The Shepherd (3 page)

He pulled out at three hundred feet, the fog was still below us. Probably the fog bank was only from the ground to xoo feet up, but that was more than enough to prevent a plane from landing without a GCA. I could imagine the stream of instructions coming from the radar hut into the earphones of the man flying beside me, eighty feet away through two panes of perspex and a wind stream of icy air moving between us at z8o knots. I kept my eyes on him, for mating as closely as possible, afraid of losing sight for an instant, watching for his every hand-signal. Against the white fog, even as the moon sank, I had to marvel at the beauty of his aircraft; the short nose and bubble cockpit, the blister of perspex right in the nose itself, the long, lean, underslung engine pods, each housing a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, a masterpiece of craftsmanship, snarling through the night towards home. Two minutes later he held up his clenched left fist in the window, then opened the fist to splay all five fingers against the glass. Please lower your undercarriage. I moved the lever downwards and felt the dull thunk as all three wheels went down, happily powered by hydraulic pressure and not dependent on the failed electrical system.

The pilot of the shepherd aircraft pointed down again, for another descent, and as he jinked in the moonlight I caught sight of the nose of the Mosquito. It had the letters J K painted on it, large and black. Probably for call-sign Juliet Kilo. Then we were descending again, more gently this time.

He levelled out just above the fog layer, so low the tendtils of candy-floss were lashing at our fuselages, and we went into a steady circular turn. I managed to flick a glance at my fuel gauge: it was on zero, flickering feebly. For God's sake, hurry up, I prayed, for if my fuel failed me now there would be no time to climb to the minimum 500 feet needed for bailing out. A jet fighter at 100 feet without an engine is a death-trap with no chances for survival.

For two or three minutes he seemed content to hold his slow circular turn, while, the sweat broke out behind my neck and began to run in streams down my back, gumming the light nylon flying suit to my skin.

HURRY UP, MAN, HURRY.

Quite suddenly he straightened out, so fast I almost lost him by continuing to turn. I caught him a second latet and saw his left hand flash the dive signal to me. Then he dipped towards the fog bank, I followed, and we were in it, a shallow, flat descent, but a descent nevertheless, and from a mere hundred feet, towards nothing.

To pass out of even dimly lit sky into cloud or fog is like passing into a bath of grey cotton wool. Suddenly there is nothing but the grey whirling strands, a million tendrils reaching out `=343' to trap and strangle you, each one touching the cockpit cover with quick caress then disappearing back into nothingness. The visibility was down to near zero, no shape, no size, no form, no substance. Except that dimly off my left wing-tip, now only forty feet away, was the form of a Mosquito flying with absolute certainty towards something I could not see. Only then did I realize he was flying without lights. For a second I was amazed, horrified by my discovery; then I realized the wisdom of the man. Lights in fog are treacherous, hallucinatory, mesmeric. You can get attracted to them, not knowing whether they are forty or a hundred feet away from you. The tendency is to move towards them; for two aircraft in the fog, one flying formation on the other, that could spell disaster. The man was right.

Keeping formation with him, I knew he was slowing down, for I too was easing back the throttle, dropping and slowing. In a fraction of a second I flashed a glance at the two instruments I needed: the altimeter was reading zero, so was the fuel gauge, and neither was even flickering. The airspeed indicator, which I had also seen, read i zo knots and this damn coffin was going to fall out of the sky at 9~.

Without warning the shepherd pointed a single forefinger at me, then forward through the windscreen. It meant There you are, fly on and land. I stared forward through the now streaming windscreen. Nothing. Then, yes, something. A blur to the left, another to the tight, then two, one each side. Ringed with haze, there were lights either side of me, in pairs, flashing past. I forced my eyes to see what lay between them. Nothing, blackness. Then a streak of paint, running under my feet. The centre line. Frantically I closed down the power and held her steady, praying for the Vampire to settle.

The lights were rising now, almost at eye level, and still she would not settle. Bang. We touched, we touched the deck. Bang-bang. Another touch, she was drifting again, inches above the wet black runway. Bam-barn-barn-babam-rumble. She was down. The main wheels had stuck and held.

The Vampire was rolling, at over ninety miles an hour, through a sea of grey fog. I touched the brakes and the nose slammed down on to the deck also. Slow pressure now, no skidding, hold her straight against the skid, more pressure on those brakes or we'll run off the end. The lights moving past more leisurely now, slowing, slower, slower.

The Vampire stopped. I found both my hands clenched round the control column, squeezing the brake lever inwards. I forget now how many seconds I held them there before I would believe we were stopped. Finally I did believe it, put on the parking brake and released the main brake. Then I went to turn off the engine, for there was no use trying to taxi in this fog; they would have to tow the fighter back with a Land-Rover. There was no need to turn off the engine; it had finally run out of fuel as the Vampire careered down the runway. I shut off the remaining systems, fuel, hydraulics, electrics and pressurization, and slowly began to unstrap myself from the seat and parachute dinghy pack. As I did so a movement caught my eye. To my left, through the fog, no more than fifty feet away, low on the ground with wheels up, the Mosquito roared past me. I caught the flash of the pilot's hand in the side window, then he was gone, up into the fog before he could see my answering wave of acknowledgement. But I'd already decided to call up R. A. F Gloucester and thank him personally from the officers mess.

With the systems off, the cockpit was misting up fast, so I released the canopy and pushed it upwards and backwards by hand until it locked. Only then, as I stood up, did I realize how cold it was. Against my heated body, dressed in light nylon flying suit, it was freezing. I expected the control-tower truck to be alongside in seconds, for with an emergency landing, even on Christmas Eve, the fire truck, ambulance and half a dozen other vehicles were always standing by. Nothing happened. At least, not for ten minutes.

By the time the two headlights came groping out of the mist I felt frozen. The lights stopped twenty feet from the motionless Vampire, dwarfed by the fighter's bulk. A voice called:

"Hallo there."

I stepped out of the cockpit, jumped from the wing to the ground and ran towards the lights. They turned out to be the headlamps of a battered old Jowett Javelin. Not an Air Force identification mark in sight. At the wheel of the car was a puffed, beery face and a handlebar musstaashe. At least he wore an R. A. F officer's cap. He stared at me as I loomed out of the fog.

"That yours? He nodded towards the dim share of the Vampire.

"Yes, I said, I just landed it."

"Straordinary, he said, quite straordinary. You'd better jump in. I'll run you back to the mess. I was grateful for the warmth of the car, even more so to be alive.

Moving in bottom gear he began to ease the old car back round the taxi-track, evidently towards the control tower and beyond them the mess buildings. As we moved away from the Vampire I saw that I had stopped twenty feet short of a plowed field at the very end of the runway.

"You were damned lucky, he said, or rather shouted, for the engine was roaring in first gear and he seemed to be having trouble with the foot controls. Judging by the smell of whisky on his breath, that was not surpising.

"Damned lucky, I agreed. I ran out of fuel just as I was landing. My radio and all the electrical systems failed nearly fifty minutes ago over the North Sea."

He spent several minutes digesting the information carefully.

"Straordinary, he said at length. No compass?"

"No compass. Flying in the approximate direction by the moon. As far as the coast, or where I judged it to be. After that..

"No radio?"

"No radio, I said. A dead box on all channels."

"Then how did you find this place? he asked.

I was losing patience. The man was evidently one of those passed-over flight lieutenants, not terribly bright and probably not a flyer, despite the handlebar musstaashe. A ground wallah. And drunk with it. Shouldn't be on duty at all on an operational station at that hour of the night.

"I was guided in, I explained patiently. The emergency procedures, having worked so well, now began to seem run-o'-the-mill, such is the recuperation of youth. I flew short, left-hand triangles, as per instructions, and they sent up a shepherd aircraft to guide me down. No problem."

He shrugged, as if to say if you insist'. Finally he said:

"Damn lucky, all the same. I'm surprised the other chap managed to find the place."

"No problem there, I explained patiently. It was one of the weather aircraft from R A F Gloucester. Obviouslyhe had radio. Sowecamein here in formation, on a G CA. Then when I saw the lights at the threshold of the runway, I landed myself."

The man was obviously dense, as well as drunk.

"Straordinary, he said, sucking a stray drop of moisture off his handlebar. We don't have GCA. We don't have any navigational equipment at all, not even a beacon.~ Now it was my turn to let the information sink in. This isn't R. A. F Merriam Saint George? I asked in a small voice. He shook his head. Marham? Chicksands? Lakenheath?"

"No, he said, this is R. A. F Minton."

"I've never heard of it, I said at last.

"I'm not surprised. We're not an operational station. Haven't been for years. Minton's a storage depot. Excuse me."

He stopped the car and got out. I saw we were standing a few feet from the dim shape of a control tower, adjoining a long row of Nissen huts, evidently once flight rooms, navigational and briefing huts.

Above the narrow door at the base of the tower through which the officer had disappeared hung a single naked bulb. By its light I could make out broken windows, padlocked doors, an air of abandonment and neglect. The man returned and climbed shakily back behind the wheel.

"Just turning the runway lights off, he said, and belched.

My mind was whirling. This was mad, crazy, illogical. Yet there had to be a perfectly reasonable explanation.

"Why did you switch them on? I asked.

"It was the sound of your engine, he said. I was in the officers mess having a noggin, and old Joe suggested I listen out the window for a second. There you were, circling right above us. You sounded damn low, almost as if you were going to come down in a hurry. Thought I might be of some use, remembered they never disconnected the old runway lights when they dismantled the station, so I ran down to the control tower and switched them on."

"I see, I said, but I didn't. But there had to be an explanation.

"That was why I was so late coming out to pick you up. I had to go back to the mess to get the car out, once I'd heard you land out there. Then I had to find you. Bloody foggy night."

You can say that again, I thought. The mystery puzzled me for another few minutes. Then I hit on the explanation.

"Where is R. A. F Minton, exactly? I asked him.

"Five miles in from the coast, inland from Cromer.

That's where we are, he said.

"And where's the nearest operational R. A. F station with all the radio aids including G CA?"

He thought for a minute.

"Must be Merriam Saint George, he said. They must have all those things. Mind you, I'm just a stores Johnny."

That was the explanation. My unknown friend in the weather plane had been taking me straight from the coast for Merriam Saint George. By chance Minton, abandoned old stores depot Minton, with its cobwebbed runway lights and drunken commanding officer, lay right along the in-flight path to Merriam's runway. Merriam controller had asked us to circle twice while he switched on his runway lights ten miles ahead, and this old fool had switched on his lights as well. Result: coming in on the last ten-mile stretch, I had plonked my Vampire down on the wrong airfield. I was about to tell him not to interfere with modern procedures that he couldn't understand when I choked the words back. My fuel had run out halfway down the runway. I'd never have made Merriam, ten miles away. I'd have crashed in the fields short of touchdown. By an amazing fluke I had been, as he said, damned lucky.

By the time I had worked out the rational explanation for my presence at this nearly abandoned airfield, we had reached the officers mess. My host parked his car in front of the door and we climbed out. Above the entrance hall a light was burning, dispelling the fog and illuminating the carved but chipped crest of the Royal Air Force above the doorway. To one side was a board screwed to the wall. It said R. A. F Station Minton'. To the other side was another board announcing Officers Mess'. We walked inside.

The front hall was large and spacious, but evidently built in the pre-war years when metal window-frames, service issue, were in the fashion. The place reeked of the expression it had seen better days'. It had indeed. Only two cracked leather club chairs occupied the ante room, which could have taken twenty. The cloakroom to the right contained a long empty rail for non-existent coats. My host, who told me he was Flight Lieutenant Marks, shrugged off his sheepskin coat and threw it over a chair. He was wearing his uniform trousers, but with a chunky blue pullover for a jacket. It must be miserable to spend your Christmas on duty in a dump like this.