The Final Flight

by James Blatch

  Realising he was being dismissed, Rob got to his feet.

  “Have you written your account of the crash yet? May?” Kilton had to raise his voice to get Rob’s attention back.

  “No, not yet.”

  “Well, find a table and chair and do that now.”

  Rob left the office and walked back down the corridor, out of the main doors and straight to his car.

  Once through the main gate, he put his foot down and sped quickly along the lane. The protestors had moved on.

  He came to a halt with a squeal of the tyres.

  Georgina opened the door; he stepped toward her and put both hands on her shoulders.

  “Are you alone?”

  “They’re all in the garden, apart from Charlie. Why?”

  “No-one else has called? No-one official?”

  Georgina shook her head. “No. Not since Mark yesterday. Should I be expecting someone?”

  “You said earlier that you wanted me to come back? You had some things for me?”

  She looked blank for a moment. “Oh, yes. Just some work stuff. What’s going on, Rob?”

  “Can you get it now?”

  “If you like.”

  She headed upstairs.

  Charlie was in the kitchen to his left, staring at him. Rob gave him a weak smile.

  A moment later, Georgina tramped down the stairs in her slippers carrying an open vegetable box.

  He glanced in, relieved to see Millie’s flying logbooks and nothing more sinister. He picked them up and handed them to Georgina. “You can keep these. Maybe Charlie would like them?”

  “Thank you,” Charlie said from the kitchen.

  Rob looked back in the box. A large brown envelope filled the bottom. It looked new.

  He pulled open the top and peered inside.

  Guiding Light – Data Output May 1966 – Page 12.

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “What is it?” Georgina said, staring at him.

  Underneath the envelope were two reels from the project.

  “Oh, no.”

  He looked underneath the tape sleeves.

  More and more. Each document stamped with a red TOP SECRET.

  Outside, a car turned into the road. Rob pulled the front door shut.

  “What’s going on, Rob?” said Georgina, peering over his shoulder to see who was arriving at the house.

  “Don’t open the door.”

  “Why ever not?”

  He pushed past her to the small porch window.

  Two green RAF security police Land Rovers, complete with blue flashing lights.

  One other car, unmarked.

  Several serious looking men climbing out and heading toward the house.

  He turned back to Georgina and, still holding the box in one hand, grabbed her wrist.

  “Listen to me. These men, they will search the house. They think something’s missing. Millie wasn’t doing anything wrong. You have to believe me.”

  “Rob, you’re scaring me. What are you talking about?”

  “Do not mention this paperwork. Do you understand? Don’t tell them you gave it to me.”

  Footsteps and voices.

  “There’s more upstairs.”

  “Christ! Georgina, get it quickly. All of it.”

  She ran upstairs.

  Charlie looked panicked.

  “It’s going to be OK,” Rob said.

  He moved to the sitting room door, away from the porch window.

  There was a knock at the front door.

  Charlie moved as if to open it, but Rob shook his head.

  Georgina appeared with a stack of papers in her hand. “I think this is everything.”

  “Let’s hope so.” Rob placed them in the box.

  He spoke in a whisper, “Both of you. Please listen. Do not tell them you gave me this material.”

  They nodded.

  “What has my father done?” Charlie said, his voice wavering.

  Another sharp knock at the door.

  “Nothing wrong, Charlie. Your father has done absolutely nothing wrong.”

  Rob hurried into the living room and out of the French windows into the garden.

  Half a dozen women milled around with cups of tea. He walked through the middle of the lawn, nodding and smiling, before disappearing through the firs.

  With clumps of greenery in his hair, he broke into a trot along the path that ran down the back of the married quarters, where he was shielded from the houses by the trees.

  Ahead, the CND marchers continuing their circumnavigation of the station. He stopped running and tried as best as he could to look normal, avoiding any eye contact.

  There were a few jeers as he pushed past them, but eventually the small group disappeared behind.

  At the end of the row of houses, he made his way along the far side of a group of garages, and ran until he got home.

  He burst through the kitchen door, staring at Mary, looking wild.

  “What on earth?”

  “Millie’s in trouble.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “I can’t tell you why, but I need to hide this stuff.”

  He brushed past her into the hallway and threw open the door to the understairs cupboard. He stashed the box inside.

  “Rob, what are you doing?”

  He backed out of the cupboard, closed it and stood up.

  “Never look at the contents of that box, do you understand?”

  “Is that an order, sir? Why would I?”

  “Look… They think Millie may have stolen something.”

  “What?”

  “Kilton’s launched an investigation. Georgina could lose her pension. She might even be dragged into it. I mean, people could go to prison. I’m not exaggerating.”

  “But that’s ridiculous. Millie wouldn’t steal anything, would he?”

  “No, of course not. But it’s complicated.”

  Beads of sweat trickled down his forehead.

  Her eyes went to the cupboard.

  Mary stepped forward and put a hand on his chest. “Rob, are we in danger because you’ve brought this into the house?”

  His breathing settled. He looked calmer, but now lost in his own thoughts.

  He shook his head and disappeared upstairs without replying.

  “He brought nothing here that looked like this?”

  The plain-clothes security man held up a cardboard sleeve in front of Georgina’s eyes. He tipped the contents into his hand, revealing a reel of tape.

  She shook her head. “No. We have a record player, but not a tape player.”

  He studied her.

  “And no other papers that you know of in the house?”

  “I’ve already told you, no. I’m sorry, officer, can you please tell me what this is all about?”

  Next door, she could hear one of the man’s uniformed colleagues moving furniture about. Charlie stood in the kitchen doorway looking agitated.

  “As I explained, your husband was involved in highly sensitive projects and this is a routine operation to ensure the security of those projects is maintained throughout this incident.”

  “This doesn’t feel very routine.”

  He ignored her and tapped his foot, apparently waiting for his searchers to find something.

  Noises from upstairs suggested they were being thorough.

  Mary sat on the arm of a sitting room chair and waited for her husband to reappear.

  Eventually, she heard his footsteps on the stairs; he had wet hair and carried a change of clothes.

  He sat on the sofa, looking anxious.

  Before she could ask him anything, he began to talk.

  “Millie and I were both working on a project that was Top Secret. Officially ‘Top Secret’. It’s not just an expression.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “What it sounds like. It’s the highest level. It means that in theory, at least, we can’t discuss it with anyone, even our own c
olleagues. Although many people at TFU knew of the project’s existence, they cloaked everything about it in a security blanket. That’s why they search cars going on and off, just in case someone has some paperwork they shouldn’t have. Even if it’s inadvertent, the consequences can be severe.”

  “OK,” she said. “I assumed that’s the sort of thing you did. But why the sudden panic?”

  Rob’s eyes searched the carpet.

  “It looks like Millie was stealing it.”

  “What? Rob! That’s ridiculous.”

  “Of course it’s ridiculous and of course he wasn’t, but it looks like he was.”

  “So, what was he doing?”

  Rob exhaled, screwed up his eyes and covered his face with his hand. She got up and moved in close, wrapping an arm around him.

  “I let him down. I should have been listening. I’ve been the worst friend and now he’s dead.”

  “I don’t understand, Rob. What should you have been listening to? What did he say?”

  Rob took a few moments to recover himself. He wiped away his tears. “I can’t tell you, I’m sorry. I can’t involve you.”

  “But the box, Rob. It’s in our house. You’ve already involved me.”

  “The less you know, the better. Please.”

  Behind Rob, something caught Mary’s eye: a figure crossing the lawn. It was Jock MacLeish from next door.

  Rob looked at her. “Say nothing about the box.”

  She went to the front door; MacLeish looked anxious.

  “The police are at Georgina’s. They’re searching the house.”

  “Goodness me, what are they looking for?”

  Jock gave her a quizzical look. “No idea, but I thought you should know. Georgina might need some support. Rob’s car’s outside the house. Is he over there?”

  Rob emerged and stood behind her.

  “Hello, Jock. No, I left it there earlier.”

  “Oh, right,” Jock said. He looked at Rob. “Are you OK, friend?”

  Rob nodded. “Yes, thank you, Jock. Just a bit of delayed reaction, I think. Look, we’ll go over now.”

  MacLeish loitered for a moment, looking uncertain, as if he was going to say something before moving off. Mary closed the door and turned to her husband.

  “Jesus, Rob, what exactly is in that bloody box?”

  His eyes turned to the cupboard.

  “It was an impulse. I need time to think.” He turned back to her. “Can you go to Georgina’s? But you don’t know anything, OK?”

  “Rob, it’s true. I don’t know anything.”

  Once Mary had left, Rob skulked around for a while, until he was sure the coast was clear.

  He retrieved the box and brought it into the kitchen.

  After pulling down the window blind and switching on the single bulb lamp that hung from the ceiling, he spread the contents out on the table.

  He recognised the data sheets; the mainframe computer produced them at DF Blackton. Lists of height readings from the laser. He had seen them earlier in the trial.

  Each sheet was labelled GUIDING LIGHT DATA FEED EXTRACTION.

  It was shocking to see the project name in black letters anywhere but inside the four walls of TFU.

  As he leafed through the data, he could see hand-drawn rings around some of the figures.

  At the bottom of the pile was a single sheet of data, separated from the rest and used as some sort of scratch pad. Millie’s handwritten notes filled it and spilled onto the back.

  He scanned the black ink scrawl. Numbers, percentages, and a few equations.

  None of it meant anything to him.

  Beneath the data sheets were two tapes.

  Under those were two tasking sheets for the project.

  He lifted them up, revealing the most incriminating document of them all: a schematic. It was a single sheet, straight from the blueprints, showing the flow of electrical signals and data.

  This is what terrified Kilton, and rightly so. It revealed the project, what it was, and more or less how it worked.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  He put the schematic back at the bottom of the pile and turned to the sheet of Millie’s handwriting.

  Millie’s ponderous voice floated into his mind, as his calculations shifted from disconnected numbers to an equation, and at the end, on the reverse side of the data sheet, what looked like a conclusion.

  2.5Cr/ = 8.75

  The phone rang.

  He hurried into the hallway and snatched it off the cradle.

  “Hello?”

  “May. Mark Kilton. We have carried out an initial search at Milford’s house.”

  “Yes, it was noticed.”

  “Well, we can’t hide this. I just need you to know that the investigation is ongoing. I need you all to be careful with how much contact you have with Georgina.”

  “I’m sorry, sir?”

  “May, we don’t know how much she was involved. It’s more important than ever that you do not share any information with her. We have no idea where it might end up.”

  “You don’t seriously believe she and Millie were doing anything sinister? Surely there’s a more logical explanation.”

  “At the moment, May, we have no alternative but to treat this as a most serious breach of project security.”

  “What about Mary? Can she still talk to her?”

  “It’s best to keep your distance. Things could get tricky and I don’t want them to get tricky for you.”

  Kilton hung up.

  Rob’s feet felt heavy as he wandered back into the kitchen.

  He shuffled the notes back into the box.

  As he pushed the handwritten paper deep into the middle of the pile of papers, the black ink letters and numbers disappeared into the fold.

  There was something pleading and urgent in the scrawls.

  Kilton wanted him to stay away.

  But Millie’s notes said something else.

  Despite the stuffy heat inside her tent, Susie pulled the entrance flaps together and sat cross-legged, out of sight from the dwindling group of protestors.

  She pulled out a small notebook and annotated her observations, using a shorthand that couldn’t easily be deciphered.

  It had been an extremely interesting day.

  Firstly, an encounter with the survivor, Robert May. She’d recognised his car from the information Roger had provided. He looked younger than his twenty-nine years, but was pale and drawn. Not surprising.

  She noted the time of the sighting and added ‘nothing out of the ordinary’ following her cursory scan of the vehicle.

  But the second sighting was altogether more strange.

  The same man, an hour later, running, then walking fast, with a box in his arms, for all the world looking like a thief escaping from the scene of a crime.

  She couldn’t break off from the march around the perimeter fence without arousing suspicion, so she noted the exact location of the back garden from where she believed he’d emerged.

  Later, on her own, she walked past the end of Lancaster Close and noted the address.

  She folded the notebook, slipped it into her shorts pocket and headed into the village.

  Roger was waiting for her call.

  “My dear, we have some interesting news for you.”

  “I have some for you, too.”

  “Well, let me go first. Your initial contact, the now deceased Christopher David Milford, is posthumously under investigation.”

  “By who and for what?”

  “That’s the thing. The RAF Test Flying Unit is covered by a new branch of the military police, rather vaguely called the West Porton Security Police. It seems to have been created along with TFU and reports directly to the Ministry of Supply. So, we can get hold of the odd bulletin, but not much else. Now, what about the survivor?”

  “Robert May. I’ve seen him, twice. On his way to the airfield this morning. And this afternoon he left the rear of a nearby house with a box under
his arms. The address…” She pulled the notepad from her pocket. “8 Lancaster Way.”

  “That’s Milford’s house,” Roger said.

  “Bloody hell.”

  “All rather peculiar. But you are not to contact him.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re jumpy about this upstairs. Too many eyes, including Number Ten’s, on the project.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  “Operate in the shadows, of course. If you feel you need to approach him, you’ll need authorisation from above. And you’ll need very good cause if the director’s to agree.”

  “The director’s taking a personal interest in this?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, darling. Maybe he thinks you need babysitting?”

  Susie sighed. “Fine, but it won’t be easy if I can’t talk to anyone.”

  “If you wanted easy, you should have signed up for MI6. You’d be sipping a G&T in Raffles by now. Of course if you need help, I can always recommend we dispatch a more experienced officer—”

  “No.” She relaxed her tone. “No, that won’t be necessary. Thank you.”

  “Well, don’t get your hopes up, my dear. There’s no actual evidence of wrongdoing and you yourself have said the CND thing has lost its threat. I suspect they’ll pull you out any moment.”

  Susie left the phone box and walked past the church, cursing her luck at Milford dying the day before they were due to meet.

  She could divert past Lancaster Way and Trenchard Close, but it was still light.

  An image of May formed in her mind: hurrying down the path, cardboard box under his arm. Had it said VEGETABLES on the side of the box?

  The road split into two: left to the West Porton main gate, right to the peace camp.

  Susie looked up.

  The sky was alight with fiery red colours as the sun set.

  Operate in the shadows.

  “Kilton wants us to remain ‘distant’ from her,” said Rob. Mary stood in the living room doorway, having just returned from Georgina’s.

  “This is all too much to take in, Rob.”

  He shrugged.

  “Well, surely I’m not subject to your silly orders? I can still see her?”

  Rob stood up and walked over to her. He placed his hands on her shoulders and gazed at her face, glowing in the soft, warm light. “Yes. And to hell with Kilton if he thinks otherwise.” He kissed her forehead.