Under the Radar

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘What the hell do we do with these?’ Amos asked, as the others stood around awkwardly in the clearing with their unwelcome livestock.

  ‘Whaddaya think?’ said Homa. He produced his knife and, taking the dog’s muzzle in one hand, deftly cut the artery in the animal’s neck before it or anybody else knew what was happening, directing the crimson spurts of blood away from his clothes. ‘This could be the only thing we get to eat in days.’ The dog began gurgling and jerking and Homa released its muzzle, letting it hang head downwards while its life ebbed swiftly with a few last whimpers into the Bavarian mud.

  ‘That’s just not on, you know,’ said a tall Royal Navy lieutenant, very white in the face. He was holding a rabbit.

  ‘You want to eat acorns for the next few days, be my fucking guest. This course is about survival, buster, and I intend to survive. I’m a country boy and this here’s a skill no Special Forces asshole needs to teach me.’

  Homa squatted and adroitly paunched the animal, tipping its guts out into the snow in a steaming heap. Having severed its paws, he began working his hand carefully around between the fur and the underlying membrane, skinning it as one would a hare. He pulled the pelt inside out down both hind legs, its pale blue underside innocent in the wan sunlight. In a matter of minutes he had dumped the fur and kicked snow over it and the entrails and had jointed the carcase, giving half to Amos to put in his pack. The head Homa kept for himself with its bulging eyes, ear cavities and grinning teeth. ‘The brain’s pure protein,’ he said. ‘Stick it in a tin mug over a fire and you’ve got yourself some real energy. Come on, Amos: we’re heading out. See you lot later. Good luck.’ And with that he and Amos set off into the woods. Looking back, Amos saw that one or two of the others had begun making clumsy attempts to dispatch their animals but the navy man had evidently decided to release his rabbit, last seen scuttling rapidly towards the nearest undergrowth.

  And now it was three or maybe four days later. Homa had vanished and Amos was on his own at 06:00 in the frozen forest. He was ravenously hungry and decided he would light a fire at first light, come what may, if only to bring some warmth back into his hands. He still had two half-burned potatoes in his pack. The joints of dog had long gone, the small bones smashed with stones for the smears of marrow they contained. On the first day he and Homa had found an abandoned orchard and had picked up a few fallen apples among the autumn leaves beneath the snow that were still not quite rotted. ‘Cider apples,’ Homa had said knowledgeably. ‘Not great but better than nothing.’ The one Amos ate had given him diarrhoea, merely adding to his misery. Snow and half-frozen leaves were not much of a substitute even for the RAF’s awful glazed lavatory paper.

  Yet dogged perseverance paid off, and eventual daylight brought easier going to the point where he reached his goal at about three in the afternoon. Hidden in the undergrowth, Amos surveyed the bare hillock on top of which was pitched a white tent. Armed men dressed as Russian soldiers in fur hats patrolled the surrounding ground at irregular intervals. Amos could see no sign of either Homa or any of the others in his group. Maybe they had long since won through to the tent or else had been captured. Either way they would even now be back at Flint Kaserne having had hot showers and a square meal, their ordeal safely behind them.

  In any case there was nothing for it but to lie up in the woods and wait for darkness. At nightfall it began snowing again and Amos was so stiff with cold he wondered it he would be able to stand, much less make a dash while avoiding guards and trip wires. From his prone position at the edge of the wood he could see the tent, now illuminated from within and not more than a hundred yards away. Suddenly there was a dull bang and the entire area was lit with the scorching white glare of a magnesium flare. It revealed a dark figure who had evidently forgotten the instruction to freeze and keep his head bowed. At a pinch he might have passed for an old tree trunk had it not been for the wild white face he was turning in every direction in order to spot the nearest guard. Seeing none, he broke into a dash for the tent whereupon two burly figures in fur hats rose from the ground and intercepted him just as the flare fell to earth and went out. In the sudden dark he gave a rabbit’s scream.

  As though his body was out-thinking his mind, Amos felt himself get to his feet and break into a swift trot, striking an oblique angle upwards in the rough direction of the tent so as to elude the guards. By some miracle he managed to avoid setting off another flare and in the confusion of the captured man’s loud protests he gained the back of the tent and went in. A lean and crew-cut Special Forces top sergeant shook him by the hand and said ‘Congratulations, soldier.’ He was given hot coffee and a jelly sandwich, after which he was escorted down the far side of the hill to a waiting Jeep and it was over.

  It turned out that he was by no means the last of his group. It also emerged that the man whose capture had provided cover for Amos’s ‘escape’ was the Royal Naval lieutenant who had liberated his rabbit rather than kill it. Apparently he and his buddy had snacked on raw turnips. He was surprisingly cheerful despite having been caught at the last moment, and proud of having survived without bloodshed. As they collected their certificates as having ‘successfully completed the course of training given at Bad Tölz, Germany’, the lieutenant said, ‘Harry icers: that’s how I’ll remember this whole caper. That and not becoming a carnivore, unlike certain crabs I can think of.’

  ‘I was taught to eat what was put before me, and be thankful,’ retorted Amos. ‘I suppose a diet of root crops does explain why you fish heads so often lack the energy to leave port.’

  Inter-service rivalry having been satisfied, they parted on good terms. But before Amos caught the train for the long haul to the Hook of Holland he made a discovery that told him he’d always been far more on his own than he’d believed. Back in the stone corridors of Flint Kaserne, with half his hair shaved off and a row of black stitches beneath a band of white surgical plaster, he’d bumped into Homa, now wearing Special Forces uniform.

  After a moment’s surprise Amos shook his head sadly and said with sudden enlightenment: ‘You were never my buddy, were you?’

  ‘Correct. Sorry about that. My job was to show you guys it was for real, how to kill your own food, how to survive, and then fade.’

  ‘Well, fuck you,’ said Amos.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Homa, nodding. ‘No hard feelings.’

  ‘Oh, terrific. I froze my balls off waiting for you in that wood behind the barn and then did the whole thing on my tod and I’m supposed to be grateful?’

  ‘It’s a thought. All you’ll get from me is that I was under orders, OK? Somebody must have wanted you to complete the course alone, which you did, and made a pretty good fist of it for a jet-jockey. One day you might have to hit the silk over enemy territory and you’ll be on your own, right? No buddies in Ivanland. You shaped up pretty good.’

  On the way home Amos thought this was probably as close to praise as he was ever going to get for his stint at Bad Tölz. Still, he’d got his certificate and could now add it to that from the ditching course, which had involved parachuting into the sea off Weymouth in full flying kit in January. He was well on his way to combat status. Good. But it did throw up that question of loyalty: how far to trust a buddy and how much to go it alone. It would have to remain unsettled.

  6

  The special flight that Group Captain Mewell had been instructed to form was now officially in existence, as evidenced by the squadron notice boards. On these it appeared as ‘P’ Flight, whimsically named after Ponsonby, the station’s mascot. As arranged, it consisted of two crews: Amos McKenna’s and Terry Meeres’s, with hints that a further two might be assigned ‘in case of future need’. If anybody knew what even the present need was they weren’t telling. This was in the time-honoured RAF tradition of keeping people in the dark until the last possible moment. Consequently there was a good deal of nervous speculation among the crews as to what their job might entail. Some discussion took place quietly over lunch at a
corner table in the mess.

  ‘If it hadn’t been for that test ban treaty last year I’d have said we were going to sniff-and-bottle somewhere,’ said Stephen Sanders, Meeres’s nav plotter. ‘One of those Chinese tests, for instance. They’d have sent us out to Midway or Singapore and the Met people would give us the winds at various altitudes and we’d have to plot courses to intercept the fallout.’

  ‘It’s still not impossible,’ Amos said. ‘It’s only a ban on atmospheric tests and the underground ones sometimes leak, apparently.’

  ‘I did a sniff-and-bottle once in a PR.9 Canberra,’ said Meeres’s co-pilot, Ludo Franek, reminiscently. ‘They tacked on a couple of underwing pods and sent us up from Spitsbergen, way out over the Barents Sea and Franz Josef Land. The Russkies had just exploded some gigantic bomb in Novaya Zemlya and the boffins wanted samples of the fallout to analyse the isotopes or whatever it is.’

  ‘You must have been worried about being meaconned and lured into Soviet airspace,’ said Ken Pilcher.

  ‘Straying? Christ, we were well inside. We’d been told to go as high as possible and with luck, if a Guideline found us, we’d crash into the sea and vanish. I told Group Captain Ops this was a new definition of the word “luck”. “Don’t you worry, old boy,” he said. “There aren’t any missile sites within a hundred nautical miles of where you’ll be, and their fighters will be out of fuel before they can get within twenty thousand feet of you.”’

  ‘So you went high.’

  ‘Never been higher. Up to sixty-two thousand. Talk about paralysed. You know Canberras: you either bake or freeze. We froze. We were so cold after nearly five hours in the air they practically had to use steam hoses to get us out of the aircraft when we got back. And that was another thing. They made us taxi to a quarantine area on the far side of the field where we were met by a bunch of moonmen in radiation suits. Masks, breathing apparatus, gauntlets, lead-lined jock straps, Geiger counters – the whole caboodle. They unhitched our pods and put them into specially lined boxes and drove them away on a trailer. Then some others ran Geiger counters over the aircraft and decided it should be decontaminated. And there we were, my navigator and I, having flown through the fallout and sampled it and carried it all the way back, still in our ordinary flying suits, frozen like ice lollies, and nobody paying us the slightest attention. We had to hitch a lift back to get a hot shower and a bowl of soup. No-one ever tested us for radiation. Never even saw the MO for a check-up. After a week of hanging around we were rotated back to Scotland. That was a few years ago, though. Today we might at least be given iodine pills.’

  ‘I thought I’d noticed a strange glow from you in the cockpit at night,’ said Terry Meeres. ‘I put it down to your halo.’ His co-pilot was a devout Catholic who never flew without his rosary.

  ‘Oh, do look, Mark,’ a voice broke in from over their shoulders. ‘The Dam Busters are having a top-secret lunch.’ Two airmen paused on their way past the table.

  ‘I say, wizard prang, Fishy. Can I have your egg if you don’t come back?’

  ‘Bugger off, you two,’ said Ken Pilcher wearily, ‘or we’ll be wondering whose Vulcan we noticed sitting on its tail this morning out there on the pan. Oh whoops. Tow it away and knock out the dents.’

  The jibe evidently struck home since the other’s tone became defensive. ‘Sod off, Pilcher – that was hardly our fault. The auto refuelling system was on the blink and the rear tanks filled first.’

  ‘Maybe your crew chief should have been in the cockpit selecting the tanks manually rather than trusting to the wonders of automation. But that’s probably a little advanced for you lot. Still, we were all impressed that you’ve trained a Vulcan to sit up and beg. It can’t be easy and I’m sure it’s expensive.’

  ‘I don’t think we want to have lunch with these snooty people, Mark,’ said the first speaker. ‘They’ve grown a bit too grand for their former mates.’

  ‘Oh, it’s only your table manners,’ Pilcher called after them reassuringly. ‘We still love your honest, boyish selves.’

  Just as Amos had feared, the superficially good-natured badinage revealed that the other crews weren’t taking too kindly to ‘P’ Flight’s special status, but he couldn’t think of anything to do about it for the moment.

  ‘Sniffing missions had crossed my mind, too,’ he resumed quietly. ‘I gather BOAC have installed discreet sniffers on some of their airliners but that can’t be as good as getting close to the test site.’

  His nav plotter said, ‘Maybe they’re working on some spiffy new navigation system and we’ll all be going to Gan for extensive testing between there and South Africa. Get our knees brown. Sun, sand, surf and dollies in grass skirts offering us their lovely firm coconuts.’

  ‘Baa Mutton, goodwill ambassador and NSU vector to the Indian Ocean.’

  ‘Widely known for his unbreakable penicillin habit.’

  But that same afternoon the two crews read a notice summoning them for a briefing next morning. This took place in a room in the ops block whose door was guarded by two armed policemen. Inside, the floor gleamed with Ronuk polish, orange traces of wax visible here and there between the boards. The ten crewmen sitting at tables stood up when Group Captain Mewell came in, the overhead lighting glinting on the glassine fronts of the photo ID badges they all wore on their left breast pockets.

  ‘Be seated, gentlemen,’ said their CO as the door closed behind him. ‘You’ll be glad to know they’ve at last seen fit to tell me what missions you’re to prepare for. You will be given detailed briefings later but to prevent speculation and to ease your minds I thought I’d better outline the general scheme so far as I understand it. There are two main tasks at present, one involving a new electronic countermeasure and the other a new weapons system. I’ll take the ECM first.

  ‘I’ve had this explained to me by a bloke from the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern. Apparently it’s his idea and he seemed pretty proud of it. Frankly, I couldn’t make head or tail of the technical stuff – it’s way over my old-fashioned head. That’s the province of you two AEOs,’ he nodded at Rickards and Pilcher. ‘You’re the experts and you’ll be properly briefed by a boffin later. What I’m clear about is that it’s an ingenious method for fooling the Russians’ radar. We all know our present system is powerful and offers good defence at various wavelengths, but it’s still basically just jamming and chaff.

  ‘Anyway, this new system is code-named Oilcan and it’s absolutely top secret. Note that, please. It’s going to put us back on the offensive rather than having to rely passively on our Red Shrimp and Blue Diver noise jammers as at present – useful as those are. Squadron Leader McKenna will vouch for what a good job they did when we flew together in that Skyshield exercise two or three years ago. What Oilcan does, apparently, is not jam the Soviets’ radar so much as fool it. It replaces your echo on their screen with one that’s so powerful it overloads their system, and to protect itself from burnout it has to reduce its sensitivity drastically. This makes your image appear to be retreating and their radar follows what in effect is a phantom target, still locked on to your jamming. At that moment Oilcan switches off your jammers and poof! you disappear from their screens. It involves something called “range gates”, I believe; but as I say, I don’t really understand it. However, if it works it does sound rather brilliant.’

  From an office along the corridor outside there came the perky trumpet lead-in to Music While You Work on somebody’s radio, instantly stifled behind a closing door. The homely aural intrusion provoked some smiles in the room.

  ‘Right, that’s Oilcan. Just remember, it has been decided at the highest level that it must remain a national secret for the present. Not even our American cousins will be told. I have been assured that the team at Malvern who developed it did so out of sight of the American personnel seconded there. And that also goes for their National Security Agency people stationed over at GCHQ in Cheltenham. So far as we know they too are none the wiser.
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br />   ‘There must be a reason for this, but I don’t know what it is and neither do you need to know. No doubt there are political wheels within wheels but all that affects us are our orders. And those, gentlemen, are not to breathe a single, solitary word to anybody, and above all not to any American colleague you may meet either here or on deployment in the US, on pain of a guaranteed court-martial. Is that absolutely clear?’

  The room was filled with murmurs of nervous assent as the men stirred uneasily. As security-conscious as they already were, this additional level of secrecy sounded draconian.

  ‘There is priority in getting Oilcan installed in both your aircraft as soon as humanly possible.’ He unbuttoned the flap of his breast pocket and found a slip of paper. ‘You’ll be going out to practise using it when we’ve found a spot where neither the Russians nor the Americans will overhear, which is none too easy. I’m not just thinking of Fylingdales but of all those wretched Russian “trawlers” stooging about chock-full of SIGINT equipment. Right: any questions so far?’

  Ken Pilcher raised a hand. ‘I’ve got one, sir. Why use Vulcans to test this Oilcan thing? What’s wrong with Canberras? Or even Shackletons? Mightn’t they attract less attention?’

  ‘Probably. But it’s V-bombers that are our deterrent force and not Shackletons. We need to use the aircraft we normally fly. From most angles it’s the Vulcan that produces the biggest radar return. As we all know, a whacking great delta can send back a whacking great echo.’b