Permissible Limits

by Hurley, Graham

  I sat down on the edge of the sofa, swamped by a great wave of longing and hopelessness. God, how I missed him. I stole a glance at my watch, trying to work out what time it might be back in England.

  ‘Coffee?’

  Harald was stooped over me, and looking up at him I sensed that somehow he knew about Jamie. Maybe he really had been down in the hotel car park that night, watching and waiting. Or maybe it was simple intuition.

  I took the polystyrene cup.

  ‘Best china,’ I said lamely. ‘Makes a girl feel quite at home.’

  ‘You’re sure you take it black?’

  ‘Black’s fine.’

  He looked at me a moment longer, then sat down. I forced myself back to the conversation over the dinner table, blotting out Jamie and the times we’d shared since Jersey, and all the other wonderful secrets I’d hauled across the Atlantic.

  ‘You and Chuck must go back a long way,’ I said lightly. ‘It’s nice to keep a relationship like that going.’

  Harald nodded.

  ‘We first hooked up at Anapolis.’ He indicated a photo on the wall behind my head. ‘We were both nuts about the navy and we ended up in the same plebe year.’

  I half-turned on the sofa. Plebe year, he explained, was when you got your first taste of service discipline. I nodded, squinting at the photo. There were three rows of cadets in dark-blue uniforms. Chuck was in the back, a tall, skinny youth with a lop-sided grin. Harald was seated in the front row. Even then, his expression - set and unsmiling - gave nothing away.

  ‘How long were you there?’

  ‘Couple of years.’

  ‘And you liked it?’

  Harald stretched over me and hooked the photo off the wall. In the light from the desk lamp I watched his finger tracing the lines of eager young faces.

  ‘I loved it,’ he murmured at last. ‘It changed my life.’

  ‘You mean that?’

  ‘Sure.’ He nodded. ‘It was pretty brutal to begin with, you know, lots of crazy stuff to try and find your breaking point, but once you understood that, understood what lay behind it…’ He glanced up, then reached for the cafetiere. ‘There was a routine called rigging pitchers. This is a pitcher of water. It’s full. It’s heavy. You’re a plebe in your first year. Mealtimes, you stand to attention in the mess hall. Last in the chow line. Last for everything. Then they give you this.’

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘The upperclass men. The top kicks.’ He had the cafetiere in his hand now and he slowly extended his arm until it bridged the gap between us.

  ‘And you just had to stay that way? Holding it? At arm’s length?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Until when?’

  ‘Until you broke.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘This.’

  Slowly, he let his arm fall. There was a soft clunk as the cafetiere reached the desk. I shook my head. It was primitive, I said, and mindless. What could rituals like that possibly teach you?

  Harald was still looking at the cafetiere.

  ‘Everything,’ he said softly. ‘Academy dealt in blacks and whites. You either hacked it or you crashed and burned. There were no shades of grey, no room for arguments.’

  ‘And you think real life’s like that?’

  ‘I know it is.’

  He returned my gaze, recognising the challenge in my eyes. I thought he was talking nonsense and I was exhausted enough to let it show. He got up from the desk. A couple of steps took him across the room. When he came back, he had two more photos for me.

  ‘I was going to talk about flying,’ he said, ‘but maybe this is better. Here.’

  He slid a framed photo across the desk towards me. I found myself looking down at an aircraft carrier alone in a huge expanse of ocean. The steely-grey light threw long shadows across the crowded flight deck and the long spreading V of the carrier’s wake gave the shot a wonderful sense of purpose and urgency. I held the photo at arm’s length, half-closing my eyes. The aircraft were parked wingtip to wingtip, a pattern repeated the length of the ship, as perfect as marquetry.

  ‘Beautiful,’ I said. ‘They look like toys.’

  ‘Exactly. So here’s another.’

  The second photo had been taken on the flight deck at night. Rain had smeared the lens of the camera, giving the shot a strange, blurry, almost surreal look, but the sheer power of the image was astonishing. The big jet fighter that filled the frame was seconds away from touchdown. The shark-like nose was rearing up and one wing was slightly tilted while the long silver legs of the main undercarriage groped for the deck. The way the plane hung there was at once ungainly and beautiful. It defied everything I’d ever learned. No landing should be like this, I thought. So brutal. So hit and miss.

  I fingered the glass that covered the print.

  ‘You flew one of these?’

  ‘Sure.’ Harald nodded. ‘That’s an A-7 Corsair. And that’s me.’

  I peered at the photo, trying to imagine what it must have taken to get a plane like this down in one piece. Admiration is too small a word for what I felt. I could practically smell the fear that must have gone with this kind of flying.

  ‘How fast?’ I gestured at the photo.

  ‘Over the ramp?’ Harald shrugged. ‘Hundred and eighteen knots. Maybe a little more. Depending on the wind.’

  ‘And it was hard? Scary?’

  Harald pulled a face.

  ‘Hardest thing I ever did. We had some guys out on the boat once, some medical research guys. They strapped sensors all over us and ran stress tests on some of the missions, and you know what they found? They got readings from guys under fire, guys getting chased around by SAMs, guys pulling Christ knows how much g, all that stuff. And then they got readings at the end of the mission, those five minutes when you’re in the groove, and you’re coming down the glide slope, flying the meatball, and it’s dark as hell, and the wind’s all over the place, and it’s raining, and the damn boat’s heaving around in three dimensions, and you’ve got bingo fuel, and -’

  ‘Bingo fuel?’

  ‘Dry tanks. Nothing left to divert. One chance to get the baby home.’

  I was looking at the photo again. I couldn’t take my eyes off the big Corsair, hanging there on the very edge of the stall.

  ‘And these tests were for stress?’

  ‘Too damn right. And you know what they showed? They showed that night landings on to carriers were three times, three times, scarier than anything the gomers could throw up at you. Not that any of the guys couldn’t have told them that to begin with, saved them a lot of dough.’ He stared at the Corsair, brooding. ‘Most nights we never saw a missile. But every mission ended with one of these.’

  In the light from the desk lamp I could see the sweat beading on his forehead.

  ‘And this landing worked out? This particular landing?’

  ‘Sure.’ He sat back. ‘They used to rate us on the landings. They had a guy out on the fantail, a pilot, a guy who knew what he was talking about. There were various grades he’d give you. A cut grade was the worst. That meant a dangerous pass, almost an accident. You got to do a lot of explaining after a cut grade.’

  I was studying the photo again. I wanted to know more about flare-out speeds, about degrees of flap, angles of attack, throttle settings. What happened if you made a pig’s ear of the landing? How long would it take to spool up the engines and go round again?

  ‘Do a bolter, you mean?’

  ‘Is that what you used to call it?’

  He nodded, talking me through the overshoot procedure. With the throttle against the stops, and a great deal of luck, the plane would stay airborne. Then it was a question of clawing your way back to altitude, back into the pitch-black sky, then rejoining the queue of planes in the landing circuit, popping the speed brakes, lowering the nose and settling the airplane back into the landing groove. Some guys made as many as eight passes before snagging a wire. The master hooksters, on the other
hand, mostly put down first time.

  ‘Hooksters?’

  Harald bent over me, his forefinger following the line of the Corsair’s belly until he found the long black hook dangling from the rear of the fuselage. Stretched across the flight deck were three arrester wires. You normally went for the third wire, he said, which meant aiming the aeroplane at an eighteen-inch strip of deck coming at you at around 120 knots. Miss it with empty tanks, and you were most probably dead.

  I sat back, thinking suddenly of the approach we’d made to the field that very afternoon. There’d been three white lines striped across the runway and an awful lot of rubber around the third. I’d seen the lines again when we’d driven across the airfield in the jeep. I asked Harald about them. Was this what he did in his spare time? Strapped on an aeroplane and pretended he was back at sea?

  Harald was pouring more coffee.

  ‘It’s a training aid,’ he said. ‘We rig lines across the runway and feed them into little detonator caps. The guys in the hangar have fixed a hook to one of the Yaks. Snag a wire and the bang says you’re on the money.’

  ‘Will I be doing that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  My eyes strayed back to the photo. At least the runway wouldn’t be moving up and down, I thought, and with luck it wouldn’t be dark.

  I smiled.

  ‘Can’t wait,’ I said gamely. ‘When do we start?’

  ‘Tomorrow. The forecast is pretty good. I want us airborne by ten.’

  ‘In the dual Mustang?’

  ‘In the Harvard. I know you’ve got solo time already but I’d like to put you in the back seat and see how it goes. Get the numbers right and we should be in the Mustang by the afternoon. How does that sound?’

  I said it sounded fine. I was thinking about the instruction manual for the Cavalier Mustang, the one Harald had given me earlier. Now I’d seen the carrier photos, it was a great deal easier to understand his near-obsession with military hardware and it began to occur to me that his years over Vietnam had probably shaped the rest of his life.

  ‘Tell me more,’ I said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the war.’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Because you’re a wonderful pilot. And that fascinates me.’

  He gave me a look, at once troubled and proud. ‘Wonderful?’

  I could tell he wanted to believe it. I hunted for other adjectives, then settled for a verb.

  ‘You feel it,’ I said. ‘It just comes naturally. Flying with you, I get the feeling nothing could go wrong.’

  ‘I crashed,’ he pointed out. ‘I lost a Corsair. I screwed the pooch.’

  ‘You flew into heavy fire. You said it yourself. The odds were against you. There’s nothing you could have done.’

  ‘There’s everything I could have done. You know what they say about the careful guy?’ I shook my head. ‘The careful guy who wants to die in bed always checks. ‘

  ‘And you didn’t?’

  ‘On this occasion,’ he shook his head, ‘no.’

  There was a long silence. Outside, deep in what I took to be Monica’s wilderness, I could hear the hooting of a night owl. Harald, for once in his life, looked almost vulnerable.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ I asked softly.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Do you mind me asking?’

  ‘Not at all. I like your curiosity. It’s ballsy. It suits you.’ His eyes found mine again, then he looked away. He was leaning forward now, his hands knotted together, the knuckles white. Recklessly, I asked him for a third time about the accident.

  ‘It wasn’t an accident. I got shot down. Partly their doing. Partly mine.’

  ‘Why yours?’

  ‘I’d strayed off track. The POL stuff hadn’t materialised and I was looking for targets of opportunity. Our intelligence guys had warned us about this particular flak trap but I guess I didn’t take them seriously. In any case, I was a fighter pilot, and that pretty much sums it up. We’re not in the business of self-doubt, Ellie. We own the airspace we occupy. It’s ours.’

  ‘Until someone shoots you down.’

  ‘Exactly.’ He looked up, a strange faraway expression in his eyes. ‘You know the sweetest sound in all the world? It goes like this. Da-dee-dah. Three notes. Da-dee-dah. It’s the signal you get in your earphones when their tracking radars lock on. It means they’ve found you. It means they’re painting you. It means they’re seconds away from loosing the missiles.’

  ‘And that’s a sweet noise?’

  ‘Sure, because then you get to earn your money. They used to fire those mothers in twos, a salvo, bang-bang. The second fella got you when you thought you’d out-turned the first, but the wilder guys just figured it was twice as exciting. The Corsair was a beautiful ship. Big strong airframe. Plenty of power, plenty of speed. We were the last of the stick-and-rudder men. Yank and bank. Turn and burn. It was a plane you had to fly, hands-on. Even the missiles couldn’t catch us.’

  ‘But you crashed.’

  ‘Sure, and in the end I figured it out. I must have gone down to small arms. I was under three hundred feet. That low, it couldn’t have been anything else. Just goes to show, doesn’t it?’ He looked up, expectant, almost childlike.

  ‘Show what, Harald?’

  ‘Show that you can’t cheat a bullet. Over ‘Nam, around that time, flying was getting tricksy. The blue-suiters, the air force guys, were packing Sidewinders and Sparrows, big fancy missiles. That called for all kinds of clever shit. Their Phantoms wouldn’t fly without two men, guy at the front to keep the thing airborne, and his buddy down aft to sort out the technology. Those guys in the back never looked out of the window. They had their heads down, eyes glued to the tube. If the computer went squirrelly, you gave up and hauled ass and went home. What the hell kind of flying is that?’

  Abruptly, he came to a halt, staring down at his hands, embarrassed and a little ashamed - not of losing his precious Corsair but of talking about it. I reached out and touched his arm. It was a gesture of sympathy, of reassurance, and maybe an apology as well for going too far, but the physical contact made him flinch and I wondered just how many times he’d told this story.

  ‘Do you talk about it a lot?’

  ‘The A-7? ‘Nam? Never. My mother, she loves all that stuff. She thinks it was all guts and glory, Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston, wide-screen, comic-book stuff. It wasn’t, Ellie. Good guys got wasted. Put a foot wrong, you bought the farm. And for what?’ He looked up again, boxing me in with his questions. ‘You know where that war was lost? Here, in the States. In DC. And you know why? Because we were fighting the wrong war with the wrong weapons. We were toting millions of dollars’ worth of ordnance and all we ever did was nail the little guys on bicycles, or maybe the odd canal, or - hell - even a truck or two. What we didn’t do was go for something that really mattered. Like the dikes. Or some of those downtown Hanoi ministries. And you know why not? Because all those big fat targets were off-limits. And you know why that was? Because the politicians said so. Because the guys in Washington wanted to keep the thing under control. You can’t do that, Ellie. Not in war, not in peace. Either you fight to win or you quit. Everything else is conversation.’

  He reached for his coffee, apologising for the outburst, and I withdrew my hand, knowing that in some strange, unfathomable way this man was beyond comfort. Showing me the carrier photographs, talking about Vietnam, had unlocked a bit of himself I’d never seen before. Watching him bent over the polystyrene cup, I sensed that he was haunted by ghosts of his own making.

  Putting the photos to one side, I tried to change the subject.

  ‘Tell me about your father,’ I said. ‘What happened to him?’

  For the second time in five minutes, I saw him physically flinch.

  ‘My dad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He frowned a moment, steadying himself, then he shook his head, dismissing my question.

&nb
sp; ‘My dad died years ago,’ he said. ‘Poor bastard.’

  Chapter twelve

  We went flying, as planned, next morning. A slim, pretty girl with a flat Indian face and a cap of jet-black hair woke me with a cup of tea, and within the hour Chuck was driving me back across the airfield in his jeep. I was in the front seat this time and I had a grandstand view as we slowed beside the runway to let a pair of Mustangs land.

  They were both single-seaters, and watching them flare for neat three-point landings I noticed that both of them had underwing pylons that I’d seen earlier in the manual for the Cavalier Mustang. The pylons are fitted to carry bombs and rockets, and the fact that they were both empty made me wonder about a series of distant thumps I’d heard earlier when I was back at the Casa Blanca, pulling on my flying suit. I’m clueless when it comes to high explosives - even in the Falklands, the war had spared Gander Creek - but it occurred to me now that the deep bass rumbles which had taken me to the window might well have had something to do with the fighters that were taxiing towards the hangars. Harald’s private air force wasn’t, after all, purely for display. Just what was I getting into here?

  Harald was waiting for me beside the Harvard. It was incredibly hot already, with a light crosswind barely stirring the orange windsock, and he had forsaken his flying jacket for a light cotton zip-up. He had a pair of skintight leather gloves tucked into the waistband of his jeans and his eyes were invisible behind his aviator sunglasses.

  The moment I said hallo I knew something was wrong.

  ‘Sleep OK?’ he grunted.

  ‘Fine, thanks.’

  ‘Good. Put that on, then we’ll go.’

  He stood aside while I strapped on the parachute harness, then he swung himself up on to the wing and gestured for me to follow. The Mustangs had taxied the length of the apron now and were turning to join the flightline of other aircraft nearby. Above the cackle of the Merlins it was difficult to hear what Harald was saying. The cockpit was already open, the lapstraps of the seat harnesses neatly crisscrossed on the metal seats. I began to clamber into the front cockpit but Harald stopped me. He had a bottle in his hand. He made a tipping gesture then gave it to me. I unscrewed the top and took a couple of mouthfuls. It was deliciously cold and slightly saline. The Mustang pilots killed their engines and in the sudden silence I handed the bottle back.