‘They’re Confidential Occurrence Reports. They put them in the bogs so that you can pick one up without anyone knowing. You grab one from the back of the door, fill in your name and the details of the incident and send it to the AIB, where it goes straight onto Power’s desk.’
‘Just a minute,’ DJ said. ‘How can it be confidential if it’s got your name on it?’
‘It’s on a tear-off strip, so only the head of AIB actually sees it and he’s only allowed to use it if he needs further clarification. After that he bins the name and personal details and circulates the rest of the form around the stations so that lessons can be learned.’
‘So is that what you’re going to do?’
Drew shrugged. ‘I’ve got to do something. I can’t just sit on my hands until Gordon’s kangaroo court’s finished with me. If I’m lucky I’ll be permanently grounded and if I’m not I’ll be court martialled and kicked out of the Air Force with a dishonourable discharge. If the CONDOR to Power doesn’t help I’m going to have to prove it myself.’
‘How the hell are you going to do that?’
Michelle’s voice startled both of them. ‘I hope you’re not planning to set up in competition with my father. I don’t want anyone ruining the family business.’
Drew smiled distractedly at her.
‘Not that I think you’ll pose too much of a problem,’ she continued. ‘You’ve no expertise, no evidence, no research data and no way of getting proof.’
‘So you don’t believe me either?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Well you’re in a minority,’ Drew said. ‘Most of the guys think I just cocked it up.’
‘Look, Drew, I have to go now. We’re going back up to let another couple of top guns have a crack at us, but I’ll see you later in the Mess. I’ll tell you something then that may help.’
‘Can’t you tell me now?’
‘It’s pretty insubstantial,’ Michelle said, ‘but it’s worth a dinner.’
* * *
Drew was due to take a jet up himself later in the afternoon, a routine flight to get himself back in the groove. Nick gave him a quizzical look as they collected their flying kit and sat down between two rows of grey lockers.
‘Are you sure you’re ready for this?’ Nick asked. ‘From what I hear, you’ve a lot on your mind just now. I mean the accident investigators,’ he added drily.
‘Air Force gossip is unbelievable. If I farted in Fairbanks, Alaska, they’d know about it here before the smell had faded.’
He felt a sense of relief at the monotony of the preflight routine, but he was unusually tense as the Tempest began to roll down the runway, catapulting forward as he unleashed the brakes and pushed the throttles. Sensing his nervousness, Nick kept his own voice neutral and dispassionate as he ran through the endless cycle of checks and counterchecks.
Once airborne, Drew kept the Tempest well within its operating limits as they rose into the overcast sky, the airframe bumping and juddering in the turbulence as they passed through the cloud layers.
They levelled out at twenty thousand feet and flew east over a rapidly changing cloudscape, soaring over towering cliffs and deep valleys of swirling vapour. Chinks and gaps in the cloud began to widen, giving Drew brief glimpses of the North York Moors far below them. By the time they crossed the coastline, the cloud was well broken and the North Sea shimmered blue as the Mediterranean in the sunlight.
‘Let’s take it up to the top and have a good look round,’ Nick said. ‘It’s not often we get a free sortie with nothing to do but sightsee.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ Drew said, hauling back on the stick and opening the throttles to send the Tempest higher.
He levelled it out again at forty-eight thousand feet, eight miles above the earth, the maximum height they could fly. He looked around him, revelling in the sight. He could see virtually the whole east coast, from the Farne Islands far to the north, down past the Wash and the pregnant bulge of East Anglia. Out to sea, tankers and freighters were ploughing up and down the congested sea lanes like trucks on a motorway.
As he swung the jet into a turn to follow the coast south, a light flashed and an alarm sounded. His jaw clenched and he held his breath, his fist tightening around the stick as he scanned the warning panel.
As he read the caption, he exhaled slowly.
‘All right?’ Nick asked.
Drew grunted. ‘Yeah, just a glitch in the computer system. It’s reset, nothing to worry about.’
As he flew along the coastline he began to relax again, glorying in the freedom of the skies.
‘Not that bad is it?’ Nick said, sharing his enjoyment.
‘Not bad at all. I tell you what, Nick, I’m not going to let the bastards take this away from me without a fight.’
‘Spoken like a man,’ Nick laughed. ‘Okay, it’s nearly time for Happy Hour. Let’s go home.’
Drew pulled the Tempest into a sweeping turn, the sun glinting on the wings as they began the long descent back into Finnington.
The bar was already packed when they got to the Mess. Michelle was in the far corner. As the drinks went back to full price and the crush began to thin, he worked his way over to her side. ‘Ready to go?’
Michelle nodded. She interrupted the latest in a long line of would-be suitors in mid flow. ‘Sorry, must go and powder my nose.’
Drew listened to her circle of admirers exchanging increasingly implausible stories about flying and women, as they waited with diminishing optimism for her to return, then he slipped out.
Michelle was waiting. They jumped into Drew’s car and sped out of the base. ‘Some of those guys have been trying to chat me up every twenty minutes since I arrived here,’ Michelle said. ‘They’ve had more knock-backs than a weak server at Wimbledon.’
‘I’m flattered to have got through to the last sixteen.’
‘You should be.’
At Finnington Hall, the head waiter steered them impassively to a table by the window, overlooking the river. Drew ordered champagne.
‘Celebrating something?’ A smile played around Michelle’s lips.
He laughed. ‘I’m an incurable optimist.’ He toasted her silently.
‘I didn’t want to say anything in front of the others,’ Michelle said. ‘But there was a crash in the Brecon Beacons last year. A Tempest from 35 Squadron at Valley.’
Drew nodded. ‘I remember it.’
‘Well they reckon that aircraft was perfectly serviceable, too, before it hit the deck. They blamed pilot error, but I knew Alastair Strang. He was one of the best pilots around and one of the coolest guys under pressure I’ve ever met.’
‘It sounds like you knew him pretty well,’ Drew said gently.
She smiled, though her eyes were sad. ‘Yes, I knew him very well. He’s one of the reasons why I don’t date aircrew.’
‘This isn’t a date?’
‘No, this is a dinner. It’s only a date if you get to kiss me at the end of it.’
‘And I don’t?’ She shook her head. ‘Sorry,’ Drew said. ‘I’ll stop interrupting.’
‘The details don’t really matter, but having been to one lover’s funeral, I don’t want to have to go to another.’
There was a silence. Drew longed to reach out and take her hand, but as if reading his thoughts Michelle sat back in her seat and folded them in her lap.
‘I also had to watch my co-pilot from 17 Squadron die in front of me.’
‘Who was he?’
‘Dave Williams. We were doing CASEVAC around Lurgan. There was a call to say a bomb had gone off and two members of a patrol were injured. We were about half a mile short of the site when I heard a bang and the canopy suddenly turned red. I thought we’d hit a flock of birds, but then I realised the blood was on the inside.
‘The IRA had been lying in wait and put a burst of heavy-calibre fire up through the floor. I was lucky – I wasn’t even touched. But a round blew off David’s kneecap and then ri
cocheted into his chest. The impacts on the cab and his knee distorted the bullet so much that it punched a hole this size’ – she gestured to her dinner plate – ‘in his chest.’
Drew winced at the thought.
‘There was blood absolutely everywhere,’ Michelle said. ‘I was covered in it and I had to wipe it off the canopy before I could see anything. He died before we set down at base.’
With a visible effort, she pulled herself back to the present. ‘It could be worth your while talking things over with some of the guys on Alastair Strang’s squadron. They reckoned there was definitely something strange about the crash that killed him.’
Drew paused. ‘Thanks. I’m really grateful. Particularly since I might be about to make waves for your old man.’
‘He’s head of the AIB, Drew. That means he likes finding out why aircraft drop out of the sky.’
He hesitated, feeling suddenly sheepish. ‘What’s it like having an Air Vice-Marshal for a dad? I mean, what’s he like out of uniform?’
‘Pink with a certain amount of grey hair.’
‘Does he have gold braid on his pyjamas?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never slept with him.’
Drew was embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry. You must have stupid pricks like me asking you this stuff all the time.’
‘I’m sorry too.’ She reached out and touched him briefly on the arm. ‘He’s all right. These days we don’t see each other as much as we did, but we’re still close. As far as I can remember, he was a bit aloof when I was young. When my mother died it would have been easy for him to have packed me off to my grandparents and then sent me to boarding school. He never did that. He was wealthy enough to afford a nanny, but he did keep me at home and spent as much time with me as he could.
‘He treated me as an equal, an adult almost, and was always as straight as the crease in his trousers with me. He’s never ever told me a lie. When I asked him if there was a Santa Claus, he just said, “Of course not, but don’t tell your friends – they might be disappointed.’”
She smiled at the memory. ‘What about your father? You said you weren’t that close, didn’t you?’
He nodded. ‘We’re not close at all. We never have been really, not even after my mother died.’
‘Tell me more.’
Drew moved a little uncomfortably in his seat. ‘My mother always felt that marriage was for life no matter how bad things got.’ He frowned at the memories. ‘My dad had been in and out of work all the time we wereLiverpool – always casual, never a steady job – and the longer we were there, the less he went out and the more he drank. He was one of the old school though: he never lifted a hand around the house. That was woman’s work, beneath a working man’s dignity, even when the working man wasn’t working at all.
‘My mother just wore herself down in the end: getting up at four to clean offices, hurrying home to make breakfast before I went to school, doing domestic cleaning for middle-class ladies in Aintree all morning, then hurrying home again to clean our own house and leave us a dinner in the oven before she went back out from five o’clock to nine at night to clean yet more offices.
‘She died of cancer, but it was everything else that really killed her. Afterwards my dad took us back to Glasgow. It was a foreign country to me and to him by then, and there was no work there either. He drank more and more and I couldn’t wait to get away.’
He looked up, embarrassed.
She gave him a few moments, then said, ‘Perhaps we’ve had enough history for one night.’
They swapped Air Force gossip and tales of bad behaviour on detachment for another hour, then Michelle glanced at her watch and looked around the restaurant, deserted save for a knot of tired and grumpy waiters. ‘I think we ought to go.’
Drew nodded. ‘I know. The head waiter’s been preparing to bring out the hoover for the last twenty minutes. It makes a refreshing change to have a waiter trying to catch my eye.’
Drew tried to pay the bill himself, but Michelle shook her head. ‘We’ll share it. Don’t spoil your new-man image by going antediluvian on me.’
She asked the waiter to phone for a taxi.
‘Don’t you want to come back for a nightcap?’ Drew asked.
She shook her head. ‘I told you. I don’t date aircrew.’
‘What if you fall in love with someone?’ Drew asked.
She met his gaze and shook her head. ‘I won’t.’
‘How can you be so sure? If you meet the right person, surely you can’t stop yourself from falling in love?’
She looked at him quizzically. ‘Can’t you? From what I hear around the crew room, you’ve been managing it pretty successfully.’
‘I hadn’t met the right woman,’ Drew said.
Michelle took another sip of her wine, raising an eyebrow at his use of the past tense. ‘Perhaps. Anyway, can we drop the subject of my dating habits?’
Her growing irritation was obvious, but he pressed on. ‘At least if your husband was a pilot himself, he’d understand the risks.’
‘Look,’ snapped Michelle, now coldly angry. ‘This is a restaurant, not the marriage guidance council. I don’t need any advice on how to run my personal life, least of all from someone who’s known me less than a week.’
Drew flushed. ‘Michelle…’
‘Forget it,’ she said coolly. ‘Let’s just go, shall we?’
There was an awkward silence as they waited for their coats.
Drew surveyed the ruins of a once-perfect evening. ‘It seems as if every time I go out for dinner these days, the evening ends in silence.’
The taxi was already waiting, Michelle paused with her hand on the door. ‘I’m sorry. I did enjoy the evening. Most of it, anyway. Goodnight.’
Drew watched the taxi lights fade into the darkness and then walked home through the deserted square, kicking an empty can in front of him.
* * *
His alarm woke him from a very short night’s sleep. He showered and then phoned the base. Always the first to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night, Russell was already at his desk, even though it was only 6:15.
‘Fine morning, Drew.’
‘Is it, sir? I’m afraid I haven’t had time to notice. I’ve been sequestered in the smallest room since half past three.’
‘Oh dear. Montezuma’s revenge, eh?’
‘I’m afraid so, sir. I don’t think I’ll be flying anything today that isn’t connected to plumbing.’
‘All right, we’ll hope to see you tomorrow.’
Drew hung up and five minutes later was in his car heading south. It took him three and a half hours to reach his destination. The first hour was a high-speed motorway run, the last two and a half an endless procession of traffic on the road snaking along the North Wales coast.
Finally he cleared the road bridge over the Menai Straits and drove across the island to the base. It was a typical Anglesey day: grey, cold and teeming with rain, making RAF Valley look even more dismal and unwelcoming than usual.
Drew showed his ID to the guard on the gate and asked directions to 35 Squadron. The crew room was deserted, but, looking out of the window through the driving rain, he could see a formation of Tempests coming in on the runway.
He helped himself to a coffee and settled down to wait, peering idly at the photographs of aircraft and aircrew on the walls.
Twenty minutes later Alastair Strang’s former crewmates began to straggle through from the changing rooms. ‘Hello there,’ said one of them. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Drew Miller, 21 Squadron. Is the weather always this bad?’
‘Bad? This is just a thin overcast and a light shower. Wait till it really starts raining.’
‘No thanks. If I’d wanted to drown, I’d have joined the navy.’
Drew went along with the banter until he had a chance to steer the conversation on to the ever-popular crew-room topic of equipment shortages. ‘It’s getting bloody ridiculous,’ one of the ol
der pilots responded. ‘They’re expecting more and more out of the aircrew and the aircraft, but providing less and less to do it with.’
‘I know,’ Drew said. ‘It’s playing hell with safety too. I had to go to yet another crash with the Mountain Rescue Team a couple of weeks ago up in the Dales. You probably heard about it.’
There were some answering nods.
‘It looks like they’re going to blame pilot error,’ Drew continued as casually as he could, ‘but I went to the crash site and it didn’t look like pilot error to me.’
He waited, hoping someone would bring up the Strang crash, but there were just a few nods and grunts.
‘Didn’t you have an incident like that a while ago?’ Drew asked eventually. ‘Alastair Strang?’
The warm welcome was instantly replaced with suspicion. ‘Why, were you a friend of Alastair’s?’
Drew shook his head. ‘I never knew him, but Michelle Power told me about him. She seems to think that pilot error wasn’t the cause of his crash either.’
Nobody spoke, but a couple of them looked at him closely and then exchanged a glance.
Drew decided to level with them. ‘Look, I almost died in a similar incident. Now the accident investigators are telling me that I was responsible. I’m just trying to get to the bottom of what happened to my aircraft.’
There was a noticeable thaw in the atmosphere. The older pilot elected himself group spokesman. ‘We’re sure the accident report wasn’t right. Alastair had been in the Red Arrows before he retrained to fly Tempests and was the best pilot on squadron, bar none. He was such a perfectionist that, if he wanted to be flying at twenty thousand feet and was at twenty thousand and one, he’d nudge it down an inch at a time until he got it there. If he was refuelling at night, blindfold, he’d still get the probe in the basket first time every time.’
He stopped, a little embarrassed. ‘Sorry, I sound like the founder member of his fan club, don’t I? But the others will tell you the same thing. He was a bloody good pilot. If he crashed because of pilot error, then I’m the Minister of Defence.’
Point of Impact Page 11
