Zoë screamed. A man on a bicycle sailed across the lane and just missed the Citroën. Silk swore, stamped on the brake, wrenched the wheel. The Citroën clipped a tree, bounced back into the lane and skidded to a stop. He swore some more, and looked back. The bicycle had vanished. Zoë’s nose was bleeding. He gave her his handkerchief. “I hit the dash,” she said thickly. “Nothing broken.”
They got out and went back to where it had happened. Or, thank God, hadn’t happened. “Crossroads,” Silk said. He walked a few yards up a side-road. “He came down here. Look: there’s a halt sign. He didn’t halt. Never even saw us. Miles away by now.”
“One second earlier,” Zoë said. She looked at the handkerchief. “Half a second. We’d have killed him.”
“Killed them. He had a little boy sitting on that thing behind his saddle. That seat-thing.”
“Little boy?” Zoë sniffed hard. “Didn’t see a…” Blood ran again. “Oh, sod it.”
“Very small boy.” The image was vivid in Silk’s mind: a tall man, in black clothes, sitting upright on a tall bicycle, looking dead ahead, going fast, with a small boy sitting behind him. Such speed! Crossed the lane in a flash. “I suppose the idiot took a chance.”
The Citroën had a bashed mudguard. Silk used the jack handle to lever it clear of the wheel. “Pillion,” he said. “That’s the word. Kid was on the pillion.”
“Does it matter?”
“Not in the slightest.”
They drove home, not talking. All the way, Silk kept thinking of cricket-bat oil, another name he hadn’t been able to remember, long ago. And that didn’t matter either, not in the slightest. So why think of it?
Hot bath. Food and drink. Bed.
“We get there half a second earlier, and he’s dead,” Silk said. “His problems are over, but we live with the consequences for ever and a day. His fault, and we pay.”
“I don’t care about him. Let him kill himself. But not the boy. He has no right to kill the boy, does he?”
“Of course not. Nobody does.”
“Except you,” Zoë said. “Tens of thousands of children. Cities full of children.” She wasn’t starting a fight; just making a point.
“I can’t think about that.” Silk turned a switch in his mind.
“I can,” she said.
No more talk. Silk lay in the dark and wondered if they could ever be permanently happy. She’d been hot in a punt, for Christ’s sake! And now, when you’d think the best answer to that suicidal maniac on a bike would be a long, strong roll in the hay, she was very, very un-hot. Marriage guidance books always said: Be sensitive to her needs. Silk was sensitive, damn sensitive. So what was going wrong? He drifted off to sleep and dreamt that he was a trapeze artist in a circus, swinging by his hands, letting go, reaching for another pair of hands that was never quite there. He woke up, heart pounding. Not very subtle, he told himself. You can do better than that, you fool.
Silk was alone in the crew room, studying a town plan of Leningrad, when Quinlan came in. He was very jovial. He looked over Silk’s shoulder and flicked a finger at the centre of the plan. “There,” he said. “That’s where our warhead will hit.”
“Railway station.”
“No. Too vague. Platform seven. Under the clock. Next to the girl selling coffee.”
Silk looked at the plan. He imagined rings of shock-waves speeding outwards from the station, as shown in the training films on nuclear attack. As shown in the wartime newsreels, too, when a blockbuster hit an ammunition dump. Which, of course, was a popped balloon compared with a nuclear explosion. “That’s how you see it?” he said. “Aim at the girl selling coffee?”
“World War Two was a slaphappy affair, Silko. We thought we were shit-hot, didn’t we? All we were doing was chucking out dozens of iron bombs in the hope that a lucky one might clip the target. Now we’ve got a true precision weapon. We use it precisely. If platform seven is our aiming point, I shall be highly displeased if we hit platform eight. But not today. Tell me, which bit of Britain is the most surplus to requirements?”
“Slough? Betjeman said –”
“Bugger Betjeman. The Isle of Lewis, top left-hand corner of Scotland, is totally superfluous, especially a spot called Benbecula, and that’s where we’re off to. Dando gets a chance to test his electronic countermeasures on the sheep, all stops pulled out and loud pedal down.”
“You’re very chipper today, Skip. Have I missed something?”
“The crew’s back in business. When my idiot second pilot got hurt we lost our Combat Status. Went down to Non-Operational. If all hell broke loose, we’d be spectators. Now we’re Combat again. Evidently the CO thinks you’re competent.”
“Well, we conned him there, didn’t we?” Silk said. Quinlan almost smiled.
The rest of the crew arrived. As they went out to the station wagon, Silk found himself next to Dando. “Benbecula,” he said. “Seems a long way to go just to play with your Pink Shrimps.”
“You don’t know the first thing about ECM, do you?” Dando said. “I’ve got toys in the back of the bomber as big as your mum’s dustbins. They draw down enough power to drive a destroyer. Only one way to supply that kind of juice: from the engines. Are you ready to sit on the deck, throttles wide open, for half an hour?”
“Not for half a minute.”
“So we’re flying. Stooge around here at six, seven thousand? While I test my jammers? Full blast? Okay by you?”
“Uh…”
“We’d fry every TV set in the county. The hens would lay omelettes and the clocks would run backwards and every mirror would split with a noise like the crack of doom.”
“I say. Extreme bad luck.”
“Which is why we go to Benbecula, where there’s nothing but No. 81 Signals Unit, and nobody cares a shit about them.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Silk said.
The car pulled up near the bomber and they got out. “Kick the tyres and light the fires!” Quinlan cried.
“He always says that,” Tom Tucker said bleakly.
The station commander had the best office on the base, high in the Ops Block with a fine view of the airfield. All the blinds were closed. This was because Pulvertaft knew that pilots couldn’t resist looking at aircraft taking off or landing, and he wanted the full attention of 409’s CO, Innes Allen, and his Operations Officer, Joe Renouf. Skull, the Chief Intelligence Officer, was there too. They settled into their seats.
“I’ve been handed a hot potato which could turn into a banana skin,” Pulvertaft said. They smiled. That was good. Stress levels in a Vulcan squadron climbed with rank. He liked to keep everyone de-stressed.
“So far, there’s nothing on paper,” he said. “All I’ve had is a very informal phone call from someone at Group HQ. He’d received a similar call from Command HQ. They’d like to know what we think about a pilot on 409 who has links at the highest level with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.”
“Kick him out,” Joe Renouf said. He had a face like a divorce lawyer: nothing surprised him. “Get rid of him, pronto.”
“I hope you don’t mean instant discharge from the Service,” Innes Allen said. He was a Scot from the Western Highlands: every word rang crisp and clear. “That’s both unwise and illegal.”
“There’s no precedent,” Pulvertaft said. “That’s the trouble.”
“We can’t have Ban-The-Bombers infiltrating 409,” Renouf said. “At the very least it’s corrosive of morale.”
“Have you seen any sign of corrosion?” Allen asked. “I certainly haven’t. Morale is superb.”