“Yes sir…” the non-com replied “…but also special orders from Fighter Command. You’re to stand down as CO and head back to headquarters immediately. They’ve instructed Flight-Lieutenant James is to take command while you’re gone. They also said that you weren’t to take part in any more flight operations…they were quite particular about that bit.”
“What…?” Trumbull almost roared, seriously in danger of losing his temper. “What the bloody hell are they playing at? Can’t they see there’s a war on? If I’m out of it, that only leaves us seven aircraft! What the hell use are seven bloody fighters going to be?” His angry mind ignored the obvious point that eight aircraft, under the circumstances, weren’t likely to accomplish much more.
“They were very specific, sir…” Sergeant Bates observed, recognising his commander’s rage was a release of pent up frustration and not directed at him personally, “…but you know what radio transmissions can be like…” Trumbull understood what the man was getting at immediately.
“Sergeant, please inform Fighter Command on my behalf that I was airborne already when you received that transmission and that I’m therefore unable to comply due to the imminent threat of air combat!”
“Yes sir!” Bates agreed with a conspiratorial smile, turning and running back toward his radio and generator as Trumbull waved his hand above his head outside the cockpit, signalling to his pilots to follow his lead. The flight of eight ragtag fighters was airborne within minutes and heading south toward an as yet invisible enemy.
North East of Scotland
North Atlantic
The air was thin and short on oxygen at an altitude of fifteen thousand metres. No birds winged their way past that high above the surface of the earth, and even on a warm summer day with not a cloud in the sky, it was terribly, bitterly cold. In July of 1940 there were only a handful of aircraft in the world that might reach close to that altitude and at that moment not one of them was within hundreds of kilometres. There was therefore not a living soul present who might’ve witnessed the cause of the ‘flash’. One moment the sky was empty and the next there was a shattering report like a huge thunderclap. For a moment a dazzling burst of light eclipsed even the sun’s brilliance — a huge flare so bright it was noted momentarily by several units of the Royal Observer Corps on the Scottish mainland a good sixty or so kilometres away.
It took a few moments before Max Thorne was able to think clearly again. They’d warned him there’d probably be some disorientation following displacement, but actually experiencing it proved — as he’d feared — to be another matter entirely. As he took a few moments to orient his mind and body and make sure he wasn’t going to throw up, the automatic pilot held him on a steady course due west into the setting sun, oblivious to the difficulties its human commander was experiencing.
A little groggy, he shook his head to clear his thoughts and raised the tinted visor of his flight helmet to rub at his eyes. As he opened them fully he winced in discomfort, direct sunlight painfully bright so far from surface the earth. Lines showed about the man’s eyes to compliment the peppering of grey through his hair beneath the helmet. He lowered the helmet’s tinted faceplate once more and took serious note for the first time of the information flashing in pale green across his vision, projected onto special lenses behind the visor of his Helmet Mounted Display System (HDMS): airspeed and altitude were steady, as was the preset heading on his navigational systems.
“Sensors: passive scan…” he spoke clearly into the microphone set into his oxygen mask, his Australian accent still sharp and clear despite fifteen years of living in England.
“No threats detected,” a computerised but clearly feminine voice replied through his headset as the aircraft’s systems performed the requested checks immediately. He resisted a natural impulse to carry out an active sweep of the area with his APG-81 radar, not willing to risk the possibility of his emissions being detected, as unlikely as that might’ve actually been.
Instead he glanced down at the cockpit before him, ignoring the single, ‘widescreen’ panoramic cockpit display screen that dominated the scene and instead turning his eyes to one side. Mounted to the actual canopy frame itself (there’d literally been no space available on the instrument panel itself), a spherical object approximately the size of a softball was fixed to a small, makeshift hinged mount.
The unit itself was a dull grey overall, with broad, angular serrations that ran longitudinally around its entire circumference. The top and bottom were flattened, and a set of small push-button controls and LED readouts were recessed into its upper face. A single black ‘figure-8’ electrical cable ran along the canopy frame from somewhere ahead of the main cockpit binnacle and ended in a gold-plated, 6.4mm jack that plugged directly into the centre of the object’s base.
Pulling the unit out toward him, away from the canopy frame, Thorne tilted it slightly to get a clear view of the LED readouts. Both were simple black characters set against a grey background, but were backlit by a faint illumination to aid viewing. The larger of the two simply read — 16:45 — while the smaller but longer readout below it showed — 07:29:1940 –. Both displays were bracketed by tiny black rocker switches that were barely large enough for a set of gloved fingers to manipulate, should the need arise, and both currently displayed a faint greenish tinge in their backlighting to match the colour of the large, blinking square pushbutton that was the only other variation on the otherwise dull grey face of the unit.
After another second or two the unit gave out a long, high-pitched beep that was too soft for Thorne to hear over the sound of the aircraft, although he was expecting it nevertheless. The pair of LED readouts flashed three times as the tone sounded, went blank for a second, then reappeared with both simply showing all zeros across the screens: all time and date information had been erased.
“None of this would’ve been necessary if you little fuckers had a better memory,” he growled softly, glaring at the little device for a few seconds before deciding that issues of ‘spilt milk’ were best put behind him under the circumstances. Thorne took a deep breath to clear his mind and returned his thoughts to the matter at hand.
“Okay…” he pleaded softly to no one in particular, pushing the unit back against the side of the canopy frame on its mounting and placing his hands firmly on the aircraft’s controls for the first time. “Please be there, mate…please be there…” he breathed softly, desperation sneaking into his tone for a moment before he steadied his voice and issued another voice command to his flight systems: “Comms: radio preset Zero-Zero-One.”
As the radio automatically adjusted to the appropriate frequency, he keyed the transmit button on his stick-mounted controls and fervently hoped there’d be someone out there who could hear him.
“Icebreaker, this is Harbinger: do you read? I repeat — Icebreaker, this is Harbinger: do you read? Over…” There was a moment’s silence that was almost an eternity before a loud reply burst in his ears through the emptiness of soft static.