Derek Robinson - Hullo Russia, Goodbye England

Silk thought about Skull. It couldn’t have been an ordinary posting. Movement orders normally took days, or weeks; they didn’t happen overnight. The odds were that Skull had got the chop again. He’d been shat on from a great height. This was such a bleak thought that Silk forced it out of his mind, searched for a happy replacement, and got Zoë. She could easily capture his mind with a royal flush of memories; but Zoë was moving to Seattle. The better the memory, the bigger his loss. He kicked Zoë out, and in came Tess Monk, riding her bike. She’d chucked him out. He forgot her. What he couldn’t get rid of was this act of forgetting. Everywhere he looked, he lost people, one after another, bang crash wallop, and it hurt. He turned to Young. “So you’re a mountaineer, are you?” he said. “You must be mad. Explain to me how you’re not mad.”

“Ah, well now…” Young didn’t turn his head. His flying was rock-steady. Maybe this was a test, an attempt to distract his attention. He checked the major dials and indicators: all correct. “Good mountaineers have a love of the mountain, they understand the rock and work with its shape. Bad climbers treat the mountain as hostile, and they fight it and lose, sometimes they die. Ten years ago, the newspapers said Everest was conquered. Wrong. Nobody conquers a mountain. What happens is it lets you share its space for a while.” He checked the fuel gauges. Okay.

“Still, it’s dangerous,” Silk said. “You wouldn’t do it if it was safe.”

“I wouldn’t be on a Vulcan squadron if I wanted a quiet life.”

“Nothing lasts forever, not even Vulcans.” That got no reply. “We’re the last in line,” Silk said. “After us, empty skies.” Still no comment. “Make the most of it, I say. What’s the best mountain in Scotland?”

“Not Ben Nevis,” Young said. “Too many tourists in gym shoes. It once had a hotel at the top. Imagine that. A hotel… I prefer the Northern Highlands. There’s a peak called Suilven…”

At that height, through the cockpit window, Scotland was unseen. When Young got a course change from the back room and gently banked the bomber, Scotland might be glimpsed. From eight miles high it looked as flat as a map.

Talk about mountaineering whiled away the time until they reached Benbecula and then it was all business: steady cruising at fixed heights and speeds and bearings while Dando switched his black boxes on and off, and 81 Signals Unit got washed in their electronic energy. Then Young turned north. Their flight plan took them clockwise around the coast of Scotland, and finally south to East Anglia and Kindrick. Routine trip. Not even a mock interception by Hunter fighters. Maybe Fighter Command had lost the hangar key.

“Good,” Silk said to Young. “I have control.”

Young sat back and poured himself some coffee. Silk got a course change to 075 degrees: just north of east. “Landfall at Cape Wrath,” Hallett said. Silk did nothing. Hallett repeated the new bearing. “Tell you what,” Silk said. “Let’s go and look at the scenic grandeur which our second pilot so much admires. What’s a nice juicy sea loch near here?” he asked Young.

“Sea loch… Let me think… Well, Loch Laxford is due east of us, maybe a bit south.”

“I need a course to Loch Laxford, Jack.”

“Give me a second, skip.”

Silk put the Vulcan into a wide, descending spiral. When he got the new course he was down to thirty thousand feet. “You know this isn’t on our flight plan, Skip,” Hallett said.

“No, I don’t,” Silk said, “but you whistle the opening bars and I’ll pick it up as we go along.”

Not even an old joke: a very old joke. Nobody laughed. Nobody spoke as Silk kept circling and losing height. At ten thousand feet he straightened out and made a shallow dive towards the mainland. When he entered Loch Laxford he was down to five thousand: still a mile high. “Damn letterbox windscreens,” he said. “No good to man nor beast.” He banked, steeply this time, and flew out to sea. When he returned, the bomber was low, and getting lower. “Nav radar to pilot,” Tucker said. “Altitude six hundred and falling.”

“You talk to them,” Silk said. “I’m too busy driving.”

He flew into the long, twisting valley of Loch Laxford at a leisurely 250 knots and 400 feet above the water. There were islands, not big, not high, and the land on either side was rugged but not threatening. “I see what you mean,” he said. “Quite delightful.” In shadow, the loch was grey; in sunlight it was green and blue. Loch Laxford was five miles long; the Vulcan covered it in a little over a minute.

“Mountains ahead,” Hallett said.

“We see them,” Young said.

“Which do you recommend?” Silk asked him.

“Ben Stack. Go dead ahead, follow the road, four or five miles, you can’t miss it, I mean give it lots of space, it’s two thousand feet high and close to the road.” Young heard the rapid-fire tension in his voice and told himself to be calm.

“Altitude four hundred and fifty,” Dando said.

Ben Stack was a magnificent hulk, and Silk showed it respect by keeping a quarter-mile distance as he circled it. The Vulcan had used a lot of fuel; it performed better now it was lighter. “Impressive,” Silk said, “but not majestic. What’s next?”

“Steer one-nine-zero,” Young said. “Skip: are we doing a low-flying exercise?”

“Mountains ahead, thirteen hundred feet,” Hallett said.

“We see them. That’s Ben Strome, steer east of it,” Young told Silk. “Look for the lochs, they’re near sea level, it’s safer there.” Silk nudged the Vulcan away from Ben Strome. Young said, “Is this an official low-level job?”

“What a lot of heather. Let’s say it’s a pioneering low-level job.”

The Vulcan swept around the flanks of Ben Strome and turned south, briefly chasing its shadow across acres of peat bog.

“Mountains coming up,” Hallett said. “Many mountains, and high.”

“That’s Quinag,” Young said. “You must be extra careful here.”

Silk skipped over a couple of lochs and a road, and lined up the Quinag range. “Doesn’t look much,” he said.

“Please, please, do a circuit. Look it over first.”

Silk dropped his speed to 200 knots and prowled all around Quinag. “See what you mean,” he said. “Several peaks.”

“Five high ones, up to twenty-six hundred feet. Steep isn’t the word. On a good day, the view of Eddrachilis Bay is… I wouldn’t swap all of England for it.”

“Isn’t that a little loch?” Silk dipped a wingtip to improve their view. Sun glinted on water, deep in the black heart of Quinag. “There’s a big valley leading up to it. That’s a glen, isn’t it?”

“With a sheer wall at the far end.”

“Vulcans climb walls. Didn’t they teach you that at your OCU?”

He banked and flew at Quinag, opening the throttles until the speed neared 300 knots. The glen was vast. It seemed to swallow the Vulcan. More throttle, but no more height. Young had the illusion that the bomber was skimming the stream that led to the little loch, an illusion created by the rising sides of the mountains as they narrowed the glen. He told himself it would be a painless death, smeared over two thousand feet of vertical sandstone. That was when Silk gave full throttle and pulled the control stick back and the Vulcan stood on its tail and left Quinag standing.

They levelled out a five thousand feet. “Always a pleasure,” Silk said. “I could get to enjoy this mountaineering game. Now where’s your favourite peak? Where’s Suilven?”

When Young first set out to climb Suilven, he didn’t know it was perhaps the most remote mountain in Britain. He took a day just to cross the wilderness surrounding it. Broken peat bogs, flat jungles of deep heather, erratic sheep trails that faded to nothing; and the weather was foul. He camped under the awesome heights, streaked silver by the run-off of rain. Next day, typical Highland weather: beautiful. He climbed the mountain and walked its ridge, a dozen roller-coaster miles, much of it knife-edged. When he wasn’t terrified he was bewitched. Then the rains returned: another wilderness slog. Three secret, sacred days.