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

Number Ten through back channels. It was a brief note and nothing came of it.

Susie made her own notes.

Ambitious and prone to step outside protocols?

She read his official service record.

Fighter pilot in the war. Battle of Britain, North Africa, Malta. By D-Day, he was at Bentley Priory.

Early jet test pilot after the war, commanded one of the first squadrons to equip with Meteors. Went through the Empire Test Pilots’ School. Promoted to squadron leader. And then…

Odd. His career faltered at that point. Desk jobs in London. Then, suddenly in 1965, he’s promoted and handed the Royal Air Force Test Flying Unit as its founder commanding officer.

She checked the date on the MI5 note about TSR-2.

So that was his reward.

The personal side of the file was brief. Wife, two children. Son died aged eleven from sepsis, daughter married with a baby somewhere in Hampshire. Wife Margaret died in 1965. Last year.

Still raw?

But nothing else. No debt, no financial impropriety. None of the things she might expect to find in the circumstances.

She lay back on the bed and let the information wash over her, allowing her mind to roam.

A dead child, a dead wife. God knows how many dead pals from the war.

That’s a lot of death to live with.

After completing her coded notes, Susie moved the papers to the floor and lay back on her bed. She closed her eyes and allowed the sounds from the garden to float through her mind.

She spent a few minutes shifting through her immediate thoughts, closing off the day-to-day until she was ready. In the quiet of a first floor room in a semi-detached B&B on the edge of Salisbury, she went through everything that had happened, moment by moment.

Her eyelids glowed yellowy-orange as the diffused sunlight filtered through the net curtains and fell on her face.

The answers lie in the shadows. Something that was said that was not quite right. Someone in a room who shouldn’t have been there.

The ‘recall’ sessions in training had been marred by men giggling. An eccentric former MI6 tutor taught them a technique to pull memories from hidden parts of your brain. Most of the men dismissed it as hokey. But Susie liked the idea of something that could give her answers.

The tutor had described it as a cross between meditation and self-hypnosis, insisting that the subconscious memory held a vast amount of information hidden from conscious thought.

He had urged them to let their minds roam freely.

Don’t force it.

Don’t try to remember anything specific.

Let your mind think for itself.

Susie often practised alone in her tent. She always came away refreshed, even if she hadn’t been searching for anything.

She learned the trick was to follow rather than push. The instructor likened it to picking out the faintest of stars in the night sky by looking just away from them, allowing them to register in peripheral vision.

Thinking about something else, when you were keen to learn more about a particular event, was counterintuitive, but it worked.

She steadied her breathing, becoming conscious of her chest rising and falling.

A van clattered in the distance, trundling over uneven cobbles.

Susie allowed the man-made noise to mix with the birdsong until it drifted beyond her hearing range.

Her mind felt cluttered and busy. She’d learned a lot in eight days.

The newspaper where she’d first read of the crash floated into view. She went forward to conversations with May, then backward to the peace camp visits he’d made.

That look on his face. Desperation? No, something else. Determination. Words, images, sounds, all floated by. She resisted the temptation to concentrate on any one thing, allowing the flow of thoughts to continue unfettered.

After several minutes, she sat up and made two notes.

Number. Who?

Tapes off West Porton. How?

She curled up, this time for a nap.

The image of Rob May’s face was back in her mind.

Frightened and weighed down.

He was pinning much on her ability to help him. But she had so little to go on, and the man who knew everything was dead.

The only thing she could see clearly was the A33 back to London.

28

Monday 4th July

“Friday? Is that possible?” Red Brunson asked.

Kilton turned over a piece of paper with a series of boxes. Each one represented a flight, concluding on Friday that week.

Rob’s head spun.

“Two flights a day until Thursday morning,” Kilton explained. “The final flight, Friday afternoon, with DF Blackton in attendance, will be ceremonial. Upon landing, we’ll hand over the signed documents to the Ministry and it’s done. Guiding Light can move into production.”

“What about the required project hours?” Rob said.

“You look pale. May. Are you feeling alright?”

“Yes, it’s just I thought we had nearly a hundred hours left?”

“That was before the break-in and before we discovered exactly what Millie was up to.”

The room went quiet.

“What I’m about to tell you stays in this room.” Kilton rose from his seat and closed the office door. “An audit of the blank tapes delivered from DF Blackton revealed more than sixty missing.”

“Missing?” said Brunson.

“Missing. They haven’t been returned to Cambridge. They’re not in our cabinets or safe. Every square inch of West Porton has been searched, but we’ve found only two of them, despite widening the search to Milford’s married quarter.”

“Why would they be there?” Brunson asked. For the first time, there was a hint of confrontation in Red’s question.

“Because the two we did find were hidden in Millie’s locker.” Kilton locked eyes with Brunson, as if challenging him to come back with another question. “The Blackton computer read one tape. It contained records that matched one of the project flights. And yet, the official reels for the flight are safely with the rest, signed in by Millie.”

“I don’t understand,” said Brunson. “So, Millie forgot to log a couple of tapes? So what?”

“Not just the odd tape, Brunson. Sixty reels are missing. That’s twenty hours of secret Guiding Light material that’s now… god knows where. We have to assume the worst. We have to assume it’s in the hands of an illegal third party. And so, with the