The Final Flight by James Blatch (books to read in your 30s .TXT) 📗

Hill’s hands gripping his ejection handle.

“Oh, shit.”

Ejection was only an option for the two pilots. Millie and Steve Bright had no chance of getting out alive at this height.

He closed his eyes and braced for death.

The aircraft continued to sink.

Is this it?

He thought of Georgina, beautiful Georgina. And Charlie. Where was he right now? In a maths lecture, probably. Oblivious to the enormity of the moment.

The aircraft shuddered.

It was almost imperceptible, but the plane’s momentum switched from a descending path to a climbing one.

He opened his eyes and looked around again, in time to see Hill release his grip on the yellow-and-black handle.

Hill pointed forward and shouted. “Trees.”

The aircraft rolled right and Millie was pinned to his seat as the engines surged to full throttle and Rob May threw them into a spectacular powered, turning climb.

Vibrations rumbled through the fuselage from the howling engines, the aircraft groaning and creaking under the stress.

Millie groaned under the sudden g-force.

He continued to hold on to the desk.

They held the gravity-defying manoeuvre for a few seconds, until the wings levelled.

Millie let out a long breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding in.

He looked across at Steve Bright, the nav’s eyes bulging wide above his mask.

The throttles eased back and the aircraft settled.

It seemed like a full minute before anyone spoke.

Eventually, the silence was broken by the normally unflappable Brian Hill.

“Jesus Christ.”

Millie’s eyes rested on the tape data recorder.

It was switched off and empty. Whatever just happened, it had happened after he’d stopped recording the height readings from Guiding Light.

He realised he needed to write down the readings he’d seen with his own eyes, but he couldn’t move.

Too much adrenaline in his system.

He settled his breathing and fished out a pencil to scribble down what he could recall.

The system had taken them to within a whisker of a catastrophic crash. The all-singing, all-dancing laser had seen straight through solid earth and told the onboard computer to descend.

How it had happened was beyond him, in every sense.

It was someone else’s problem now. Someone back at DF Blackton in Cambridge.

Back to the drawing board with this one.

He added a note to the end of his description of the event.

Guiding Light evaluation suspended.

Wing Commander Mark Kilton struggled with the acetate sheet. The image in the overhead projector was either upside down or back to front, and now it was out of focus and too large to fit the screen.

The tall and wide American lieutenant general took his seat at the table. “You fly jets better than you operate a projector, Kilton?”

Kilton offered Eugene Leivers III a thin smile and gave up with the projector. He took his own seat at the repurposed dining room table that had somehow found its way into the side office he’d commandeered for the meeting in the station headquarters building.

Paint peeled from the walls of the 1930s construction and the unseasonable heat of an English June made life uncomfortable for the five men in the room.

Leivers removed his jacket, replete with three rows of medal ribbons, and hung it on the back of his chair. He made a dismissive gesture with his hand toward the white screen intended to display Kilton’s diagrams, and spoke with a Louisianan drawl.

“Forget it, Kilton. I know what Guiding Light does. What I need to know is, does it work?”

Kilton glared at him. “It works.”

“Outstanding.”

RAF Air Vice Marshal Richard Mannington stood up and opened the curtains. Kilton winced as daylight flooded in.

“Sunshine,” said Mannington, “to illuminate a moment of British engineering triumph.”

Kilton turned to the general. “Guiding Light is working and it will change everything.”

A broad grin spread across Leivers’s face. “Damn straight it will, Kilton.” The general leaned forward and banged the table. “Gentlemen, I have to tell you, we’ve carried out some theoretical simulations using the information you’ve provided about Guiding Light, and the results have been phenomenal. Phenomenal.”

He took a deep breath, lowered his voice.

“What I’m about to tell you will never leave this room. Understood?”

The general’s eyes darted between Kilton, Mannington and the two other men sitting at the table. They each gave a nod of acknowledgement.

“Terrain-following radar, the new technology we’re both rushing to fit to our new jets, is dead.”

“Dead?” Mannington asked.

“Dead, Dickie. The Russkies can detect it.”

Kilton tried not to show his shock.

“But we’re planning to fit TFR to everything,” Mannington said. “The laser… Guiding Light. It’s supposed to be a backup.”

Leivers continued. “It just got promoted. Instead of helping our boys get in and out of the badlands, TFR will do the opposite. Every Russkie SAM from Berlin to Vladivostok will lock on and blow them out of the sky. They may as well be flying with floodlights and a big arrow that says SHOOT HERE. Damn shame.”

Kilton inhaled. “Do the Russians know we know this?”

Leivers smiled at him. “No, Kilton. They do not. And neither do they know about Guiding Light. Your silent laser solves a very big headache at just the right time. This goes all the way up the line. And I mean all the way. This is not about winning World War Three. It’s about preventing it. Once we have an unassailable advantage over the Reds, it’s game over for them.” He leaned back and spoke a little more slowly. “And that’s why I’ve got POTUS’s attention on this one.”

Mannington turned a pencil over in his hands. “What’s Potus?”

“POTUS is the President of the United States, Dickie.”

Minister of State David Buttler cleared his throat. “General. The United Kingdom is not putting Guiding Light on a shelf for sale to all comers.”

Leivers balked. “All comers? I thought we had a special relationship, Mr Buttler.”

“Of course we have a special relationship, General. But we must remember that Guiding Light is a system that gives us all an advantage only so long as the enemy remains oblivious to its existence. At least until it’s fitted to the fleets.”

“You don’t trust the US to keep a secret?”

“Britain trusts America implicitly. It’s just that the chances of the secret