“No, sir. Silk. Flight Lieutenant.”
“Damn.” The colonel took a pencil from behind his ear and altered the sheet on the clipboard. “Bloody admin orderlies… Makes no difference. You’ve got the chop, Silk. Blown it. Flunked, as the Yanks say. Down the pan.” He rapped the clipboard with his knuckles. “If this is the best you can do, you’re not fit to drive a Naafi van.”
“That’s… disappointing, sir.”
“What? It’s bloody unpatriotic.” He advanced on Silk and poked him in the chest with the pencil. “You thought you could bullshit your way into Bomber Command! Look at these fucking pathetic scores! What? What have you got to say?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“A gentlemen would apologise!” The pencil-prodding got harder. “Damned insolence! Damned arrogance! Don’t try to deny it. To think we fought two wars for the shoddy, shabby likes of you.” Spots of saliva were reaching Silk’s tunic.
“Three wars, sir.” Silk pointed at one of the colonel’s medal ribbons. “Isn’t that the Boer War medal? Sixty years ago. You must have been jolly young.”
The colonel’s face turned red. He began to shout. He damned and insulted Silk, cursed him for a sponger and a wastrel and a fraud, and stamped out.
Ten minutes later an orderly arrived and escorted Silk to the Chief Medical Officer. “Boer War gong,” he said. “How did you know?”
“My uncle won it. Used to wear it every Armistice Day. Anyway, what’s a pongo colonel doing in Bomber Command?”
“Testing your self-control, see if you would crack. It’s a bloody silly idea, but just occasionally it draws blood… Anyway, you’re medically fit to fly Vulcans.” He signed a form. “You have the heart and stomach of a sixteen-year-old boy. Pass it on to me when you’ve done with it.”
“You’ll have to lose thirty pounds first.”
The CMO added the date to the form. A five looked slightly unstable, so he straightened it. “You’ve been out of the Service for a long time, flight lieutenant. You have forgotten the courtesy due to senior rank.” He looked up, his eyes wide open; and Silk’s toes curled.
“Yes, sir.”
“Group Captain Evans is in Room 800. Do not joke with Group Captain Evans.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Silk found Room 800. Evans told him to take a seat. He was a big man, almost completely bald, with a permanent frown. Silk suddenly worried about his taxes. He’d left all that stuff to Barney Knox.
Evans leafed through a thick file. He closed it, and said: “You’re a bloody mercenary, flight lieutenant.” It was true. Silk stayed silent. “A whore of the skies, that’s you,” Evans said. “What?” Silk frowned, as if thinking. “Scum rises to the top, flight lieutenant. That’s your story too, isn’t it?” Evans whacked the file. “What?” No reply.
Evans went back into the file. He found a tattered page that briefly made him hold his breath. “Christ Almighty,” he muttered. “You could go to jail for this.” He read it again. “Didn’t anybody…? No, of course not. They gave you the saw and sent you up the tree, and watched you cut off the branch you were sitting on. Now look at you: stark bollock naked. What?”
Silk chewed his lip and studied the group captain’s face. Large wart on the left cheek. Must make shaving tricky.
“Air America,” Evans said. “Cowboys paid by crooks. CIA pulls the strings, Mafia makes a killing.” He tossed a reporter’s notebook at Silk, then a ballpen. “Come clean, flight lieutenant. Full confessions, and I mean full. It’s your only hope.” He went out. A key turned in the lock.
Evans came back five hours later. It was dusk; a lamp burned on the desk. Silk gave him the notebook.
“1835 hours,” Evans read aloud. “Urinated in waste-paper bin. Appears to be watertight. 1907 hours: telephoned Officers Mess, spoke to Duty Officer. 1920 hours: airman opened door with master key. 1930 hours: Mess servant delivered dinner on tray with half-bottle of claret. 2015-2050 hours: took a nap. 2100 hours: discussed football with office cleaner.”
“He emptied your waste-paper bin,” Silk said. “I gave him ten shillings.”
Evans grunted. “Extravagant. Five bob would have done. And I’m not paying for your wine.” He sat at his desk. “You’ve read your file?” Silk nodded. “Anything to add?” Silk shook his head. “Thank God,” Evans said. “You’ve been okayed by MI5, Special Branch, the FBI and the Dagenham Girl Pipers. Also, it didn’t hurt that President Eisenhower invited your titled wife to dinner at the White House.”
“Did he really, sir?” Zoë’s not titled, Silk thought: “She never told me,” he said.
“Amazing. Why on earth d’you want to join Bomber Command again?”
The honest answer was To be near Zoë. Silk briefly considered To help defend the West. He said, “To fly the Vulcan, sir. Finest aircraft in the world.”
“It’s a nuclear weapon with wings. Killing a quarter of a million Russians doesn’t bother you?”
Silk thought of all the Germans he must have killed in two tours. “Not if it doesn’t bother you, sir.”
Evans got up and walked to the window. “Britain’s not a bad country, you know. I’d certainly kill to save it. When you think of the Hitler war, of the huge pressures we put bomber crews under… They wouldn’t have been human if they hadn’t gone on the razzle, got drunk, got laid, got into fights…”
“It helped, sir.”
“Not now, Silk. Not in the Cold War. Too dangerous. A Vulcan crew is the closest thing to God hurling down thunderbolts. The crew can never relax. On duty, all day every day, for five years. Hell of a burden. If you’ve got a weakness, flight lieutenant, it will find you out, it will break you and you will crack, you will fall apart, collapse, kill someone, probably yourself, anything to escape the nightmare of being God, not the God who allegedly created the world but the God who exists to destroy it. If you find that weakness, come and tell me.”
“Yes, sir.” Silk relaxed. He was in. He was flying. He had no weakness. “Thank you, sir.”
POOR RUMPTY AND TUMPTY
By the time he rejoined Bomber Command, Silk had flown more than sixty types of aircraft; and the more he flew, the more he admired birds. Gulls especially. He marvelled at the way they did so much, so easily. Gulls could soar and wheel, and search and hunt, and call or scream, and all with such grace. He watched, and sometimes daydreamed about flying an aircraft with a performance better than any bird. When this came true it resembled a fish. The Vulcan looked like a sting ray.
He had joined an Operational Conversion Unit, and an instructor was showing him around the bomber. “Not quite a perfect triangle,” the instructor said. “Slight kink in the leading edges. Helps airflow, which makes the boffins happy. Big fin, keeps her nice and stable. No tailplane, of course, because the wings do that job. In fact the wings do just about everything. The Vulcan’s a flying wing, with a nose up front for the crew to sit in.”
They walked underneath. Silk raised an arm and could not reach the wings. The undercarriage struts were massive. Each unit had eight wheels. “What does she weigh?” Silk asked.
“Depends on the fuel load. All tanks full, something like a hundred and twenty tons.”
Silk tried to remember what a Lanc with a full bombload had weighed. Twenty-something tons came to mind. “I’m glad to see we’ve got runways to match.”