‘We’re short of fuel, but we’ve come this far,’ Withers said to his crew, ‘I’m not turning back now.’
And while he invited their opinion on his decision, the edge in his voice precluded debate. He was determined to succeed. For all his easy affability and democratic approach to captaincy, Withers was displaying the steel that those back at Waddington knew he possessed. He never doubted that his close-knit crew would back his decision. And not one of them had a moment’s hesitation in doing so. We’ll sort something out, thought the co-pilot, Pete Taylor, from the isolation of the sixth seat.
Chapter 37
For the first time in nearly eight hours, 607 was on her own. And, 3,500 miles from home, she was off the V-force maps. With less than 300 miles to run, everything now depended on the accuracy of the twin Carousel INS. The two Navigators had been forced to abandon astro-navigation and the bomber’s GPI6 computer told them they were miles away from where Nav Plotter Gordon Graham’s own dead reckoning told them they were supposed to be. And that relied on little more than compasses, stop-watches and slide rules.
‘Plotting the Two…’ said Graham in his Scottish west coast burr, as he marked the latitude and longitude readings from the two Carousels on to his improvised northern-hemisphere map. The two positions were now thirty miles apart. There was no way of knowing which one was correct or even whether either was correct; they could both be wrong.
‘What do you think?’ Graham asked Bob Wright, drawing him into the problem. Although Graham was the senior man, it made sense to agree a plan of action with the radar operator – who, like Graham, was a trained Navigator. There was no certain answer. The decision they reached would always reflect whatever assumptions it was based on. Between them, they agreed to split the difference. Graham drew a line between the two conflicting positions and marked its median point. Graham input their new position into the GPI6. It meant that when Wright turned on his radar before the bomb-run, the picture he expected to see on his cathode ray screen would be dictated by an arbitrarily agreed plot on an upside down chart. It wasn’t an ideal starting point.
With the Top of Descent just minutes away, it was time for Dick Russell, having helped get the thirsty jet this far, to give the right-hand seat back to Pete Taylor for the bomb-run. Although he’d felt some sympathy for the young co-pilot as he languished below during the long flight down, the veteran tanker captain didn’t look forward to the move with any relish. Let’s get it over with, he thought as he folded up the fuel tray to allow him and Taylor to manoeuvre around the cramped flight deck. Bob Wright got up from his seat in the back to help them swap places. First of all he disarmed the co-pilot’s ejection seat to prevent any danger of it being triggered accidentally, by slotting safety pins back into the top and bottom of the Martin-Baker chair. Then Russell unstrapped himself and, stooping, eased sideways between the seats and down the ladder. From his new position on the jump seat, he was no longer able to see what was going on and equally no longer able to eject in an emergency. To cap it all, his leg had gone to sleep. As Bob Wright helped plug him into the intercom, Pete Taylor got up from his own spot on the starboard side of the cabin and climbed up the ladder to join his Captain.
What a bloody awful crew compartment it is compared to the Victor, thought Russell, and buckled up in the gloom.
In contrast, Pete Taylor felt he was back where he belonged. As his eyes adjusted to the brighter light on the flight deck, he got settled next to Martin Withers. He strapped into the harness, clipped the ejection seat’s leg restraint lines to his shins and attached his PEC to the side of the chair. Then he removed the safety pins from the two yellow and black striped firing handles and pushed them into a specially designed storage block on the side of the flight deck. It was a simple system: if the pins were stowed in their slots, the seat was live. Ready now, he and Withers acknowledged each other. The Captain was quick to hand over control to his co-pilot. It wasn’t just altruism. The bomber was going to slip in underneath the sweep of the enemy search radars, giving them as little notice of her arrival as possible; giving her and her crew their best chance of success and survival. He didn’t want his co-pilot coming to it cold.
Pre-descent checks, please…
The crew paid particular attention to their pressure settings and altimeters. All the Met information they had was forecast and they couldn’t absolutely rely on its accuracy. There were no updates from Air Traffic; no local weather stations to rely on. A descent to low level over the sea at night was an unforgiving undertaking and for every millibar of pressure the forecast was wrong, they would be another thirty feet higher or lower than they thought they were. As 607 closed on the Descent Point, Hugh Prior, preparing himself to combat the Argentine air defences, spoke up.
‘Once we start running in, keep the intercom on; turn all the radios off – everything, particularly the RWR, because you won’t hear the noises. If we get locked up or illuminated, you won’t get distracted. Concentrate on what you’re doing, like being in the simulator; just go through normal procedures.’
It was good advice and the rest of the crew followed it. All except Dick Russell, who, stuck in the sixth seat, didn’t have any choice but to listen to whatever came through his headset.
When they were 290 miles from the target, Pete Taylor pulled back on the four throttle levers and relaxed his grip on the stick. The engine note fell away and all on board felt a subtle change in the bomber’s pitch as she nosed over into a shallow descent.
The small hours were always the worst, when every problem seemed more intense. Since the invasion, John Fowler had frequently found himself lying awake at night in his house on the Stanley harbour front, worrying about what the weeks ahead held in store for him and his young family. On the morning of 1 May though, Fowler had been sleeping, only to be woken just after four o’clock by the sound of one of his children crying. He got up, leaving his wife Veronica in bed behind him. He settled the child but he knew he’d never get to sleep again. He padded through to the kitchen to make a cup of tea.
As John Fowler’s kettle boiled, a couple of hundred miles to the north the Vulcan was descending towards the sea at a rate of 2,000 feet a minute. As they sank through the air, Bob Wright and Gordon Graham checked the bombing offsets – the distinctive features over which Wright planned to place his markers: Mengeary Point to the north-east, Cape Pembroke at the eastern extremity of the hammerhead of land on which the airfield was built, and Ordnance Point, just over one and a half miles to the north-west. Wright also hoped that a hangar he could see marked on the Public Works map might break out of the ‘green porridge’ too.
‘Watch your speed,’ Withers called out to Pete Taylor as he noticed the airspeed starting to drop off. Taylor lowered the nose. In the back, Gordon Graham was also watching his airspeed indicator, or ASI. His warning appeared to echo the one from Withers.