Under the Radar

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The rough little cottage faced east, and when in the morning Gavin opened the shutters he winced at the blast of sunlight before being struck by the magnificence of the panoramic view, which was of the molten heave and glitter of sea to the horizon. Sections of nearby cliff were of desert-coloured rock. A dry breeze smelling of marine things with an underlay of something aniseedy from the tough vegetation filled his lungs and slightly cleared his aching head. From somewhere came the distant whanging and jangling of church bells.

  ‘Milk and sugar in your coffee, I suppose?’ Veronica called up from the kitchen.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Hard cheese. There isn’t any. You get it black or not at all.’

  On an ancient wireless set she found the BBC World Service. The news seemed to be mostly about the escalating war in Vietnam. They drank their coffee in silence until Gavin said with a self-deprecating laugh, ‘I’m sorry, Veronica. I really had much too much to drink last night. You know how it is.’

  ‘I do indeed,’ she said with a weary trace of bitterness. She patted his hand condescendingly. ‘That’s your alibi, darling, you stick to it. Handled with care it could serve you for life.’ After a little: ‘You’ll be wanting to get back now?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. We’re off to Libya tomorrow on an exercise,’ he added indiscreetly.

  ‘How very dreary for you. Darling, I’ve been to Libya with Dad and it’s utterly frightful. There’s bugger-all there, you know. Roman ruins, yawn yawn. A few nice olive groves and vineyards that Mussolini’s Italians planted along the coast around Tripoli. Good for Il Duce, frankly: they’re about the only green things in the country. A few of the old Sicilians who farmed them are still there. In Tripoli itself it’s just ex-Bedouins and Texan oilmen in frightful check shirts. Thirty miles inland it’s desert and wadis and escarpments and sand dunes and that sort of thing for X thousand miles all the way down to Chad or Niger or one of those other non-countries. Forget Libya.’

  ‘Oh, it’s just an exercise for a day or two and anyway we’ll be based in Luqa and flying down. We won’t set foot in Libya.’

  ‘Bully for you.’ But Veronica had already wearied of this topic and they left the house and got into the car whose dew-wet soft top was already tautening in the sun. On the drive back to Luqa Gavin thought Malta looked much how he’d imagined Libya might: a sandy-coloured landscape with blocky, whitewashed buildings seen against a gentian-blue sky and garnished with vicious succulents. It was also dotted with skeletal iron windmills, presumably for pumping scarce water from artesian wells. In addition to ancient British cars, the narrow roads were full of blowsy, shambling buses with bright paintwork displaying unpronounceable destinations full of x’s. In due course Veronica dropped him back at Luqa and his erotic adventure, such as it was, was over. She sped off with a non-committal wave and he found he was relieved to be back in the RAF’s ample and reassuring bosom. He could see in the distance the two Vulcans’ camouflaged fins sticking up above the other parked aircraft. This, at least, was a familiar world in which he felt properly at home. His first act was to have a thorough shower. Then he went to the mess for breakfast, which was humming with the news of Baldy’s shooting.

  ‘You mean, shot dead?’ said Gavin incredulously, forkful of bacon arrested in mid-air.

  ‘Doornail. It probably wasn’t on purpose but the Snowdrop hit his femoral artery and he bled out on the spot,’ said Vic Ferrit, not (it struck Gavin) entirely without relish. ‘It’s true I never really took to the guy. He was an odd sod but you had to admit he was a top-notch chiefie. But that’s still not the real punchline. Guess what they found on him? Only a spy camera complete with flashgun.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Vic. ‘I got it from Amos, who’s just been with the CO here. It’s all heavily under wraps but it looks like old Baldy was working for them on the side.’

  ‘You mean the Russians? Baldy? I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Join the club, dearie,’ said Vic amiably. ‘No-one here wants to believe it, you can bet on that. But why else was he trying to get into the aircraft at night with a camera? More importantly, why aren’t these Vegenins I’ve been taking doing a damn thing for my headache?’

  ‘All hell’s breaking loose,’ confirmed Ken Pilcher, at that moment joining them with his coffee. ‘They don’t know whether to shit or go blind. How much has been compromised? They haven’t the foggiest.’

  ‘Sabotage?’

  ‘No, they think that’s unlikely,’ Ken said. ‘After all, he was flying in it.’

  ‘True,’ agreed Vic. ‘My reading of our late lamented chiefie is that he was too devoted to his aircraft to do it deliberate damage. I don’t think he cared much about us, but he did about his precious charge. He struck me as pretty much wedded to the thing.’

  ‘So what about Frayed Panties?’ Gavin asked. ‘Do you think it’ll go ahead?’

  ‘God knows. You can bet all sorts of scrambled phone calls and coded telexes are whizzing between here and High Wycombe at this very moment. Personally, I can’t see any reason for cancelling if old Baldy was just freelancing on his own behalf. I say we get some more toast,’ Ken said. ‘All this drama has given me a real appetite.’

  By lunchtime both Vulcan crews had been informed that the exercises would go ahead as planned. Yogi 1 would just have to get along without its crew chief for a few days but that shouldn’t be a problem. By mid-afternoon much of the shock had worn off in the absence of any more information. The local technicians had meanwhile connected both Vulcans to the ground power supply and Gavin had spent an hour in his aircraft’s crew compartment running his own check of the extensive electrical systems. He then went outside to sit on one of the main wheels, watching the air traffic coming and going on the runway. He noted that the inevitable Snowdrops and their dogs were never far away. After a while a dusty RAF Land Rover drew up and Amos came and joined him.

  ‘Jesus, what a to-do,’ he greeted Gavin. He hitched himself with a groan onto an adjacent tyre. ‘Talk about a right royal kerfuffle.’

  ‘What’s the latest?’

  ‘Well, old Baldy’s still dead. That’s about the only certainty. I had to go to the morgue and identify him for the groupie here. Bit of a shock, seeing him lying there the colour of chalk. They say he’s completely exsanguinated. Not a drop left in him. His only bit of colour was that tattoo on his arm, “Dishonour Before Death”. At least his motto came true in the end,’ said Amos grimly. ‘I suppose they’ll be flying him home.’

  ‘You don’t think we might have to take him?’ asked Gavin. ‘In one of our panniers with his bike?’

  ‘It’s a thought, but I expect he’ll go in a Transport Command hold, packed in dry ice. The thing is – and no gossiping, OK? – groupie here has gathered from London that security were already suspicious of him and would probably have arrested him the moment we got back. But the brass were too keen to see these exercises go well to risk acting just on suspicion. The whole thing’s an absolute shock. Who would have thought old Baldy of all people . . . ?’ his voice tailed off as he shook his head disbelievingly.

  ‘He was always going on about money, wasn’t he? He certainly didn’t earn as much as some of his juniors. If you ask me, that’s asking for trouble.’

  ‘Mm. Well.’ There was a moment’s silence. ‘Anyway,’ said Amos in a subject-changing tone of voice, ‘onward we go. We’ve now got to concentrate on putting up a good show against the Yanks. Incidentally,’ he glanced at Gavin, ‘I’d be interested to know what happened to you last night. I last saw you at the Phoenicia, enmeshed in the toils of a femme fatale. So – how did it go, if I may ask?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ Gavin said, feeling himself blush. ‘She seemed sort of eager and bored at the same time. I’ve never met anybody quite like her.’

  ‘Oh, she’s the same with everyone. Some of the lads at the hotel know all about Veronica. Apparently she’s an old hand. She lies in wait like a vampire for
innocent-looking boys like you, then takes them off and sucks them dry. She’s famous for it.’

  ‘Now he tells me. Thanks a lot for letting me know. And there was I, thinking she wanted me to take a look at her Daimler’s wiring. Either that or she was a Soviet spy hoping to seduce me into giving up secrets.’ Gavin didn’t like to think about the indiscretion of having mentioned the Libyan exercise to her.

  ‘But she didn’t.’

  ‘It might have been more interesting if she had. I don’t really think I’m cut out for these casual capers.’

  ‘You mean as a spy victim or vampire victim?’

  ‘Either. Both, really. I – I’m afraid I’m not much of a sexual athlete, Amos. Or I haven’t been so far. Maybe I need more training sessions.’

  Amos gave him a sideways smile. ‘Maybe we both do, although you obviously made out better than I did last night. I just sat around with some empty-headed air hostesses who were drenched in that Blue Grass perfume my wife liked. I didn’t fancy either of them although it would have been a pushover. Instead, I watched our Vic getting wasted. A couple of hours ago he made a light lunch of Alka-Seltzer and he and Baa are now working out our course for tomorrow.’

  There was a thoughtful pause while the two airmen stared out across the airfield watching a pair of photo-reconnaissance Canberras take off, turn to starboard and head away eastwards as they gained height. ‘Akrotiri, for a bet,’ said Amos. ‘It’s the right direction for Cyprus, anyway. Off to do some snooping in the Middle East somewhere.’

  There was another pause. ‘I . . .’ Gavin began.

  ‘Mm?’ Amos turned to look at him with an encouraging lift of the dark eyebrows that reminded Gavin so much of Gregory Peck’s.

  ‘I just wanted to say I’m sorry about Jo, Amos. It’s almost like death: nobody dares say anything. But I liked her.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Amos after a bit. ‘I did, too. There’s no real mystery. We got married too young. People do. And then sometimes I suppose they just grow out of each other. I don’t think she should ever have married into the service. She came to hate what I’m doing. What we’re all doing, really.’

  ‘That’s hardly your fault. If anything, it’s the fault of politicians.’

  ‘Yes, but she didn’t just mean that. She used to say I was married to this –’ he pointed a finger upwards at the immense wing overhead. ‘She said I was far more interested in it than I ever was in her. And you know, she was absolutely right. When all’s said and done.’ He looked up and then patted the landing gear’s massive leg at their backs. ‘It’s still beautiful to me, this aircraft. Did you know they planned a civil airliner version of the Vulcan back in the mid-fifties? It was going to be the Avro Atlantic. It was dropped because they never got enough orders from BOAC to justify it. So many missed opportunities.’

  A brief silence fell. Then, as if Amos thought Gavin was owed further explanation, he added, ‘When I was posted to Wearsby as a captain – well, you’ll remember it since it’s not so long ago – my long-suffering wife probably thought I would settle down into the model husband who’s on top of his profession and I suppose comes home in the evenings and stands in front of the fire with both hands in his pockets, jingling his small change, puffing on his pipe and probably calling her “Kitten”.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like you.’

  ‘Nor is it.’ Amos glanced sideways at Gavin. ‘I can’t see you being like that, either.’

  ‘No. I don’t have the interest. I suppose I’m not very good at domesticity, or those sorts of relationship. The only time . . . look at the size of that thing,’ he pointed to where an Argosy transport was starting its take-off run five hundred yards away. ‘If it’s the one that was here yesterday it’s one of 70 Squadron’s. I think they’re based in Cyprus.’

  They both watched as the immense twin-boom aircraft gathered speed. As with most large aircraft seen at any distance, it still seemed to be moving at a walking pace halfway down the runway. The combined note of the four Rolls-Royce Dart turboprops reached them more as a frantic groan as finally the bulbous nose tilted and it lifted off.

  ‘You never think they’re going to make it,’ Amos said, watching with a pilot’s eye. ‘Sometimes, of course, they don’t . . . You were saying?’ he prompted. ‘About a relationship?’

  ‘Oh, nothing, it’s silly. I was a kid. It was at school. And it certainly wasn’t a relationship.’

  ‘Ah, school. And?’

  Gavin shifted on the Vulcan’s tyre. ‘It really was nothing, Amos. I was in the CCF and getting mocked for being what they called “Corps-keen”, which at my place was a black mark against you. I used to spend a lot of time in the signals hut. I really loved that place. It was freezing cold most of the time although you could work up a decent fug with the stove going. It was somewhere I could retreat to because very few others went near it. I was perfectly happy alone there doing repairs on the Corps’s radio equipment. Whenever I think about it I can still smell the smoking flux coming from a hot soldering iron. I was a serious radio ham in those days, collecting QSL cards from contacts I made all over the world. The only fly in the ointment was this older guy who began pestering me and in the end always seemed to be in the hut when I was. For a long time I thought he was like me and just interested in working new contacts. But that wasn’t all he was interested in.’

  ‘So you fought to protect your honour?’

  ‘No – far more pathetic than that.’ Gavin laughed. ‘Poor bugger. I just went on fiddling around with valves and frequencies and squelch buttons as if nothing was happening and eventually he just gave up. Maybe I was like you in a junior sort of way. I mean, too absorbed in what I was doing to be interested in much else.’

  ‘Oh, I was interested, all right,’ said Amos after a glance towards the policeman who was safely out of earshot. ‘There was always someone, you know. At school, at Cranwell.’ He paused and took a breath. ‘Just as there is now. You. But I expect you knew that.’

  There was a brief, frozen silence before Gavin said, ‘I wasn’t quite sure.’

  ‘You can be now,’ Amos said bleakly. ‘Knowing what I’ve always known about myself, it was wrong of me to have married poor old Jo. I did love her in a sort of way, just not in the right sort of way. But I really thought it might cure me. That night of the party proved the opposite. Though actually I knew it was hopeless the moment you joined the crew.’ Absently, he picked at the longitudinal grooves in the tyre next to him. ‘I’m fated, you know. I shall always be on the wrong side of everything. The law. Normality. Marriage. Even love. I do try hard to make up for it by . . .’ he gestured silently upwards at the great wing. ‘Otherwise it all seems too empty.’ He paused. ‘And you? Since I’m being so frank?’

  ‘I’ve never been really sure,’ Gavin said. ‘But, well, you’re definitely the most important person in my life at the moment.’

  ‘Ah. At the moment.’

  ‘You know what our problem is? I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. You and I have spent all our lives in bloody institutions, right from when we were children. Prep school, public school, and now the RAF. All along we’ve been pretty much insulated from the outside civilian world by our own laws and discipline: our own codes and traditions and ethos. Even vocabulary. When you think about it, the RAF’s got so much in common with our boarding schools it’s really just a semi-adult extension of them.’

  ‘Jo used to say that. Poor girl, she never got used to it.’

  ‘Exactly. But you and I can recognise what goes on because it’s so similar to boarding school. Quite apart from the peculiar customs and slang there’s all that rumour, jealousy, rivalry, arse-licking, sneaking, toadying, bullying – or at least victimisation of one sort or another. It all goes on. And love, of course. But I don’t think people who haven’t lived in an institution ever completely understand it. It might help if they’d been to prison, I suppose. I do know that grammar-school types like Vic and Baa are often baffled by the sheer
pettiness of much that happens, even now. The one thing they don’t reckon with is how emotional things can become. But to you and me all that became familiar when we were eight – or whenever we were first sent away to school.’

  ‘Those hothouse relationships.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Amos glanced at him and nodded briefly, then away at a Hastings that was just bringing its engines up to take-off revs at the end of the runway. With a heavy drone it began to trundle along until after a few hundred yards something abruptly changed in the engines’ note. They saw the whirling discs of the propellers alter as the pitch changed and the pilot throttled back. The aircraft lost speed.

  ‘He’s aborted,’ said Amos. ‘I wonder why.’

  He got up to walk out from beneath the Vulcan’s wing when there was a peculiar whistling swish and something like a tall, twisted black plank embedded itself with a startling thud in the ground right at the edge of the concrete apron, a bare five yards away.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Amos exclaimed, jumping. Gavin joined him and together they inspected the object. ‘Have you any idea how lucky we are?’

  ‘It looks like a propeller blade.’

  ‘That’s exactly what it is. If we’d happened to be standing out there it could have sliced us in two. A few yards more and it could have done mortal damage to poor old Yogi 1. Imagine what that might do to thin aluminium skinning. It would go right through a fuel tank.’

  ‘Had it gone the other way it could have sliced through the Hastings.’

  ‘They were dead lucky. Except now they’ll be grounded for a bit and there’ll be an inquiry.’ He nodded toward the big transport, which had turned and was taxiing towards a runway exit on three engines. They could now see the stilled starboard inner propeller was gap-toothed. Between them they tried to pull the blade from the ground but it was too deeply embedded to budge. ‘I suppose we’d better notify them where it landed.’

  Amos went over and spoke to the MP. Then he and Gavin got into the Land Rover. Before they moved off Gavin impulsively put his hand over his captain’s where it lay on the squab seat between them. ‘It’s hopeless, isn’t it?’ he said quietly, his eyes suddenly full of tears.