As they embarked on their uncertain return journey, Blue One, the Vulcan’s tanker, continued with the attack formation a little while longer. At the furthest extent of the first refuelling bracket she would give the Vulcan an additional top-up then turn for home herself. After 607 had taken an extra 4,500lb to fill her tanks at the first transfer, the Victor Captain, Wing Commander Colin Seymour, could see that she was thirstier than expected. The next transfer, taking place after half an hour of flying straight and level, would show him exactly how much more fuel she was burning than they’d bargained on. At 23°00′ south and 24°08′ west, Seymour spoke to his Nav Radar. Clear to trail.
Vulcan 598 crossed the Runway One Four threshold much faster than normal. The higher the landing weight, the higher the speed of the approach. John Reeve tried to put the heavy bomber down on to the main-wheel bogies as gently as possible. But, as if this wretched sortie hadn’t gone badly enough, as he guided her down the runway, keeping the nose high to use the barn-door expanse of the Vulcan’s delta planform to slow them down, he scraped her tail down the Tarmac, kicking up a flash of orange sparks in her wake. It was insult to injury.
Monty watched them taxi back to the dispersal area. Travelling fast, he noticed. He hadn’t returned to the Ops tent for over an hour after the formation flew out of Wideawake. And when he’d been told that John Reeve was flying the returning Vulcan he thought it must be a mistake. After running through the shutdown checks, Reeve reached forward and opened the DV window – the source of their failure. As it swung open, a perished seal fell limply out of the frame. All that bloody work, he thought, unable to adequately capture his bitter disappointment. Monty waited for the crew door to open, then fixed the ladder and ran up into the cockpit.
‘What the hell’s wrong?’ he asked as he looked round at the crew’s faces. He’d never seen Reeve look so angry. ‘Let’s calm down,’ he said, trying to sound soothing. ‘We’ll get everyone out and have a beer. You can tell me what happened.’
Despite the best of intentions, Monty needed to be careful. Mick Cooper wanted to lash out. Barry Masefield found it hard even to look anyone in the eye, unable to shake a corrosive feeling that they were going to be accused of LMF – Lack of Moral Fibre. The AEO was walked away by his counterpart, John Hathaway, to sign all his codes back in. Cooper, holding a bag carrying all the safety pins for the bombs, found an armourer.
‘Do you need me to put them back?’ he asked. The airman wisely shook his head. Cooper handed over the bag and his mind turned enviously to Bob Wright on board 607. How good are you going to be?, he wondered. You’ve only got twenty-one; for Christ’s sake don’t waste them.
‘Seal on the DV window,’ Reeve explained tersely as they left the bomber behind on the pan.
Monty drove them up to Two Boats where they all chatted miserably and haltingly over beer.
‘John,’ Monty began, in an effort to help him rationalize, ‘there’s nothing I can say that’ll make you feel any better. It’s happened…’ But he realized it was still too soon for that. Reeve was inconsolable and, Monty thought, looked close to tears.
Along with the rest of Reeve’s crew, Monty eventually turned in, leaving 598’s forlorn Captain sitting alone out on the veranda, nursing a can of beer. AARI Pete Standing came outside briefly to say that he couldn’t sleep with the light on. Reeve switched it off, opened another beer, and continued to stare out into the night.
Nav Plotter Jim Vinales was the only member of the crew who didn’t return to Two Boats. Instead, he stayed at Wideawake. He’d expected to be up all night anyway and thought he’d discreetly watch events unfold from inside the Ops tent. Jerry Price, he noticed, was chain-smoking.
At the controls of Red Three, one of the four Victors returning to Ascension from the first refuelling bracket, Squadron Leader Barry Neal was starting to feel concerned about his fuel state. Things should have been fairly healthy after that first transfer, but he was well down. He was just about to break radio silence when a voice from one of the other three jets crackled through his headset.
‘This is White Three. Are you guys short of fuel?’
Neal and the other two Victors said they were, but none of the four crews were sure what they could do about it. They all re-examined their fuel and compared notes, estimating where each would be at Top of Descent into Ascension. All would be well below minimum. The AEOs tried to raise Red Rag Control on the HF radio, but they knew that there was nothing Ascension could do. They were out of tankers. In any case, it would have taken longer to scramble one at short notice than any of the four inbound Victors now had. They considered their options and quickly realized that there wasn’t going to be time for each of them to land, roll to the turnaround pad, change direction, backtrack nearly two miles and vacate the strip before the next one had to come in. They were going to have to land one after another. They got a message through to Jerry Price asking him to approve the plan. It had to be their decision, he told them. Right, OK, Neal thought, knowing they were all committed to it, I’m happy with that. That’s the way we’re going to do it. Then they asked Price to make sure there was a Victor pilot in the Wideawake tower and agreed the sequence in which they were going to come in, based on their relative fuel states. Barry Neal was to come in last.
In the tower, Bill Bryden and the PanAm controllers were joined by David Davenall from the Victor Ops team. Between them, they decided that the only way to recover the approaching tankers would be for the first three to land, hold on to their drag chutes, taxi to the turnaround pad at the end of the runway and position themselves right, left and straight-on like a fleur-de-lys. They would completely block the end of the runway. If the brakes or chute of the fourth jet failed – or if Barry Neal simply misjudged his one approach – the destruction at the end of the runway would be catastrophic. In the event of a brake failure, they suggested Neal pull off the Tarmac into the volcanic cinder field to the left of the strip. His jet would be wrecked but, they believed, the crew would survive and it might save the airfield and the other three Victors. From the tower, they asked the four Victor captains to try to allow as much of a gap between each landing as they felt they could. They alerted the fire crews and waited anxiously for the first of the big tankers to descend out of the darkness.
Ten minutes separated White Three from White One; Red One followed five minutes after that; Red Three was coming in barely two minutes behind her. As Barry Neal intercepted the glidepath, he prepared the tanker for landing. Gear down and landing checks, please.
Down, three greens, came confirmation. After setting the flap to ‘take-off’, he settled into long finals. With the four Conway engines set at 84–85 per cent rpm, he controlled his speed on the approach with the big clamshell airbrake underneath the Victor’s high dihedral tailplane. While he adjusted the airbrake with his left hand and flew with his right, his co-pilot controlled the throttles, tweaking the power a couple of percentage points as Neal called for it. He could see the runway lights ahead and, at the point where the line ended, the other three Victors, their anti-collision beacons blinking redundantly in the distance. He had one chance to get it right. And he knew that the Handley Page Victor K2 had notoriously bad brakes. He was dependent on the brake chute deploying. Descending towards the One Four threshold he passed through 200 feet. Decision height. He set full flap and committed to the landing. Then, as if offering a psychological helping hand at the vital moment, the long, high hump in the Wideawake runway obscured his view of the three waiting Victors. Neal flared over the threshold and his co-pilot cut the power. The moment the mainwheels squealed against the Tarmac he streamed the chute, brought the nosewheel down fast and applied the brakes. He had no qualms this time about hitting them early and hard. The Victor barrelled along the runway like a runaway train, but, as she crested the rise in the runway and the flashing red lights and camouflaged shapes of the other three Victors came into view again, Neal knew the speed was coming off. The brakes had held.