Derek Robinson - Hullo Russia, Goodbye England

“I wasn’t told.”

“You didn’t think to ask.” He watched Skull take off his tunic and look for somewhere to hang it. “This isn’t the Dorchester,” Silk said. “Chuck it behind you.”

He got on with his job, talking to the rear crew and to the tower. Skull knew enough to plug in his intercom but he understood little: the talk was too fast, too cropped. Then the engines started and it was like sitting in the middle of a ceaseless thunderstorm. The cockpit vibrated: not much, but Skull sensed disaster and his hands squeezed the armrests. The vibration began to hurt his teeth. He discovered that he was clenching his jaws, and he forced himself to relax.

The bomber rolled. It was raining and the wipers were flinging water off the windscreen with a fury that he found manic. He closed his eyes. “Kick the tyres and light the fires,” Silk said. Skull opened his eyes. “Good luck charm,” Silk told him. He moved the throttles and the thunderstorm was lost in a volcanic blast. Skull thrust himself back against his seat and the nightmare swarmed about him. Everything was out of control. It got worse: the Vulcan tipped backwards until he was watching the cloudbase hurtle towards them. They smashed through it and gradually he came unstuck from his seat. The engines had faded to a soft bellow. His ears popped. The sun came out. Silk gave him a boiled sweet. “How high are we?” Skull asked.

“By the time I tell you we’ll be higher still.”

Life became less intolerable. The Vulcan levelled out and the engines settled down to a steady roar, no worse than collapsing surf. “Cruise climb,” Silk said. Skull knew what that was: burning fuel to lose weight to climb more easily. “What’s our target?” he asked. Silk gave him a map.

A long and very jagged red line ended at the city of Sverdlovsk. Skull loathed it. Bolsheviks shot the Tsar’s family there in 1918. Soviet missile knocked down Gary Powers’ U2 spy plane there in 1960. Skull didn’t gave a toss about the Tsar or Powers: they got what they asked for. What appalled him was that Sverdlovsk was forty miles east of the Ural Mountains. It was in Siberia. It was more than halfway to China. This raid stretched in front of him like a jail sentence. “Where the devil do we land?” he asked.

“First things first. Make yourself useful and lower the blinds.”

Skull did. Now even the letterbox view of blue sky was lost. The cabin seemed much smaller. His demons were going to love this.

Nothing terrible happened for a while. Sometimes a small red or green light blinked. Silk clicked a switch and the light vanished. Needles flickered in softly lit gauges. Once, Silk turned a dial, held it briefly, then turned it back to its original position. “What was that in aid of?” Skull asked.

“BBC. News headlines.”

Skull gave up. He looked at the map. A horribly long way to Moscow, and Sverdlovsk was another seven hundred miles beyond that. Jesus wept.

“Second pilot’s job is to switch over the fuel tanks,” Silk said, “but I don’t suppose you can use a sliderule.”

“That’s right, I can’t.”

“Then I’ll have to do it. I’m rotten at sums. What’s nine eights? Never mind. If I get it wrong there’s probably somewhere we can land, some Polish bog –”

Tucker’s voice broke in. “The weapon’s hot, skip.”

Skull’s fingers made a small tear in the map.

“How hot is hot?” Silk asked.

“Three degrees above safe.”

“Three degrees.” Silk scratched his nose. “Three degrees, you say.”

Skull cleared his throat. “Blue Steel?”

“Yup. Blue Steel it is. The boys in the backroom keep a close eye on its HTP. That’s High –”

“I know what HTP is.” Skull felt a small surge of optimism. Blue Steel’s Stentor engine ran on kerosene and High Test Peroxide. HTP supplied the oxygen to make kerosene burn in thin air; but HTP was more dangerous than TNT. It demanded airtight tanks and immaculate handling. A speck of dust might trigger a ferocious reaction. Then the HTP would leak a torrent of exploding oxygen that would ignite everything it touched. Crews were ordered to abandon a flight if the temperature of their Blue Steel’s HTP rose by five degrees. Skull relaxed. This might be a very short flight.

“Could be a freak reading,” Silk told the rear crew. “Duff equipment, maybe. Any change?”

Pause. Then: “Two point seven, skip.”

“Gremlins. They get in everywhere.”

“Two point six. Two point four.”

Skull despaired. Even faulty equipment was against him. “What difference does it make?” he said. “It’s too late to turn back now. If the Blue Steel overheats, we’ll go to hell with it.”

“Dear me,” Silk said. “That doesn’t sound like your normal cheery briefing, Skull.”

A different voice said: “Morale here in the broom cupboard is very bad. If the second pilot can’t look on the bright side, one of us will shoot him.” It was Dando.

Skull had a great desire to hit someone. He was strapped into his seat, yet he experienced a clumsy, helpless sensation: he was growing bigger, his limbs were expanding, lengthening, his fingers felt like sausages, his feet were remote. If he shut his eyes, his body might return to normal. It was all very exhausting. He fell asleep.

A shout woke him.

“Hey! What was that ?” Silk was leaning forward. “At our nine o’clock. More or less.”

“Gdansk is that way,” Tucker said. “Or maybe Kaliningrad. They’re both air defence centres.”

“What was what?” Skull asked.

“A splash of sun,” Silk said. “It leaked through the anti-flash screen.”

Skull looked at the map. The red line crossed Denmark, entered the Baltic and turned south near the German-Polish border. Gdansk was fifty miles away; Kaliningrad twice that. “Our Thor missiles should have taken them out long ago,” he said. Silk was working on his sliderule. “Maybe it was a Canberra strike. Or an F-100,” Skull said.

“Maybe it was an F-100 getting the chop at forty thousand feet. If it was, Soviet fighters are up in force. Put this on.” Silk gave him a black eye-patch.

The elastic string cut into Skull’s face. He felt foolish, but Silk was wearing an eye-patch, so he said nothing.

The Vulcan zigged and zagged across Poland, into Czechoslovakia, and turned east towards the Ukraine. Its route was designed to avoid Warsaw Pact military centres, anywhere that was heavily defended. But nuclear bursts flared unexpectedly. The rear crew suggested strikes had been made on probable targets: Grudziadz, Bydgoszez, Poznan, Wroclaw, Czestochawa, Olomouc, Zilina, Miscolk… Sometimes blast rippled over great distance and height to rock the bomber. Often Dando told Silk he was jamming the VHF transmissions of Soviet fighter controllers. Otherwise pilot and rear crew had little to say until they crossed the border into the Ukraine and Hallett warned Silk to steer zero-two-zero in order to avoid the known hotspot of Lvov. That was when the Vulcan refused to change direction, the compass broke, and Hallett’s link to the navigational computer in the Blue Steel failed.

Nobody got excited. Each man made his report. Silk said he would steer by varying the thrust and he throttled back the port outer engine. Hallett tackled the compass problem. Tucker tried to revive the Blue Steel computer. Dando found intense VHF activity ahead.

“That’s the bitch about high-level penetration,” Silk told Skull. “Soviet radars can see you coming, two hundred miles away.”

“I know.”

“I know you know. I like sharing the misery, that’s all.”

Skull picked up the map and put it down at once. After Lvov, there were still hundreds and hundreds of miles to fly before they got anywhere near Sverdlovsk. Below was Russia, the Great Motherland, Hitler’s Folly. Skull was an Intelligence Officer. He claimed to deal in facts. Was misery a fact? It must be a factor. How could men fly a thousand miles over Russia, hoping to dodge fighters twice as fast and nuclear-tipped anti-aircraft missiles they couldn’t outclimb, so as to kill a million strangers in some remote city, knowing all the time that the home they had left was history, was ashes, was dead in a flash? How can men do that without suffering paralytic misery? Skull opened his mouth to ask, but Tucker spoke first. MiG-21s were climbing, positioning for a stern attack. He had them on his radar. Dando’s jamming hadn’t worked.