“It can’t be Berlin,” Freddy said. “We’re built into the integrated attack plan. If Kruschev got shirty about Berlin, Omaha would be on the phone day and night. Where else? The oil states? China?”
“It’s something in their own backyard,” his boss said.
“The Caribbean? Makes no sense. Kennedy won’t invade Cuba, not after the Bay of Pigs nonsense.”
“Wasn’t exactly Camelot, was it?”
“Perhaps they aim to repeat Operation Ortsac,” Freddy said. “But that wasn’t secret, and it didn’t shift Castro, did it? I’m slightly baffled.”
His boss informed the PM’s office. Freddy called his contacts in the Foreign Office and elsewhere. No joy. Something was up. Nobody knew what.
Since childhood, Skull had collected a ragbag of nightmares. Sometimes they left him alone for months or years. Then they lurched back into his sleep, as ugly as drunks. They might reappear so often that his sleeping mind recognised a prancing monstrosity and wearily told it to get out of his dream. It always stayed, until its tormenting jolted him awake and left him clenching the tangled bedclothes, searching for comfort and sanity in the thick grey light of pre-dawn.
He thought he knew what his nightmares were about: it was a fear of losing control, and a terror of confined spaces. When he was small, his sisters had shut him in a wardrobe and gone away. Or maybe he had feared such cruelty and invented the wardrobe. The horror was just as real. Since then he always slept with the windows open and the door ajar. Losing control was different. At school, gymnastics had been compulsory. Skull dreaded handstands and cartwheels and somersaults, any action that threw his sense of balance into chaos.
Flying offered both terrors. It locked Skull in a box and without warning it changed direction, often violently. There was also the risk of exploding, burning and crashing. Flying robbed him of all control. He hated it. Throughout his twenty years as an Intelligence Officer he had flown only twice. In 1939 he went to France in a slow, steady Bombay troopcarrier and was painfully sick. In the middle of the war he was a passenger in a Wellington bomber in a raid on Germany. The flak and the evasive tactics were so intense that he was in a state of utter exhaustion even before they turned for home. He was ill for a week and scarred forever.
“Good news,” Silk said. His mouth was serious but his eyes were enjoying it. “The simulator’s had a cancellation this afternoon.”
“Splendid,” Skull said. It was only an imitation, it wasn’t flying, it was a couple of hours sitting inside an enormous toy. Silk was a turd, a typical pilot. Just because he could defeat gravity at the taxpayer’s expense he thought he was God. “Refresh my memory,” Skull said. “Exactly what are we going to do?”
“Exactly what? Christ knows. That’s the difference between intelligence and operations, Skull. You expect war to behave reasonably, whereas I know it’s always a cock-up.” Silk waited, but Skull had no comment. “Fourteen hundred hours,” Silk said. “Don’t be late. Kruschev’s missiles are very prompt.”
The word simulator was deceptive. It didn’t so much simulate as duplicate. Getting into the thing was exactly like climbing into a Vulcan’s cockpit: the same size, the same controls, the same feel, the same array of buttons and switches and gauges on all sides. Same smell. Same sounds. Same cramped view.
Silk was in his seat, finishing his pre-flight checks, when Skull arrived, dressed as a wing commander. Silk was in lightweight flying kit. “You’ll sweat like a pig in that outfit,” he said. “The Vulcan’s tropical. Too late now.”
“I wasn’t told.”
“You didn’t think to ask.” He watched Skull take off his tunic and look for somewhere to hang it. “This isn’t the Dorchester,” Silk said. “Chuck it behind you.”
He got on with his job, talking to the rear crew and to the tower. Skull knew enough to plug in his intercom but he understood little: the talk was too fast, too cropped. Then the engines started and it was like sitting in the middle of a ceaseless thunderstorm. The cockpit vibrated: not much, but Skull sensed disaster and his hands squeezed the armrests. The vibration began to hurt his teeth. He discovered that he was clenching his jaws, and he forced himself to relax.
The bomber rolled. It was raining and the wipers were flinging water off the windscreen with a fury that he found manic. He closed his eyes. “Kick the tyres and light the fires,” Silk said. Skull opened his eyes. “Good luck charm,” Silk told him. He moved the throttles and the thunderstorm was lost in a volcanic blast. Skull thrust himself back against his seat and the nightmare swarmed about him. Everything was out of control. It got worse: the Vulcan tipped backwards until he was watching the cloudbase hurtle towards them. They smashed through it and gradually he came unstuck from his seat. The engines had faded to a soft bellow. His ears popped. The sun came out. Silk gave him a boiled sweet. “How high are we?” Skull asked.
“By the time I tell you we’ll be higher still.”
Life became less intolerable. The Vulcan levelled out and the engines settled down to a steady roar, no worse than collapsing surf. “Cruise climb,” Silk said. Skull knew what that was: burning fuel to lose weight to climb more easily. “What’s our target?” he asked. Silk gave him a map.
A long and very jagged red line ended at the city of Sverdlovsk. Skull loathed it. Bolsheviks shot the Tsar’s family there in 1918. Soviet missile knocked down Gary Powers’ U2 spy plane there in 1960. Skull didn’t gave a toss about the Tsar or Powers: they got what they asked for. What appalled him was that Sverdlovsk was forty miles east of the Ural Mountains. It was in Siberia. It was more than halfway to China. This raid stretched in front of him like a jail sentence. “Where the devil do we land?” he asked.
“First things first. Make yourself useful and lower the blinds.”
Skull did. Now even the letterbox view of blue sky was lost. The cabin seemed much smaller. His demons were going to love this.
Nothing terrible happened for a while. Sometimes a small red or green light blinked. Silk clicked a switch and the light vanished. Needles flickered in softly lit gauges. Once, Silk turned a dial, held it briefly, then turned it back to its original position. “What was that in aid of?” Skull asked.
“BBC. News headlines.”
Skull gave up. He looked at the map. A horribly long way to Moscow, and Sverdlovsk was another seven hundred miles beyond that. Jesus wept.
“Second pilot’s job is to switch over the fuel tanks,” Silk said, “but I don’t suppose you can use a sliderule.”
“That’s right, I can’t.”
“Then I’ll have to do it. I’m rotten at sums. What’s nine eights? Never mind. If I get it wrong there’s probably somewhere we can land, some Polish bog –”
Tucker’s voice broke in. “The weapon’s hot, skip.”
Skull’s fingers made a small tear in the map.
“How hot is hot?” Silk asked.
“Three degrees above safe.”
“Three degrees.” Silk scratched his nose. “Three degrees, you say.”
Skull cleared his throat. “Blue Steel?”
“Yup. Blue Steel it is. The boys in the backroom keep a close eye on its HTP. That’s High –”
“I know what HTP is.” Skull felt a small surge of optimism. Blue Steel’s Stentor engine ran on kerosene and High Test Peroxide. HTP supplied the oxygen to make kerosene burn in thin air; but HTP was more dangerous than TNT. It demanded airtight tanks and immaculate handling. A speck of dust might trigger a ferocious reaction. Then the HTP would leak a torrent of exploding oxygen that would ignite everything it touched. Crews were ordered to abandon a flight if the temperature of their Blue Steel’s HTP rose by five degrees. Skull relaxed. This might be a very short flight.