Clunk. A domino slips into place in my mental map. This enquiry didn’t come through the RAF, this came direct from Hastings. “You’ve worked with us before.”
“Not exactly…” He pauses beside an anonymous door, and extracts a fat key chain: “But I was with the Squadron, on ground crew. Once you’re in, you never really leave.” Click. “They like to stay in touch.”
What squadron? I wonder, annoyed but afraid to display my ignorance. “Tell me about Marcia,” I prompt, as he opens the door to reveal another prefab tunnel between buildings, this one windowless and stifling.
“Volunteer airframe conservator Marcia Moran. Age twenty-nine, completed her short service enlistment, then signed up with BAE Systems maintenance division when the defense review came down-she’s solid. Was solid.”
He took a deep breath. “She should never have been allowed to work on XR727’s cockpit instruments. We had them round the back, under padlock and warded by a class two repulsion geas. She shouldn’t even have been able to see them. She’d have twigged straight off that it wasn’t a normal F.3 integrated flight system and weapons control board. She wasn’t qualified to work on it.”
He falls silent as he trudges along the passage.
“What happened to her?” I repeat.
Hastings shook his head. “You’d have to ask the doctors. I’m not sure they know; they say she might be safe to release next month, but they said that last month too.”
Another domino. “XR727 was one of the, uh, Squadron’s planes. Yes?”
“They didn’t brief you?” He doesn’t sound surprised. “In here, Mr. Houghton.” I don’t bother to correct him as he shoves open a side door and steps into an echoing, gloomy cavern of a room. “See for yourself.”
The room we’re in resembles an aircraft hangar the way a mausoleum in a graveyard resembles a bedroom. It’s dimly lit, daylight filtering through high windows, and the light reveals the mummified skeletons of half a dozen fast jets littering the oil-stained concrete floor. Their severed limbs are stacked in jigs and frames, their viscera embalmed in the canopic jars of parts bins-patiently awaiting resurrection, or at least reassembly into the semblance of life. There’s junk everywhere, toolboxes, rodent control traps, workbenches piled high with parts. Closest to the door hulks the fuselage of a Lightning. Its tail is missing, as are its outboard wing segments and the conical spike of its nose radar, but it’s substantially intact. Close up, the size of the thing is apparent: a pit bull to the chihuahua of an old Russian MiG-squat, brutal, built for raw speed. It’s big, too-the wing root high enough overhead to walk under without stooping.
Something about it makes me feel profoundly uneasy, as if a black cat has walked half the length of my grave, paused furtively, taken a crap, and been about its business before anyone noticed.
“This is Airframe XR727. According to the official records it was scrapped in 1983. Unofficially… it ended up here, because of its history: it’s a ringer, it was on the books with 23 squadron and 11 squadron, but they never saw it. It was working for you people. In the Squadron.” I shiver. The hangar’s weirdly, incongruously cold, given the bright summer afternoon outside. “It logged 280 hours on the other side, escorting the white elephants.”
Angleton mentioned a white elephant, didn’t he? I glance at the shadows under XR727’s belly. The concrete is stained and greasy with fluid, whorls and lines and disconnected nodes that swim before my eyes. Clonk. The final domino slides into place.
“Jesus, Angleton,” I mutter, and pull out my PDA. Tap-click-boing and I pull up the thaumograph utility running on the rather nonstandard card in its second expansion slot. I point it at the swirling directed graph that the phantom hydraulic leak has dribbled across the concrete apron and the display flashes amber.
I take a slow step back from the airframe, and motion Hastings over. “I don’t want to alarm you,” I murmur. “But did you know your airframe is hot?”
Hastings shakes his head sadly. “Figures.” He shrugs. “Do you want to look at the cockpit instrumentation?”
I nod. “Just point me at it. Is it still where Marcia had her incident?”
“I haven’t moved it.” He gestures towards a canvas screen, surrounded by a circle of traffic cones with hazard tape strung between them. “Do you need any help?”
“I’m afraid I’m probably beyond help…” I advance on the traffic cones, PDA held in front of me. It begins to bleep and warble immediately. Edging sideways, I look round the canvas screen. There’s a workbench bearing a stack of black metal boxes, wires dangling, needles and dials glowing eerie blue-blue? Glowing? I check my PDA and swear under my breath. If this was a radiation leak I’d be backing away and reaching for the lead-lined underwear right now: but it’s not, it’s just thaumic resonance, albeit at levels you don’t usually see outside of a summoning grid-what the ignorant persist in calling a pentacle. “Scratch that. Do you have any conductive tape? A soldering iron? Some blue chalk?”
“You’re going to exorcise it,” states Hastings. “Right?”
“Right-”
“Got a field exorcism kit in the mess hut. Squadron issue, rev three, and I keep everything in date. Want me to fetch it?”
“I think that would be a very good idea,” I say with feeling, thinking, Field exorcism kit? Squadron issue? “By the way, what was the Squadron’s unit number?”
Hastings stares at me. “Triple-six. Didn’t they tell you anything?”
HERE IS HOW YOU GO ABOUT EXORCISING A HAUNTED JET fighter, latterly operated by the more-than-somewhat-secret 666 Squadron, RAF:
• You can explosively disassemble the airframe, if it’s in the middle of a desert and there are no neighbors within a couple of miles.
• You can violate any number of HSE directives and outrage public opinion by dumping it at sea-shallow waters only, we don’t want to annoy the owners by violating the Benthic Treaties-and wait for time (and electrolytes) to wash the memories away.
• You can truck it to a special hazardous waste certified recycling site in Wales, where they have a very special degaussing coil for exactly this purpose.
• Or, if you believe in living dangerously, you can do it with a soldering iron, a stopwatch, a grounding strap, and a good pair of running shoes in case you screw up.
Guess what Muggins here does?
Look, it’s a museum piece. They don’t exactly grow on trees: blowing it up and drowning it aren’t on the menu; shipping it to Wales would cost… Well, it wouldn’t fit on my discretionary expense worksheet: too many zeros (more than two). That leaves the grounding strap and the running shoes. So if you were in my place, what would you do?
I approach the anti-static point beside the nosewheel bay very cautiously: holding one end of a grounding strap at arm’s length in front of me, the other fist clutching the stopwatch behind my back, legs tensed, ready to run. The grounding strap is basically a long conductive wire; the other end is attached to a villainous black signal generator Hastings pulled from the field exorcism kit-all bakelite and flickering needles on dials, like something out of a 1950s Hammer Horror flick. There’s a small but bizarre diorama occupying the middle of the hastily cleared workbench it sits on: a model airplane from the souvenir shop, a rabbit’s foot, a key-ring fob skull pendant, and a diagram carefully sketched in conductive ink.
Look, this isn’t quite as spontaneously suicidal as it sounds. I don’t go anywhere these days without a defensive ward on a chain round my neck that’ll short out a class three offensive invocation, and Hastings is safely tucked away inside a grounded pentacle with Thoth-Lieberman geometry-he’s safe as houses, at least houses that aren’t sitting on top of a fault line wound up to let rip with a Richter 6.0 earthquake. As it happens, I do this kind of thing regularly, every week or so. It’s about as safe as a well-equipped fireman going into a smoldering inflammables store to spray cooling water across the overheating propane tank in the corner next to the mains power distribution board. Piece of cake, really-as long as somebody’s shut off the power.