With his oxygen mask dangling under his chin, he muttered to himself, “This is a young man’s game.” But his words were lost in the perpetual roar as the jet thundered its way across Wales.
He looked up the short ladder to the cockpit, where Brian Hill craned his neck, looking down toward him.
“Getting ready for your afternoon nap, Millie?”
Millie smiled and pulled his mask across his face so his words would be heard on the intercom.
“Would be lovely. Try and fly smoothly.”
Hill laughed and turned back.
A third voice piped up on the loop. Rob May, the youngest among them.
“We’re not here for smoothness, my old friend.”
Millie noted the briskness of Rob’s words; the co-pilot was technically in command of the aircraft, although much of the decision making had been ceded to Guiding Light.
Hill drew the curtain back across to cut out the light glare from the windshield, allowing Millie and Bright to see their dials and displays clearly.
Millie turned his chair back to the workstation and again kept a close eye on the height data as it ticked over.
The numbers pulsed, updating every three quarters of a second. It was hypnotic and Millie had to fight the urge to close his eyes.
He tried to think of the technology behind the figures. He was told by a boffin at DF Blackton that the computer made decisions forty-seven times a second.
Forty-seven times a second.
That sounded like indecision to him.
Millie reached forward and turned the small black dial. Position two showed 1,021 feet, position three showed 314 feet. They were hugging a valley, just three hundred feet from one side.
The computer was showing them what good tactical flying looked like.
He rotated it back to position one. Nine hundred and fourteen feet directly below them.
Nine hundred and fourteen feet. Really?
Suddenly Millie was lifted in his seat.
He felt the aircraft plummeting.
Must be trying to get back to three hundred feet above the ground.
He called into the intercom. “Why are we so high?”
“We’re not,” Rob May’s clipped voice responded.
The aircraft continued down.
Millie grabbed the desk to steady himself.
“What?” he shouted, urgently needing clarification. If they weren’t really at nine hundred feet but the jet thought they were, it would try and descend into the…
“What’s happening, Rob?” Millie shouted. He glanced at Steve Bright, who also held on to the desk.
Millie’s eyes darted back to the range reading.
803.
“What’s going on, Rob? How high are we, for god’s sake?”
He needed to know what the picture looked like outside.
“Rob?”
Eventually, Rob replied. “About one hundred feet.”
Millie looked back at the reading.
749.
“Talk to me, Millie.”
“Christ, it’s gone wrong. Cancel. CANCEL.”
They were under instruction not to intervene with Guiding Light unless absolutely necessary. But surely they were about to die unless they took control?
Sweat dripped from Millie’s forehead. Why was Guiding Light suddenly blind? Why was the laser looking straight through solid rock?
In the back, they felt a lurch as the autopilot disengaged.
Millie sensed the angle change as the nose raised, but he knew the momentum of the heavy aircraft was still downward.
He looked over his shoulder and stared up into the cockpit; the curtain wasn’t fixed and in the g-force it rippled open.
Millie saw Brian Hill’s hands gripping his ejection handle.
“Oh, shit.”
Ejection was only an option for the two pilots. Millie and Steve Bright had no chance of getting out alive at this height.
He closed his eyes and braced for death.
The aircraft continued to sink.
Is this it?
He thought of Georgina, beautiful Georgina. And Charlie. Where was he right now? In a maths lecture, probably. Oblivious to the enormity of the moment.
The aircraft shuddered.
It was almost imperceptible, but the plane’s momentum switched from a descending path to a climbing one.
He opened his eyes and looked around again, in time to see Hill release his grip on the yellow-and-black handle.
Hill pointed forward and shouted. “Trees.”
The aircraft rolled right and Millie was pinned to his seat as the engines surged to full throttle and Rob May threw them into a spectacular powered, turning climb.
Vibrations rumbled through the fuselage from the howling engines, the aircraft groaning and creaking under the stress.
Millie groaned under the sudden g-force.
He continued to hold on to the desk.
They held the gravity-defying manoeuvre for a few seconds, until the wings levelled.
Millie let out a long breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding in.
He looked across at Steve Bright, the nav’s eyes bulging wide above his mask.
The throttles eased back and the aircraft settled.
It seemed like a full minute before anyone spoke.
Eventually, the silence was broken by the normally unflappable Brian Hill.
“Jesus Christ.”
Millie’s eyes rested on the tape data recorder.
It was switched off and empty. Whatever just happened, it had happened after he’d stopped recording the height readings from Guiding Light.
He realised he needed to write down the readings he’d seen with his own eyes, but he couldn’t move.
Too much adrenaline in his system.
He settled his breathing and fished out a pencil to scribble down what he could recall.
The system had taken them to within a whisker of a catastrophic crash. The all-singing, all-dancing laser had seen straight through solid earth and told the onboard computer to descend.
How it had happened was beyond him, in every sense.
It was someone else’s problem now. Someone back at DF Blackton in Cambridge.
Back to the drawing board with this one.
He added a note to the end of his description of the event.
Guiding Light evaluation suspended.
WING COMMANDER MARK KILTON struggled with the acetate sheet. The image in the overhead projector was either upside down or back to front, and now it was out of focus and too large to fit the screen.
The tall and wide American lieutenant general took his seat at the table. “You fly jets better than you operate a projector, Kilton?”
Kilton offered Eugene Leivers III a thin smile and gave up with the projector. He took his own seat at the repurposed dining room table that had somehow found its way into the side office he’d commandeered for the meeting in the station headquarters building.
Paint peeled from the walls of the 1930s construction and the unseasonable heat of an English June made life uncomfortable for the five men in the room.
Leivers removed his jacket, replete with three rows of medal ribbons, and hung it on the back of his chair. He made a dismissive gesture with his hand toward the white screen intended to display Kilton’s diagrams, and spoke with a Louisianan drawl.
“Forget it, Kilton. I know what Guiding Light does. What I need to know is, does it work?”
Kilton glared at him. “It works.”
“Outstanding.”
RAF Air Vice Marshal Richard Mannington stood up and opened the curtains. Kilton winced as daylight flooded in.
“Sunshine,” said Mannington, “to illuminate a moment of British engineering triumph.”