Chapter 34
At 0520, an hour and a half before sunrise and six and a half hours after the first thirteen aircraft had departed, the first of four Victors accelerated with a buzzsaw roar down Ascension’s long runway and climbed away over the sea. As they left the Wideawake circuit they set course for the Rio RV, an agreed lat/long point above the South Atlantic over three hours’ flying time to the south-west. Barry Neal and his crew had been on the ground for less than two hours. Two of the other crews had also already flown that night. For one of them, Frank Milligan’s crew, which included the Victor detachment boss, Alan Bowman, as its Nav Plotter, it was a chance to make up for their disappointment earlier on. They’d been forced to return within an hour of BLACK BUCK’s launch with a faulty HDU. They were flying the same Victor now. XL163 had her chance to make amends. The departing formation had just one task: to bring the Vulcan home.
Three minutes after the departure of the recovery wave, Red Rag Control began picking up transmissions through the static on the HF. Somebody was trying to make contact.
High-frequency – or shortwave – radio had long been used as a method of long-range communication by the RAF. It works through radio transmissions being reflected by the ionosphere and bounced back towards the earth’s surface, hundreds of miles below. But while communication over great distances is possible, HF is vulnerable to the effects of changing atmospheric conditions. Night or day, summer or winter, even the eleven-year solar cycle and sunspots affect the ionosphere’s ability to reflect radio waves and, as a result, the performance of HF radio communications. As listeners to the BBC’s World Service know only too well, frequencies can strengthen and fade away through the course of a single night.
The variable quality of HF reception in the Ops tent at Wideawake meant that following the mission’s progress involved guesswork, intuition and anticipation. Little could be entirely relied on and much of what was picked up made no sense at all. This confusion was compounded by the changes that had necessarily taken place within the formation. But as Jeremy Price and the rest of the Red Rag team tried to piece together the mission’s progress from talking to returning crews and the fragments of clear radio traffic, they tried to be prepared. So when, at 0523, Quebec Five Charlie crackled through the HF reporting a fuel leak, Price was able to scramble a jet to meet him. With John Elliott’s crew ready to go, the Victor was airborne just eight minutes after the request came in. Elliott had been on one of the four jets that had returned on vapours from the first refuelling bracket. So as he took to the air, he and the rest of his crew understood all too well the tension they were feeling aboard Quebec Five Charlie.
As the rumble of Elliott’s engines receded into the distance, Price allowed himself the briefest of moments to reflect. His foresight in having a TAT on standby might just have saved the lives of one of his crews. If the jet hadn’t been made ready to go it would never have been airborne quickly enough to meet the damaged inbound Victor in time. Nice one, Cyril, he thought, and lit another cigarette.
They’d already flown as far as London is from Timbuktu. And on board 607, Gordon Graham was becoming concerned about the flight plan. There was a discrepancy emerging between what the Carousels were telling him and where his flight plan and slide rule told him they should be. As far as he could tell, six hours from Ascension, they were nearly half an hour out. On top of this he’d noticed that they seemed to be burning fuel at a far higher rate than had been expected. What that might mean, he didn’t know, but it was unlikely to be good news. Potentially more alarming was the slight but definite difference in what the two Carousels were telling him, a discrepancy that seemed to be increasing.
There was normally a healthy trade in chicken legs as the crew bartered with the contents of the ration tin. This time, though, the food on board remained untouched. Only the orange juice doled out by Pete Taylor was accepted gratefully, but they gulped it down at a price. It was running straight through them. With the third fuel bracket looming and beyond that the run-in to the target, Martin Withers knew he couldn’t put it off any longer. He had to take a leak. If he went now, at least he could take advantage of the relative quiet to overcome the rigmarole of immersion suits and pee-tubes. He handed control of the bomber to Dick Russell and got to work. After loosening the straps on his seat harness, he’d just managed to unzip the heavy rubber suit when patches of cloud obscured Russell’s view of the formation to the left. Withers though still had visual contact with the Victors so, with perfect comic timing, Russell handed the jet back to her captain.
‘You have control,’ he said with a grin, and Withers, with his one free hand, was forced to take over from his smiling AARI.
Martin Withers throttled back a little as they began their descent from the 33,000-foot cruising height to the refuelling height 4,000 feet below. During contact, with two large aircraft flying in close formation, the extra power and control that came in the lower, thicker air was welcome. Tonight it would be crucial. At night, with their radars switched off, they had no way of seeing what lay ahead. But, on what had been a gin-clear night lit only by bright stars, those first smudges of cloud warned of heavy weather ahead.
The numbers in the Ops tent had thinned out a little. Monty had gone to bed in the early hours, leaving his AEO, John Hathaway, to hold the fort. They’d agreed to swap shifts in the morning. Air Vice-Marshal Chesworth had also turned in. It made sense: there was nothing either of them could add to the work being done by Price and his Ops team.
At 0600, another message made it through to Red Rag Control on the HF. Red Rag Control, this is Quebec Five Charlie. Request RV at 13°30′ south, 17°48′ west at 0622, over. Red Rag read the message back to them to confirm it, then tried to raise Elliott in the outbound TAT to tell him of the inbound Victor’s suspected fuel leak. They passed him a bearing and distance and confirmed the RV on channel 15. And, they stressed, he should make his best possible speed to the struggling jet.
Only soldiers were out on the streets of Stanley at night. As the civilian population slept behind blacked-out windows, the occasional Argentine military vehicle moved around with masked headlights. A light wind blew from the south-west. Once again, residents of the wooden houses on the hill at the back of town had sought comfort and safety in the centre. Hilda Perry and her husband had their chairs and sofas full with sleeping guests. In Sparrowhawk House, John and Ileen Smith were putting up their friends Duffy and Jeannie with the kids Eli and Maxwell as well as their own four children. Joe King had been forced into a pair of pyjamas. The seven people staying with him and his wife may have been friends, but that didn’t mean they deserved to see him wandering around in a vest and Jockey Y-fronts. Leona Vidal and her brother Glen slept soundly. On the night of the invasion, their mother had made them sleep fully clothed with their shoes next to the bed. Things had settled down, but to Leona, too young to fully appreciate the anger and anguish caused by the occupation, much of what was going on still seemed exciting and different. Elsewhere, Liz Goss and her young family were staying with her in-laws and Peter Biggs and his wife Fran, despite advice, were defiantly sleeping on the first floor of the two-storey house. If they were going to die, they decided, they’d rather die in the comfort of their own bed.