Frederick Forsyth: The Shepherd

As the fighter slipped towards Norfolk the sense of loneliness gripped me tighter and tighter. All those things that had seemed so beautiful as I had climbed away from the Westphalian airfield now seemed my worst enemies. The stars were no longer impressive in their brilliance; I thought of their hostility, sparkling away there in the timeless, lost infinities, of endless sub-zero space. The night sky, its stratospheric temperature fixed, night and day alike, at an unchanging fifty-six degrees below zero, became in my mind a limitless prison creaking with the cold. Below me lay the worst of them all, the heavy brutality of the North Sea, waiting to swallow up me and my plane and bury us for endless eternity in a liquid crypt where nothing moved, nor would ever move again. And no one would ever know.

At 15,000 feet and still diving, I began to realize that a fresh, and for me the last, enemy had entered the field. There was no ink-black sea three miles below me, no necklace of twinkling seaside lights somewhere up ahead. Far away, to right and left, ahead and no doubt behind me, the light of the moon reflected on a flat and endless sea of white. Perhaps only a hundred, two hundred, feet thick, but enough. Enough to blot out all vision, enough to kill me. The East Anglian fog had moved in.

As I had flown westwards from Germany a slight breeze, unforeseen by the weather men, had sprung up blowing from the North Sea towards Norfolk.

During the previous day the flat, open ground of East Anglia had been frozen hard by the wind and the sub-zero temperatures. During the evening the wind had moved a belt of slightly warmer air off the North Sea and on to the plains of East Anglia. There, coming in contact with the ice-cold earth, the trillions of tiny moisture particles in the sea air had vapourized, forming the kind of fog that can blot out five counties in a matter of thirty minutes. How far westward it stretched I could not tell; to the West Midlands, perhaps, nudging up against the eastern slopes of the Pennines? There was no question of trying to overfly the fog to the westwards; without navigational aids or radio, I would be lost over strange, unfamiliar country. Also out of the question was to try and fly back to Holland, to land at one of the Dutch air force bases along the coast there; I had not the fuel. Relying only on my eyes to guide me, it was a question of landing at Merriam Saint George or dying amid the wreckage of the Vampire somewhere in the fog-wreathed fens of Norfolk.

At 10,000 feet I pulled out of my dive, increasing power slightly to keep myself airborne, using up more of my precious fuel. Still a creature of my training, I recalled the instructions of Flight Sergeant Norris again.

“When we are totally lost above unbroken cloud, gentlemen, we must consider the necessity of bailing out of our aircraft, must we not?”

Of course, Sergeant. Unfortunately the Martin Baker ejector seat cannot be fitted to the single seat Vampire which is notorious for being almost impossible to bale out of, the only two successful candidates living lost their legs in the process. Still, there has to be a first lucky one. What else, Sergeant?

“Our first move, therefore, is to turn our aircraft towards the open sea, away from all areas of intense human habitation.”

You mean towns, Sergeant. These people down there pay for us to fly for them, not to drop a screaming monster of ten tons of steel on top of them on Christmas Eve. There are kids down there, schools, hospitals, homes. You turn your aircraft out to sea.

The procedures were all worked out. They did not mention that the chances of a pilot, bobbing about in a winter’s night in the North Sea, frozen face lashed by sub-zero wind, supported by a yellow life-jacket, ice en crusting on his lips, eyebrows, ears, his position unknown by the men sipping their Christmas punches in warm rooms three hundred miles away that his chances were less than one in a hundred of living longer than one hour. In the training films they showed you pictures of happy fellows who had announced by radio that they were ditching, being picked up by helicopters within minutes, and all on a bright, warm summer’s day.

“One last procedure, gentlemen, to be used in extreme emergency.”

That’s better, Sergeant Norris, that’s what I’m in now.

“All aircraft approaching Britain’s coasts are visible on the radar scanners of our early warning system. If, therefore, we have lost our radio, and cannot transmit our emergency, we try to attract the attention of our radar scanners by adopting an odd form of behaviour. We do this by moving out to sea, then flying in small triangles, turning left, left, and left again, each leg of the triangle being of a duration of two minutes flying time. In this way we hope to attract attention. When we have been spotted, the air traffic controller is informed, and he diverts another aircraft to find us. This other aircraft of course has radio. When discovered by the rescue aircraft, we formate on him, and he brings us down through the cloud or fog to a safe landing.”

Yes, it was the last attempt to save one’s life. I recalled the details better now. The rescue aircraft who would lead you back to a safe landing, flying wing-tip to wing-tip, was called the shepherd. I glanced at my watch; fifty-one minutes airborne, thirty minutes left of fuel. The fuel gauge read one-third full. Knowing myself to be still short of the Norfolk coast, and flying level at 10,000 feet in the moonlight, I pulled the Vampire into a left-hand turn and began my first leg of the first triangle. After two minutes, I pulled left again, hoping (without a compass) to be able to judge 120 degrees, using the moon as a rough guide. Below me the fog reached back as far as I could see, and ahead of me also, towards Norfolk, it was the same.

Ten minutes went by, nearly two complete triangles. I had not prayed, not really prayed, for many years and the habit came hard. Lord, please get me out of this bloody mess… no, you mustn’t talk like that to Him. Our Father, which art in Heaven… he’d heard that a thousand times, would be hearing it another thousand times tonight. What do you say to Him when you want help? Please, God, make somebody notice me up here, please make someone see me flying in triangles and send up a shepherd to help me down to a safe landing. Please help me, and I promise… What on earth could I promise Him? He had no need of me, and I who now had need of Him had taken no notice of Him for so long He’d probably forgotten all about me.

By seventy-two minutes airborne on my watch I knew no one would come. The compass still drifted aimlessly through all the points of the circle, the other electrical instruments were dead, all their needles pointing at zero. My altimeter said 7,000 feet, so I had dropped 3,000 feet while turning. No matter. The fuel read almost one-eighth full say ten minutes more flying time. I felt the rage of despair welling up. I began screaming into the dead microphone.

You stupid bastards, why don’t you look at your radar screens? Why can’t somebody see me up here? All so damn drunk you can’t do your jobs properly. Oh God, why won’t somebody listen to me? By then the anger had subsided and I had taken to blubbering like a baby from the sheer helplessness of it all.

Five minutes later I knew, without any doubt of it, that I was going to die that night. Strangely, I wasn’t even afraid any more. Just enormously sad. Sad for all the things I would never do, the places I would never see, the people I would never greet again. It’s a bad thing, a sad thing, to die at twenty years old with your life unlived, and the worst thing of all is not the fact of dying but the fact of all the things never done.

Out through the perspex I could see the moon was setting, hovering above the horizon of thick white fog; in another two minutes the night sky would be plunged into total darkness and a few minutes later I would have to bale out of a dying aircraft before it flicked over on its last dive into the North Sea. An hour later I would be dead also, bobbing around in the water, a bright yellow Mae West jacket supporting a stiff, frozen body. I dropped the left wing of the Vampire towards the moon to bring the aircraft on to the final leg of the last triangle.