Point of Impact

by Point of Impact (retail) (epub)

  ‘The things we do for international relations.’ Nick chomped a herring and tossed his glass back in one. He smiled and smacked his lips appreciatively, partially masking the sound of DJ gagging.

  Still pale, DJ was led to a flatbed trailer with seats bolted onto it. Drew, Nick and Ali also hopped aboard, still clutching their drinks. A tractor pulled them across the base, belching diesel fumes.

  Their crewmates were already comfortably ensconced outside the crew room. Drew was relieved to see that the Gammel Dansk had been replaced by cans of Carlsberg. He helped himself to one and joined the others, but DJ sat by himself. Nick looked across at him and then motioned Drew to one side.

  ‘Look, DJ may have been a prat, but he deserves the same benefit of the doubt that you’d expect yourself.’

  Drew started to argue, but Nick put up his hands. ‘I know it looked bad, but we weren’t in the cockpit with him. Something could have gone wrong with his jet. Even if he did cock it up, he needs to learn the lessons and go on from it, not have his confidence shredded so totally that he jacks it all in. Did you never make a mistake when you were working up to combat-readiness?’

  Nick’s point struck home. Three years before, Drew had lost track of one piece in the three-dimensional chess game while flying a two v two training sortie and had almost flown into his wingman. Nick had been in the back seat.

  Drew gave a grudging nod.

  ‘In any case,’ Nick said, ‘you were right out of order sounding off at him in public like that. If he deserved a bollocking – and he probably did – it should have been done in private, quietly, not broadcast on Radio Aalborg.’

  ‘You’re beginning to make me feel like it was my fault.’

  Nick laughed. ‘Good. Now you know how DJ feels.’

  Drew walked off to get himself another beer but, when he thought Nick was looking the other way, he went over to DJ.

  ‘Look, maybe I went at you a bit hard. If so, I’m sorry. I got as big a fright as you did.’

  DJ smiled. ‘I’m sure a couple of pints will help me forget the whole thing.’

  Chapter Four

  Drew awoke with a start, streaming with sweat. The telephone was ringing and he fumbled blearily for the receiver.

  ‘Good morning,’ said a recorded Danish voice. ‘This is your alarm call, the time is six-thirty.’

  Dog-tired and badly hung over, Drew unleashed a useless volley of abuse down the phone and slumped down again. He still had his head glued to the pillow an hour later when a hideously cheerful Nick called him up. ‘Come on, you’re late. Transport’s in fifteen minutes.’

  Drew fell out of bed. A gorilla appeared to have broken into his room during the night, breaking a light fitting, strewing his clothes all over the room, battering his head with a baseball bat and taking a crap in his mouth. He shuddered, drank some water and brushed his teeth, but his head went on pounding and his stomach felt as if it was full of broken glass.

  It was the worst hangover he had ever had. He had been falling down drunk once or twice as a teenager back home, but ever since he joined the Air Force he had prided himself on keeping a cool head, knowing when to stop while others drank themselves sick or stupid. It was not a boast he would be able to make this morning.

  He stared at the vision from hell in his bathroom mirror. Nice going, he thought to himself. You can’t blame anyone else for this. What are you, a professional pilot or a professional piss-artist? He turned away and stumbled into the shower.

  It did little to revive him. He could not face breakfast and met Nick and the others down in reception, just in time to catch their transport to the base.

  Nick took one look at him and burst out laughing. ‘God, Drew, I thought I was rough.’

  ‘You are, it’s just that I’m worse. You’re going to have to drive the car. There’s no way I can drive in this state. I shouldn’t be flying, either, but we’ve got to do it; we can’t lose face with the young lads.’

  Drew and Nick were again paired with DJ and Ali, going up on a Combat Air Patrol, two v one with a Danish F16. DJ and Ali briefed the mission, but made a mess of it, transposing a couple of digits in the coordinates. Had Nick not corrected them, they would have been exercising over the centre of Copenhagen instead of the North Sea.

  While most of his colleagues laughed off the mistake, Drew said, ‘For Christ’s sake, DJ, get your act together.’

  ‘Shit,’ DJ breathed to Ali, ‘if this is what he’s like when he gets a hangover, I hope he’s not going to be mentoring us all week. He’s going to be a real pain in the arse.’

  Nick leaned over to Drew. ‘Can’t you get off DJ’s case for a while? In a few minutes he’s going to be taking up the jet he almost died in yesterday. He’s going to be shitting himself as he goes down that runway, wondering if whatever happened is going to happen again. What he needs is reassurance and confidence, not another bollocking.’

  Drew knew he was right, but was too hung over and bad-tempered to acknowledge it. He did not interrupt the briefing again, but nor did he give DJ any reassurance. He took his foul mood and his foul head with him into the air.

  Flying in a foreign country for the first time, DJ was having problems both with Danish Air Traffic Control and with setting up the CAP position, but Drew made no attempt to help him.

  Drew sat in his aircraft with the switch set to one hundred per cent pure oxygen. Medics insisted it was an old wives’ tale, but pilots swore it could cure a hangover. ‘Christ, Nick, I shouldn’t be up here. I’m sweating pure North Sea Oil.’

  ‘Just make sure you don’t screw up,’ Nick warned. ‘One near miss is enough to be going on with.’

  Drew did not reply, too busy gulping and swallowing as saliva flooded his mouth. Just as DJ got everything set up, with the two Tempests and the F16 all in the right places in the sky, Drew gulped again, tore off his face mask and reached for his blue Nato-standard sick bag, guaranteed not to spill or burst even at thirty G.

  Drew retched miserably, then dabbed ineffectually at his chin. He stuck down the self-seal tag, groaned and called DJ on the radio. ‘Nitro Two, I’ve got a bit of an in-cockpit snag.’

  ‘What’s up?’ DJ asked. ‘Anything we can do about it?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Drew hastily. ‘It’s just in-cockpit, but we’ll have to get back to base now.’

  ‘Do you need to declare an emergency?’

  ‘No, no,’ Drew said testily. ‘It’s very minor. Don’t worry, we’ll be fine as soon as we get on the ground.’ DJ cursed to himself, but called up the FI6 and then wheeled his jet around to follow Drew back down to Aalborg. They touched down and taxied back in, the journey back along the taxiway seeming at least twice as far to Drew as it had on the way out.

  After he pulled to a halt, he fumbled again with the sealing strip of his sick bag. It was designed to stay sealed even under combat conditions and took him another minute of sweat and struggle to get it open.

  Nick laughed. ‘Probably the most expensive drink in history. Getting two RS3s and an F16 up into the air over Denmark must have cost the taxpayers about £100,000.’

  Drew just groaned and bent over the bag again. When he’d finished, he clambered unsteadily down from the cockpit and went across to DJ and Ali as they were walking away from their jet. ‘Look, I’m really sorry.’

  DJ’s glance took in Drew’s greenish tinge and the blue sick bag half hidden behind his back.

  Drew followed his gaze and added shamefacedly, ‘I should know better at my age than to fly with a hangover. Sorry to wreck your sortie.’

  DJ let the silence last long enough for Drew to remember their previous conversation on the Aalborg tarmac, then said, ‘That’s all right. I’m sure you’ll have to do the same for me before the week’s out.’ Though the words were friendly, the tone was not.

  * * *

  They had been sitting drinking coffee for an hour while Drew nibbled on pieces of dry toast, when a stunning young Danish airwoman came sprinting in with a
flash signal from Finnington. She handed it to Russell, who was alone in showing more interest in the message than the messenger. He scanned it and then leapt to his feet.

  ‘What is it?’ Nick asked.

  ‘An immediate recall to base. It doesn’t say why. You’ve got half an hour to get back to the hotel, pack your bags and be back here ready to fly.’ He paused and looked pointedly at Drew.

  ‘I’m fine now. No problems. I think I must have had a bad herring,’ Drew said, but Russell was already halfway out of the door.

  ‘Here we go again,’ DJ said, ‘the knee-jerk reaction. Something’s happened, let’s all rush off home immediately. This must have happened five times in the last six months and every time it’s been something trivial.’

  Ali laughed. ‘Never mind, DJ. Perhaps Mariella will wait for you.’

  Russell radioed the crews still flying their sorties. Those with enough fuel transited straight to Finnington, while the rest landed back at Aalborg, refuelled and were airborne again inside the hour. As usual, the ground crew were left to tidy up the mess, collect all the equipment and fly home later on the lumbering Hercules transports.

  As soon as Drew and Nick touched down at Finnington, they rushed into the Ops room, where several other members of the squadron were already haranguing Russell.

  ‘Come on, boss, what’s going on?’

  ‘Just wait till everybody’s in and I’ll tell you.’ Russell puffed on his pipe, enjoying being the focus of attention. ‘We’ll have a briefing in half an hour. Make sure everybody knows about it.’

  Drew sat in the crew room with the rest of the squadron for half an hour, drinking coffee and exchanging increasingly wild speculation. Before they filed into the briefing room, rumours ranged from an escape attempt by Russell’s budgerigar to an outbreak of nuclear war in Bosnia.

  Nick sat calmly through the frenzied speculation. ‘Why don’t we just wait and see?’

  ‘What?’ Drew said. ‘And let the facts spoil a good story?’

  ‘It’s probably another squadron to be mothballed,’ Jumbo said gloomily, buttering himself another piece of toast. ‘Wonder if it’s us this time?’

  Russell was already standing by the podium. He waited until the last man was seated and then cleared his throat.

  ‘As you may have guessed from the news bulletins over the last few days, we are very likely to be called forward to set up an air exclusion zone again over Bosnia. We’ll be responsible for ensuring that nothing gets off the ground and if it does we’ll be ensuring that it is in no state to land on a runway again.’

  ‘Just like last time, boss?’ Drew asked. ‘Seven thousand violations in three years and only one engagement?’

  There was a knowing laugh from the rest of the squadron. Russell ignored it. ‘We have got to be ready to move in twelve hours, though we’re just as likely to be on standby for a month or even longer. We may not even go at all. Most of you have been in this situation before, with the Gulf, Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia the first time around, so you should be getting used to it.

  ‘Let’s not forget the lessons we learned. Let’s not try and reinvent the wheel. Those of you who were out there last time, prepare briefs for the newer guys telling them as much as possible of what they can expect.

  ‘Right, we’re knocking it on the head for today. The engineers are preparing all the aircraft as fast as they can and, providing we haven’t been given the order to go, we start training tomorrow. 33 Squadron are sending their Pumas up.’

  He waited for the buzz to die down. ‘As you know, the Puma’s traditionally a troop carrier and battlefield support helicopter, armed only with nose guns and a door-mounted machine gun operated by the crewman. These are the new generation, however, carrying rocket packs in addition to the nose and door guns. They’ll be simulating the tactics of the Serb helicopter gunships, so that we can start practising our helicopter affiliation.’

  Even the most world-weary members of the squadron showed a flicker of interest at the news, for their day-to-day work was purely fast jet against fast jet. Learning to fight helicopters would be new to almost all of them.

  ‘Everybody can take the rest of the day off to sort out your affairs,’ Russell said, ‘but be back in for Met brief at seven tomorrow morning.’

  They started to get to their feet, but hesitated as they realised that Russell had something more to say. ‘I know we’ve all been having a wild time in Aalborg – even if we were only there for twenty-four hours in the end – but this is serious business now and I want strict adherence to the twelve-hour bottle-to-throttle rule.’

  Drew avoided catching his eye.

  * * *

  Drew dropped Nick at his house and then sped home to a cold and empty flat. He turned on the heating and sat down at the table with a pen and paper, spent the next few minutes doodling aimlessly and then threw the paper in the bin.

  Abruptly he got up and began to pack his bags. When he’d finished, he prowled from room to room, pausing to leaf through a magazine and then impatiently throw it away. Twice his hand hovered above the phone, but each time he resumed his pacing without making the call.

  By early evening he was slumped on the couch, staring blankly at the television. He thought of DJ and Ali, already out on the town, and he imagined Nick and his wife, playing and laughing with their kids as they got them ready for bed.

  He smiled ruefully to himself as he took in his surroundings. You really know how to live, Drew, he thought. This could be the last night before you go to war. What a way to spend it, sitting in an empty flat watching Coronation Street and eating a takeaway pizza straight out of a cardboard box.

  The rest of the pizza followed the paper into the bin. He left the television blaring and walked out, heading for his local pub. He stood at the end of the bar, gazing blankly ahead of him, too dispirited even to make the attempt to start a conversation with anybody. He stayed in the pub for an hour, talking to no one but the barman who served him, then walked slowly home.

  The noise from the television did nothing to disguise the emptiness of the flat. He sat at the desk and methodically sorted through his papers, throwing away every letter and postcard from Josie and every photograph of her. Then he turned off the television and threw himself down on the bed.

  Faint traces of Josie’s perfume filled his nostrils. He leapt up, stripped the sheets from the bed and stuffed them into the washing machine. He went back into the bedroom, remade the bed and then dragged it on its protesting castors to the other side of the room. He moved the dressing table and wardrobe as well and then lay down on the bed and picked up a book.

  It was still lying on the bed, unread, when he woke the next morning. He shoved it aside and dragged himself into the shower. A search of the kitchen cupboards revealed only an empty bread wrapper and some cereal, but no milk. He contemplated rescuing the cold pizza from the bin, then thought better of it and went to scrounge breakfast at Nick and Sally’s house instead.

  ‘How did last night go?’ Nick asked as they were setting off for work.

  ‘It didn’t.’

  Nick raised an eyebrow. ‘So it wasn’t much of a farewell-to-freedom night?’

  ‘You could say that,’ Drew said. ‘I went for a few drinks, just for a change.’

  As they passed through the barrier into the base, they both noticed the air of anticipation. The squadron had moved onto a war footing and the customary laid-back attitude had disappeared. People moved about their business briskly, purposefully, and even the morning tea-and-toast rituals in the crew room were over in a few minutes.

  Russell called the senior aircrew to a conference in his office. He beamed around the room, like Santa Claus about to open his sack.

  ‘Right, we’re on a war footing. With luck, that means that peacetime constraints will be eased and, within reason, we can have whatever equipment we want, without worrying about budgets or the date of the next General Election. So what do you all reckon we need?’

 
The others were almost falling over themselves to speak, like kids let loose in Hamleys.

  ‘We’ll need new chaff dispensers…’

  ‘And flare dispensers…’

  ‘And let’s try to get that new French jamming pod. It defends against ground missile systems and hostile aircraft.’

  ‘Is it available?’

  ‘Yes, I saw it in Jane’s Defence Weekly a few weeks ago.’

  Santa was already back-pedalling, stuffing toys back into his sack. ‘I don’t know,’ Russell said nervously. ‘I can’t go to HQ and ask for all this in the present financial climate.’

  ‘Look, boss,’ Nick began, ‘this is our one and only chance to get the kit improved to the standard we need to do our job properly. Instead of an adequate aircraft we could be flying a capable one.’

  Drew followed his lead. ‘And surely it’s our job to tell HQ what we actually need. It’s their job to tell us whether they can afford it.’

  Russell frowned. ‘I hope you’re not lecturing me on my responsibilities.’

  ‘Of course not, but—’

  ‘Thank you gentlemen, that will be all,’ Russell said. ‘I’ll get on to Strike Command immediately and do what I can on equipment. Now let’s get out and get everybody crewed up. Sort out who flies with who, to get the best blend of experience.’

  Christmas was over. The men filed out, their elation forgotten. ‘We’ll be lucky if he asks for a rubber band and a box of paper clips,’ Drew said as he shut the door.

  ‘Come on, Drew,’ Nick said. ‘I think you’re being a bit harsh. I’m sure he’ll ask for two rubber bands.’

  When Russell arrived in the crew room half an hour later, Drew could tell from his manner that he had got a dusty answer from Strike Command. He nudged Nick. ‘Here comes Mr Bumble. Who’s going to be Oliver Twist and ask for some more?’

  ‘Not me and not you if you’ve got any sense. You’ve already rattled his cage enough for one lifetime.’