You can't really pinpoint the beginning of something. It might have begun when a girl hid in a wardrobe, and when a boy found a strange window in the air. It might have begun when the scientists of another world forged a knife that could cut through worlds. It might have begun with the Big Bang.
SOMETHING definitely began in the spring of 1982, when the brutal and bankrupt regime in Argentina decided to attack a windswept chain of islands lost to the British in the previous century to distract people from the fact that the country was falling to bits. That something was the process by which a close friend of Jonathan Parry wound up travelling to an alternate dimension with his widow and lovelorn teenage son, narrowly avoided being killed on a number of occasions, and having a very difficult time retaining his grip on reality. However, he always denied that if he'd known about certain parts in advance -him causing a train wreck, getting buried in falling masonry or losing his right leg whilst being chased through London in a pickup truck by a couple of attack helicopters, for example- he would have participated in such goings-on with any less enthusiasm.
A weekend break in the Falkland Islands doesn't fit anybody's definition of a thirteen year-old kid's idea of fun. Even a batchelor with no experience with any child under thirty, like the man chosen by John Parry's colleagues to look after Will whilst Elaine recovered from her experiences, should have known that. Why he even asked if he wanted to come is unclear.
"Well, it's got to beat sitting around at home," Will had replied, to Mary's surprise. "And I need a break from the project anyway."
The project was largely a collaboration between Will, Dr Malone and Will's new stand-in dad, one David Marshall. He was a former Royal Navy fighter pilot who'd served in the Falklands and the Gulf, earning his spurs in Harriers, and his flying experience was important to the intriguing plans that the four of them had for crossing boundaries that most people didn't even really believe existed.
Will and Mary knew this for a fact, and Will's girlfriend was on the other side of one. His refusal to regard this as an insurmountable barrier to their relationship, combined with Dr Malone's scientific expertise, would eventually culminate in the Malone Drive (patent pending). Dave was handling the design of the aircraft to contain it, and he was currently burying himself in design calculations for necessary minimum speed and takeoff weight. It had taken the direct threat of violence from Elaine, who was feeling much better these days, to make him or Mary leave their laptops behind. Will was glad his mother was back to her old self, but he wasn't exacly one hundred percent certain that her people skills were any better now that she was back on the same plane of reality as him. She spent a lot of time henpecking Dave, albeit in an affectionate sort of way, and she'd remembered everything she'd learned in the assertiveness workshop John had sent her to. The words 'assertiveness workshop' should make any husband flee in terror, even an ex-Royal Marine. John had allegedly got the idea after reading about Adrian Mole's mum doing it; he must have been posessed either of unlimited courage or a total lack of sense, although since he spent three quarters of his time up some mountain somewhere it probably didn't bother him much. The epitome of this was when she had begun getting up at 5am for a run in preparation for the expedition, and then spending an entire day practicing with firearms or survival gear. Mary had speculated that she was climbing the high bit of a manic-depressive phase.
"Nope," Will's new guardian had rather wearily replied, "she was always like this." David himself was the sort of man any teenager would like as an uncle. He owned a motorbike. He'd been to Knebworth to see the finale of Queen's Magic tour. He'd got himself thrown out of Stringfellow's and arrested for pouring soap powder into the fountains of Trafalgar Square on his 21st birthday. He even flew aeroplanes for a living, though civil aviation lacked a certain something these days.
It was a long flight in poor weather, in an elderly RAF transport aircraft. Will spent most of it writing extremely bad love poetry, which Lyra thought terribly touching when she eventually got a look at it. Dave restrained himself from commenting, but busied himself with a sketch of the aircraft he was working on. It resembled an old Catalina flying-boat with turbine engines, though it was a good deal bigger and had more air-to-air weaponry. He hadn't decided on a name for it yet, but it would eventually become known as the Aurora Borealis.
He carefully drew in a couple of distant clouds for some perspective and paused, running a hand through his sandy brown hair, and tapped a pencil against his teeth. It needed something more...
"Nice," Will remarked distantly.
"Thanks. Another six months or so and she'll be more than a pretty picture, and we can start testing her out. Give it say another four months, and we'll make the first jump drive test," Dave replied. "Less than a year, kid, and you can read that stuff to her. Less than a year."
"I thought you said we could stop worrying about all that for a while," Elaine chuckled, but she knew how Will felt. That didn't make his poetry any good, though- not that she'd say so, of course. Mums don't.
"You know, I don't think you ever told us how you and John got to know each other," Mary remarked. "I know you both served here, but you came over on different ships."
"Yeah, he was on Hermes and I flew off Invincible. We actually met in the field, or at least A field, under interesting circumstances. Remember when we saw Behind Enemy Lines?" Taking Will to stuff like that was what the fathers of young boys describe as 'man stuff', so Elaine had declined to go. According to Dave, letting him drink Carlsberg and play video games Elaine didn't approve of also costituted man stuff, which was why he was under specific instructions not to tell her about any of it.
Will cocked an eyebrow at Dave. "You had to eject over enemy territory?" When he'd heard Dave mutter 'Been there, done that' early on in the film, he'd assumed it was the horseplay with the football and the launch catapault, and he said so.
"Well, I've done THAT too!" Dave laughed. "I managed to catch it, though," he added. It had been quite an expensive ball, so it was just as well.
"So what happened?" Elaine urged him.
"Well," Dave began, "it was something like this..."
***
The Harrier streaked over the enemy positions, dropping cluster bombs in a lethal shower. It performed a triumphant barrel roll, climbed to twelve hundred feet and turned for home. The pilot flipped up his visor's eye shields, and switched on his radio.
"Strike complete. I'm RTB to refuel and rearm, so I'll see you lot again in an hour. Think you can carry on without me for a wee bit, over?"
"Sod off, swabby!" The company sergeant major from 2 Para on the other end replied amiably. "We're doing fine. Now go have your dinner, there's a good boy, over."
"Are you trying to get me to drop a load of those litle nasties in the wrong place?" the pilot laughed. "See you later. Out." //Honestly. You wouldn't do that to an RAF pilot, would you? Not when you might have to jump out of a plane he was flying!// It occurred much later to both pilot and paratrooper, the latter of whom was most apologetic about it afterwards, that if they hadn't spent as much time making fun of each other then things might have happened differently.
BANG! "What the-?" an antitank rocket, fired by a vengeful Argentinian soldier with an uncanny aim, punched a hole in the left wing. "Christ, I'm hit!" The Harrier began to wobble, whilst the pilot hastily radioed HMS Invincible to warn that he'd been hit and was in emergency drill. This task completed, he began wrestling his machine back under control.
The aircraft's erratic progress took it further over enemy territory, and brought it to the attention of a Mirage pilot who felt like coming home with a kill. He closed to six miles and launched a single heat-seeking missile.
"Oh, BUGGER!" The Harrier slewed sideways, flares spilling from the tail. The damaged wing couldn't take the stress, and broke in two. The aircraft began to spiral downwards, the pilot trying to regain control at a lower altitude where the thicker air would give him some lift. The Mirage followed, stitching the rear fuselage with its cannons and setting the engine on fire. It is possible to survive this in many fighters, but the relatively small Harrier only has one engine, where most strike aircraft have two. The Harrier pilot took the only remaining option available, and ejected. Given the unsporting nature of the previous attack he half expected the Mirage to machine gun him on the way down, but the French-built aircraft merely made a couple of flybys. He gave it the finger.
//Right, now I have to land. This always seemed easier in training... possibly because there was a flat piece of ground at the bottom rather than jagged rocks and the occasional really deep bog. Would we even bother to try and get this place back if Labour weren't looking up a bit in the polls?//
There was a rather crowded five minutes, during which the pilot was dragged along in the fierce wind by his canopy through a dense thicket of heather and gorse, mashed his scrotum against a rock and was dumped face-first into a small pool of water.
"Bollocks to Argentinia's Air Force, the Conservative Party, and... oh, just bollocks to everything!" he groaned, clutching his testicles and struggling free of his parachute. "I don't get paid enough for this kind of crap."
He sat down on a handy rock, still massaging his abused nutsack, and tried to work out just exactly where the hell he was. Unfolding his map with one hand, he extracted a packet of Benson & Hedges from his jumpsuit pocket and tapped a single cigarette out. Holding it in his mouth, he returned the packet and fished out a box of matches; lighters are too fragile to survive parachute landings, and our hero was a thorough sort of man. Striking a match without using both hands was beyond him, however, and he carefully laid down the map to light up. He felt slightly better for it. He wasn't exactly certain which side of the battle lines he was on, not that they were especially static at the moment, so he figured he'd wait until nightfall before using his distress beacon; be just his luck if both sides could direction-find on it. Night vision equipment was pretty rudimentary in the 1980s, but military intelligence said that the Argentines didn't have any. This probably meant that their night-vision kit was better than the British Army's, but no NVGs yet designed were anywhere near as good as the human eye in normal daylight, so he might have a slight advantage if... WHANG! A rifle bullet smacked off the rock about six inches from his arse.
//This day REALLY isn't getting any better,// the pilot grumbled, diving for cover and drawing his sidearm as if it would help much. He saw a line of men approaching from his right, so he began to move left in a crouching run. Another shot hit the ground near him with a squelch. //WHY do I do this job?// He dived headfirst into a nearby drainage ditch and fired a couple of pistol shots in the general direction of the Argentines, hoping it would help. It didn't.
"Come out with arms up!" a voice ordered in very bad but just about intelligible English. The pilot hesitated for a few moments, wondering what his chances were. If he crawled far enough then there might be a break in the wall or a length of pipe to hide in or SOMETHING, but who knew how far that line of men went? And if he did surrender then at this rate it'd turn out he'd clusterbombed the platoon sergeant's best mate earlier, and he'd probably get kneecapped and thrown in a bog or something. If only he'd switched on that bloody distress beacon...!
Luckily for our hero, it turned out that the pull-tab that activated the beacon's repeating signal function had come out at some stage in the proceedings. He shouldn't have been surprised, as they did this quite often. He'd participated in the large scale search and rescue operation resulting from one such beacon being inadvertently activated whilst in storage.
He briefly considered telling them to sod off, but realised that while they might, they'd probably toss a couple of grenades his way first. That course of action struck him as about as sensible as trying a payroll heist at an abbatoir, armed only with a two-inch switchblade.
Our hero's brief pause for reflection was interrupted by the sound of rotor engines approaching very fast. The luckless Harrier pilot learned a few pretty impressive curse words in Spanish before the imprecations were drowned out by a machine gun.
//Ah, perhaps there IS a God, after all.// Our hero was still a couple of decades away from encountering a young lad who had not only met Him, but had prevented His overthrow in a coup d'etat by his girlfriend's nutty father. The process that would culminate in the two meeting was begun that day, however, despite the fact that the boy in question wasn't even sperm at this point.
The Argentines had a fleeting impression of a helicopter full of British soldiers hovering over them shooting at the ground, but didn't hang around long enough to take in minor details like the pilot they'd been chasing making obscene gestures at their retreating backs.
Our hero climbed gratefully aboard the Sea King, and shook hands with the tall, bearded Marine officer who'd helped him aboard.
"Flight Lieutenant David Marshall, 55 Squadron Royal Navy, hi."
"Captain Jonathan Parry, 45 Commando, hi."
***
"There's more, especially involving all the bars we visited afterwards, but that isn't for your young ears," Dave concluded as the plane came to a halt. "Or for those of his other half!" Elaine rolled her eyes.
They disembarked a few minutes later, and deposited their luggage in their rooms at a tiny guesthouse in the centre of Port Stanley. They had a few hours to kill before the memorial ceremony, so they went to find a coffee. They wound up in a small cafe overlooking the town, drinking instant coffee in plastic cups.
"I've never understood this," Dave remarked. "We're an hour's flight from some of the best coffee country in the world, and we're drinking the kind of stuff I only buy because I haven't got a decent percolator. Economics are weird sometimes."
"Who're we going to buy it off, the Argies?" said the proprietess bitterly. "No chance!"
"The fascist dictatorship that decided to reconquer the Malvinas went tits-up after we got rid of them," Dave pointed out. "What's the point in holding a grudge? I'm not, and they shot me down and chased me across the moors before getting seen off by a chopper full of Marines."
The woman's attitude thawed noticeably. "Oh, you're one of the veterans?" She immediately refilled their coffees and wouldn't accept payment. It'd be nice to say that he got a lot of that sort of thing, but few people's gratitude for their liberation by British servicemen was exceeded by their annoyance at the mayhem caused by the British servicemen assigned here. Bored, young, MALE servicemen. The pub owners didn't mind much, though their insurance people probably did.
Dave drank his coffee, remembering the experience. He'd stayed in the RAF until after Desert Storm, leaving as a Group Captain with a Distinguished Flying Cross and a Military Medal. John had gone missing by then, but he'd been unable to contact his family until fairly recently. He hoped that John would be reasonably happy with his attempt at standing in for him.
***
Nearly a quarter of a century later, Will was back in the Falklands, possibly to go to war. He stood on the flight deck of the nuclear carrier HMS Cunningham and looked out over the moors and hills of the land where his two fathers would meet. Since his mother had got around to acting on the obvious crush she had on Dave, people had been assuming that Dave was his father, and he'd stopped correcting them after a while.
He hadn't been in the Aurora Borealis for over a year now. His training for Fleet Air Arm had occupied most of his time for the last few years, and he was now serving Queen and Country as a fighter pilot. Having recieved a fair bit of tutorage from a decorated Navy veteran had helped, as well as his extensive practical experience with combat systems.
There was a low rumble as a Sea Typhoon ground attack aircraft lined up for a landing. Will watched with interest and more than a few nerves as it glided in, snagged the wire and jerked to a stop before moving towards the main elevator, guided by the deck crew.
Will's fellow pilot and best mate, Jack McAllister, wandered past and stopped to watch it land. "Relax, Mark. Lizzie can handle that thing like she was born in the cockpit," he remarked. "Mark Ransome" smiled. Machismo or not, he knew full well that "Elisabeth Silverton" was as good a pilot as he was, if not better. For all that, not even a veteran pilot can watch a tailhook landing and remember to breathe. Takeoffs are worse, if anything. Will had never stopped being very glad he flew the vertical-takeoff F22 Joint Strike Fighter. It wasn't too good at tankbusting, hence the conversion of the British version of the Eurofighter to carrier duties to replace the old Jaguar, but you didn't need a launch catapault.
The Sea Typhoon's cockpit canopy opened and the pilot vaulted athletically over the side. She removed her helmet, running her hand through her close-cropped blonde hair. Both of her colleagues waved.
She stood next to him, admiring the view. Unconsciously, Lyra squeezed Will's hand. Jack made no sign that he'd noticed, though Will knew he must have. On the other hand, it was common knowledge below decks that Jack was trying desperately hard to get off with his beautiful Welsh navigator Carrie-Anne, so he was hardly in a position to pass judgement.
"Your dad'd be dead proud if he could see how you've got on in life," she said to him. "He'd be pleased with Dave too."
"Yeah," Will replied. //Dave made a pretty good go of standing in for you, Dad. I doubt you'd be thrilled about him letting me watch his Quentin Tarantino DVDs before I was old enough, taking me and Lyra paintballing on my fifteenth birthday or all the other batchelor uncle stuff, but I owe him a lot. Well, now I'm back where you two met each other. I might even be going to war here, if they don't sort out the crisis. I'll do my best to live up to your reputation.//
Seeing all this by means that elude mortal description, John Parry smiled at his son. "Don't worry about that, kiddo," he replied, though he knew Will couldn't hear him. "You already have. And no, I'm not thrilled about the Quentin Tarantino DVDs. That stuff scares ME! Typical bloody Dave, that is..."
If it's hard to trace the beginning of something, it's damn near impossible to pinpoint the end.
SOMETHING definitely began in the spring of 1982, when the brutal and bankrupt regime in Argentina decided to attack a windswept chain of islands lost to the British in the previous century to distract people from the fact that the country was falling to bits. That something was the process by which a close friend of Jonathan Parry wound up travelling to an alternate dimension with his widow and lovelorn teenage son, narrowly avoided being killed on a number of occasions, and having a very difficult time retaining his grip on reality. However, he always denied that if he'd known about certain parts in advance -him causing a train wreck, getting buried in falling masonry or losing his right leg whilst being chased through London in a pickup truck by a couple of attack helicopters, for example- he would have participated in such goings-on with any less enthusiasm.
A weekend break in the Falkland Islands doesn't fit anybody's definition of a thirteen year-old kid's idea of fun. Even a batchelor with no experience with any child under thirty, like the man chosen by John Parry's colleagues to look after Will whilst Elaine recovered from her experiences, should have known that. Why he even asked if he wanted to come is unclear.
"Well, it's got to beat sitting around at home," Will had replied, to Mary's surprise. "And I need a break from the project anyway."
The project was largely a collaboration between Will, Dr Malone and Will's new stand-in dad, one David Marshall. He was a former Royal Navy fighter pilot who'd served in the Falklands and the Gulf, earning his spurs in Harriers, and his flying experience was important to the intriguing plans that the four of them had for crossing boundaries that most people didn't even really believe existed.
Will and Mary knew this for a fact, and Will's girlfriend was on the other side of one. His refusal to regard this as an insurmountable barrier to their relationship, combined with Dr Malone's scientific expertise, would eventually culminate in the Malone Drive (patent pending). Dave was handling the design of the aircraft to contain it, and he was currently burying himself in design calculations for necessary minimum speed and takeoff weight. It had taken the direct threat of violence from Elaine, who was feeling much better these days, to make him or Mary leave their laptops behind. Will was glad his mother was back to her old self, but he wasn't exacly one hundred percent certain that her people skills were any better now that she was back on the same plane of reality as him. She spent a lot of time henpecking Dave, albeit in an affectionate sort of way, and she'd remembered everything she'd learned in the assertiveness workshop John had sent her to. The words 'assertiveness workshop' should make any husband flee in terror, even an ex-Royal Marine. John had allegedly got the idea after reading about Adrian Mole's mum doing it; he must have been posessed either of unlimited courage or a total lack of sense, although since he spent three quarters of his time up some mountain somewhere it probably didn't bother him much. The epitome of this was when she had begun getting up at 5am for a run in preparation for the expedition, and then spending an entire day practicing with firearms or survival gear. Mary had speculated that she was climbing the high bit of a manic-depressive phase.
"Nope," Will's new guardian had rather wearily replied, "she was always like this." David himself was the sort of man any teenager would like as an uncle. He owned a motorbike. He'd been to Knebworth to see the finale of Queen's Magic tour. He'd got himself thrown out of Stringfellow's and arrested for pouring soap powder into the fountains of Trafalgar Square on his 21st birthday. He even flew aeroplanes for a living, though civil aviation lacked a certain something these days.
It was a long flight in poor weather, in an elderly RAF transport aircraft. Will spent most of it writing extremely bad love poetry, which Lyra thought terribly touching when she eventually got a look at it. Dave restrained himself from commenting, but busied himself with a sketch of the aircraft he was working on. It resembled an old Catalina flying-boat with turbine engines, though it was a good deal bigger and had more air-to-air weaponry. He hadn't decided on a name for it yet, but it would eventually become known as the Aurora Borealis.
He carefully drew in a couple of distant clouds for some perspective and paused, running a hand through his sandy brown hair, and tapped a pencil against his teeth. It needed something more...
"Nice," Will remarked distantly.
"Thanks. Another six months or so and she'll be more than a pretty picture, and we can start testing her out. Give it say another four months, and we'll make the first jump drive test," Dave replied. "Less than a year, kid, and you can read that stuff to her. Less than a year."
"I thought you said we could stop worrying about all that for a while," Elaine chuckled, but she knew how Will felt. That didn't make his poetry any good, though- not that she'd say so, of course. Mums don't.
"You know, I don't think you ever told us how you and John got to know each other," Mary remarked. "I know you both served here, but you came over on different ships."
"Yeah, he was on Hermes and I flew off Invincible. We actually met in the field, or at least A field, under interesting circumstances. Remember when we saw Behind Enemy Lines?" Taking Will to stuff like that was what the fathers of young boys describe as 'man stuff', so Elaine had declined to go. According to Dave, letting him drink Carlsberg and play video games Elaine didn't approve of also costituted man stuff, which was why he was under specific instructions not to tell her about any of it.
Will cocked an eyebrow at Dave. "You had to eject over enemy territory?" When he'd heard Dave mutter 'Been there, done that' early on in the film, he'd assumed it was the horseplay with the football and the launch catapault, and he said so.
"Well, I've done THAT too!" Dave laughed. "I managed to catch it, though," he added. It had been quite an expensive ball, so it was just as well.
"So what happened?" Elaine urged him.
"Well," Dave began, "it was something like this..."
***
The Harrier streaked over the enemy positions, dropping cluster bombs in a lethal shower. It performed a triumphant barrel roll, climbed to twelve hundred feet and turned for home. The pilot flipped up his visor's eye shields, and switched on his radio.
"Strike complete. I'm RTB to refuel and rearm, so I'll see you lot again in an hour. Think you can carry on without me for a wee bit, over?"
"Sod off, swabby!" The company sergeant major from 2 Para on the other end replied amiably. "We're doing fine. Now go have your dinner, there's a good boy, over."
"Are you trying to get me to drop a load of those litle nasties in the wrong place?" the pilot laughed. "See you later. Out." //Honestly. You wouldn't do that to an RAF pilot, would you? Not when you might have to jump out of a plane he was flying!// It occurred much later to both pilot and paratrooper, the latter of whom was most apologetic about it afterwards, that if they hadn't spent as much time making fun of each other then things might have happened differently.
BANG! "What the-?" an antitank rocket, fired by a vengeful Argentinian soldier with an uncanny aim, punched a hole in the left wing. "Christ, I'm hit!" The Harrier began to wobble, whilst the pilot hastily radioed HMS Invincible to warn that he'd been hit and was in emergency drill. This task completed, he began wrestling his machine back under control.
The aircraft's erratic progress took it further over enemy territory, and brought it to the attention of a Mirage pilot who felt like coming home with a kill. He closed to six miles and launched a single heat-seeking missile.
"Oh, BUGGER!" The Harrier slewed sideways, flares spilling from the tail. The damaged wing couldn't take the stress, and broke in two. The aircraft began to spiral downwards, the pilot trying to regain control at a lower altitude where the thicker air would give him some lift. The Mirage followed, stitching the rear fuselage with its cannons and setting the engine on fire. It is possible to survive this in many fighters, but the relatively small Harrier only has one engine, where most strike aircraft have two. The Harrier pilot took the only remaining option available, and ejected. Given the unsporting nature of the previous attack he half expected the Mirage to machine gun him on the way down, but the French-built aircraft merely made a couple of flybys. He gave it the finger.
//Right, now I have to land. This always seemed easier in training... possibly because there was a flat piece of ground at the bottom rather than jagged rocks and the occasional really deep bog. Would we even bother to try and get this place back if Labour weren't looking up a bit in the polls?//
There was a rather crowded five minutes, during which the pilot was dragged along in the fierce wind by his canopy through a dense thicket of heather and gorse, mashed his scrotum against a rock and was dumped face-first into a small pool of water.
"Bollocks to Argentinia's Air Force, the Conservative Party, and... oh, just bollocks to everything!" he groaned, clutching his testicles and struggling free of his parachute. "I don't get paid enough for this kind of crap."
He sat down on a handy rock, still massaging his abused nutsack, and tried to work out just exactly where the hell he was. Unfolding his map with one hand, he extracted a packet of Benson & Hedges from his jumpsuit pocket and tapped a single cigarette out. Holding it in his mouth, he returned the packet and fished out a box of matches; lighters are too fragile to survive parachute landings, and our hero was a thorough sort of man. Striking a match without using both hands was beyond him, however, and he carefully laid down the map to light up. He felt slightly better for it. He wasn't exactly certain which side of the battle lines he was on, not that they were especially static at the moment, so he figured he'd wait until nightfall before using his distress beacon; be just his luck if both sides could direction-find on it. Night vision equipment was pretty rudimentary in the 1980s, but military intelligence said that the Argentines didn't have any. This probably meant that their night-vision kit was better than the British Army's, but no NVGs yet designed were anywhere near as good as the human eye in normal daylight, so he might have a slight advantage if... WHANG! A rifle bullet smacked off the rock about six inches from his arse.
//This day REALLY isn't getting any better,// the pilot grumbled, diving for cover and drawing his sidearm as if it would help much. He saw a line of men approaching from his right, so he began to move left in a crouching run. Another shot hit the ground near him with a squelch. //WHY do I do this job?// He dived headfirst into a nearby drainage ditch and fired a couple of pistol shots in the general direction of the Argentines, hoping it would help. It didn't.
"Come out with arms up!" a voice ordered in very bad but just about intelligible English. The pilot hesitated for a few moments, wondering what his chances were. If he crawled far enough then there might be a break in the wall or a length of pipe to hide in or SOMETHING, but who knew how far that line of men went? And if he did surrender then at this rate it'd turn out he'd clusterbombed the platoon sergeant's best mate earlier, and he'd probably get kneecapped and thrown in a bog or something. If only he'd switched on that bloody distress beacon...!
Luckily for our hero, it turned out that the pull-tab that activated the beacon's repeating signal function had come out at some stage in the proceedings. He shouldn't have been surprised, as they did this quite often. He'd participated in the large scale search and rescue operation resulting from one such beacon being inadvertently activated whilst in storage.
He briefly considered telling them to sod off, but realised that while they might, they'd probably toss a couple of grenades his way first. That course of action struck him as about as sensible as trying a payroll heist at an abbatoir, armed only with a two-inch switchblade.
Our hero's brief pause for reflection was interrupted by the sound of rotor engines approaching very fast. The luckless Harrier pilot learned a few pretty impressive curse words in Spanish before the imprecations were drowned out by a machine gun.
//Ah, perhaps there IS a God, after all.// Our hero was still a couple of decades away from encountering a young lad who had not only met Him, but had prevented His overthrow in a coup d'etat by his girlfriend's nutty father. The process that would culminate in the two meeting was begun that day, however, despite the fact that the boy in question wasn't even sperm at this point.
The Argentines had a fleeting impression of a helicopter full of British soldiers hovering over them shooting at the ground, but didn't hang around long enough to take in minor details like the pilot they'd been chasing making obscene gestures at their retreating backs.
Our hero climbed gratefully aboard the Sea King, and shook hands with the tall, bearded Marine officer who'd helped him aboard.
"Flight Lieutenant David Marshall, 55 Squadron Royal Navy, hi."
"Captain Jonathan Parry, 45 Commando, hi."
***
"There's more, especially involving all the bars we visited afterwards, but that isn't for your young ears," Dave concluded as the plane came to a halt. "Or for those of his other half!" Elaine rolled her eyes.
They disembarked a few minutes later, and deposited their luggage in their rooms at a tiny guesthouse in the centre of Port Stanley. They had a few hours to kill before the memorial ceremony, so they went to find a coffee. They wound up in a small cafe overlooking the town, drinking instant coffee in plastic cups.
"I've never understood this," Dave remarked. "We're an hour's flight from some of the best coffee country in the world, and we're drinking the kind of stuff I only buy because I haven't got a decent percolator. Economics are weird sometimes."
"Who're we going to buy it off, the Argies?" said the proprietess bitterly. "No chance!"
"The fascist dictatorship that decided to reconquer the Malvinas went tits-up after we got rid of them," Dave pointed out. "What's the point in holding a grudge? I'm not, and they shot me down and chased me across the moors before getting seen off by a chopper full of Marines."
The woman's attitude thawed noticeably. "Oh, you're one of the veterans?" She immediately refilled their coffees and wouldn't accept payment. It'd be nice to say that he got a lot of that sort of thing, but few people's gratitude for their liberation by British servicemen was exceeded by their annoyance at the mayhem caused by the British servicemen assigned here. Bored, young, MALE servicemen. The pub owners didn't mind much, though their insurance people probably did.
Dave drank his coffee, remembering the experience. He'd stayed in the RAF until after Desert Storm, leaving as a Group Captain with a Distinguished Flying Cross and a Military Medal. John had gone missing by then, but he'd been unable to contact his family until fairly recently. He hoped that John would be reasonably happy with his attempt at standing in for him.
***
Nearly a quarter of a century later, Will was back in the Falklands, possibly to go to war. He stood on the flight deck of the nuclear carrier HMS Cunningham and looked out over the moors and hills of the land where his two fathers would meet. Since his mother had got around to acting on the obvious crush she had on Dave, people had been assuming that Dave was his father, and he'd stopped correcting them after a while.
He hadn't been in the Aurora Borealis for over a year now. His training for Fleet Air Arm had occupied most of his time for the last few years, and he was now serving Queen and Country as a fighter pilot. Having recieved a fair bit of tutorage from a decorated Navy veteran had helped, as well as his extensive practical experience with combat systems.
There was a low rumble as a Sea Typhoon ground attack aircraft lined up for a landing. Will watched with interest and more than a few nerves as it glided in, snagged the wire and jerked to a stop before moving towards the main elevator, guided by the deck crew.
Will's fellow pilot and best mate, Jack McAllister, wandered past and stopped to watch it land. "Relax, Mark. Lizzie can handle that thing like she was born in the cockpit," he remarked. "Mark Ransome" smiled. Machismo or not, he knew full well that "Elisabeth Silverton" was as good a pilot as he was, if not better. For all that, not even a veteran pilot can watch a tailhook landing and remember to breathe. Takeoffs are worse, if anything. Will had never stopped being very glad he flew the vertical-takeoff F22 Joint Strike Fighter. It wasn't too good at tankbusting, hence the conversion of the British version of the Eurofighter to carrier duties to replace the old Jaguar, but you didn't need a launch catapault.
The Sea Typhoon's cockpit canopy opened and the pilot vaulted athletically over the side. She removed her helmet, running her hand through her close-cropped blonde hair. Both of her colleagues waved.
She stood next to him, admiring the view. Unconsciously, Lyra squeezed Will's hand. Jack made no sign that he'd noticed, though Will knew he must have. On the other hand, it was common knowledge below decks that Jack was trying desperately hard to get off with his beautiful Welsh navigator Carrie-Anne, so he was hardly in a position to pass judgement.
"Your dad'd be dead proud if he could see how you've got on in life," she said to him. "He'd be pleased with Dave too."
"Yeah," Will replied. //Dave made a pretty good go of standing in for you, Dad. I doubt you'd be thrilled about him letting me watch his Quentin Tarantino DVDs before I was old enough, taking me and Lyra paintballing on my fifteenth birthday or all the other batchelor uncle stuff, but I owe him a lot. Well, now I'm back where you two met each other. I might even be going to war here, if they don't sort out the crisis. I'll do my best to live up to your reputation.//
Seeing all this by means that elude mortal description, John Parry smiled at his son. "Don't worry about that, kiddo," he replied, though he knew Will couldn't hear him. "You already have. And no, I'm not thrilled about the Quentin Tarantino DVDs. That stuff scares ME! Typical bloody Dave, that is..."
If it's hard to trace the beginning of something, it's damn near impossible to pinpoint the end.