‘So what looks like a Transport Command troop transport is actually a pretty sophisticated spy plane?’
‘Technical, or electronic, surveillance is the term we use these days, Charlie. She’s a Q plane. Call sign, as you know – Queenie: something pretending to be other than what she actually is. Someone in Command has a sense of the ironic.’
‘And who are we, then?’
‘Queenie’s courtiers,’ M’smith leaned over and told us. ‘She’s Watson’s pride and joy, so we’re not even allowed to be sick in her. If you feel ill, we’ll hang you out the door by your ankles until you feel better.’
I remembered something then, that I’d forgotten to ask Nansen earlier: ‘Where do we buy our beer, Oliver? From Pat Tobin?’
‘. . . thought you’d never ask, old dear. No, Pat’s too dear, dear. I’ll introduce you to a braw young lassie from the NAAFI: you’ll love her. If Robert Burns was alive today do you think he’d write some of his doggerel about a lassie from the NAAFI?’ Then he sang, ‘I love a lassie, she works in the NAAFI, she’s the apple of her mother’s old glass eye . . .’
He sounded a bit like Harry Lauder. ‘What else rhymes with lassie?’
‘Chassis,’ I told him.
‘I’m sure we can do something with that . . .’
‘Don’t worry about Oliver,’ M’smith butted in. ‘He’s Watson’s Q airman, just like Queenie here. He looks like a queer and sounds like a queer, but actually he’s not. He’s just like you and me, and when he puts his mind to pulling a bird I’ve never seen one turn him down. You’ll find that living alongside him is quite depressing.’
‘Bloody fine photographer too,’ Nansen said. ‘Don’t forget that. Sandwich anyone? I brought enough for you two too, because I knew you’d forget.’
‘One last thing,’ I asked them, ‘. . . and then we can talk rubbish all the way to Turkey if you want.’
‘What?’
‘What?’
They’d obviously flown together before.
‘The pilot and his mate; they’re not regular RAF either, are they?’
M’smith got in first.
‘Australian Special Forces,’ he told me. ‘If we crash in the desert they’ll slit your throat, and drink your blood to stay alive if they have to.’
I was glad I still had my small pistol in my pocket.
Queenie droned north. Sometimes we gained height, and sometimes we lost a bit. Periodically, Oliver would unsheathe his belly cameras, and photograph a strip of land that would one day be strategic to some poor sod or another. Two Israeli late-model Spitfires came up for a look at us. The pilots smiled and waved, and took our photographs with hand-held cameras. More for souvenirs than anything else I think. In 1948 and 1949 we and the Israelis had been killing each other on the quiet, as we Brits got in the way of the creation of the new state of Israel. Something had happened between then and 1953, because now we were acting as if we’d always been best buddies. Ask the politicians; they’re the ones who order and direct all the killing, aren’t they? And they’re the ones who tell us when to stop. And then they pretend it was nothing to do with them after all, and ask us to vote for them all over again. I don’t know why we’re always stupid enough to do it.
The Arabian states came and went under the starboard wing. I can describe them in two simple words: mainly brown. They looked brown, sounded brown, and smelled brown. Not one of my favourite colours. When someone comes back from Saudi these days, and tells you it’s shite, I promise you that they will be speaking from more than one perspective. Whenever a red light came on over the nav’s table Oliver had to open the camera ports, and when a green came on alongside it he triggered the belly cameras.
Three hours into the flight we were over mountain ranges in southeast Turkey.
‘They used to call this Kurdistan in the old days, I think,’ M’smith told us. ‘The native people underneath us have had at least half a dozen masters in the last thousand years. No one managed to break them . . . they’re as bad as the Afghanis on the North-West Frontier. We have to look for something which was spotted during an overflight a few months ago.’
Our piratical pilot was letting us gently down towards the peaks and valleys. Too many bloody peaks and too few valleys for my liking. The air got a bit lumpy. There was even some snow on the high ground. I had never imagined snow out here, and we were nearer to the bloody stuff than I was comfortable with. There were very few radio signals. Not many people up here to send them, I imagined. They were all probably tucked up in their igloos for the winter. We started a run. Red light. Nansen’s camera ports opened with a slight rumbling sound. Green light. About three or four minutes.
Then I heard Oliver’s voice in my earphones. ‘Cameras, Skip . . . can you come round again, and get us any closer?’
‘. . . give you another hundred feet, OK? I wouldn’t want to get any nearer to the pointy things than that.’
Queenie’s twin engines roared like lions – which reminded me of something – as he pulled her around in a climbing turn to
