Hullo Russia, Goodbye England

by Derek Robinson

  “We did that in Lancasters. Called area bombing.”

  “No nostalgia, Silko,” Skull warned him. “Six years of war was enough, without your tedious reminiscences.” Chilled bottled beer arrived. “What’s new from the Pentagon?”

  “Well, Kennedy says we’ll do anything, go anywhere to protect liberty,” Leppard said. “The Pentagon seriously doubts that, but not out loud.”

  “Damn good beer,” Silk said.

  “So Tibet is fairly safe,” Skull said. “The West is not going to fight Red tyranny in Tibet.”

  Leppard spread his hands. “No votes in it.”

  “Hungary?”

  “No oil in it.”

  “Saudi Arabia?”

  “Be serious, Skull.”

  “Well, that leaves Germany,” Skull said. “We think the Kremlin thinks it’s the jewel in their crown. We think they think we think it’s not worth shedding Anglo-Saxon blood over. They fought Hitler, they won, they deserve it. All of it.”

  “I agree,” Silk said. “Take sauerkraut, for instance.”

  Leppard waited briefly, but that was all Silk had to say.

  “We don’t think they think they can get away with a smash-and-grab attack on Germany,” Leppard said. “Not with armed B-52s on patrol 24 hours a day.”

  “That scenario assumes rational, reasonable behaviour,” Skull said. “War isn’t rational. It’s a dance of death.”

  “Sure. But this isn’t about war, is it? It’s about non-war. And we think the Kremlin respects logic too much to invite nuclear reprisal.”

  “Logic?” Skull said. “I knew a professor of logic who strangled his wife.”

  “She was a miserable cow,” Silk said. “She had it coming.”

  Soon the steaks arrived and the conversation lost him. It was dotted with too many technicalities: talk of Blue Danubes and Yellow Suns, Red Shrimps and Blue Divers, and much more. Later they got around to discussing Micky Finns and Lone Rangers. Silk half-remembered some of the terms from OTU lectures; right now there were more interesting things in his life. He ate his steak. It was thick as his wrist and so tender, you could cut it with a spoon.

  Coffee on the terrace. They had it to themselves.

  “Shall we examine the broader aspect?” Skull suggested. “Hail to the Chief! Everyone here seems to think he’s a good egg. What do your people think?”

  “We think that Kruschev thinks that Kennedy’s just a pretty face,” Leppard said.

  “Fur coat and no knickers,” Silk said.

  Skull almost winced. “And you think that Kennedy thinks that Kruschev...?”

  “Is a loose cannon.”

  “All mouth and no trousers,” Silk said.

  Leppard polished his glasses with a handkerchief and peered at Silk. “Is your family in the garment trade?” he asked.

  “I hear voices. Nasty prang in ’43.” Silk tapped his forehead. “Solid silver. Grateful nation.”

  “Do shut up, Silko... What are the world’s hot spots, Karl? I mean, leaving aside Berlin, where would you say Kruschev and Kennedy are most likely to lock horns?”

  “The Congo first. Unbelievably rich: copper, uranium, cobalt, diamonds, gold. We can’t just leave it to the Soviets to take their pick. Persia second. The Shah’s getting old. Russia’s itching to get the oil he’s sold to us. Thirdly: Cuba, which is more of a nuisance than a problem. Hell, if Moscow wants to buy Castro’s sugar, let ’em.”

  “Well, I say we bomb Cuba,” Silk declared. Skull closed his eyes. Leppard poured more coffee. “Congo’s got uranium, Persia’s got oil,” Silk said. “It’s absurd to bomb the stuff we want. What’s Cuba got? Bloody awful rum, nobody wants that. So the obvious answer is: bomb Cuba. No Cuba, no problem.”

  “Crushing logic,” Leppard said. “Okay if I strangle your wife?”

  “Time for bed,” Skull said. “Any word on the great cricket-baseball occasion?”

  “I’ll have news tomorrow,” Leppard said.

  * * *

  Skull was silent for the first five minutes of the drive back to base. Then he said: “Is there anything that isn’t a joke to you?”

  “Drowning. Definitely not funny, especially in the ocean. And dentists. Never heard a dentist joke that worked. And dogshit. Drowning, dentists and dogshit. Anything beginning with a D is bad news, unless of course it’s dentists drowning in dogshit.”

  “Was that a joke?” Skull didn’t wait for an answer. “How about death?”

  Silk yawned. “I never saw much fun in death. Dying, yes, plenty of jokes there. New Yorker cartoon. Two old ladies looking at a tombstone. One says: I told him it wouldn’t kill him to be nice once in a while, but it seems I was wrong.” Silk laughed freely.

  Skull changed gear. “Mildly facetious.”

  “Bloody funny. Your trouble, Skull, is you’ve got too many rings on your sleeve. Mental handcuffs, that’s what they are.”

  “Not a problem you’re ever likely to have.”

  “I liked you better in the war. You didn’t believe anybody, you put up lots of blacks, you got the chop. Now you’re too damn serious.”

  “We do a serious job.”

  “Cobblers. We don’t do anything. We fly nowhere and bomb nothing and come home, and none of it makes a blind bit of difference.”

  Skull allowed a long pause before he answered. “If that’s what you genuinely believe,” he said, “you made a large mistake in rejoining Bomber Command. You’ve joined a suicide club, my friend, and we play for the highest stakes, nothing less than the survival of civilisation itself and –”

  “I’ve heard that speech,” Silk said. “It was all balls then and it’s all balls now.”

  End of conversation.

  TONS OF MAGIC BOXES

  1

  The crew had breakfast together. For the first time, Silk looked around the Mess and got a sense of the size of the two Vulcan squadrons stationed at Kindrick. About a hundred men were present. Others would be abroad or on leave. Enough to crew twenty Vulcans, and scattered across England were another dozen V-bomber squadrons, Vulcans and Valiants and Victors. Each bomber could knock out a Soviet city. Silk knew that all war was brutal, but this struck him as a very casual kind of organized slaughter. You might kill the entire Moscow Philharmonic in the middle of a nice bit of Tschaikowsky. Or annihilate all the girls in the Bolshoi ballet. There were some real corkers in the Bolshoi, he’d seen a film, what amazing legs! Put him in bed and wrap a pair of legs like that around him and he’d join the Red air force... “Oh, thanks,” he said. A plate of bacon and eggs had appeared in front of him.

  “I hear Skull took you to the Bum Steer last night,” Jack Hallett said.

  “Is that what it’s called? Very clever.”

  “Rumour has it the steaks are beyond compare,” Nat Dando said.

  “I’ve had worse. There was a price to pay: Skull’s conversation. Deadly dull. Not like the old days.”

  “Everything’s funny when you’re young,” Hallett said. “Remember how we laughed during those ops on Berlin in winter? Hilarious.”

  “I saw two Jerry nightfighters collide,” Tom Tucker said flatly. They looked at him, expecting more. “With each other,” he explained.

  “I’m sure it brightened up the night,” Dando said.

  “No doubt you met Brigadier Leppard,” Quinlan said to Silk. “That’s why Skull goes there: to broaden his mind. What did they talk about?”

  “Generalities.” Silk could see that this wasn’t good enough. “Intelligence gossip. Who’s up, who’s down.”

  Quinlan leaned forward, and tapped on the table with the butt of his knife. “See here: we are one jump ahead of the enemy or we’re dead. You spent last evening with a senior US intelligence officer and you heard gossip?” The knife had left dents in the tablecloth.

  “He gave us his forecast of the most likely hot spots in the Cold War,” Silk said rapidly. “He reckoned the hottest is the Congo, all that mineral wealth. Next is Persia, for the oil. La
st is Cuba, because of Castro.”

  “Next time, listen harder.” Quinlan swigged his coffee and got up and walked away.

  Tom Tucker looked at his watch. “A man of very regular habits,” he told Silk.

  “And if the Russians attack us now?”

  “They’ll be told to wait,” Dando said. “If they want a proper war, they have to behave properly.”

  2

  The crew was scheduled to train on flight simulators. There were three of these. The pilots’ simulator replicated their cockpit. The two navigators’ simulator was set up in another building; all their systems, including radar, operated as if in flight. The Air Electronics Officer was at a third location. His equipment worked with the same total realism. The three simulators were linked. “Take a Mars bar with you,” Tucker advised Silk. “I always do. These exercises are bloody exhausting.”

  First they were briefed on the strategic importance of the operation. Skull did this.

  “Today’s exercise calls for a different tactical approach. Tula is your target, a city about 150 miles south of Moscow. Instead of making your orthodox insertion, via the North Sea and Baltic, you will take a more direct route across West and East Germany and into the USSR. Navs and AEO will get their full separate briefings, as usual. You’ll penetrate Soviet airspace at height, so no weather problems. No doubt Soviet countermeasures will pull out all the stops, but you have ways of ducking and dodging.”

  “Why the southerly route?” Quinlan asked. “Why make life easy for their early warning system?”

  “We’re testing a new battle plan,” Skull said. “We use the tactical bombers stationed in Germany and England – Canberras and Super Sabres – to make nuclear strikes on the battlefield. This cleans out the entire Warsaw Pact front. By then our Thor missiles are deleting the first air-defence bases and communication centres in western Russia. You’ll carry a Blue Steel stand-off missile. You should have a clear run-in and be able to launch your Blue Steel one hundred miles from target.”

  “What’s so special about Tula?” Silk asked.

  “Special?” Skull bared his teeth and narrowed his eyes in a display of concentration. “Nothing special. It’s a city, a population centre, a communications hub.”

  “You forgot the cathedral,” Dando said.

  “Yes, of course it’s got a cathedral. St. Basil’s. Quite exquisite.”

  “Skull is fond of Russian cathedrals,” Dando told Silk. “He knows where to find all the best ones.”

  “Enough chat.” Quinlan was on his feet, impatient to go. “Are we done here?”

  “One last word,” Skull said. “The flight plan is designed for your survival. Stray from it, and you may stray into the nuclear contribution of another bomber.”

  “He says that every time,” Dando told Silk.

  “Come on, damn it!” Quinlan said. He urged the crew out, rotating his arm as if winding them up. Silk was last. “What’s the rush?” he asked. “It’s only a session in the simulator. It’s not the end of the world.”

  “One day it might be,” Quinlan said, “and I don’t intend to be late.”

  * * *

  Three hours later they were all back in the same room. “Shambles,” Quinlan said. “What went wrong?”

  “What do you think went wrong?” Skull said.

  “East Germany was like an air display,” Hallett said. “Our inward route was filthy with stuff.”

  “But surely you flew above it? Sixty thousand feet?”

  “We weren’t alone up there,” Dando said. “Somebody locked-on and took a pot at us.”

  “You told us tactical nuclear strikes would clean out the Warsaw Pact area,” Silk said. “Well, they didn’t.”

  “That was the plan,” Skull said. “Our Canberras and the Americans’ Super Sabres took heavy losses. Those who succeeded had to return and rearm and make a second attack.”

  “Second attempt, you mean,” Tucker said heavily.

  “Return and rearm where?” Silk asked. No answer.

  “Tom reckons somebody hit the wrong town,” Quinlan told Skull.

  “My radar picture doesn’t lie,” Tucker said. “We got routed smack over some other bastard’s mistake.”

  “Which buggered up my lovely black boxes,” Dando said, “on account of they got a bath in electro-magnetic radiation.”

  “The fog of war,” Skull murmured.

  “Nothing foggy about it,” Quinlan said. “The Soviet missile defences saw us coming, clear as day.”

  “Remind me of the plan,” Silk said.

  “Our Thors should have cleared the way,” Skull said. “Maybe the Soviets moved their missile sites... Still, you got through and launched your Blue Steel?”

  “Tula is no longer answering the phone,” Quinlan said. “And I’m completely knackered.”

  “Yes, we thought you would be.”

  “All those cock-ups were deliberate?” Silk said. “The plan was meant to be crap? What the hell does that prove?”

  “All plans go wrong,” Skull said. “What matters is that you pressed on, at all costs. You scored highly there.”

  “God speed the plough,” Hallett said wearily.

  “And now, lunch.” As they left, Skull signalled to Silk. “Freddy Redman is here. You’ll find him in the Mess.”

  3

  It was a brief meeting. Freddy, on his way to a conference, just stopped to grab a sandwich and a beer. He wanted to know if Silk had settled in okay: any problems? Silk said he hadn’t expected to crew with a bunch of suicidal geriatrics, but the food was good. Freddy laughed. “Geriatrics I understand. Actually, when you joined that crew, its average age came down below forty. But suicidal? Surely not.”

  “All our briefings are about outward trips. Nobody ever talks about coming back.”

  Freddy took a deep breath and puffed out his cheeks. “Not my department, Silko. Try Skull, he was always good at crossword puzzles... How’s your lovely wife? You see much more of her now, I hope.”

  Silk said Zoë was fine, always busy but that’s how she liked it. Some women had bridge, some had astrology, Zoë had politics. All a total mystery to him. They had an understanding: he didn’t ask what she got up to, and she didn’t talk about it. One politician in the home was plenty.

  “Absolutely right,” Freddy said. “Bang on target. Stay out of trouble, Silko. Politics is always trouble. Always.”

  His gravity surprised Silk. “Well, you should know, Freddy. You’re a lot closer to it than me.”

  “What I meant was... Well, talking shop is the death of many a marriage. You’re lucky you can’t talk to Zoë about... you know... any of this.” Freddy’s gesture covered all RAF Kindrick. “Especially to Zoë. I mean to say, security here –”

  “I’ve had the lecture. Several times.”

  “Of course you have. I must dash. You and Zoë have an open invitation. Sunday lunch, for instance.”

  “Sounds good,” Silk said. But he knew Zoë wouldn’t come. She’d be busy. As usual.

  4

  Nat Dando and Silk walked slowly around their Vulcan. “There it is,” Dando said, pointing.

  “I can’t see anything,” Silk said.

  “That’s the beauty of it. Point zero one per cent is actually visible. All the rest is hidden inside the fuselage, especially in that bulge behind the tail. Tons and tons of magic boxes. The Vulcan’s a flying power station, with us out in front, twiddling the knobs.”

  “So where does your Technicolour zoo fit in? Yellow Prawn and so on.”

  Silk had spent part of the afternoon going through the notes he’d made during lectures on air electronic warfare at the OCU. He wasn’t good at electronics. His notes were heavy with acronyms and clumps of alphabet that now meant nothing at all. In the end he went looking for Dando and asked for a Cook’s tour of the AEO’s kingdom. Nothing too technical. Fifteen minutes, say. Twenty minutes, max.

  “Yellow Prawn,” Dando said. “Sounds most unhealthy. You’re thinking
of Red Shrimp... I’d better start at the beginning. The Soviets know we’re coming, right? Their early warning radars are looking for us. We blind them with jamming. Blue Diver is our jammer. Two Blue Divers, one on each wing tip, swamp their radar receivers with white noise. Their screens look like a really bad migraine.”

  “Isn’t that a bit crude?” Silk said. “We sneak into Russia, shouting our heads off.”

  “It’s a big country. They can’t defend it all. Anyway, it’s not just us. With a whole fleet of Blue Divers going full blast, they won’t know where to look.”

  “Blue Diver. Strange name.” Silk went to the nearest wing tip. “Damned if I can see anything.”

  “Trust me. Moving on: Blue Divers are hotly pursued by Red Shrimps. Russian flak uses gun-laying radar, which is very clever, so we can’t allow that, and we jam it with our Red Shrimps.” Dando led him to the jet pipes of numbers 1 and 2 engines, and pointed to a small flat plate between them. “See? Red Shrimp. There’s another on the other side.”

  “Looks like a tea-tray.”

  “Yes? I could brain you with a tea-try if I hit you hard enough. Red Shrimp radiates outwards at forty-five degrees. From fifty thousand feet that makes a huge footprint. Or two.”

  “Fifty thousand feet is a hell of a height to send a shell. What makes you think the Soviets can do it?”

  “What makes you think they can’t?” There was an acid sting in his voice that silenced Silk. “They also have missiles. Red Shrimp transmits on their frequencies too. Baffles their radars.”

  “No flak, no missiles,” Silk said. “That leaves the field clear for their fighters, doesn’t it?”

  “So we carry Blue Saga and Red Steer. One is a radar warning receiver that picks up the fighter’s signal, the other’s a tail warning radar transmitter that scans in search of the fighter. Your twenty minutes are up. I’ve got a squash court booked.”

  Silk watched Dando stride away.

  “Red Shrimp,” he whispered. “Blue Saga.” Joke names for deadly serious boxes of electronic counter-measures. Against which Russian boffins would have figured out equally deadly counter-counter-measures. Probably not called Green Caviare or Pink Vodka. No, definitely not Pink Vodka. Iron Gauntlets, maybe. Notoriously humourless, Russians. Especially when foreigners tried to kill them. Take Napoleon. Take Hitler.