Джеймс Блатч - The Final Flight

The flight lieutenant scratched his chin for a moment. “So, you want me to swap the spare Canberra for the ADF trial, release their jet for you, and move the Devon to spare?” He said it slowly, as if testing the viability of the suggestion.

“If it’s not too much trouble?”

Pete looked at his papers, which Millie now realised were the tasking sheets for the day. No doubt he would have some unwanted new paperwork.

After a moment, he shrugged and said brightly, “I don’t see why not.”

“Marvellous. Thank you, Pete. Very kind.”

Millie left the room, avoiding any further questions.

He walked to his locker. Having the tapes hidden within was dangerous. He’d openly raised concerns about the project; if the material was discovered, out of place in his possession, Kilton would probably jump to the correct conclusion.

A fast-track to retirement would the very best he could hope for.

Millie pulled his car keys out of his pocket and opened the wooden door. He felt inside, checking the reels remained in place.

“Millie?”

He slammed the locker shut, spinning around to see a surprised-looking Pete.

“Sorry to startle you. Just wanted to know how late you can depart.”

“We need to be in a meeting at Warton for 14.30 local, so sometime after 13.00? Rob will come up with a more precise time.”

Pete nodded and looked pleased. “OK, good. We need both Canberras this morning, but it should be no problem to get one refuelled for you in time for 13.00.”

“Thank you, Pete. And make sure it’s Oscar Mike, please.” The whole exercise would be futile if Pete gave him the wrong aircraft.

Back in the main planning room, Millie sat down at one of the side desks. The room was filling up fast. Loud complaints about the gate security filled the air.

The pilots and navs disappeared off to the met brief.

Millie pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. He placed it on his desk and stared at the ten lines of numbers he’d taken down from Belkin.

He had the secure cabinet unlocked, and retrieved the Guiding Light manuals. A normal enough exercise for the project leader.

The manual contained schematics of the equipment itself, detailed descriptions of the inner workings.

It was one of the most valuable documents in the world.

But after ten minutes of leafing through, he was no closer to explaining what the first two fields were.

Before handing the file back, Millie had a thought. He wondered if he would need the basic schematics to submit as part of his evidence? The file was rarely looked at now. They used it in the early days, but it was likely he was the first to pull it out in months.

There was a danger it would get moved to a secure archive soon.

He removed four key pages.

With the room still quiet, he handed the file back before slipping the folded schematics alongside the reels in his locker.

Back at the desk, he stared at the two fields, hoping for some moment of inspiration.

0000127344 15105550114922

0000127681 15105550114810

0000128001 15105600014834

Again, he noticed how the first column of numbers appeared to go up sequentially, and evenly, with each line, but the second number went both up and down.

The first column might be the time, but not in a form he recognised.

The room filled up again; the met brief had obviously concluded.

An idea struck Millie, as he recalled a TV documentary he’d seen recently on the Apollo project. Casting around the room, he saw Red Brunson, friend of the astronauts, standing at the tea bar.

As he stood up, Rob appeared next to him.

“Morning. Thank you for lunch, and sorry if I was a little overbearing. Mary told me off when we got home.”

Millie smiled. “No apology necessary. Living under the shadow of the bomb does that to man.” Rob laughed. “Anyway, how’s the weather?”

“Ah, well you can look out of the window, or I can tell you what the met man just said. I doubt the two are related. But we should be fine. Anything I need to prepare for this afternoon?”

“I don’t think so. You just need to ensure the Guiding Light panels are identical at your end in the cockpit and I’ll do the same down below. The boss wants crews to swap between the jets easily. And I think it’s all being done in a bit of a rush, so the drawings might not be reliable.”

“OK, fine. I’m up with Red in the Victor this morning. Simple radio trial. Should be done by eleven.”

“Sounds like fun.” Rob loitered for a moment, looking down at the sheet of paper on Millie’s desk.

“Picked up some young ladies’ telephone numbers?”

Millie’s hand covered the handwritten lines of data.

“Oh, no. It’s nothing.”

“Ha. It’s OK, Millie, I didn’t really think you’d pulled.” He moved off.

Millie slipped the sheet back in his pocket and went for a cup of tea.

The American stood over a planning desk. Millie poured himself a cup from the urn and joined him.

“Red, quick question. You once said something about the computer on the Apollo project?”

“Yeah, pretty neat. The guys at Edwards told me it runs the show. They do everything from the ground, more or less. The pilots—sorry, astronauts—they’re only there to flick the odd switch. Strange.”

“And I recall you said something about the clock.”

“The mission clock, yeah. What about it?”

“Is it important to know the time?”

“It’s not the time, it’s the mission clock. A different thing. It’s absolutely vital. Same as the Gemini and Mercury projects before Apollo, the computer does everything according to the clock. That famous countdown to launch? That’s not just for the television. That’s the mission clock, counting down. Then it starts counting up. T-minus something before launch and T-plus something after. Mission elapsed time.”

“I see, so it’s not the actual time? Zulu, Greenwich Mean Time, for instance?”

Red put his hand on Millie’s shoulder. “I know you Brits think you’re the centre of the world, but it ain’t Zulu. It’s just seconds, man. Seconds, minutes, hours, days.”

“Interesting.”

“Sure is, skip.”

Back at his desk, Millie quietly opened up the sheet.

He did some maths on the first field, subtracting the second line from the first.

0000127681 – 0000127344

The difference was three hundred and thirty-seven. He furrowed his brow. Far too many seconds.

According to the file, the laser fed the computer three reports of height data every second.

He looked back at the numbers:

0000127344

0000127681

0000128001

“Bingo,” he whispered.

The fourth digit along must be whole seconds, followed by hundredths. So the first height came at 127.344 seconds, the next at 127.681, and the third at 128.001. Gaps of roughly one third of a second.

He could see it clearly now.

On the pad where he had written the numbers, he added column headers for the first set:

s s s s s s h h h

0 0 0 1 2 7 3 4 4

He thought back to the flight where these readings were created. Why did it all start at 127.344 seconds?

Millie had switched on Guiding Light as they rolled down the runway, but hadn’t started the tape until they were established on their route. He’d checked it was working, first by dialling through the eleven data feeds, then switching the tape recorder to RUN .

127.344 seconds. Two minutes of fiddling. That was about right.

It all made sense.

One field down, one to go.

THEY GOT airborne in the Canberra at 13.40, for a meeting at 14.30 local in Lancashire. Flight time was a miserly forty minutes, but enough for two tapes of Guiding Light height data.