“I bamboozle Ivan’s defences.” Dando was as sleek as a bandleader. “I baffle him with wizardry. The navs couldn’t baffle a pussy-cat with a kipper.”
“A kipper,” Silk said. “Heavens above. And here’s me thinking you used a mackerel.”
“I didn’t understand any of that,” Quinlan said, “and I’m grateful for my ignorance. Everyone been briefed? No questions? Good. Here’s my briefing: It’s a long flight, so empty your bladders.”
“He always says that,” Hallett told Silk.
“It’s not a Lanc,” Quinlan said. “You can’t go for a stroll down the fuselage and pee in the Elsan, because there’s no fuselage and no Elsan. And I don’t like plastic bottles of piss in my aeroplane. Unprofessional.”
They waited in the aircrew caravan, wearing flying kit, for almost an hour. “No room for ballroom dancing in a Vulcan,” Quinlan told Silk, “so on word of command, we sprint to the kite in strict order of charm and ability. First me, then you – up the ladder and into the cockpit – followed by nav plotter, nav radar and AEO. Door shut, engines fire, wheels roll, goodbye Mother Earth in one minute fortyish.”
“And be sure to take your lucky Cornish pixie,” Dando said, “because he won’t let you go back for it.” He showed Silk a tiny coin. “George the Third farthing. Life insurance. Cheap at the price.”
“I thought all that superstitious stuff went out with the war.”
Hallett fished a tattered ace of spades from an inside pocket. “Trumps,” he said. “It got me through a tour on Hampdens in 1940.”
Silk looked at Tucker. “You too?” But Tucker yawned.
“Tom’s not superstitious,” Quinlan said. “All the same, he hasn’t changed his underpants since his first op. February ’42, wasn’t it?”
“Hamburg,” Tucker said. “Bloody dump.”
“Somebody gave me a lucky greyhound once,” Silk said. “Bequeathed it, actually. Nice dog, but not quick enough. Got flattened by the CO’s car.”
“Luck ran out,” Hallett said.
“Not necessarily,” Dando said. “Dog’s dead, Silko isn’t.”
A klaxon blared. “Into battle!” Quinlan was running for the door. “Go go go!” Silk was still tightening his straps when the Vulcan turned onto the runway and Quinlan opened the throttles. By now Silk was accustomed to the sudden charge, as if the bomber were racing down a slope. In a fully loaded Lancaster, the take-off run had been toil; and with the roar of engines alongside the cockpit, it had been deafening toil. Now the Vulcan accelerated with the zeal of a fighter, and its engines created their thunder far to the rear. Silk checked dials and gauges, and thought: One hundred and twenty tons. Quinlan eased the stick back and they were airborne. He touched the brakes to check the wheelspin, and then retracted the undercarriage. It took eight seconds for the bays to swallow the gear. Now smooth as a swallow, the Vulcan stood on its tail and climbed.
Quinlan levelled out at fifty-five thousand feet. There was nothing to see but blue sky so dazzling it was nearly white, and not much of that: the windscreen was narrow and it gave only a forward view. The cockpit roof was solid canopy. Small portholes to left and right added little.
“Not much to look at, is there?” Quinlan said.
“I had a sports car with a bigger windscreen,” Silk said.
“There’s nothing to see up here but thermonuclear explosions. See one, you’ve seen ’em all. Fix the blackout.”
Silk closed the anti-flash screens on the windshield and the portholes. Quinlan flew blind to the Baltic and back again, on courses given by the navigators. Silk’s main job was to make sure the fourteen fuel tanks were used in the correct sequence, and to stir the sugar in Quinlan’s coffee. After four hours of sitting in near-darkness he opened the screen as Quinlan made his approach to Kindrick. It was dusk.
They taxied to a hardstanding and gave the bomber to the groundcrew. “Enjoy yourself?” Quinlan asked.
“I have a strange feeling that we went nowhere, and we did nothing.” Silk said.
“Oh, we went somewhere. Not Jaroslavl. Not this time. Jaroslavl would have been the next stop on the line. But we got close enough to have Soviet radar breathing hard. I bet they scrambled a few MiGs, in case we pushed our luck too far.”
“With their anti-flash screens closed?”
“Possibly.”
“Like two blind boxers.”
“It’s a little more complex than that.”
The crew went to debriefing. It was a sober business, far removed from the wartime sessions that Silk remembered, when some men were all noise and bad jokes while others couldn’t speak of what they’d seen, and everyone was weary and hungry for bacon and eggs. This was different. This was experts discussing technical problems. Their talk was spiced with jargon; Silk half-understood about half of it. After a while he got up to stretch his legs and saw a face that made a fool of time and place and rushed him back to 409 Squadron, and Kindrick, and 1942.
Silk didn’t think. The jolt of astonishment made the decision for him and he walked across the room. The man was talking to another officer. “Skull,” Silk said.
“Not now, old boy,” the man said, without even looking around, and went on talking. Silk backed away. He felt a rush of blood to his ears: he had been snubbed; put in his place like a thoughtless servant. By Skull, for Christ’s sake. He looked again. Skull was a wing commander, talking to an air commodore. Some things never changed in Bomber Command and rank was one. In the RAF, a blunder was known as a ‘black’. Silk had just put up a black. What rankled was that Skull had caused it. In the war, Skull had put up more blacks than God made little green apples. Never bothered him then. Now he couldn’t bring himself to look around when he told Silk to push off. What a sod.
Skelton had been a young Cambridge don (Tudor history, with special reference to the northern Puritan sects) when he fell in love, disastrously, and joined the University Air Squadron on the rebound. It was a reckless act. Hitler was chucking his weight about, everyone said war was inevitable, Skelton thought that maybe he would die a glorious, sacrificial death, and then she’d be sorry. There was never any risk of this. By now she was in Kenya, happily married to a man who hadn’t read a book since he left school; and the RAF knew at once that, even in the direst national emergency, it could never make a pilot out of Skelton. They could straighten his academic stoop and teach him to salute; they could even cram his lanky body into a cockpit; but his spectacles were as thick as clamshells and without them he couldn’t see worth a damn. Forget aircrew.
“My word, this is our lucky day,” the University Air Squadron adjutant said to him. “We badly need an Intelligence Officer, and you’re splendidly qualified.”
War came. Skelton was posted to a Fighter Command, to a Hurricane squadron. On his first day he got his nickname. His forehead bulged, his cheeks narrowed, his nose was boney, he had to be Skull.
He learned his trade by on-the-job training. If he had a fault it was his brain. The Cambridge don in him could not ignore the truth, and sometimes he challenged the official view of the war. Commanding officers resented critical comment from a man who didn’t fly and therefore couldn’t know what he was talking about. At the height of the Battle of Britain he infuriated an air vice-marshal by pointing out an awkward truth. It was a black too many. Skull got sacked.
He was posted to a training airfield in a remote and drab corner of Scotland. “We make our own entertainment here,” a flying instructor told him. “Ping-pong and funerals, mainly.” Skull avoided the funerals. He did a lot of trout fishing, put up no blacks, and was quietly living out the war when he was suddenly ordered south, to join 409 Squadron of Bomber Command, which was flying Wellingtons. That was where he met Silk. They had little in common, but sometimes opposites attract. Two years of war, and war’s cock-ups, had made sceptics of them both. Bomber Command claimed to be hammering Germany. Skull saw the intelligence reports and did not believe them. Silk saw the burning incendiaries and knew they had missed the target; often they had missed the city; sometimes they hit the wrong city. Nobody else agreed. Naturally, Skull and Silk formed a connection. It was not a friendship. All the friends Silk had known when war broke out were dead, and he didn’t expect to live much longer. No point in manufacturing grief: that was Silk’s opinion. He amused Skull. Few pilots were so candid about faults and failures when senior officers were listening. Skull felt encouraged to speak his mind, and he put up a fresh series of blacks. Silk was a valuable pilot; he became 409’s joker in the pack, too good to lose. Skull was an intelligence officer, a penguin, a flightless bird, and he got the sack. Kicked out of Bomber Command and into the Desert Air Force.