Bags of Swank
OKAY IF I STRANGLE YOUR WIFE?
The RAF Kindrick that Silk remembered from 1944 had been a windy prairie with a triangle of runways and a cluster of buildings and hangars whose camouflage paint was peeling like sunburn. Now the same wind blew; everything else was different. The new runways were twice as long and the whole station had grown until there were signposts at the road junctions. The corrugated black Nissen huts had disappeared. Today the buildings were brick, the windows glittered, the paintwork looked new. The grass was inch-perfect, as measured by the RAF Service Policemen who patrolled the base with Alsatian dogs. In Silk’s day, the SPs had passed their time in the back of the guardroom, making toast on the coke stove. Then, there had been numerous gaps in the perimeter fence, short cuts to the pubs used by groundcrew and aircrew. Now the perimeter was wired tight like East Berlin.
Another difference was the station commander. Silk remembered Group Captain Rafferty, the big man who always stayed up late to say, “Damned good show.” Now Kindrick had two squadrons of Vulcans and a group captain named Pulvertaft.
He summoned the batch of newly arrived aircrew to his office and asked them to sit. Bugger me, Silk thought, he’s not much older than I am. Station commanders were supposed to be grey-haired types who tore you off a strip for beating up the control tower. If a kite hit a stuffed cloud, the station commander carried the wreath from the Air Ministry. This bloke was as fresh as aftershave.
“Let’s get Pulvertaft out of the way,” the group captain said. “An odd name, but I didn’t choose it. Not nearly as funny as, for instance, Mönchengladbach, a very amusing town in the Ruhr where the flak got my Lancaster in September 1944.” Pulvertaft wasn’t smiling. “I’ll do a deal with you. I won’t bore you with my memoirs if you won’t sneer at my name.”
That’s smart, Silk thought. That’s clever. Now he’s softened us up, here comes the sucker punch.
“You have the best, and the worst, job in the world,” Pulvertaft said. “You have the Vulcan, incomparably the finest bomber. That’s the best bit. Your job is to fly to the Soviet Union and destroy cities. That’s the worst bit. Why? Because, for the first time in Britain’s history, the army can’t save us and neither can the navy. If Moscow decides to go berserk, Soviet bombers can attack us with nuclear weapons. Say we destroy ninety per cent. Ten percent will get through, enough to turn these islands into a smoking wasteland.” He tugged his ear. Routine speech, Silk thought. Given it a hundred times.
“And of course there would be a hail of incoming nuclear missiles,” Pulvertaft said. “Nothing could stop them. Only one thing can deter Moscow, and that is fear. If Moscow decides to obliterate Britain, it does so in the sure and certain knowledge that Britain will obliterate Moscow and simultaneously two dozen cities from Leningrad to Stalingrad. You will do that. And be in no doubt: you will do it. No turning back. Any doubt, any hesitation, is suicidal. The maniac in Moscow cannot be allowed to think we do not mean what we say.” He let that sink in. “Any questions so far?”
Silk raised a hand. “So it’s crucial that the Moscow maniac knows we exist, sir.”
“We know he knows.”
“But not everything, presumably.”
“Just the bare facts. If he discovers anything more, it’s a chink in our armour.” Pulvertaft paused. “A metaphor from the medieval battlefield. Meaning?”
“A knife in the ribs?” a navigator said.
“Yes. For Bomber Command, security is ten-tenths of the battle. We keep the enemy guessing. Outside your squadron, say nothing. Inside your squadron, say no more than the other person needs to know. Never allow yourself to become vulnerable to outsiders. Last week I got rid of a highly competent sergeant armourer. All his pay went on dogs and horses. Compulsive gambling is a weakness, a vulnerability, a chink in the armour. He was groundcrew. Imagine how much higher your standards must be.”
Silk had to show his pass three times before he found his pilot in a room in the sprawling Operations block. He was Squadron Leader Quinlan: DSO and DFC, taller than average, thick black moustache, wide grey eyes. He was looking at a wall map of Eastern Europe and Russia. It covered the whole wall.
“Glad to see you,” Quinlan said. “We’ve got a training exercise this afternoon, and I hate borrowing crew. I suppose you’ve had the station commander’s standard speech?”
“Scare Moscow, and keep your nose clean.”
“You’re married, as are we all. So that removes one major problem. What’s left? Drink, drugs, politics, religious mania? Nude leapfrog? Playing the ukulele? You’ve been cleared by Special Branch. Don’t bend the aeroplane, and you should have five happy years here.”
“That would make a nice change.”
“And if at any time you get a funny feeling that someone’s watching you, don’t panic, because somebody is. Always.”
Silk wrinkled his nose and shuffled his feet. “I’m not supposed to tell you this, sir, but… I’m here to watch you.”
Quinlan was only half-amused. “Jokes like that are in bad taste, Silko. We live in each other’s pockets, week in, month out. A Vulcan crew can get twitchy. You play silly buggers with someone like Tom Tucker, my nav radar, and he’ll deck you.” Quinlan threw a punch that stopped an inch from Silk’s nose. “And when you’re lying there, stunned and bleeding all over the carpet, don’t come running to me for sympathy.”
“I withdraw my confession,” Silk said. “Not watching anyone. Never even saw them. What should I know about this exercise?”
Quinlan turned to the map and found a town about 150 miles north of Moscow. “Jaroslavl. That’s our target.”
“Not very big, is it?”
“And considerably smaller by the time we’ve finished.”
The whole point of having the Vulcan was being able to get your retaliation airborne before the Russian nuclear weapon hit the ground. Silk had learned all about this from lectures at his Operational Conversion Unit. Four minutes was the maximum warning time that Bomber Command could expect. “You haven’t got four minutes,” the lecturer had said. “You haven’t got two minutes. If your bomber has not come unstuck and begun climbing like a rocket within two minutes of scramble, the blast from the nuclear explosion will get you and fling you far out over the Irish Sea, where you will descend in tiny burning fragments. You won’t like the Irish Sea, gentlemen. It is cold and rough, like my first wife. Not recommended.”
The RAF had boiled the answer down to three words: Quick Reaction Alert, or QRA. Quinlan’s training exercise began with a practice QRA. The crew moved into a caravan that was parked at the end of the runway near their aircraft.
Silk had already met the other three men, all flight lieutenants. “Nav plotter,” Quinlan said. “Jack Hallett.” He was short and stocky, with a round and happy face; he looked more like a farmer. “Jack drives the bus. We just sit in front and look brave.”
“Damn right,” Hallett said.
“Nav radar: Tom Tucker.” This was the man with the short fuse. He shook hands and did not smile. Quinlan said: “If we ever drop the thunderflash, it’ll be Tom’s finger on the button.” Tucker displayed the finger: right index. He said nothing.
“Air Electronics Officer, Nat Dando,” Quinlan said. “AEO stands for Any Old Excuse. They got the letters wrong, like everything else. I don’t know what he does, but it smells of sulphur.”