” Skull said. “A sergeant in the MT section does it for me. Not illegal, of course. Well, maybe just a tiny bit illegal.” As he drove out of the base he took the RAF police sergeant’s salute. “Sorry I had to treat you so boorishly, Silko, but when an air commodore is in full flow, you don’t cut him off.”
“Don’t you? I wouldn’t know.” Silk stretched his legs: there was ample room. “Air commodores never speak to flunkeys like me.” His backside slid on the leather as Skull accelerated into a long right-hand bend. “But I see you’re still climbing the greasy pole, wing commander.”
“The rank suits me. Civilians think I actually command a wing.”
“Took you fifteen years.”
“No, no. Much less. When the war ended, I went back to Cambridge. Not a wise move. Severe anticlimax. They thought modern history ended with Quee
n Victoria’s death. Any unpleasantness after that was unfit for discussion. So I left and learned Russian instead.”
“Cunning bugger.”
“I rather enjoyed it.”
“Who paid?”
“Uncle Henry. What a sport he was. On his eighty-third birthday he hooked a twelve-pound salmon, had a heart attack, and left me everything. Perfect timing. It financed two years at Cambridge, one at Harvard, one in Berlin. By 1950 the Cold War was big business and the RAF was quite keen to welcome back a slightly shop-soiled intelligence officer who was fluent in Russian.”
“What’s the Russian for bullshit?”
“Almost everything,” Skull said. “Alas.”
Ten minutes later they stopped at a small manor house, steeply gabled and half-timbered. “Private dining club,” Skull said. “There’s a vast US Air Force base just down the road. This is where the higher-ranking officers can escape and think the unthinkable over a good claret. I’m a member.”
“So you’re an honorary Yank.”
“Not as honorary as you were. Don’t argue, don’t get into any fights, smile if you can, and listen.”
“God help us,” Silk said. “It’s a Baptist outing.”
The dining room was large. All the curtains were closed. The tables were widely spaced and dimly lit. Somewhere the Modern Jazz Quartet was playing Misty, maybe in the minstrel gallery, more likely on LP, and with great restraint.
“I was wrong,” Silk said. “It’s a Baptist speakeasy.”
A middle-aged man in a steel-grey suit came to greet them. He had rimless spectacles and a square face. He reminded Silk of a geologist he’d known in Venezuela. That man looked like Harry Truman’s kid brother but he found great gushers of oil, so what did a face tell you? Skull introduced Silk to Brigadier Karl Leppard.
“I flew with Barney Knox in the Hitler war,” Leppard said.
“Awfully nice chap. He got me into Air America.”
“Which doesn’t exist,” Skull said.
“Just like Communist China,” Silk said. “And the far side of the moon.”
Dinner was simple. Everyone ordered steak. “They hang the beef in a meathouse out back,” Leppard told Silk, “until it starts to rot around the edges. Called creative waste.”
Hullo Russia, Goodbye England Page 9
