The Striker Portfolio

Chapter Five — THE WIDOWMAKER

It looked ugly on the ground.

Ferris had called it adaptable, versatile, flexible, sophisticated. On the ground it looked humped, bow-legged, sinister, obscene. Sexual.

Down here at Linsdorf they called it the Widowmaker.

I had telephoned Ferris.

The sun was directly behind it, a flat orange disc two diameters high in the mist It squatted there, black. Why sexual? I had to think about it.

Ferris had ordered me down here to Linsdorf. Herr W. Martin Aviation psychologist attached to the Ministry's Accidents Investigation Branch. Walter: another name that could be English or German, whichever was the more convenient at any given time.

Because the wings drooped. They were held spread open and drooped like the wings of a crow in the act of copulation. That was why.

They were running the engine up. The kerosene haze darkened the sun, dirtied it.

The pilot was walking across from the crew's quarters, clumsy in his boots and anti-g suit, his oxygen helmet dangling.

Ferris had ordered me to Linsdorf for his own reasons. I didn't ask what they were. He was my director in the field.

'I told you you should have picked something up in Firearms.'

'I didn't need anything.'

'What happened?'

'We finished up playing "Last Across" and he cut it too fine.'

'You could have avoided a situation like that if you'd had a — '

'Oh for God's sake what do I want to shoot at them for? We want to send them to Parkis alive, don't we, so he can watch them do what Lazlo did after he'd bled them. Don't we?'

The black haze smothered the sun's disc, fouling it. There wasn't much sound: the acoustic irradiation was spreading away from where I stood. Only half-visible, only half-audible, the plane existed and didn't exist. You could believe you imagined it, that it was something out of a hangover, a black tumour on the sun.

'You don't have to be upset,' Ferris bad said.

That's good.'

I'd started out on a routine flush-and-follow exercise. Objective: find where they were based or who their contacts were and then signal Ferris like a good boy. I'd finished up without an overcoat and out of breath like a bloody fool. Of course there was no need to be upset.

He wasn't too jolly himself. If I'd stopped one in the lung all he could have done was signal London and try to wipe up the mess.

'You'd better get down to Linsdorf.'

I asked him to tell the car-hire people to keep their shirt on till the police found an abandoned 250 SE. That was what he was for, that kind of thing.

The pilot stood watching the plane, then suddenly turned round and trotted back to the crews' quarters and I thought: Surely he's not got the wind up already.

After I'd talked to Ferris I went round to Avis and picked up another one for the drive down to Linsdorf: a good-looking N.S.U. RO-80, the one with the rotary engine. I couldn't resist it because it was an engine I'd never tried. London Accounts would put up a bleat: The type of motor-vehicle selected for routine transport in Hanover, West Germany, 1 November, appears excessively expensive in view of the fact that no Special-Uses form was filed in retrospect.

The half-noise of the half-thing that stood there against the sun was dying away and I saw the silhouetted head of the flight mechanic prodding out of the cockpit looking for the pilot.

Signal to London Accounts: Reference your observation concerning the hire of I N.S.U. RO-SO in Hanover. I would respectfully suggest you go and stuff your cucumber up the Old Kent Road, Then the pilot came trotting across from the crews' quarters again, calling something to one of the ground staff. The flight mechanic climbed down from the plane and the pilot checked his report sheet and nodded and swung up and the mechanic passed him his helmet. The sun was clear now and beginning to dazzle.

Of course you can pick up a 260 k.p.h. Lamborghini and file a Special-Uses application in retrospect on the grounds that you'd had to chase someone in a Concorde before it got airborne. They'll believe anything: all they understand are the mechanics of parsimony.

The chocks were away and the thing was turning. It looked even worse broadside on with the wings flexing to every bump in the ground. I'd only seen them in the air before, once through the binoculars over Westheim and once at Farnborough Air Show eleven months ago: there'd been three of them and they'd looked pretty enough with the R.A.F. roundels and polished-metal finish and everyone cheering like mad. That was before they'd started dropping out of the sky all over Germany.

The N.S.U. wasn't the only thing. I couldn't go back for my stuff at the Carlsberg or they'd have made sure of me with a distance-shot so I'd bought the bare necessities at a supermarket on the edge of Am Kropcke — toothbrush, shaving-gear, so forth — but I'd gone to town on the overcoat: it was a sheepskin job and a perfect fit except where the bandage was, right upper fore-arm. High collar and full lapels and extra length, right down over the bum and beautifully warm. It was a pleasure to stand here inside it watching that bloody aeroplane. The type of overcoat selected for winter wear in Hanover, West Germany… Cucumbers.

He was rolling faster and turning towards the end of the runway with the wings rising and falling and the recognition lamps winking, easier to see now because the sun wasn't behind him any more, then he was gunning up on tower permission and rolling again with the wings lifting and holding and the power piling on and the wake of dark gas streaming behind and then he was airborne so fast that the legs were folding before he came abreast of where I stood on the perimeter road already craning my neck. The sound hit me with a kind of protracted slam and indicated better than anything else that a mass of ten tons was being pulled upwards at forty-five degrees through an element that wouldn't support a feather.

He made one circuit and was lost within nine seconds. The airbase couldn't have been in his track because there was no sonic boom as I walked round the perimeter to the main buildings. The sky was totally silent.

They were stowing the chocks in the bay.

'Why did the pilot run back?'

'Who are you?'

'Martin, British A.I.B. group.'

'Have you shown your papers to Security?'

'I couldn't be here if I hadn't.' '

'You must ask the Herr-Direktor of Operations.'

I went on towards the hangars. There was a pilot pumping up his bicycle outside the crews' quarters.

'It was a nice take-off.'

'What?'

'I was watching his take-off. Very neat.' I didn't know their slang: it wouldn't be in any dictionary. The correct use of slang is like an accepted accent and can open doors that are shut to printed credentials.

He laughed briefly, undoing the pump and stowing the extension. 'Oh, they go up all right.' He was older than a boy and younger than a man, notably handsome, careful in his movements and speech.. The strain marking this face would show on all of them: it was part of their identity.

'Did he forget something?'

'Who?'

The chap who's just taken off.'

He clipped the pump back and looked at me uncertainly. 'What like? I'm sorry — I don't seem to be quite with you.'

The pilot ran back for something. I was worried.'

He laughed again. 'We're all worried. No, he'd only forgotten his sea-horse. He often does that.'

The Striker was in the circuit again, much higher, much wider. We heard it faintly.

'I suppose he won't fly without it.'

'Never.'

He was wondering who I was. I asked him:

'What do you use, yourself?'

'Women.' The laugh was the same: part-nervous, part-cynical. 'I don't take them up with me but they're quite a tranquillizer.'

What would they dig out of the mess of alloy and blood and fibreglass and bone in the crater at Westheim: St Christopher, a rabbit's foot?

'My name's Martin.'

'Rohmhild.' His feet came together. 'Are you English?'

'Yes. Aviation psychologist.'

'Another one?' He corrected himself quickly. 'Maybe you're the one we've been waiting for.'

It looked as if a ton of grey lump-sugar had been tipped across the hangar floor in the chance shape of an aeroplane.

There were only six people working on it. The place was enormous, a tin cathedral, and cold. The heaters were on and it was less cold than outside by a few degrees. The cost of the heaters would probably have kept the whole squadron airborne for a week. The winter sun was up but it was brighter inside the hangar: lamps hung in focussed clusters from the gantries, their glare emphasizing the silence. Despite the movement of six men there was a mortuary stillness here.

'You know anything about orchids?'

One of the small doors at the side of the hangar came open and I looked across to see who it was. The survivor, the one with the wet guttural laugh, might be sent down here to look for me. I'd come to Hanover to see Lovett and Lovett had known when the next one would crash so they might think it natural for me to move out to Linsdorf and take it from there. So I wanted to know who people were when they came towards me.

'Not much,' I said.

This was Philpott, leading the A.I.B. group. I'd been here for an hour and all he liked talking about was orchids.

The man who had come into the hangar was carrying a transverse coupling and he dropped it on to the thick-topped butcher's bench. It set up a pure vibration that echoed from the roof.

'Sound as a bell.'

None of the others came near. Pure vibration wasn't news. They were waiting for something that made a sulky clunk when you dropped it.

'I'm working on a tropical epiphyte called Orchis Ledulum at the moment. Grafting, you know.'

He was a short hesitant-moving man in a white dust-coat. He looked gloomily across the plane-shaped litter of metal and saw nothing to interest him there. But his reputation was big even at Farnborough and I supposed he was like a conductor at rehearsal, dozing off until a false note came, then he would hit the roof.

The man who had come in was tying a mauve label to the transverse coupling.

'What did you do to your hand, then?' Philpott asked me.

Tin-opener.'

'Ah.'

A man with devon aviation on his dust-coat came over from the engine area. The engine was a slug-shaped lump encrusted with white ash and there was nothing they could do with it: the kinetic energy created by a gas-turbine running at full pitch on impact will melt most of its alloys.

'Did Andy check this, Mr Philpott?'

It was some kind of control-toggle.

'Have a look at the list, then give it a flame-test. He'll be back tomorrow. Is the other one like that?'

'I've not freed it yet.'

'Go careful, then. Andy's got hopes there.'

I followed him past the nose section. It was just a melted lump but he seemed pleased with it.

'Titanium. They know how to take it on the nose, don't they?' He gave a wintry smile.

'Would you expect to turn up manufacturing faults at this stage?'

'Normally. Not with the Striker. They introduced Zero Defects Programming at Devon before these things were built.' He gazed at me pensively. 'These Strikers are perfect when you roll them out. It wasn't like that a few years ago. You'd find anything left about inside, you could furnish a house with some of the stuff. Rivets, bulldog clips, hand-rags. A whole tablecloth, once. You know what we found inside a flexible tank a couple of years ago? Three-legged stool, milk a cow on it. Went down off the Azores with a crew of seven. Zero Defects is going to put a stop to all that. American idea. Rolls-Royce brought it into Britain. Why?'

'I just wanted to know.'

'Design faults are different. We can turn anything up.' He looked broodingly across the sea of fragments. By the time we've rebuilt this lot we can tell you how many kids the chief riveter's got and whether they're boys or girls. Of course it's getting more difficult for us these days. Look at that turbine. Now what can you do with that? The higher they go up the harder they come down. You imagine the noise this one made when it hit. Like a bomb.'

'I can imagine.'

The test-flame coughed into life across at the butcher's bench.

'We can turn up anything. Anything.'

'Have you given much thought to sabotage?'

'Quite a bit.' He was looking away from me, watching the colour of the flame when the component was passed through it. 'You've got to. Flags, frontiers, it's like a circus.'

When the flame went out I said: 'This isn't exactly in your department, but if the pilot loses control and hasn't switched to automatic what attitude does the Striker assume?'

'Nose-down at four or five degrees.'

We went across to the bench.

'It's negative, Mr Philpott. 'Tell Andy.'

The man took a green label from the box.

'Then we could say, could we, that if they didn't want to leave any evidence they'd go for the engine?'

'Who?' There was a drip on his nose and he blew it, squinting at me above his handkerchief. 'Oh, I see. Yes. That's what they'd probably go for.'

He'd been drinking but he wasn't drunk.

'Psychologize me.'

A quick forced laugh.

'I'm off duty,' I said.

They held each other, both half-turned towards me, still moving to the music. The whole of her body was in her eyes as she looked at me and I knew she would look at anyone like that, any man.

'Martin,' he said, 'wasn't it?'

'That's right.'

He said to her: 'Herr Martin.' He spoke to me without looking away from her. 'This is my wife.'

'Frau Rohmhild.'

'Nitri,' she said. The flash of her mouth took away some of the animal, brought back some of the child.

'Walter.'

'Franz. Franz, Nitri and Walter.' As if we had made some eternal pact. 'We will see you again.'

'Yes,' she said and looked back over her bare shoulder as I knew she always did, at anyone. They drifted away.

'She's charming.'

'Yes.'

His name was Eagner and he had a doctorate in psychology. We had met earlier and he was back in the corner again where I was holed up to watch people, especially the pilots.

Even for a peace-time officers' mess it was lush and the band had been brought in from Hanover. It was invitation night and the room was crowded: pilots and their wives and girls, admin, officers and attached civilian staff, the A.I.B. group and the Devon Aviation team. I'd seen even Philpott here brooding solitarily at the bar over his tropical epiphytes.

I looked at the door every time it opened. If they came at all they would come before morning: the moment their controllers knew where I was they'd send them in very fast so that I couldn't do them any more damage. I was more than ready for them because I hadn't cooled down much: a bandaged hand and a bandaged arm were all I'd got to show for last night's work and I badly wanted to signal Ferris with something good, something he could use, as a change from mucking it up.

And at the back of my mind I was trying to tell myself it wasn't true that Parkis had put it across me so smoothly that you could have spread it on toast. Because that was what he had done. I'd been through the situation twice and it stood up. Someone had told Lovett where and when the next Striker SK-6 was going to crash. Lovett had signalled London. Parkis had wanted it confirmed and he'd wanted it confirmed by the man in the field who was going to be given the mission so he'd sent me in from Munich to observe and report. I was already hooked when I'd gone to see him: he knew I was interested in aeroplanes and he knew if he could bring one down on my head I'd be more interested still.

But he was thorough: this one 'wasn't for me'; they were 'giving it to Waring'; there 'wasn't time' to change the director in the field if I didn't want to work with him. I'd have worked with Pontius Pilate and the Seven Dwarfs and he'd known that. I was a shadow executive and he'd made me sit up and beg for a sabotage investigation job and now I was doing it. I would have refused: he'd known that too. I'd tried to refuse the Berlin thing and after that Bangkok and he wasn't going to let me refuse this one.

The sole consolation was self-cancelling: Parkis wanted me on the Striker pitch because it might break me into something bigger before I was through and the odds against that were the same as the odds against any of his blind swipes: twelve to one.

There was one chance, one, of breaking into something bigger. Somewhere along the line I could turn up the missing link.

'… as well as I'd like to.'

He waved to someone going past.

'I see.'

The link. The man who had told Lovett.

'It's because my duties are rotational — I cover a dozen bases on a strict schedule and that doesn't give me too much time to meet with them, I mean as individuals.'

The man who had told Lovett could be in Moscow or East Berlin or Hanover or here in this room tonight but most probably he was dead because he'd been the primary leak and Lovett was only a contact and Lovett had gone through a glass roof and woken everyone up.

'You seem very popular,' I said.

But there was a chance.

'I fill a need, they need a father figure.'

He was speaking in English with an American accent. Most people in the Federal Republic who speak English do it with an American accent and sometimes you forget they're German and not American. In appearance he could have been anything: Austrian, Swiss, Scandinavian. He had light eyes and a strong nose and a habit of lifting his head when he looked at people as if he were fixing a sight on them, especially people in middle distance. He wasn't much taller than Philpott but he was more energetic, jerking his hands as he talked, swinging his head suddenly to note my reaction. He was doing that now.

I said: 'That's not surprising.'

'But what can I do? I send them for mud baths and psychoanalysis up at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. I talk to them before they take off and after they land. I give them sedatives and tranquillizsrs — quite often it's a sugar-pill and statistically they're almost thirty per cent as effective and that satisfies me because the speed of the nervous impulse is in the region of three hundred kilometres an hour and I don't like to slow it down even by a fraction.' His long thin hands were jerking again. 'You have to find a working balance between calming their minds and slowing their reactions, do you understand me? It is becoming very difficult here at Linsdorf because there hasn't been an accident for quite some while and they're waiting for it. Everyone is affected: ground staff, administration, their own families. Yesterday a request was sent out to the wives of all pilots asking them to refrain from telephoning for news whenever the squadron has just landed. Everyone is affected and I have my own private name for it: Striker psychosis.'

They had changed partners, Franz and Nitri.

'Is it better or worse at the other bases?'

'It is as you would expect. I have drawn graphs of the pattern. When I arrive at my next base I can tell at once if there has been an accident and how many days ago it took place. After two days the shock is absorbed and the anxiety dissipates quite automatically. The worst has happened — do you understand me? — and everyone feels better. Here at Linsdorf it is different now. Look at them. They are so gay. But that is forced. It is frenetic.'

The floor was small and they came past often. They didn't look across at each other. It was as if they'd changed partners for life. I watched Franz Rohmhild because I would need one of them — one pilot — for study, and it might as well be him.

'He is not a difficult one.'

'Which one?'

'Rohmhild. The one you are watching. His outlet is in — shall I say — human company. His wife's. Others'. That is very good. But some are difficult. They come to me with spurious complaints: headaches, vision, chest-pains. Of course I send them to the Herr Doktor Reitermann: he is a physician and I am not. But they don't keep the appointment. They come to me in the hope that I shall suspend them from flying duties and finally that is what I do because their stress has reached its threshold and if I let them go up they will only bale out and report an engine failure. That has happened. It will happen again. I would be delighted: what do we lose? One plane. Six million dollars. Who cares? The pilot is safe. But I am not delighted because he is no better: he is worse. He now has guilt feelings added to his anxiety. He knows he is a sham and a coward. Then he is finished. We do not let him fly again.' His head had swung towards me and he was sighting along his nose. 'I think that comes in your own field, Herr Martin?'

One of them was getting drunk. It was the one who'd run back for his sea-horse. He was doing aerobatics with his hands and there were people round him, laughing loudly.

'My job is to save money for my government,' I said.

'Doc! Nitri wants to dance with you!' Franz was going past with a new girl. I couldn't tell if he wanted to break it up between Nitri and her partner; it just looked like a pleasantry.

'I am a responsible married man! I cannot dance with girls like Nitri, you realize that!'

It was noisier in here now and there was a lot of laughter and you could hear the undertone, the fear of tomorrow.

'I think you are attached to the engineers,' said Wagner with polite interest. 'But I cannot see how a psychologist can help them. How is that?'

'When a pilot sends in a false report to the wreckage analysis team they can spend months looking in the wrong places. My job is to question the pilot and find out if he's lying. Especially if he's reported engine trouble.' I kept my voice low so that he'd get bored with missing the odd word or two and let it go but he was listening hard.

'Engine trouble. Why?'

'It's the only bit of the plane we can't examine. It's just a lump of burnt-out alloys. And the pilots know that.'

'Yes, I understand.'

He was still watching me and I had a choice. I was on thin ice and I could either keep as clear as possible of Wagner or try to work with him. If I could work with him I'd learn more but he had a doctorate and there was the risk of blowing my cover. I chose the risk because it could pay off if I used great care.

'That's where you could help me. You know these boys better than I do.'

His head swung away. 'I would be delighted. You say you are trying to save your government's money. Is that modesty or cynisicm? What you are really trying to do is to discover the cause of the accidents and to prevent them. That will save many lives. It is my own ambition.' He was facing me again and saying forcefully: 'Herr Martin, I am averse to the waste of men like these. They are the youth and the future of Germany. I shall willingly sit in with you at a pilot's examination and shall invite you to attend my own. Co-operation can only — '

The one at the bar, the one who was drunk, had finished some aerobatics with his hand and now his hand drove downwards vertically and the stiffened fingers hit the teak surface of the bar and sent a glass crashing. The only sound after that was his laughter and when it stopped there was a hush in the room. People turned away from him.

A murmur came from Wagner. 'He should not have done that.'

'Let's hope he never will.'

Halfway into Hanover along the autobahn the rain came and I switched on the wipers.

'Either with her or someone else. He has a wide choice. Is that the phrase? A wide choice.'

She was curled up on the seat with her shoes off. Not very animal now, nearly all child. And hurt.

'It doesn't mean anything to him,' I said.

'Only at the time. It's the time I think of.' She stretched and pushed her fingers through her hair. 'But I have my times. I think of those too. It's wild, isn't it? Grotesque.'

Her speech wasn't slurred. She might have been cold sober: it was hard to tell. A lot of them had drunk steadily the whole evening, more than they normally did, more than they would be drinking now at some of the other bases — Spalt, Oldenburg — where the 'anxiety was dissipating automatically' after the accident.

I said, to make her talk: 'It's rough on everyone.'

'It's not like I suppose a war is like, when everyone's in it. They're on a sort of list. A waiting-list. Only just the few of them. Sometimes I think of him as already dead, and there's only the waiting for it to be official. That's when I forgive him most. Have you a cigarette?'

I checked the glove-pocket to see if there were a packet left behind.

'It doesn't matter. I don't want to smoke. It's cosy in here. What car is this?' The reflection of her hair was a cloud of silver on the windscreen and sometimes her nails flashed through it as she brushed it back.

'It's an N.S.U.'

'I don't drive. I lost my licence. I didn't even hurt anyone, only myself, but they took it away. It's grotesque.' We listened to the rain and the wipers for a long time. The lights of Hanover made a sudden haze on the horizon to the north and then vanished as we dropped again below hills. 'He wants to have as many as he can while there's time. All right, we can't live together any more but I'm his wife and we're in love, I think. But how much of what I feel is because I might not know him for long?'

I checked the mirror regularly and slowed a little when lights came. They all went by.

'He seems very confident,' I said. 'That's an important safety factor.'

'He's enormously brave. Fantastic record, almost as good as Otto's. He's come out of three crashes, I mean ordinary ones, not the special ones.' What Ferris called 'pattern crashes'.

'Were any of them due to pilot error?'

She swung her head and made a laughing sound though it wasn't quite laughter. 'You don't know Franz. He can bring in a plane backwards.' She was still watching me. 'He says you're a psychologist. It must be like undressing people.'

'It's much more difficult. You've got to get through a dozen overcoats before you can reach anyone's mind.'

'He says you're English. I'm wild about the English. You don't talk.'

'It's just that you can't hear, because of the overcoats.'

There's the city,' she said. 'Where are you staying?'

'At Linsdorf.'

'But I thought you were going to Hanover.' She shifted sideways on the seat to face me, her legs still drawn up, one arm along the top of the facia. She was no closer to me than before and her scent was no different but suddenly she made herself explicit: her proximity, her scent, her body. 'You came specially?'

I said: 'Anyone would have given you a lift.' A lot of the cars I'd slowed for had been coming from the air-base after the party broke up.

'I know. But I didn't think you were coming specially.'

'What would you have done if you'd known?'

'Nothing.'

We drove through Hanover-Messe and up Hildesheimerstrasse. 'Let me know, will you?'

'I'm in Lister-Platz.' She looked for her shoes. 'Will you come infer a drink?'

'I don't think so.'

'Did you want to ask me about Franz and the others? To get information?'

'No.'

Then we'll have a drink.'

The apartment was small and overheated and untidy, with her clothes around and nothing to show whether it was from indifference or despair.

She sat curled up on the floor just as she had been in the car, in the attitude of a child. The blatant carnality she had shown in the crowded room was quite gone, because the necessity had gone; but her reasons remained and she spoke with her head turned away.

'It's late, and I don't want to have to go out again. If it can't be you it'll only have to be someone else.'