Vortex

Chapter Five

Ben was tired, but could not sleep.

Everything seemed to be buzzing around in his head as he lay in the darkened dormitory, listening to the heavy breathing of the other hostel guests sleeping around him. The rain had started again, and he thought of the old man out there protected from the elements only by his dark grey overcoat. No doubt Don would dismiss his midnight wanderings as the crazy actions of someone who had lost his marbles, but suspicions still gnawed away at Ben, suspicions he couldn't quite put his finger on, but which troubled him nonetheless. He found himself repeating the conversation he had had with the old man time and again, trying to squeeze meaning out of it that he might have missed.

'Strange things happening at Spadeadam,' he had said in his odd accent. 'Always have been, ever since I can remember, ever since Blue Streak.'

What did he mean? What was Blue Streak? Ben felt like he was trying to put a jigsaw together without knowing where all the pieces were.

Suddenly he remembered his PDA. Quietly, so as not to disturb any of his room-mates, he crept out of bed and rummaged among his things until he found it. Then, covering himself with his sleeping bag so that the glow from the screen did not wake anyone up, he switched it on. In seconds he had an Internet connection. He googled 'Blue Streak' and waited for the results.

What he discovered kept him reading for some time.

Blue Streak, he learned, was a rainbow code — one of a series of code names used in the middle of the last century to disguise the true nature of various British military research operations: code names like Black Arrow, a vehicle used to launch satellites, or Green Satin, an airborne navigation unit — but Blue Streak was more destructive than either of those. It was the secret name given to the development of a medium-range ballistic missile. After the Second World War, Britain had needed a nuclear deterrent in order to remain a world power. Blue Streak was to be it.

Ben blinked when he read where the central location of the Blue Streak project was. Spadeadam, just a couple of miles from where he lay at that very moment.

The Spadeadam test site was absolutely enormous. Before Blue Streak it was practically uninhabited, but soon large numbers of workers were brought in and a huge amount of construction work started: control bunkers, reservoirs, miles and miles of piping, engineering workshops and, most importantly, huge, concrete static test-beds. These giant structures were intended to test the missile engines which, when they were started, could be heard for miles around. Millions of gallons of water from a nearby river were pumped into the test-beds in order to cool the engines: as a result, enormous clouds of steam caused micro-climates far and wide over Spadeadam.

Blue Streak was always controversial, however, and MPs finally refused to allow the underground missile silos to be constructed because they were too expensive. In 1959, the Americans unveiled Skybolt, an aircraft-based missile, which made Blue Streak effectively redundant. The programme was never completed.

The end of Blue Streak did not mean that people stopped being interested in it, however; and for years, rumours circulated that there was more going on at Spadeadam than the government admitted to, or perhaps even knew about. Ben scoffed slightly when he read reports of mysterious personnel dressed in what looked like white spacesuits in remote parts of the base. More believable was the rumour that had apparently gone round the local villages that Spadeadam housed an enormous underground hospital. Whatever the truth, it was clear to him that many people believed there were more secret, sinister things going on there.

Of course, he knew that already. He had just met one of them.

In 2004, the conspiracy theorists were given ammunition to back up their claims. An area of trees in the Spadeadam site needed to be cleared. It was a routine procedure, but what was discovered was very far from being routine: there were found to be extensive excavations for an underground missile silo, of exactly the type that was never supposed to have been built in Spadeadam. Investigations showed that no official plans of this silo existed, nor any other records whatsoever.

Clearly it had been a very official secret. Something the authorities did not want the man in the street to know about.

What was it the old man had said? 'Stay away from Spadeadam. It's not safe.'

Ben furrowed his forehead. Everything he was reading about had happened so long ago, during the Cold War — surely nobody believed in this day and age that suspicious things were still happening there. Did they? He decided to research Spadeadam a bit further.

In 1976, the RAF took over the Spadeadam site, and the following year they converted it into the world's first Electronic Warfare Tactics Range. Electronic warfare — Ben didn't really know what that meant, although he felt pretty sure Annie would be able to fill him in. But everywhere he looked, he found insinuations of cover-ups and secret operations going on within the boundaries of the Spadeadam site. Nothing concrete. Nothing official. Just rumours.

Ben wasn't sure if he thought it all made sense, or if he was even more confused than before. He switched off his PDA and lay there in the darkness, trying to piece together everything he had just read. There didn't seem to be much doubt about the fact that secret, classified government projects had been undertaken there in the past — the discovery of the hidden missile silo made that pretty clear. But all that was a long time ago. Cover-ups? Conspiracies? Surely that sort of thing didn't go on now. Did it?

With those thoughts spinning round in his brain, sleep gradually overcame Ben. It was a turbulent sleep, broken and full of ominous visions of missiles and concrete bunkers, of faceless gunmen and slaughtered birds, and above all the troubled, piercing green eyes of the old man whose words Ben could not seem to get out of his head.

'Strange things happening at Spadeadam…' His voice seemed to echo in the darkness. 'Strange things happening at Spadeadam…'

Strange things indeed.

Ben awoke with a start.

He felt no sleepiness, just a sudden clarity. His dreams had been a jumble, but now something made perfect sense to him. When he had told the old man about the hen harrier, it had not seemed to surprise him at all. 'Makes perfect sense,' he had told Ben.

And suddenly, it did.

It was still dark outside — a glance at his watch told him that it was just past four o'clock — and Ben's first thought was for the old man. Was he still out there in the unwelcoming night, or had he crept back to the hostel before it had closed for the night to try and take advantage of its warmth and shelter? Somehow, he felt he knew the answer. He crept out of bed, sneaked illicitly into Annie's dormitory, and woke her up.

For a minute she didn't seem to know where she was, but she soon regained her bearings. 'What time is it?' she whispered hoarsely to Ben.

'Four o'clock, but you have to get up. I need to talk to you about something.'

'At four o'clock in the morning?'

'Yeah. Get your stuff ready — I'll meet you downstairs.'

The reception area was empty as Ben waited for her; finally she came down the stone steps carrying her rucksack, her face a thundercloud. Ben spoke before she could say a thing. 'We've got to go to Spadeadam.'

She looked at him like he was mad. 'What are you talking about, Ben?'

So Ben told her about the old man and how he had seen him wandering off into the night. 'We met in the common room last night and he kept talking about Spadeadam and Blue Streak. It's a—'

'I know what Blue Streak is, Ben. Don't tell me you've started to buy all those stupid conspiracy theories.'

'Listen,' Ben urged. 'It all makes sense. If you're doing something you want to keep secret, the last thing you want is random people walking around where they can stumble upon it, right?'

'I suppose so,' Annie replied reluctantly.

'Why have we come to the area?' Ben pressed.

'For the bird-watching.'

'Do you think they get many bird-watchers here?'

'Yeah, quite a few, I suppose.'

'Exactly. So what's the best way to stop bird-watchers coming to Spadeadam?'

The two cousins looked at each other, their faces serious.

'Are you trying to tell me,' Annie asked slowly, 'that someone is shooting rare birds around here to stop bird-watchers trespassing into Spadeadam and discovering their… their… secret plans? Ben, Spadeadam is a serious place, an important facility. They train our soldiers well so that they don't lose their lives…'

When she put it like that, Ben realized how farfetched it sounded; but the pieces of the jigsaw still fitted, and somehow he knew he was right. 'Can you think of another explanation?' he asked.

Annie was shaking her head. 'Nobody would do something as sick as that,' she told him.

Instantly, Ben thought back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 'Believe me,' he murmured, 'I've seen them do worse. Anyway' — he decided to try a different tack — 'what about the old man? He's not all there. I bet you any money you like he's gone to Spadeadam. I bet he's just wandering around there, getting freezing cold. We've got to try and find him, make sure he's all right.'

'Ben,' Annie told him patiently. 'You can't just go wandering into RAF Spadeadam. Do you have any idea what they do there?'

'Yeah.' Ben shrugged, trying to sound as if he knew what he was talking about. 'It's an electronic warfare tactics range.'

'And do you know what that means?'

'Er… no,' he admitted. 'Not really.'

Annie sighed. 'Electronic warfare,' she explained, her voice taking on an almost school-teacherly tone, 'or EW, is manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum to defeat or evade the enemy.'

'Right,' Ben replied. 'And in English?'

'Jamming radars, stealth technology, scrambling your enemy's signals and using your own electronic weapons to destroy them. My dad says it's the future of warfare. At Spadeadam, they simulate the effects of electronic warfare so that pilots can learn how to deal with it. They have dummy targets for aircraft to practise on under EW conditions.'

She must have realized that Ben was still looking at her a bit blankly, because when she spoke again it was much more slowly and clearly. 'Planes fly over Spadeadam and blow things up, Ben,' she stated.'A lot. And the army's EW research, a lot of which goes on at Spadeadam, really is top secret.'

Ben fell silent. He knew Annie had a fair point — trespassing on an RAF base was a dangerous business — but he just couldn't shake off his conviction that something untoward was happening there. He thought back to his experiences in Australia — all had not been as it seemed at the US base there. Maybe that was why he was not so convinced as Annie that everything was as it should be in Spadeadam. 'You're right,' he said quietly. 'We're going to have to be careful.'

'We're not going to have to be careful, Ben, because we're not going.'

Ben shrugged. 'Speak for yourself,' he said. He picked up the rucksack that was on the floor beside him and made for the door.

'Wait!' Annie told him. Ben smiled slightly to himself. He knew, despite her arguments, that Annie would not be able to resist a bit of intrigue. He turned to look at her. 'My dad's an air commodore,' she appealed to him. 'Can you imagine the trouble I'll be in if we're caught?'

'Then we'd better make sure we don't get caught, hadn't we?'

Annie's face was still filled with doubt. Ben had one last suggestion to try.

'Tell you what,' he said. 'I've got my digital camera here. We'll sneak into Spadeadam and see if we can find anyone shooting birds. If we do, I'll take a picture of them and we can show it to someone who can put a stop to it. But if we don't find anything by sunset, we'll leave and I'll never mention it again.'

For a moment Annie didn't reply and Ben could see that she was grappling with her conscience. Then she took a deep, slow breath. 'Do you promise, Ben?'

Ben nodded his head firmly. 'I promise.'

She closed her eyes. 'All right,' she said. 'When do we leave?'

Ben glanced back towards the exit.

'No time like the present,' he observed, as he opened the door and stepped out into the early morning.

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