Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  ‘We don’t want to forget our navigation lights,’ he reminded the Captain. While in the formation they’d tried to make themselves as visible as possible, but the last thing they wanted to do was run in to Stanley with lights blazing. ‘Let’s turn them off now, while we can.’

  It seemed sensible enough to act now, rather than regret it later, Withers agreed. Russell reached down to his right and killed the lights. The black shape of the bomber was now invisible against the dark sky.

  Chapter 36

  The new day came quickly so close to the equator and, hidden behind the volcanic hills that crowd Wideawake, the first orange glow of dawn grew quickly into the flat light of early morning. Jerry Price and the Red Rag team had made it through the night and forestalled disaster, but an accurate picture of BLACK BUCK’s progress was still elusive.

  X-ray Four Lima. In the dust and fug of the Ops tent, call signs ebbed and flowed over the HF, but while they could be ascribed to a particular crew and aircraft, their meaning was often impossible to interpret.

  Charlie Five Tango. That was Skelton.

  Seven Echo Foxtrot, authenticate: Milligan, being asked to provide the one-letter code that would prove he was who he said he was. Did it mean there was a problem?

  Price could only try to second-guess what was going on further south. While fractured transmissions were coming in from the tankers closest to Ascension, there was nothing from beyond the second fuel bracket, as the attack formation pushed south in strict HF radio silence. Although unaware of the pasting the attack formation had taken from the storm Price drew his own conclusions about the shape they were in. He wasn’t sure how desperate they might be on their return flight, but, after the close calls earlier, he was sure that their situation would be precarious. They would not have the fuel they needed. He wanted TATs airborne and ready to bring home his two long-slots: Tuxford and Biglands. At 6.15, Price ordered two further Victors to prepare to get airborne at 7.30. And while the measured, thoughtful tones in which he spoke barely betrayed the strain, the restless smoking left no doubt.

  Minutes later, Milligan’s presence on the airwaves became clear. Victor 163’s HDU had failed again. As the sky outside the tent turned from black to blue, Frank Milligan’s AEO called Red Rag Control to say they were on their way home early for the second time that night. They hadn’t even been airborne an hour. Price couldn’t help but feel for them. Poor old Milligan, he thought, knowing the unfortunate crew, including his friend Alan Bowman, would be in for a ribbing in some quarters. It was just the way of things. But aside from the blushes and frustration of the crew, their return meant that the redundancy in the recovery formation was now gone. Two of the remaining three Victors would instead fill the tanks of Barry Neal’s Victor as close to the Rio RV as possible. They would then leave him to fly on alone to the holding point, a few hundred miles out over the Atlantic, abeam the Brazilian capital. The plan had called for two Victors to wait there. Now there was no redundancy. If there was any problem with Neal’s jet that prevented him from transferring fuel to the Vulcan, the bomber wouldn’t make it back to Ascension. Not for the first or last time this night, their eggs were, once more, in one basket.

  Passing across an imaginary boundary into the fourth refuelling bracket, Ernie Wallis flashed the floodlights underneath the Victor. Flying in radio silence, this was the signal to tell the Vulcan crew they were cleared to refuel. For the last time, Martin Withers eased his aircraft into position behind the tanker with gentle, fluid precision. Once settled in the wake of the tanker, he and Dick Russell watched the red lights shining alongside the root of the trailing fuel hose, waiting for them to change; waiting for the go-ahead to make contact. And nothing happened. Then the floodlights flashed off and on again. They were cleared to move in behind the Victor. But they knew that, they were already there. Confused, Russell turned to Withers.

  ‘I don’t know what’s up with him…’

  The Vulcan Captain didn’t answer. Instead, a voice from the Victor came over the RT: ‘You’re clear astern.’

  ‘We are astern!’ Russell replied, puzzled. And then it dawned on him: the Victor couldn’t see them. With their anti-collision beacons and navigation lights already turned off, Ernie Wallis, peering through his periscope inside the Victor, couldn’t make out 90 tons and 3,500 square feet of delta-winged bomber flying just a few yards away. A little sheepishly, Dick Russell flicked the switch alongside his ejection seat to bring them on again. Contact followed smoothly and easily. Fuel began to flush into the Vulcan’s tanks as Russell, relaxed and comfortable flying in close formation, kept her tucked in close. Some impressive flying and the flexibility of the Victor force had overcome all the storm had thrown at them and, it seemed, things were back on track. He and the rest of 607’s crew were about to discover how wrong that assumption was.

  Tux knew he couldn’t pass them the fuel they needed. As fuel pumped out of the back of his jet, Ernie Wallis and the co-pilot, Glyn Rees, watched the numbers spin, poised to end the transfer, when they hit the bingo figure.

  Seven five… six… seven… eight… nine…

  Wallis flashed the amber lights on the HDU to tell the Vulcan crew that they’d had all the tanker could spare. They had to withdraw.

  Still 7,000lb short of what they needed the news was greeted on board the Vulcan with surprise and bafflement. They’d taken on a little over half what they’d been expecting. And although the Victor hadn’t actually cut the fuel flow, the instruction was clear. Surprise began to turn to anger. What’s he doing?, Withers thought. How dare they? Completely unaware of the knife-edge on which the Victor crew had already placed themselves, Withers was furious that with a job to do, he was being left in the lurch barely 300 miles north of the target. He wasn’t going to break contact until he knew what was going on.

  So, ignoring the amber lights, the Vulcan remained in contact with the drogue. Fuel was still flowing. And the Victor was paying double for every mile further south they flew. Any fuel burnt beyond the point at which the tanker crew had planned to turn north would have to be burnt again just to return to that same point.

  ‘What’s going on?’ crackled a pinched voice from the Vulcan.

  ‘Come on,’ Tuxford said to Ernie Wallis, ‘we’ve got to call a halt to this. We can’t keep on giving him fuel and abandon the plan we’ve just worked out.’

  Wallis couldn’t simply cut the fuel flow as that would empty the hose, lightening it, causing it to display different flying characteristics. Tuxford thumbed the RT.

  ‘Blue Two, you’ve got to break contact,’ he told them, angry that Dick Russell, the refuelling specialist in the right-hand seat of the Vulcan, wasn’t putting it all together; that he’d failed to appreciate their predicament. But through the eyepiece of the rear-facing periscope, Ernie Wallis could see that he was, at least, listening.

  He’s dropping back, Wallis reported, he’s free.

  ‘We’re 7,000lb short,’ Hugh Prior radioed from the AEO station in the back of the Vulcan. ‘We don’t have the fuel to carry out the mission.’

  Tuxford could hear the anxiety being caused, but had to hope that Dick Russell would work out what was happening and explain. Tux’s own crew had been to the limit, but now, he felt, it was time they tried to save themselves.

  ‘We have to turn off.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m sorry, that’s it; I have no more fuel to give you,’ Tux emphasized, frustrated by the apparent ignorance aboard the Vulcan of how marginal his position had become. It remained in formation, tucked in close behind them, its presence there questioning and accusatory.

  Any understanding between the two crews had broken down.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Ernie,’ said Bob Tuxford to his Nav Radar, ‘we’ll offer him more fuel.’ His heart was ruling his head. He decided to gamble on one last throw of the dice to send the bomber on her way. Tuxford pressed the transmit button on his control yoke.

  ‘I’m rolling out on to
a heading of 040. Going north, if you follow us round, we might be able to give you more…’ Then he banked into a wide, left turn towards the north, trailing the hose behind him.

  Ernie Wallis, his view behind confined by the periscope’s narrow field of vision, continued to watch the Vulcan’s lights blink out of the dark at him.

  ‘He’s following us!’ Wallis reported, unable to conceal his surprise that the delta was following them round, turning away from her target to the south. None of the Victor crew had really believed that the bomber would take up an offer made more in hope than expectation.

  And Martin Withers would never have followed the Victor into the turn if it hadn’t held the prospect of more fuel. But, in contrast to the view aboard the Victor, he quickly became sure that far from receiving the fuel to make 607’s reverse worthwhile, he’d been given all he was going to get. And he was livid about it. Following the tanker round in the hope of an unknown quantity of fuel had been a wild goose chase. A complete waste of their time and precious fuel. They had a time over target to meet, they were flying in the wrong direction and, Gordon Graham had told them, they were already thirty-seven minutes behind plan.

  ‘We can’t keep going north,’ Withers told his crew over the intercom and thumbed the RT to tell the Victor crew they were leaving them.

  ‘We’re off,’ he transmitted before standing the bomber on her ear to bring her back on to a southerly track. He rolled out on to a heading of 237 degrees. Vulcan 607 was heading back towards the Falklands again.

  Withers’ transmission was greeted with stunned silence in the cockpit of Tuxford’s Victor. What did they mean? We’re off to Ascension or we’re off to the Falklands?, Tuxford wondered. The bomber had rolled away. Ernie Wallis could confirm that, but they’d have had to do that even if they were climbing north on a parallel course. The exhausted Victor crew sank into their seats, despondent at the thought that the Vulcan could have abandoned the mission after all they’d put themselves through to ensure its success.

  ‘Right,’ Tuxford cut into their thoughts without enthusiasm, ‘Ernie, let’s get the hose in; get her cleaned up and we’ll climb to altitude. Post-tanking checks, please…’

  As the five men ran through the checklist, Tuxford trimmed the hard-worked old V-bomber into a lazy cruise-climb to 43,000 feet. And towards her uncertain future to the north.

  Martin Withers was completely unaware of the tanker’s predicament. Eleven tankers and fifteen fuel transfers had brought them to within an hour of their target and now he was being sold short. He felt bitterly let down – so did Dick Russell. The veteran AARI was making quick mental calculations. They were supposed to reach the RV 400 miles off Rio with 14,000lb of fuel in the tanks. Take 7,000lb away from that and it didn’t leave much in reserve. Dear, oh dear, he thought. Russell knew the failsafe operating procedures of the tanker force inside out. If they were going to do it by the book, he told Withers, they had to turn back. As the only man on board with any genuine air-to-air refuelling experience, he had a duty to point out that to guarantee the safety of the aircraft, they should abort. If they were to succeed, only then to lose the bomber as the contents of the tanks turned to vapour, it would be a disaster, not just for them but for the entire British war effort.

  Dick Russell had said what he had to say, but however uncomfortable he was with the prospect of pressing on towards the target, he knew that the decision wasn’t his to make. The thought of aborting never crossed Martin Withers’ mind. He’d barely taken in what Russell had said about Standard Operating Procedure and he certainly wasn’t going to put it to the vote. Like Russell, Withers was making rough calculations about their fuel situation. But in contrast to his AARI, he knew the Vulcan well; knew that he could move the remaining fuel around the bomber’s fourteen tanks to eke it out as long as possible. He also figured that they could make their escape from the Stanley air defences at altitude instead of dropping back down to sea level. That might save another two or three thousand pounds too. They could worry about the detail of the low-fuel handling drills later. For now, he thought, we can do this.

  ‘We’re short of fuel, but we’ve come this far,’ Withers said to his crew, ‘I’m not turning back now.’

  And while he invited their opinion on his decision, the edge in his voice precluded debate. He was determined to succeed. For all his easy affability and democratic approach to captaincy, Withers was displaying the steel that those back at Waddington knew he possessed. He never doubted that his close-knit crew would back his decision. And not one of them had a moment’s hesitation in doing so. We’ll sort something out, thought the co-pilot, Pete Taylor, from the isolation of the sixth seat.

  Chapter 37

  For the first time in nearly eight hours, 607 was on her own. And, 3,500 miles from home, she was off the V-force maps. With less than 300 miles to run, everything now depended on the accuracy of the twin Carousel INS. The two Navigators had been forced to abandon astro-navigation and the bomber’s GPI6 computer told them they were miles away from where Nav Plotter Gordon Graham’s own dead reckoning told them they were supposed to be. And that relied on little more than compasses, stop-watches and slide rules.

  ‘Plotting the Two…’ said Graham in his Scottish west coast burr, as he marked the latitude and longitude readings from the two Carousels on to his improvised northern-hemisphere map. The two positions were now thirty miles apart. There was no way of knowing which one was correct or even whether either was correct; they could both be wrong.

  ‘What do you think?’ Graham asked Bob Wright, drawing him into the problem. Although Graham was the senior man, it made sense to agree a plan of action with the radar operator – who, like Graham, was a trained Navigator. There was no certain answer. The decision they reached would always reflect whatever assumptions it was based on. Between them, they agreed to split the difference. Graham drew a line between the two conflicting positions and marked its median point. Graham input their new position into the GPI6. It meant that when Wright turned on his radar before the bomb-run, the picture he expected to see on his cathode ray screen would be dictated by an arbitrarily agreed plot on an upside down chart. It wasn’t an ideal starting point.

  With the Top of Descent just minutes away, it was time for Dick Russell, having helped get the thirsty jet this far, to give the right-hand seat back to Pete Taylor for the bomb-run. Although he’d felt some sympathy for the young co-pilot as he languished below during the long flight down, the veteran tanker captain didn’t look forward to the move with any relish. Let’s get it over with, he thought as he folded up the fuel tray to allow him and Taylor to manoeuvre around the cramped flight deck. Bob Wright got up from his seat in the back to help them swap places. First of all he disarmed the co-pilot’s ejection seat to prevent any danger of it being triggered accidentally, by slotting safety pins back into the top and bottom of the Martin-Baker chair. Then Russell unstrapped himself and, stooping, eased sideways between the seats and down the ladder. From his new position on the jump seat, he was no longer able to see what was going on and equally no longer able to eject in an emergency. To cap it all, his leg had gone to sleep. As Bob Wright helped plug him into the intercom, Pete Taylor got up from his own spot on the starboard side of the cabin and climbed up the ladder to join his Captain.

  What a bloody awful crew compartment it is compared to the Victor, thought Russell, and buckled up in the gloom.

  In contrast, Pete Taylor felt he was back where he belonged. As his eyes adjusted to the brighter light on the flight deck, he got settled next to Martin Withers. He strapped into the harness, clipped the ejection seat’s leg restraint lines to his shins and attached his PEC to the side of the chair. Then he removed the safety pins from the two yellow and black striped firing handles and pushed them into a specially designed storage block on the side of the flight deck. It was a simple system: if the pins were stowed in their slots, the seat was live. Ready now, he and Withers acknowledged each other. The Captain was qu
ick to hand over control to his co-pilot. It wasn’t just altruism. The bomber was going to slip in underneath the sweep of the enemy search radars, giving them as little notice of her arrival as possible; giving her and her crew their best chance of success and survival. He didn’t want his co-pilot coming to it cold.

  Pre-descent checks, please…

  The crew paid particular attention to their pressure settings and altimeters. All the Met information they had was forecast and they couldn’t absolutely rely on its accuracy. There were no updates from Air Traffic; no local weather stations to rely on. A descent to low level over the sea at night was an unforgiving undertaking and for every millibar of pressure the forecast was wrong, they would be another thirty feet higher or lower than they thought they were. As 607 closed on the Descent Point, Hugh Prior, preparing himself to combat the Argentine air defences, spoke up.

  ‘Once we start running in, keep the intercom on; turn all the radios off – everything, particularly the RWR, because you won’t hear the noises. If we get locked up or illuminated, you won’t get distracted. Concentrate on what you’re doing, like being in the simulator; just go through normal procedures.’

  It was good advice and the rest of the crew followed it. All except Dick Russell, who, stuck in the sixth seat, didn’t have any choice but to listen to whatever came through his headset.

  When they were 290 miles from the target, Pete Taylor pulled back on the four throttle levers and relaxed his grip on the stick. The engine note fell away and all on board felt a subtle change in the bomber’s pitch as she nosed over into a shallow descent.