‘No, sir.’
‘Any other problems?’
‘No, sir,’
‘There you are then,’ he said to the medics. ‘Why don’t you guys let him get a good night’s sleep and do all your tests in the morning?’
‘But—’ one began.
‘That wasn’t a question, it was an order,’ the general barked.
Drew eased himself past and went to the Mess. The drink was already flowing freely.
Drew went through the motions, answering some questions mechanically and shrugging off others. His thoughts were only of a forest several hundred miles away, where Nick had met his death.
Finally he could stand it no longer. He pushed his way through the crowd and out into the night. His mates watched him go but no one followed him.
Drew stood alone on the edge of the airfield gazing out unseeingly across the deserted tarmac, his shoulders heaving, his body racked by sobs.
Still crying, he walked back to his quarters, stripped off his clothes, leaving them in a pile in the middle of the floor and got into the shower. He set the temperature as hot as he could bear and scrubbed himself over and over again, trying not to look at the water, stained with blood, as it spiralled down the drain.
Finally he towelled himself down, brushed his teeth until his gums bled and then fell into bed.
His sleep was broken by a recurring nightmare in which Russell and Power were trying to bury Nick under a pile of corpses. Drew woke, covered in sweat and shouting, ‘But he’s alive, he’s alive.’ As the realisation dawned, he turned and lay staring at the blank wall.
He got up late the next morning. A letter had arrived which did nothing to lift his mood. It was short and to the point: ‘No go. Need more – much more. Danny.’
Drew turned the envelope over in his hands. It could have been his imagination, but he thought it had been tampered with. He threw it angrily into the bin and lay down again, staring at the ceiling. Hard though he cudgelled his brains, he could think of nothing to link the loss of control of his Tempest over Bosnia with the crash in the Eden Valley.
He showered again and shaved three days’ stubble from his chin, then headed for the canteen. Starving though he was, he managed only a few mouthfuls before he felt full. He pushed his plate away and went to report to the medical centre.
The medics carried out even more tests than usual, then sedated him and confined him to a hospital bed for twenty-four hours. In his drugged state, he kept replaying the loss of the Tempest in his head. Something kept nagging at him, just below the surface of his thoughts: but, try as he might, he could not drag it to the front of his mind.
* * *
He woke the next morning feeling rested, cold and calm. As he shaved, he stared hard-eyed at his reflection. The face looking back at him was icily determined. After another battery of tests, the medics were forced to pass him as fit. Even the injury to his side, sustained as he parachuted down into the Bosnian forest, proved to be only severe bruising.
It was almost lunchtime when he finally escaped. He checked his watch, then went to the Sergeants’ Mess in search of Neville Springer, the most experienced member of the ground crew.
Springer was holding court at the bar, but he broke off to greet Drew with genuine warmth. ‘We heard you made it back, sir. Glad you did. The first one’s on me.’
He signalled to the barman. ‘I’m sorry about Nick Jackson, though. It’s always the best blokes who go, isn’t it?’
Drew nodded, his face a mask.
Springer shook his head. ‘It’s silly, I know, but even though they’d already put it out on the Tannoy that you’d been forced to eject, the ground crew waited on the line all day, until nightfall, just in case you got the aircraft back somehow.’
‘I’d be even more touched if I didn’t know that you were more worried about your aircraft than you were about us.’ Drew’s voice cracked.
‘Quite right, sir,’ Springer said. ‘But we are honoured. We don’t often get aircrew slumming it in here. Come to see how the other half lives?’
‘As a matter of fact, I’ve come to see if I can buy you a beer.’
Springer’s response was to drain his glass instantly, but, as he wiped the foam from his lips, he paused. ‘But there’s no such thing as a free beer, is there?’
Drew smiled ruefully. ‘Well, I did want to pick your brains about something.’
‘Pick away,’ Springer said evenly. ‘I’m like a parking meter; I’m all yours as long as you keep putting another beer in the slot.’
Drew bought them both another drink, sat down at a quiet table, then came straight to the point. ‘I’m trying to work out why we’re losing so many Tempests.’
‘Not really your department, sir, is it?’ Springer said, swallowing half his beer at one gulp.
‘Don’t you start. I’ve been getting that from Russell non-stop for the past few weeks.’
‘So what can I tell you that the combined intellectual might of 21 Squadron hasn’t been able to work out for itself?’
Drew shrugged. ‘There weren’t the same problems with the original Tempests, were there?’
‘No. We lost a few in training accidents as we always do, but nothing like the rate we’ve been losing the RS series.’
‘When they carried out the modifications to the Tempest, what exactly was altered?’
‘What wasn’t? They changed the engines and replaced the weapons systems. Just about the only thing that wasn’t altered was the computer. As usual, they kept upgrading the specification and squeezing the budget – more bangs, less bucks. To cut costs, they fitted one central processing unit rather than dedicated computers, so the original computer is driving some much more sophisticated weapons systems.’
‘Could that be part of the problem?’
Springer shrugged. ‘It’s been tested to the limit on more simulators than you can shake a stick at and nothing’s ever shown up, as far as I know. You really need to talk to one of the computer organ-grinders who designed it, not the grease monkeys who mend it, but I can’t see any of them breaking the Official Secrets Act to talk turkey with a mere pilot, even supposing you can find one who uses English as a first language instead of MS-DOS.’
‘Something’s going wrong somewhere, though, isn’t it?’
Springer nodded, smiling as he raised a fresh beer to his lips. ‘But your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps there are just a lot of shitty pilots about. They should get ground crew to fly the jets. The blokes that have to repair them would treat them with a bit more respect.’
Drew grinned. As he got up to leave, he spotted some unfamiliar faces among the ground crew lounging against the bar. ‘Who are those guys?’
Springer swivelled to follow his gaze. ‘They’re with a Puma squadron that flew in while you were on your holidays.’
‘Pumas?’ Drew said. ‘Which squadron?’
‘Thirty-three,’ Springer said, but found himself talking to thin air.
‘Good to see you back, Mr Miller,’ Springer said to Drew’s swiftly retreating back.
Chapter Sixteen
Drew found Michelle sitting in the spring sunshine outside the Officers’ Club – a ramshackle breeze-block building, roofed with a piece of rusting corrugated iron and surrounded by a few battered iron tables and chairs. In the eyes of visiting aircrew, its only saving grace was three massive fridges, each stocked with cold beer and wine. Michelle was with Sandy Craig and Paul Westerman.
As soon as she saw him, she jumped up and ran to him. She kissed him and held him fiercely, then led him back to the table, still holding his hand. Catching the embarrassed looks of her crewmen, she smiled and released Drew’s hand, then sank back into her chair.
Drew nodded to the other two, pulled up a chair and added his feet to the circle on the table top.
‘So,’ Michelle said. ‘You decided to walk round Bosnia instead of flying over it?’
‘And Nick?’ Paul asked.
‘Didn’t eve
n get the chance to walk. The Serbs used him for target practice as he was dangling from his chute.’
‘I know, I heard,’ Michelle said leaning over to squeeze his hand again. ‘I’m sorry.’
Paul stretched, yawned, got to his feet and said, ‘Sandy and I have to go and do something. See you two later.’
‘What?’ Sandy said, startled.
‘You know, that thing we were talking about earlier.’
‘What thing?’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, get out of that chair. I’ll explain on the way.’
He winked at Drew and Michelle and dragged the still-protesting Sandy away.
‘I wish the guys on squadron were even a tenth as tactful,’ Drew said.
‘I’ve done the same for him once or twice,’ Michelle said. ‘Though it doesn’t always work out for the best. I discreetly left him to chat up a woman on a USAF base in Carolina once and found him two hours later with a black eye and a missing tooth. His new friend’s husband had come home unexpectedly early.’ She paused. ‘Why don’t you get me another beer. In fact, make it two more,’ she said, as he stood up. ‘We could take them down to the beach.’
‘Only the Brits would go to the beach in March. The locals are still wearing overcoats and turning up the heating.’
Michelle flashed him a smile that set his heart pounding. ‘More fool them. They don’t know what they’re missing.’
They walked away from the base, picking their way among the tangle of boulders, as basking lizards darted away from beneath their feet. They wandered along the shoreline until they found a quiet cove.
Michelle put down her beers and turned to face him, slipping a bare brown arm around his neck. ‘It’s great to see you,’ she said. ‘I’ve missed you.’
Her mouth searched for his, her tongue darting between his lips. He crushed her to him, then heard the sound of footfalls and gasping breath. They pulled apart as two puce-faced joggers came lumbering into view, staring at them as they passed, their feet floundering in the soft sand.
Michelle laughed. She held him at arm’s length, still with a wry smile playing around her lips.
Drew was about to pull her to him again when his eye was caught by a flash of reflected light from the control tower on the runway. He shook his head, then smiled. ‘There’s a pair of binoculars pointing straight at us from the control tower. It wouldn’t surprise me if they aren’t broadcasting a blow-by-blow description over the Tannoy.’
‘Then let’s just sit here and talk.’ She gave him a slow smile. ‘I might just persuade you to give something away about yourself.’ He hesitated. ‘Don’t you trust me?’
‘I don’t know if I trust myself.’
Michelle looked deep into his eyes. ‘Was it very bad out there?’
He nodded, turning slightly away from her to stop her seeing that he was close to tears. He watched the waves roll up the beach for a while before speaking again. He told her about Nick and his escape, and about hiding on the outskirts of the village, hearing the screams. And, haltingly, he told her about the man whose clothes he had to take.
‘It sounds crazy, but the worst thing was the photograph of his wife and kids. She had her arms round them and her look said, “It’s tough where we are, but we love each other, so everything’s going to be all right…’ He wiped his eyes. ‘She was wrong, wasn’t she?’
Michelle reached out and touched his hand. ‘She made you think of your mother, didn’t she?’
‘Christ Almighty,’ Drew said. ‘For a moment I thought she was my mother.’ He hesitated, but could no longer stop the memories from crowding in. ‘My father was a real caricature Glaswegian. Though he never hit my mother, even when he was drunk, he took out a lot of his frustrations on her in other ways.’
‘Like what?’
‘He used to belittle her and criticise her constantly. Nothing that you could really put your finger on and say that’s going too far, just a steady drip, drip, drip of negativity that stripped her of her confidence and self-respect.
‘Like a lot of of women then, she put up with it and transferred all her own dreams and ambitions on to her child. She dedicated herself to me, worked her fingers to the bone for me and I took it all without even a show of gratitude, and even complained there wasn’t more.’
‘You can’t blame yourself,’ Michelle said gently. ‘Every kid’s the same. It’s only when you’ve grown up yourself that you begin to realise how much they sacrificed for you.’
He nodded mechanically, his gaze still far away.
‘The only thing I ever did for her was help her die.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She had cancer of the brain. She’d been in hospital for quite a while. They sent her home to die, though of course that was never actually mentioned. A district nurse came in twice a day, but otherwise there was only my dad and me to look after her.
‘I found it strange and very frightening. She had patches of lucidity, but there were long periods when she didn’t really seem to know us at all. I opened the curtains one morning and she gasped in surprise at a view she’d seen every day for years.
‘Anyway, my father began to crack up. He couldn’t stand sitting around the house, just waiting for her not to be there. On the third day she was home, I’d bunked off school. My father went out to the pub about eleven in the morning and was gone all afternoon.
‘I went upstairs to see if she was all right. She was deathly pale apart from two bright red spots in the middle of her cheeks, but she was sitting up in bed. She took my hand, made me sit on the bed and tell her everything I’d been doing. I was so happy because I thought she was getting better.’
He broke off, smiling at his own naivety. ‘Doctors call it the brightening, apparently; it nearly always happens before someone dies. I sat with her through the afternoon, chatting to her, but she gradually fell silent again and the colour faded from her cheeks. She stopped responding when I spoke to her, though I felt she could still hear me, and her breathing grew more and more laboured and irregular.
‘I wanted to call the doctor but we didn’t have a phone and I didn’t dare leave her to go to the one at the end of the street. I just stayed there hoping my dad would come home.
‘When I took her hand again, it was icy cold. Her eyes flickered open at my touch, then closed. I didn’t know what else to do, so I talked to her quietly, just saying anything that came into my head, trying to soothe and calm her.
‘I talked about drifting downstream on a river: “It’s warm and the sunlight is dappling the water. The air is heavy, you can hear the water lapping, the birds singing and a bee buzzing by. It’s so peaceful you could just lie there all day, drifting along, drifting along.” That sort of thing.’
He glanced at Michelle, but she nodded encouragingly.
‘After a few minutes, the cold in her fingers had spread to her wrists. She was lying still. There was only the rasp of her breath to show that she was still alive. I heard the door open downstairs, as the nurse came in on her evening visit, but I still let my voice run on. “Just let yourself go with it, feel the river drifting away. All your friends are there on the bank. They’re all waiting for you, just let yourself go, and drift away on the stream; drift down the river, under the trees, into the shade…”
‘Her breathing stopped abruptly. I broke off and sat motionless, watching her face. There was a long, long silence. Five, ten, fifteen seconds – I don’t know how long it was – as I held her hand tightly. There were tears trickling down my cheeks. I heard the nurse come upstairs and called out to her, “I think she’s gone,” but suddenly there was a gasp and she started breathing again.
‘The nurse looked at her, then went out again, quietly closing the door. I began to talk again about the river. Her breathing stopped again, restarted with another convulsive gasp, stopped and started again. She was frail, paper-thin, but she was still fighting. I never knew how hard the dying cling on to life till then.
‘There w
as another breath and then silence. I held my own breath and waited, waited and waited. At last I exhaled and this time there was nothing. I sat there crying, holding her cold hand until the nurse came back into the room and told me to go downstairs. My father came home an hour later. He didn’t even go up and look at her. He just sat in his chair staring into the fire.’
Drew brushed the tears away again. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’ She leaned over and kissed him, then looked at him in silence for a moment. ‘You’ve changed, Drew. Just in a few days.’
‘How?’
‘You seem…’ She hesitated, trying to find the right words. ‘You’re different. I can’t explain it.’
They stayed on the beach for hours, watching the sun sink behind the hills and the sky reddening into dusk. A cool breeze had begun to blow and finally Michelle sat up and shivered. ‘Come on, let’s get back. I’m freezing.’
She leaned over to kiss the corners of Drew’s mouth as he lay there, staring up at the sky and listening to the waves.
‘Not bad, is it?’
Drew’s smile faded. ‘I’d better make the most of this. It could be my last overseas trip at Air Force expense.’
As they walked back along the beach, she slipped an arm through his and laid her head on his shoulder. ‘I wish I could do something to help. I had to give them a statement about what I saw, but to be honest I didn’t see that much. I just said that I saw the aircraft coming in high from the left, in a descending turn. The next thing I knew there was a pall of smoke.’
‘I was thinking things through while I was in sickbay yesterday, and you could do something to help.’
‘What?’
‘I need to get back to England. I promised Sally – Nick’s wife – that if anything ever happened to him I’d be the one to tell her. It’s already too late for that, but I must go and see her.’
He hesitated. ‘I’m also going to go and see someone at Barnwold Industries. They made the Tempest. It’s in their interests to help find out what’s going wrong with it.’
‘Will they see it like that? They’re still trying to sell them abroad. Their sales pitch won’t exactly be helped if they have to admit that the aircraft keep falling out of the sky of their own accord. And, even if they were willing to help, you can’t just march up to the front door and ask to see the managing director.’
Point of Impact Page 24