Point of Impact Read online

  Point of Impact

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This book is dedicated to the memory of all those aircrew who have given their lives in the pursuit of excellence.

  Prologue

  The Tempest flashed around the shoulder of the hill, a black dart, stark against the pale winter sky. Contour-flying, hugging the ground, the jet soared over ridges and swooped down valleys, burning across the sky at five hundred miles an hour, vapour trails streaming from its wing tips.

  It was ten years to the day since the navigator had made his first sortie in a Tempest. Now he was guiding a young pilot through his maiden flight, a twenty-one-year-old in charge of thirty million pounds’ worth of sophisticated electronics which one momentary lapse of concentration could convert into a useless pile of scrap.

  During the long months of training, the pilot had been like a learner driver with the controlling hand of an experienced instructor always resting on the dual controls. Now he was at last flying free, both nervous and elated.

  The navigator had flown a thousand sorties over every conceivable terrain from the Arctic tundra to the deserts of Iraq, but, like all aircrew, he had never lost the thrill of fast-jet flight. He loved it all, from the smell of kerosene fuel and the whine of the electronics as the jet sat ready on the ground, to the moment when it punched through the cloud ceiling into the zone where the sun always shone and the blue of the sky began to darken into the black of space.

  The navigator knew the Yorkshire Dales landscape flashing below them almost as well as he knew the streets of his home town but he gazed down for a moment with fresh eyes, seeing it as the pilot was seeing it. A flash of silver light reflecting from the jet’s fuselage momentarily lit the moon face of a sheep farmer staring upwards, as remote from them as a coin sparkling in the depths of a well. As the black shadow of the jet passed overhead, the roar of its engines shook the earth. Startled by the storm – first the lightning, then the thunder – the farmer’s sheep scattered over the green fields.

  He shared in the young pilot’s mounting excitement, even as his voice – cool, clinical, detached – forced him to focus on the humdrum routines of the flight. ‘All you’ve learned to do in training so far is to fly the aircraft. Now you have to learn to operate it. Let’s make sure of the fuel checks – check balance, check contents… That’s good. Your nearest diversion at the moment is going to be Finnington, which is fifty miles, heading two-seven-zero. Okay, take it down the right-hand side of that lake, Semerwater.’

  The jet wash rippled the surface of the water, glinting in the early morning sunlight. The aircraft’s hawk-shadow sent the moorhens, wings splashing, scattering for the cover of the willows and alders on the shore.

  ‘If you come hard right now, you’ll see Hawes on your nose.’

  The village flashed underneath them and was gone, a blur of grey stone, casting a long shadow in the low sunlight.

  The navigator saw the altimeter start to rise a little and forced his pilot to keep down at two hundred and fifty feet. ‘Make sure we stay low round this bend. Try not to climb as you come around the spur of the mountain. Don’t balloon over the ridge line.’

  The pilot nudged the stick, making minute and largely unnecessary adjustments like a learner driver. He pushed the Tempest into a hard, low-level turn.

  ‘Okay,’ the navigator said, ‘we’ve got a little fuel to spare, so let’s have some fun before we go home. Come hard left around that fell there. Increase speed to max power and keep the power on as you come round the corner.’

  The jet flashed around Shunnor Fell, the pilot plugging in the after-burner to boost their speed; but, as their G-pants started to inflate under the force of the turn, there was a sudden clamour of attention-getters on the cockpit warning panels and a Christmas tree of lights began to flash.

  ‘My God, what’s that?’ Panic edged the pilot’s voice.

  ‘Level the wings.’ The matter-of-fact tones of the navigator belied his own unease, but the pilot responded instinctively to the command, stabilising the aircraft as he had been trained to do.

  Red lights still flashed insistently while warning sirens whooped in their headsets.

  Sensing the pilot’s continuing indecision, the navigator’s calming voice betrayed no hint of the danger. ‘Pull up. Get away from the ground.’

  The pilot did not react for a moment, staring frozen at the computer screen, where a caption should have identified the problem. There was nothing but the battery of lights. Over the headset, his breathing sounded faster and shallower by the second.

  The navigator barked the order once more. ‘Get the nose up. Get away from the ground.’ His voice was now urgent, but still betrayed no emotion.

  This time the pilot moved swiftly, though he continued to stare in horrified fascination at the warning lights. The navigator checked his screens again, but the Tempest’s computers still offered no explanations. Like the pilot, he had practised every conceivable emergency in the simulators until he could carry out the drills in his sleep. Unlike the pilot, he had also faced and survived many real emergencies, but in each of them there had been some identifiable fault and a prescribed response.

  He had seen nothing like this before.

  The first priority was to keep the plane stable and gain height. Only when safely clear of the dark, looming fellside would he allow himself to dwell on the possible cause. His hand moved involuntarily towards the black-and-yellow-striped handle under his seat as the pilot wrestled the controls. The aircraft started to come up, but too swiftly.

  ‘Don’t get the nose too high.’ The navigator’s warning was an irrelevance. As he spoke, the jet began to barrel roll to the right.

  ‘I can’t control it,’ the pilot screamed, paralysed by the sight of the hill rushing up to meet them.

  As his instruments showed one hundred and thirty-five degrees of bank and the blue sky over the cockpit turned to green grass and black rock, the navigator yelled, ‘Eject, eject.’

  They both grabbed the handles at the same moment, as the aircraft hurtled towards the ground.

  The ejector rockets fired and the canopy blew away with a crack as the plane spiralled, but the rockets that should have thrown them three hundred feet upwards into the safety of the sky blasted them directly into the mountainside. The aircraft smashed into the ground an instant later. An explosion more deafening than a clap of thunder echoed around the hills as an inferno burst from the wreckage. Then there was silence again.

  Four seconds had elapsed between the first warning siren and the impact, four heartbeats separating life from death. There was no trace of either pilot or navigator, no movement but the belching flames and the oily smoke spiralling up into the sky, alongside the rooks startled from their treetop nests.

  Chapter One

  ‘Mountain Rescue call-out. Mountain Rescue team report to Hangar Seven immediately
.’

  Drew Miller was sitting in the crew room at RAF Finnington, drinking a cup of coffee and doodling absent-mindedly in the margins of his newspaper, when he heard the alarm on the Tannoy start to sound around the station.

  In a base making daily use of the most advanced electronics and engineering, it was an incongruously old-fashioned signal, a man blowing three blasts on a whistle, like a referee signalling full time in a football match.

  As the alarm sounded, all over the base men scrambled from their work. The Mountain Rescue team were all volunteers. Engineers servicing aircraft on the line outside the hangars downed tools and ran, a cook washing dishes in the Mess sprinted for the door, still wearing his apron, and a member of the firecrew dozing in his bunk, leapt up and hurried out, hopping from leg to leg as he tried to pull on his boots. There was a fusillade of slamming doors as they rushed outside, jumped into their vehicles and raced towards Hangar Seven.

  Drew dropped his pen and ran for the door, cursing as he brushed against his cup of coffee and sent it spilling onto the floor.

  ‘Sorry, I’ve got a call-out,’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘I’ll clean up the next one.’

  ‘That’ll be the day,’ came the reply, but Drew was already out of the door.

  He jumped into his car and tore off towards the Mountain Rescue headquarters on the other side of the airfield. He screeched to a halt outside the armoury for a moment to pick up his deputy on the MR team and then bucketed on across the airfield, swerving across the bows of a lumbering Hercules transport as it taxied out towards the runway.

  ‘Christ, go steady, Drew.’ His passenger ducked instinctively as the Hercules towered above them. ‘We’re supposed to save lives, not lose them.’

  Drew grunted, but kept his foot down as they sped through the secret core of the base, the two squadron sites, clustered around one end of the seven-thousand-foot runway. He took a shortcut through the web of taxiways connecting the runway to a warren of hardened aircraft shelters – burrows of concrete and steel, each just large enough for a single Tempest. Fuel and arms dumps were hidden nearby, submerged under even thicker carapaces of reinforced concrete.

  ‘Shame isn’t it?’ Drew said, gesturing to the shelters as they sped past. ‘As much concrete as the Berlin Wall and just as redundant these days.’

  His deputy laughed. ‘Don’t let the boss hear you talking like that or you’ll be on a permanent posting to the Outer Hebrides.’

  The jokes stopped as they braked to a halt outside Hangar Seven. It was already buzzing and Drew looked on approvingly. Without the need for any orders from him, the individuals had melded into a team, going about their preparations coolly and methodically, without a wasted movement or superfluous word. The kit was quickly checked and packed and the vehicles – two Land Rovers and two HGVs – lined up outside the hangar.

  The teleprinter was chattering in the corner. One of the team ripped off a message and brought it to the control desk. Drew scanned it hurriedly and then called the team around him. ‘A Tempest from 71 Squadron at Coningsby, call sign Raven 2–1, has been overdue for an hour. Smoke and flames have been sighted near Gunnerside in Swaledale. No reports of the crew so far. The suspected crash site is Crowgarth Farm on the edge of Ivelet Moor, grid reference 401319. The helicopter is already on its way. We will deploy by road – it should take about fifty minutes to get there. Despite the urgency, let’s make sure we all get there in one piece. Drive safely. Let’s go.’

  His deputy smiled to himself, knowing Drew’s normal driving to be anything but safety first.

  The members of the team piled into their vehicles and set off with blue lights flashing and sirens sounding. An armed guard raised the barrier as they sped through the entrance gate of the base. He turned to his fellow guard, watching through a slit in a concrete pillbox, with only his eyes and gun barrel visible in the gloom. ‘There they go – another one bites the dust. I tell you what, you wouldn’t catch me flying a Tempest.’

  ‘I suppose it would be a bit of a step down from your Honda 50,’ his mate said sardonically, turning his attention back to the approach road.

  The convoy headed west from Finnington, climbing steadily as it negotiated the winding roads leading up into the hills. Twice Drew’s Land Rover, leading the way, was forced to a juddering halt as he rounded a bend to find a farmer’s tractor blocking the road.

  ‘Come on, Farmer Giles, out of the bloody way,’ he muttered irritably, turning on the siren to emphasise his urgency, but the second farmer was not to be hurried. He whistled in his dogs and even lit a cigarette before easing himself ponderously into his seat to move the tractor.

  Drew inched his way past and climbed higher, burrowing through dark tunnels of single-track road where the trees met over their heads, shutting out the weak sunlight. Damp walls of rock rose on either side, moss and ferns sprouting from every crevice. They branched off at last on to a rough track, marked with a mouldering wooden sign, lichen almost obliterating the legend directing them to Crowgarth Farm.

  As Drew pulled into the farmyard, he saw a yellow Sea King helicopter in the corner of the field. The Tempest crew’s locator beacons had been superfluous. The pall of smoke from the jet’s funeral pyre had been visible for miles.

  As he yanked on the handbrake, Drew was already halfway out of the door. He raced across to speak to the winch operator from the Search and Rescue helicopter, by now an old friend. ‘Anybody get out?’

  ‘They got out, but that’s all they did. They’re over there.’ He pointed up the hill.

  Drew and his men walked quickly to the edge of the wood but there was little to be seen. The aircraft had tent-pegged, rolling over and going into the ground nose first. Only the jet pipes and the tailplane were visible above the ground, a fierce fire still raging around them. A small amount of wreckage was scattered around the site.

  Drew looked round at the winchman. ‘Where’s the rest of it?’

  He jerked his head towards a huge ash tree. ‘Over there.’

  Walking further into the wood, Drew winced as he saw the bases of two ejection seats. One was embedded in the side of the hill, the other had smashed into the ash tree, twelve feet above the ground. A yellow survival pack dangled uselessly below it.

  A severed arm lay on the ground a few feet from the base of the tree. Drew looked up and had to suppress a shudder as he saw the pilot’s legs and lower body still strapped into the seat. The head and torso had disappeared, pulverised on impact, with only a dark red stain on the trunk of the tree to show where a man’s life had ended.

  His men gathered around him, gazing in disbelief at the sight facing them. There was a gagging sound. Drew turned to see a newcomer to the Mountain Rescue team vomiting, tears pouring down his face.

  Drew took a last look at the mangled seat above him and then turned away, briskly issuing orders. ‘Okay guys, no survivors from this one. Get a temporary crash cordon organised immediately. Jack, take three men over there, Harry, over there with another three.’

  He left them to mount the crash guard and headed back to the Land Rover, nodding curtly to the farmer and a handful of locals standing in a circle in the farmyard, muttering to each other.

  The farmer’s face was still white with shock. The twin poles of his life were his two hundred acres of steep, sparsely grassed hillside and the livestock market in Hawes, barely ten miles away, where he sold his sheep. In his fifty-two years, he had travelled further than Hawes only a handful of times. He had often paused as jets flashed overhead, sour but not a little envious of the freedom of aircrew who could traverse that distance in less than a minute and span a continent in a couple of hours. Now he had seen at first hand the price that some paid for that freedom.

  Drew called in to base. ‘I’m at the crash site. It’s a Tempest RS3. No survivors. We’ll need a full crash cordon organised as soon as possible. I’m sending a Sea King down to pick them up.’

  His orders were immediately relayed around the base by T
annoy.

  ‘Crash procedures in operation. Each section to organise three guards with full overnight kit, to report to Hangar Two in fifteen minutes.’

  No one was spared: every sector from filing clerks and kitchen porters to engineers and aircrew had to take an equal part in one of the Air Force’s least popular duties.

  The reluctant conscripts pulled on several layers of winter clothing and then began straggling towards the hangar, less than enthusiastic at the prospect of spending a cold night on a bleak hillside. By the time they had assembled, the Sea King was already clattering in to pick them up and ferry them to Crowgarth Farm.

  Drew was standing in the farmyard ready to greet them as they clambered awkwardly out of the helicopter. ‘Right, we haven’t got much daylight left. Your job is to secure the site; the investigation begins in the morning. Meanwhile, I don’t want any curious locals, souvenir hunters or bloody tabloid reporters within a hundred yards of here. No one gets close to the site and no one takes anything; let’s keep it as it is for the investigators.’

  The senior medical officer from the base had also arrived to confirm that the men were dead, prising his bulk out of the helicopter and struggling up the field, his brogues slipping and sliding in the mud.

  ‘It doesn’t take a sodding doctor to see they’re dead,’ muttered a chef from Finnington, a less-than-willing volunteer, dragged from his warm kitchen for the cold, all-night guard duty. ‘That’s about as bleeding pointless as dragging us up here to guard the site: there’s nothing to nick and no one up here to nick it, even if there was. There’s nothing but bleeding sheep for twenty miles.’ He kicked at a pile of droppings to emphasise the point.

  As the shadows lengthened, Drew’s team hurried to disentangle the mangled remains of the pilot and navigator from their ejection seats and place them in two black rubber body bags, laid out side by side on the trampled grass beneath the trees.

  Drew detailed his most experienced man to climb the ash tree and secure the ejector seat with some rope. The seat was stuck fast, driven into the trunk like a nail, and his men had to bring up ladders and hack at the tree with axes for twenty minutes before the seat could be prised loose and lowered gingerly to the ground.