Permissible Limits

by Hurley, Graham

  Harald was rummaging around in the corner. When he appeared beside me he had something in his hand. It was Monica’s metal cage. He pulled the little door open. I stared at it.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  Harald nodded down at the rabbits. Most of them had disappeared inside their hutch.

  ‘Some of these little fellas. My mother does it most days.’

  ‘Why? Why does she need them?’

  Harald had opened the wooden door to the run. One of the rabbits he grabbed couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks old. It blinked up at me, wet button nose, twitching whiskers, perfect blue eyes.

  ‘She feeds them to her pet,’ he said.

  ‘What pet… ?’ My voice faltered. I knew the answer already. I heard the clang of the metal as he shut the rabbits in the cage.

  ‘She’s got a pet alligator.’ He glanced up at me. ‘She had an old Seminole Indian guy trap him. Down in the Everglades.’

  I was still looking at the rabbits, remembering the unblinking yellow eye and the sour stink of the alligator’s breath. No wonder he’d come to me. No wonder he’d opened those huge jaws.

  ‘She does this every day?’

  ‘Without fail.’ Harald was heading for the door. ‘I tell her it’s unfair but she pays no attention.’

  ‘Unfair?’ Sickened, I could think of far stronger words.

  Harald laughed, fumbling with the padlock.

  ‘Sure. Damn reptiles are supposed to be out there hunting. Any more silver service and this one’ll die of boredom.’

  My last day’s flying at Standfast nearly killed me.

  The thunderheads had been piling up all morning and it was only my eagerness to fit in one last sortie that persuaded Harald to fuel up my Cavalier Mustang and let me have my way. The forecast, he said, was dire. I was to avoid the coastal area and keep well away from the towering stacks of cloud. When he asked whether I needed an escort, I shook my head. Greedy for one final hour alone in the Florida sky, the last thing I wanted was company.

  I took off to the north-east. After ten minutes or so I was up at 12,000 feet. From here, just, I could see both sides of the Florida panhandle, the long appendage that hangs down into the Caribbean. The visibility, for once, was good - a sure sign of impending rain -and as we began to climb again I checked the settings on my camera. The souvenir picture I’d dreamed about would show the entire coastline of southern Florida. To achieve that, I needed to go south.

  I winged the Mustang over, still climbing. The higher you fly, the thinner the air becomes, and I nudged the throttle forward, watching the airspeed push past 160 knots. Pilots will tell you that the Mustang is a very slippery aircraft and they’re right. It’s got a very thin wing, and poor manners at low speeds, but up here in the cold, thin air it was a joy to fly. I banked again, the gentlest of turns, checking the view. Below me, quite suddenly, there was nothing but haze, and as I watched - literally - the haze thickened into a blanket of ripply grey cloud. Like an idiot, I’d failed to keep a detailed note of my speeds and headings, convinced I’d be staying visual. With the cloud below me, I’d run out of landscape. Not only had my photograph disappeared but so had all the clues I relied upon to get home. In short, I was lost.

  I throttled back and stored my camera in the starboard bin. That lovely warm feeling of euphoria I’d felt earlier had quite gone. In its place, the first cold stirrings of fear.

  It was now 17.14. I checked the fuel gauges, calculating exactly how much I had left. If I called up Standfast, I thought, and they got a radar bearing on my transponder, they’d be able to give me a heading back to the airfield. Provided I could fly that heading, I’d be fine. If I had to divert for some reason, I’d have around half an hour’s extra fuel to play with. I stared down at the cloud, trying to estimate how thick it might be. If I got low again, down below the cloudbase, then at least I’d be visual to the ground. Then, with a radar heading, getting home would be that much easier.

  I throttled back, shedding height, then had second thoughts. I was still up at 12,000 feet. The longer I stayed here, the longer I’d eke out the fuel. Down low, in the thicker air, the Mustang drank Avgas.

  I checked my transponder, then called Standfast. I asked the controller for my range and bearing but when he enquired whether I had a problem, my pride told me to gloss the truth.

  ‘Negative,’ I said briskly. ‘Just a safety check. Over.’

  There was a longish silence. Then the controller came back with the information I needed.

  ‘You’re one hundred and thirty-nine miles bearing at one five seven degrees. You need to fly three three seven. Repeat, three three seven. Over.’

  ‘Roger, turning on to three three seven.’

  I thanked him and signed off. The fact that he’d worked out my

  course for me meant that I hadn’t fooled him. They’d be watching me now on the radar. Standfast’s newest recruit was under surveillance.

  I let go of the stick a moment, flexing my fingers. Ahead of me, the thick pillars of cumulus had closed, forming a dense, impenetrable wall of cloud. Just the time it had taken to talk to Standfast had brought it immeasurably closer. Inside these clouds, swirling up-draughts of superheated tropical air could tear the strongest aircraft apart. To risk it in the Mustang was suicidal.

  My mouth felt dry. I began to talk to myself. At all costs I had to stay calm, stay in control. Panic, make a single wrong move, and the consequences didn’t bear contemplation.

  Dusk falls quickly in southern Florida, and already I could detect the colour draining from the sky. This was another complication, of course. I had absolutely zero experience of night flying, and even if I managed to grope my way home, the landing lights at Standfast were pretty rudimentary.

  Up ahead, brilliantly neon against the looming grey cloud, I saw a flicker of lightning. Then another, further to the west. I checked my airspeed: 240 knots. I slipped back the cuff of my flying suit. My watch said 17.23. More lightning. Then the first fat drops of rain exploding against the canopy. I was in real trouble now and I knew it. I cursed my foolishness, my overconfidence, my greed. I’d been stupid to even think of cheating the weather. Harald, as ever, had been right. I should have been back in my room at the Casa Blanca, packing my bags, dreaming of England.

  England. Jamie. Adam. Mapledurcombe. I shut my eyes a moment, trying to drive the images to the very back of my mind, but Adam, especially, wasn’t having it. I could feel him here, with me in the Mustang, talking me through it, and the echo of his voice in my head made me feel even more vulnerable, even more alone. Was this the way it had happened for him? Back in February? Way out over the Channel? Had he made some hideous mistake and put the aircraft beyond his own competence? Or had it been something else?

  We were closing on the cloud wall very fast now, the Mustang spearing through curtains of rain. Soon, perhaps in seconds, I’d have absolutely no visual reference at all. Just a grey formless world that would first swallow me up and then kill me.

  I knew I had to do something. A glance over my shoulder told me that the way back was blocked, more clouds, more lightning. I checked the altimeter again. Somehow, God knows how, we’d lost 2,700 feet. The best way through it, the quickest way through it, was down. I pushed the stick forward, feeling my stomach rise. The airspeed was increasing dramatically and I felt a shiver of turbulence. At first it was like cobblestones in the sky, then we hit a vicious curl of windshear and the Mustang dropped like a stone then rose again, rearing up like the stallion she undoubtedly was. I was flying on instruments alone now, using the attitude indicator to try and keep the wings level. The needle on the airspeed indicator had passed 400 knots and the altimeter was unspooling so fast I thought it must have broken.

  Then, suddenly, there came a searing light, incredibly white, incredibly bright, that seemed to start behind my eyeballs and spread and spread until it filled the entire cockpit. At the same time there was a huge bang and a funny acrid smell. I screamed. The s
tick went dead in my hands and for a second I thought we’d hit the ground. Then the controls began to answer again and I hauled back on the stick, my eyes scanning my precious instruments. A minute or so earlier, I’d switched on the dashboard lights. To my horror, the dials were now deep pools of black. The electrics had gone. We’d been hit by a lightning strike.

  The key instruments in a Mustang are air-driven. That meant I still had the airspeed indicator, altimeter and artificial horizon, but without illumination they were as good as useless. It was so dark in the cockpit, I could barely see my hands. Once or twice in my life, people have told me about a fear so overpowering, so total, that it ceases to be fear at all. At the time I hadn’t a clue what they meant, but now I understood them completely. Cold as ice, I relaxed at the controls. I had to sink the aircraft as tidily as I could. I had no idea whether I was upside down, or banked to port or starboard, or dead level. Whether or not I came out of the cloud in time to recover would be pure chance. There wasn’t even any point in weighing the odds. All I could do was get on with it.

  Seconds went by. I saw more lightning, though nothing close. I had the throttle at what I judged to be a conservative setting and I could feel the aircraft sinking through the seat of my pants. After the fear, I felt a deep, cold anger. Bitch, bitch, bitch, I thought. What a bloody stupid way to die.

  Abruptly, the cloud parted. I looked down, or rather sideways, because I was in a shallow left-hand turn. A huge field of densely packed citrus trees looked horribly close. I levelled out and eased the throttle forward. The cloud base was maybe a hundred feet above me and for a few precious seconds it wasn’t raining. I could see a road ahead and a tiny flatbed truck with its headlights on. I winged over, meaning to follow the truck, trying to work out whether it was wise or not to risk a landing. It looked like a country road. It looked pretty straight. Apart from the truck, there was no other traffic. Should I go for it?

  I’d slowed as much as I dared, resigned to never finding Standfast, and I was still wondering about a landing when the road veered to the left and disappeared. My only other option now was a field empty and big enough for me to put down. My chances of surviving that were pretty bleak. My chances of keeping the aircraft intact were zero.

  Houses flashed past beneath me, a small town of some kind. The rain was back again, thick beads of moisture tearing across the canopy, and what was left of the daylight had acquired an eery green-yellow tinge that made me wonder whether I wasn’t already dead. Was this the afterlife? An eternity of little houses with their lights on and their curtains drawn?

  Suddenly, off to port, something crept into my field of vision. Not on the ground, not part of this surreal blur of images, but up alongside me. I risked a glance to the right, then looked again, scarcely believing my eyes. I was hallucinating. I had to be. The plane was another Mustang. And the face staring back at me was Harald’s.

  Two days later, I was back in the air again, looking down at the low, brown sprawl of New Orleans. Two hours out from Standfast, we were on track for Flagstaff, Arizona. From there, after a ride through the Grand Canyon, Harald’s flight plan would take us east again, to Denver, and then Chicago.

  We were back in the dual Mustang, Harald in the rear cockpit, my luggage tightly strapped down in the stowage space aft. As New Orleans began to resolve itself into city blocks and a huge brown lake behind, Harald gave me a new heading. The islands of the Mississippi delta lay below us and he was keen for me to fly west, along the coast.

  ‘Makes a nice picture,’ he said drily. ‘If you’ve still got the camera.’

  I didn’t bother replying. My adventures over southern Florida had earned me a debrief I’d never forget. By the time I’d called in for the radar fix, Harald had already been airborne, dodging the thunder-heads, fearing the worst. The controller back at Standfast had vectored him on to my radar blip and he’d shepherded me back to the airfield. By the time we landed, I was down to less than ten minutes’ fuel. Back in his office, cold as ice, he tore me to shreds. In sheer self-defence I wanted to point out that he’d sanctioned the flight, given me permission to go, but when he paused and gave me a chance to bite back, the only word I could think of was ‘sorry’. The man had saved my life. What else was there to say?

  ‘Up to the north is Baton Rouge. Next state along’s Texas. We’ll drop into Fort Worth for gas. Then route west for the Grand Canyon.’

  ‘OK.’

  I double-scanned the instruments. This was the first time I’d flown since I’d nearly blown it and to my surprise it felt wonderful. Three long phone calls to Jamie had helped me cope with the aftershock, and even Harald, I think, was impressed by my resilience. At the end of the debrief he’d softened slightly, telling me that training should always be a little scary, just to give me a taste of the real thing. Quite what the real thing might be was still a mystery, but when we met again later at the Casa Blanca, I confessed that my days of fighting it out with tropical thunderstorms were over. There was nothing I wanted more than a nice Atlantic low, rolling up the English Channel. Those I could cope with. Those I understood.

  Harald had eyed me over a bowl of minestrone soup.

  ‘You and Adam both,’ he’d said softly. ‘Next time, just have a little respect.’

  The Grand Canyon was awesome. We got to the southern edge late in the afternoon. The sun cast long black shadows across the canyon floor and the photos I took were a thousand times better than anything I might have snapped over southern Florida. After two passes - one high, one way down at 300 feet - we climbed away to the north-east and an hour and a half later I was applauding Harald’s landing at a small municipal airfield in the Denver suburbs.

  He’d reserved us a couple of rooms in a motel about a mile from the airfield, and the restaurant nearby where we ate dinner was owned by a buddy from the Marine Corps. I studied the menu while the two men talked at the bar. I was longing to get home now. After we’d paid our respects to Mr Brokenka, up in Chicago, I couldn’t wait to be aboard the overnight United flight Harald had booked for me. In my heart, I knew I owed him everything. A first-class seat back to Heathrow was the smallest of my debts.

  Harald rejoined me at the table. His buddy’s name was Al. Harald told me he’d come west in pursuit of a woman called Pamela-Ann who’d once been Miss Mardi Gras. He’d staked most of his Corps gratuity on the belief that she was crazy about him, and he’d lost the lot. They’d been married in three months, divorced after six. The relationship, in every conceivable respect, had been a disaster.

  The man behind the bar gave me a rueful grin. He looked a little like Harald, I thought. Same build. Same watchfulness.

  ‘Do you see him a lot?’ I asked Harald.

  ‘Couple of times a year. He comes down to Standfast once in a while. He was an explosives specialist in the Corps and he gets to talk to the guys about it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I ask him.’ He was looking at the menu. ‘You need to wire a car? Have it blown up? Al’s the man. You need someone out of your life? Ask Al. Only problem he never solved was Pamela-Ann, which I guess was pretty inevitable. That woman would make him go bang just by smiling at him.’

  He looked up, gazing across at his buddy. There was almost a fondness in his eyes, something I’d rarely seen before, and again I wondered what the Marine Corps and active service had really done to Harald. I was used to men embellishing war stories - even Adam had occasionally done it - but Harald just wasn’t the kind of person to exaggerate for the sake of effect. For one thing, it wasn’t his style. And for another, he didn’t have to. He really had flown fast jets in combat. And, for all I knew, he really had been part of a life where people got blown up or - in his phrase - ‘wasted’.

  The thought chilled me and I toyed with the food when it arrived. Harald asked me whether anything was wrong and I shook my head, sawing gamely through the huge rib-eye steak. This didn’t fool him for a moment, but when he tried to enquire further, I quickly changed the subje
ct, asking about his schedule for the next few months. What was he doing in the summer? Before the Fighter Meet? Would he be across in the UK at all? And if so, might there be space in his diary for a long weekend at Mapledurcombe?

  The prospect seemed to attract him. He pushed away the remains of his own steak.

  ‘Business is like war,’ he mused. ‘Did you know that? Business is war by other means.’

  He began to talk about the deals he was brokering around the Russian Shuttle, the commemorative flight into the heart of the old Soviet Union. In my naivety I’d somehow assumed that this little expedition had been cancelled or at least postponed - where would Harald find the time to organise it? - but the longer he talked the more obvious it became that he had a network of agents, men and maybe women whom he trusted, people perhaps like Adam.

  When I asked him if that was the case, he frowned.

  ‘I have a lot of money,’ he said guardedly. ‘It’s not necessarily the same thing.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I buy people, good people. But I don’t have to like them.’

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘You implied it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By including Adam. Adam was a one-off. Adam was a friend.’

  I looked at him and nodded. I’d felt that too. Exactly that.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ I said. ‘Tell me more.’

  He hesitated a moment, twisting his signet ring around his little finger.

  ‘I liked the guy a lot. I knew where he was coming from, what was happening inside his head. And I admired his judgement, too.’

  ‘Adam was hopeless at business.’

  ‘I didn’t mean business.’ He smiled softly. ‘I meant you.’

  The confession, coming from Harald, was a huge surprise. This past month or so we’d lashed together a pretty stable little raft. The relationship was close - of course it was - but it was practical as well. It had weathered some of the most intense, challenging flying I could ever have conceived. It had permitted him to be both a friend and a mentor. Why complicate it, so suddenly, like this?