“Could be a freak reading,” Silk told the rear crew. “Duff equipment, maybe. Any change?”
Pause. Then: “Two point seven, skip.”
“Gremlins. They get in everywhere.”
“Two point six. Two point four.”
Skull despaired. Even faulty equipment was against him. “What difference does it make?” he said. “It’s too late to turn back now. If the Blue Steel overheats, we’ll go to hell with it.”
“Dear me,” Silk said. “That doesn’t sound like your normal cheery briefing, Skull.”
A different voice said: “Morale here in the broom cupboard is very bad. If the second pilot can’t look on the bright side, one of us will shoot him.” It was Dando.
Skull had a great desire to hit someone. He was strapped into his seat, yet he experienced a clumsy, helpless sensation: he was growing bigger, his limbs were expanding, lengthening, his fingers felt like sausages, his feet were remote. If he shut his eyes, his body might return to normal. It was all very exhausting. He fell asleep.
A shout woke him.
“Hey! What was that?” Silk was leaning forward. “At our nine o’clock. More or less.”
“Gdansk is that way,” Tucker said. “Or maybe Kaliningrad. They’re both air defence centres.”
“What was what?” Skull asked.
“A splash of sun,” Silk said. “It leaked through the anti-flash screen.”
Skull looked at the map. The red line crossed Denmark, entered the Baltic and turned south near the German-Polish border. Gdansk was fifty miles away; Kaliningrad twice that. “Our Thor missiles should have taken them out long ago,” he said. Silk was working on his sliderule. “Maybe it was a Canberra strike. Or an F-100,” Skull said.
“Maybe it was an F-100 getting the chop at forty thousand feet. If it was, Soviet fighters are up in force. Put this on.” Silk gave him a black eye-patch.
The elastic string cut into Skull’s face. He felt foolish, but Silk was wearing an eye-patch, so he said nothing.
The Vulcan zigged and zagged across Poland, into Czechoslovakia, and turned east towards the Ukraine. Its route was designed to avoid Warsaw Pact military centres, anywhere that was heavily defended. But nuclear bursts flared unexpectedly. The rear crew suggested strikes had been made on probable targets: Grudziadz, Bydgoszez, Poznan, Wroclaw, Czestochawa, Olomouc, Zilina, Miscolk… Sometimes blast rippled over great distance and height to rock the bomber. Often Dando told Silk he was jamming the VHF transmissions of Soviet fighter controllers. Otherwise pilot and rear crew had little to say until they crossed the border into the Ukraine and Hallett warned Silk to steer zero-two-zero in order to avoid the known hotspot of Lvov. That was when the Vulcan refused to change direction, the compass broke, and Hallett’s link to the navigational computer in the Blue Steel failed.
Nobody got excited. Each man made his report. Silk said he would steer by varying the thrust and he throttled back the port outer engine. Hallett tackled the compass problem. Tucker tried to revive the Blue Steel computer. Dando found intense VHF activity ahead.
“That’s the bitch about high-level penetration,” Silk told Skull. “Soviet radars can see you coming, two hundred miles away.”
“I know.”
“I know you know. I like sharing the misery, that’s all.”
Skull picked up the map and put it down at once. After Lvov, there were still hundreds and hundreds of miles to fly before they got anywhere near Sverdlovsk. Below was Russia, the Great Motherland, Hitler’s Folly. Skull was an Intelligence Officer. He claimed to deal in facts. Was misery a fact? It must be a factor. How could men fly a thousand miles over Russia, hoping to dodge fighters twice as fast and nuclear-tipped anti-aircraft missiles they couldn’t outclimb, so as to kill a million strangers in some remote city, knowing all the time that the home they had left was history, was ashes, was dead in a flash? How can men do that without suffering paralytic misery? Skull opened his mouth to ask, but Tucker spoke first. MiG-21s were climbing, positioning for a stern attack. He had them on his radar. Dando’s jamming hadn’t worked.
For twenty minutes, Silk jinked the Vulcan from side to side. Working the throttles was a crude alternative to using the flying controls but it was all he had. Tucker second-guessed a MiG’s attack, Silk dodged its fire. The fighter had to stay level and steady in order to hold its target. The swerving Vulcan flung back a stormy wake of air. Such flying was heavy on fuel. One by one, the MiGs gave up.
“Next time they’ll collide,” Silk said. “With me, I mean.”
Skull said nothing. Constant swaying and wallowing had made him sick. He had filled his handkerchief and it lay on his lap, soaking into his trousers.
“We’re off track,” Hallett said.
“And somebody down there loves us,” Dando said. “We’re radar-illuminated. Maximum jamming now.”
The jammers were electronic but they generated a range of sounds. Some whined, some crackled, some bleeped. The crew welcomed them as signs that the gear was working. Skull’s head throbbed from his vomiting. One particular jammer made a furious, metallic tearing noise, like a train coming off the tracks. Skull’s jaws ached. The racket climbed to a screech, almost a whistle, sank and climbed again: a fire siren gone berserk. Simultaneously a mob with hammers was smashing glass, enormous sheets of glass that boomed as they shattered. The mob fought the train wreck. Skull took off his headphones. “No!” he cried. “Madhouse!” He ripped off his eyepatch.
“Put that bloody thing on,” Silk ordered.
“Go to hell.” Skull tried to undo his seat belt and failed. His hands were shaking too much.
“Sit down. Shut up. You’re a crew member. Act like one.”
“You maniacs can…” Now his head was shaking. At last he got the belt undone, tried to stand, remembered his vomit-filled handkerchief and grabbed it just as Silk’s fist hit him in the mouth and knocked him sideways. The loaded handkerchief fell behind his seat. There was a modest bang and all the lights went out.
“Trust you to hit the fusebox,” Silk said. “And you owe me a fiver.”
It was only a split lip, but rank has it privileges and the Senior MO himself examined Skull, while a medic discreetly wiped away the evidence of vomit. No stitches were necessary. A strip of plaster, two aspirin. Avoid alcohol. Get some rest.
Silk walked him to his quarters. “You forgot to do the debriefing,” he said.
“Who cares? It was just a damnfool trip in a simulator.”
“Of course it was. Still, you got quite excited, didn’t you? Pity it had to be cut short. Tell you what: let’s do it again tomorrow, double or quits, how about that?”
Skull tried to kick him, but Silk dodged. Skull was looking ilclass="underline" white about the chops, strained about the eyes. “You were always a rotter, Silk,” he said, “but now you’re an utter shit.”
Silk gave a grunt of surprise. He had never heard Skull use that word before. “Right first time,” he said. “It’s a shitty job, so it takes an utter shit to do it.”
“You flatter yourself. Scrambling a Vulcan on QRA isn’t a job, it’s a charade, it never makes a damn bit of difference, because nobody’s going to drop the bloody bomb. You’re getting paid to be frightened, like the Soviets, it’s a balance of terror. Where’s the war in the Cold War? Doesn’t exist. Can’t exist. So – no glory, no victory. Just a perpetual output of fear. What a monumental waste.” The plaster had fallen off, and Skull’s lip was bleeding.