The Fire Baby

The sight of a shadow dashing across the Fens as one of the giant B-52s flew in to Mildenhall was now as familiar as the turning sails of a windmill had once been. And up there, beyond the clouds and on the edge of the stratosphere, something else circled. Two airborne command centres were kept aloft in a shift pattern providing a permanent flying nerve-centre from which a putative war in Europe would be waged. From this impossibly distant metal cylinder the US would direct the death rites of a continent. By that time, Dryden comforted himself, he’d be a small pile of radioactive ashes beneath an atomized cloud of best bitter.

He dragged himself back to the night of the Black Bank air crash, trying to imagine the scene as the transatlantic flight took off that June night. He’d been up in one of the new transporters that summer, a Lockheed Starburst, on a facility trip from Lakenheath, just north of Mildenhall. Passenger space was small and cramped, the noise terrifying, the porthole view obscured by racks for kit and stores. But that night in 1976 most of the passengers on flight MH336 would have been just happy to be flying home. Marlene, though, would have been struggling with two competing emotions, grief for her father and the coming ordeal of the funeral, and her excitement and pride in showing her mother the new boy. For Jim, Vietnam behind him for at least a period of extended leave, the flight must have offered a rare opportunity to collapse into sleep, haunted perhaps, thought Dryden, by the rhythmic thud of turning helicopter rotor blades.

Dryden saw the scene as the dust storm hit the aircraft. All the servicemen would have heard the sudden change in the engine noise, the metal of the turbine blades screaming as they were shredded in the diamond-hard dust. He tried to shut out the image of the aircraft stalling, the fuselage tilting violently, nose down, into a dive, a sickening spiral fall into the black peat below. A savagely short journey, but not short enough for Marlene and Jim, joined, Dryden imagined, in a single embrace across the tiny body of their infant son Lyndon.

He re-focused on the microfiche with tired eyes. The only survivor from amongst the air passengers had been Lyndon Koskinski, aged thirteen days. Maggie Beck had found him in the rubble of the farmhouse, still secure in a travelling cradle strapped into his seat. She’d walked out of the flames with him wrapped in a USAF blanket, having seen her own child trapped, and clearly dead, in the ashes of the farmhouse. She’d saved Lyndon’s life, thought Dryden, and now he was here to see hers end.

The next day – 3 June 1976 – the Cambridge Evening News had a picture of Maggie Beck coming out of the mortuary at Cherry Hinton. The caption caught the horror of the moment: ‘Maggie Beck leaves the city mortuary after identifying the bodies of her parents, William and Celia Beck, and her 15-day-old son Matthew John’.

The good news came two days later. James Koskinski, Snr, and his wife Gale were shown holding their grandson at a photocall at USAF Mildenhall. They had flown the Atlantic to take custody of the child, saved from the ashes of Black Bank. ‘We have met Miss Beck and extended our thanks for her courage in saving Lyndon’s life,’ said Koskinski, according to the Daily Telegraph. Both tried and failed to deliver a smile for the cameras. They didn’t look thrilled to be parents again, and certainly not a few days before the funeral of their only child Jim. They flew home with their grandson, and two coffins.

Inquests on all those killed were held on the same day. The Crow’s reports were the most detailed, but given the cataclysmic forces involved in the disaster the verdicts – of accidental death – were a foregone conclusion. The heat of the crash had made most post-mortem examinations on the passengers impossible and irrelevant. Dental records were required for formal identification of most victims.

President Gerald Ford sent a message of condolence which was read at the military service of remembrance at Mildenhall’s bleak, brutal, 1950s chapel on the base perimeter. All US personnel killed in the crash were flown home for burial or cremation. An official USAF inquiry cleared the pilot of any negligence but severely admonished the air traffic controllers at Mildenhall and the senior officer in command of the base. He finished his tour of duty in the UK, and then returned to a desk job in the Pentagon.

Maggie’s parents were buried at the church on Black Bank Fen. It had been their last wish, according to an interview with William Beck’s sister, Constance, shortly before the funeral. The Crow carried a brief report of the ceremony itself with a single-column heading: ‘Crash victims buried within sight of home’. An honour guard from USAF Mildenhall escorted the coffins to the graveside. Matthew John, known as ‘Matty’, was cremated at his mother’s request.

The Revd John Peters, team vicar for the parish of Feltwell Anchor, which embraced Black Bank, delivered a eulogy at the Becks’ funeral, fully recorded in The Crow. ‘They were transported from here to eternity in an instant,’ he told the congregation. Dryden wondered how often Maggie Beck had relived the few seconds which had destroyed her life.

6

Dryden lowered the window of the Capri and let the breeze buffet his ear. It was evening time but the heat of the day still made the cab stink. Hot plastic, socks, and sump oil merged in an odour that Humph liked to call ‘Home’. The promise Dryden had made to Maggie Beck weighed heavily on him, but he felt he had done everything he could, short of touring the north Norfolk coast himself on the off- chance he could spot her missing daughter. In the meantime he had a job to do, which meant he had to find a decent story for the next edition of the Ely Express, The Crow’s downmarket tabloid sister paper.

Dryden had spent many hours that summer scanning the national papers for stories to follow up in the Fens. The so-called ‘silly season’ had struck early that year. Nobody could be bothered to make news in the heat, or even make it up. Last week The Crow had splashed on the drought for the sixth time in a row. From ‘It’s a scorcher!’ to ‘Mains water to be cut’ the soaring temperatures had dominated everything.

The Crow’s meagre editorial budget did not stretch to a full set of national papers each day so Dryden spent an hour in the library every afternoon. He’d begun to spot the pattern in the first days of May. The odd paragraph here and there but, essentially, always the same story. Police raids on lorry parks on the motorways. Illegal immigrants in small, bedraggled groups. Mainly sub-Saharan West African in origin, all Francophone. They probably crossed the Med from the North African coast to the ports of the South of France. Then north to the Channel and via container ship to Felixstowe where they could be shipped across country by lorry. Some had got out en route for the West Midlands. At night, in roadside lay-bys, welcomed by silence and fear.

And the same promise. Jobs. Pickers in the fields. An idyllic picture, laughably misplaced. Dryden scanned the horizon. Miles of empty dry peat. Thousands of acres and not a single living thing on two or four legs except the wheeling birds and a single conspicuous black cat picking its way across the ridges of a vast field. No pickers. Even at harvest time you couldn’t see them in the fields. They shuffled along in the shade of the picking machines. An ambling production line. Then they disappeared inside the sheds for the rest of the summer. Sorting, cleaning, and packing, but always hidden.

He knew that several police forces were tracking the illegal trade. ‘Operation Sardine’, as it was called, had been coordinated by East Cambridgeshire and the East and West Midlands forces with help from Norfolk and Suffolk. He’d been given a briefing in Coventry at the regional crime squad’s HQ by the detective leading the operation. Dryden had been on several raids but little of substance had been found so far. So he’d started to made his own enquiries, which was why he was going to try his luck at Wilkinson’s celery plant.