Permissible Limits (40 page)

‘
Can’t wait,’ I said gamely. ‘When do we start?’

‘
Tomorrow. The forecast is pretty good. I want us airborne by ten.’

‘
In the dual Mustang?’

‘
In the Harvard. I know you’ve got solo time already but I’d like to put you in the back seat and see how it goes. Get the numbers right and we should be in the Mustang by the afternoon. How does that sound?’

I said it sounded fine. I was thinking about the instruction manual for the Cavalier Mustang, the one Harald had given me earlier. Now I’d seen the carrier photos, it was a great deal easier to understand his near-obsession with military hardware and it began to occur to me that his years over Vietnam had probably shaped the rest of his life.

‘
Tell me more,’ I said.

‘
About what?’

‘
About the war.’

‘
Why do you want to know?’

‘
Because you’re a wonderful pilot. And that fascinates me.’

He gave me a look, at once troubled and proud. ‘Wonderful?’

I could tell he wanted to believe it. I hunted for other adjectives, then settled for a verb.

‘
You
feel
it,’ I said. ‘It just comes naturally. Flying with you, I get the feeling nothing could go wrong.’

‘
I crashed,’ he pointed out. ‘I lost a Corsair. I screwed the pooch.’

‘
You flew into heavy fire. You said it yourself. The odds were against you. There’s nothing you could have done.’

‘
There’s everything I could have done. You know what they say about the careful
guy?’
I shook my head. ‘The
careful guy who wants
to die in bed always
checks.
‘

‘
And you didn’t?’

‘
On this occasion,’ he shook his head, ‘no.’

There was a long silence. Outside, deep in what I took to be Monica’s wilderness, I could hear the hooting of a night owl. Harald, for once in his life, looked almost vulnerable.

‘
Do you want to talk about it?’ I asked softly.

‘
Not really.’

‘
Do you mind me asking?’

‘
Not at all. I like your curiosity. It’s ballsy. It suits you.’ His eyes found mine again, then he looked away. He was leaning forward now, his hands knotted together, the knuckles white. Recklessly, I asked him for a third time about the accident.

‘
It wasn’t an accident. I got shot down. Partly their doing. Partly mine.’

‘
Why yours?’

‘
I’d strayed off track. The POL stuff hadn’t materialised and I was looking for targets of opportunity. Our intelligence guys had warned us about this particular flak trap but I guess I didn’t take them seriously. In any case, I was a fighter pilot, and that pretty much sums it up. We’re not in the business of self-doubt, Ellie. We own the airspace we occupy. It’s ours.’

‘
Until someone shoots you down.’

‘
Exactly.’ He looked up, a strange faraway expression in his eyes. ‘You know the sweetest sound in all the world? It goes like this. Da-dee-dah. Three notes. Da-dee-dah. It’s the signal you get in your earphones when their tracking radars lock on. It means they’ve found you. It means they’re painting you. It means they’re seconds away from loosing the missiles.’

‘
And that’s a
sweet
noise?’

‘
Sure, because then you get to earn your money. They used to fire those mothers in twos, a salvo, bang-bang. The second fella got you when you thought you’d out-turned the first, but the wilder guys just figured it was twice as exciting. The Corsair was a beautiful ship. Big strong airframe. Plenty of power, plenty of speed. We were the last of the stick-and-rudder men. Yank and bank. Turn and burn. It was a plane you had to
fly,
hands-on. Even the missiles couldn’t catch us.’

‘
But you crashed.’

‘
Sure, and in the end I figured it out. I must have gone down to small arms. I was under three hundred feet. That low, it couldn’t have been anything else. Just goes to show, doesn’t it?’ He looked up, expectant, almost childlike.

‘
Show what, Harald?’

‘
Show that you can’t cheat a bullet. Over ‘Nam, around that time, flying was getting tricksy. The blue-suiters, the air force guys, were packing Sidewinders and Sparrows, big fancy missiles. That called for all kinds of clever shit. Their Phantoms wouldn’t fly without two men, guy at the front to keep the thing airborne, and his buddy down aft to sort out the technology. Those guys in the back never looked out of the window. They had their heads down, eyes glued to the tube. If the computer went squirrelly, you gave up and hauled ass and went home. What the hell kind of flying is that?’

Abruptly, he came to a halt, staring down at his hands, embarrassed and a little ashamed - not of losing his precious Corsair but of talking about it. I reached out and touched his arm. It was a gesture of
sympathy
,
of
reassurance, and maybe an apology as well for going
too far, but the physical contact made him flinch and I wondered just how many times he’d told this story.

‘
Do you talk about it a lot?’

‘
The A-7? ‘Nam? Never. My mother, she loves all that stuff. She thinks it was all guts and glory, Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston, wide-screen, comic-book stuff. It wasn’t, Ellie. Good guys got wasted. Put a foot wrong, you bought the farm. And for what?’ He looked up again, boxing me in with his questions. ‘You know where that war was lost? Here, in the States. In DC. And you know why? Because we were fighting the wrong war with the wrong weapons. We were toting millions of dollars’ worth of ordnance and all we ever did was nail the little guys on bicycles, or maybe the odd canal, or - hell - even a truck or two. What we didn’t do was go for something that really mattered. Like the dikes. Or some of those downtown Hanoi ministries. And you know why not? Because all those big fat targets were off-limits. And you know why
that
was? Because the politicians said so. Because the guys in Washington wanted to keep the thing under control. You can’t do that, Ellie. Not in war, not in peace. Either you fight to win or you quit. Everything else is conversation.’

He reached for his coffee, apologising for the outburst, and I withdrew my hand, knowing that in some strange, unfathomable way this man was beyond comfort. Showing me the carrier photographs, talking about Vietnam, had unlocked a bit of himself I’d never seen before. Watching him bent over the polystyrene cup, I sensed that he was haunted by ghosts of his own making.

Putting the photos to one side, I tried to change the subject.

‘
Tell me about your father,’ I said. ‘What happened to him?’

For the second time in five minutes, I saw him physically flinch.

‘
My dad?’

‘
Yes.’

He frowned a moment, steadying himself, then he shook his head, dismissing my question.

‘
My dad died years ago,’ he said. ‘Poor bastard.’

Chapter twelve

We went flying, as planned, next morning. A slim, pretty girl with a flat Indian face and a cap of jet-
black
hair woke me with a cup of tea, and within the hour Chuck was driving me back across the airfield in his jeep. I was in the front seat this time and I had a grandstand view as we slowed beside the runway to let a pair of Mustangs land.

They were both single-seaters, and watching them flare for neat three-point landings I noticed that both of them had underwing pylons that I’d seen earlier in the manual for the Cavalier Mustang. The pylons are fitted to carry bombs and rockets, and the fact that they were both empty made me wonder about a series of distant thumps I’d heard earlier when I was back at the Casa Blanca, pulling on my flying suit. I’m clueless when it comes to high explosives - even in the Falklands, the war had spared Gander Creek - but it occurred to me now that the deep bass rumbles which had taken me to the window might well have had something to do with the fighters that were taxiing towards the hangars. Harald’s private air force wasn’t, after all, purely for display. Just what was I getting into here?

Harald was waiting for me beside the Harvard. It was incredibly hot already, with a light crosswind barely stirring the orange windsock, and he had forsaken his flying jacket for a light cotton zip-up. He had a pair of skintight leather gloves tucked into the waistband of his jeans and his eyes were invisible behind his aviator sunglasses.

The moment I said hallo I knew something was wrong.

‘
Sleep OK?’ he grunted.

‘
Fine, thanks.’

‘
Good. Put that on, then we’ll go.’

He stood aside while I strapped on the parachute harness, then he swung himself up on to the wing and gestured for me to follow. The Mustangs had taxied the length of the apron now and were turning to join the flightline of other aircraft nearby. Above the cackle of the Merlins it was difficult to hear what Harald was saying. The cockpit was already open, the lapstraps of the seat harnesses neatly crisscrossed on the metal seats. I began to clamber into the front cockpit but Harald stopped me. He had a bottle in his hand. He made a tipping gesture then gave it to me. I unscrewed the top and took a couple of mouthfuls. It was deliciously cold and slightly saline. The Mustang pilots killed their engines and in the sudden silence I handed the bottle back.

‘
You’re sure you’ve had enough?’

‘
Absolutely. Your mother poured coffee down me. The last thing I need is more liquid.’

I gestured loosely at the waiting cockpit, trying to make a joke of my weak bladder, but Harald didn’t smile. After he’d finished the bottle and handed it to a waiting mechanic, he helped me into the rear cockpit. As he bent to tighten the seat straps, I remembered the smell of his aftershave from the last time we’d flown together, back home at Sandown, and I remembered as well how different he’d been on that occasion. Relaxed isn’t a word I’d ever associate with Harald, but over the Isle of Wight he’d filled me with nothing but confidence - not in my own abilities but in his willingness to teach me just a little of what he knew. Now, that feeling of kinship seemed to have gone completely. He was brusque and impatient, as if I and this wretched Harvard had come between him and something infinitely more important. When I pressed against the seat harness and tried to turn my head, suggesting it was maybe an inch or so too tight, he just looked at me as if I were some punter at a country fair.

‘
It’s there to restrain you,’ he said. ‘Or hadn’t you noticed?’

I kept my mouth shut, not wanting the argument. Already, the draining heat and a flutter or two of pre-flight nerves were making me feel queasy. With the cockpit canopy shut, I knew I was going to roast. While Harald signalled for the mechanic to strap him into the front seat, I sat back, telling myself to relax.

Compared to yesterday, the airfield was buzzing. A couple more planes had touched down - high-winged twins of a kind I’d never seen before - and they too were taxiing towards the hangar. At the far end of the apron, a big white minibus had just come to a halt, and I watched half a dozen men in combat gear step down on to the tarmac. Here was yet more evidence to justify Dennis Wetherall’s brisk analysis of Harald’s real business interests. The men from the minibus were carrying short, stubby weapons, machine guns of some kind, and they ambled across towards one of those old Huey helicopters you see in the Vietnam newsreels. The soldiers were dark-skinned, Latin American in appearance, and I was still watching them when I heard a crackle in my headphones and then the rasp of Harald’s voice.

‘
Remind me how many hours you’ve got.’

‘
On Harvards?’

‘
Yes.’

‘
Thirty-six.’ ‘Recent?’

‘
Over the last year or so.’

‘
OK, we’ll see how you do.’

There was a brief silence, then he told me the aircraft was mine. He’d done the external checks already. After the start-up routine, I was to taxi to the hold. We would be taking off to the north-east.

The intercom went dead. I sat rigid in my harness, staring at the back of his head over the top of the cockpit combing. What kind of brief was this? Where were we going? What should I expect in the way of conflicting traffic? How long might the flight last? What about the weather?