Point of Impact

by Point of Impact (retail) (epub)

  Nick raised an eyebrow. ‘What was the problem – the posting to Germany?’

  ‘That’s part of it.’ Drew paused as he accelerated to overtake a lorry. ‘But not all of it.’

  Nick studied Drew’s profile for a moment, then gazed through the windscreen as he spoke, picking his words with care. ‘You’ve got to think about what you really want for yourself, inside or outside the Air Force. If you want a career in fast jets, then you really have to go to Germany. If you don’t, the Air Force isn’t the be-all and end-all. There are lots of other things you can do.’

  ‘I know,’ Drew said, swinging the Audi through an S-bend, ‘but there aren’t many that are this much fun. I’ve got a friend who’s a lawyer in the City. He makes a stack of money, but it takes him an hour and a half to get to work every morning and his job bores the tits off him. Then there’s my mate Hamish. He’s a farmer up in the north of Scotland. It’s a beautiful place, but he’s up to his neck in nettles and cow shit, and the most exciting thing that ever happens is when he gets rid of the double-six playing doms. It’s a great place to fly over, but I wouldn’t want to live there.’

  He thought for a few moments, then spoke again, slowly, as much to himself as to Nick. ‘I keep thinking that I should stop messing around with the Boy’s Own hero stuff and take a ground job, but if I wasn’t happy doing it I’d only make Josie’ – he gave an embarrassed smile – ‘I mean whoever I’m with miserable as well.’

  He glanced across at Nick. ‘You’ve done your two tours in the front line. You’ve got a nice wife and kids and have every reason to settle down with your pipe and slippers. I’ve still got things I want to do in the Air Force.’

  ‘Then it sounds like you’ve already made your decision… and a bit less of the “pipe and slippers” if you don’t mind.’

  Drew smiled and flicked on the radio for the news. There was a terse report, buried halfway through the bulletin: ‘The RAF have still not released the names of the Tempest fighter crew killed in a crash in the Yorkshire Dales the day before yesterday. Investigators are at the scene working to establish the cause. An RAF spokesman said that the parents of one of the dead men are on holiday abroad and the names of the crew cannot be released until the next of kin have been informed.’

  Drew turned off the radio. ‘Imagine coming home from holiday to that.’

  ‘Imagine being told that, period,’ Nick replied. ‘It must be the worst thing in the world for parents to outlive their children.’

  Both men sat in silence for a while. After a few moments Nick looked up. ‘Sorry. These crashes must be getting to all of us. That’s the third in four weeks.’

  ‘Did you know that Jeff Faraday was one of the guys who died?’

  Nick shook his head. ‘He had two kids, didn’t he?’

  He fell silent again, then asked, ‘Do you know what happened?’

  ‘Not really. I was with the Mountain Rescue team up there. It was a hell of a mess. I had to sit still for the whole bloody life story of the farmer who saw the crash, but the only thing he could tell me was that he wanted compensation for the shock to his sheep.’

  Drew pulled out onto the outside lane of the dual carriageway and gunned the engine. Like most pilots, he was an excellent driver, but with a correspondingly high opinion of his own skills and a complete lack of patience with other motorists.

  ‘Look at that dickhead.’ He flashed his lights and sounded his horn at a Montego doing the legal maximum and stubbornly blocking the outside lane.

  ‘What’s it matter?’ Nick asked. ‘We’re almost at the turn-off anyway.’

  ‘I know that, but he doesn’t.’ Drew switched to the inside lane. He shot past the Montego but then braked and sped down the slip road, catching a glimpse of the Montego driver soundlessly mouthing obscenities at him as he disappeared.

  At one time anyone could have driven right up to the guardroom at the heart of the base before being challenged. Since the IRA began its bombing campaign, every visitor, no matter how familiar, was now stopped by armed guards at the main gate. The barriers were flanked by concrete screens solid enough to stop a speeding truck.

  ‘Morning. ID, please… Oh, hello, sir.’ The guard was a technician on Drew’s squadron.

  ‘Morning, Mike. How are things?’

  ‘Murder. The new baby’s going for the UK All-comers record for screaming. The only time I get any sleep is when I’m on guard duty. Okay, sir, drive on.’

  Chuckling at his own joke, the guard nodded to a colleague invisible in the gloom of the featureless concrete blockhouse. As the barrier swung silently upwards, the gun barrel protruding from the narrow slit in the blockhouse swung away from them and onto the next car waiting in line.

  Drew accelerated away, driving in through the suburbs towards the heart of the base. He paused again at a second checkpoint, then passed another barbed-wire fence separating the commercial area from the operational sector, off limits to all except authorised personnel.

  Chapter Three

  Drew drove past the ranks of two-storey brick buildings, as functional and featureless as a 1950s industrial estate, before pulling up outside the 21 Squadron crew room.

  Round the corner of the building two armed guards with a snarling Alsatian paced across the concrete. Drawn up on the line outside an enormous hangar were ten sleek grey killing machines, bristling with missiles slung under fuselage and wings. Drew stared out across the airfield, punctuated by the concrete and blue glass of the control tower and a revolving black steel radar dish, restlessly scanning the skies.

  Nick stood waiting with mounting impatience. Finally he called, ‘There’s a tour bus leaving in ten minutes. Want me to book you on it?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Drew said, ‘I was miles away. Shall we check the flight programme or get a cup of coffee?’

  ‘What a question to ask a professional,’ Nick said. ‘Always do the important stuff first; let’s get the kettle on.’

  As they entered the crew room, Drew gave the squadron mascot, a stuffed tiger, an absent-minded pat, dislodging a further couple of hairs from its ever-diminishing pelt.

  Ancient as it was, the tiger was still slightly younger than 21 Squadron. The ‘Fighting Tigers’ had an illustrious history dating back to the First World War. Their emblem was emblazoned on the sleeves of 21’s flying suits and the tiger motif also extended to everything from the crew room coffee mugs to the squadron tie.

  The tiger was much loved, even though its once luxuriant fur was threadbare and its ferocious snarl had been cruelly emasculated by their sister squadron, 26. The ‘Screaming Eagles’ had kidnapped 21’s tiger on a drunken, predawn raid and removed all its teeth with a pair of pliers. 21’s honour had been satisfied only when 26’s mascot – a stuffed eagle, naturally – had been taken down from its perch, plucked, dressed, and left on a silver serving salver, surrounded by pork chipolatas. The toothless tiger had been restored to its podium in the 21 crew room, doubling as mascot and repository for surplus flying kit.

  Drew dropped into one of the battered old armchairs grouped around the fireplace. He looked around the room. Sometimes this was the only place he felt at home.

  David ‘DJ’ Jeffries, the most junior member of squadron, glanced up from the toaster behind the coffee bar and called, ‘Hello, Drew, has my watch stopped or are you actually on time for once?’

  Drew yawned and stretched. ‘Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren’t smart enough to think of good excuses for being late.’

  Nick had been rummaging through the cupboards. ‘There’s no bloody coffee.’

  ‘Tea will do,’ Drew said.

  Nick emerged frowning from beneath the counter. ‘No, this is too serious to let go. Who’s the coffee-bar officer round here?’

  ‘I am,’ DJ said, unsure whether this was a genuine complaint or yet another crew-room wind-up.

  ‘Well, it’s not that difficult to run a coffee bar, is it?’ Nick asked. ‘If you can’t fly a kettle and a toast
er, God knows what you’re like in a jet.’

  ‘Pretty crap on recent evidence,’ Drew said. ‘He cocked up his starting checks as he was winding his engines up the other day and dumped two hundred gallons of avgas all over the tarmac. He was still running down the line to the spare jet shouting “Wait for me” when the others took off.’

  There was a burst of laughter. DJ flushed, gazing uncertainly from one to the other, but his tormentors were already off on another tangent.

  ‘Better luck next time, DJ,’ his navigator, Nigel ‘Ali’ Barber called, half hidden by the fug of steam and smoke. ‘By the way, anyone heard anything about that crash?’

  ‘A little,’ Drew said. ‘It was an RS3 from 71 Squadron at Coningsby. I went up to the site with Mountain Rescue.’

  ‘I know,’ DJ said. ‘I was the one who had to clean up the coffee you spilled in all the excitement.’

  ‘Such ingratitude,’ Drew sighed. ‘I go out of my way to give him the chance to make himself useful and he turns on me.’

  ‘So anything grisly at the crash site?’ DJ asked.

  ‘Just the body of a good friend of mine.’

  DJ’s face fell. ‘I… I er…’ He twisted a strand of hair between his fingers.

  ‘Do we know why it happened?’ Ali asked, coming to the rescue.

  ‘Not yet,’ Drew said, ‘but they were only flying a routine sortie and it was perfect visibility.’

  There was a brief silence. Then Drew said, ‘Right, are you ready, Nick? Let’s go check out the programme.’

  As he reached the doorway, he turned. ‘DJ, a word.’

  Nick walked a discreet distance further down the corridor as DJ followed Drew out of the crew room. ‘Drew,’ he began, ‘I’m really sorry about your friend. I didn’t realise—’

  Drew cut him off. ‘Forget it. That’s not why I want to talk to you. But I did think about you while I was helping to pick up the bits of the pilot that died in that crash. I don’t know who he was – the nav was my mate – but he was very young. Too young to die, certainly.’

  DJ waited for Drew to continue.

  ‘What I’m trying to say is that you’ve got to learn a lesson from that. Sheer bloody bad flying causes most crashes. You’re good, there’s no doubt about it, one of the best young pilots I’ve seen.’

  DJ blushed slightly at the praise.

  ‘But you’re still very young and inexperienced and you’re impulsive. You take risks that a more seasoned pilot never would. People who don’t know you think you’re arrogant, but we both know that air of supreme confidence you try to project is just camouflage. You’d rather make a snap decision – even the wrong one – than risk being thought indecisive. I’m telling you this now because I don’t want to be scraping your brains off a hillside one day.

  ‘So starting today, when we go to Denmark, I want you to concentrate on the basics. Forget the flash moves, forget pushing it to the limit.’

  He caught DJ’s sullen expression. ‘Yeah, I know it’s boring, but it’s the stuff that keeps you alive. If you try to cut the corners, somebody ends up dead. Okay?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks, Drew,’ DJ said, without enthusiasm.

  Drew nodded and walked down the corridor.

  ‘More of Mother Miller’s homespun wisdom and handy hints?’ Nick asked.

  Drew scowled. ‘Something like that.’

  They walked across the car park and left the bright sunlight for the gloom of the Hard – the Pilots’ Briefing Facility – built from two-foot-thick reinforced concrete and designed to withstand a direct hit from a bomb. Having seen the footage of concrete buildings disintegrating during the raids on Baghdad, Drew was less than reassured.

  In times of tension, the Hard became a closed world behind thick steel security doors and pressurised airlocks. Today was just a normal day: the doors stood wide open and there was no guard behind the bulletproof glass screen. A repair man parked his van and walked into the nuclear bunker to service the photocopiers.

  Drew and Nick followed him in. They passed the racks of rifles and respirators by the airlocks separating the outer layers of the Hard from the core and squeezed between the filtered chambers and the dormitory. Known as the Submarine, it was a stiflingly tiny room filled with racks of beds on three tiers. They spent many a sleepless night here on exercise, preparing for Armageddon.

  They found the squadron commander, Bert Russell, in the Ops room. In his mid-forties, Russell was inevitably nicknamed ‘Jack’. He sat with his feet on the desk, preening his handlebar moustache.

  Drew sighed to himself. In his present mood, he would have preferred to avoid him. Russell saw himself as an open and approachable father figure to the squadron, but Drew regarded him as a humourless stuffed shirt.

  Russell’s clerk was pressing him for a decision on the day’s programme, without obvious success. ‘Are we still flying the first mission this morning, sir, or are we trying to keep the jets serviceable for the deployment to Denmark this afternoon?’

  ‘I haven’t decided yet. Just give me a moment, will you?’ he snapped.

  ‘I have to let Ops and Air Traffic know.’

  She looked to Drew and Nick for help, but they only shrugged. Giving a bollocking to a senior officer was not normally regarded as a good career move.

  ‘I see Russell’s charisma bypass operation is still a success,’ Drew muttered to Nick. ‘Play it safe and by the book and, if that doesn’t work, procrastinate. We’ll be lucky to get a flying programme for Denmark before we actually arrive there.’

  Russell swivelled in his chair. ‘What was that, Miller?’

  ‘I was just talking to Nick about the detachment in Denmark, sir. I don’t suppose there’s a flying programme yet?’

  His smile was not returned. Russell looked at him with something close to distaste, then hauled himself upright.

  ‘Okay, let’s bin the morning missions. Let the engineers have the jets back, then at least we have ten serviceable for two o’clock this afternoon. Drew, you and Nick are going to lead the push-out – God knows why I let you, when all you do is give me a hard time. Make sure you’ve got the flight plans in and everything’s sorted for a one o’clock brief. Now does anybody mind if I go to the lavatory? 1 might at least get a bit of peace in there.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Drew said. ‘We just saw Jumbo heading in there with the Telegraph crossword and a very purposeful look on his face.’

  It was a daunting thought. Jumbo was seventeen stone of prime Scottish beef. Beneath a crop of tightly curled fair hair, his florid face was a tribute to his idea of a balanced diet – a pork pie in one hand and a can of beer in the other.

  Russell raised his eyes to heaven. Drew winked at the clerk and followed Nick through to the map room. They spent the next couple of hours scattering maps, poring over computer screens, typing in coordinates and drawing up flight plans, punctuating their deliberations with regular refuellings of coffee.

  By one o’clock they were ready to brief the sortie. The Tannoy called the squadron together: ‘Nitro, briefing for detachment now.’

  When all the guys had assembled in the briefing room, Drew took the platform. ‘Okay. Met brief. The weather here is fine, light easterly winds. We’re going to be working just off Flamborough Head, where conditions are similar, with the wind likely to strengthen slightly and back round to the south-east by mid-afternoon. The forecast for Aalborg is good all day, so we should have no problems getting in.

  ‘Tirstrup is our diversion. Make sure you have enough fuel for that and bear in mind that we are going to a new base at Aalborg. We haven’t been there before, so let’s not arrive with minimum fuel. Make sure you’ve got an extra couple of hundred KGs to flog around if we get messed about by Air Traffic Control.

  ‘We haven’t flown with the Danes for almost a year now, so you all know why we’re going over there – and it’s not for the nightlife. This isn’t just a jaunt. We could easily find ourselves shipped out at any time to fight alongside them in
some faraway place with an unpronounceable name, so we need to catch up on any changes in their tactics and try and surprise them with a couple of ours. They’ve also had a new radar warner fitted apparently, which they’re keen to try out on us.’

  Jumbo grinned. The Air Force abbreviation for the Danish detachment was TDPU – Tactics Discussion and Principles Update – but they all knew that the wives’ scathing alternative, Thinly Disguised Piss-Up, was much closer to the truth.

  Drew called them back to order. ‘Any questions? Right. Back to today’s mission. Nick and I will be doing one v one air combat with DJ and Ali. The rest of you straight transit over there and make sure everything’s set up on the ground. You’re going to be responsible for starting the liaison with the Danish guys as soon as you land and that includes the compulsory pickled herrings and North Sea oil.’

  Groans greeted the Air Force nickname for Gammel Dansk, a frighteningly potent brew which had the same colour, texture and, many swore, the same taste as Brent crude. The herrings were not to everyone’s taste, either, raw and pickled in spiced vinegar – or battery acid, according to some jaundiced veterans.

  ‘Tomorrow morning we’ll do the serious business. We’re going to be flying basic dissimilar combat, starting off with standard two v ones and building it up from there. We’ll be under the control of Danish radar and they’ve been told it’s a full-up sortie, so we’ll be playing with hard rules. Any questions? Okay, the time is thirteen-seventeen… now. Let’s do it.’

  The men filed out, heading for the changing room, where they struggled into their flying gear under the watchful eye of the corporal who presided over their equipment. He sorted through the mountain of flying kit dumped in a heap by the returning aircrews and produced it, cleaned and neatly folded, ready for the next day’s sorties.

  ‘No matter how many times you do this, it doesn’t get any easier, does it?’ Nick battled with his rubber immersion suit.

  Drew grunted as he hauled the top half of his suit over his head and forced his arm down the sleeve. He had three layers of clothing under the suit. On ninety-nine per cent of sorties, they would just make him hot, sweaty and uncomfortable. On the hundredth, they might save his life; an unprotected pilot ejecting into the North Sea would die from hypothermia in minutes.