“Correct.”
“Strewth. That’s an aristocratic expression of surprise. Either the women of Kansas… I am right, Kansas?… are all dreadfully slow, or, well, to be frightfully crude, your wedding tackle is in less than full working order.”
“Wedding tackle…” He found that amusing. “I wouldn’t be an Air Force pilot if the medics had found any defects. And God knows they look hard.”
“Splendid,” Zoë said. “So reassuring. One doesn’t want any disconcerting revelations, does one?”
“One sure as hell doesn’t. And I guess two don’t want them twice as much.”
They reached a stile in a hedge. He went first, and then gave her his hand to help her over. They strolled on, fingers interlaced. Stevens put down his binoculars and made another note.
“That thing on a hillock, looking rather foolish, is our gazebo,” Zoë said. “Not very high, but then Lincolnshire is fairly flat, isn’t it? Let’s go up, shall we?”
The gazebo was a six-sided room with a pointed roof, raised on iron stilts. They climbed the stairs. The air inside smelt faintly of varnish and turpentine. “The previous owner wanted to be an artist,” Zoë said. “That divan was where his model posed.”
“Peaceful. Quiet.” He poked the divan. “Well sprung.”
She removed a cotton sheet from a stack of canvases. They were all nudes. “He knew what he liked,” she said.
“Yeah. I guess he did his best, but look: the bed is sexier than the girl. That’s not a criticism.”
“Certainly not.” She was unbuttoning his tunic. “Somebody once said that the secret of a woman’s success is to be born with a silver zipper in her hand.” She unzipped his fly. “Can that be true?” She opened his belt buckle.
“The great thing about a railroad is the trains run both ways,” he said, and unzipped her jeans. “And that’s enough fancy talk for now.”
Sitting comfortably in the branches of an oak tree, Stevens watched the movements inside the gazebo until the figures sank from view. He made a note. Twenty minutes passed. From his pocket he took two currant scones, wrapped in wax paper. Later he ate a slice of fruit cake and drank a small bottle of lemonade. There was nothing to record. He opened a paperback copy of British Trout Flies and was studying a colour plate of Greenwells Glory when the couple came out of the gazebo. They stood on the stairs, arm in arm. She spoke. He grinned. They went back inside. Stevens looked at his watch. An hour and seven minutes. Such stamina! He made a note.
ALL HOUSE-TRAINED MANIACS HERE
Some bloody fool had left a tractor parked beyond the end of the runway. It was the tractor that was used to mow the grass. Hooked up behind it was a triple gang-mower, capable of cutting a swathe twenty-five feet wide. Well, RAF Kindrick was a big airfield.
Four Vulcans stood on the Operational Readiness Platforms, short strips of concrete that angled into the runway. At 1637 hours, Bomber Command Ops Room ordered a scramble. The crews spilled out of the QRA caravan. An umbilical cord linked each Vulcan to a massive trolley-load of batteries. As each captain reached his seat, the crew chief pressed a button that released a flood of electricity which simultaneously fired all four closely-grouped jet turbines and thus released the makings of seventy tons of thrust. The cable fell away. Wheels rolled.
The first Vulcan to swing onto the runway, using far less than maximum effort, blasted the tractor and mowers off their wheels. The next Vulcan hurled them thirty yards back. Quinlan’s Vulcan came third. He opened his throttles, and the wreckage smashed through the perimeter fence and killed three rabbits in the next field.
Pity about the rabbits. They’d grown accustomed to Vulcan take-offs. The air thundered, the ground shook, the rabbits flattened themselves until all faded and they went back to their dandelions, lightly flavoured with sweet kerosene. But a savage attack by a mad tractor was different. That was a hazard they were not prepared for.
The last Vulcan was airborne one minute forty-seven seconds after the scramble order: satisfactory. Within half an hour they landed at their dispersal airfield, Yeovilton in Somerset; turned; taxied back up the runway; parked on the ORP. Nearby were operational caravans where the crews could rest, wash, get a hot meal. A supply of fresh underwear was available if needed. Nobody knew how long this exercise would last.
At midnight, Jack Hallett and Nick Dando were playing chess. Quinlan was reading a book on the Korean War. Tom Tucker was playing with his sliderule. Silk had just finished writing a long letter to Zoë. He re-read it, and looked up. Tucker had found an answer on his sliderule. Or perhaps it was a question, because he was using his forefinger to write an invisible calculation on the armrest of his chair. He didn’t like the result and he rubbed it out, although there was nothing visible to erase. He saw Silk watching. “Jack’s fault,” he said. “His threes look like eights.”
“He always says that.” Hallett said. He moved his bishop.
Silk flicked through his letter. He tore the pages in half, and in half again, and dropped the bits in a metal waste bin. Quinlan turned his book sideways to look at a photograph. Silk put his pen away.
Tucker said, “I bet Special Branch cleans these rooms when we go.”
“It was nothing special,” Silk said.
“Special Branch specializes in nothing special. They’ve got a file on you marked Nothing Special.”
Silk took the waste bin outside and set fire to the bits. They made a fierce little blaze. When he came back, Tucker looked at the bin and said, “You’ve gone and blistered the paint.”
“Tell you what,” Silk said. “Stuff it in the bomb bay and tomorrow we’ll drop it on Minsk and nobody need ever know.”
Tucker cracked his knuckles and went back to his sliderule.
An hour later, an airman brought them sandwiches and coffee. “What’s the score, laddy?” Quinlan asked. “When do we get out of here?”
“Don’t know, sir.”
“Poor show. In the war, cookhouse always had the gen on ops before anyone else.” Quinlan peeled open a sandwich. “No mustard. How d’you expect us to biff the Russkis without mustard?” The airman left.
“Maybe this isn’t an exercise,” Silk said. The others chewed, and seemed not interested. “Oh well,” he said. “I don’t suppose it matters.”
“What is it, if it’s not an exercise?” Quinlan said. “This is your bog-standard Micky Finn.”
“Very quiet.”
“They’ll call us when they need us,” Tucker said.
“Relax, Silko,” Hallett said. “It’s a routine panic. A no-notice recall and dispersal. God knows, we’ve done it often enough.”
“So we’ve dispersed to our wartime launch base,” Silk said. “That’s what this is.”
“Obviously.”
“If there’s a threat of war, we’d follow the exact same procedure.”
“It’s a Micky Finn, my friend,” Dando said. “That’s what Micky Finns are all about. Who’s got the sugar?”
Silk thought of giving up. Nobody cared. It was just a routine panic. But there was a long dull night ahead, probably, so he persisted. “For all we know, there really is a threat of war. Maybe they ordered a Micky Finn to get the squadrons onto their dispersal fields but they don’t want the crews hanging about wondering if enemy missiles have already arrived, back at base.”
That caused mild amusement. “If enemy missiles had arrived, you wouldn’t be standing there, enjoying your ham sandwich,” Quinlan said. “You’d be sitting next to me, twelve miles over Russia, making Mach point nine.”
“That’s assuming we had a basket of sunshine in the bomb bay,” Tucker said. “Which we haven’t. It’s a dummy.”