‘You have control,’ said the voice in his headphones.

‘I have control,’ Amos acknowledged.

‘And if you screw up your landing at Kindley I shall be really quite vexed. Not that you will, of course. Still, must put on a good show for the Yanks.’

Amos smiled into his oxygen mask as he let the Vulcan climb out of Goose Bay, Labrador towards their planned ceiling of fifty thousand feet. Typical Muffin, he thought, glancing almost affectionately at the man beside him in the left-hand seat who was so close their shoulders were touching. Wing Commander ‘Muffin’ Mewell DFC and bar was thirty-eight, which to Amos made him old enough to have seen the ice sheets retreat from Guildford and mammoths wander the South Downs. In fact, in RAF terms he was even more venerable. Mewell had actually flown with 617 Squadron on the Dams raid in 1943 as a twenty-year-old navigator and soon afterwards had applied to be retrained as a pilot. He had eventually been shot down and remained a PoW until the war’s end. Now, sixteen years later, the Vulcan’s captain was leaning back in his seat with his eyes closed.

Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped compartment immediately behind the cockpit were the three crewmen. For this trip a fourth man had been added: the aircraft’s crew chief. Strapped uncomfortably into his ad hoc seat on the floor, he would be responsible for supervising refuelling and any maintenance on the trip but would not be allowed on the actual exercise. Now Viv, the nav plotter, came on the intercom with a course correction that would take them slightly east of Halifax with a clear run over yet more empty ocean almost due south to Bermuda: some twelve hundred nautical miles. He added that the other three Vulcans in their flight were airborne and following. Amos confirmed the correction and tilted the great white delta a few points to port as it climbed. Once they had levelled off well above any transatlantic commercial aircraft he could go to autopilot, although he was too keyed up to relax much. He had snatched an hour’s sleep on the five-hour first leg out from Scampton to Labrador while ‘Muffin’ was flying and now here he was, a mere stripling of twenty-four, in charge of one of Britain’s most potent and charismatic nuclear bombers for as long as the captain slept. This was not a time to make an ass of himself.

Amos could still hardly believe his luck in having been swept up in a chain of events that had begun several months ago, and about which he had known nothing until almost the last moment. Like so much else currently affecting Bomber Command the chain had begun with a NATO panic. Half a dozen years ago, with the Cold War getting colder by the week, Canada and the United States had suddenly realised how vulnerable they would be to attack by nuclear-armed Soviet bombers flying directly in over the Arctic. The decision was taken to build lines of radar installations stretching across the North American continent to provide advance warning. Together these electronic barriers constituted North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD. In theory, the system would have afforded some three hours’ warning of an attack. In practice, it had to be tested. Hence this exercise, Operation Skyshield, the second of its kind, and this time the RAF had been invited. The RAF decided it could spare eight Vulcans. Skyshield II had been planned for mid-October 1961 and by September all eight aircraft had begun intensive training in the area around the Orkneys. They flew up almost daily from Lincolnshire to practise co-ordinating their electronic countermeasures and determining the exact extent to which their radar defences interfered with each other and at what heights and ranges.

Then within days a flu epidemic struck, affecting RAF personnel all over eastern Britain, including the crews practising for Skyshield II. Replacements were quickly drafted in from other squadrons. As a qualified Vulcan co-pilot Flight Lieutenant Amos McKenna had suddenly found himself ordered to report to RAF Scampton on temporary secondment. And so it was that a bare month later he was sitting in the right-hand seat of XJ786 heading for Kindley Air Force Base in Bermuda from where, in a couple of days’ time, he would be taking part in a mock attack against New York.

The plan was for four of the Vulcans to approach North American airspace from the south and the other four to do so from the north, in rough mimicry of what Soviet bombers might do from Cuba as well as from their Arctic bases in the Kola Peninsula near Murmansk. His own flight had left Scampton in advance, having that much further to go. The other four aircraft, having first deployed to Lossiemouth, were due out next day. They, too, would fly to Goose Bay, from where they would launch their own attack the day after that. Amos had never been to Bermuda but ‘Yourshout’ Maybury had told him to pack a pair of swimming trunks in case he got the chance of a quick dip: one of the perks of having struck lucky. None of his mates destined for Labrador in mid-October was thinking of swimming.

This leg was a mere three hours of monotonous flying and he had to make an effort not to emulate his senior officer slumped and dozing in the seat next to him. Amos had long discovered that he was susceptible to crossing time zones. On the morning’s flight across the Atlantic from Scampton to Goose they had gained four hours: taking off at 10:30, the four Vulcans in his group had landed at noon in time for lunch and a rest while the aircraft were refuelled. He had made sure to limit his liquid intake, first-rate bladder control being a prerequisite for V-bomber pilots; but the food had been generous and he felt a certain drowsiness descending. The time was now 15:20 local, getting on for half-past seven in the evening according to his body clock. He scanned the instruments in front of him, an automatic check as unconscious as a tic. They were now at their planned altitude, as Viv suddenly confirmed over the intercom. He reached down by his left thigh to the autopilot control panel between the seats and found it hidden beneath the sleeve of Muffin’s flying suit. Once, on an exercise to an air base in Nebraska, he had flown in one of Strategic Air Command’s huge B-52 bombers whose cockpit (Amos recalled wistfully) was the size of a tennis court compared with that of the Vulcan. He brushed his superior’s sleeve aside and set the autopilot, trimming for level flight at a cruising speed of Mach .85.

Somehow the hours passed. The trouble with flying so high was that there was nothing to see, a lack of visual interest that was anyway not helped by the cockpit’s restricted vision. After an interminable period the headphones in his cloth helmet at last clicked and ‘Bunny’ Carmichael, the air electronics officer (or AEO) sitting a few feet behind him, announced that he had made radio contact with Kindley. Immediately afterwards Viv gave Amos a slight course correction and told him to begin his descent. As they lost height the sun, seen through an increasing thickness of atmosphere, became a deeper orange and seemed to sink. It was getting on for 18:00 hours local on 12 October: even in Bermuda the nights were beginning to draw in. He found himself looking forward to dinner. Kindley AFB was, of course, an American base on a British island and the Yanks usually did themselves remarkably well when it came to eating; indeed, both the food and the quarters were generally a good deal cushier than their equivalents back home.

As he altered course to bring them in from the east he suddenly glimpsed the islands out of the porthole window beside his head: a little green archipelago set in an otherwise unbroken expanse of wrinkled gold.

‘I presume that means there’s an evening breeze blowing down there,’ said Muffin unexpectedly at his side. Had the canny old bugger actually dozed off at all? Amos wondered. ‘I’ve flown into Kindley five or six times now, and on a couple of occasions they brought us in from the west. It doesn’t much matter to us because we’ve got nearly ten thousand feet of runway to play with. Did I ever tell you I once landed and stopped a Vulcan in two thousand feet?’

‘Is that a challenge?’

‘Certainly not. You do your landing how you like. There’s plenty of space and a bit of a headwind. No point in wasting a chute. That’s the great thing about American runways: they’re so long one can practically run out of fuel just taxiing from one end to the other. Take your time. We’re the lead aircraft. The others will follow. You realise ‘Bing’ Cross will be lurking?’

‘What?’

‘Yes, God knows what he’s doing here. Apparently this exercise on Saturday is going to be a very brassy occasion. Just about everybody you can think of with scrambled eggs on his cap will be lurking. But you can bet Bing will be watching us arrive. So squadron’s honour at stake, and all that. Now, do you want me to call out some heights and speeds for you?’

‘Roger that.’ Amos put the presence of Bomber Command’s C-in-C to the back of his mind and concentrated on his circuit over the sea. Behind him, he knew, the other three Vulcans would be strung out with a three-quarter mile safety margin between each, setting up for their approach directly into the setting sun. With a little turbulence over the ocean and with gear down and air brakes out he was at 132 knots, just above the stipulated safe minimum speed, as the end of the runway slid beneath the aircraft. He held his breath as a hundred tons touched down like a marshmallow settling into custard. Jammy sod – he thought to himself – pulling off a greaser just when needed. Keeping half an eye on the edge of the speeding...