Permissible Limits (39 page)

‘
Chuck was a rotorhead. He was flying one of the big rescue choppers out of Da Nang. We called them the Jollies. At night they’d come in over the DMZ, settle themselves down, and tune in to the strike freqencies.’

‘
He pulled you out?’

‘
Next day, yes.’

‘
Saved your life?’

‘
Without question.’

I looked at Chuck. With enormous tact, he converted a yawn into a hollow cough. There was a long silence. After a while, I frowned.

‘
So how come you screwed the pooch? Why was it your fault? I’m not sure I understand.’

Harald at last met my eyes.

‘
The Corsair’s a single-seater,’ he said quietly. ‘If you’re talking blame, the buck stopped with me.’

After supper, Chuck disappeared. Harald walked his mother back to her room, and before the door closed I heard him kissing her good night. When he came back, he was carrying a cafetiere. The coffee smelled wonderful.

‘
You want to come along to the den? We could talk there.’

If I hesitated, I hoped it didn’t show. I was dog-tired, so tired I could barely get up from the table, but the stuff about Vietnam had intrigued me more than I cared to admit and I wanted to find out more.

I followed Harald through the darkened house. I was trying to shape some kind of plan of the place in my head and I sensed we’d turned into the furthest of the two wings I’d seen when I arrived. Harald paused outside a locked door. I held the cafetiere while he fumbled for a key.

The den, small and cluttered, reminded me at once of Adam’s office beside the hangar on the strip back at Sandown. The desk piled with paperwork. The brimming bookcases. The neatly folded maps. The shadowed pictures jigsawed across the wall. Even the smell was the same, a mixture of old leather, stale coffee and half-smoked cheroots.

Harald waved me on to the low sofa that flanked the desk. When he switched on the little desk lamp beside his laptop, the light pooled on a stack of invoices. Before he tidied them into a drawer, I caught a glimpse of the top one. It came from Steve Liddell Engineering and
for a second or two the sight of the familiar letterhead brought a
lump to my throat. The last time I’d been over to Jersey was with Jamie. I remembered the landing he’d pulled off with the big commercial jet on his tail, and I remembered as well the night we’d spent together, waiting for the weather to clear up. More smells. More memories.

I sat down on the edge of the sofa, swamped by a great wave of longing and hopelessness. God, how I missed him. I stole a glance at my watch, trying to work out what time it might be back in England.

‘
Coffee?’

Harald was stooped over me, and looking up at him I sensed that somehow he knew about Jamie. Maybe he really had been down in the hotel car park that night, watching and waiting. Or maybe it was simple intuition.

I took the polystyrene cup.

‘
Best china,’ I said lamely. ‘Makes a girl feel quite at home.’

‘
You’re sure you take it black?’

‘
Black’s fine.’

He looked at me a moment longer, then sat down. I forced myself back to the conversation over the dinner table, blotting out Jamie and the times we’d shared since Jersey, and all the other wonderful secrets I’d hauled across the Atlantic.

‘
You and Chuck must go back a long way,’ I said lightly. ‘It’s nice to keep a relationship like that going.’

Harald nodded.

‘
We first hooked up at Anapolis.’ He indicated a photo on the wall behind my head. ‘We were both nuts about the navy and we ended up in the same plebe year.’

I half-turned on the sofa. Plebe year, he explained, was when you got your first taste of service discipline. I nodded, squinting at the photo. There were three rows of cadets in dark-blue uniforms. Chuck was in the back, a tall, skinny youth with a lop-sided grin. Harald was seated in the front row. Even then, his expression - set and unsmiling - gave nothing away.

‘
How long were you there?’

‘
Couple of years.’

‘
And you liked it?’

Harald stretched over me and hooked the photo off the wall. In the light from the desk lamp I watched his finger tracing the lines of eager young faces.

‘
I loved it,’ he murmured at last. ‘It changed my life.’

‘
You mean that?’

‘
Sure.’ He nodded. ‘It was pretty brutal to begin with, you know, lots of crazy stuff to try and find your breaking point, but once you understood that, understood what lay behind it…’ He glanced up, then reached for the cafetiere. ‘There was a routine called rigging pitchers. This is a pitcher of water. It’s full. It’s heavy. You’re a plebe in your first year. Mealtimes, you stand to attention in the mess hall. Last in the chow line. Last for everything. Then they give you this.’

‘
Who’s they?’

‘
The upperclass men. The top kicks.’ He had the cafetiere in his hand now and he slowly extended his arm until it bridged the gap between us.

‘
And you just had to stay that way? Holding it? At arm’s length?’

‘
Sure.’

‘
Until when?’

‘
Until you broke.’

‘
What does that mean?’

‘
This.’

Slowly, he let his arm fall. There was a soft clunk as the cafetiere reached the desk. I shook my head. It was primitive, I said, and mindless. What could rituals like that possibly teach you?

Harald was still looking at the cafetiere.

‘
Everything,’ he said softly. ‘Academy dealt in blacks and whites. You either hacked it or you crashed and burned. There were no shades of grey, no room for arguments.’

‘
And you think real life’s like that?’

‘
I know it is.’

He returned my gaze, recognising the challenge in my eyes. I thought he was talking nonsense and I was exhausted enough to let it show. He got up from the desk. A couple of steps took him across the room. When he came back, he had two more photos for me.

‘
I was going to talk about flying,’ he said, ‘but maybe this is better. Here.’

He slid a framed photo across the desk towards me. I found myself looking down at an aircraft carrier alone in a huge expanse of ocean. The steely-grey light threw long shadows across the crowded flight deck and the long spreading V of the carrier’s wake gave the shot a wonderful sense of purpose and urgency. I held the photo at arm’s length, half-closing my eyes. The aircraft were parked wingtip to wingtip, a pattern repeated the length of the ship, as perfect as marquetry.

‘
Beautiful,’ I said. ‘They look like toys.’

‘
Exactly. So here’s another.’

The second photo had been taken on the flight deck at night. Rain had smeared the lens of the camera, giving the shot a strange, blurry,
almost surreal
look, but the
sheer power
of the
image
was astonishing. The big jet fighter that filled the frame was seconds away from touchdown. The shark-like nose was rearing up and one wing was slightly tilted while the long silver legs of the main undercarriage groped for the deck. The way the plane hung there was at once ungainly and beautiful. It defied everything I’d ever learned. No landing should be like this, I thought. So brutal. So hit and miss.

I fingered the glass that covered the print.

‘
You flew one of these?’

‘
Sure.’ Harald nodded. ‘That’s an A-7 Corsair. And that’s me.’

I peered at the photo, trying to imagine what it must have taken to get a plane like this down in one piece. Admiration is too small a word for what I felt. I could practically smell the fear that must have gone with this kind of flying.

‘
How fast?’ I gestured at the photo.

‘
Over the ramp?’ Harald shrugged. ‘Hundred and eighteen knots. Maybe a little more. Depending on the wind.’

‘
And it was hard? Scary?’

Harald pulled a face.

‘
Hardest thing I ever did. We had some guys out on the boat once, some medical research guys. They strapped sensors all over us and ran stress tests on some of the missions, and you know what they found? They got readings from guys under fire, guys getting chased around by SAMs, guys pulling Christ knows how much g, all that stuff. And then they got readings at the end of the mission, those five minutes when you’re in the groove, and you’re coming down the glide slope, flying the meatball, and it’s dark as hell, and the wind’s all over the place, and it’s raining, and the damn boat’s heaving around in three dimensions, and you’ve got bingo fuel, and -’

‘
Bingo fuel?’

‘
Dry tanks. Nothing left to divert. One chance to get the baby home.’

I was looking at the photo again. I couldn’t take my eyes off the big Corsair, hanging there on the very edge of the stall.

‘
And these tests were for stress?’

‘
Too damn right. And you know what they showed? They showed that night landings on to carriers were three times,
three times,
scarier than anything the gomers could throw up at you. Not that any of the guys couldn’t have told them that to begin with, saved them a lot of dough.’ He stared at the Corsair, brooding. ‘Most nights we never saw a missile. But every mission ended with one of these.’

In the light from the desk lamp I could see the sweat beading on his forehead.

‘
And this landing worked out? This particular landing?’

‘
Sure.’ He sat back. ‘They used to rate us on the landings. They had a guy out on the fantail, a pilot, a guy who knew what he was talking about. There were various grades he’d give you. A cut grade was the worst. That meant a dangerous pass, almost an accident. You got to do a lot of explaining after a cut grade.’

I was studying the photo again. I wanted to know more about flare-out speeds, about degrees of flap, angles of attack, throttle settings. What happened if you made a pig’s ear of the landing? How long would it take to spool up the engines and go round again?

‘
Do a bolter, you mean?’

‘
Is that what you used to call it?’

He nodded, talking me through the overshoot procedure. With the throttle against the stops, and a great deal of luck, the plane would stay airborne. Then it was a question of clawing your way back to altitude, back into the pitch-black sky, then rejoining the queue of planes in the landing circuit, popping the speed brakes, lowering the nose and settling the airplane back into the landing groove. Some guys made as many as eight passes before snagging a wire. The master hooksters, on the other hand, mostly put down first time.

‘
Hooksters?’

Harald bent over me, his forefinger following the line of the Corsair’s belly until he found the long black hook dangling from the rear of the fuselage. Stretched across the flight deck were three arrester wires. You normally went for the third wire, he said, which meant aiming the aeroplane at an eighteen-inch strip of deck coming at you at around
120
knots. Miss it with empty tanks, and you were most probably dead.

I sat back, thinking suddenly of the approach we’d made to the field that very afternoon. There’d been three white lines striped across the runway and an awful lot of rubber around the third. I’d seen the lines again when we’d driven across the airfield in the jeep. I asked Harald about them. Was this what he did in his spare time? Strapped on an aeroplane and pretended he was back at sea?

Harald was pouring more coffee.

‘
It’s a training aid,’ he said. ‘We rig lines across the runway and feed them into little detonator caps. The guys in the hangar have fixed a hook to one of the Yaks. Snag a wire and the bang says you’re on the money.’

‘
Will I be doing that?’

‘
Of course.’

My eyes strayed back to the photo. At least the runway wouldn’t be moving up and down, I thought, and with luck it wouldn’t be dark.

I smiled.