Silent War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘Nothing as sinister, Charlie. They’ll guard the aircraft when we’re on the ground – keep Johnny Foreigner at arm’s length.’

  I didn’t even have all that much to do. Once the pilot had set course I flipped a couple of switches on a newish piece of kit. It looked like a wire recorder, but used a spool of plasticky tape, and all of the radio traffic was automatically recorded. It even self-triggered as soon as it picked up a broadcast. I still had to do a few manual sweeps on infrequently used wavelengths, but for the most part this new gear did everything itself. Nansen told me that he also had two wide-angle-lens fixed reconnaissance cameras in the aircraft’s belly. All he had to do was make sure the ports covering them were opened before the pilot commenced runs along pre-set coordinates, at briefed heights. Piece of piss.

  ‘So what looks like a Transport Command troop transport is actually a pretty sophisticated spy plane?’

  ‘Technical, or electronic, surveillance is the term we use these days, Charlie. She’s a Q plane. Call sign, as you know – Queenie: something pretending to be other than what she actually is. Someone in Command has a sense of the ironic.’

  ‘And who are we, then?’

  ‘Queenie’s courtiers,’ M’smith leaned over and told us. ‘She’s Watson’s pride and joy, so we’re not even allowed to be sick in her. If you feel ill, we’ll hang you out the door by your ankles until you feel better.’

  I remembered something then, that I’d forgotten to ask Nansen earlier: ‘Where do we buy our beer, Oliver? From Pat Tobin?’

  ‘. . . thought you’d never ask, old dear. No, Pat’s too dear, dear. I’ll introduce you to a braw young lassie from the NAAFI: you’ll love her. If Robert Burns was alive today do you think he’d write some of his doggerel about a lassie from the NAAFI?’ Then he sang, ‘I love a lassie, she works in the NAAFI, she’s the apple of her mother’s old glass eye . . .’

  He sounded a bit like Harry Lauder. ‘What else rhymes with lassie?’

  ‘Chassis,’ I told him.

  ‘I’m sure we can do something with that . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry about Oliver,’ M’smith butted in. ‘He’s Watson’s Q airman, just like Queenie here. He looks like a queer and sounds like a queer, but actually he’s not. He’s just like you and me, and when he puts his mind to pulling a bird I’ve never seen one turn him down. You’ll find that living alongside him is quite depressing.’

  ‘Bloody fine photographer too,’ Nansen said. ‘Don’t forget that. Sandwich anyone? I brought enough for you two too, because I knew you’d forget.’

  ‘One last thing,’ I asked them, ‘. . . and then we can talk rubbish all the way to Turkey if you want.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What?’

  They’d obviously flown together before.

  ‘The pilot and his mate; they’re not regular RAF either, are they?’

  M’smith got in first.

  ‘Australian Special Forces,’ he told me. ‘If we crash in the desert they’ll slit your throat, and drink your blood to stay alive if they have to.’

  I was glad I still had my small pistol in my pocket.

  Queenie droned north. Sometimes we gained height, and sometimes we lost a bit. Periodically, Oliver would unsheathe his belly cameras, and photograph a strip of land that would one day be strategic to some poor sod or another. Two Israeli late-model Spitfires came up for a look at us. The pilots smiled and waved, and took our photographs with hand-held cameras. More for souvenirs than anything else I think. In 1948 and 1949 we and the Israelis had been killing each other on the quiet, as we Brits got in the way of the creation of the new state of Israel. Something had happened between then and 1953, because now we were acting as if we’d always been best buddies. Ask the politicians; they’re the ones who order and direct all the killing, aren’t they? And they’re the ones who tell us when to stop. And then they pretend it was nothing to do with them after all, and ask us to vote for them all over again. I don’t know why we’re always stupid enough to do it.

  The Arabian states came and went under the starboard wing. I can describe them in two simple words: mainly brown. They looked brown, sounded brown, and smelled brown. Not one of my favourite colours. When someone comes back from Saudi these days, and tells you it’s shite, I promise you that they will be speaking from more than one perspective. Whenever a red light came on over the nav’s table Oliver had to open the camera ports, and when a green came on alongside it he triggered the belly cameras.

  Three hours into the flight we were over mountain ranges in southeast Turkey.

  ‘They used to call this Kurdistan in the old days, I think,’ M’smith told us. ‘The native people underneath us have had at least half a dozen masters in the last thousand years. No one managed to break them . . . they’re as bad as the Afghanis on the North-West Frontier. We have to look for something which was spotted during an overflight a few months ago.’

  Our piratical pilot was letting us gently down towards the peaks and valleys. Too many bloody peaks and too few valleys for my liking. The air got a bit lumpy. There was even some snow on the high ground. I had never imagined snow out here, and we were nearer to the bloody stuff than I was comfortable with. There were very few radio signals. Not many people up here to send them, I imagined. They were all probably tucked up in their igloos for the winter. We started a run. Red light. Nansen’s camera ports opened with a slight rumbling sound. Green light. About three or four minutes.

  Then I heard Oliver’s voice in my earphones. ‘Cameras, Skip . . . can you come round again, and get us any closer?’

  ‘. . . give you another hundred feet, OK? I wouldn’t want to get any nearer to the pointy things than that.’

  Queenie’s twin engines roared like lions – which reminded me of something – as he pulled her around in a climbing turn to starboard. It occurred to me to wonder what her stalling speed was, but this guy seemed to know what he was doing. As we banked around a 360 Nansen pointed out the target to me from one of our round glazed windows.

  ‘There – down there. Like a small dark cross on the ground.’

  As we lost height towards it I could see it quite clearly. But it wasn’t a dark cross: it was an aircraft. A bigger, blacker aircraft than the thing I was sitting in. It was a four-engined bomber type, from the war half the world had just been engaged in; parked neatly on a flat grassy plateau as if it had grown there. Oliver was also snapping away with his hand-held cameras for all he was worth.

  M’smith peered over my shoulder and asked, ‘What the fuck’s that doing down there? I didn’t think that the Turks had anything that big.’

  They didn’t. It was a big black bastard of a Stirling bomber, and I knew in my heart I had seen her before. A rage as black as her peeling flanks rose in me. Now I knew what I had been called up for, and for once I couldn’t wait to see Watson again . . . and then get my hands around his treacherous fucking throat.

  I had to wait as it turned out, because our lord and master had been called away. I didn’t find that out until the morning after we had returned from our flying four-day scheme, introducing Turkey and Iran to the best the RAF could offer. That meant trying to drink the clubs dry in Istanbul and Tehran.

  Istanbul was my sort of place: poky small bars where the coffee was so sweet you could stand your spoon up in it, and bazaars you could get lost in. I had never thought of Constantinople as one of the great walled cities of the world, but it is. Our Aussie flew us on a circuit of the massive walls, before putting us down at a very rudimentary airport where the Varsity was promptly surrounded by policemen in dark outfits and dark red fezes: they looked like a Toy Town army. The purpose of the Turkish police was to stop the locals making off with essential pieces from the outside of our transport. The purpose of our own two policemen was to prevent the Turkish cops getting inside the aircraft and stripping it bare. If we had left it unattended we would probably have found it for sale in component parts in the Grand Bazaar the very next day.
The Turks are the greatest thieves in the world.

  ‘Who looks after our two guys?’ M’smith asked, as we stepped down into a temperature like a Sussex spring. ‘They have to eat, and all that.’

  ‘I do,’ answered a world-weary-looking young man from the front of one of the police jeeps. He wore a crumpled linen suit and a battered panama. When he took it off his prematurely thinned hair clung to his pink scalp like seaweed. He handed me a card. It was as crumpled as his suit. Why do these ambassadorial types all have to dress like something from a Graham Greene book? ‘Lance Love; British Embassy. I’ll make sure that your men are accommodated. If you’d like to do the Customs thing in that small building over there, I’ll give you a lift into your hotel. I’ve booked you for two nights, OK?’

  Oliver gave him a grotesque come-on con of a smile, and said, ‘Lance? Nice name . . .’

  Love blushed. Men who’ve cultivated world-weary should be told not to blush. Our pilot looked from one to the other and said, ‘Why don’t you two fairies just fuck off, and leave us to find our own way around?’ I don’t think there was an insult intended. The words just flowed in a very conversational tone.

  Nansen turned on him. ‘Oh no, dear; couldn’t do that. You’ll need someone to protect you from all these naughty Turks. Didn’t anyone tell you?’

  The Aussie grimaced. He may have bunched a fist. I thought we might be in for an interesting evening.

  The next day I had a hangover. We all did. The flight crew looked like wounded bears. M’smith had heard that the best way to cure a hangover was a Turkish massage. Nancy, who knew better, cautioned us against it, which sort of made our minds up.

  In a massage joint that looked like the inside of a synagogue, my small and naked body was covered in a soapy, oily concoction, and flipped around on a marble slab as if I was a piece of fish. Then the fat Ottoman doing the flipping stood on me and dug his feet in. His toes burrowed into my back like moles, and I knew what poor old HMS Victory must have felt like when the Death Watch Beetle started on her. After that I felt too ill, and was in too much pain from the massage, to protest. I just wanted to die.

  I left the place an hour later with every joint in my body dislocated, every muscle pounded into useless jelly and with no feeling in my fingers and toes. Maybe they had been playfully wrenched off by the monster appointed to me. Chastened, we headed for the nearest bar, smelling like poofs. When I looked around it, every other patron seemed in the same state as me and pouring light beers down their throats as if the world was about to end. The lesson I learned there was that if you want to own a really successful bar, open one as near to a massage parlour as you bloody well can.

  I didn’t get the trots, but M’smith did. I gave him my stuff. He took the linctus, but gave me a funny look and handed back the ointment.

  Nansen grabbed it, ‘I’ll have that if you don’t want it.’

  ‘What for, Oliver?’

  ‘I can sell it, you dummy . . . worth a bloody mint over here.’

  I wasn’t empty-handed when I climbed wearily back into the aircraft. Four large sacks of spices I’d bargained for at the Spice Bazaar followed me on to it. The smell wasn’t all that bad, but the cops complained. Cops always seem to be able to find something to complain about, don’t they?

  M’smith asked me, ‘What are those for?’

  ‘A place in Berlin I’m involved with. Someone over there told me that you could ask what you wanted for spices in Germany – although that was a couple of years ago. It may not be as good now.’

  ‘How will you get them there?’

  I was tempted to use that phrase they’d taught me about Egypt, but said instead, ‘I haven’t worked that one out yet.’

  After Istanbul, Tehran was a cinch. It was in the most Westernized Arab country I’d been near yet, even if their prime minister was well known for telling ours where to get off. The Aussies disappeared for twenty-four hours, and when they came back they were in high spirits. That meant they’d shafted someone. I got round to asking the skipper his name.

  He told me, ‘Hudd.’ When I put the same question to the copilot he replied, ‘Hudd’s man.’

  I’d ask Nancy about that later. M’smith sniggered. Hudd’s man looked at him, and he stopped sniggering. I would have done the same.

  Because our take-off was put back nine hours until a local sandstorm blew itself out, I had a beer alone with Hudd at the airport bar. We’d rigged tarps over the engines in a high wind, and were experiencing that odd high that men get from achieving a difficult task successfully together. Wrestling twenty feet of old tarpaulin into a Force 8 just about comes under that description. He blew the froth from a large glass of beer, then passed it back to the barman for a top-up.

  When the barman had moved away he said from out of nowhere, ‘They’ve handed you a shit of a job, haven’t they?’

  ‘How did you guess that?’

  ‘I didn’t. I heard you sucking your breath in the first time we banked over that old aircraft down in Turkey.’ He must have heard me over his head set.

  ‘Why did you think it was me?’

  ‘Oh, I always know.’

  ‘. . . anyway, the answer is that I don’t really know yet. I last saw that aircraft on the ground in England in1944 – just before it was stolen by its crew. Later I was accused of helping them to get away. It can’t be coincidence that you just happened to fly me over it, can it?’

  Hudd laughed. Then he asked, ‘They can’t seriously want it back, can they? It will be fuck-all use if it’s been standing out there for nearly ten years.’ He took a huge swig at his beer, and emptied half the glass.

  ‘You know the War Office . . . it has a memory like an elephant. What are you doing out here anyway? You don’t look like the bus-driver type to me.’

  ‘You heard of Operation Ajax?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. Forget I said it then.’

  ‘What is it?’

  He shook his head, but after a pause said, ‘Ike wants to lose a prime minister an’ make a new friend. We’re gonna help him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Where you bin these last coupla years, son? This Persian bastard nationalized the oil over here, an’ wants to sell it to the Reds.’

  ‘And we’re going to kill him for that?’

  ‘. . . would if I was asked to, but no . . . jest gonna convince his Arab brothers to choose another prime minister. The guy left in charge will be like a king, and he’ll love us for it.’

  ‘How do you persuade a people to replace their government?’ He didn’t answer. He looked away and smiled.

  I told him, ‘I used to know a girl who went out with Ike whenever he was back in Britain. They used to go up to some Scottish castle, and dance the night away with eightsome reels or something.’

  ‘Why are you telling me?’

  ‘Because she’s an Aussie too.’

  ‘So was Ned Kelly, but I don’t see no reason to boast about it.’ This was as close to polite as he got. He was telling me to shut up, and get another round in. Or maybe he was trying to tell me something else altogether: you just don’t know with maneaters.

  That night, as we were taking off into the twilight, the centre of Tehran exploded with riots. Over the ’phones I heard one of the Hudds whistling ‘When Johnny comes marching home again’, and then ‘Waltzing Matilda’. I’m glad someone was happy.

  We staggered out of the aircraft in the early hours, and I had nothing in my mind other than getting a shower and falling on my bed. The shower block was dark – the bloody lights had blown again – and to cap it all the last bastards through there had forgotten to run the pump to refill the shower cistern. It was as empty as a Mother Superior’s dreams. Something flat and dark and long moved along the floor in one of the stalls, so I decided to pass up on that as well. Bollocks. My bed was still there, and I dropped onto it fully clothed. Nancy was already snoring.

  I awoke looking at a calendar tacked high on one of the ten
t posts with a drawing pin. There was a pink lady pictured above the grid of dates. Not that dreadful Pink Lady cocktail our infantile thirty-year-olds are drinking these days, but a painting of a cheerful pink lady without her clothes. Her nipples looked like strawberries. She was advertising the capabilities of a company named Ralph W Folk, from Milton, Wisconsin.

  I yawned, and asked Nancy, ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘I bought her from a man in the souk in Istanbul. Ten bob. I thought if I stuck her up here no one would get the wrong idea about us.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘We’ll have to hide her whenever we’re both away or she’ll get nicked.’

  ‘What do Ralph W Folk and friends do?’

  ‘They advertise things.’

  ‘So she’s advertising advertising by advertising?’

  ‘I suppose so. Do you want to give her a name?’

  I said, ‘Grace,’ and regretted it immediately.

  ‘I like that: if we get bored with that we can change that to her lesbian friend Mary.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Hail Mary full of Grace – just like Tuesday’s child.’ I suppose my face showed that he’d touched a bone, because he immediately asked, ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Bollocks. What’s the matter?’

  ‘I knew a Tuesday’s Child once – a Lancaster bomber I flew. She crashed and burned first time out with her next crew. I suppose she still worries me.’ He didn’t respond, which was a reasonable thing to do. Then I observed, ‘It’s odd, but the further I get from the war the more it seems to matter. It didn’t matter much at the time; we just got on with it. What do you think?’

  ‘I think you’ve shared a tent with me for too long: it’s making you sensitive. Why don’t you get up and wash, and then go down and tear a strip off our governor . . . it’s all you were talking about on the trip in. He’ll probably CB you for fourteen days, and we can all get back to a normal life complaining about the wogs.’

  I had slept so well that I had forgotten. Bollocks.