She pushed back her chair.
She stood up and the Deputy Prime Minister, the Chief of the Defence Staff and Frank Waters, the latter with a broad, admiring smile splitting his handsome, weather-beaten face struggled to their feet.
“Please escort these people back to their aeroplane.” She ordered, sniffing the air like a Tigress searching for the scent of fresh prey. “They have a long flight back to Russia.”
This said she turned on her heel and walked away, her heels clicking on the stone floor of the hangar.
Chapter 45
Of the three V-Bomber types the Vickers Valiant, the first of the three to see service was the workhorse, and the least radical in concept and design. The second type, the Avro Vulcan’s great delta wing made it instantly recognisable miles away, like a menacing Hell-bound black bat. The third and the most advanced — it was revolutionary and ahead of anything that anybody in the World had had on the drawing boards at the time if its first flight in 1952 — V-Bomber, the Handley Page Victor simply looked and performed like something out of a Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon movie.
The Victor was bigger, stranger looking — even than the Vulcan — and it had the mother and father of all enormous bomb bays. To the crews of № 100 Squadron, the Victor was always ‘the Beast’; because what other description would any sane aviator give to a flying machine that could haul and drop, with terrifying precision, up to thirty-nine general purpose (GP) one-thousand pounder bombs, or a pair of six-ton Tallboys, or a single ten-ton Grand Slam to a target three thousand miles away?
Last night Victor B.2 ‘The Angry Widow’, and four No. 9 Squadron English Electric Canberras had bombed Red Army concentration points and depots, two air bases close to Baghdad, and a water treatment plant and a power station within the city. Apart from being ‘painted’ by several enemy ground-based radar systems at long range and encountering minimal — negligible, actually — electronic jamming in the Baghdad area the five bombers had been allowed to get on with their business unmolested.
Now The Angry Widow was racing the dawn across the dark Eastern Mediterranean three miles below on final approach to RAF Akrotiri.
“You have the controls, Guy,” the aircraft commander declared cheerfully.
“I have the controls,” Squadron Leader Guy French acknowledged, trying very hard not to grin like a Baboon under his chaffing oxygen mask. His hands tightened involuntarily on the controls, even thought the aircraft’s automatic flight control system was still actually flying The Angry Widow.
Guy French had fallen in love with ‘the Beast’ the first time he had sat in the right hand co-pilot’s seat over a month ago. He and his fellow ‘Vulcan boys’ had regarded their immensely powerful and manoeuvrable steeds like giant Spitfires and revelled in the joy of flying an aircraft that — with its massive delta wing — was literally, unique. And then he had been exposed to a Victor B.2. ‘B.2’ because it was the second main production variant of the bomber fitted with upgraded engines and avionics to permit it to operate at altitudes above fifty thousand feet carrying the latest nuclear bombs. External fuel tanks mounted on pylons beneath each wing excepted, a casual observer would have had trouble distinguishing the B.2 from its more numerous predecessors because practically all the other upgrades and ‘improvements’ had been accommodated in a virtually unchanged airframe.
That airframe that was marvellously futuristic, superbly streamlined with four turbojet engines — Armstrong Siddeley Sapphires in the B.1, and Rolls-Royce Conway Mk201s in the B.2s like The Angry Widow — buried in the wing roots. The wings were swept back, as was the towering tail plane and beneath the nose, which came to a needle-sharp point was a ‘chin’ bulge containing the targeting radar and nose wheel assembly.
In common with earlier Handley Page bombers, a more than passing consideration had been given to the disposition of ‘the Beast’s’ five man crew. The Angry Widow’s crew were accommodated on the same deck level in a single relatively large — positively ‘roomy’ by the standards of the Vulcan and the Valiant — pressurised compartment. The three ‘backseat’ crewmen — the navigator/plotter, the navigator/radar operator, and the air electronics officer — faced rearward. As was common in the V-Bomber fleet only the two pilots had ejection seats, although in the Victor the backseat crewmen sat on ‘CO2-powered exploding’ cushions, allegedly to ‘assist in their escape from the aircraft in an emergency’.
Nobody in the RAF could actually remember any backseat crewman surviving a serious V-Bomber ‘incident’; so most backseaters did not spend a lot of time worrying about what to do if there was an ‘emergency’.
Before the October War The Angry Widow would have been decked out in the white and silver ‘flash’ camouflage of all RAF nuclear bombers; now she wore a mottled dark and buff checkerboard scheme to break up her form from overhead, while being painted eggshell blue underneath to match with the sky above.
The V-Bomber force was equipped with a common Navigation and Bombing System, or NBS in short. This equipment used information from the aircraft’s H2S, Green Satin and other radar systems to feed information into an electronic ‘bomb sight’. H2S, albeit in a rough and ready earlier incarnation, had first seen service with Bomber Command two decades ago during the Second World War. Now, backed up with Green Satin, a Doppler system which monitored the aircraft’s drift and direction, it was possible to feed very accurate wind speeds into the NBS thus converting the H2S’s ground-scanning capability into a viable precision bombing tool.
At the time of the October War The Angry Widow had been in the process of being accepted into squadron service and had sat out the cataclysm in a hardened revetment at RAF Wyton. In fact, for want of trained air and ground crews the aircraft had only recently been ‘activated’. She was therefore, a brand new machine. Whereas the Vulcan that Guy French had flown across the Baltic on the night of the war had been a typical ‘Avro plane’; cramped, stinking of leather and hydraulic fluid, hot metal, sweat and some of the time, vomit, The Angry Widow was an entirely different kettle of fish, as evilly businesslike inside as she was outwardly, and everything was cleanly modern, even the control systems. The aircraft had duplicate powered controls which transmitted the pilot’s movements through low-friction mechanical systems that artificially fed back ‘feel’ to the pilot.
Built with multiple flight surface redundancies the Victor incorporated eight separate hydraulic circuits, and the later B.2 variants were all fitted with a Blackburn Artouste airborne auxiliary power unit — effectively a small fifth engine — located in the right wing root to provide emergency power in the event of an engine problem, and high-pressure air for rapid engine start ups. The whole aircraft could be automatically ‘fired up’ ready for take-off in approximately two minutes with the press of a single button. The four main engines, Rolls-Royce Conway turbofans were so powerful that if a pilot inadvertently dropped the nose of the bomber — designed for sub-sonic flight — at high engine settings ‘the Beast’ would effortlessly blast through the sound barrier to well over Mach 1.1 within seconds.
This aircraft, The Angry Widow, equipped with the latest state of the art ECM — electronic counter measures — suite including the Red Steer warning radar module, was probably the biggest and most modern ‘beast’ on Cyprus and Guy French could hardly believe his luck being assigned to her.