On the Edge

by Michael Ridpath

  On the Edge

  Michael Ridpath

  Copyright © 2012, Michael Ridpath

  For my father, Andrew

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Two

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Flying Officer Alex Calder watched as the Tornado he was piloting flew itself at five hundred miles an hour two hundred and fifty feet above the Herefordshire countryside. His left hand rested on the throttle and his right on his lap as the aircraft made tiny corrections to heading and altitude prompted by messages from the Terrain Following Radar in the nose. Farmland sped by in flashes of green, gold and brown and in the sunshine the lone Tornado’s shadow trickled along the ground a few yards to the right, like a loyal but ghostly wingman.

  A chimney approached, rising two hundred feet above a cement works, a white sore on the landscape. ‘Waypoint B,’ announced Jacko, the stocky Scouser navigator in the rear cockpit, and the Tornado lurched to the left, obeying the instructions on the cassette that Jacko had carefully programmed back in 13 Squadron’s Personnel Briefing Room at RAF Marham. ‘Nothing on the RHWR.’

  There were five reconnaissance targets programmed on to the cassette, and Calder and Jacko were also expecting a visit from a pair of fighters somewhere along the way. The Radar Homing Warning Receiver would give them some indication that the fighters were up there looking for them with their own radar, if the fighters chose to switch it on of course. Otherwise they would have to rely on their eyes.

  The brown flanks of the Welsh hills lurched towards them, guarded by a bank of slate grey clouds.

  ‘Brace yourself, Jacko,’ warned Calder as the Tornado surged and bucked over the first ridge. Despite his five years’ service as a navigator, Jacko still suffered from airsickness, and the movement in the back played havoc with his stomach, especially when flying on the TFR.

  Now the aircraft was ducking and weaving, hunting the contours of the hills and valleys, the on-board computer instructing it to skip over each obstacle as it showed itself on the TFR. Even after a year of flying Tornados, Calder still found it difficult to restrain himself from giving the aircraft a helping hand.

  Over the crest of a tree-covered hill, and the first target appeared – a dam at the end of a narrow lake. Calder took control of the aircraft, approaching the dam with an offset of about a hundred yards or so to get the best picture possible for the photographic interpreter back at base. The Tornado’s infra-red video system was running, and as they flew past the dam Jacko called out a description of the structure. On the flight back to Norfolk he would edit the videotape, and this together with the cockpit voice recording would be given to the photographic interpreters as soon as they landed.

  The dam behind them and on to the next target, deeper in the Welsh mountains. This was the flying Calder loved, the high mountainsides providing a ground rush even at three hundred feet. Calder’s concentration was focused on the hills outside the cockpit, seen through the little green markings of the Head-Up Display, with only an occasional glance inside at the moving map.

  ‘Buster! Kick sixty left!’

  Instantly Calder jammed the throttle forward as far as it would go and threw the aircraft sixty degrees to the left, his g-suit gripping his legs and abdomen to counteract the gravitational pull from the turn and the acceleration. He kept low, hugging the mountains.

  ‘Bogey four o’clock high, descending, about five miles.’

  Calder glanced at his RHWR and could see a trace of the fighter’s radar. It would be an F3 from RAF Coningsby, the fighter variant of the Tornado, attempting to close near enough to fire its heat-seeking missiles. The F3 was much faster than the GR.1A that Calder and Jacko were flying, and in open country they wouldn’t have stood a chance, but in the mountains they might just be able to shake the fighter before it reached the stern range needed to fire its missile. Despite the wonders of modern electronics, the scientists hadn’t invented anything yet that could see through rock.

  ‘There’s a valley that runs perpendicular to this one just over that ridge on the left – we’ll lose him there!’ Jacko called.

  Calder turned the aircraft hard left, banking it all the way to inverted as he crossed the mountain ridge into the next valley, trying to keep the minimum height and time above the crest of the ridge where the fighter might make visual contact with them. The heather shot by above his head. Flying upside-down, he pulled the stick back to push the nose of the jet down into the valley. He rolled out. As the world righted itself, he saw in front of him a narrow green strip of pasture dotted with sheep, following a winding river downhill. A road led down to a tiny grey slate village with a chapel. And in front of the village, suspended as if stationary, was an aircraft. A high-winged, single-engined aircraft: a Cessna.

  Of course the Cessna wasn’t really stationary, it just looked that way to Calder. Which meant the two aircraft were on course to collide.

  ‘What the hell is that doing there!’ Calder shouted. It was madness for a civilian aircraft to fly that low anywhere, but especially here, in the middle of the Tornados’ playground. It takes ten seconds for the pilot of a fast jet to spot an aircraft, identify it as a potential collision risk, choose a course of evasive action, and allow time for the aircraft to respond to the controls. At a closing speed of six hundred miles an hour, ten seconds is the time it takes to travel nearly two miles. The Cessna was now less than a mile away.

  Calder rammed in the throttle and pulled back on the stick. The Cessna seemed to explode in size as the two aircraft closed. The Tornado’s nose rose, but too late. Calder flinched as the Cessna hit them, just to the left of the cockpit. There was a bang, and the Tornado bucked.

  ‘We’re on fire!’ Jacko shouted.

  Calder looked out to the left. There was a chunk missing from the wing and flames engulfed the port engine. Red warning lights flashed and sirens sounded as the Tornado told its crew that they were in trouble. They knew that already. The controls were listless in Calder’s hands and the aircraft, which had been about to climb, was levelling off prior to entering a dive. Outside the fire was spreading.

  There was only one decision, it was a decision he had been trained to make and Calder made it.

  ‘Prepare to eject! Prepare to eject!’ He reached down for the black and yellow handle between his legs. The nose of the Tornado was already beginning to point downwards. ‘Three, two, one … Eject! Eject!’

  But just as he was about to pull the handle, he looked up. Ahead, growing alarmingly in size, was the village. His eyes focused on a playground, small figures scattered over a square of tarmac in front of him. Dir
ectly in front of him.

  He removed his hand from the handle and pulled hard back on the stick. He heard the pop of the canopy as Jacko banged out behind him. The air roared past the now open cockpit. At first there was no response from the Tornado to his commands, but he pulled back as hard as he could, almost ripping the stick out of the cockpit. Movement, just a bit of movement, then, miraculously, the nose of the Tornado rose. Now, instead of the schoolyard, there was the flank of a mountain, perhaps a mile away. It took six seconds to travel a mile.

  Calder held on for two of them, until he was sure that if he let go of the stick the aircraft wouldn’t plummet into the village. Then he pulled the handle.

  The straps around his body tightened. Then nothing happened. For the next half a second, half a lifetime, Calder feared he had left it too late. Then there was a flash of light as the rockets under his seat exploded, the restraints dragged his arms into his sides and he was thrust upwards, into the jet’s slipstream, a wall of air moving at five hundred miles an hour. As he tumbled he heard the explosion of the Tornado hitting the mountain, and then the small drogue parachute opened and stopped the whirling.

  A moment later he was stable and drifting downwards under the main parachute. He became aware of a twinge in his back. A couple of hundred yards away, the Tornado was burning strongly. He saw the flames licking around the squadron insignia, a lynx’s head painted on the giant tailfin. He glanced across at the school, still in one piece, and then beyond that to another smaller fire in a field on the other side of the village, where the Cessna burned. That poor bugger didn’t have an ejector seat, he thought.

  There was definitely something wrong with his back.

  The ground rushed up at him in the shape of a steep slope strewn with rocks. Surprised by the speed of his descent after the brief calm following the opening of his parachute, Calder barely had time to pull his ankles together for landing when he crashed into a large rock and oblivion.

  PART ONE

  1

  The skaters swirled around the tiny rink in the middle of Broadgate Circle, gliding, weaving, twisting, spinning, stumbling, maintaining a relentless anti-clockwise motion. A gangling young man still wearing his pinstripe suit scrabbled on to the ice, barely managing to remain upright for more than a few seconds. He grabbed at the handrail. In his ignorance he tried to force his way clockwise against the current. It broke in front of him and re-formed behind. He fell, bewildered, blinking in the floodlights. Looked around. Understood his mistake. Pulled himself to his feet. Followed the flow.

  Calder smiled as he sipped his champagne, embraced by the warm alcoholic fug of Corney and Barrow, the semi-circular bar that overlooked the ice rink. He knew exactly how the man felt. In the first two months of the year he had been fighting against the current, buying Italian bonds when everyone else was selling. Then he’d given up, changed direction, and made a quick two million euros in a trade which he had closed out half an hour earlier. Two million wasn’t much – Calder’s team had made over forty million for their employer in the previous year, but it was a start. It certainly warranted a bottle of champagne.

  ‘Hey, that looks neat. Shall we try it later?’

  Calder turned to Jen, his new junior trader. ‘Not tonight. Maybe some other time.’ He winced as the man in the suit took another tumble. That ice looked hard. Calder could almost feel the jarring in his fragile back. During his sudden exit from the Tornado eight years before, he had sustained a compression-fractured vertebra, an injury quite common in ejected pilots. In time it had healed to become barely noticeable, and it didn’t interfere with his ability to pilot an aircraft, but his spine was weakened and could not be risked in another ejection. No more fast jets. He could have converted to slower aircraft, but that didn’t appeal, and so he had requested to leave the air force early.

  With trepidation, he had followed some of his Cambridge contemporaries into the City. It had been a good decision: he was a natural at trading bonds just as he had been a natural at flying, and several years on he had developed an intuition about the markets and risk that was earning him, and his employer, a lot of money.

  At least he and Jacko were still alive, unlike the pilot of the Cessna, a thirty-year-old entrepreneur from Swansea with two hundred hours’ flying time: enough to make him cocky, not enough to make him safe. He had been buzzing low over his uncle’s farm and hadn’t informed the local air-traffic controllers what he was up to, probably because he knew they would forbid him from doing it.

  ‘Scared I’ll show you up?’ Jen smiled at Calder, challenging him.

  ‘Can you skate?’

  ‘You bet. Every winter when I was a kid we’d go out on to the fire pond behind our house after school and play hockey. I loved it. I whipped the boys’ asses.’

  ‘Well, I doubt you’d whip mine.’ Calder had only skated a couple of times before, but he had confidence in his general athletic ability and he was sure he would be able to keep up with her.

  ‘You mean because I’m only a girl?’

  ‘Um …’ Calder could feel himself reddening slightly. That was what he had meant, although he didn’t want to admit it.

  She grinned at him. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll spare your embarrassment for now.’ Jennifer Tan was American. Chinese-American. The Chinese part you could have guessed from the way she looked, but not from the way she spoke. Brought up in a wealthy suburb of New York, with a post-graduate degree from one of the most selective universities in Boston, she was a fully paid-up member of the East-Coast elite.

  She sipped her champagne. ‘That’s the trouble with this country. No decent winters. What you guys need is some cold blue skies and some real snow instead of this miserable grey damp.’ She shuddered. ‘It’s so depressing.’

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ Calder said.

  ‘Now why do I find that even more depressing?’

  ‘Oh, come on, London isn’t all that bad.’

  ‘No, actually, it’s not.’ Jen smiled at him over her champagne glass. ‘I like my job, for instance. For the first time in a long time I actually look forward to coming in to work in the mornings.’

  ‘I knew I was being too easy on you,’ Calder said. ‘But you’re taking to it well. We’ll have you making real money for us soon.’

  Jen’s eyes searched Calder’s, checking for insincerity but finding none. Calder knew she was bright and she had shown a quick grasp of the reasoning behind the trades he put on. He ran the Proprietary Desk in London for Bloomfield Weiss, a large American investment bank. His team of four had the freedom to deal across the world’s bond markets for the bank’s own account. The trades were big, and complicated, and usually very profitable. Calder was one of Bloomfield Weiss’s most successful traders, a rising star with a reputation for taking big risks that made big money. Jen had the potential to succeed too, although she lacked a key ingredient: self-confidence. That was why Calder was careful to encourage her, gently, subtly. She had arrived at his desk with her belief in herself badly damaged. Calder was willing to invest several months to discover if the damage was permanent. But if she didn’t shape up by the summer, she’d have to go. There were a limited number of opportunities to make a big profit in the bond markets in any one year and Calder needed decisive traders to take them.

  ‘Oh God,’ Jen groaned. ‘Look.’

  Calder turned. Another group of Bloomfield Weiss employees had taken up their positions at a table a few feet away. They, too, were drinking champagne, which was being poured by a man with a curly mop of fair hair, a pale babyish face and delicate wire-rimmed glasses. Although he looked the youngest of the crowd, he was actually the boss. Justin Carr-Jones.

  ‘Ignore them,’ Calder said.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Jen. ‘Let’s find another table.’

  ‘There aren’t any,’ Calder said. The place was filling up. ‘Besides, you can’t let Carr-Jones scare you away.’

  Jen shifted her chair so that her back was to the group. ‘I just
don’t want to be anywhere near him.’

  Calder stifled his irritation. ‘So he’s a jerk. But Bloomfield Weiss is full of jerks. You have to learn to live with them.’

  ‘I guess,’ said Jen doubtfully. She sipped her champagne. ‘Doesn’t that bother you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That the firm we work for is full of jerks?’

  Calder hesitated. ‘No. Not really,’ he said. He was her boss, after all. But he could see Jen knew from his tone what he really thought.

  ‘I guess I should have expected it when I joined,’ she said. ‘Bloomfield Weiss does have a brutal reputation.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s true the firm is known for being aggressive, but there are a lot of decent people who work here, people who would do anything for each other.’ Calder couldn’t avoid Jen’s look of scepticism. ‘Or at least there used to be.’ He sighed. ‘Maybe you are right. Things are changing. Sometimes I get the feeling these days we’re outnumbered by the scumbags.’

  ‘Like Justin Carr-Jones?’

  ‘Like Justin Carr-Jones.’

  ‘Doesn’t that make you wonder why you work here?’

  Calder shook his head. ‘It’s the same everywhere,’ he said. He realized he was slipping badly from his earlier plan of motivating Jen. ‘Bloomfield Weiss is still the best bond house in the market. There’s no better place to learn your trade.’

  Jen smiled, but Calder could see she wasn’t convinced.

  Matt and Nils, the two other members of Calder’s team, finished their discussion about the spread-betting options for Manchester United’s European Champions League game that evening, put down their glasses and took their leave. Calder checked the champagne bottle, which was empty. He didn’t want to abandon the warmth of the bar and make the trek back to his cold empty flat, a flat that had felt colder and emptier since Nicky had moved out. He glanced at Jen. ‘Shall I get another?’

  She nodded her agreement with what seemed to Calder genuine enthusiasm, although she could just be humouring the boss. They broke open the second bottle, and proceeded to get pleasantly drunk in each other’s company.