2012
"Potter, try not being such a total dick." growled the black-haired woman glaring at him from across the room, over an aeroplane magazine.
"I simply cannot comprehend how someone can be over sixteen and quite than naïve Georgie." he responded mildly, applying his concentration to gluing together two halves of a Airfix de Havilland Mosquito fuselage.
"Honestly, I think you put far more effort into disliking children than you actually dislike them. The poor kid only said that he didn't understand why we didn't spend more on defence over political posturing, you didn't need to bite his head off, I mean, do you have any social skills?" she riposted.
"Stopped bothering with socialising in nineteen-ninety. It was overrated anyway." said Harry; "Anyway, I didn't bite his head off, as far as I'm concerned it was merely a changing of his point of view."
"Huh, you actually believe what you're saying." commented Georgie; "Tell you what, given that you need to find out how normal humans work, you can come to Boscombe Down on Saturday with us for the air experience."
"Got to be at work." Harry denied immediately, slowly putting the partly built model down on the desk and leaning back, meeting the woman's gaze.
"Tell your boss that you want a couple of hours off in the morning." Georgie shrugged apathetically.
"Why? What's there to be gained by me flying around in the aviation equivalent of a Nissan Micra?" he demanded, ignoring the way that the other occupants' eyes flicked between the woman in the RAF blue uniform of a Flying Officer and the man wearing civilian khaki cargo trousers and a t-shirt which hugged a lithely muscled chest.
"Plenty. And it would give you an opportunity to try interacting with us mere humans. The other good reasons are that if you don't I'll kick your head in." responded Georgie heatedly.
What she didn't expect was barking laughter from the man her ire was directed at.
"Thanks, I haven't had a good laugh like that in years!" he commented.
"Be careful, she attends martial arts lessons and will kick your head in." warned one of the officers.
"If she can kick my head in, then she deserves it. And it is an if, I'd say I'm capable of stopping most attackers without resorting to weapons. Twenty years practice makes sure of that." Harry snorted.
"Which discipline?" Georgie asked, curiosity momentarily overcoming ire.
"Krav Maga and eskrima." said Harry with a slightly predatory grin; "Though there's a few others I'm not bad at, those are the only ones I'm rated as a full master."
"Sorry, I'm missing something here." said the CO of the Air Cadet unit, Flight Lieutenant Robert Jackson, looking from his horrified officer to the civilian instructor; "I mean being a master of a martial art or two is good and all..."
"Krav Maga is a rather infamous martial art." Harry explained; "It utilises anything that can be used as a weapon, and defends against same. The only aim is to maim, incapacitate or kill your opponent in as short a time as possible, no matter what weapon he has, or lack thereof. The same for most of the other martial arts I've learnt over the last twenty years. Where other martial arts like the Oriental ones concentrate somewhat on mental preparation and suchlike. Krav Maga, Silat Melayu, and of course cudgels and eskrima. Though honestly, at the time I only took up the latter two because they look cool and the latter means I can call myself an eskrimador, which sounds cool."
"Anyway, even if you are so brilliant at martial arts as you say, that does not change the fact you are going to be participating, even if it's just because I say so." Georgie continued.
"How far do you think this argument's going to go?" whispered Pilot Officer Bill Hay to the CO; "Do you think they'll get past the mutual flirting to the snogging?"
A moment later a cricket ball impacted the wall behind him from a glaring Georgie while Harry just gave him an unblinking stare of utter disbelief.
"Are you both stupid and suicidal? Also, relationships require social lives, social lives are for people with nothing better to do with their time." he said slowly; "Anyway Georgie luv, where did you say this air experience thing is, because I am not riding in a converted van with a bunch of roudy kids."
"Boscombe Down, and call me 'love' again and I'll hurt you... badly." she replied.
"I guess I can be there, my work's around there." Harry shrugged eventually, before glancing at his watch; "Time to dismiss the teenagers."
"I'd actually quite like to be a pilot here." commented Georgie as they walked through the corridors of the RAF Volunteer Reserve part of Boscombe Down. She had arrived with part of the squadron and one of the other officers to find Harry sitting in the briefing room sipping from a cup of coffee and flicking through a classic car magazine.
"Oh, I'd have taken you for a front line pilot if you decided to sign up." Harry replied with a raised eyebrow, actually slightly surprised.
Unlike what most thought, while often the two argued, it was never heated, but more a banter, and when they conversed properly, they actually listened to each-other. Though there were more sarcastic retorts in said conversations than most people tended to use.
"No, I've always been somewhat enamoured with the idea of being a test pilot, flying on the edge of the unknown." she shook her head.
"You do realise there probably is a lot of paperwork and testing of new bits of programming? I think you're idolising the job a bit, maybe once it would have been like that, now its a lot of health and safety reports and other bits of paperwork." said Harry; "And anyway, I'd expect that they are still pretty selective with who they hire?"
"Yeah, I suppose you're right. Anyway, have you been up yet?" Georgie responded, glancing at the flying suit he was wearing, and had been since before they'd arrived.
"Went up for half an hour in one of the trainers." he nodded, adding mentally; 'A QinetiQ Dornier Alphajet actually.' before continuing smoothly; "It was a rather... different experience."
"Hah! That's the most smooth understatement I've ever heard." laughed Georgie; "But not bad. I've been with the Air Cadets since I was thirteen, seventeen years and I've only done about a hundred hours. By the way, isn't that a G-suit for jet flights you're wearing?"
"It was the first which fitted me." Harry answered honestly, it had been the first to fit him about a year ago; "I saw one of the QinetiQ Dorniers go up with a load of testing equipment in the back, apparently testing some kind of fly-by-wire system like most modern fighters use and there's a Dassault Mirage 2000 sitting on the stand with a full war load of various weapons I didn't recognize and Sidewinder missiles."
"I thought that the Quick Reaction Alert force was provided with Tornados?" Georgie asked, glancing out of a window into a large hanger where a green Lockheed C-130J was parked.
"Yeah, this is probably a test airframe." replied Harry; 'My test airframe which I'll be taking up once you lot aren't around, or when you're all flying.'
"Flying Officer Silver, if you'd like to go down to the briefing room, just a short briefing before you go up." said an officer, poking his head around a door in the corridor.
Harry grinned slightly as she dashed off.
"Thanks Bill. I'm going to head down to the Mirage now, while nobody is looking." he stated.
"No problem boss." replied the officer; "Your ground crew inform me that all the checks are complete and as soon as you arrive they'll have the engine running. How d'you get that level of devotion?"
"Gotta love the enthusiasm." Harry laughed; "The answer is I hand-picked them all, they're all brilliant, but until recently had no employment, so when I came along with an offer to work on fast jets, they nearly prostrated themselves before me. A few of the most senior were technicians on Harriers and the retired Tornadoes who found themselves out of jobs, and when I was given charge here, I didn't want talent going to waste."
As they walked down a staircase to the tarmac where a scruffy open-top Land Rover was waiting, Bill asked;
"How did you come to be running the RAF detachment with QinetiQ?"
"You weren't here then were you?" Harry mused, Bill being a reserve officer who had accepted a posting about six months before to the airfield; "I used to be a brown job, on the ground in the mud. Or more often, sand. I'd intended to retire after Iraq, I thought it suitable that my career started in Iraq, in late 1990, and ended in Iraq. Someone phoned me up two weeks into retirement and told me that they could do with me taking up this role. I'd gone through flight training after Bosnia in '96, so I didn't need more than a refresher course. I was sent on an ambassadorial mission to the French Armée de l'Air when we deployed to Libya, so I got to fly missions over the country. That's why I insist on having a Mirage here."
They climbed into the Land Rover and raced down the taxiway to the stand where half-a-dozen of the white Grob Tutors were parked along with a Dassault Mirage 2000-5 Mark 2.
"Right boss, don't crash and die horribly will you." Bill said cheerfully as Harry climbed out and went over to the aircraft which had technicians crawling over it and a ladder on the side of the cockpit. He shimmied up the ladder, ignoring Bill's upbeat comment and stepped into the cockpit.
Placing his hands on the rim of the windscreen, he levered himself into the cockpit fully as a QinetiQ briefing officer climbed up beside him to discuss what had been changed. The aircraft itself was already a significantly modified one with various bits of British equipment replacing a few of the less compatible French systems, allowing it to be used as a test-bed without drawing from the very strained pool of Eurofighter Typhoons
Originally, they'd had half-a-dozen Mirage 2000Cs they'd got off the French for tuppence on the surplus market, but after a few months of use, the French had offered a pair of 2000-5 Mark 2s for their use. The offered airframes had been snapped up and ferried from an Armée de l'Air airbase to Boscombe Down.
"Give me the changes Ian." Harry ordered as he pushed his flight-plan into a plastic pouch adhered to the top of the control panel ahead of him.
"Basically, the contractors who maintain the weapons have done some minor modifications to the guidance chips on the missiles for which Dassault's programming engineers have had to make a few tweaks to your onboard systems. You're running three AIM-9 Sidewinders which are not modified, they are to test the programming. There are two German IRIS-T infrared guided missiles, range of about fifteen miles which we want to compare to the subject of your flight. AIM-132 ASRAAM missiles, range of about thirty miles." explained the officer; "We want you to go up to one of the RAF firing ranges, Holbeach, the army has provided a couple of Banshee drones to shoot at. You expend a Sidewinder, and if that goes fine, no problems then proceed to fire an IRIS-T. Observe and compare to your last discharge, an ASRAAM. You've got enough of each in case of failures, and just in case you decide to manually range or just get bored, two-fifty rounds of thirty mil."
"Good good." Harry grinned, removing one of the maps from his briefing document and pinning it to the side of the cockpit. Old-fashioned or not, he liked to have a manual method of navigation, laminated paper and a chinagraph pencil. They generally didn't fail, but sometimes other navigation systems could.
Ian, the QinetiQ officer climbed down the ladder and away across the stand. Harry pulled on his flying helmet and flipped down the clear visor, testing the oxygen supply. Leaning out, he looked at the engineer stood off the left side of the nose, waiting as the engineer glanced around, making sure the stand was clear before raising both hands, thumbs up so that they were visible to the fighter's pilot.
"CLEAR!" Harry barked.
Pressing the ignition and the starter buttons, Harry held them down as his left hand eased open the throttle the engine ran up. A short whine and then the roar of burning jet fuel rushed across the airfield. He was just finishing the last checks when the radio buzzed to life.
"Echo Golf Delta Mike, this is AJET callsign Bravo zero-one. Mayday, mayday, mayday. Fly-by-wire failure, we are twenty-two knots heading approximately five degrees north north-east." came a rapid but calm delivery over the radio. AJET was the shorthand name for the Dassault-Dornier Alpha Jet.
"Bravo zero-one, this is Guardian Actual, how much control do you have?" Harry cut off the air traffic control before they could begin to respond.
"Guardian, control is one tenth, inputs cause change in flight, but not as wanted. There is no pattern, so cannot just reverse inputs to get same direction." replied Flying Officer Richard Edgecombe who was flying the test-bed Dornier with a bunch of computers in the back seat.
"Bravo zero-one, are you closing towards Salisbury?" he demanded; "Do you think you can get the aircraft back to anywhere, even landing in a field?"
"I am attempting to deviate... Sorry, it's an affirmative, heading towards Salisbury." sighed the pilot; "I really don't think I can get back to base and I'm nearly as certain that an attempted landing would not go well."
"Bravo zero-one, stay with the aircraft, that's an order! Echo Golf Delta Mike, this is Guardian Actual, scramble QRA." he ordered.
"Quick Reaction Alert force are grounded for maintenance." replied the Boscombe Down controller.
"Echo Golf Delta Mike, demanding takeoff runway bearing two-three, do you copy." Harry barked, leaning out of the cockpit again, gesturing to his engineer.
He eased open the throttle and released the brakes as the ground crew pulled the chocks out from the aircraft's undercarriage, pulling away smoothly.
"Guardian zero-one this is control, I copy, runway two-three is clear for takeoff, you have a five-minute window." replied the air traffic controller.
"Roger Echo Golf Delta Mike, will proceed immediately to runway two-three and takeoff." said Harry, lowering the canopy as he moved.
A few long, tense seconds later, he was at the end of the runway. Easing open the throttle to full, he kept going, full afterburner on. Twenty-one thousand pounds of thrust from its Snecma M53 turbofan kicked the aircraft forward, hard. Harry held the Mirage at about twenty feet above the runway as he gathered speed, not expending any of his ever-increasing momentum on climbing.
The undercarriage came up with a muffled thud, at which point, the Mirage was quickly accelerating to six-hundred knots and kept going to seven-hundred miles an hour.
"Bravo zero-one, say altitude, say speed, over." Harry radioed.
"Guardian zero-one, flight level seventy-five, lateral speed, four-hundred knots, twenty miles from Boscombe, losing height at rate of about seventy-five feet a second." replied Richard, beginning to sound slightly panicked; "Orders sir! I can't stay in the aircraft."
"I'll be with you in a few seconds. The only reason I've left you in there is data." Harry replied immediately; "Control, do you have us on scopes?"
"Guardian, affirmative." was the answer.
Harry quickly calculated, four-hundred knots was about four-hundred and sixty miles an hour. It would take about a hundred and fifty seconds to cross the twenty miles to the airfield. Richard was at seven and a half thousand feet, but losing seventy-five feet a second, he would be splattered across the landscape in one-hundred seconds if that rate of descent continued. He'd fall short of the airfield by over six miles. Right in Salisbury.
He wanted to intercept at four-thousand feet. The Dornier would have to lose 3500 feet, which at seventy-five feet a second would take just forty-seven seconds. In that time it would be six miles closer to Boscombe Down. He had fourteen miles to cover in forty-seven seconds, requiring a speed over a thousand miles an hour.
If he stayed at seven-hundred, he would only cover nine miles in that time, the Dornier would be in the same place, but he'd be five miles short. He could cover those five miles in about twenty-five seconds. His target would have descended over nineteen hundred feet to two-thousand one-hundred but also be three miles behind him.
"Bollocks!" came the muttered curse over the radio; "Echo Golf Delta Mike, going supersonic."
Harry slammed the throttle open and accelerated up to twelve-hundred miles-per-hour before bleeding off a bit of speed by climbing, down to one-thousand and seventy two miles-per-hour, climbing at a rate of five-thousand one-hundred and six feet a minute, or four-thousand feet in forty-seven seconds. Their closing speed was about fifteen hundred miles-per-hour.
"Roger Guardian, you are closing, I say forty seconds, Bravo will be to your port side, about ten-o'clock high." control guided him in to his beleaguered pilot; "Do you copy?"
"I copy control. Richard, bang out, bang out on my word!" he ordered.
"Wilco." the Dornier pilot replied, slightly more calmly with the presence of the Mirage approaching fast and the order to leave the doomed test aircraft.
Forty seconds later, Harry snapped the jet around as he spotted the Dornier on radar and out of the corner of his eye. Coming up to it from behind to one side, he jammed on the air-brakes and eyed the land below them. They were flying towards the River Avon, or the water meadows around it, which was fine with him.
"Now!" Harry ordered.
He saw the flash of light and the jump seat leave the jet. It separated from the pilot and he tumbled away, far behind and below them, his parachute opening. Harry had opened the cover on the master arm switch, setting the fire control radar to the twin DEFA 30mm revolver cannons. He didn't have time for radar-locking missiles.
Set to a one-second burst, Harry fired. The twin DEFA cannons unleashed a hail of shells, twenty-two each. The projectiles each weighed two-hundred and twenty grams, nearly ten kilograms of metal leaving the muzzles. They smacked into the Dornier which promptly disintegrated and blew up spectacularly.
Glancing at the fuel computer on his control panel as he flew away from the fireball, Harry quickly worked out that he had a range of about five-hundred miles left, so turned north-east and climbed.
"Area control, this is Guardian one-zero, proceeding at flight-level two-zero-zero, bearing zero-three-five to RAF Holbeach, do you copy?"
"I copy Guardian one-zero." replied the area controller; "We are having some issues due to a supersonic shockwave in the Salisbury area."
"I have absolutely no idea why." Harry commented.
He hadn't been in the mood to stick around at Holbeach. Approaching the range at a mere six-fifty knots, eleven and a half less than the speed of sound, he'd alerted the army to his presence by flying a few feet over their heads before pointing his jet skyward and screaming to twenty-thousand feet in about twenty seconds. Quickly hunting down a drone with his fire control radar, Harry launched a Sidewinder at short range, two miles.
With the first test making sure the programming was working, he'd rapidly disposed of the other two drones with his other missiles, an ASRAAM and an IRIS-T. The flight to Holbeach had taken just twelve minutes and he'd stayed around for less than five minutes before turning south-east and opening the throttle.
Just under half-an-hour after it left, the Mirage returned, a slight puff of smoke from the wheels as it hit the deck before the braking parachute blossomed out behind the jet, slowing it massively. With the chute released and a chase car catching it, he taxied onto the stand and cut the engine.
With the pneumatic hiss of the canopy easing open having stopped, Harry peeled off his helmet and dumped it on the edge of the windscreen in front of him before levering himself up onto his feet. One of the engineers propped up a ladder onto the cockpit sill, allowing him to quickly descend onto the concrete of the stand.
"Richard's in the hanger boss." reported one of his engineers.
"Thanks." Harry nodded, dropping into one of the open-top Land Rovers.
"Have you ever banged out boss?" asked Richard, sitting in the galley of the C-130 parked on one side of the test squadrons' main hanger.
"Twice." Harry replied with good humour as they sipped at mugs of coffee; "'September '96 with 233 OCU, I was in a Harrier, at the controls with an instructor sitting in the back doing fuck all when the engine decided to eat a large seagull. Needless to say it didn't end well. The second time was deliberate, testing a bang seat in a Gloster Meteor for Martin-Baker. Anyway, I need to know what happened."
"I've got it all on helmet cam, I'll write the specifics up later." Richard said with a slight grimace; "Just put it at sudden uncontrollable descent and the controls responding randomly to any input."
"Right, good lad. Have the medics had a look at you?" Harry enquired.
"Only a basic first aid going over from one of the boys over at the rotary squadron who picked me up." answered Richard after a moment.
"And where were the search and rescue helicopters?" said Harry, raising an eyebrow.
"Down for maintenance I think." Richard stated, a sardonic smirk on his face.
"Right, no QRA, no SAR, what kind of air force is this?" Harry scowled.
Georgie sat in the crew room, slightly uncomfortable in the tense silence. In the space of an hour, she'd heard the radio-chatter between a Dornier Alphajet and a Dassault Mirage, the pilot of the latter had a distinctive husky baritone she was certain was Harry's. Then after all flights had been recalled to Boscombe Down, some senior officers had arrived, apparently from RNAS Yeovilton, RAF Benson, RAF Odiham.
Then the door burst open and nearly flew off the hinges. Harry stormed in, still clad in a flying suit with anti-G trousers and the four stripes of a Group Captain, followed by one of the pilots.
"Gentlemen, I'd like to enquire why, despite full knowledge due to radio communications that you did not deploy SAR forces which are available at all of your bases?" he hissed.
He was angrier than she'd ever seen the normally mild man.
"Due to budget restrictions-" began one of the officers, standing up.
"Sit down and shut up!" Harry barked; "Any of you got a reasonable excuse?"
"We assumed-" one of the others began.
"Sit down and shut up!" he snarled.
"Our aircraft were down for emergency maintenance sir." said one of the younger officers; "I wasn't going to risk sending anyone out in defective airframes."
"At least one of you isn't a colossal imbecile." sneered Harry; "You kid, try and keep at least one airframe in working order. The rest of you shove off, you're no longer needed."
"You know, I haven't seen him quite that angry since Basra back in '05." commented one of the Boscombe Down test pilots who had gone out in a test-bed CH-47 Chinook to pick up Richard. He was an ex-7 Squadron UK Special Forces Aviation Wing pilot who'd been recruited straight out of the RAF into the Empire Test Pilot's School.