He stopped talking. A vehicle was coming up behind him. He didn’t look back, kept walking. “Pacifism strikes again,” he said. “Thank you very much, madam.”
It was a jeep, open-top, and it stopped beside him. The driver wore pilot’s wings. He was too young to drive, let alone fly. He had the reddest hair that Silk had seen since Ginger Rogers, and a smile so wide and generous that Silk found it disturbing. Nobody on 409 smiled like that. It was a large candle in a dirty world. “Goin’ somewhere?” the driver asked. Midwest, probably.
“Nowhere special,” Silk said.
“Me too. Coincidence.” They took a long look at each other. “I’m lost. You want to show me the best road to nowhere, I’d be happy to take you along.”
Silk got in, said he was Silko, they shook hands. The other man was a captain called, inevitably, Red. Full name, Red Black. “I wasn’t born, they won me at roulette,” he said. Silk chuckled. Just one chuckle. That’s all it was worth.
They drove past the Vulcans, lined up immaculately as a guard of honour but with nobody to admire them except a tattered crowd of crows that couldn’t keep formation if they were tied together with black silk ribbon. Silk took the salutes of Service policemen with Alsatian dogs. “Keep going,” he said. They drove on, to the most remote corner of the airfield. “This is it,” he said. “Best mushrooms in Lincolnshire.”
The grass was longer here. A breeze chased through it, searching left and right, giving up, then trying again. “Never saw such greenery as you folks got,” Red remarked. They flushed a hare, and stood watching it bound away.
“Beautiful beast,” Silk said.
Red smiled his wide and wonderful smile. “Reckon that hare ate all your mushrooms.”
“Could be.” As Red turned away, Silk noticed how quickly his smile faded. It simply fell off his face. Now he looked, not sad, but stony, almost bleak. The contrast was startling. Yet the smile had been so true, so generous. How could it vanish so fast? After that, Silk watched for this change of face. It kept happening.
“The mushrooms are around here somewhere,” he said. “I remember a day in… must have been 1942. Pug Duff came by in his car and picked me up, just like you did, and we drove out here.”
It was a slim fragment of memory, quickly told. Pug Duff, short but tough, got his wings same time as Silk but went up the promotion ladder twice as fast, so by ’42 he commanded 409. That evening Pug had brought grub – bacon, sausages – and a Primus stove and frying pan. Add mushrooms and it made a decent meal, very decent. Silk searched his mind for more exciting detail and found none.
“You guys do a lot of that?” Red asked. “Hot sausages around the fire?”
“That was the only time. I think Pug needed a break. Had to get away from the war for an hour. We were losing too many aircraft. Good crews getting the chop. Bad for morale. Poor old Pug worried but of course he couldn’t do anything except press on.”
“Poor old Pug?” Red said. “Should I ask what happened to him?”
Silk thought about it. “Better not,” he said. Did Pug get the chop? Must have done. This was turning into a gloomy chat. “Where are you from?”
“Manhattan, Kansas. New York City gets our mail, we get theirs.” The smile was back. The American was pleased to find an Englishman who knew so much of his country, and for a while they talked easily. Red was getting nostalgic about the great taste of American ice cream when the first raindrops smacked them in the face. They ran.
It was a cloudburst. The wipers flung water left and right and still the windscreen was swamped. Red put his head outside the jeep, and the rain hammered at his eyes: the faster he drove, the less he saw. Then Silk shouted and pointed, grabbed the wheel. They turned onto the concrete hardstandings where the Vulcans stood, and drifted gratefully under the vast delta wings of the nearest bomber. Red dragged a handkerchief from his pants pocket and mopped water from his eyes and ears. Now he could hear the steady bass thunder of rain. “See England and drown,” he said. Big smile.
“It’s what makes our greenery so green,” Silk told him. A policeman arrived. “Hullo, corporal. We are orphans of the storm.” He checked their identity documents and went away. “Airfields are all alike,” Silk said. “Vast areas of nothing much. Not even mushrooms.” He sneezed. “Damn. I’ve been talking garbage. Wrong place. I wasn’t here with Pug Duff in ’42. We were based at Coney Garth, in Suffolk. Well, that explains everything.”
“You lost me there.”
“Bags of mushrooms at Coney Garth. Famous for it.”
Captain Black dried the wheel with his handkerchief. Now he had a dry wheel and a soggy handkerchief. He hung it on the gear lever. “I came out here to kill myself.” He took a small automatic from his tunic pocket. “You’d better have this. I don’t like guns.”
“Very un-American.” Silk examined it: compact, tidy, loaded. He removed the magazine. “Why carry it if you don’t like it?”
“Standard issue,” Red said wearily. “We all get one. Self-protection in case we get shot down.”
Silk thought about it as they sat watching the rain bounce knee-high off the taxiway. The banging of the little gun might amuse Russian infantry in the few seconds before they shot Red Black dead; but it would be unkind to say so now. “None of my business,” he said, “but going nowhere with a gun you dislike is an odd way to end your life.”
“Oh, hell.” He was thoroughly miserable. “It’s not easy. Nothing’s easy.”
“Take some leave. Go to Scotland. Jump off a mountain. Lots of mountains in Scotland, highly dangerous. People fall off them without even trying. And the scenery – ”
“You married?” Red asked. “You talk like a guy who’s married.”
“Many years. You, on the other hand…”
“She wanted to. I said, wait till I’m out the Service. She didn’t wait. Found some other guy.”
Silk exercised his arms. Wet clothes, gusting wind: cold was eating into him. “You volunteered for aircrew,” he said. “And you must be damn good to make pilot in an elite squadron. Why blow it all?”
“It’s a waste. Total waste.” Now his head was trembling, whether from cold or rage or fatigue, Silk couldn’t tell. “Look: everybody gets allocated a target, right? What’s yours?”
“Um… it varies. Here and there.” Dangerous question. Safe answer.
“Mine is East Berlin,”
“Ah. Not a friendly place.”
“We’re a tactical nuclear strike outfit. We take out the enemy air defence command centres. Clear the way so the big boys can go in and whack the Soviet cities.”
“Jolly sporting of you.” Silk wished he hadn’t said that. The American hadn’t heard. Apparently.
“The F-100 is a fighter-bomber. Carries a bomb big enough to leave East Berlin looking like Nagasaki times ten, maybe times twenty. Times fifty, who’s counting? Not me, because a couple minutes before I get there, one of your Thor missiles, also tactical nuclear, is scheduled to take out the same target also. And a couple minutes after I get there, another Thor is scheduled to do likewise. That means if I arrive early or late, I get fried. Or if one of those Thors is early or late, I get fried. Slice it where you like, I’m fried, just so East Berlin gets taken out three times over.”
“Dismal prospect, old chap. Still, buck up.” Christ Almighty, Silk thought, I sound like my father, and he’s dead. “Look on the bright side. East Berlin did its best to take me out, more than three times, so the wretched place deserves all it gets.”
A ghost of the smile returned. “I’ll try to remember that,” Black said.
“Forgive my curiosity….” Now I’m my grandfather, and he’s extremely dead. “How old are you?”