Under the Radar

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Bloody fool, Amos thought almost viciously, turning back to finish with the wiper. Only an idiot would fly a helicopter that close. What did he think would happen? It was the familiar reaction with which airmen so often masked distress and fear. Immortality was naturally granted to those who were not that stupid . . . Amos had witnessed several fatal accidents in his flying career and thought little more about this one until he overheard some gossip and caught the unfortunate pilot’s name: O’Shea. Simultaneously the small shock raced through him again. Surely not Marty O’Shea? But inevitably it was. Apparently the pilot of the Beverley had reported foreign object damage to his starboard wheels on take-off, and as the nearest aircraft Marty’s Sycamore had been diverted to make a visual inspection. It had simply flown too close. Although Marty and his no. 2 were wearing parachutes, neither had managed even to release his seat harness: centrifugal force must have pinned them where they sat. Wrenched violently in all directions, they might dimly have perceived for a few seconds that they were doomed. The Sycamore had slammed into the ground upside down, digging itself a grave several feet deep. The removal of the two men had taken place piecemeal; and although fire hoses had later flushed out the wreckage it still smelt and attracted flies whenever the sun was on it in Wearsby’s dump. Pilot error, the Accidents Investigation Branch inspectors had reluctantly concluded.

  It had hit Amos hard. Marty and he had been at Cranwell together and had shared many a daft escapade. They had been at the same drunken dance in Grantham the night they met Avril and Jo. In what Amos now ruefully considered the daftest escapade of all, Marty had married Avril and he had married Jo. It had been all the dafter because at the time the RAF reinforced its disapproval of officers marrying before they were twenty-five by not assigning them married quarters even when they were available, which was seldom, and frequently obliging young couples to buy their own caravans to live in and to move them at their own expense when they were posted. The promise of a life of Calor gas lighting, Elsan toilets and a likely bus ride for the wife to reach the NAAFI shop surely argued true love.

  That had been in 1957. Or was it 1958? On graduation Marty had opted for a rotary-wing course and had stuck with helicopters, winding up flying rescue missions with Coastal Command. For some years he and Amos had seen little of each other until Marty was posted not far from Wearsby, somewhere out by the Wash. Jo and Avril, who had remained in touch by occasional letter, still met quite often. These days Jo contrived to spend ever more time with her widowed friend and two small fatherless children and had ever less to say when she fetched up back at Wearsby. ‘This whole world of yours,’ she would gaze stonily out of their married quarters’ metal-framed windows at the identical brick blocks of flats on either side. ‘It stinks of death, Amos. You do realise that?’

  I’m every bit as upset about Marty as you are, he would think to himself, reflecting that he’d known his friend rather longer than he’d known his wife but managing to stop himself from saying so. One had to make allowances for the womenfolk, everyone recognised that. Most of the time they were as keenly wedded to the ethic of the service as their men; but every so often an emotional side could surface when they seemed to forget the overriding demands of this attritional war against communism in which they were all, willy-nilly, combatants. Amos preferred not to risk one of Jo’s disparaging retorts about ‘male bonding’, whatever that was. No doubt some phrase she had picked up from the Reader’s Digest to which she subscribed at a Forces discount. It paid to increase your word power, Amos thought bleakly. ‘You married into the services, Jo,’ he protested as quietly as he could, nettled more by the idea of embarking yet again on a tedious circle of repartee than he was by her implied accusations.

  ‘Into, yes. But I didn’t marry the Royal bloody Air Force. “I Give My All”. What kind of a daft squadron motto is that? Not to me, you don’t, and I’m your wife.’

  ‘I think I’m supposed to give it to my monarch,’ he told her mildly. ‘Private life gets whatever’s left over.’

  ‘Slim pickings.’

  ‘Maybe. But at Cranwell I took an oath of allegiance to “Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors”.’

  ‘And may I remind you that you also took an oath of allegiance to me. Your marriage vows – affirmed before God, in case you’ve forgotten.’

  ‘We knew all that beforehand, Jo, remember? Frankly, I don’t mind giving my all if it prevents the world being obliterated with nuclear weapons. I’ve never made a secret of it. I like being a cold warrior. I regret but believe in its absolute necessity. It’s what I’ve been trained for.’

  He supposed it was the shock of her friend’s widowhood causing this bitterness. That and the new regime of QRAs – quick reaction alerts – to say nothing of his frequent absences on exercises and sorties to far-flung places around the globe. ‘It’s the job, Jo. We can’t ease up. Do you want Britain turned into a wasteland of fused glass just because we’ve been caught napping by a pre-emptive Soviet attack? You can’t trust the Communists an inch, you know that.’ But it remained acknowledged and unspoken that the constant state of alert could break normal life, collapse marriages. It was the poisonous fallout of a confrontation structured to ensure no nuclear bomb would ever be dropped in anger. Security was such that wives quickly sensed what questions not to ask about their husbands’ work, the operations they flew, and least of all about the weapons and equipment they deployed. And there were even a few women who outranked their husbands, or whose jobs made them privy to information they couldn’t share in bed.

  ‘Shit-a-brick, that’s the deal,’ Amos told the stratified heaps of sheet metal in the fire dump as he stood in the morning light full of righteous exasperation. Unexpected absences, certain no-go areas – they were surely the trade-off for cheap living, for allowances and pensions, the best medical attention, paid holidays, even the occasional free flight care of Transport Command to sunny places like Singapore or Aden or Nairobi. Not for the first time – by no means for the first time – he was aggrieved enough by his own rhetoric to add aloud, ‘Bloody women.’ What a ridiculous mistake to have made: starting out his adult life by swearing solemn oaths to not one but two of them. At least the Queen didn’t moan at him over breakfast. One of these days, he thought with a tiny lift of satisfaction, I shan’t be able to stop myself telling Jo that I love flying more than I love her. Never mind the initial drilling and bull back at Cranwell, learning to fly had been wonderful. And now years of disciplined study and practice as well as the Operational Conversion Unit course have finally put me in the left-hand seat of a nuclear bomber. The responsibility would probably scare me shitless if I ever allowed myself to think like that instead of treating it as the best thing in my life . . . For a moment Amos thought fondly of his crew: professionals all who loved what they were doing and believed in it. By comparison the domestic and emotional world was strangely aimless, its civilian inhabitants amateurish and clumsy. From where he stood he could glimpse between two elms one of his squadron’s Vulcans nearly a mile away. For a long moment its dew-beaded tail fin blushed beneath a pinkish ray of the rising sun and again he felt his heart lift as once a cavalryman’s might at the magnificence of a charger in peak condition. It was more than the mere tool of his trade, a piece of service-issue equipment. Wives sometimes referred sourly to their husband’s aircraft as ‘the other woman’. That’s the deal, he thought again.

  In the strengthening light Amos glanced around before laying an affectionate hand on the Sycamore’s shattered carcase.

  ‘Bless you, Marty,’ he murmured a little self-consciously. ‘You knew what it was about. Good hunting to you, old boy, wherever you may be.’ The words said themselves without the least belief in anything beyond the point of impact; but the sentiment filled his eyes with momentary tears.

  After a few more minutes in this junkyard-turned-shrine he glanced at his watch and pedalled away. The day had begun. Within a matter of hours the weather had turned and he was suited up and sittin
g patiently in the captain’s seat of XM580 on yet another QRA.

  3

  Ever since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 a proportion of the V-force – one aircraft in each squadron – was always held at readiness state one-five. That is, the bombers could be in the air with their Blue Steel nuclear weapon at fifteen minutes’ notice, hence the ‘quick reaction alert’ designation. Tannoys screwed to buildings on every part of the airfield could exert their raucous klaxon tyranny at any time, day or night. This might be followed by the stentorian announcement: ‘Exercise Edom! Exercise Edom! Readiness state zero-five!’ The booming voice relayed from Bomber Command’s HQ at High Wycombe would go rolling away into the Lincolnshire countryside, often clearly audible in nearby towns and villages. The nominated crews who had been waiting, suited up, for anything up to twenty-four hours would make a dash for their aircraft which were already in a state of cockpit readiness with the pre-take-off checks complete, there to await the next instruction.

  The theory was that since most bomber airfields held two or three, sometimes even four squadrons, Britain could generate some ninety or more nuclear-armed bombers within the four minutes’ notice of incoming Soviet missiles the Fylingdales radars would theoretically give. In practice it was assumed that escalating international tension would buy several days’ additional warning time for the V-force, allowing it to be deployed to thirty-six secondary airfields scattered throughout the British Isles. Whitehall was banking on the Soviets never being mad enough to launch a pre-emptive ‘bolt from the blue’ attack on the Lincolnshire and East Anglian main bases because the Americans, forewarned, could then annihilate the USSR with retaliatory attacks more or less at their leisure. But with the RAF’s Vulcans and Victors and Valiants at full cockpit readiness anywhere between the Lizard and the Orkneys it was reckoned that a good few would be able to get off the ground in time and, even allowing for some of them being intercepted by missiles or fighters en route for Moscow, Stanley Baldwin’s pre-Second World War adage that ‘the bomber will always get through’ was still widely enough believed by all sides for its deterrent threat to be effective.

  Now Squadron Leader Amos McKenna and his crew were sitting in their Vulcan on its dedicated dispersal pan at the far end of Wearsby airfield. They had been there for an hour and a half already on zero-five alert, strapped in while wearing a flying suit, an air-ventilated suit, G-trousers and G-waistcoat. They had already missed lunch and were beginning to be both hungry and thirsty. From long experience they had known not to drink too much liquid that morning. There was provision for ‘easement’ aboard the bomber in the shape of chrome-stoppered rubber tubes ending in piss bags, known to all as ‘rubber kippers’. However, the sundry straps and tightly laced garments offered too daunting a prospect for any but the most desperate. Somehow the exigencies of a national emergency always managed to take precedence over mere bodily functions and subdue them except – as at least two crew members could remember – in the case of a co-pilot they’d once been assigned who had eaten an unwary chicken curry in Market Tewsbury’s Moti Mahal a few hours before a high-altitude sortie. The curry had had real authority and there was no provision aboard a V-bomber for that sort of emergency, least of all at fifty thousand feet, and the luckless man was unwise enough to confide his acute sufferings over the intercom. Helpful advice was immediately forthcoming from the rear compartment. ‘Bomb doors to open.’ ‘Better out than in.’ ‘Go on – you know you want to.’ And eventually, strapped firmly into his ejector seat as he was, there had been no alternative. For the rest of the flight an apprehensive silence settled over the crew. The man even carried out the landing in order to keep up his currency, a perfect greaser despite a gusty crosswind. (‘If that’s flying by the seat of one’s pants I wish more pilots shat themselves,’ the AEO remarked to his neighbour as they were taxiing back.) The pilot was known for a while as ‘Skid-marks’ but by the time he was posted to train for a captain’s seat he was universally known as ‘Vindaloo’, a name probably destined to follow him for the rest of his RAF career, and one he would never explain to his family.

  From his seat twenty feet above the concrete pan Amos smiled to himself at the recollection before dragging his attention back to the present. As always, the insistent ‘beep’ of the Telebrief in his earphones was inducing its own kind of nervous tension in him. For as long as the aircraft was held on readiness, its intercom system was linked directly by umbilical cable to the Bomber Controller at High Wycombe, who would issue the next orders. The beep, repeated every ten or fifteen seconds, was fed into the line to show that it remained open and live. The same sound was being listened to aboard crewed-in bombers on the same QRA all over eastern England. It was also audible in the headphones worn by Baldy Hodge, the crew chief, who was huddled below sheltering from the rain beneath the Vulcan’s ample wing. After an hour of it Amos found himself waiting for the next beep much as the victims of Chinese water torture must have waited for the next drop. Suddenly an imperious voice came on the line.

  ‘Attention. Attention. This is Bomber Controller. For Wittering, Wearsby and Finningley wings: maintain readiness state zero-five. I repeat: Wittering, Wearsby and Finningley wings: maintain readiness state zero-five. Bomber Controller out.’

  ‘Ahh, buggeration,’ came Bob Mutton’s voice over the intercom. ‘How much frigging longer, eh? We could do with some nosh back here, Skip.’

  ‘So we could up here, Baa,’ Amos told his nav plotter as the monotonous beep resumed. ‘We’ve been here before. You know what’ll happen the moment we get the soup heated and the sandwiches broken out: they’ll call a scramble and we’ll be in the shit. Better to hang on.’

  ‘We’ve tried feeding him grass but it just makes him fart.’ This was the nav radar, Vic Ferrit. Amos allowed a couple more exchanges of banter before commanding silence. Although he knew it to be impossible, he could never quite disabuse himself of the idea that these crewed-in conversations might somehow be audible to the brass hats in their High Wycombe nerve centre. Perhaps it would be salutary if they were. It might convince the powers that be that the men they were commanding from their distant bunker were under a constant strain that could be a little relieved by ribaldry. The endless repetitive checks to achieve cockpit readiness took their toll. So did the practically daily sessions of target study in ‘the Vault’ in Station Ops. Before each QRA the air electronics officer and the nav plotter were given a target in Russia but not the route they needed to reach it: that was something they had to work out for themselves before the klaxon sounded and they dashed for the aircraft. Amos often wondered if the upper echelons of Bomber Command weren’t too cut off from the consequences of their demands.

  One of the oddities of this new kind of warfare, he reflected, was that the more concerted the bombers’ response was required to be, the more each crew ended up in isolation. The view from the Vulcan’s cockpit was never good, and the rain falling outside from a gloomy low ceiling of clouds made it still worse. Almost immobilised in their seats by straps and bulky layers of clothing, with news from outside blanked out by the Telebrief’s beep in their headphones, it was easy for the two pilots crammed together in the narrow cockpit to feel cut off from the world, suspended in a capsule of slowed-down existence. They had an inkling of how Yuri Gagarin must have felt orbiting the earth in his titanium ball three years earlier. Nor were conditions any better in the crew’s compartment behind them. It was at moments like this, simultaneously tedious and nerve-fraying, that Amos saw his aircraft less as a friendly beast and more as the weapon it always was, its human component stuffed into cramped holes up in the nose with the rest of the immense fuselage given over to the capacious bomb bay and the nine heavy dustbin-sized drums of ECM gear in the tail.

  And truly isolated they would be if ever it came to the real thing and they took off with a live nuclear weapon they were committed to drop somewhere in western Russia. It would mean that Britain had already been attacked; and as they flew eastwards they wo
uld know there would be no coded message telling them to return. They would listen out for it, of course. In default of an official recall on the usual military wavelengths the Vulcan’s radio compass could be tuned to the BBC Home Service, which in the last resort would broadcast the recall code – assuming that Broadcasting House itself still existed. But there would be nothing left to return to and nowhere to land: no airfield, no families, friends, wives, children – nothing but glowing rubble. Then they really would be on their own. They had been told they should make for Turkey and land there, but they all knew there would be little fuel left for such a diversion after dropping the bomb. No-one liked to think of these things, of course; and because they all had absolute faith in the V-force as an effective deterrent they none of them believed it would ever come to that. Even committed Communists were only human and not irrational madmen. But still the images of Armageddon lurked disguised in their dreams, now and then given flickering shape by recent films shown at Wearsby’s little Astra cinema such as Dr Strangelove and Fail-Safe. Those cinematic reminders were probably salutary, anyway. The rituals of constant rehearsal could all too easily lead to forgetting what the final picture might look like if things went badly wrong.

  The imperious voice once again broke into the thoughts of everyone aboard XM580. ‘Attention, Attention. This is Bomber Controller. For Wearsby wing only, revert to readiness state one-five. I repeat, for Wearsby wing only, revert to readiness state one-five. Bomber Controller out.’

  ‘Yippee!’ ‘About bloody time too, and all.’ Headphones were shed and ears massaged to the tinkling of harnesses being thrown off and connectors clanking against metal. Fifteen minutes’ readiness was the baseline and meant the crew could disembark. Amos and his men ran their shortened shutdown checks. Someone pulled a lever, the hatch opened and cold Lincolnshire air gusted in. Crew Chief Hodge appeared below to reach up and pull down the extension of the yellow-painted ladder. The men swiftly disembarked, encumbered by their go-bags and the awkward aluminium ration boxes and Thermos flasks.