‘White Two, you’re rolling left.’
The warning from Steve Biglands, terse and crackling over a discrete radio channel, punctured Tuxford’s inattention. If he and Rees had momentarily taken their eye off the ball, at least Biglands, flying to their right in starboard echelon, hadn’t. As Tux checked the controls, he felt himself flush, a mixture of adrenalin and embarrassment. He shook off his drowsiness and gently rolled the Victor’s crescent wings back straight and level. As he stretched and rolled his shoulders, he chastised himself, determined not to lose concentration again. And he thought of the hours ahead.
Still nearly five hours away from the moment he could strap himself into the co-pilot’s seat, Pete Taylor tried to make himself useful. After the first refuelling he stepped up on to the ladder to the flightdeck to help check the Vulcan’s fuel tray, but mostly he was simply doing a good job keeping his colleagues supplied with cups of orange juice from the ration tin. They, in turn, maintained their vigil on the walls of dials, magnetic doll’s-eyes and flickering needles that surrounded them. Each man went through well-rehearsed routines that had, over many hours of training, become second nature.
On the flight deck, Withers and Russell held the bomber’s place in the formation with an eye on the lights from the four Victors and small instinctive corrections to the stick. Every half-hour Hugh Prior ran through checks on the Vulcan’s crucial electrical systems and asked for a fuel check from the pilots. Bob Wright was under-employed. His H2S radar scanner would stay switched off until the bomb-run. During the long transit over the sea it was no good to them, but as they approached the islands, if switched on prematurely, its emissions would give them away. Instead he rehearsed the bomb-run in his mind’s eye, playing it through, step-by-step, making sure that he was comfortable with it. But there was too much time to dwell on what lay ahead if he allowed himself to. He tried to keep his mind occupied. He unstrapped and stood on the ladder between the two pilots to look out ahead. He even tried reading, but despite being stuck into John Ralston Saul’s appropriately named political thriller Birds of Prey, Wright found it difficult to concentrate on it. He couldn’t help it, his thoughts kept turning to that bomb-run. Sitting next to him, Gordon Graham was monitoring the aircraft’s position. In front of him, the GPI6 provided continuous read-outs of latitude and longitude. A small discrepancy between the Vulcan’s automatic dead-reckoning equipment and what the INS was telling him was developing. And he didn’t yet entirely trust the twin Carousels. While there was no reason to doubt them, he felt uncomfortable putting all his eggs in one basket. Furthermore, if there was a problem with either, having two was not much better than having one. Like clocks telling different times, if one of the Carousels went awry, it was impossible to know which was right. As they reached the top of a cruise climb to 33,000 feet after the first refuelling bracket, Graham asked Bob Wright to take a star shot with the sextant so he could check their position against the night sky. Wright only managed to take one reading before they reached the next refuelling bracket. Flying in formation and frequently interrupted by the need to refuel, Graham and Wright realized they’d have to abandon their efforts at astro-navigation. It took too long. It needed relatively long periods of undisturbed, straight and level flying. In formation, leap-frogging from one refuelling bracket to the next, it just wasn’t going to work. Graham had no choice but to accept what the Carousels were telling him. On the flight deck, the two pilots prepared to refuel for the third time, initiating the checks for what, Dick Russell knew, was a complicated bracket. Withers initiated the pre-refuelling checks, keeping 607 back to the rear and starboard of the formation as the Victors began their intricate aerial dance.
First of all, Red Two refuelled Red Four. Ten minutes later, the transfer complete, Red Two banked gently across the sky to the right and took up a position ahead of 607, ready to refuel the Vulcan. Martin Withers watched to his left as Tux in White Two drifted across the sky to the left and dropped in behind Red Four to take on fuel. Twenty minutes later, tanks full to 123,000lb again, Tux fell back and the coupling was broken. Then, as planned by Red Rag Control, he moved across to the right as Steve Biglands in White Four slotted in behind the tanker to take on the 14 tons of fuel that would carry him south. Framed by the ironwork of the Vulcan canopy Withers saw the floodlit undersides of the three Victors rise and fall and move forward and back together against the tar black sky; a careful three-dimensional ballet. Despite the appearance of grace and calm, 33,000 feet below the sea was speeding past at over 500 miles an hour.
Four hours into the mission and nearly 2,000 miles south of Ascension, Withers nosed the Vulcan towards Red Two. As 607 approached from dead astern, the bright-white shape of the Victor’s planform grew until it filled the cockpit windows. Withers focused on it, barely blinking. Gloved in soft, pale-grey pig-skin, one hand kept a light grip on the pistol-grip stick while the other spread across the four central throttle levers. Using the heel of his hand he carefully nudged them forward and pulled them back, maintaining settings between 80 and 90 per cent, where the Rolls-Royce engines were at their most responsive. Next to him, Dick Russell kept a watchful eye on Withers’ approach, ready to react to any developments before they became dangerous. The tip of the probe felt for the drogue as 607 closed at around 2 or 3 knots – slow enough to be safe, fast enough to push the hose back into the HDU with enough force to trigger the fuel flow. Through their headsets, the rest of Withers’ crew heard the sound of their captain breathing in and out. Aboard the Victor, the Nav Radar watched 607 through his periscope and relayed the bomber’s progress to the rest of the tanker crew over the intercom.
As the red lights on either side of the Victor’s HDU winked out, Withers flew forward through the mild buffeting that always accompanied the last few feet before contact. The drogue seemed to hover ahead of him, almost still, but gently responding to the imperfections of the fluid air in which it was being trailed. When the tip of the probe hit target, rollers inside the basket rode over it and gripped it to create a secure, watertight coupling. The Victor’s Nav Radar continued his commentary.
Aboard 607, Withers and Russell watched the two green lights come on, and, through the probe, non-return valves and four-inch-thick bifurcated pipes that ran underneath their feet, Avtur began to flush into the number 1 and 2 tanks behind them at over a ton a minute. Contact made, Withers passed control to Russell in the right-hand seat, and for the next fifteen minutes the experienced AARI comfortably held the big delta in close formation behind the Victor – less than twenty yards from her tailcone.
At the end of the second refuelling bracket, two more Victors peeled away from the formation to head home to Ascension. As they settled on to a north-westerly heading they would begin to enjoy the assistance of a 60-knot tailwind. Flying into the same wind, the attack formation pressed on towards the Falklands. There were now just three of them: Bob Tuxford, Steve Biglands flying the long-slot, and the Vulcan. The V-bomber three-ship formation cruised on south at 33,000 feet, still unaware of the biting fuel problems that jeopardized the success of their mission. Neither did they know that one of the two Victors that had just rolled away from them was now in serious trouble. Aboard Red Four, the AEO was trying to raise Wideawake on the HF radio: Three Tango Foxtrot Niner, this is Quebec Five Charlie, over… Three Tango Foxtrot Niner, this is Quebec Five Charlie, over…