“Good,” Silk said to Young. “I have control.”
Young sat back and poured himself some coffee. Silk got a course change to 075 degrees: just north of east. “Landfall at Cape Wrath,” Hallett said. Silk did nothing. Hallett repeated the new bearing. “Tell you what,” Silk said. “Let’s go and look at the scenic grandeur which our second pilot so much admires. What’s a nice juicy sea loch near here?” he asked Young.
“Sea loch… Let me think… Well, Loch Laxford is due east of us, maybe a bit south.”
“I need a course to Loch Laxford, Jack.”
“Give me a second, skip.”
Silk put the Vulcan into a wide, descending spiral. When he got the new course he was down to thirty thousand feet. “You know this isn’t on our flight plan, Skip,” Hallett said.
“No, I don’t,” Silk said, “but you whistle the opening bars and I’ll pick it up as we go along.”
Not even an old joke: a very old joke. Nobody laughed. Nobody spoke as Silk kept circling and losing height. At ten thousand feet he straightened out and made a shallow dive towards the mainland. When he entered Loch Laxford he was down to five thousand: still a mile high. “Damn letterbox windscreens,” he said. “No good to man nor beast.” He banked, steeply this time, and flew out to sea. When he returned, the bomber was low, and getting lower. “Nav radar to pilot,” Tucker said. “Altitude six hundred and falling.”
“You talk to them,” Silk said. “I’m too busy driving.”
He flew into the long, twisting valley of Loch Laxford at a leisurely 250 knots and 400 feet above the water. There were islands, not big, not high, and the land on either side was rugged but not threatening. “I see what you mean,” he said. “Quite delightful.” In shadow, the loch was grey; in sunlight it was green and blue. Loch Laxford was five miles long; the Vulcan covered it in a little over a minute.
“Mountains ahead,” Hallett said.
“We see them,” Young said.
“Which do you recommend?” Silk asked him.
“Ben Stack. Go dead ahead, follow the road, four or five miles, you can’t miss it, I mean give it lots of space, it’s two thousand feet high and close to the road.” Young heard the rapid-fire tension in his voice and told himself to be calm.
“Altitude four hundred and fifty,” Dando said.
Ben Stack was a magnificent hulk, and Silk showed it respect by keeping a quarter-mile distance as he circled it. The Vulcan had used a lot of fuel; it performed better now it was lighter. “Impressive,” Silk said, “but not majestic. What’s next?”
“Steer one-nine-zero,” Young said. “Skip: are we doing a low-flying exercise?”
“Mountains ahead, thirteen hundred feet,” Hallett said.
“We see them. That’s Ben Strome, steer east of it,” Young told Silk. “Look for the lochs, they’re near sea level, it’s safer there.” Silk nudged the Vulcan away from Ben Strome. Young said, “Is this an official low-level job?”
“What a lot of heather. Let’s say it’s a pioneering low-level job.”
The Vulcan swept around the flanks of Ben Strome and turned south, briefly chasing its shadow across acres of peat bog.
“Mountains coming up,” Hallett said. “Many mountains, and high.”
“That’s Quinag,” Young said. “You must be extra careful here.”
Silk skipped over a couple of lochs and a road, and lined up the Quinag range. “Doesn’t look much,” he said.
“Please, please, do a circuit. Look it over first.”
Silk dropped his speed to 200 knots and prowled all around Quinag. “See what you mean,” he said. “Several peaks.”
“Five high ones, up to twenty-six hundred feet. Steep isn’t the word. On a good day, the view of Eddrachilis Bay is… I wouldn’t swap all of England for it.”
“Isn’t that a little loch?” Silk dipped a wingtip to improve their view. Sun glinted on water, deep in the black heart of Quinag. “There’s a big valley leading up to it. That’s a glen, isn’t it?”
“With a sheer wall at the far end.”
“Vulcans climb walls. Didn’t they teach you that at your OCU?”
He banked and flew at Quinag, opening the throttles until the speed neared 300 knots. The glen was vast. It seemed to swallow the Vulcan. More throttle, but no more height. Young had the illusion that the bomber was skimming the stream that led to the little loch, an illusion created by the rising sides of the mountains as they narrowed the glen. He told himself it would be a painless death, smeared over two thousand feet of vertical sandstone. That was when Silk gave full throttle and pulled the control stick back and the Vulcan stood on its tail and left Quinag standing.
They levelled out a five thousand feet. “Always a pleasure,” Silk said. “I could get to enjoy this mountaineering game. Now where’s your favourite peak? Where’s Suilven?”
When Young first set out to climb Suilven, he didn’t know it was perhaps the most remote mountain in Britain. He took a day just to cross the wilderness surrounding it. Broken peat bogs, flat jungles of deep heather, erratic sheep trails that faded to nothing; and the weather was foul. He camped under the awesome heights, streaked silver by the run-off of rain. Next day, typical Highland weather: beautiful. He climbed the mountain and walked its ridge, a dozen roller-coaster miles, much of it knife-edged. When he wasn’t terrified he was bewitched. Then the rains returned: another wilderness slog. Three secret, sacred days.
Silk did Suilven in eight minutes.
After that he did the An Teallach range, wandered around the coast and did the Beinn Alligin ridge, hopped over Wester Ross and stooged down Loch Carron and up Loch Alsh, frightening the yachtsmen, and did the Five Sisters of Kintail.
“I don’t want to spoil your fun, skip,” Hallet said, “but this ultra-low-level stuff must be drinking our fuel like there’s no tomorrow.”
“Glencoe,” Silk said. “Can’t leave out Glencoe.”
“You do Glencoe,” Dando said, “and we might not reach Kindrick.”
“Glencoe tops are probably fogged in,” Young said. “They often are.”
Silk took the Vulcan up to three thousand. “You drive,” he said. “I’m knackered.”
“Steer one-six-five,” Hallett said.
The identification letters and numbers on the fin of the aircraft were easily readable. Bird watchers on Ben Strome had binoculars; they looked down on Silk’s Vulcan thundering past and abandoned any hope of seeing snow buntings, peregrine falcons, greenshank or golden eagle. They scrambled down the slopes and looked for a telephone. Theirs was one of a stream of complaints that reached Air Ministry.
While the Vulcan was still cruising south, Freddy phoned Pulvertaft, gave him the ident and was not surprised to hear that Silk was the pilot.
“How low?” Pulvertaft asked. Freddy told him. “The man has a death-wish,” Pulvertaft said. “He’s a menace. I’ll place him under close arrest the minute his wheels touch down. I don’t want to prejudge, but he’ll be stripped of his commission and go to prison, that I can guarantee.”
“Wait. We still have a little time,” Freddy said. “Do nothing. It’s not as simple as it looks. I had enough trouble with Skull. Silko could be infinitely worse. I’ll call you again in fifteen minutes.”
He talked to a few colleagues, veterans of crises, and then got back to Pulvertaft. “Agreed, Silko’s got to go. But absolutely no fuss, no close arrest, leave the Provost-Marshal’s office out of this.”
“Surely we should make an example.”
“Never forget: his wife is Mrs Silk MP. Very big in CND. They’d love a big court-martial, they’d squeeze every drop of juice out of it. Nuclear Pilot Goes Berserk: I can just see the placards. No, we tread very softly-softly. When he lands, have a car ready. Take him at once to Bomber Command’s medical centre, the place where we test would-be Vulcan pilots. Someone will meet him. And pack his kit.”