Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  ‘Tell me when the last bomb’s gone,’ Withers continued, aware that because of the fuel shortage, they wouldn’t be out of the woods just because they might make it through the bomb-run unscathed. ‘We’re not going to run out at low level. I’ll climb straight out.’ For now, the Captain just had to concentrate on nothing else but keeping the wings absolutely straight and level and the speed on the button. Stability meant accuracy.

  With ten miles to run, less than two minutes, to the target, Withers dropped a hand to the console to his left and flicked the bomb door control to ‘Open’. Selecting ‘Auto’ could have left the job of opening them to the NBS, but if there was going to be a problem with them, he wanted to know now in time to try to do something about it, not in the final seconds before the bomb release point.

  Open bomb doors, he told the crew, ready to catch any disruption to the bomber’s balance as they swung down into the airflow. As they travelled slowly through their 90-degree arc, the disturbance to the bomber’s smooth progress through the sky could be felt slightly in the cockpit. The doors locked into position either side of the rows of bombs like a dog baring its teeth and a magnetic doll’s-eye indicator in the cockpit flicked from black to white.

  Bomb doors open, confirmed Withers. Vulcan 607 was settled perfectly into her final run-in to the target. Then Hugh Prior’s headphones erupted in a high-pitched, angry rattle as the 228 RWR picked up a short-range fire-control radar. A quick PRF, one pulse running into another like the buzz from a malevolent insect. Skyguard. A fire-control radar looking for a lock-on, guiding the twin barrels of the Oerlikon cannons through smooth but sharp, decisive movements in search of a target. Three bright dashes cut across the indicator on Prior’s control panel to tell him the radar emissions were coming from a point off to the left of the Vulcan’s nose.

  ‘Gunnery control radar. Medium threat. Ten o’clock. Jamming,’ Prior reported to the crew. He’d resisted the opportunity to react until now for fear of doing no more than confirming the Vulcan’s presence. There was nothing more to be gained by doing so. They had been discovered. He had to act. Prior reached up to the newly installed control panel for the Dash 10 pod and switched it on, hoping that, despite the tripped fuse at Ascension, it would work as advertised. Of the rest of the crew, only Dick Russell, still sitting on his hands in the bowels of the crew compartment, heard the raw noise of the 228 through his headphones – and he wouldn’t have chosen to. The rest of them couldn’t afford to be distracted now. To Prior’s left, Bob Wright was locked in concentration, his face buried in the H2S radar scope. Next to him, Gordon Graham monitored the NBS, backing up the Nav Radar’s efforts. Ahead of them, Withers remained focused on keeping the bomber on track. Any effort to jink and turn to break a radar lock would wreck their bomb run. Over the 10,000 feet the bombs had to fall, even minor movement would be amplified, ensuring that, without any doubt, they would miss the thin strip of the runway. From this height, had they been flying in daylight, it would have looked no bigger than a match placed on an Ordnance Survey map. Like the bomber crews of the Second World War, they had to hold their nerve, not deviating at all as they pressed home their attack.

  Powerful white noise emanated from the pod under the Vulcan’s right wing to obscure the view of the Skyguard radar, at the same time throwing the Vulcan’s radar detection pulse out to one side – telling air defence crews that the jet was miles from the point where it was actually flying. Ten seconds later, the urgent tone from the 228 broke off. The Dash 10, it appeared, had defeated the Skyguard radar and without it the 35mm cannons it controlled were blind. Relieved, Hugh Prior crossed his fingers under the desk, willing the Argentine gunners not to come back at them again.

  Ahead of the bomber, a little to the right of their track, Martin Withers and Pete Taylor saw lights from Stanley flickering in the moist air through gaps in the broken cloud.

  And in the back, the distance to target dial between the two Navigators was decreasing steadily towards the point – two miles from the target – where the NBS computer would release the first bomb. Gordon Graham called out the distances.

  Four miles to run.

  Chapter 39

  Elizabeth Goss woke up early, not quite understanding why. The young mother who as a little girl had surprised her parents with early predictions of the arrival of visiting cars just knew something was different. In the distance she could hear the barely perceptible drone of an aircraft. But that in itself wasn’t unusual, these days. Since the invasion there had been a constant stream of Argentine aircraft of all types coming in and out of the airfield. Day and night. But some instinct told her this wasn’t the same. The engine note was heavier and more substantial. More threatening even. She lay in bed, unable to move and hardly daring to breathe as the unfamiliar sound grew in intensity. Stock-still in the dark, with her husband fast asleep beside her, she held her breath and listened.

  Three miles to run, Gordon Graham continued – one mile to bomb release – then began counting down, five, four, three, two, one…

  Still two miles away from the airfield itself, at the point that the ballistic computer calculated the middle bomb of the stick would hit the middle of the runway, the first of the thousand-pounders fell away from the bomber’s cavernous open belly. Just under a quarter of a second later it was followed by the second. From 607’s height of 10,000 feet and with her speed over the ground of just over 320 knots – nearly 400 mph – the bombs’ forward throw would carry them to the target while they gathered massive, destructive vertical speed. To his left, Bob Wright watched the little mechanical counter clicking up. It appeared to be ticking over in slow motion, each bomb taking what felt like an age to follow the one before. Behind him, though, the heavy bombs dropped from their racks with relentless, metronomic efficiency.

  On the flight deck, Martin Withers steadily increased his forward pressure on the stick. As the Vulcan disgorged a 10-ton payload, she tried to climb. Relieved of her burden, she wanted to soar, but until the last bomb was gone Withers had to keep her steady. Next to him, Pete Taylor was struck by an omission. He felt like he was in a movie, but one that was missing its soundtrack. Accompanying the bomb-run, he thought, should be the sound of a swirling crescendo from a symphony orchestra. Something suitably dramatic, at least. Instead there was just the soulless, metallic scratch and crackle of the intercom and a tight feeling of anticipation.

  Just over five long seconds after the first bomb fell, Bob Wright’s bomb counter finally clicked on to twenty-one and an amber light to his side flicked on.

  ‘Bombs gone,’ he called and immediately flicked the switch to close the bomb bay. Without waiting for the doors to shut on the empty bomb bay Martin Withers pushed the throttle levers all the way to the gate and poured on the power. The four Olympus engines assaulted the night with 80,000lb of dry thrust as they drove the jet forward. Withers pulled the stick across to his left and the big delta bit into a 60-degree bank to the left. Lighter now than at any time since leaving Waddington, she felt agile and responsive again. As he wound her round in a steep 2g turn, the whole crew was pushed deep into their seats. After the insidious, consuming uncertainty about what would await them at the end of their journey south, Withers felt an overwhelming sense of relief as he turned away from Stanley. Away from the wasps’ nest of Argentine anti-aircraft defences. And away from the Roland missile battery that, still waiting for confirmation that the Vulcan was even hostile, was yet to join the battle. But there was still nearly half a minute to go until 607 would once more be outside their reach, beyond the kill zone.

  From the right-hand seat, Pete Taylor looked across his Captain towards the ground. As Withers held the bomber in the turn, careful to control any sideslip with his rudder pedals, Taylor once again caught sight of Stanley’s lights about seven miles to the west. Then three miles closer, he saw the milky, cotton wool shapes of the clouds around the airfield flare like cumulus in an electrical storm as, eighteen seconds after it had left the Vulcan,
the first thousand-pounder bored deep into the centre of the runway and detonated. At the Nav Radar’s station behind him, Bob Wright felt the distant crump of the bombs resonate through the skin of the bomber as it turned.

  A plug of Tarmac, concrete and hardcore over sixty feet wide and half as deep was vaporized by the explosion as the earth below was heaved over the lip of the new crater. One hundred feet on and a quarter of a second later, the next bomb hit the ground, gouging out and destroying another superheated chunk of the airfield’s surface. From the epicentre of each blast, shockwaves struck out in concentric rings. From the supersonic heart of each blast, steep walls of pressure, density and temperature were thrown out, driven from behind like the bow-wave of a super tanker. But these invisible, unstoppable, waves of boiling overpressure pushed out from the blast at the speed of sound. Huge kinetic energy turned to heat as they swept irresistibly across the flat ground against the still night air. The delay by the GADA 601 AN/TPS-43 operators in confirming the identity of the British intruder meant that when the first bomb exploded on the runway, it did so utterly without warning. Major Alberto Iannariello had been sitting in an armchair in the control tower, lost in his thoughts, when the deafening explosion ripped him out of his reverie. Almost instantaneously, a scorching red pressure wave swept violently into the building, punching out the windows and shaking the walls to their foundations. Iannariello was thrown from his chair and passed out. The rest of the stick of thousand-pounders slammed into the ground, opening up a line of wreckage that walked relentlessly across the airfield. For five seconds one heavy, percussive boom followed another, the massive sound of each explosion running into the next.

  Angry, billowing clouds of heat and shrapnel rolled across the exposed airfield, mauling anything in their path. The hangar was flayed, stripped of its corrugated iron walls. Stores and equipment were smashed. And vehicles and machinery caught in the path of the fierce ripples of overpressure lost their hydraulic systems, their fluid-filled pipes bursting under the intensity of kinetic energy pulsing through the air. Only the effective dispersal of accommodation, combustibles and ammunition by Major Héctor Rusticinni protected some of the airfield’s most vital assets.

  Rusticinni himself had been asleep on the floor of his shelter as the bombs hammered into the ground. Close to the explosions, the terrible noise was overwhelming. He was pitched into the air, stunned awake with the rest of the men in the hideout. With each successive eruption, they were tumbled and churned together, all of them alarmed, confused and frightened by the sudden, unknown force of the attack.

  And inside the foxholes sheltering the conscripts, the sound of screaming augmented the thunderous noise from the British bombs. Some screamed because they’d been told to. These unfortunates had been taught, at the first sign of bombardment, to open their mouths and yell at the top of their voices to protect their hearing. Yet still their eardrums felt like they would rupture. Those that forgot their training cried out through fear.

  Sitting in his living room with a cup of tea, John Fowler noticed that his fire was dying out. He got up and bent over it with a poker. As he jabbed at the glowing peat, the ground-shaking noise from 607’s stick of bombs shook the house. Desperately unsettled, he began to work out that it had come from the direction of the airport, and he knew that war had arrived.

  The first explosion came almost as a relief to Elizabeth Goss – an end to the agonizing tension of anticipation that had followed the sound of the Vulcan’s engines. She lay still as the hollow, heavy crump, crump, crump of the bombs rolled across the harbour to Stanley. The house rattled in the dark. And still her husband didn’t stir.

  Joe King leapt out of bed as the sound and shock first reverberated through Stanley. He rushed to the east window of the first-floor bedroom to try to see what was going on.

  ‘What is it?’ his wife asked urgently.

  ‘I can’t see. There’s an awful lot of noise, but I can’t see anything. Either somebody’s bombing the airport or something’s exploded down there.’

  Then the force of the pressure wave slammed shut the window and King jumped back from it. As he stumbled, the old pyjamas he’d taken to wearing while he and his wife housed so many guests slipped down around his ankles.

  ‘Look at that,’ he said, turning back to his wife, ‘they’ve blown my pyjamas off!’

  Across town, other islanders were also woken abruptly from their sleep and, as they shook themselves awake, confusion and panic gave way to smiles as they began to realize that the boomboomboomboom from the airport meant that the British were fighting back. Peter Biggs tried to reassure his wife Fran, explaining to her what he thought was happening. Then he heard the crisper, machine-gun rattle of the flak crackle through the night.

  Alberto Iannariello was underneath his armchair when he regained consciousness. He could hear the sound of a man in pain from the ground floor. Iannariello freed himself, grabbed his helmet and rifle and ran down two flights of stairs towards the baggage-handling area. At the foot of the stairs he found Captain Dovichi, his face pale and strained from the agony of a badly injured back. Iannariello continued outside to witness scenes of carnage and chaos. Soldiers and airmen were running around without apparent purpose. Wounded, shell-shocked men staggered or lay moaning. And three men were already dead. This, he thought, is our baptism of fire.

  As he looked across the shattered airfield, the muzzles of the anti-aircraft guns flashed red, illuminating their immediate surroundings, as they spat out ammunition at over 500 rounds per minute. Tracer streaked into the air accompanied by the furious clatter from the gun barrels. Hundreds of high-explosive shells pumped into the air, each blown into the sky from the Oerlikon and Rheinmetall cannons at over 3,000 feet per second, lashing out at their unseen attacker. Behind him from south of the airfield, Iannariello saw surface-to-air missiles explode into the sky, burning white-orange through the dark in hopeful pursuit.

  The defiant, chaotic onslaught didn’t let up for nearly half an hour.

  Fortunately, Pete Taylor never saw the flak open up behind them, because at 10,000 feet the Vulcan had never been immune from it. Now nearly 14,000 feet away from the guns, the bomber was beyond the effective range of the Oerlikons, but the shells could tumble onwards beyond that for another 6,000 feet. During that time they remained lethal, if inaccurate. And without finding a target, they exploded anyway. The bright, neat little explosions were more deadly than they appeared. Beyond the neat puff of smoke, each detonation threw twisted chunks of shrapnel across the sky. Vulcan 607’s safety had been relative, but the angry Argentine hail of ammunition had been too late to touch them. Surprise, avoidance and suppression: the attack plan had worked. The invaders had been caught by a determined, British reaction that few of them, least of all the hapless conscripts, had thought would ever come.

  Chapter 40

  Withers rolled out of the turn to climb away to the north. He was still on edge. In his mind’s eye he’d anticipated flak; he’d even expected fighters; and so far, apart from interest from the Skyguard fire-control radar, they’d got through unscathed. For over eight hours he’d drawn deeply on reserves of nervous energy, pushing his anxiety aside, and his tiredness was now starting to make itself felt. Then, as he levelled the wings, a bright light caught his eye.

  Bloody hell – he jumped, suddenly sharp again – a fighter. But as he studied what at first glance had been an Argentine Mirage bearing down on them, he realized it was a planet. Probably Venus, he reckoned. He’d seen only what he had been looking for. He shook himself out of it; they needed to report news of their attack. Withers had kept his feelings to himself, but Pete Taylor couldn’t help noticing that Withers seemed saddened by the hurt he might have inflicted. In fact, the Captain thought it had all seemed rather cold-blooded. Sneaking in before dawn using false codes and dropping bombs. Not much gallantry in that, he thought. The way he saw it, he’d just started a shooting war and he took no pleasure from that. None at all.

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nbsp; As they gained height, putting distance between themselves and the islands, an Argentine search radar continued to sweep over them. Every ten seconds, its forlorn pulse was relayed into Hugh Prior’s headset by the 228. No threat at this time.

  Resignation had replaced the uncertainty and gloom felt aboard Bob Tuxford’s Victor when the Vulcan left them. Travelling at 43,000 feet they were still seven hours’ flying time south of Ascension, but they had less than five hours’ fuel in the tanks. Tuxford briefly considered shutting down one of the four Rolls-Royce Conway engines to eke a little more range out of the remaining fuel, but abandoned the idea. It would have got them further, but it still wouldn’t get them home. Ultimately, all Tux had to reassure himself that his jet wasn’t going to fall out of the sky was his faith in the experience and judgement of the ‘tanker trash’ at Wideawake. He tried to relax and recuperate a little after the exertions of the previous two hours. It’s not a hopeless situation, he told himself, certainly not a foregone conclusion.

  Behind him, AEO Mick Beer monitored the Vulcan’s frequency on the HF radio.

  Under the canvas at Ascension, Jeremy Price was still guessing. He’d dispatched two TATs for Biglands and Tuxford. The two tankers were heading south on an assumption that they’d be needed. He’d heard nothing from either of the long-slot Victors. He could only do what he could do, though, and they had, at least, just brought Alan Skelton home. After reporting a fuel leak when he turned north from the third refuelling bracket his jet had taken on 20,000lb of fuel 400 miles south of Ascension. After sunrise, Monty returned to the Ops tent. Price immediately explained what he knew of the night’s developments. Beyond the fact that the mission appeared to be nearly an hour behind schedule, there was little Price could tell them. BLACK BUCK’s progress was unknown.