Permissible Limits

by Hurley, Graham

  I was still thinking about Standfast, the kinds of planes I’d seen, good solid propeller technology, nothing complex, nothing too hi-tech. Was this the way it had evolved? Had Harald put his Central American experience to work back home?

  Chuck nodded.

  ‘You got it.’ He grinned, leaning forward in the armchair. ‘Harald figured there had to be a market for all that hardware. Refurbished Mustangs. Ex-combat choppers. Dumb bombs. Rockets that don’t cost a million bucks a throw. The name of the game is affordable air power, and believe me, we’ve got customers lining up all around the block. Harald sells them the package. Flight training. Aircraft. Aftercare. And any little extras they might care to name.’

  ‘Extras?’ The word had a faintly sinister ring. ‘What kind of extras?’

  ‘Stuff you pick up en route. Skills, tricks, techniques. You build up a kind of repertoire.’ Chuck gazed at me a moment. ‘Exactly how well do you know Harald?’

  I thought about the question.

  ‘My husband and Harald were good friends,’ I said carefully. ‘They had lots in common, flying mainly. Since Adam died, Harald has been incredibly helpful. Generous, too.’ For a moment I toyed with describing Harald’s several bids to buy our Mustang outright but in the end I decided against it. ‘He’s made a huge difference,’ I said instead. T don’t know what I’d have done without him.’

  ‘Sure.’ Chuck nodded. ‘So you’ll know how hands-on he can be.’

  For a split second, I misinterpreted the phrase. Chuck saw the expression on my face and roared with laughter.

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m talking hardware, nuts-and-bolts stuff. The man eats and sleeps schematics. Show him a wiring diagram, you’ve made his day.’

  I nodded. I was thinking about the times I’d seen Harald and Dave Jeffries together, discussing how to fine-tune our Mustang. Chuck was right. Harald, it occurred to me, even thought like an engineer. Everything in its rightful place. Everything carefully buttoned down.

  ‘So how does that relate to Standfast?’ I wondered aloud. ‘To what you’re up to here?’

  ‘Hell.’ Chuck grinned again. ‘You’re talking business now. We get clients from all over, like I said. Central America, Latin America, the Pacific Rim, even Africa. Those guys you saw today, they’re from Honduras. If the shoe fits, we can give them anything, jungle survival, air combat, ground attack, reconnaissance, infil, exfil, deniable violence, you name it.’

  ‘Deniable violence?’ I’d never heard the phrase before.

  ‘Sure.’ Chuck was looking around now, trying to illustrate a point. ‘You’re holed up in some hotel room some place. You’ve got access to soap and maybe a little gasoline. You want to make yourself a bomb but you’ve no idea how. No problem. Our guys will talk you through it.’

  ‘And Harald?’

  ‘Harald teaches our guys. All that stuff just fascinates him. Always has done, ever since the Academy. Give the guy a screwdriver and a couple of batteries and a metre or so of wire and you’ve lost him for the rest of the day. I guess that’s partly why he’s such a good pilot. He thinks his way into it. He becomes the machine.’

  I tried not to look shocked. The last twenty-four hours had given Harald Meyler dimensions which even Dennis Wetherall hadn’t suspected. Not just a merchant of death but maybe a practitioner, too. Soap? Gasoline? Screwdrivers? A length of wire? Was Chuck serious? Did Harald really specialise in blowing people up?

  Another thought crossed my mind.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Was Harald ever married?’

  Chuck looked at me a moment, then shook his head.

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Was he ever close to it?’ ‘Not that I know about.’ ‘Why not?’

  Chuck gave the question some thought. Outside, I could hear the soft clunk of a door closing. Chuck got to his feet, fetching a third glass.

  ‘I guess he never found the right diagram,’ he murmured. ‘I guess he never figured it out.’

  Chapter thirteen

  Next morning, I found the letter on the floor outside my room. The airmail envelope was addressed in a thick green Pentel and I knew from the line of kisses on the back that it had come from Jamie.

  I retreated back to bed, kicking off my shoes and lying full length on the duvet as I tore the envelope open. I’d been awake half the night, trying to work out when would be the best time to phone home to Mapledurcombe. I was missing Jamie more than I’d ever thought possible and the feeling of emptiness, of being completely alone, was beginning to affect me in ways I didn’t like to admit. Abandoned lovers make lousy pilots. Thank God he’d put pen to paper.

  The letter was almost incoherent and I wallowed in it. Saying goodbye at the airport had been the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. He remembered nothing about the drive home. He’d had nightmares about the plane crashing and next day the nightmares had got worse. By lunchtime, I’d fallen in love with Harald, chosen a bridal gown, booked a honeymoon cruise and made love in a million and one positions. I dwelt on each phrase, the way you linger over a box of chocolates, enjoying Jamie’s wild desperation, picturing him bent over the lined foolscap pad, trying to make me understand just how much I’d changed his life.

  He loved me more each passing hour. Real life was a blur, remote and irrelevant, a sad, passionless tableau in which people worried about the weather, and the mortgage rate, and Andrea banged on and on about grass stains on the hall carpet. She’d told him only yesterday that his job was on the line. He’d stopped concentrating. He’d stopped even caring whether the filter had been changed in the swimming pool, or the curtain tracks replaced in the Mitchell Suite, or the taxis booked to meet the first bunch of guests off the hydrofoil from Southampton. None of that stuff, he said, was of the slightest importance. Not compared to me. Not compared to us.

  Andrea, of course, must have known only too well what was going on in Jamie’s head, and the realisation that I hadn’t really gone at all- that I still haunted Mapledurcombe - was obviously driving her barmy. According to Jamie, she’d totally lost her cool. Only yesterday, he wrote, she’d sneaked into the little garden shed where he stored his bike and kept his tools. He’d pinned a couple of snaps of me to the back of the door and he’d returned to find them torn up and scattered all over the floor. This particular image made me giggle. Andrea had never been able to resist direct action and if I needed proof that Jamie was as dizzy and lost as I was then this was surely it.

  I was still halfway through the letter when someone knocked on the door. It was the girl who normally brought me tea. She’d had a phone call from Mr Meyler. He was over on the flight line. He was sending the Jeep for me in ten minutes.

  Back in the real world, I pulled on my flying suit, slipping the letter into one of the top button-down pockets. Close to my heart like that, it gave me the warmest feeling, and I was still grinning when the Jeep delivered me to the hangar on the other side of the airfield where Harald stood waiting.

  He was standing beside a Mustang I’d never seen before. The metal skin had been burnished until it shone and the only paint on the fuselage had been applied to the anti-dazzle panel that extended from the windshield to the propeller boss. The plane must have been flown in that very morning because I could still feel the heat from the engine.

  Harald gestured up at the open cockpit.

  ‘Here she is,’ he said. ‘Sweetest T-bird in the south.’

  T-bird is aviation slang for a trainer. This Mustang, like ours, had dual controls.

  ‘This is yours?’

  ‘Nope. Belongs to a buddy of mine, but there’s no limit on the loan.’

  I sensed at once from his tone of voice that we were in for a wonderful day’s flying. Yesterday’s sourness, that feeling of thin-lipped reproach, had disappeared completely. Instead, Harald was back to his usual self, patient, precise, infinitely painstaking. The weather was glorious. We’d be flying most of the day. First, though, I needed a proper brief.

&nb
sp; We walked into the hangar together, picking our way between the parked aircraft. At the back, beside the flight of metal stairs that led up to his office, Harald paused beside the Messerschmitt that I’d seen when I first arrived. The last of the certification tests was due in a couple of days and the inspector from the Federal Aviation Agency would be flying down from Atlanta.

  Harald beckoned me over to the cockpit. The canopy opened sideways, hinging upwards.

  ‘You want to sit in? Fantasise a little?’

  I accepted the invitation. Compared to the Mustang, the cockpit felt small, narrow and cramped. I reached up, pulling the canopy closed. If I was taller, as tall as Adam, I’d have to crouch to fly the thing. The stick felt miles away. I bent forward and waggled it a couple of times, and then glanced over my shoulder. The visibility to the rear was awful.

  Harald was looking in at me. I made a face at him, then opened the canopy again.

  ‘Not nice,’ I said. ‘Or not as nice as the Mustang, anyway.’

  Harald laughed, taking my hand as I climbed out of the cockpit and jumped off the wing.

  ‘Damn right,’ he said. ‘She’s a monster on take-off, really nasty torque swing, and there’s no rudder trim so you’re forever working the pedals. Put her in a dive and the ailerons lock solid. First time I did it I nearly made a hole in the Everglades.’

  For Harald, this was quite a speech. Messerschmitts in working order are hard to find, so why had he bothered?

  ‘Nostalgia.’ He patted the wing panel. ‘The guys who flew these things had a really hard time. See the width of that undercarriage?’

  He was squatting now, his arm outstretched. I knelt beside him. The narrower the undercarriage, the easier it is to screw up on landing, and the thin little tyres on the Messerschmitt certainly seemed uncomfortably close together.

  ‘I’ve got a library of books on the 109. Some months they lost more to landing accidents than combat. Tight fields, you see. And young guys with no experience.’ He shook his head fondly. ‘She’s one helluva bitch. Getting to know her’s been a real pleasure.’

  We went up the stairs to Harald’s office. It was much bigger than I’d expected and he settled me in a comfortable old canvas chair before disppearing to fetch some juice. I looked round. The place had the feeling of one of the ops rooms you see in old black-and-white war movies. A row of grey metal filing cabinets filled the space beneath the long window that looked down on to the hangar floor and the wall opposite was entirely occupied by a huge board charting the deployment of more than a dozen aircraft. The forward schedule took each plane to the end of August, and judging by the lack of empty white spaces, Standfast looked set for a busy summer.

  I was still trying to make out the movements of the DC-3, a big two-engined cargo plane on the hangar floor beneath us, when Harald returned with a huge carton of orange juice. He’d already warned me about the draining heat, how easily it could affect concentration in the air, and he poured the juice into polystyrene cups before handing me a couple of salt tablets.

  ‘Pop these,’ he said briskly, trying to answer one of the two phones on the desk.

  When he’d finished, I pointed at the board. For the Dakota, under June, I’d finally deciphered four destinations. Kiev. Piryatin. Karkov. Moscow. How come?

  ‘The Russian Shuttle,’ he said without looking up. ‘Commerce dressed up as history.’

  The Russian Shuttle. The phrase sounded familiar. Wasn’t this what Dennis Wetherall had been telling me about?

  ‘Adam,’ I said aloud. ‘Wasn’t he going to be involved in all that?’

  Harald looked up, surprised.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘he was.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask him to organise it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And didn’t you pay him…’ I frowned, ‘… seventy thousand pounds?’

  Harald nodded, saying nothing. Finally he got up and went to the window.

  ‘You weren’t supposed to know about that.’

  ‘My accountant told me. It showed up in the figures after Adam went down.’ I paused, waiting for an explanation. When none came, I asked him where the money had gone.

  ‘It went to Steve Liddell.’

  ‘Why?’

  Harald bent to one of the filing cabinets. I heard the drawer slide out and then the scrape of the metal files as Harald hunted for something inside. At length he handed me a fat airmail envelope. The stamps were Indian. The postmark read Madras.

  ‘Open it.’

  I shook the contents of the envelope on to my lap. There were perhaps a dozen colour photographs. I recognised the lines of the Spitfire at once. This one was in desert camouflage, yellows and browns. It had definitely seen better days but everything looked more or less intact, and judging by the grin on the face of the pilot kneeling beside one wheel, it may even have been airworthy.

  Harald was standing behind me, looking down over my shoulder.

  ‘It was meant to be a birthday present,’ he said. ‘For you.’

  ‘For me?’ I twisted round, staring up at him. ‘How come?’

  ‘Adam wasn’t keen on the Shuttle business. He thought it would be a distraction, take up too much of his time. It was only the money, plus my promise to find him a Spitfire…’ he nodded at the photo, ‘… that changed his mind.’

  ‘He was going to buy this for my birthday?’

  ‘Sure. Maybe next year’s. The engine needed a lot of work. Steve estimated around nine months. Possibly longer.’

  I gulped, leafing through the photos again. My birthday falls in June. A year from now, had Adam not died, I’d have been the proud owner of my very own Spitfire. Was this the kind of present a man would buy for a wife he didn’t love? For a wife he was about to abandon for some sex goddess on a windsurfer?

  I reached for my orange juice. Confusion is too small a word to describe the way I felt. I risked a glance at Harald. He’d have known about this morning’s letter from Jamie. God knows, he might even have left it outside my door. And even if he’d have missed the morning’s post, he certainly knew about yesterday’s calls because it had been Harald who’d answered the phone. So what must he be thinking? Adam barely dead and buried and yours truly involved with a youth nearly half my age?

  Harald didn’t have to say anything and he knew it. I watched him bent over the filing cabinet. The photo, I thought. The photo I’d found in the drawer in Adam’s office. Wasn’t that the clinching evidence? Didn’t that prove I’d been betrayed?

  Harald turned round. I was on the point of telling him everything, getting it all off my chest, giving myself just a shred of self-respect, but the moment passed.

  ‘Let’s go through the theory first,’ he said. ‘Get it out of the way.’

  ‘Theory?’ I asked blankly.

  ‘The Mustang.’ He smiled down at me. ‘You need to know what makes it the best fighter in the world.’

  Harald talked me through the technical brief for the best part of an hour. We explored areas where even Adam would have been struggling - stuff about laminar air flow, and drag co-efficients - but he had a little plastic model of a Mustang and whenever I looked more stupid than usual, he took care to spell out the real-life consequences of all that aeronautical jargon. How the Mustang would slip into a stall with very little warning. How the stick would go light, how I’d feel just a shiver or two of airframe buffet, and then how the left wing would suddenly drop if I didn’t ease off the back pressure and reduce the angle of attack.

  The Mustang was a big plane, he said. It was forty per cent heavier than a Spitfire but the design was technically more advanced. It was built, he told me, around a very simple proposition. That it would out-fly, and out-manoeuvre, and out-range anything else in the sky. It was a fighter pilot’s mount, a thoroughbred in every conceivable respect, and that meant I had to adopt what he called a very definite mind-set.

  ‘This machine doesn’t know you’re not a fighter pilot.’ He was holding out the little model at arm�
��s length. ‘So that’s what you’ve got to become.’

  Yesterday’s adventure with the Harvard and the smoke bomb suddenly began to make sense.

  ‘You mean that?’

  ‘Absolutely. No question about it. That’s what this plane expects. I’ll be taking you to the limits. I’ll be showing you bits of the envelope you never knew existed. You’ll be doing things here that’ll seem crazy at the time - high-g accelerated stalls, vertical departures, post-stall shimmies from blown overheads, the whole caboodle. At the time it’ll scare the hell out of you and you’ll be asking yourself what on earth all this has to do with your kind of flying, but believe me, you’ll be grateful.’

  He got to his feet, leaving the model on the desk, and went over to the window again. Down on the hangar floor I could hear the phut-phut of a rivet gun. I reached for the Mustang, turning it slowly in my fingers, still listening to Harald.

  ‘We’re talking extreme situations, Ellie. You’ll get to think like a fighter pilot, fly like a fighter pilot, do everything else like a fighter pilot, and who knows? It may one day save your damn life. That’s what we tell the guys here, the ones that come up from the south. We tell them sweat more in peace, bleed less in war.’ He turned round. ‘Does that make any kind of sense?’

  I said it did. We finished the carton of orange juice and went back to the sunshine outside. The light and the heat hit me like a hammer blow. I did the external checks on the Mustang then struggled into the parachute harness and let Harald strap me into the front cockpit. The aircraft had been refuelled already, and within ten minutes we were airborne. Harald had given me a notepad to slip into the thigh pocket on my flying suit, and every time I hit a snag or had a query, he made me scribble a note to myself. These, he said, would take us through the debrief. Not only that, but adding yet another little task to my in-flight list would stretch me the way I needed to be stretched.