‘So what happens if it doesn’t acquire a target?’
‘It will carry on in more or less the direction it was launched until it finds a heat source or it runs out of fuel and crashes several miles away.’
Sean O’Flynn had decided he was the one who was going to shoot the Redeye they were taking to Brize Norton.
‘What if we just fired it at the control tower?’
‘You’d get a face full of superheated spent rocket fuel if you aimed it at a ground target without launching it at an angle to the horizontal of at least forty-five degrees. Aiming this kind of missile at a ground target is virtually impossible.’
‘Forty-five degrees?’
‘The launcher ejects the missile from the tube and the rocket motor kicks in the moment the guidance system detects it has reached a viable launch velocity. That means the rocket motor will initiate after it has travelled about fifteen to twenty feet.’
The two IRA men had unloaded their Redeye and stashed it in the nearby outhouses and gone off on foot to steal a vehicle. The arrangement had been that if they were not back inside an hour he would leave. In the event he had given his ‘comrades’ seventy minutes before he departed. He had toyed with the idea of retrieving the third Redeye, or failing that, booby-trapping it. In the end he decided to stick to the original plan.
If Frank Reynolds and Sean O’Flynn managed to create some kind of diversion at Brize Norton, good for them!
Salisbury Plain and parts of the Cotswolds were home turf for most British Army infantrymen, tankers and engineers. Cheltenham had had a small World War II aerodrome before the October War but it had been far too small for modern jet aircraft; hence the brutal destruction of Cheltenham Race Course, slashing nearly three miles of tarmac between the foothills to the north east and deep into the suburbs of the town to the south west.
It was amazing what the British could achieve when they had to!
The villages of Bishop’s Cleeve and Southam were almost directly under the flight path of the new air base. When the prevailing wind blew in from the Atlantic every aircraft flew low over the two villages; because no matter the ruthlessness with which the builders had carved the new runway out of the Gloucestershire countryside and demolished houses on the boundaries of the field, approaching planes — V-Bombers and big jets alike — knew they had to touch down virtually on the threshold of the main runway to be able to come to a safe halt short of Cheltenham town. Approaching low, sinking fast towards the gently rising Cotswold hills beneath them, landing required fine judgement; take off was simpler with the raw power of a modern jet bomber or jetliner’s engines beneath a pilot’s throttle hand. But landing, well, landing was a challenge even when the prevailing wind blew.
Sean McCormick had done the basic trigonometry, checked the arithmetic and worked out just how low aircraft would have to fly over Bishop’s Cleeve and Southam to land safely at Cheltenham. The numbers he got back were; below a thousand feet over Bishop’s Cleeve, and a lot less than four hundred feet over Southam.
If the Redeye performed anywhere near to specification for a straightforward ‘tail pipe shoot’ those sort of ranges were point blank. Jesus, he might have had an even chance of winging a big aircraft with an old fashioned Bazooka at five hundred feet!
The problem was he had to find a launch location where he could set up and wait for an aircraft to overfly him. Somewhere within a thirty degree arc either side of the likely flight path would do nicely but the hills overlooking the air base were alive with troops and police. Everywhere within the five mile defence exclusion zone around RAF Cheltenham was prime shoot first and ask questions later territory. He had only got this far because the dozy squaddies manning two roadblocks had taken his word for it — they had not looked overlong or hard at his movement orders — that he was delivering ‘sensitive and very delicate replacement parts’ for RAF Cheltenham’s ILS — Instrument Landing System — and replacement ‘guidance gizmos’ for № 25 Squadron’s two Bloodhound long-rang SAM batteries. These latter units were located within the boundaries of the air base itself; and allegedly, ‘slaved’ to the local RAF air traffic control radars. If his six-month old intelligence regarding the disposition of № 25 Squadron had been out of date he would have been dead by now. A couple of half-intelligent questions would have revealed that he knew precisely nothing about the particulars of the air base’s Instrument Landing System and he would have been reaching for the Browning forty-five under the dashboard.
With nowhere to hide a great big lump of a lorry like the Bedford he had brazenly parked the vehicle on the village green at Bishop’s Cleeve, gone in search of the local Police House, told the local bobby his ILS and Bloodhound story and explained — well, complained actually — that the air base never accepted deliveries after dark so he was ‘going to have to sit out the night here’. The policeman’s wife, a skinny, wrinkled woman who despite appearances was most likely still in her forties had offered him a cup of tea.
‘Sorry, I can’t leave the lorry unattended for more than a few minutes at a time,’ he had explained and disappeared back into the night again. He planned to move on around dawn, attempt to drive off road into the woods where he could shoot the Redeyes from just inside a protective tree line. He had no idea how practical this would prove to be but that was the problem when a man was making everything up as he went along.
The first time he got unlucky it would be the last.
Chapter 67
Admiral Sir David Luce had been roused from an uneasy sleep by Captain Lionel Faulkes. His old friend Julian Christopher had asked for Faulkes as his Senior Staff Captain shortly after arriving in Malta in December last year, and the First Sea Lord had been happy to oblige.
“Who did you say this bloody woman is?” He asked again now that he was more fully cognisant of his surrounding as he pulled on his jacket. The First Sea Lord always felt undressed without his tie and jacket; looking the part was half the battle in high command.
“Air Vice-Marshal French was a little vague about that, sir,” the other man apologised. “However, he was most insistent that we should hear what she has to say.”
David Luce had not known very much about Dan French until recently. However, Julian Christopher had spoken of him as a ‘very safe pair of hands’ and a man in whom ‘confided without fear or favour’; and the airman’s conduct of himself and his command in the intolerable and painful circumstances of the last few days had done nothing to diminish the First Sea Lord’s growing regard for him. He had already determined to recommend Dan French be confirmed as C-in-C Malta to the Prime Minister on his return to Oxford. The airman and the man responsible for carrying out Operation Grantham, Rear-Admiral Nigel Grenville — advanced to the rank of Vice-Admiral in command of the Mediterranean Fleet — would make a good team.
Rachel Piotrowska was surprised to be greeted in a small reception room on the seaward side of the palace not just by Dan French, the Acting C-in-C but by several other men whom she recognised but did not know. The airman did the introductions; “Admiral Sir David Luce, Head of the Chiefs of Staff, Mr Iain Macleod, Secretary of State for Information, Mr Airey Neave, Secretary of State for Supply, and Captain Faulkes of my staff whom you have already met.”
Everybody sat down in comfortable padded wicker chairs more normally to be found on sunny Mediterranean verandas, patios and balconies.