‘I know why you’re calling,’ said the Swiss businessman.
‘May I come along and see you?’ Baldwin asked.
‘No,’ replied Loyk, and Baldwin prepared to make his case, ‘but if you can send someone in civilian clothes, that might be OK. I’ll get back to you.’
Spike Jones later called John Laycock and arrangements were made for the Station Intelligence Officer, Flight Lieutenant Martin Hallam, to take a trip to the Grantham factory to meet him. The information Hallam brought back to Waddington was priceless.
Oerlikon, it turned out, had trained the Argentinians to set up and use their guns. Jones could tell them the recommended pattern of radars and gun emplacements to defend a standard airfield. And from this, Baldwin and Laycock were able to make an informed estimate of how the guns might be deployed around Port Stanley airfield. Jones told them how many shells had been sold to the Argentinians, how many they’d since had to replace and what they’d been replaced with. Some of them had been supplied by a rival company and, he said, were inferior in performance to the Oerlikon-manufactured ammunition. He told them by how much. But most important of all, he was able to provide them with details of all the Argentine anti-aircraft weapons and their respective kill zones – the range within which they were considered deadly – and confirmed the frequencies of their air defence radars.
The information from Jones was a real nugget, but, in addition, information on the Argentine defences was starting to filter through from the RAF Intelligence net. Baldwin asked the Station Intelligence Officer to mark the kill zones on to a piece of A3 graph paper. Concentric lines arced across the orange squares recording height and distance from the weapons’ launch point where the x and y axes met. A Tiger Cat missile burnt out at 8,500 feet. It was optically aimed, which certainly reduced its effectiveness, but with the Vulcan flying down the length of the runway at 300 feet, on a clear night a lucky shot from an alert operator couldn’t be ruled out entirely.
Another ring drawn on this diagram at 12,800 feet out on the face of it represented the biggest threat of alclass="underline" the Franco-German Roland missile. Roland was a modern and effective radar-guided missile. Capable of supersonic speeds of up to Mach 1.6, it could be fired in all weathers, day or night, without its operator ever catching sight of the target. A Vulcan was desperately vulnerable to a weapon like Roland but, Jones had told them, the Argentinians couldn’t deploy the system with its bulky launch trailer to the islands. Baldwin hoped he was right.
The third line represented the Oerlikon guns. This was the one. The heavy shells began to tumble out of control at 6,500 feet. Go in below 6,500 though, he thought, and they’re going to get you. And that was exactly what Monty, Reeve and Withers were training to do. Baldwin sat back and lit his pipe as he weighed it all up. Low level wasn’t looking like such a good idea.
In Argentina, meanwhile, GADA 601 had unloaded their Roland missiles from the hold of the Ciudad de Córdoba. It hadn’t been thought possible to squeeze Roland into the hold of a C-130 Hercules, but Argentine Air Force engineers decided that if there was a way of doing so, they were going to discover it.
Regulations stated that safety altitude was the height of the highest ground within twenty-five nautical miles of the aircraft’s track, plus 10 per cent of that height, plus another 1,500 feet. Unless there was visual contact with the ground, or the aircraft was under positive radar control, these limits were not to be broken. The RAF took a belt-and-braces approach to making sure that its aircraft avoided coming into unplanned contact with the ground.
Although Neil McDougall hadn’t yet been day- and night-qualified for refuelling, he and his crew were shadowing the training programme of the three principal CORPORATE crews. And McDougall was following the rules; while he watched his instruments, his co-pilot, Chris Lackman, maintained visual contact with the ground.
Flying mock night-time attacks against remote airfields scattered around the Scottish Western Isles – Stornoway, Benbecula, Tyree and Islay – McDougall dropped to 500 feet and held the aircraft there. Then, comfortable and confident at that height, he stepped it down on the TFR selector: 400 feet, 300 feet, 200 feet. It seemed fine but for the increasingly enthusiastic exclamations from Lackman in the seat next to him. As part of the drive to enhance the Vulcan’s capabilities each of the co-pilots had been issued with night vision goggles, or NVGs, and instructed on how to use them. Down low they’d allow the co-pilots to provide a visual back-up to the Nav Radar during the bomb-run. Lackman couldn’t contain his excitement.
‘Wow! That’s amazing,’ he kept on until the laconic McDougall had had enough.
‘Chris, what the bloody hell are you talking about?’ he snapped.
‘It’s the sheep!’
‘What about the bloody sheep?’
‘I’ve never flown as low as this before, I’m looking them in their eyes!’
‘What do you mean?’ asked McDougall. ‘We’re at two hundred feet.’
‘More like twenty…’
The NVG sets made objects appear closer, but that didn’t make sense. McDougall checked his instruments and realized with a thump of adrenalin that he’d forgotten to turn on the TFR. He’d been flying on nothing but the hopelessly inaccurate altimeter. Through the NVGs, the young co-pilot could see they weren’t going to hit anything and was enjoying the ride. It frightened the living daylights out of McDougall.
Aboard the other three jets there were other worries. As they targeted the airfields for the first time, Mick Cooper started to question the wisdom of the way they were training. If they were practising low-level attacks against coastal airfields, he assumed, not unreasonably, it was because the powers that be expected that they were going to fly a low-level attack against a coastal airfield. That was fine if they wanted him to take out hangars or a line of parked fighter jets, he thought. We can run in as fast and low as possible, keep our arse to the blast and go like shit off a shovel. But if it was the runway they were after, this was definitely not the way to go about it.
On top of Cooper’s emerging doubts about the tactics, there had been further problems with the refuelling. Their first tanker went unserviceable and had to return to Marham. Then, on contact with its replacement, they suffered another massive fuel leak. Looking ahead to a long-range mission Cooper asked himself: How many reserves are we going to have? On the evidence so far, whatever reserves there were might quickly find themselves stretched pretty thin.
News of the difficulty Waddington was having with the fuel leaks had filtered back up the RAF chain of command. Ten days into the training programme, senior RAF staff were becoming increasingly concerned that the problem had not yet been solved. There was a fear that, having said they were going to do it, they might not actually be able to pull it off. Beetham, overseeing every aspect of the RAF build-up, didn’t have time to dwell on the minutiae of Waddington’s struggles.
‘For God’s sake,’ he told Ken Hayr in exasperation, ‘go and sort it out. I’ve already told the Cabinet we’re going to do it!’
In fact, in a moment alone with the Prime Minister, Beetham had levelled with her about the challenge they faced.
‘We’re trying to do this in a hurry,’ he explained. ‘We haven’t done it in a long time and we are having problems, but we’ll get over them.’
Despite his frustration, Beetham was confident they would. Margaret Thatcher didn’t seem to doubt it.