Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  The carrier steamed south towards the naval base at Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego. She stayed close to the coast, just inside the limit of Argentina’s territorial waters. Just outside the twelve-mile limit, HMS Splendid shadowed her. For the submarine’s captain, it was going to be a long, frustrating night. For while an attack on the pride of the Argentine Navy may have been against the spirit of the Rules of Engagement, Roger Lane-Nott was sure that, as long as he was in international waters, it was within the letter of the law, providing, that is, he could visually identify the ship. He needed to see her with his own eyes. That day, Admiral Woodward had been given authority by Northwood to shoot down the Argentine Air Force Boeing 707 that had been flying daily reconnaissance missions to track the fleet’s progress, providing it could be positively identified. There was no doubt at all in Lane-Nott’s mind that he would receive the same authority. If the Veinticinco de Mayo was in torpedo range, he was going to sink her. But he had to wait until daybreak. Through the night, in Splendid’s control room, men concentrated on their individual roles, tense with anticipation. Sonar reports kept them updated.

  At two o’clock in the morning, Lane-Nott told them he was going to action stations at 5.30. And then they counted the minutes. The captain never had to mention it again, it just happened, as planned, at dawn.

  ‘Periscope depth,’ Lane-Nott ordered and, with torpedoes in the tubes, the 4,000-ton attack boat rose through the water to let the captain identify his target. Nothing. He could barely see a hundred yards ahead of the boat. After days of gales and thirty mile visibility, he was gazing into thick fog. Can’t see a bloody thing, he cursed to himself. He continued his pursuit as best he could, but it was pointless without a positive ID. Veinticinco de Mayo and her crew had been extremely lucky. Splendid had to let her go.

  The number of Argentine troops in and around Stanley was now approaching 10,000 and any house which they thought was unoccupied – especially one on the outskirts of town – was likely to become a shelter to them. Liz Goss hated the thought of her home being violated. Every day she would leave her children Karina and Roger with their grandparents and return to the house she’d left on the first day of the invasion. Autumn had been mild so far and, despite the occasional snow flurry settling on the ground, the carnations growing in her garden were probably the best she’d ever had. A welcome splash of colour. She’d pick a fresh bunch on each visit and put them in a vase inside, replacing the flowers from the previous day. If the soldiers came in, she hoped there would at least be the appearance that the house was still occupied. This time, as she walked to the garden to pick the carnations she felt herself being watched. She tried to ignore it. Then, as she approached the flowerbed, she saw that severed ducks’ heads had been scattered around the stems. Just, she thought, distressed at the cruelty and ugliness of such a senseless act, to see my reaction.

  Chapter 21

  Monty was worried about his friend. During RED FLAG in January, he and Martin Withers had become close. Now, in the ten days since they’d begun training for CORPORATE, Withers had lost over half a stone in weight – his nervous loss of appetite compounded by the relentless pace of the training schedule. The friendly, unassuming glow that had made such an impression on Monty, just a few months earlier, was in danger of being worn away.

  When the Vulcan crews weren’t flying – they sometimes flew twice a day – or sleeping, they were in briefings: long afternoons in uncomfortable chairs in the Ops block. Much of what they were told was straightforward and no more or less than was expected. But increasingly it was starting to paint a stark picture of what lay ahead. The crews were briefed on the capabilities of Argentine fighters and anti-aircraft defences. There were lectures on South American politics which left none of them in any doubt about the bloody campaign waged by the Argentine junta on its own citizens; on the disputed history of the Falkland Islands; on the Geneva Convention – and on survival. All of them had some training in that. Week-long courses were held during deployments to Goose Bay, its bleak landscape chosen to simulate the Russian tundra. There was a bit of cooking on the campfire and shelter building, but nothing too severe. For that you had to volunteer. Then you got escape and evasion and resisting interrogation too. It was the interrogation that put Withers off. It’s just not the sort of thing, he thought, that you’d want to volunteer for! Others on his crew had been through it. Posted to Singapore in 1963, Hugh Prior had been chased by one of the Highland regiments through dense jungles and rivers that seemed more like open sewers. He’d been caught, stripped and hooded, before a female voice told him, ‘That’s a very small prick you’ve got there.’ He only discovered later that the tape recording didn’t discriminate. Gordon Graham had volunteered for winter training. The Scot was a keen skier and that was the carrot. It didn’t do it for Withers, but at least he understood the motive: A week’s skiing, a week’s torture. But it’s free!

  If they were forced to bail out over the Falklands, they were to make their way to designated safehouses, the locations of which they’d be given before the mission. Photocopied sheets explaining the ‘PW One Hand Mute Code’ – a Vietnam-era sign language that provided for silent communication while on the run – were distributed. When they reached the rendezvous they were to stay put until they were pulled out by special forces. If they weren’t found by the Argentinians first. This was also covered. A typed sheet explained how to conceal a secret message in a letter:

  CONCEALMENT OF INFORMATION IN LETTERS/MESSAGES – SAMPLE TEXT

  (Writer’s daughter was born on 6th October – read every 6th and 10th word alternately of text.)

  1st May 1980 (= Contains concealed message)

  My darling (= Safety check – not under duress)

  You will (= 3 x 4 = 12 words concealed in text) feel after the hours waiting that the three of you can now relax. Time passes, and the best news is always worth waiting the (= ignore rest of sentence) extra few days for. Your memory and the childrens’ lights my way forward. No problems now but perhaps the end will be for western people some way off. There’s room I’m sure for highest level talks which should be kept going on although the (= ignore rest of sentence) chance of doing anything to help things from here is small.

  Best wishes dearest,

  Your loving

  Alex

  Message reads (in reverse order) KEPT HIGHEST ROOM WESTERN END. NO LIGHTS. BEST TIME THREE (= 0300) HOURS.

  It would have been fiendishly difficult to compose, especially under the strain of captivity. Most of the crews simply remembered that if, while being filmed, they scratched their nose, those watching at home would know that they were lying.

  Each of the AEOs was given a cassette tape that carried a hissing recording of a message in Spanish. Designed to confuse the enemy air defences, it claimed to be from an Argentine maritime patrol aircraft that had lost an engine and wanted to put down at Port Stanley. No puedo oirle. Usted no esta muy claro (‘I can’t hear you. You’re not very clear’), repeated the coda at the end of the message, precluding further debate. Barry Masefield took the tape to Gibraltarian Nav Plotter, Jim Vinales, the only man on any of the crews who actually understood what was being said. Despite its not using the appropriate Catalan dialect, Vinales thought it was a reasonable attempt – even if the intonation did sound a bit like a ‘Learn Spanish the Easy Way’ course. Broadcast on a long-wave frequency, crackling with static, he told his colleagues, it might buy them time. On the other hand, they all knew, it would alert whoever was listening to the fact that someone was out there. The AEO’s defence of the aircraft was driven by one rule above all others: you never gave anyone anything for nothing; you never showed your hand unless you had to. The tapes got quietly tucked away. Things would have to get pretty desperate for them to come out again.

  Some of what was said at the briefings was taken with a pinch of salt by crews looking to relieve the pressure of the work-up. It didn’t do to dwell too much on what could go wrong. Despite efforts to remai
n in high spirits, though, they were all getting tired. The concentration demanded by the training sorties was intense. Their sleep was curtailed. And underpinning it all was a draining, insidious unease about the mission itself.

  But however reluctant the crews themselves might have been to acknowledge the fatigue and stress, others were keeping an eye on them. All of them, eventually, were ordered to visit Squadron Leader Warwick Pike, Waddington’s station doctor. None of them wanted to – it was more time out of an already full schedule – and none of them accepted his offer of Temazepam to help them sleep.

  ‘I’ve never taken pills, Warwick… sir’ – Monty added a little deference to soften his rejection – ‘and I’m not taking them now!’

  ‘You will,’ Pike said wearily as Monty turned and left his office, ‘you will…’

  On Saturday the 24th, Martin Withers took advantage of a single day’s break in the flying programme to visit his parents in Fakenham in Norfolk. Throughout the day, in the background, was the prospect of war. Nothing was said, but when it was time for Withers to leave his mother and father, their parting felt loaded with significance. A last goodbye. Driving home through the Fens after dark, Withers stopped the Ford Capri behind a queue of traffic to wait for a boat to pass through a raised bridge. When he woke up, the boat was far away, the bridge had been lowered, and the cars in front of him were long gone.

  While Simon Baldwin’s aircrew trained for war, supported by a small clique of engineers and operations staff, life for everyone else at Waddington continued much as it always had. The difference now, of course, was that they knew they were being closed down in July. John Laycock did his best to straddle the two concerns, dividing his time between CORPORATE flights and the business of the ceremonials that would mark the run-down of the station and disbandment of its squadrons. The timing was far from ideal, but plans were too far advanced.

  As Martin Withers had been with his parents, men and women from four Waddington squadrons and their support Wings, twenty-four Alsatians and their handlers, and the 1 Group Pipe Band marched down Lincoln’s main street to commemorate the anniversary of the base being given the Freedom of the City. As four Vulcans flew low overhead, spontaneous applause broke out. It continued long after the roar of the engines had receded into the distance. The historical reason for the parade was lost. The crowd were angry and proud. It was clear to Laycock that they would not be persuaded that this was anything but a display of military might; a demonstration of the country’s determination to win back the Falkland Islands.

  That evening, when those who’d been on parade earlier in the day had settled down with their families to watch The Val Doonican Music Show or ITV’s popular quiz show 3-2-1 over dinner, Monty and Reeve and McDougall rumbled out for another four-hour night-time sortie.

  After a clear day, cloud had settled over Lincolnshire at 300 feet. As the power came on and the bomber began its take-off roll, Monty tried to relax. While he’d been strapping himself in he’d felt disengaged, absent. He sensed that the rest of the crew’s minds weren’t really on the task in hand either. He needed to get on top of things. At about 100 knots, the jet veered violently to the left. Monty caught her quickly and straightened her up to continue down the runway.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ came the inevitable question from the back. He laughed it off, but it was another warning.

  The Vulcan was lightly loaded. Like this, it had bootfuls of excess power and an agility in the air that belied its imposing size and shape. Monty rocketed up through the low clouds into a beautifully clear sky above.

  He continued his climb out east to the rendezvous, trying to shake himself out of his torpor. Right, he told himself, snap out of it. Up over the North Sea he spotted the tanker easily. Then he closed in on the Victor’s trailing fuel hose. Gently playing tunes with the four throttle levers as he made contact, he drove the refuelling probe into the basket. Too fast.

  With a visceral ‘whumph’, the sky around him exploded and the tanker disappeared from view.

  A sheet of fuel from his broken probe flushed into the engine intakes, simultaneously blowing 1 and 2 out and torching the unburnt fuel that had cascaded straight through to produce an angry, billowing fireball. The dusk sky flared and the Vulcan dropped away – down like a B-17, thought John Reeve as he looked on, recalling images of American heavy bombers shot down in flames over Germany forty years earlier.

  As the Vulcan fell, Monty realized he’d lost the engines. But the bomber wasn’t on fire. They had altitude and they had time.

  ‘John, get the checklist,’ he told his AEO over the RT. With two engines gone, so too were two-thirds of the jet’s electrics. Hathaway was already running through his blue book.

  ‘Engine failure number 1…’ Hathaway began initiating the call-and-response drills to shut down both engines correctly. Once that was done it was safe to relight them.

  ‘Restart drill number 1 engine…’ Both ignited again without drama, but Monty had had enough. He pointed the nose back towards Waddington, their evening’s work brought to an abrupt, unnerving conclusion.

  Monty’s collision with the Victor’s drogue hadn’t just ripped the tip off the Vulcan’s refuelling probe; it had also damaged the drogue itself. Unable to transfer any further fuel to Reeve, the Victor returned to Marham. A second tanker was scrambled, but that too was unserviceable. A third also had problems with trailing its hose. Reeve managed to take on just 2,000lb of fuel – barely enough to taxi down the runway and back – before a massive fuel leak sluiced over him too. And he’d been perfectly positioned behind the Victor. The air-to-air refuelling was still a lottery.

  The uncomfortable truth was that the V-force was no closer to being confident that they could make this work than they were when they started. There were too many opportunities for things to go wrong. One thing was certain, though: unless Waddington came up with an immediate solution to the refuelling problem there was no hope of success; the South Atlantic was simply out of their reach.

  Difficulties had been expected. But it was clear now that this was more than just teething trouble. Something essential was being overlooked, they just couldn’t pinpoint what it was. The Air-to-Air Refuelling Instructors said there was nothing wrong with the way the Vulcan Captains were flying. And the engineers were scratching their heads too. Laycock had seen clusters of them gathered in the hangars under hot lights, poring over books.

  He and Baldwin decided it was time to bring together everyone involved to thrash out a solution. With the night’s training sortie scrubbed, they wasted no time. The aircrews and engineers were there, as well as Baldwin’s Ops Team. The AARIs were back from Marham and AOC 1 Group. Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight was driven down from Bawtry with Keith Filbey, a member of his Victor planning team.

  As they examined the evidence, two separate problems emerged. And, as it turned out, Monty’s flame-out didn’t appear to have been caused by either of them.

  When, during the Easter weekend, the engineers called Marham to ask how to test the reconstituted refuelling plumbing they did as they were told: they plugged a fuel hose from a bowser on to the end of the refuelling probe and pumped. It was what they weren’t doing that was important. At Marham, the fuel hose, with its contents, was supported by a cherry-picker parked next to the aircraft’s nose. If that information had been passed on, its importance hadn’t been realized. At Waddington the probe itself was left to take the weight. And it hadn’t been built to. In the act of actually proving the system, they were leaving it ever so slightly crooked. The damage wasn’t obvious, but in the air the bent valves were unable to form a proper seal inside the drogue. This allowed a steady stream of fuel to flow down the probe and up over the cockpit windows. Any leak at all would always be felt acutely in a Vulcan because of the position of the probe, but if using a cherry-picker was going to help reduce the number of leaks, it would be an important step forward.

  The more alarming problem was the flood of unburnt fuel th
at could wash over the jet as the probe was withdrawn – as if the valve was somehow remaining open. When any aircraft pulled away from a tanker there was always a fine white puff of fuel as the probe disconnected, but it was little more than vapour. The Vulcans suffered from a wave that threatened to wash out the engines. The solution lay with the Engineering Wing, frustrated that the fault just made no sense. Apparently identical probes that had worked for years fitted to the Victors didn’t work on the Vulcans. To try to solve the puzzle, a Victor probe was quickly dispatched from Marham to Waddington and both were systematically stripped down on the bench. It was a eureka! moment. For something so small, the satisfaction was immense. The Vulcan probes, redundant since the late 1960s, were missing a shim in the valve assembly. All of Waddington’s probes were modified to include it. For want of a nail…

  There was reason for guarded optimism now, but the engineers wouldn’t know whether or not they’d cracked it until someone flew again. Only if the next refuelling was successful would they know if this was do-able.

  And ironically, given that it provoked such urgent action, Monty’s violent loss of his 1 and 2 engines looked like nothing more than ‘finger trouble’. Exhausted, he’d just hit the drogue too hard.