Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  They heard the strange plane long before it came over. This was normal: final approach into Crystal Two Air Field came directly up Frobisher Bay, so that the mountains of Hall Peninsula and Meta Incognita funnelled the sound to the strip. They had plenty of time to drink their tea and wonder who this arrival might be; the US Air Force control tower expected no incoming traffic today. And how, the Canadians all wondered, did that poor bastard up there propose to put down on this godforsaken runway when you couldn’t see the tower from the hangar, only thirty feet away?

  The unknown plane passed unseen overhead. It was a big one, the idlers could tell that from the sound of four radial engines: probably a DC-4 freighter diverting from some other fogged-over strip. Good luck to it. It would have to try elsewhere today.

  The plane banked and began to circle, avoiding the hills that rose on three sides. It orbited for an hour more, until it got boring, until the men on the ground had got so used to its droning, invisible presence that they scarcely noticed it any more. And then, just when the strange plane was starting to get interesting again – how much fuel did it have left? The nearest alternative was the short gravel strip at Coral Harbour, five hundred miles away – the pilot must have sensed a gap in the weather, because he flew off to the south-east, turned back, straightened out, the roar of the engines booming off hillsides, and a few moments later, as if by magic, an American B-29 appeared on the apron, its propellors tearing spiral tunnels in the fog.

  The mist closed in and everyone lost interest. The Americans ran this bleak airstrip, which they had built and paid for in the war. They could do what they liked with it. A beer delivery was the only good thing that could happen up here, and even then the wet canteen was off-limits for Canadians.

  Nobody thought to wonder, at first, why the giant bomber didn’t kill its engines on the American side of the apron. It was three years since the war had ended, and nothing interesting happened up here any more. Most of the wartime buildings stood empty, the mist rolling in through broken windows and doors. Crystal Two barely counted as an airbase by now: the Americans used it mainly as a weather station, while the Canadian photographic detachment had come up in the spring to map Baffin Island: God willing, it would go back to Ontario in the fall, mission accomplished, never to return. Frobisher Bay was Canadian soil, but if you asked most of the 9 Detachment types, the Americans were welcome to it. If they’d only let us into their goddam canteen . . .

  So nobody thought it strange when a stooped, slightly stout man in US Air Force Arctic gear walked in from the mist and asked for the skipper. It was only when he shook off his coat to reveal a blue battledress tunic that they took notice: what kind of Canadian wing commander appears unannounced in a total white-out fog? Outside, the B-29 revved its engines, taxied back to the threshold and hurtled blindly off into the void. It had only been on the ground for ten minutes. It hadn’t even bothered to refuel.

  How does a mid-ranking Canadian officer get an American strategic bomber to give him a ride to the end of the world?

  Wing Commander Hugh Morgan chose a private room in an isolated Quonset hut where no one would bother him. When he woke next morning he lay in his cot and listened to a loose sheet of metal banging in the wind. The sound told him that the weather had changed in the night and the fog must have lifted. There was a square of black felt tacked over the window but the glare around its edge said that it was morning. The day had come and there was nothing else for it.

  He packed his kit, hid his empty Mackinlay’s bottle under the hut, and set off on foot through rows of abandoned billets, relics of that recent past when Frobisher Bay had been somewhere that mattered. The morning was cool and overcast, the Arctic sun glaring from everywhere at once. He felt gravel crunch beneath his soft flight boots, saw white foam on the wavelets that washed up the shore. There were children down there by the inlet – Inuit kids from the base’s twin village, sitting on boulders and fishing for char. Across the head of the bay the northern slopes of the Meta Incognita clung to their last winter snow. He had been here before in the winter, during the war, when Crystal Two was a refuelling stop for new war planes being ferried to Europe via Greenland and Iceland. Now the world had passed it by again. Apart from the Inuit, only a few American weathermen stayed here year-round. It was as it should be. The rusting trucks and jeeps, the empty oil drums, disused barracks and collapsing tin shacks were strewn along the shoreline like the leavings of a tide.

  The plane for today’s operation stood on the apron in a clutter of fuel drums. It was a four-engine Lancaster, built to bomb Germany then modified for photo-survey work. Morgan should have gone straight to the operations room but the familiar outline drew his feet from their path.

  He remembered a warm autumn evening by a cornfield in Lincolnshire, the idling motor of the truck that had brought them to dispersal. The boys of T-Tommy, smothered in their heavy flying kit, cracked jokes to cheer up their anxious WAAF driver. When the tower flashed the signal they gave her their unsmoked cigarettes, as if by a casual afterthought, then heaved themselves into the plane. He remembered their voices on the intercom, oddly bored, almost apologetic, as they advised the skipper about courses and searchlights and clusters of flak. He had climbed into the astrodome and watched, amazed, the whole world turned to fire – the circus city blazing below, flak shells bursting Santa Claus red, bundles of fighter flares blazing like Christmas, lighting the sky for the night-fighters and their streams of glittering death. Another Lancaster, flying just below them, had blossomed into flower, drifted gracefully down and away from them, bursting in a rain of golden sparks. He remembered all that, but he couldn’t remember the names or the faces of the crew of T-Tommy, having only met them once, in the briefing room before the operation. The following morning, on their return from the Ruhr, a jeep was waiting at dispersal to drive him back to Bletchley. T-Tommy, he later learned, had gone out again the following night and that was the end of her.

  He walked slowly round this other, living Lancaster, running a hand over its duralumin skin. The gun turrets had been gelded, patched with sheet metal like the front of a derelict house. Its wartime camouflage paint was now stripped to bare metal, gleaming dull silver in the overcast sun. Three new windows had been installed in the floor and sides for the Trimetrogon survey cameras. There too, protruding ventrally, fore and aft of the new windows, were two T-shaped antennae: the aerials for the SHORAN distance-finding radar. When it became operational this would take precise triangulation readings from transmitters at known positions on the ground, allowing the cartographers to peg their mosaics of mapping photographs to established geodetic control points. Thus regions of the north where surveyors had never even set foot could be aligned to the European and American trigonometrical surveys. Soon there would only be one world to live in, one made of numbers not names.

  Morgan passed slowly along the side of the aircraft. He stopped beneath the reared-up nose where the bomb-aimer’s bubble stuck out like a chin. There was nothing painted there – no cartoons, no pin-up girls, no name, no sticks of little black bombs – not even the Camera Bashers’ crest of the 22nd Photo Wing.

  A few yards away, by the port inner engine, some airmen worked a hand-pump attached to a fuel drum. Morgan turned to to their corporal. ‘Does this Lanc have a name?’

  The corporal had been trying to ignore this unannounced inspection. ‘We’re not allowed to paint nose art any more, sir. Peacetime regulations.’

  ‘I know that. But what do you call her?’

  ‘Just her number. Two-one-four. She’s a war baby. She came off the Mississauga line in March ’45 and went straight into mothballs. If it wasn’t for this mapping job she’d have never flown at all.’

  Alice, decided Morgan. Her name is A for Alice, at least today.

  The operations room was built inside the hangar, a long, plywood lean-to attached to one wall. Its windows looked over the apron on one side and the hanga
r floor on the other. Squadron Leader Harbison, the detachment commander, was waiting there with Barnett the pilot and Tomkinson the navigator. Over in the corner, behind a screen of charts and noticeboards, an airman fried slices of spam on a hotplate. They all stood to attention when Morgan came in. Harbison saluted. He must have kept his hat on while he waited for me, thought Morgan, just so he could salute. Up here, of all places. They have no idea who I am.

  He returned the salute. ‘Please carry on. We’re a long way from Rockcliffe.’

  He took out the sealed envelope containing his orders – the orders that he had typed himself the night before, at the new American strip at Thule in northern Greenland – and handed them to Harbison. ‘Today’s job.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Would you like some coffee and a spam sandwich while I read it? The Americans are supposed to cook for us up here, but their chow line doesn’t start until after take-off.’

  ‘No, thanks.’ Morgan didn’t think he could stomach food yet.

  ‘You sure, sir? Our own boys will be eating anyway. There’s no galley on the Lanc. Not much heating either.’

  ‘Really . . . ? Well, thanks, then.’ The grease might dampen down his hangover until he could get on the plane and take a hit of oxygen. As Morgan ate he watched Harbison read the orders, look at him, then pass the paper to Barnett and Tomkinson.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Tomkinson. ‘Why do we have to fly there?’

  ‘It’s a fill line,’ said Morgan. ‘One of your other detachments screwed up a Trimetrogon survey line on the Melville Peninsula last fall. Between Hall Beach and Igloolik. Rockcliffe needs it completed this season.’

  ‘Okay. But why not just fly direct to the fill line, sir? These orders have us doing a huge dog-leg to reach the target area – north over Baffin Island then due west across Foxe Basin.’

  I should have put something about that in the orders, thought Morgan. I’m getting careless. He thought quickly. ‘Because they want you to do an ice reconnaissance while you’re up there. To see if the upper Foxe Basin has thawed yet.’

  ‘Why?’ It was Tomkinson the pilot this time. ‘No one ever goes there, sir. Who is they?’

  ‘That’ll do,’ said Harbison. ‘You have your orders, boys. Go prep your machine.’

  ‘There’s another thing,’ said Morgan. ‘I’ll be riding along with you.’ He saw them exchange looks. ‘I need to do some calibration on the new SHORAN set. That’s my job during the flight.’

  Barnett spoke up. ‘The SHORAN?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are you going to calibrate it against, sir? It’s not operational yet – we don’t even have any ground stations set up. What will you listen to?’

  ‘I’ll be looking for any stray signals that might bleed onto the SHORAN frequencies. I’ve just come from seeing the Operation Polaris people at Thule. The Americans say they’ve noticed some problems with ghosting. Probably due to the ice in the air, or maybe the proximity to the magnetic pole.’

  None of these officers had trained yet on SHORAN, but they still had to know that he was talking bullshit. He might as well get to the point.

  ‘That’s my affair anyway. And if you look at the orders you’ll notice that they aren’t signed with my name. This is because my presence here is classified as secret. My name is not to appear on the flight manifest or in any of the logs. And I’ll have to ask you to forget what I just told you.’

  Barnett twisted his mouth. ‘I don’t think you’ve told us anything, sir.’

  Tomkinson took out a pipe and polished its bowl. ‘I flew for a bit with 101 Squadron in the war,’ he said conversationally. ‘They made us take an odd-bod on operations. A Jewish guy. Half German. He had a box of tricks that he wasn’t allowed to explain to anyone – even the skipper wasn’t told what it did. Once we were over the continent he just sat with his back to us, listening to his headphones and twiddling his knobs. We never found out what he was up to.’ With his index finger he tamped tobacco in his pipe.

  Morgan figured he’d better give them something. ‘He must have been an ABC operator: “Airborne Cigar”. They picked men who spoke German and trained them at Ludford. The idea was to detect and jam the radio links between the German night-­fighters and their ground controllers.’

  ‘Really? . . . Well, it didn’t work too well for this poor bastard. A fighter shell took half his head off.’ Tomkinson struck a match and lit his pipe. ‘Were you on ops, sir?’

  There it was. They had given him the DSO and DFC, among other things, but it didn’t do for him to wear the ribbons. ‘I was more of a boffin. Radio. Radar. Magnetics.’

  ‘Magnetics?’ Barnett’s tone was a little too solemn.

  ‘Magnetic anomaly detection. Looking for submarines under the water. That sort of thing.’

  ‘I didn’t know we could do that sort of thing. Must have been important.’ Tomkinson barely hid his sarcasm.

  ‘It was.’ Which, Morgan thought, smiling apologetically, is why you didn’t know about it.

  Lough Neagh, Northern Ireland, 1942

  To make a target for Morgan’s secret test, the 422 Squadron fitters welded six empty fuel drums end to end. This dummy submarine was then smuggled from RAF Castle Archdale to Bannfoot on the back of truck. Watched by a solemn Ulster farmer and his no less solemn dog, the 422 types rolled their hollow steel tube down the bank of the Bann where it entered Lough Neagh. As anticipated, the current carried it a little way into the lake before the inflowing water, seeping through the bung-holes, dragged it to the bottom. Flight Lieutenant Morgan, watching from the blister of his circling flying boat, could still see its outline in the shallow lake. That was good: this test wasn’t meant to be blind.

  The PBY flying boat banked and flew north over the lake. To the west, the Sperrin mountains were red with heather. To the east, the whins were a yellow flame on the ridge of the Antrim hills. As the plane climbed higher, preparing to turn, a grey line of distant ocean peeped over the chequerboard fields to the north.

  It was a rare clear day in a grey Irish summer, and the sun funnelled in through the observer’s blister, soaking Morgan’s tunic with his sweat. The sunlight overwhelmed the glowing green spikes on the cathode-ray tube mounted in front of him, making them almost invisible. Morgan didn’t yet know how or if this secret new magnetometer, ‘borrowed’ from the unwitting Americans, actually worked. Now he couldn’t even see its read-out. He should have left the cathode tube where the British and Canadians had found it, mounted further up the fuselage behind a blackout screen. But he needed to match its readout to his visual sightings of the dummy submarine. Otherwise how would he know what a submerged U-boat was meant to look like on the tube? And who would have bet on a clear day in Ireland?

  This was a problem. What to do next? The aircraft decided for him. As it banked to the east, preparing to come around for a run on its target, the port engine sputtered, backfired and died. The plane lurched sideways then straightened again, the starboard engine roaring to full revolutions.

  ‘We’ve lost number-one engine,’ said the pilot in his earphones. ‘It’s that fuel pump again. And number two’s already running hot. She won’t hold altitude with the weight of your gizmo. I’m going to have to put down near here for repairs. Do you prefer Aldergrove or Langford Lodge?’

  Morgan figured the angles. Aldergrove would be bad – lots of RAF brass who would want to stick their oar in. Langford Lodge would be much, much worse: it was a depot for the US squadrons based in England, and Morgan didn’t fancy having to explain to the Americans how one of their latest anti-submarine aircraft, fitted with a technology so secret that even their allies weren’t supposed to know about it yet, came to be flying around Northern Ireland disguised in RAF markings. The Americans had written it off after its crew ditched their malfunctioning aircraft and took to their dinghies at the entrance to Lough Foyle.

  ‘Nei
ther,’ said Morgan. ‘We’ll put down on the lake. The 422 types can help us moor until we get it fixed.’

  ‘There’s quite a wind down there, Hughie. It may only be a lake but it’s still pretty choppy.’

  ‘We still have one engine. We’ll be able to taxi.’

  The plane turned south and flew inland for a couple of miles, passing over the belt of rushy fields and bog and ash woods that fringed the lake to the south. To the east, a train puffed self-importantly up the Dublin–Belfast railway line. The plane turned again, nose into wind. Morgan saw the faces of the ground crew staring up from the riverbank. Now the PBY was over the lake again, gradually descending. The second engine, he noticed, was running slightly rough.

  They were supposed to go sailing that day but none of Elizabeth’s church group knew anything about boats, and even their guides from Lurgan Sailing Club struggled to cope with the wind. It pinned their dinghies to the muddy shore of Kinnego Bay, flapped sails in their faces, drenched them with spray from the short urgent waves that beat on the hulls.

  Elizabeth, who feared deep water and easily became seasick, was glad when the Reverend Emerson gave up on boating and skipped to the picnic. But now they faced another problem: any place which offered shelter from the wind – any lakeside hedge or tree or wall – had already been occupied by swarms of black lough flies. The flies didn’t bite – having no mouth parts, living only one day in order to copulate – but whenever the wind fell away they smoked up from their hiding places, clouds of fractal desperation, frantic to mate before they died. They ruined the picnic – embedding themselves in the jam tarts and kicking sadly in the tea.