Under the Radar

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘You did exactly right. It’s lovely to have company. Also, it’s nice to have someone who can help out. The kids adore you, so you’ve made my life a lot easier in the last however long it is. Three weeks? But I know it’s much harder for you to get into work these days without Amos’s car. That’s an awful bus ride first thing in the morning.’

  ‘True. But I still love the job, Rilly, and it’ll get better once winter’s over. It’s the getting up in the dark I hate. Thank God you were able to borrow your brother’s car to move me from Wearsby, otherwise I don’t know what I’d have done. Called Pickfords, probably. I just had to be gone by the time Amos came home.’

  ‘I wonder what he’s been doing since you left?’

  ‘Oh, the same as always. Flying, or talking about flying. Drinking in the mess or in town with the boys. For all I care he may have got young Gavin to move into Brabazon Close with him. That would give the true-blue neighbours something to talk about, let alone the barrack warden.’

  21

  The two Vulcans were being prepared for their ranger to Libya. Based at Luqa in Malta, they would fly their desert sorties to the ranges south-east of Wheelus AFB, a distance of only a little over two hundred nautical miles. The base commander at Wheelus had extended a warm invitation to the two crews and was offering refuelling and overnight facilities as needed, but Bomber Command evidently felt it would be better if the Vulcans were based on an RAF station, where any spare parts for the aircraft would be more easily available. That was them being heavily tactful, Amos thought; it was more likely their chief concern was to keep Oilcan and Vector away from snoopers, even if they were our allies. But regardless of where they were to be based, the crews were looking forward to Exercise Praying Mantis, as the Americans were calling it. Predictably, the Wearsby wags had already renamed it. Even the lineys out on the pan now referred to it as Fraying Panties.

  The two crews’ chief technicians, Baldy Hodge and Barry Venn, would be coming along as well in the sixth seats, although they would not fly on the actual sorties to Libya. This was for reasons of safety rather than security. Several of the runs would be at low level and a fourth crewman might fatally slow the evacuation of the crew compartment in the event of a low-level emergency. But the two men would be invaluable if there were some mechanical problem. Baldy Hodge spent the day before the trip inspecting his aircraft with great thoroughness. He even remembered to look out his passport, although over the years he had flown to stations all over the world without once having to produce it. Having your F.1250 was all the ID you needed, and any scruff-arsed country that thought otherwise was one he didn’t fancy going to.

  As soon as he had known he would be going to Luqa Baldy had called the betting shop in Barnsley, quoted Cardew’s Reward and had passed on the information to the plummy voice. The voice had told him that someone in Malta would contact him for the rest of the photographs. Baldy had made it clear to the voice that he would expect decent money in return for them since the job was very much riskier than anything else he had undertaken. ‘Noted,’ was all the voice had said and the connection was broken after only fifteen seconds. Baldy had been obliged to make the call from the public box outside Wearsby’s main gate: a breach of his normal cautious practice made unavoidable by his being unable to get away for more than a few minutes. At least he couldn’t be overheard there, unlike in the sergeants’ mess. The kiosk smelt of fresh paint and as yet no-one had hastily scratched phone numbers onto any of its surfaces. In fact the entire box was new, the GPO having finally replaced the old booth that had been partly demolished by carousing airmen some months earlier.

  As he worked, Baldy was irritated that he hadn’t yet had an opportunity to complete photographing the new equipment. But security in general on the station had recently been tightened. Instead of regular patrols there was now an MP and police dog on continuous guard beneath each of the two ‘P’ Flight Vulcans. No-one knew the reason for this new regime. As always, rumour talked of spies; some hazarded it was connected with the black-market food scandal in which three arrests had already been made on the station. More cynical gossips claimed that poor old Groupie had put up such a black over the Christmas party affair it was as much as his career was worth to risk anything else that might suggest he wasn’t running a tight ship. But Baldy packed the Minox and the flash-gun, confident that things were bound to be more relaxed in Malta and that sooner or later a suitable opportunity would present itself. He wasn’t fussed about it. Things were always dozier abroad, especially in Mediterranean countries.

  His more immediate concern was trying to imagine everything that might go wrong with the aircraft. He began to assemble suitable spares and equipment to take with them in a two-ton pannier that would be carried in the Vulcan’s bomb bay. First to go in was a spare tail parachute – a bulky pack weighing all of two hundred pounds which he nonetheless picked up and heaved in by himself. Some spare radio sets went in, a dozen gallons of red hydraulic oil and, given the Olympus engines’ notorious thirst for oil, twenty gallons of the stuff. Better safe than sorry. Sundry other parts were added and Hodge topped off his selection with his own Elswick Hopper, incongruous though a bicycle looked in the bomb bay of a nuclear bomber. He had years of experience of his aircraft being parked on a pan at the far end of a runway in the tropics, a mile’s blazing walk from the nearest building. He had frequently made it clear in his distinctive manner that he was buggered if he was going to be stranded out there on the edge of Bongo-Bongo Land replacing a fuse while everybody else roared off in the only available transport to a nice cool mess with the rhythmic swish of overhead fans and beer so cold it numbed your mouth.

  Now that his bicycle was stowed Baldy could see there was room enough left in the pannier for the crews’ kit, which was much neater than having to stow it inside the aircraft in the bomb-​aimer’s niche, anchored beneath a cargo net. But in any case the new bombing kit was now taking up all available space. Baldy liked his aircraft pin-neat, which is why it pained him after sorties and QRAs to find the floor of the crew compartment littered with wrappers from Spangles and Blackjack chews as well as empty sherbet fountain tubes that had rolled away underfoot. On one occasion he had even found an immense gob-stopper welded to the floor next to the nav plotter’s seat. He assumed the man had spat it out when called on suddenly to use the intercom. A bloody childish sweet anyway, Baldy thought sourly. The thing was almost the size of a golf ball. It only needed a serious bump from a turb to lodge it in your windpipe and that would be it for a vital component of Britain’s nuclear deterrent: incapacitated by a gob-stopper. When flying, the chief technician favoured jelly babies himself.

  Meanwhile his counterpart, Barry Venn, was engaged in the same job on Yogi 2, parked alongside. Periodically the two men trotted over to shelter from the winter weather beneath each other’s aircraft and compare notes. Naturally, both of them knew the purpose of Exercise Fraying Panties, just as they knew that the code words Oilcan and Vector referred to the new systems that were to be tested in Libya. Group Captain Mewell might have ordered this knowledge be restricted to the two aircrews, but even he would have known such things couldn’t be kept secret for long from the engineers who in many respects knew the aircraft more intimately even than the men who flew them.

  ‘Ever been to Luqa?’ asked Baldy. ‘Well, I have, and it’s got something all these stations have that share runways with a civil airport. Civilians.’ He managed to get a fair amount of disgust into the word and Venn nodded sympathetically. The only civilian aviators that military aircrew rated seriously were ex-RAF or, at a pinch, ex-USAF: the rest were frankly more or less of a liability. ‘Though to be fair, the local tassafs at Luqa are a step up from your usual native grease-monkey, probably because we’ve trained them a bit over the years.’

  ‘Tassafs?’ queried Venn.

  ‘That’s what they call them there. TASF – Transit Aircraft Servicing Flight. We’ll probably be parked on tassaf dispersal. They’re local Maltese
boys but they can do most things in the way of regular service and repairs. They’re not really used to having crew chiefs like us coming along so I suppose they’ve had to learn how to do some of our work themselves. One or two of ’em are not too dozy.’

  Venn recognised this as a positive accolade from Baldy, whose generosity with praise was usually illustrated behind his back by jokes involving Scotsmen and Jews. ‘Well, I must say it’ll be nice to get away. Fenland in January – I mean, it’s just not designed for human beings, is it? Look at it.’ Venn swept a gloved hand at the hissing sleet that temporarily obscured the control tower three hundred yards away. ‘I always feel we’re under water here. We might as well be stationed on Dogger Bank or somewhere. Still, I’ll say this for Vulcans – they do keep you dry on the pan. Not like bloody Beverleys, where the wing’s too high to give you much shelter, specially if it’s blowing.’

  ‘Even so, my lad, don’t expect to get much of a tan in Malta.’ This was Old Hand Baldy speaking. ‘It can get pretty cold in the Med at this time of the year. It ought to be better than this, though. Tell you the truth, I don’t really like these trips as much as I used to. Must be getting old.’

  ‘You’re not alone, Ernie. It’s so effing uncomfortable. You squat there in the dark on that survival pack trussed up like a ruddy turkey and feeling airsick while your feet freeze, hour after hour of it. Don’t get me wrong: I love the job. I wouldn’t do anything else. It’s just the flying I don’t like.’

  ‘I’m taking hydraulic oil, are you? They’re ninety-nine per cent certain to have drums of the stuff at Luqa but it’s that one per cent that flips the shit into the fan. It doesn’t take more than some faulty swaging.’

  ‘It’s already in. True – all we need is what happened Tuesday and we’re sunk. That was XJ810 again.’

  ‘Bloody jinxed, that aircraft. First Cowans stands it on its tail while refuelling, stupid prat, I hope he’s freezing his balls off at St Athan in Welsh Wales right now. And then that caper the other night. Nobody’s fault here, just crappy manufacturing. Either a pipe’s end is properly swaged or it isn’t. Don’t talk to me about quality control in British industry. We’ve become a nation of shoddy workers. If you ask me, it’s high time we learned from the Yanks. They build their aircraft like Swiss fucking watches compared to ours.’

  This was a familiar Baldy theme and could be heard aired at any lunchtime in the sergeants’ mess. It was always forceful and usually baffling because one could never quite work out what his own position was, other than dissenting. Some said he sounded like a Communist, others like a reforming patriot. He would very often quote his favourite film, I’m All Right Jack, in defence of the British worker who was forced into sloppiness and unionised militancy by inept, self-interested management. Ever since that toffee-nosed arsehole Duncan Sandys had screwed it up, said Baldy, the aircraft industry was a shambles. You raise his salary and boost his morale with some decent management and your British workman will give you quality second to none . . . Although nobody in the mess quite believed this, the large and truculent Baldy was someone to whom you instinctively murmured assent from behind your copy of Reveille, especially when his ears glowed like red flags.

  The present pretext for his outburst was an incident three nights ago when one of the flexible hydraulic hoses to the brakes on XJ810 had torn loose on landing and sprayed oil over the port main bogie’s disc packs. It was sheer luck it happened where there were erks with the right kind of fire extinguishers to put out what could have become a major fire. It was just the sort of incident neither chief technician wanted to happen to one of their planes when they were away. Eventually Baldy Hodge trotted back to Yogi 1 and completed his own checklist of things he might need before supervising the ground crew as they ran a painstaking external inspection of the aircraft. For the moment the weather had lifted somewhat. The wind stocking near the threshold of the runway was stiff in the cutting breeze that was coming from the north-east and bringing over sudden flurries of snow and sleet. In the intervals between them visibility improved so that in the distance the occasional car or lorry could be seen on the main road or parked in the lay-by beyond the perimeter fence. In the other direction the pale grey tower of Market Tewsbury church stood clear for a while against the more leaden grey of the sky. In these intervals Hodge as usual strode about in the open making a variety of his trademark spastic gestures, apparently in involuntary response to what he thought of as the lineys’ blundering incompetence as they went about their tasks.

  *

  On the morning of their departure the two crews went out to their aircraft at dawn to make them ‘combat ready’ so the more laborious of the crew-in checks could be dispensed with later. They then went off to breakfast, Baldy Hodge treating himself to a mammoth feast with Barry Venn at the aircrew diner. As he observed with an air of weary experience, one never knew on these trips where the next meal was coming from. When at last the coach drew up outside he got Amos to sign Yogi 1’s Form 700 while bringing with him the form’s travelling version for the trip.

  The Met report favoured a take-off by mid-morning, after which they said more snow was on the way. Baldy followed the crew up the ladder into the cramped and dark compartment, which almost immediately became still darker as the hatch closed with a hiss and a thump. The two small porthole-like windows, one on either side of the AEO’s and navrad’s positions, were always kept covered. The chief technician understood the reason but still cursed the gloom as he took his place. His ad hoc seat was the lid of a toolbox on the floor. He began strapping himself tightly into his bulky parachute, from which further webbing went to the survival pack that dangled under his ample bottom and which would form an unyielding and lumpy cushion for the duration of the flight. Finally, he clipped himself into the even more restricting safety harness attached to the bare metal frame on the bulkhead with the leather pad for his head. Warplanes were definitely built with functionality rather than comfort in mind.

  Once seated, panting slightly and trussed with sundry straps and buckles into a semi-crouch, Baldy plugged in his own intercom connection and listened to the crew carrying out the irreducible minimum of pre-start checks before he heard the turbine outside feed compressed air to the first engine for start-up. Soon all four engines were running and he heard McKenna given the clear-to-go. Almost at once the pilot blipped the throttles to unstick the aircraft from the slight icing around the tyres and Baldy could feel her begin to move. Everything outside had been handled well, he conceded grudgingly. No difficulties with the chocks, and nor should there have been. A problem sometimes occurred on the pan if a QRA ended in a scramble and an over-eager pilot had the power up to eighty per cent or more and held only by the brakes. There was a point at which the tremendous thrust simply overcame the brakes and the aircraft would start to move regardless. It wasn’t that the brakes failed, simply that the Vulcan would move even with the wheels locked solid. If the lineys weren’t quick enough to remove the chocks the tyres could half override them, making it impossible to pull them free, which always led to an abort and a serious black mark against whoever was in charge – usually the chief technician. Baldy was an old enough hand to ensure that when his aircraft was scrambled the chocks were pulled almost completely away before the pilot gunned the engines. In this way only the last inch or two of the long Toblerone-shaped blocks remained in front of the main bogies and could be wrenched free or even scrunched aside by the massive tyres.

  Now Yogi 1 was lined up at the threshold of runway two-four and Hodge was listening to the familiar pre-take-off checks: brakes on, throttles to eighty per cent, check all gauges normal, airframe anti-icing on, parking brake off, main brakes off, engines to full take-off thrust. Since he was facing rearwards the increasing acceleration threw him forward against the harness. He listened to the co-pilot calling out the speeds up in the cockpit barely six feet away, announcing when the rudder became effective, 100 knots – 120 – 140 – 160 – V1, rotate – lift off – 1
70 knots – climbing out – undercarriage up. He cocked a professional ear for the clunking sounds beneath him of the doors closing and the latches engaging. The ambient noise suddenly became quieter as the airflow outside smoothed and the reflection of the engines’ blast from the ground no longer reached them.

  The AEO’s voice could be heard calling the checks.

  ‘Undercarriage up – all lights out.’

  ‘Up and lights out,’ came the co-pilot’s response.

  ‘Flaps up.’

  ‘Flaps up.’

  ‘Cabin air supply on.’

  ‘Cabin air supply on.’

  ‘Heat on.’

  ‘Heat on.’

  And eventually Rickards said ‘Take-off checks completed.’

  Soon they had reached the top of their climb, had levelled off at cruise power of ninety-three per cent and were settled into what was scheduled to be a flight of three hours and eighteen minutes. Baldy’s seat on the survival pack soon became so uncomfortable he released his harness and stood up as much as he could with his heavy parachute on. He slackened its straps and then took the pack off altogether before standing on one of the vertical steps to the cockpit. That put him between the tall backs of the pilots’ ejector seats, a position he often took on flights he accompanied. From here he could keep an eye on various dials and gauges while also enjoying what he could of the limited view afforded from the Vulcan’s windows. He was thankful neither of these pilots smoked. In the past he had flown with a captain who, in defiance of regulations, lit up a pipe in the cockpit and, once the auto-pilot was engaged, sat back and read a book, puffing contentedly. On a flight to Khormaksar in Aden, one co-pilot had managed to get through the whole of Mickey Spillane’s The Deep, and that leg had included some tricky in-flight refuelling. Baldy didn’t mind the reading but he did object to the smoking, even though the captain concerned had tapped all his ash and dottle into an old St Bruno tin rather than on the cockpit floor.