The crews synchronized their watches.
After the refuelling plan was briefed, the Met Officer got up to speak. South-westerlies would mean headwinds of up to 70 knots on the way down. The Nav Plotters took down the weather information. The wind speed and direction were a crucial part of their calculations of speed, distance and track. But the most potentially significant information was that, at around 20 and 40 degrees south, two cold fronts meant that thunderstorm activity was probable and that at the height refuelling was to take place turbulence was likely.
Air Vice-Marshal George Chesworth had, he felt, a duty to say something. As the briefing came to an end, he got up to speak. Careful not to go on too long, he tried to find the right words: This has never been done before; the eyes of the world are on you; there’s a lot riding on this. But he knew they didn’t want to hear him. He wished them all luck and left them to it.
Chapter 30
The Vulcan crews worked in teams, each of them talking through the mission with his opposite number from the other crew and supported by their counterpart from Monty’s Ops crew. The AEO’s Hugh Prior and Barry Masefield discussed their tactics with John Hathaway. They agreed not to use the Vulcan’s own Red Shrimp jammer, but rely instead on the Dash 10 pod. Prior and Masefield marked their flight logs with AVF, HF, VHF and UHF radio frequencies, including those for the approach and tower at Rio, their closest diversion. There were local and international call signs and codes for all occasions: the maritime code, a short-term security code with which any information could be transmitted securely; and the two-letter authentication codes which changed every thirty minutes to confirm to their own side that they were who they said they were. The IFF – Identification Friend or Foe – transponder settings changed with the same frequency. Get it wrong and they’d be seen as fair game by nervous Royal Navy air defences. Lastly there were ‘Superfuse’ and ‘Rhomboid’. The former was to be transmitted after a successful bomb run; the latter if they failed.
Dick Russell had been thinking about the threat from the guns around Stanley. During the bomb-run, he would be no more than a passenger. Once the refuelling was done, the co-pilot, Pete Taylor, would swap places with him and he would sit, plugged into the RT, with absolutely no control over his destiny. It made him feel vulnerable.
‘What difference does it make,’ he asked Withers, ‘if we drop from 8,000 feet or 10,000 feet?’
Withers considered this briefly before checking with his Navigators. Graham and Wright agreed that it was relatively insignificant and a late decision was made to pop up to the higher altitude and fly the bomb run at 10,000 feet. It was a small extra measure of safety.
In another corner of the tent, the co-pilots and AARIs checked and rechecked the fuel, while Mick Cooper and Bob Wright went through the switching and fuses with Dave Stenhouse. They and the Nav Plotters, Jim Vinales and Gordon Graham, updated their flight plans with the latest Met reports. Ironically, given the decision to switch to Red Rag Control, Vinales had got the name of the operation wrong, scribbling BLACK BULL at the top of his flight plan. He crossed out the word ‘Exercise’ and replaced it with ‘Operation’. Next to it, in the box meant to record the time they expected to ‘End Night Flying’ he wrote ‘Good Question.’ They looked at the slim pickings available for diversions: Rio was the only realistic bet, the rest were in Chile: Punta Arenas, Balmaceda and Puerto Monte. They were unlikely at best. And they considered their options in case they had to ditch. Tristan da Cunha was mentioned as a possibility. This tiny South Atlantic colony had no airstrip, but there was a friendly British population of about 300. And it was closer to the Falklands than Ascension. Worth a try as a last resort, maybe. Both men were having to improvise, charting their course on an upside-down map of the northern hemisphere. It was all there was. Gordon Graham scribbled out the Azores and pencilled in the Falkland Islands at the appropriate latitude and longitude. X marked the spot.
As if they were blind to the realities of the situation, a last, random signal arrived from the MoD authorizing the Vulcans to exceed 250 knots at low level. And if it hadn’t arrived in the nick of time, Monty wondered, who would have stopped them doing it anyway? And while they were at it, where was the authorization for flying the Vulcans at way above their maximum take-off weight? Ridiculous, he thought. Then it was time for the intelligence briefing.
The nicest name the crews gave the beefy-looking Intelligence Officer with the thick moustache was ‘Nick the Knowledge’. With barely an hour to go until crew-in, trying to get intelligence out of him felt like trying to get a straight answer out of a politician.
‘I can’t reveal my sources,’ he protested as the anxious bomber crews probed him for information. In the eyes of the listening Vulcan crews, ‘Nick the Knowledge’ seemed to be almost trying to give unsatisfactory answers. Monty became increasingly angry at his stonewalling, then John Hathaway snapped. He’d had enough and tore into the man.
‘You fucking well tell us what we need to know because we’re the ones who are going in.’
It did no one’s nerves any good. The next five minutes passed uncomfortably as the big man, aided by a Captain from the SAS, revealed the locations of remote safehouses with studied politeness. Each of them was handed a piece of a 1:50,000 map of East Falkland, cut from a larger sheet. It was laminated with Fablon sticky-back plastic to give it a degree of water resistance. They were not, he told them, to mark the co-ordinates of the RVs on the maps. Memorize them. If they were shot down, he told them, they were to find their way to these locations and wait to be picked up. On three consecutive nights, a Sea King helicopter from 846 Naval Air Squadron would come looking. He pointed out known Argentine troop positions and he ran through the anti-aircraft defences again: Oerlikon, Tiger Cat, Skyguard, Superfledermaus. Just as Simon Baldwin had briefed them before they left Waddington. There was no mention of Roland.
What, Monty was asked, should happen to classified documents if a crew had to abandon their aircraft? Thinking on his feet the little Scotsman suggested they load all the paperwork into the tin ration box they’d be carrying in the cockpit then just throw the whole thing out of the crew hatch into the sea.
The reality of ejection, safehouses, disposal of secrets and late-night pick-ups had a sobering effect on Martin Withers. He should have expected it, of course, but somehow he’d managed to tuck away the reality of what they were about to do and not dwell on it. Being tossed a box of 9mm bullets for the Browning did nothing to comfort him. No time to worry about it now.
‘You happy about things?’ Monty asked the two Captains. Silence. Earlier in the afternoon, Monty had picked up the same problem with 607’s number 1 tank as John Reeve had the previous day. Mel James had explained that it was only the gauge. The tank was fine, but the seed of doubt had been sown in Reeve’s mind. He decided to go with 598. Withers would fly reserve in 607. ‘Nothing at all, fellows?’ Reeve and Withers checked the Form 700s – the jets’ detailed service histories – then signed. Vulcans 598 and 607 were now their responsibility. It was time to go.
In the Officers’ Mess, RAF Waddington, IX Squadron were enjoying a final dining-in night. They were always full-blooded affairs, and under normal circumstances the sociable, hearty Station Commander would have enjoyed himself thoroughly. Tonight, though, was anything but normal. John Laycock may have looked the part, dressed impressively in full mess-kit, but his appearance was misleading. He didn’t taste his food, savour his wine, or listen much to what was being said. He was just going through the motions, waiting for an opportunity to make his excuses and join Simon Baldwin in the Ops block for news of BLACK BUCK’s progress.