Permissible Limits

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘You mean flying? In our Mustang?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The bumping stopped as we crossed the runway. Somewhere in the darkness away to our left were three white lines and an awful lot of rubber. Was this why Harald was putting me through the hoop? Was he trying to turn me into a display pilot?

  I tried to voice the question. Harald, I should have known, was rarely in the business of direct answers.

  ‘Display flying is heavily regulated,’ he said. ‘It might sound simple but it isn’t.’

  I agreed at once. Living with Adam had taught me just how fussy the CAA people could be. Even with his experience, getting a display authorisation had taken months of effort.

  ‘But that’s the idea?’ I reached out to Harald to steady myself. ‘You’re going to turn me into a circus act?’

  Harald glanced across at me, amused.

  ‘We’ll see. Depends how you shape.’

  I looked across at him, expecting more, but he refused to elaborate. So far so good, he seemed to be saying. I sat back, my legs braced, watching the lights of the Casa Blanca getting closer. What would it be like, doing what Adam had done? Stepping into his shoes? Displaying our Mustang in front of tens of thousands of people? Could it possibly be any more difficult than the tests Harald had been setting me? Wasn’t it obvious that I could hack it?

  Too many bottles of Sol wreck your better judgement. The Jeep came to a halt outside the Casa Blanca. Harald switched off the engine. I leaned over towards him, collapsing heavily against his shoulder. I could feel him trying to withdraw.

  ‘I just want to say thank you,’ I said thickly. ‘For showing me a new life.’

  Harald eased me back to the vertical. I kissed him on the lips.

  ‘Thank you,’ I repeated. ‘Muchas gracias’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Has it been a pleasure?’ I held him at arm’s length, trying to focus. ‘Be honest.’

  He looked at me for what seemed an age. Then he led me very gently into the house. The next thing I remember was the click of my bedroom door closing behind me. I looked round. I didn’t want to go to bed and I resented the suggestion that I should. Instead, I went across to the window. The dark shadows of Monica’s wilderness loomed out of the night. I could hear the rustle of wind in the trees and the buzzing of a thousand insects. I headed back to the door. I wanted to know about the little cage she left there every afternoon. I wanted to know why she did it, what she put inside. There was a torch in the kitchen. I’d seen it.

  I made my way back down the darkened corridor. Of Harald, there was no sign. I was tempted to find him, to invite him along for the ride, but I decided against it. Drunken lady pilots weren’t altogether to his taste, far too wild, far too unpredictable.

  Torch in hand, I left the house and made my way along the chain-link fence. The gate, when I found it, was unlocked. I pushed it open, the light from the torch pooling at my feet. I began to wobble along the beaten earth path, sweeping the torch left and right, not knowing what I might find. The Sol had robbed me of fear. I didn’t even mind the clouds of mosquitoes settling on my bare arms. The path veered suddenly to the left, the vegetation pressing against me. It was noisier than ever in here and I began to giggle, wondering how insects ever got a decent night’s sleep, when the torch settled on something metallic.

  It was another fence. I stepped towards it. It looked pretty solid, heavy-gauge mesh wired to sturdy timber posts. Beyond it, I could see the dull glint of water. I steadied myself against the nearest post. I was drunker than I realised. I closed my eyes a moment, willing the world to stop spinning, then shone the torch along the fence, trying to find some explanation. Why go to such lengths to protect this little pond? What could possibly justify all these precautions?

  In the beam of the torch, a flight of rough wooden steps led up to a little viewing platform. Halfway up I stumbled, gashing my leg beneath my knee. I tried to hold the torch steady, swatting away the mosquitoes from the trickle of blood. I could feel nothing.

  I made it safely up the rest of the steps. The handrail around the platform at the top was sticky to my touch. I leant against it, staring down at the water. At first I thought the long black shape beneath me was a log of some kind. Then, very slowly, it began to move. I closed my eyes again and shook my head, annoyed with myself. I shouldn’t have drunk so much. Harald had been right. Bed would have been a much more sensible option.

  I opened my eyes, shone the torch down, then took an involuntary step backwards, rigid with shock. An enormous alligator was staring up at me. Its jaws were open and the flesh of its mouth was pink behind the savage rows of teeth, but it was the eye that I’ll never forget. It was a yellowy-greeny colour, the colour of evil, and it was staring up at me, unblinking. Very slowly, I began to retreat down the wooden steps. This brought me even closer to the alligator. I switched off the torch, not wanting to look, but its jaws were still open and the sour fish-stink of its breath was overpowering.

  At the foot of the steps I turned and fled, my heart still thumping. At the end of the path, the gate clanged shut behind me and I lay against it, breathing hard, trying to rid myself of the sight and smell of the alligator. I understood now about the need for all these fences. But why the afternoon visitations? And why the empty metal cage afterwards?

  After a while, calmer, I turned the torch on and followed the fence around the property. Above the hum of the insects and the dry rasping of the cicadas, I could hear music, something classical and immensely sad. There was a clarinet in there, diving and soaring, and I made my way along the path that skirted the pool.

  Harald’s den was at the back of the far wing. His windows were open behind the insect mesh, and the light inside threw a soft white panel across the grass. I paused. I’d been badly frightened. There were questions I wanted answered. The Casa Blanca had begun to spook me. I stirred again and crept towards the window. Then I stopped. Harald was sitting at his desk, the chair swivelled sideways, his face in profile. In his right hand, held high, was a plastic model of an aircraft. It was a single-seater, propeller-driven, and at first I thought it was the Mustang he’d used when he briefed me. He held the little plane at arm’s length and he was flying it in long, graceful turns, perfectly matched to the music. It was like a child’s game, mesmeric, dreamlike, and I must have been watching for a couple of minutes before it dawned on me that this wasn’t a Mustang at all. It was too small. The profile was all wrong.

  The music was coming to an end now and I edged a little closer to the window as the aircraft soared upwards. At the top of the loop, Harald held it perfectly still, and at last I had a chance to recognise the tiny swastika on the tail. The plane was a Messerschmitt, a 109, just like Harald’s.

  The music ended. For a second or two the plane hung there, secure between Harald’s fingers. Then he let the little fighter fall, and in the busy silence of the night I heard the splintering of the wings and fuselage as it disintegrated on the desk below.

  Chapter fifteen

  The memories of that night have never left me - the party, getting drunk, the nightmare that awaited me in Monica’s wilderness - but the questions I wanted so badly to ask were quickly swamped by the rest of Harald’s flying programme. From the start, he’d promised to stretch me in every direction, and over the next three weeks that’s exactly what he did. The only physical evidence of that unforgettable evening was the gash in my leg, which quickly healed.

  Item One on Harald’s training schedule was something he termed ‘precision targeting’. That meant sortie after sortie out to the bombing range, a ten-mile square boxed on to the Standfast air maps that Harald had specially printed at a little repro shop in Fort Myers. The range had once belonged to the Department of Defense and Harald had acquired what he called ‘sole deposit rights’ on a twenty-year lease, another little present from his friends in the Pentagon.

  I never had the hours to turn myself into any kind of half-decent dive-bomber but I loved th
e disciplines it taught me. How to adjust the optical sight to the exact setting for - say - a forty-five-degree dive and a 3,000-foot release. How to calculate the slant range and then factor in the wind speed. And most important of all, how to suddenly change your mind and recompute all the settings and still arrive at the roll-in point in time to wing the Mustang over into a dive and then track the nose slowly up until the pipper in the bombsight was centred on the target. Put this way, it sounds easy. The fact that I never once dropped a bomb closer than 75 metres convinced me that it wasn’t.

  Alongside bombing, on alternate days, Harald introduced me to strafing. Strafing is the business of laying down machine-gun and rocket fire from the air. The Cavalier Mustang I was using had six .50 machine guns mounted in the wings. I knew from day one that Harald insisted on using live ammunition - the memory of those belts of shiny cannon shells for the Messerschmitt never left me - but on the sharp end, arrowing down from 3,000 feet, the kick of the machine guns made me think pretty hard about exactly what it was that took men so easily to war. Other pilots I know say it becomes addictive and I believe them, because nothing on this earth prepares you for the raw excitement of watching the tracers streaking way ahead of you, pocking the earth below with tiny little blossoms of dirt as you walk the bullets towards the big orange target.

  The first couple of times I did it I was hopeless, not least because I forgot to take my finger off the firing trigger. A full load of ammunition lasts just under ten seconds but I was so fascinated by the patterns I was making in the dust that I never wanted it to stop. Addiction, again. So simple. So sexy. So indescribably satisfying.

  Bombing and strafing, naturally enough, took me to air-to-air combat, an application I approached with considerable misgivings. It turned out that the damaged Mustang I’d seen the day I went solo in fact survived the landing, but I’d talked to the pilot since - a young guy from the Venezuelan Air Force - and it was obvious that the line between make-believe and the real thing was - at Standfast - dangerously thin. Harald, he said, believed in rattling a few cages. That was a phrase I recognised, the phrase Harald had used the morning I popped a smoke bomb at Chuck’s flailing soldiers, and it made me aware yet again what kind of cage life had constructed for Harald himself.

  The day I was due to become a fighter pilot began, as always, with a briefing. It was cooler than usual, a grey, overcast morning with the wind blowing down from the north. Harald and I were to fly as a pair, and we stood beside the wing of my Mustang while Harald rattled briskly through an introduction to air combat tactics.

  Way back in the thirties, he said, squadron commanders had flown in triangular ‘vics’ of three aircraft. Then the smarter guys had dreamed up something he called a ‘finger-four’ formation, each aircraft covering the other. This, in turn, had led to a Luftwaffe variation called the rotte, which was basically a two-ship formation, with the pilots hunting in pairs. In the jet age, thanks to the Americans, the rotte had become known as ‘loose-deuce’, two aircraft flying side by side with lots of sky between them.

  Harald’s phrase for this was ‘lateral separation’, and when I looked bemused, he produced two little diecast models - both Mustangs - and weaved them around in front of me. Watching his hands, I was instantly back in the hot darkness outside his den, the night I’d ventured into Monica’s wilderness. In my mind, the significance of that little episode was still unresolved. What would make a man fly a plastic Messerschmitt around? Was he a child at heart? Did he have an inexhaustible supply of little plastic 109s? To be honest, I hadn’t a clue, but watching him now it occurred to me that the real answer was probably very simple. At some point in his life, Harald had lost touch with that glorious muddle that is - for most of us - real life. Flying, having to rely on no one but yourself, was infinitely safer.

  Was I right? No, of course I wasn’t, but it seemed a reasonable enough theory at the time, and when we finally got airborne that morning I was concentrating far too hard to give this strange man’s motivation a second thought.

  The object of the exercise was close formation work. I was to be Harald’s wingman. We’d be flying against a couple of guys from Honduras. At all costs I was to stick to him, and stick close.

  ‘How close?’ I asked him.

  ‘Like shit on a shovel,’ he grunted, hauling on my seat harness and giving me a good-luck pat on the shoulder.

  We were in the air for less than an hour but it felt like all day, and by the time I wobbled in for an untidy three-pointer, I swear I’d lost pounds in weight. My face was bathed in sweat. My pulse rate was still in three figures. And when Harald finally taxied to a halt in front of me I found myself physically shaking with what I can only describe as delayed shock.

  I pulled back the canopy, sucking the air into my lungs. Harald was up on the wing and beside me in seconds. He looked excited. For reasons I didn’t begin to understand, we’d evidently won the dogfight.

  ‘We shot them down?’

  ‘Smoked them both.’ He nodded. ‘Twice.’

  The Hondurans had been practically invisible. We’d been way up above the thick eiderdown of cloud but I’d only spotted them a couple of times, twisting silver fish against the blue, blue sky. For the rest of the time they’d only existed in my headphones, brief clues from Harald. Five o’clock high. Eight o’clock low. Up-sun. Down-sun. I’m sure he was right, they were doubtless there, but I was concentrating far too hard on keeping formation, matching him move for move as he dived and banked and turned in his determination - in his phrase - ‘to kick them in the nuts’.

  The key, of course, was to get behind them, get in their six o’clock. A fighter pilot’s love affair with the average timepiece begins and ends with six o’clock. Slide into his six o’clock, and your opponent’s war is over. Let him get into yours, and it’s goodbye world. That, at least, was the way Harald saw it.

  ‘So how did I do?’

  We were walking back across the apron. Just putting one foot in front of the other was suddenly very difficult. Inside the hangar, Harald patted me on the shoulder. ‘My wingman,’ he murmured.

  Still dazed, I watched him heading for the stairs that led up to his office, and he’d disappeared before it occurred to me that I’d just won the ultimate accolade. Harald’s wingman. Lucky old me.

  It was later that day, in the kitchen back at the Casa Blanca, that I brought up the subject of Karel Brokenka. Ralph had written to me by now, enclosing a long list of detailed questions, and it was becoming important to fix some kind of appointment. I had another five days down here at Standfast. As soon as I could, I wanted to phone this man, introduce myself and find out exactly where he lived.

  To my surprise, Harald had it all worked out.

  ‘It’s a nursing home called Shoreview. It’s along the lake, west of Chicago.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I talked to the guy on the phone. Ralph gave me his number. We’re going up there together, first thing next week.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Yes, you and me. Any objections?’

  Next week was June. I’d promised Andrea and Jamie I’d be back at Mapledurcombe by the seventh, well in time for my birthday. Wasn’t this cutting it just a little bit fine?

  ‘Not at all. I’ll get you a ticket back from O’Hare. If that’s really what you want.’

  O’Hare is Chicago’s main commercial airport. I blinked, listening to Harald detailing the trip he’d planned. We’d take the dual Mustang. We’d need to refuel en route but held arranged for the auxiliary tanks to be fitted and it should be a pretty easy go. If the weather was right, he was thinking of a little detour, a huge left-hand curve that would take us west over Texas and Arizona. It was, he said, a pity to have me leave the US without at least a glimpse of the Grand Canyon.

  ‘Sounds lovely.’ I was still thinking of his first remark. If that’s really what you want. What did that mean? Why shouldn’t I want to go home?

  Harald was making space for his mother
at the table. She’d come in from somewhere at the back of the house. She was wearing a pair of rubber gloves. I glanced at my watch. It was exactly half past four. Monica sat down, and mother and son exchanged glances before Harald got to his feet.

  ‘Ralph says he’s nearly finished the book.’ Harald was heading for the door.

  I followed him.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘He sounds quite excited.’

  ‘You’ve talked to him?’

  ‘A couple of times.’

  ‘Recently?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘So how’s he getting on?’

  We were outside now. The sun had come out at last and the swimming pool looked especially inviting. Harald was heading for a long, low wooden shed out of sight of the main house.

  ‘He’s finished the picture research and he’s done a couple of drafts on the text,’ I said. ‘I think he must have left a hole for this man Brokenka.’

  ‘The Czech guy’s that important?’

  ‘Ralph thinks so. It was the only time our Mustang scored.’

  Harald had produced a key for the padlock on the door of the hut. He paused, looking back at me.

  ‘What about the other guy? The guy in the 109? Wasn’t Ralph trying to get a picture or something?’

  ‘That’s coming.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Yes, he’s been in touch with the German archive people. They’ve found the file now. It’s just a question of getting the photo across.’

  ‘And this Brokenka? He hasn’t got a photo already?’

  ‘No, but it’s the account Ralph wants. He’s talked to the man on the phone, of course, and I think he’s written a couple of times, but what he really wants is a proper sound recording, me talking him through it. Ralph’s really keen. It’s the least I can do.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Harald opened the door. I used to keep rabbits back home at Gander Creek and I recognised the smell at once. There were dozens of them in a long wired-off run. The tiny ones looked adorable.