‘Come on, he’s about to lock us up and you’re just pissing about back there.’ The crackle on the intercom made it difficult to hear. ‘Try the right-hand side of the panel.’
A red box containing threat data was blinking in the top quadrant.
Girling screwed his eyes against the glare on the screen.
‘E-band surveillance radar,’ he said. ‘Dead ahead.’
Rantz’s voice crackled in his headphones. ‘Let’s stick an ALARM down his throat and see how he likes it.’
More jargon. Girling racked his brains, trying to remember what the acronym stood for. Air-Launched Anti-Radiation Missile. Designed to knock out enemy radars by homing on a pre-assigned signal, shooting hypersonically down the line of the offending beam until impacting the antenna, or exploding close enough to put the system out of action. It had received its combat baptism in the Gulf.
Beneath the wings, a facsimile missile, rigged with an ALARM seeker head and processor, squawked its attack signal to the nearest ground tracking station. If the missile could lock on to the simulated enemy radar and register a hit, the radar would be marked out of the game by the examiners on the ground.
Unlike a live firing, there was no plume of flame, no streak across his vision as the missile homed in on its target. All that, he had to imagine.
The screeching stopped. Simultaneously, the red box on the threat-warner winked out.
Six days before, a Tornado from Rantz’s squadron had ploughed through a Devon village, leaving twenty-seven dead, almost all of them school children. They never found the pilot, but it was presumed he had had a heart attack. The navigator wasn’t testifying either. He’d ejected at the last moment, but as the Tornado was three-quarters inverted at the time, his seat had fired him straight into the ground.
The press had had a field day.
Parliament resounded to the cries of back-benchers, from both sides of the House, demanding an immediate moratorium on low flying. It was a time to put constituency interests before Party loyalty. Time, if you were an MP, to get your face on the TV and convince the electorate that you were doing everything to protect its safety.
Demonstrators, activists mostly, had hurled abuse and bricks at the unrelenting walls of the Ministry of Defence, and were probably still doing so.
It made good copy, of course. Kelso, Girling’s editor, told him to go out and get some words, find some new angle. The public had been treated to five days of torrid abuse against the RAF from the tabloids. Even some of the weightier nationals had joined the outcry.
As Dispatches’ science and technology correspondent, Girling went to try and see the story from where the pilot sat.
So they had arranged for him to fly back-seat in a Tornado, principal all-weather, twenty-four-hour strike asset of the Royal Air Force. Its primary task, the mission for which it had been designed, precision delivery of nuclear or conventional ordnance against the Warsaw Pact.
Girling smiled. Warsaw Pact. What was that?
The Royal Air Force, anxious to put across a good case for low-flying, had been happy to oblige Girling’s request. Kelso’s enthusiasm for the story soared when he learned that Girling had been granted exclusive access to Exercise Stalwart Divider, a war game to test Britain’s air defences.
They’d given him a crash course in navigation and weapons system operation, and finally introduced him to Squadron Leader John Rantz. Rantz, twenty years in the service, combat tested in the Gulf, and terminally pissed off because he was heading for a desk job in Whitehall in two weeks and had better things to do with his time.
Their Tornado, hurtling towards the target at five hundred and sixty knots, or the length of three and a half soccer pitches a second, was the lead element in Red Force, a strike package composed of British and American fighter-bombers. Their target was a railway bridge, a left-over from the days when steam trains thundered across the great Scottish rivers on their way to and from London, now a rusting relic on the weapons range.
Girling had been on base, waiting to scramble for three days, banned from so much as placing a phone call to the office, or even his daughter. Exercise rules. No communication with the outside world. No radio, no TV, no tabloids.
Even the manner of his mobilization had been carried out without concession to his civilian status. Just one call from the MOD’s PR men to report to Marham at 0900 the next morning. There had been barely time to dispatch Alia to his parents before making the trip to East Anglia.
Rantz’s voice came over the intercom.
‘Arm the bombs.’
Girling leant over and found the switches. ‘Bombs armed.’
‘Switch on the radar.’
Girling moved the dial on one click from ‘stand-by’. ‘Radar on.’
‘See the IP?’
Girling peered into the radar picture. It took almost two million pounds of taxpayers’ money to train a professional to interpret the thing and he was being asked to ‘read’ it after two hours in the simulator.
Initial Point, the IP. A strong navigation feature, in this case a factory chimney, from which the pilot could plot a course to the target. Chimney, O fucking chimney, where were you? Girling’s mind fogged over as he thought of football pitches, scores of them, rushing beneath the plane’s belly.
‘I said, can you see the IP?’
The beam swept the picture, highlighting objects in a dazzling green and black contrast that made his eyes water. He could make out hills, valleys, but nothing that resembled a…
‘OK, got it.’ A needle of light contrasting against the background clutter, just as the instructor had said. ‘Straight ahead. About ten miles.’ He could see the target, too, a little way off, its features clearly defined on the radar screen.
‘Take your time,’ Rantz muttered.
Girling strained past Rantz’s ejection seat for a view forward. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the pilot grab the IP-to-target map and clip it to a knee pocket. The chimney reared out of the haze a fraction to the left of the fighter-bomber’s nose, a beacon on its rim flashing high above them. He saw Rantz adjust course a fraction, advancing the throttles as he did so.
The chimney filled the canopy. It seemed, for a moment, as if they would scythe it in two.
‘Stand by…’ Rantz yelled. He jerked his hand down as he depressed the button on his stopwatch. The chimney shot past the left wing-tip in a blur of mottled browns and reds.
‘Viking zero-one?’ A new voice in Girling’s head-phones. The pilot of the airborne laser designator.
‘Roger.’
‘I’ve got the target, sight’s on.’
Girling looked past the swept wing for a glimpse of the stand-off designator aircraft, another Tornado equipped with a thermal imager and laser target-marker. He could see nothing except rolling greenery, but he knew the second aircraft was close by.
A glint of reflected sunlight in the forward hemi-sphere made him switch his attention to the front again. The river snaked in the distance from right to left just below the horizon. Spanning it, the majestic arches of the girder bridge were clearly visible.
Girling felt the Tornado jink left then right as Rantz manoeuvred his sight over the target.
‘Sight’s on, sight’s on,’ he called. A brief pause. ‘Bombs gone.’
The Tornado swept skyward, relieved of almost four thousand pounds. The two laser-guided bombs, dubbed Paveways, streaked off in the general direction of the bridge. Without laser guidance from the stand-off designator, the Paveways would coast blind, their stubby fins generating enough lift to fly several miles, eventually splashing into the river or the muddy ground beyond. Once the laser was directed at the target, however, they became surgical strike weapons, able to hit any point designated by the laser operator.