The Fuller Memorandum - Страница 3

Доступ к книге ограничен фрагменом по требованию правообладателя.

The RAF Museum is fronted by a shiny new glass-and-steel aircraft hangar of an exhibit hall. I march right up to the front desk (there’s no queue), present my warrant card, and say: “Bob Howard. I’m here to see Mr. Hastings.”

The wooly headed volunteer behind the cash register puts down her knitting and peers up at me over the rim of her bifocals. “Admission is five pounds,” she chirps.

“I’m here to see Mr. Hastings.” I force a smile and adjust my grip on the warrant card.

“Is that a season pass?” She looks confused.

What? I shove the card under her nose. “I have an appointment with Warrant Officer Hastings,” I repeat, trying to keep a note of impatience out of my voice. “I’m from the Department of Administrative Affairs.” It’s a thin bluff—jeans and tee shirt aren’t normal office attire for the civil service, even in this weather—but I’m crossing the fingers of my free hand and trusting my card to untangle enough of her neurons to get the message across. “A meeting to discuss the, ah, business in Hangar Six.”

She blinks rapidly. “Ooh, Hangar Six! That’s a bad job, it hasn’t been the same since Norman had his Health and Safety inspection . . . They used to keep the Whirlwind in there, did you know? You’re wanting Geoffrey, aren’t you?”

“Would that be Warrant Officer Hastings?” I ask, hopefully.

“Oh yes.” She pushes her knitting aside with one liver-spotted hand and picks up the telephone with another. “Geoffrey? Geoffrey? There’s a man here to see you! Who did you say you were? A Mr. Howarth! Yes, to see you now! He’s out front!” She puts the phone down. “Geoffrey will be here in a couple of minutes,” she confides, “he needs to scrub up first.”

I tap my toes and whistle tunelessly as I look around the entrance hall. There’s something casting a weird shadow overhead; I look up, and find myself staring at the bulging ventral fuel tank of an English Electric Lightning interceptor, dangling from the ceiling like a demented model-maker’s pride and joy. It’s enough to stop the foot tapping for a moment—if the cable fails, I’ll be squashed like a bug—but a moment’s consideration tells me that it’s highly unlikely. So I stare wistfully at the Lightning for a couple of minutes. Two missiles, sharply raked razor-thin wings, a huge, pregnant belly full of fuel, and the two screamingly powerful engines that once rammed it from a cold start to a thousand miles per hour in under a minute. Life would be so much simpler if our adversaries could be dealt with by supersonic death on the wing—but alas, Human Resources aren’t so easily defeated.

“Mr. Hogarth?”

I turn round. There’s a bluff-looking middle-aged man in blue overalls standing by the front desk: sandy receding hair, a gingery regulation mustache, and a face creased with questions. I hold up my warrant card. “Mr. Howard,” I say. “Capital Laundry Services. I believe you asked for a visit.”

He does a visible double take. “Eh, yes, I did—” He’s clocking the jeans, tee shirt, and casual linen jacket, and I can see the gears whirring in his head as he wonders if I’m some kind of impostor. Then his eyes reach my warrant card and something clicks behind them and he’s slightly less human than he was a moment before—“sir.”

“I was told your problem is in Hangar Six. Why don’t you take me there? You can explain along the way.”

I put the warrant card back in my pocket. No point in frying him.

“If you’d follow me, please, sir.” He has a pronounced borders accent. He turns and opens a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. “Sorry about Helen on the front desk,” he murmurs. “She’s a little slow, but she means well. Only see you, she’s been helping out here since forever, and we run on volunteers.” He shrugs. “I suppose it’s better for her than sitting around an old-age home waiting to die—” He lets the door close behind us before he says anything more. “Bloody rum business, Hangar Six.”

“Tell me about it. In your own words,” I add.

“It’s another of the Lightnings—hull number XR727.” He glances over his shoulder. “It’s been sitting in Hangar Six for years while we were waiting for funding to come through—plan was to restore it for static display in Hall Four when it’s ready. It’s an F. Mark 3, upgraded from F.2A like the one over the front desk.” I’ll take his word for it: I’m not au fait with the model numbers. “We’ve had a few odd incidents.”

Odd incidents? “Define odd.”

“Frosty patches on the hangar floor, mysterious oil leaks—under hydraulic pipes that were drained more than twenty years ago when it was taken out of service—nothing really unusual, seeing where it came from, if you follow my drift. But then there was the business with Marcia and the instrument panel, and I thought it might be a good idea to call you chappies directly.”

Clunk. A domino slips into place in my mental map. This enquiry didn’t come through the RAF, this came direct from Hastings. “You’ve worked with us before.”

“Not exactly . . .” He pauses beside an anonymous door, and extracts a fat key chain: “But I was with the Squadron, on ground crew. Once you’re in, you never really leave.” Click. “They like to stay in touch.”

What squadron? I wonder, annoyed but afraid to display my ignorance. “Tell me about Marcia,” I prompt, as he opens the door to reveal another prefab tunnel between buildings, this one windowless and stifling.

“Volunteer airframe conservator Marcia Moran. Age twenty-nine, completed her short service enlistment, then signed up with BAE Systems maintenance division when the defense review came down—she’s solid. Was solid.”

He took a deep breath. “She should never have been allowed to work on XR727’s cockpit instruments. We had them round the back, under padlock and warded by a class two repulsion geas. She shouldn’t even have been able to see them. She’d have twigged straight off that it wasn’t a normal F.3 integrated flight system and weapons control board. She wasn’t qualified to work on it.”

He falls silent as he trudges along the passage.

“What happened to her?” I repeat.

Hastings shook his head. “You’d have to ask the doctors. I’m not sure they know; they say she might be safe to release next month, but they said that last month too.”

Another domino. “XR727 was one of the, uh, Squadron’s planes. Yes?”

“They didn’t brief you?” He doesn’t sound surprised. “In here, Mr. Houghton.” I don’t bother to correct him as he shoves open a side door and steps into an echoing, gloomy cavern of a room. “See for yourself.”

The room we’re in resembles an aircraft hangar the way a mausoleum in a graveyard resembles a bedroom. It’s dimly lit, daylight filtering through high windows, and the light reveals the mummified skeletons of half a dozen fast jets littering the oil-stained concrete floor. Their severed limbs are stacked in jigs and frames, their viscera embalmed in the canopic jars of parts bins—patiently awaiting resurrection, or at least reassembly into the semblance of life. There’s junk everywhere, toolboxes, rodent control traps, workbenches piled high with parts. Closest to the door hulks the fuselage of a Lightning. Its tail is missing, as are its outboard wing segments and the conical spike of its nose radar, but it’s substantially intact. Close up, the size of the thing is apparent: a pit bull to the chihuahua of an old Russian MiG—squat, brutal, built for raw speed. It’s big, too—the wing root high enough overhead to walk under without stooping.

Something about it makes me feel profoundly uneasy, as if a black cat has walked half the length of my grave, paused furtively, taken a crap, and been about its business before anyone noticed.

“This is Airframe XR727. According to the official records it was scrapped in 1983. Unofficially . . . it ended up here, because of its history: it’s a ringer, it was on the books with 23 squadron and 11 squadron, but they never saw it. It was working for you people. In the Squadron.” I shiver. The hangar’s weirdly, incongruously cold, given the bright summer afternoon outside. “It logged 280 hours on the other side, escorting the white elephants.”

Angleton mentioned a white elephant, didn’t he? I glance at the shadows under XR727’s belly. The concrete is stained and greasy with fluid, whorls and lines and disconnected nodes that swim before my eyes. Clonk. The final domino slides into place.

“Jesus, Angleton,” I mutter, and pull out my PDA. Tap-click-boing and I pull up the thaumograph utility running on the rather nonstandard card in its second expansion slot. I point it at the swirling directed graph that the phantom hydraulic leak has dribbled across the concrete apron and the display flashes amber.

I take a slow step back from the airframe, and motion Hastings over. “I don’t want to alarm you,” I murmur. “But did you know your airframe is hot?”

Hastings shakes his head sadly. “Figures.” He shrugs. “Do you want to look at the cockpit instrumentation?”

I nod. “Just point me at it. Is it still where Marcia had her incident?”

“I haven’t moved it.” He gestures towards a canvas screen, surrounded by a circle of traffic cones with hazard tape strung between them. “Do you need any help?”

“I’m afraid I’m probably beyond help . . .” I advance on the traffic cones, PDA held in front of me. It begins to bleep and warble immediately. Edging sideways, I look round the canvas screen. There’s a workbench bearing a stack of black metal boxes, wires dangling, needles and dials glowing eerie blue—blue? Glowing? I check my PDA and swear under my breath. If this was a radiation leak I’d be backing away and reaching for the lead-lined underwear right now: but it’s not, it’s just thaumic resonance, albeit at levels you don’t usually see outside of a summoning grid—what the ignorant persist in calling a pentacle. “Scratch that. Do you have any conductive tape? A soldering iron? Some blue chalk?”