“Quite,” the professional head of the Royal Navy acknowledged brusquely. “I suggest we board the plane without delay so we can be about our business.”
Airey Neave drew a breath of relief.
The present crisis had not just strained the patience of the Chiefs of Staff it had pointed up the glaring weaknesses and deficiencies in British military capabilities, cruelly highlighting how over-stretched those forces were everywhere, and vividly illustrating the past insensitivity of the political elite to practically every warning the Chiefs of Staff had voiced. The point had been reached when if things got out of hand sooner or later one or other, perhaps all three of the Chiefs of Staff might turn around and say ‘enough, no more’.
The three men fell into ragged step, pausing at the foot of the ladder up to the open forward hatch of the RAF liveried Comet. Airey Neave and the First Sea Lord held back as Iain Macleod haltingly, painfully ascended the steps. The ever watchful Marines and Royal Military Policemen patrolling around the jetliner would have been happy to assist the Minister of Information but he hated it when people offered him a helping hand.
Airey Neave turned to the erect, dignified naval officer at his shoulder.
“Contrary to outward impressions, Admiral,” he said lowly, “we are all in this together.”
“Yes, Minister,” Admiral Sir David Luce retorted dryly, “but while we are all in it together it is my people who are the ones who are actually doing most of the dying.”
Chapter 51
Seamus McCormick had been flying blind for several hours. At both pre-designated ‘contact points’ he had parked up and waited — twenty minutes each time — and there had been no ‘contact’. This meant only one thing; the rest of the active service unit embedded in England ahead of his arrival had been driven underground, or worse, ‘blown’.
The farm buildings had looked derelict and they had needed to get off the road and work out what to do next.
An hour ago they had broken into the coffin containing the small arms and plastic explosives. Each of the three men now had a loaded Browning 9-millimetre pistol stuffed in his waistband as they crouched around the fire.
Army trucks drove from base to base. Army trucks carried their cargo and that was it. They had been travelling light; no food, no rucksacks, blankets, none of the normal kit a British squaddie slung over his back on a march. If they had been stopped carrying anything like that questions would have been asked and it would have ended badly. So they were travelling light; and were hungry now with no maps, and no safe place to hide up.
The cigarette cupped in Frank Reynolds’s hands had burned down to a stub. He took a last drag and threw it into the fire they had lit to warm their hands. He was the younger of the two IRA killers assigned to ‘watch over’ the turncoat British soldier who was nominally the leader of their small ‘cell’.
Reynolds glanced to Sean O’Flynn, the stockier of the two gunmen.
“There’s no way we’d get those coffins back across the water,” he grunted, stating the obvious.
“We could bury them,” the other man suggested thoughtfully. “Leave them for somebody to collect later?”
Seamus McCormick listened impassively as he smoked his cigarette and continued to think through his next move. His mind was walking down much narrower, sharply focused roads than his companions. The IRA men still thought they had options, that they were still in control of their own fate but Seamus McCormick knew otherwise. He had been in the British Army over eight years before he defected, spent time in Germany and Aden, actually spent two tours in Ulster fighting people exactly like Frank Reynolds and Sean O’Flynn. He had no illusions as to how perilous their situation had become and how little time they had before the net closed around them.
Before the October War there would have been other traffic, civilian traffic, on the roads to make it harder for the searchers to zero in on their quarry. These days there were no private cars, only registered trucks and lorries, and there were roadblocks everywhere cracking down hard on the black market and rigorously enforcing the ‘transit and transfer’ protocols designed to stop the wasteful burning of fuel by military and other vehicles. They had been lucky so far. Very lucky.
Oddly, food was not a problem.
Three men in uniform with current ID cards could walk into any ‘Austerity Kitchen’ in the United Kingdom and get a free meal with no further questions asked. Usually, the meal on offer was only some kind of soup, a lump of bread and a mug of tea but a man could live on that almost indefinitely. However, that was the only thing going for them.
Theoretically, they could steal anything they needed; fuel, maps, clothes, uniforms at the point of a gun. Practically, if they tried it more than once they would probably be dead a few hours later. The mainland was just as much an armed camp as Ulster and most major roads were patrolled; post-war even the Police carried hand guns and rifles.
“We’re not burying the coffins,” he said quietly.
It had rained overnight and the ground around the three men was wet.
McCormick picked up a stick and scratched a cross in the earth.
“We’re here, outside Redditch,” he declared. And scratched another cross approximately south-east of the first. “This is Oxford, sixty to seventy miles away. And this,” he added another cross west of Oxford, “is RAF Brize Norton, a few miles west from it.” He looked at the faces of his associates. “Another fifty miles more or less west from there is Cheltenham, and another nice long runway. In between we have the Cotswold Hills. The main runways at Cheltenham and Brize Norton are angled so that aircraft can take off and land into the prevailing westerly wind. At both airfields the runways are angled approximately west-south-west in relation to magnetic north. This matters because it determines the landing approach and take off flight paths of approaching or departing aircraft. Are you guys still with me?”
Frank Reynolds scowled, Sean O’Flynn was poker-faced.
“An aircraft which is just about to land or has just taken off, most likely heavy with fuel, cannot take violent evasive action without stalling and crashing. That matters because a jet airliner like a Comet or a V-Bomber like a Vulcan is basically a big jet fighter, very nearly fully aerobatic like giant Hurricanes or Spitfires. It they have sufficient altitude they can twist and turn, dive and climb sharply and if they get lucky, evade a heat-seeking missile like a Redeye.”
Neither IRA man spoke.
All three men stared at the four crosses and the lines joining them on the ground at their feet.
“Aircraft take off and land into the wind so the way the wind is blowing tells us where to get the best shot at an aircraft’s tail pipes — the hottest part of the airframe — when it is at its most vulnerable. When it is making its final landing approach.”
The two IRA men were beginning to smile; they could not help themselves.
“What we need to do is get from here,” Seamus McCormick prodded the first cross he had made, “to here and here,” he went on indicating the crosses for Brize Norton and Cheltenham. “Or rather, I’m going to take two of the Redeyes to here,” he stabbed at Cheltenham, “and you two are going to take the other Redeye to Brize Norton.”