RAF Waddington sits on Lincolnshire heights, five miles south of the county’s cathedral city. Carved from flat, well-drained farmland during the First World War, it wasn’t until the RAF’s rapid expansion in the late 1930s that Waddington became a significant bomber base. Although operations were flown on the first day of the Second World War, it wasn’t an auspicious start. The Handley Page Hampdens of 44 and 50 Squadrons failed to identify the German fleet and returned to Waddo after dropping their bombs into the North Sea. With the introduction of Lancasters in 1941, things improved dramatically and the contribution of her squadrons to the war effort was a substantial one. By 1956, with the formation of 230 Operational Conversion Unit, she became home to the RAF’s first Vulcans and the piston-engined heavies were consigned to history.
Now, in 1982, it was the Vulcan’s turn to go. Experienced aircrew were already beginning to drift away from the squadrons to new posts. That might not be too good an idea, thought Laycock after his conversation with Air Vice-Marshal Knight, and he picked up the phone to his OC Administration Wing.
‘Look, we might have to get people to turn round and come straight back.’
‘Don’t worry,’ came the reassuring reply. ‘We’re on top of it. Let’s see what happens.’
HMS Splendid surfaced for only fifteen to twenty minutes every day to fix her position. For the rest of the time she kept up a punishing pace. A day and a half behind Spartan, sailing from Gibraltar, Lane-Nott pushed his boat through the water at a constant 26, 27, even 28 knots. But in the control room the only evidence of her speed was a small dial indicating that they were travelling at 20-plus knots. As they travelled south, sticking to the anti-metric depths they used to complicate the Soviets’ efforts, Lane-Nott and his First Lieutenant worked up their attack teams. They trained the crew hard for an hour and a half, three times a day, letting them resume normal duties between sessions to keep them focused. The Captain’s knowledge of Soviet submarines, Soviet surface vessels and Soviet tactics was encyclopaedic, but when it came to the Argentinians, the copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships they carried on board represented the sum of it. The Argentinians had good, German diesel-electric submarines, but how effective were they in Argentine hands? For a while, Lane-Nott wasn’t even sure what sort of torpedoes the enemy were carrying. But he did know, from his own experience, that a well-handled diesel boat will always detect a nuclear submarine before it is itself detected. There were French A-69 frigates and a carrier, but what sort of a threat did they represent? And there were the British Type 42 destroyers. At least he knew what they sounded like; the Hercules had been the ship on the slip at Barrow-in-Furness immediately before Splendid herself. For all of the crew’s confidence in locking horns with the Soviets in the battleground of the North Atlantic, knowing so little about the threat they were facing made him genuinely apprehensive.
Only a slight rise in the temperature on board as they sailed into the warmer water of the tropics gave any hint to the crew of Splendid’s progress. But as they approached the equator, they expected problems with satellite communications. At least on this journey they actually had such a facility. When HMS Dreadnought had been sent south to patrol Falklands waters in 1977, Lane-Nott had been at Northwood. The only way they’d been able to get a message to her then was to send a high-frequency signal to Endurance, who in turn would have to turn it into a UHF signal before flying one of her helicopters at sufficient height for the message to reach the submarine over the horizon. Although the British satellite communication system, SCSYS, was yet to come on line, Splendid was fitted with an American system and had access to a reserved British channel on an American satellite.
It was one of the many ways that American support would prove crucial to the campaign ahead.
It took nearly a month for the Americans to come down publicly on the side of the British, but, as the US Secretary of State, Al Haig, raced between London, Washington and Buenos Aires in gruelling rounds of ultimately futile shuttle diplomacy, Beetham was relaxed about securing their help. As well as Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s anglophile Secretary of Defense, Beetham had another ally at the Pentagon in the shape of Weinberger’s Chief Military Adviser, Brigadier Carl Smith. In an earlier NATO staff posting, the British Chief of the Air Staff had been lucky enough to have this talented officer as his Executive Officer. The two men had been golfing partners and remained good friends. The Pentagon, Beetham knew, would give the Royal Air Force all the help it needed, even though Weinberger’s own advisers were telling him that the British objective was ‘not only very formidable, but impossible’. Beetham knew through his own contacts that the American Air Force thought ‘we were bonkers to even think about it’, but, undeterred, he wanted fuel for his V-bombers and transport fleet. Lots of fuel.
The British Air Attaché in Washington wasn’t feeling as confident. But as he walked through the Pentagon dressed in formal uniform, draped in gold braid, the slaps on the back and exhortations to ‘Give ’em hell down there!’ and ‘Go, Brits!’ were heartening. He sat down with the Admiral in charge of logistics and began to outline what was needed. First of all, he explained that the weekend flights into Ascension were just the beginning. Ascension would be the hub for all air operations against the Falklands and, he hoped, the US wouldn’t object to that increased traffic. The meat of the discussion, though, was about fuel.
‘How much fuel are you thinking of?’ the Admiral asked.
‘We’d like an eight-million-gallon tanker full of jet fuel off Georgetown within the next seven days.’
Unfazed, the Admiral drew back screens to reveal a chart pinpointing the position of every tanker supplying the US military throughout the world. After a brief telephone exchange, he pointed to the chart and said that a tanker on its way to Guantanamo could be diverted. So far, so good. Weinberger, it seemed, had already made his wishes clear.
‘How are you going to store the fuel?’ enquired the Admiral.
‘The ship will have to lie off Georgetown with lines ashore and be used as a floating fuel station until empty.’
‘How long will that take and will you need any more?’
‘We’ll need a similar tanker seven days after the first, and then another in seven more days, and so on.’
‘You can’t use that much fuel!’ the Admiral said, finally questioning the Briton’s requests.
‘I can assure you we’re going to try.’
Gerald Cheek had already been back to Stanley airfield once. Soon after the invasion he’d travelled back up there with the Argentine air traffic controllers. He’d half-heartedly resisted their invitation. ‘You’re in charge now,’ he told them, but secretly he was itching to get up there and curiosity got the better of him. As they drove past soldiers lining the roads, Cheek turned to the Argentinian.