One of the reasons Dick Russell was first chosen to work with the Vulcan crews was the size of his waistband. As the Vulcan was originally designed to be flown by a single pilot, its flight deck was cramped. Before either pilot could take to his Martin Baker ejection seat, he had to slide away the large fuel management tray that sat centrally, extending backwards at ankle level from the mess of dials of the instrument panel. Negotiating his way through the narrow gap between the pilots’ seats to swap places with the co-pilot was a job the tall, slim Russell was expected to accomplish with less palaver than his more rotund colleagues.
John Laycock walked around to the Ops Room from his office to find Russell and the two other AARIs. It had been confirmed by 1 Group that they would be joining the Vulcan crews on the mission itself. Laycock bumped into Russell first. The two men knew each other well from shared time on a Victor bomber squadron in the 1960s.
‘Dick,’ Laycock opened, with no hint of the bombshell to come, ‘I’m going to have to send you to fly with the Vulcan crews.’
‘I don’t think I can do that,’ Russell answered instinctively, not initially taking on board the importance of what was being said.
‘I can’t think of a single reason why not!’ Laycock persisted affably, knowing it hadn’t quite sunk in.
‘It’s my birthday party on Friday! My fiftieth! Muriel and I have got all these people coming. We can’t cancel it now…’
Russell’s wife had spent weeks making plans for friends and family to join them. Laycock explained the thinking behind the decision: the length of the planned mission; the necessary complexity of any refuelling plan; the inexperience of the Vulcan pilots as prodders. However unappealing the idea, on the face of it, might seem to Russell and the two other AARIs, Pete Standing and Ian Clifford, they’d be a valuable addition to each of the bomber crews. Russell’s protests evaporated. In truth, serious doubts had never entered his head; it had just taken him rather by surprise. Poor Muriel would just have to rearrange the party for when this was all over.
For now, there was just time to get back to Marham, break the news to her, pick up his kit, and return to the bomber station.
Jim Vinales was in the garden when John Reeve arrived to tell him that their crew were flying Primary. Monty and the rest had already left for Ascension as Ops crew, he told his Navigator. They’d be following him tomorrow.
Vinales and his wife Jean were worried about their son, Edward. Two years old, he suffered from recurring earaches, which were sometimes so severe that the boy would bang his head on the floor to try to relieve the pain. They felt they were making progress when the condition had recently been diagnosed as glue ear. After Reeve had left, Vinales took a phone call from the consultant, hoping to arrange another appointment.
‘Can you come in tomorrow?’ he asked.
‘No, I… erm… I’ve got another engagement,’ Vinales told the doctor apologetically.
Withers, who had no burning desire to fly into harm’s way, was philosophical about leading the reserve crew. He discussed the merits of the decision with them all. It cut both ways: Reeve might be the guinea pig, but he would at least enjoy an element of surprise. The co-pilot, Pete Taylor, agreed with his Captain – if they didn’t go on this one, at least they were guaranteed to live to fight another day. There might not, after all, even be a second mission. Hugh Prior, Withers’ tough, experienced AEO, disagreed. He rather wished his Captain had volunteered. All things considered, the first raid was, he was sure, the one that would give them their best chances of survival.
The VC10 was routed to Ascension via Banjul and Dakar. On board the packed transport jet, Monty sat next to Mel James. The two men took a notebook and tried to plan for their arrival. Since leaving Waddington they’d barely had time to think. After two weeks completely absorbed by the Vulcan work-up, the organized chaos at Brize had been eye-opening. A WRAF had asked Monty if the kit he was requesting was for Op CORPORATE.
‘You can’t say that, it’s secret!’ Monty hissed.
She patiently explained that everyone and everything at Brize was part of CORPORATE. Monty’s head was spinning from the pace of it and, once on board the VC10, he and Mel James found it difficult to know where to begin.
‘What do you think we should do?’ Monty ventured.
‘No idea…’ James told him.
They struggled on briefly before Monty put his notebook away and tried to get some sleep on the aircraft’s cabin floor.
Chapter 26
A small team of armed police arrived at Gerald Cheek’s house early in the afternoon of Tuesday the 27th. They were, they said, going to take the family away to the airport ‘for their own safety’.
‘Are we all going to go?’ Cheek asked them, thinking of his two young daughters and his elderly parents.
The policemen said they were.
Fourteen people around Stanley had suffered similar visits that day – including two other families with young children. They were a mixed bunch that had in common a pro-British outlook matched in intensity by the strength of their anti-Argentinian feelings. Apparently they were upsetting the authorities – that was something at least – who wanted to remove them before anything really ugly happened.
Cheek called Carlos Bloomer-Reeve, the ex-head of the Stanley LADE office, the operation running the pre-invasion passenger service between the islands and Argentina. The unfortunate Air Force officer had been hurriedly recalled from a new posting in Germany to act as the friendly face of the occupation. Bloomer-Reeve told Cheek that they didn’t all have to go, but that he did. He could take his family with him to whatever lay ahead, or leave them behind. It was an appalling choice. Cheek had no idea what lay in store, but he did know what happened to people when armed police took you away in Argentina. He asked, hopefully, if he needed a passport. Alarmingly, he didn’t. He fought a corrosive, not entirely irrational, fear that he was just going to be thrown out of whatever flew him out of the airfield. The goodbyes he shared with his parents, wife and daughters were traumatic and, as he was driven away by an armed escort, thoughts of them all raced through his mind. At BAM Malvinas, a green-and-brown camouflaged C-130 Hercules stood waiting on the pan with all four engines turning. Hell, he thought, that’s my next transport. Over on the eastern side of the airfield he noticed a battery of anti-aircraft guns.
In The Vault at Waddington, the two Nav Radars, Mick Cooper and Bob Wright, bent over desks studying maps of East Falkland. They made an odd pair: Cooper, the untidy, red-haired veteran; Wright, the neat, earnest first tourist. They were in The Vault to be briefed by Simon Baldwin’s Ops Team and to do their target study. Used to the beautifully prepared comprehensive target information, including photographs, from JARIC, the Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre at RAF Brampton in Huntingdonshire, they were now provided with little more than a few old maps.
As far as they could, Simon Baldwin’s Ops Team had tried to replicate the nuclear-training system the crews were familiar with, preparing go-bags for each crew member that contained all the information they needed to fly the mission. The flight plan had been hastily revised to an attack track that cut the runway and pop-up was at thirty miles from the target. While the Nav Plotter’s charts were less than ideal, it was still the Nav Radar’s planning that was made most difficult by the lack of detailed information.