Permissible Limits

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘What happens when I press the bomb release?’ I enquired drily, ‘Only I really liked Chuck.’

  I could hear Harald laughing again, but this time it sounded real.

  ‘It’s only smoke,’ he assured me. ‘And Chuck knows the routine backwards.’

  We were passing a thousand feet in a shallow dive, the airspeed nudging 160 knots. There was a gyro gunsight mounted on top of the dashboard and Harald told me to level the pipper once I’d found the guys in the swamp.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  At 700 feet, seeing nothing but islands of mangrove, I pulled the Harvard out of the dive. Flying the plane from the front cockpit was infinitely easier and I winged it over as we began to climb again, still not knowing quite what I was looking for.

  ‘There! Three o’clock low.’

  I looked down to the right, following Harald’s instructions. At first I didn’t see it. Then a strange, feathery pattern on the water drew my attention, the downdraught from a rotor blade, and I realised I was looking at a helicopter. It was the old Huey I’d seen beside the hangar earlier. The jungle camouflage blended perfectly with the greens and browns of the swamp.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Go for it again, same heading. He’ll be dropping the guys in any time now.’

  Checking the compass, I pulled the Harvard into a climb, pushing the throttle forward against the stops and holding it there. Passing 3,000 feet I levelled off, then winged the old plane over, heading back. For the first time in my flying career I felt a thrill of what I can only describe as bloodlust. No one had ever asked me to look for the bomb-release button before. Not in earnest. Not with flesh and blood on the receiving end.

  ‘Promise it’s just smoke.’

  ‘Don’t you trust me?’

  I didn’t have time to answer. I was too busy trying to locate the helicopter. From 1,500 feet it looked like an insect. Seconds later, I heard Harald’s voice again. He was shouting.

  ‘He’ll break to the right. Wait until I say.’

  The Huey was fattening in the gunsight. Suddenly it sheared away to the right, leaving tiny figures splashing around in the swamp. They looked hopelessly vulnerable. I could see one or two faces raised skywards, then a man running. I glanced at the altimeter. I was God up here, but I was fast running out of height.

  ‘Tell me when,’ I yelled.

  ‘Now!’

  I felt the little black button give under my thumb. At the same time I hauled back on the stick as hard as I could. The airframe was juddering around me and for one horrible moment I thought I’d left it too late. Then I caught a blur of faces and bits of green and brown racing past and finally a huge patch of blue, blue sky that filled the gunsight and seemed to spill over the rest of the cockpit. I could hear the thump-thump of my own blood pulsing through my head and I felt a wild exhilaration that even now I find hard to describe. I wanted to share it with Harald but I didn’t know how to put it, so in the end I cranked the speed up to 140 knots and barrel-rolled the fat old trainer, my own way of saying thank you for one of the most exciting pieces of flying I’d ever experienced. The fact that I’d just crossed the line between flying for pleasure and flying for some infinitely darker purpose didn’t, I think, occur to me. All I could think of was the undeniable fact that I’d hacked it. Harald had set me a task, I’d followed the brief, and - guess what - we were still in one piece.

  Horizontal again, I glanced up at the mirror. Harald was half-turned round in his seat, looking back at the guys in the swamp.

  ‘Upwind and on target, Ellie.’ He sounded gleeful. ‘You really rattled their cage.’

  After we’d landed back at Standfast, Harald disappeared without a word. I watched him hurrying across the tarmac towards the hangar, and it was one of the mechanics who finally clambered on to the wing and helped me out. When I asked him where Harald had gone, he said he didn’t know, and the longer I stood there in the blazing sun, the more attractive the prospect of the afternoon off became. Only now did I realise how exhausted I was. With no life-and-death decisions left to make, all I wanted to do was sleep.

  I hung around in the shade of the hangar for maybe half an hour. Then the mechanic who’d rescued me earlier took pity on me again and ferried me across to the Casa Blanca. The house was empty except for the sound of music from a radio in the kitchen. I let myself into my room. Someone had made the bed and I stepped out of my sweaty flying suit and slipped gratefully between the cool, crisp sheets.

  A noise outside the window awoke me hours later. I’d been dreaming about that first landing in the Harvard, the runway this time shoelaced with thick lengths of white nylon tape. It had felt horribly real, like dumping the plane into a cat’s cradle, and I was seconds away from certain death when the sound of a woman’s voice jerked me awake.

  I got up on one elbow, rubbing my eyes. It was the voice of someone old, almost singsong, calling a name I didn’t recognise. I went to the window. Along the fence, inside the open gate, a thin black figure was bent over a stick. It was Monica. She was calling into the wilderness, the way you might try and summon a pet cat or dog. Beside her stood the girl who’d brought me my morning tea. She was carrying some kind of metal cage. It was about the size of a shoe box and there was something moving around inside it. As I watched, Monica raised her stick, pointing down the path that led into the dense wall of green, then tugged at the girl’s arm. The pair of them ventured forward, disappearing for a minute or so before returning with the cage empty. Monica tapped the girl lightly with her stick, a gesture - I thought - of approval, then both women turned back towards the house.

  I stood at the window for a while, staring into the wilderness. The wind had got up a little and it carried a rank, slightly sour smell I’d never come across before. It spoke of fertility and decay and I thought at once of the vast expanse of swamp we’d flown across only hours ago. Monica, it seemed, had returned this little parcel of Florida to its virgin state. Quite why she’d want to do this was beyond me but I kept wondering about the metal cage the girl had been carrying, and what it might contain. The answer of course was to go and have a look and I was debating whether to do just that when I heard a shuffle of footsteps on the bare wooden floor outside.

  It was Monica. She stood in the open doorway. She was holding a cordless telephone in one hand and a slip of paper in the other. I took the slip of paper and she peered up at me while I made sense of the figures. The handwriting, I knew at once, was Harald’s. He’d scribbled a phone number, underlining the prefix three times. The end of the number was all too familiar. 0860 354876. My own mobile.

  I glanced down at Monica. She had a strange twisted smile on her face.

  ‘Nice young man,’ she said at last. ‘Jamie, I think Harald said his name was.’

  I was confused for a moment, then I remembered that I’d left my mobile with Jamie at the airport. I didn’t think it would work in the States. There seemed no point taking it.

  ‘He phoned? Jamie phoned?’

  ‘This morning, my dear. Very early.’ The smile, if anything, widened.’Twice.’

  ‘Twice? ‘

  ‘So Harald tells me.’

  ‘Ah…’

  I looked at the number again. Maybe this was why Harald had been so curt with me, so distant. He’d fielded the calls from Jamie at God knows what hour and drawn the appropriate conclusions. Not that it was any of his business. Not that it should have made the slightest bit of difference.

  ‘Is Harald around? Only I obviously owe him an apology.’

  ‘Harald’s gone to Miami, my dear. He’ll be back tomorrow.’ She offered me the phone. ‘Now then, do you want to talk to your young man?’

  ‘Not now.’ I almost resented the way she was thrusting the phone at me. ‘No thanks.’

  I swear Monica looked disappointed. Then she reached forward, taking my hand the way she’d done that first time we met. In a second or two she’d be asking about Jamie, who
he was, what he meant to me. We were friends, allies. Whatever secrets I had would be safe with her.

  I began to back into my room. I was still only half-dressed. Monica turned to go, then stopped.

  ‘I nearly forgot,’ she said. ‘Chuck wants you to meet his wife. He says she’s been cooking for you all day.’ Her eyes strayed to the phone number. ‘Be nice to meet new people, my dear. Don’t you think so?’

  Chuck called for me at seven o’clock. He was wearing civilian clothes this time, a pair of nicely cut chinos and a blue and white striped shirt that really suited him, and as we drove around the airfield perimeter track I was glad I’d made the effort to iron a frock and put on a squirt or two of decent perfume. Whether she’d meant to or not, Monica had hit the mark. The Casa Blanca was already beginning to feel just the slightest bit claustrophobic.

  Chuck lived forty minutes away, in a small township called Corkscrew. When I laughed at the name, he looked amazed.

  ‘That Maplewhatever place of yours -’

  ‘- durcombe.’

  ‘Mapledurcombe, yeah. And you think Corkscrew’s wild?’

  I told him how ancient Mapledurcombe was, how it went with the grain of an old, old country, and when he demanded to know more, I found myself turning the last four years inside out, explaining about all the building work we’d done, and Adam’s passion for vintage aircraft, and exactly how we’d set about building a bridge to all the USAAF veterans who’d made Old Glory such a success. The idea behind the business fascinated him. His own father had flown against the Japanese and he knew only too well how powerful the tug of those wartime years had become. Something like Old Glory was exactly the kind of dream vacation folks like Chuck’s dad were looking for. With proper marketing, he said, we’d make a fortune.

  ‘You’re right.’ I nodded. ‘But I expect we’d need a bigger house.’

  ‘And more airplanes.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So is he looking?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Adam. This husband of yours.’

  I stared at Chuck. It was a straight question.

  ‘You haven’t heard?’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘About my husband, Adam.’

  ‘No.’ He was frowning now. ‘What am I missing here?’

  I told him briefly about the accident. Adam was dead. His Cessna had disappeared in mid-Channel and so far no one knew why. Chuck couldn’t believe it.

  ‘And this happened… ?’

  ‘Back in February. You’re telling me Harald didn’t mention it?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘Did he mention I was married?’

  ‘No, but then I guess I never asked. He just said you were a good friend. He said he owed you lots of favours, said you were crazy about Mustangs. I just thought…’ he shrugged, ‘… you know…’

  ‘That we were together? Harald and I?’

  ‘Yeah… well… kinda. He never actually said it, you know, spelled it out… but, I guess, hell…’ He shook his head, visibly embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry, I’d no idea, Jeez.’

  The next mile or so passed in silence. I stared out at the gathering darkness, trying to make sense of this little bombshell. How come Harald could lose one friend and not tell another? How come these separate compartments in his life were so bloody watertight?

  Chuck was slowing now, and a sign loomed out at me. Welcome to Corkscrew, it read, Gateway to the Everglades. We turned left, and left again, and then coasted to a halt. The street was lined with low-rise, timber-framed bungalows. With the engine off I could hear the tick-tick-tick of a dozen lawn sprinklers. Chuck muttered that we were home and began to open the door but I reached across, my hand on his arm.

  ‘How well do you know Harald?’ I asked him.

  Chuck glanced back at me. His face betrayed his bewilderment.

  ‘I know him pretty good,’ he said at last. ‘Yeah, pretty damn good.’

  Chuck’s wife met us at the door. She was Costa Rican, at least half his age, with a beautiful smile and a figure most men would kill for. Her name was Esmeralda and she spoke American with barely a trace of an accent. The food was already on the table, a vast selection of exotic-looking salads, and she darted in and out of a nearby bedroom while Chuck busied himself fixing drinks from a huge fridge in the kitchen.

  He and Esmeralda had just had their first baby, a little girl called Conchita, and when it was obvious that she wasn’t going to sleep I insisted she join us. If anything, she was even more exquisite than her mother - wonderful almond eyes and the most perfect little feet imaginable - and watching her nestled in Chuck’s huge arms it was obvious that this marriage, at least, had been a love match. He and Esmeralda had met at an embassy party in San Jose. She was working for one of the big American oil companies and within six months they’d been married. Chuck never actually spelled it out but I suspected there’d been other wives before Esmeralda. Not that Esmeralda seemed to care.

  After the meal she disappeared back into the bedroom with the baby. I offered to help Chuck with the washing-up but he wouldn’t hear of it. He had some nice cool Chardonnay. We could take it through to the lounge and relax. Ezzie would join us when junior was finally squared away.

  Chuck’s lounge reminded me a little of Harald’s den. There was a woman’s touch in the extravagant stands of scarlet flowers and the bits and pieces of what I took to be Inca pottery, but the biggest picture on the wall featured a huge twin-rotor helicopter half-glimpsed through swirls of rising dust. We all carry baggage from the past and this, I assumed, was Chuck’s.

  I stood in front of the canvas. The helicopter was hovering on the edge of a paddy field. A nearby copse of spindly trees spat flame while a defensive ring of US Marines sprawled in the short grass were returning fire. Somewhere in the middle of the picture, his back against a dike, slumped a small, broken figure in a flying suit.

  I stepped forward and took a closer look. Without doubt, the painting was an original. The colours were pretty dramatic and some of the figurework was a bit uncertain but the feeling of immediacy, of actually being there, was undeniable. This was an important corner of someone’s war and it wasn’t difficult to work out whose.

  ‘Vietnam?’

  Chuck was rummaging in a drawer behind me. ‘Yep.’

  I pointed at the figure at the foot of the dike.

  ‘And this is Harald?’

  ‘Nope, another guy. Same year, though. Seventy-one.’

  ‘And you rescued him? You pulled this guy out?’ I glanced round. Chuck was looking almost bashful.

  ‘That’s right, ma’am. All part of the service.’

  I went back to the picture again. The temptation was to ask about medals and citations and what twenty-five years had done to memories like these, but I sensed that Chuck was past all that. I could hear him drawing the cork from the wine. I sat down in one of the big Naugahide chairs.

  ‘Tell me about Standfast,’ I said. ‘Tell me what happens there.’

  ‘Like this morning?’

  ‘Like any morning. Those guys I saw, the ones in combat kit, the ones you must have taken out to the swamp. What was all that about?’

  Chuck was pouring the wine. He passed me a glass, complimenting me on the smoke bomb.

  ‘You pickled it pretty good,’ he said. ‘Even Harald was impressed.’

  ‘All I did was hit the release. He talked me through it.’

  ‘Yeah, sure, but you were at the sharp end. At least that’s the way I heard it.’

  I grinned, wanting to agree. The memory of what we’d done would be with me forever. The rich greens of the mangrove filling the gunsight, the flailing bodies of the soldiers, the way the g forces had tightened around my belly, forcing the blood to my legs the moment I hauled the Harvard out of the dive. I wanted to tell Chuck about it, to share the excitement, but to someone with his experience, my little adventure would be pretty small change.

  He was telling me about Standfast. The busine
ss belonged to Harald. It had developed from stuff he’d been doing in the eighties, helping out the Reagan people down in Central America. The airfield had once belonged to the military, an important staging post on the resupply runs down to Honduras and El Salvador, but Harald had since acquired it on a thirty-year lease.

  I frowned, trying to follow the history. The ins and outs of the Contra scandal were largely beyond me.

  ‘What was Harald doing down there?’

  ‘Training, mainly. We were helping out the rebels in Nicaragua. The strategy had to do with rolling back the commies. Same game plan as ‘Nam, except that Central America is a helluva lot closer.’

  ‘You were there, too?’

  ‘Sure. I was out of the Corps and bored to hell. Harald called up one day and asked whether I was interested in making a buck or two to help out Uncle Sam.’ He shrugged. ‘What do you say when a guy makes that kind of offer?’

  He sipped at the wine, an infinitely delicate gesture from such a big man, and then he told me the way it had been down in Central America. The ferrying-down of supplies. The endless problems with spares and reliable munitions. The brutal fact that many of the so-called insurgents were simply in it for the money.

  ‘We were flying into a couple of airstrips, Llopango and Santa Elana. As fast as we warehoused the stuff, they just sold it on. In the end we could have been working for Federal Express. Even Harald said so, and he doesn’t give up easy.’

  ‘But what about the training?’

  ‘We did what we could. The stuff we had to use was pretty Mickey Mouse. Fixed-wing, you’re talking Cessna twins with a couple of five-hundred-pound bombs strapped on. Most of the choppers were hangar queens.’

  ‘Hangar queens?’

  ‘U/S, unserviceable.’ He frowned, running his fingertip around the rim of the glass. ‘Wars like that, you don’t need anything fancy, but you’re still talking regular maintenance and proper operational procedures. That was pretty much first base to these guys and most of them didn’t make it. Hell, we tried our best. We all knew that without air support the Contras would go down. Turned out we were right, too.’