“I hear voices. Nasty prang in ’43.” Silk tapped his forehead. “Solid silver. Grateful nation.”
“Do shut up, Silko… What are the world’s hot spots, Karl? I mean, leaving aside Berlin, where would you say Kruschev and Kennedy are most likely to lock horns?”
“The Congo first. Unbelievably rich: copper, uranium, cobalt, diamonds, gold. We can’t just leave it to the Soviets to take their pick. Persia second. The Shah’s getting old. Russia’s itching to get the oil he’s sold to us. Thirdly: Cuba, which is more of a nuisance than a problem. Hell, if Moscow wants to buy Castro’s sugar, let ’em.”
“Well, I say we bomb Cuba,” Silk declared. Skull closed his eyes. Leppard poured more coffee. “Congo’s got uranium, Persia’s got oil,” Silk said. “It’s absurd to bomb the stuff we want. What’s Cuba got? Bloody awful rum, nobody wants that. So the obvious answer is: bomb Cuba. No Cuba, no problem.”
“Crushing logic,” Leppard said. “Okay if I strangle your wife?”
“Time for bed,” Skull said. “Any word on the great cricket-baseball occasion?”
“I’ll have news tomorrow,” Leppard said.
Skull was silent for the first five minutes of the drive back to base. Then he said: “Is there anything that isn’t a joke to you?”
“Drowning. Definitely not funny, especially in the ocean. And dentists. Never heard a dentist joke that worked. And dogshit. Drowning, dentists and dogshit. Anything beginning with a D is bad news, unless of course it’s dentists drowning in dogshit.”
“Was that a joke?” Skull didn’t wait for an answer. “How about death?”
Silk yawned. “I never saw much fun in death. Dying, yes, plenty of jokes there. New Yorker cartoon. Two old ladies looking at a tombstone. One says: I told him it wouldn’t kill him to be nice once in a while, but it seems I was wrong.” Silk laughed freely.
Skull changed gear. “Mildly facetious.”
“Bloody funny. Your trouble, Skull, is you’ve got too many rings on your sleeve. Mental handcuffs, that’s what they are.”
“Not a problem you’re ever likely to have.”
“I liked you better in the war. You didn’t believe anybody, you put up lots of blacks, you got the chop. Now you’re too damn serious.”
“We do a serious job.”
“Cobblers. We don’t do anything. We fly nowhere and bomb nothing and come home, and none of it makes a blind bit of difference.”
Skull allowed a long pause before he answered. “If that’s what you genuinely believe,” he said, “you made a large mistake in rejoining Bomber Command. You’ve joined a suicide club, my friend, and we play for the highest stakes, nothing less than the survival of civilisation itself and –”
“I’ve heard that speech,” Silk said. “It was all balls then and it’s all balls now.”
End of conversation.
TONS OF MAGIC BOXES
The crew had breakfast together. For the first time, Silk looked around the Mess and got a sense of the size of the two Vulcan squadrons stationed at Kindrick. About a hundred men were present. Others would be abroad or on leave. Enough to crew twenty Vulcans, and scattered across England were another dozen V-bomber squadrons, Vulcans and Valiants and Victors. Each bomber could knock out a Soviet city. Silk knew that all war was brutal, but this struck him as a very casual kind of organized slaughter. You might kill the entire Moscow Philharmonic in the middle of a nice bit of Tschaikowsky. Or annihilate all the girls in the Bolshoi ballet. There were some real corkers in the Bolshoi, he’d seen a film, what amazing legs! Put him in bed and wrap a pair of legs like that around him and he’d join the Red air force… “Oh, thanks,” he said. A plate of bacon and eggs had appeared in front of him.
“I hear Skull took you to the Bum Steer last night,” Jack Hallett said.
“Is that what it’s called? Very clever.”
“Rumour has it the steaks are beyond compare,” Nat Dando said.
“I’ve had worse. There was a price to pay: Skull’s conversation. Deadly dull. Not like the old days.”
“Everything’s funny when you’re young,” Hallett said. “Remember how we laughed during those ops on Berlin in winter? Hilarious.”
“I saw two Jerry nightfighters collide,” Tom Tucker said flatly. They looked at him, expecting more. “With each other,” he explained.
“I’m sure it brightened up the night,” Dando said.
“No doubt you met Brigadier Leppard,” Quinlan said to Silk. “That’s why Skull goes there: to broaden his mind. What did they talk about?”
“Generalities.” Silk could see that this wasn’t good enough. “Intelligence gossip. Who’s up, who’s down.”
Quinlan leaned forward, and tapped on the table with the butt of his knife. “See here: we are one jump ahead of the enemy or we’re dead. You spent last evening with a senior US intelligence officer and you heard gossip?” The knife had left dents in the tablecloth.
“He gave us his forecast of the most likely hot spots in the Cold War,” Silk said rapidly. “He reckoned the hottest is the Congo, all that mineral wealth. Next is Persia, for the oil. Last is Cuba, because of Castro.”
“Next time, listen harder.” Quinlan swigged his coffee and got up and walked away.
Tom Tucker looked at his watch. “A man of very regular habits,” he told Silk.
“And if the Russians attack us now?”
“They’ll be told to wait,” Dando said. “If they want a proper war, they have to behave properly.”
The crew was scheduled to train on flight simulators. There were three of these. The pilots’ simulator replicated their cockpit. The two navigators’ simulator was set up in another building; all their systems, including radar, operated as if in flight. The Air Electronics Officer was at a third location. His equipment worked with the same total realism. The three simulators were linked. “Take a Mars bar with you,” Tucker advised Silk. “I always do. These exercises are bloody exhausting.”
First they were briefed on the strategic importance of the operation. Skull did this.
“Today’s exercise calls for a different tactical approach. Tula is your target, a city about 150 miles south of Moscow. Instead of making your orthodox insertion, via the North Sea and Baltic, you will take a more direct route across West and East Germany and into the USSR. Navs and AEO will get their full separate briefings, as usual. You’ll penetrate Soviet airspace at height, so no weather problems. No doubt Soviet countermeasures will pull out all the stops, but you have ways of ducking and dodging.”
“Why the southerly route?” Quinlan asked. “Why make life easy for their early warning system?”
“We’re testing a new battle plan,” Skull said. “We use the tactical bombers stationed in Germany and England – Canberras and Super Sabres – to make nuclear strikes on the battlefield. This cleans out the entire Warsaw Pact front. By then our Thor missiles are deleting the first air-defence bases and communication centres in western Russia. You’ll carry a Blue Steel stand-off missile. You should have a clear run-in and be able to launch your Blue Steel one hundred miles from target.”
“What’s so special about Tula?” Silk asked.
“Special?” Skull bared his teeth and narrowed his eyes in a display of concentration. “Nothing special. It’s a city, a population centre, a communications hub.”
“You forgot the cathedral,” Dando said.
“Yes, of course it’s got a cathedral. St. Basil’s. Quite exquisite.”