Hullo Russia, Goodbye England

by Derek Robinson

  America had installed nuclear missiles in Turkey, aimed at the Soviet Union. Kruschev was furious. He wanted leverage to get the missiles out. The summer and autumn of 1962 saw a stream of Russian ships to Cuba. Just to transport the troops took 85 merchant ships. Missiles came downriver by barge to the Black Sea and were loaded onto freighters. On reaching Cuba, they were unloaded by night; but missiles were conspicuous, and they were no secret to many Cubans. One mystery is why American intelligence took so long to discover the truth. Another mystery is how Kruschev hoped to construct missile launch sites in Cuba without being detected. Marshal Biryuzov, of the Strategic Rocket Forces, told the Soviet Presidium that the missiles could be installed secretly. To US reconnaissance aircraft, he said, “they would look like palm trees.” Kruschev agreed.

  The build-up was big and getting bigger: 42,000 Russians on Cuba by mid-October was a lot of Russians. Already, Kennedy had issued warnings, had put 150,000 reserve troops on active duty, had sent more aircraft to spy on Cuba. At last, on 14 October he was shown aerial photographs of construction work that looked like launch sites for medium range ballistic missiles. More missiles were on ships crossing the Atlantic.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff urged Kennedy to order an immediate air strike on all military targets in Cuba. General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force Chief of Staff, saw the Cuban crisis as an excuse to launch a full pre-emptive nuclear assault on Russia. He believed that the SAC could obliterate the Soviet Union. How much of the US would be obliterated by the Soviet Union in return, General LeMay did not say.

  The fuse had been hissing and sputtering and crackling for a long time. Now, in October 1962, there wasn’t much of it left and it was burning fast. World War Three was a serious likelihood. To some, an attractive possibility. Wait any longer and the chance might be missed.

  2

  Everyone in 409 Squadron assumed that Skull knew the inside story about Cuba. He got tired of telling them to listen to the BBC, and he phoned Brigadier Leppard and suggested lunch. “On me,” he added.

  “Bomber Command is so desperate for news? This Cuba thing’s nothing, just a misunderstanding, that’s what I’ve been told to say, although I can’t see what’s to misunderstand about sixty-three feet of ballistic missile aimed at the White House. But sure, I’ll let you pay. Tell the truth, I’ll be glad to get off the base. Everyone’s hepped up, afraid they might miss the war.”

  “There won’t be a war, Karl. There might be a nuclear spasm.”

  “Good, I’ll tell them that. They’ll ask me to spell it.”

  They got the last booth in the Bum Steer. “What happened to you?” Leppard asked. “Fall out of the wrong bed?”

  “I was punched by a pilot, in a simulator. It was a point of honour.” No it wasn’t, it was a point of panic. “Trivial incident.” Unforgettable terror.

  They ordered drinks and steaks. “Okay, here’s all I know,” Leppard said. “Cuba’s been a rumbling volcano all summer. Late August we knew they had Russian surface-to-air missiles, purely defensive, no big deal. Now it turns out they’ve also got a bunch of medium-range ballistic firecrackers, and they’re making launch sites for even bigger bangs, plus they’ve got MiG-21s and Ilyushin-28s, and heavy helicopters, and coastal defence stuff like gunboats with their own missiles. I may have missed five or ten thousand Russian infantry, they’re hard to see in the sugarcanes.”

  “If I were Castro,” Skull said, “I’m sure I’d feel a lot more secure.”

  “And if you were Kennedy, you’d feel a hell of a lot less secure. Suddenly a dozen US cities are within range of nuclear attack.”

  “So is Moscow, and Berlin, and London, and Lincoln. We’ve learned to live with it.”

  “Not the point. It’s the secrecy that’s got everyone spitting blood. Sneaky Commies trying to smuggle their missiles inside our defence. That makes Americans rise in wrath.”

  “Wrath.” Skull took his glasses off and squinted unhappily at the blur of the diningroom. “Russians rose in wrath when Gary Powers’ U2 got shot down a thousand miles inside their borders.” Drinks arrived. “Sneaky Yanks,” Skull said. Leppard was more interested in his Scotch. “Wrath is bad for the brain,” Skull said. He put his glasses on. “Cuba isn’t going to launch any missiles. Castro’s not going to give the Pentagon an excuse to invade.”

  “Then why all this nuclear muscle?”

  “Why Operation Ortsac? Why the Bay of Pigs? Isn’t it just the Cold War to a Latin rhythm?”

  “Not a hope,” Leppard said. “Either Castro gets his hired guns out of town or all hell breaks loose.”

  “Goodness,” Skull said. “You sound just like John Wayne.”

  “Well, Kruschev acts like Genghiz Khan. What do you expect? Lassie the Wonder Dog? America doesn’t respond kindly to threats.”

  Skull could hear an undertone of anger. “I wasn’t thinking of kindness,” he said. “More of intelligent selfishness.” He could see their waiter approaching.

  “I’ve got kin living in Washington. Cousins. What does this make them? Hostages?”

  It wasn’t what Skull had hoped to hear. “The Soviets take a bit of knowing,” he said. “For instance, Genghiz Khan wasn’t Russian, on the contrary his Mongol hordes conquered Russia, they exploited it as a colony for three or four hundred years. One reason why Russia has always been rather sensitive about foreign pressures.” Leppard was eating his steak. “And so on and so forth,” Skull said. After that, they talked of other things until the meal was over and they were walking to their cars.

  “I sometimes wonder how many of our crews would actually drop their bombs,” Skull said. He looked at the sky: a perfect autumn blue, made more perfect by a faint sketch of mackerel cloud.

  “What’s to stop them?”

  “Perhaps...” Skull hesitated, and took the risk. “A sense of right and wrong.”

  “Isn’t that the same as a sense of duty?”

  “Duty to whom? We tell our crews that the West will never make a first strike. So, when they’re scrambled for a second strike, they know they can’t make a difference. The catastrophe has happened. Will they really drop a hydrogen bomb? What will it achieve? Most aircrew are a decent lot. They’ll bomb for a better tomorrow, but what if there is no tomorrow?”

  “Oh, no doubt about it, Skull,” Leppard said confidently. “There is no tomorrow. Never has been. Seize the day! And if it doesn’t deserve to survive, then cut its foolish throat. Thanks for lunch.”

  3

  The news, never good, got worse.

  Kennedy and Kruschev swapped angry messages. The secretary-general of the United Nations tried to cool them down, asking Kruschev to stop all Soviet shipping to Cuba and asking Kennedy not to force a showdown. Both agreed; neither trusted the other. The codeword for American military alertness was DefCon, for Defense Condition. Kennedy upped it from DefCon 5 to DefCon 3, a big jump and a signal to Moscow as much as to the Pentagon. Half the Russian ships had stopped or changed course in mid-Atlantic; but construction work on the Cuban missile launch sites went ahead. If the work was completed, Kennedy might find he had a much weaker hand in this game of maniacs’ poker. He could order an air strike. Cuba was nearby. Kruschev would respond. Where? Maybe England. Why? England wasn’t far off, either. Nobody said that thermonuclear ping-pong had to make sense.

  Skull sat in his office, watching the afternoon sun inch its way across the carpet. That could be the last sunlight half the world would ever see. He picked up the phone and called Bomber Command HQ. He had once gone trout fishing in the Aberdeenshire hills with an air commodore called Jenkins, now in Intelligence.

  “Nobody is in a flap,” Jenkins said. “But here’s a funny thing. We monitor SAC transmissions, of course, and they’ve stopped using code for a lot of signals.”

  “Plain English? I’ve never known SAC to do that.”

  “And we know from cockpit transmissions that some SAC bombers are pushing their luck, flying beyond the points where they normally turn b
ack, getting so close to Soviet airspace that Russian radar must think they look like trouble coming.”

  “It’s provocative,” Skull said.

  “So is firing a ballistic missile over the Pacific. Last night SAC launched an Atlas ICBM in California. It came down five thousand miles away, in the Marshall Islands, as planned. Russian radar must have picked up the launch. They didn’t know it was an unarmed test missile, not until SAC said so. In English.”

  “And the Soviets believed them.”

  “Well, they haven’t retaliated yet, so...”

  “Hasn’t the SAC got anyone who speaks Russian?”

  “Steady on, Skull. Now you’re being sensible.”

  4

  If anything is worse than the inexcusable, indelible knowledge of having committed murder, it is the bone-deep suspicion of probably having killed someone, not a stranger, without reason, and being unable to prove that it was a crime or a mistake or perhaps even that it hadn’t even happened. Many times before, Skull had suffered under the crushing weight of his own guilt. It was a dream, he knew that. He only murdered in his dreams, because that was where he was already trapped, imprisoned before he was captured. Now he broke out and lay sweating. His heart was playing rapid hopscotch.

  He couldn’t sleep. He got up, washed his face, put on corduroy trousers and a windcheater, found his glasses, went out and did something he would never have done a week ago: he knocked on Silk’s door.

  “You’re not Lana Turner,” Silk said. His voice was flat and tired from sleep. “I ordered Lana Gardner. Or maybe Piper Laurie. One of the two.”

  “Awfully sorry.”

  “Forget it. I had to get up anyway, some bastard was hammering on the door.” He yawned. “What’s wrong?”

  “Well, it’s ... Look, I know we’ve had our differences recently, but ... ”

  “Come in. Haven’t seen my wife, have you? Neither have I. Girl friend’s gone missing too.” He sat on the bed. “Women are an odd lot, Skull. You can’t pin them down.”

  “I keep thinking about Cuba.”

  “Oh, Christ. Bloody Cuba. Not here.” Silk pulled on his uniform over his pyjamas. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “It’s the principle of deterrence I worry about.” They went out. “Just when we need it most, it’s falling apart.”

  “That happened to me, once,” Silk said. “Lost my marbles. In California.”

  “Deterrence demands a form of balance. If one side persists in provocative behaviour, that balance is prejudiced and rational analysis goes out of the window.” Silk wasn’t listening. If Skull didn’t care how he lost his marbles in California, then he didn’t care what Skull chucked out of the window.

  They walked to the camp cinema and back. Skull talked, urgently and fluently. Silk grunted from time to time. They reached his bedroom door.

  “You see the dilemma,” Skull said. “Fear breeds fear.”

  “Go to bed, Skull,” Silk said. “Go to hell, go to Cuba. Better still, go to Pulvertaft. He likes a good dilemma at four in the morning.” He went in and locked the door.

  5

  There was little flying at Kindrick: just a few air tests to doublecheck the servicing. The Vulcans that had been elsewhere were returned to the base. Aircrew and groundcrew were recalled from leave; major overhauls were postponed. Extra attention was paid to QRAs, but then QRAs always got high priority. One afternoon the Vulcan crews sat in their cockpits for an hour and then were released. And that was as far as the impact of the Cuban Crisis went. Bomber Command was on a very discreet alert. Extra police patrolled the airfields, but the bases were not locked up tight: personnel came and went. The newspapers got very excited. Kindrick remained calm.

  Skull decided not to take his anxieties to Pulvertaft. The station commander was a group captain looking forward to making air commodore; he didn’t question RAF policy. So Skull sat in his office and wondered how two billion people had allowed themselves to drift into a situation where two men, seven thousand miles apart, might blow the planet to bits.

  He was drinking coffee when he heard that America had gone to DefCon 2. Just a hiccup away from war.

  Doing anything was better than nothing. He called Freddy Redman’s office. Mr Redman wasn’t there, he was making a tour of bomber airfields, in fact... There was rustling of paper. “He should be at Kindrick about now.”

  Skull went to the window. Freddy was getting out of a car, shaking hands with Pulvertaft. Skull went downstairs, Freddy saw him from a distance, waved, beckoned. When they met, Freddy shook hands and said: “Lunch, sandwiches, you, me and Silko, out there, by the Vulcans. It’s a treat I’ve promised myself for weeks. Can you lay it on? Splendid fellow.”

  An hour later they were walking along the taxiway. Silk, as junior officer, carried the sandwiches and a flask of coffee. For once, the wind had dropped and the airfield was silent. “Glorious,” Freddy said. “Pure fresh air. Beats London, I can tell you.”

  “Last time I did this I met a Yank on his way to shoot himself,” Silk said. “Talked him out of it. Damn glib, I was.”

  “Captain Black?” Skull asked.

  “That’s him. Got posted home.”

  “Where, alas, he did in fact shoot himself. Karl Leppard told me. No known reason.”

  “He wasn’t too thrilled about bombing East Berlin,” Silk said. “He had qualms. I had qualms once. Big as barnacles.”

  “Tell me this, Freddy,” Skull said. “How can we have a strategy of deterrence and a policy of secrecy at the same time?”

  “Nobody knows,” Silk said. “All the boffins are baffled, take my word. Now can we talk about sex?”

  “You’re proposing we drop the secrecy?” Freddy said to Skull. “Let the Soviets know exactly what we’ve got? The Cabinet would have a fit. The Opposition would have an orgasm. Nato would have kittens.”

  “And civilisation might survive. Just consider –”

  “He’ll bore you to death, Freddy,” Silk said. “I had it from him, both barrels, at four in the morning. God, I’m hungry.”

  “You can’t have deterrence and secrecy,” Skull argued. “If the Soviets won’t attack us because they’re afraid of our weaponry, then the more they know, the greater their fear. A secret deterrent is a contradiction in terms!”

  “You’d show them everything,” Freddy said.

  “I’d have a Soviet general living on every bomber base. No secrets, no misunderstandings, no doubt in anybody’s mind about what would happen if.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Secrecy isn’t a weapon. We don’t want the enemy to guess what we’ve got. He might guess wrongly.”

  “Life is a lottery,” Silk said. “Take my wife...”

  “Let’s be specific,” Freddy said. “The QRA system: you’d tell the Soviets how that works?”

  “They know already,” Skull said. “How many bomber fields have main roads running past them? Anyone with a stop watch can time the scrambles. We want them to know.”

  They had reached a line of Vulcans. “Magnificent beasts,” Freddy murmured. “You chaps don’t know how lucky you are...” He walked to the nose of the first bomber and enjoyed the great sweep of the wings. “Incomparable,” he said. “Destined for the scrap-heap all too soon, I’m afraid.”

  Silk was chewing the inside of his lower lip. His teeth nipped the skin. “Scrap-heap?” He tasted warm and salty blood. “Don’t be bloody silly, Freddy.”

  “No joke, old chap. Vulcans were made to fly so high and so fast that they were untouchable. No longer. Soon you’ll switch to low-level attacks. Probably high-low-high: high approach, go low to slide under the radar and release Blue Steel, then high, lickety-split.”

  “Under the radar,” Silk said. “Christ Almighty. They’ll be chucking vodka bottles at us.”

  “Gary Powers was ten thousand feet higher than you when they clobbered his U2. And that was two years ago.”

  “Exactly,” Skull said. There was a note of triumph in his
voice. “The Soviets demonstrated their deterrent power, so we took them seriously. That’s how deterrence stops wars!” He tried to kick a dandelion and missed.

  “Nobody’s going to scrap the Vulcan,” Silk said. “It’s a winner. How can you scrap a winner?”

  “I’ll tell you how,” Freddy said. “The oxy-acetylene cutters burn through the wing roots and the wings hit the concrete with a bang that breaks your heart. Now let’s eat before you pair destroy my appetite entirely.”

  “If you scrap the Vulcan we bloody well deserve to lose.”

  They sat on the grass and worked their way through the sandwiches. Nobody spoke.

  Freddy lay on his back and watched a highflying buzzard make large, slow circles. Silk chewed a toothpick to tatters. Skull found himself thinking about his pension, felt slightly ashamed for not worrying about Cuba, then felt annoyed. He’d earned a pension, hadn’t he?

  “In an ideal world, Skull,” Freddy said, “life would be a damn sight easier without secrets between us and Moscow.”

  “But,” Skull said. “Here comes but.”

  “Their bombers aren’t a patch on the Vulcan,” Silk said. “That’s no secret.”

  “But it’s not an ideal world. And one reason we’ve got to keep our defences secret is the famous four-minute warning. In itself it’s fine, we’d certainly get four minutes’ notice of an attack. But how many Vulcans could respond?”

  “QRA works,” Skull said. “Airborne in under two minutes.”

  “And how long does it take to prepare the kites?”

  “Hours and bloody hours,” Silk said. “Fourteen fuel tanks to fill, pre-flight checks. Make the sandwiches, Hoover the carpet. Then you’ve still got to kick the tyres.”

  “And remember Blue Steel,” Freddy said. “A couple of hours’ work there. That HTP: nasty stuff. Can’t be rushed.”

  “There’s two hundred and thirty gold studs connecting the weapon to the bomber,” Silk said. “Bugger-up one connection and the whole thunderbox has to come off and start again.”

  “Well done, Silko,” Freddy said. “Full marks.”

  “I read it in Woman’s Own. Very hot on stand-off missiles, they are.”