The sky stood black, the woods were black, and the icy heavy driving rain reduced what little visibility to nothing at all.
The only way to locate a tree. Walk straight into it. The only way to locate a dip in the ground. Fall into it.
When Alexis woke me a three-thirty with a cup of tea she told me when she been speaking to Thames House at midnight – I'd been asleep – she left me in no doubt although Fitzgerald organized the helicopter, London sounded most unenthusiastic and considered the whole thing a waste.
A rare occasion indeed I ever felt myself in total agreement with Thames House.
With my mind beginning to think I wouldn't find the helicopter anyway. I wouldn't believe it could have been so difficult to find one's way across a few miles of wooded inland at night-time. I didn't contend with rivers or rushing torrents or cliffs or precipitous clefts in the ground or any kind of dense or tangled vegetation.
Rendlesham Forest walking routes dissected from one side to the other of it and would have been only an easy Sunday afternoon stroll for an active octogenarian.
My troubles started when I made it back to the mainland, accompanied by Sergeant Fitzgerald. He needed to get back to the station to write up his report and also to speak to his wife and family.
He dropped me off near the forest and I set off from there, with my only guides the wind-lashed rain and the lie of the land. The collection point lay to the east, and with the near-gale force wind almost due west, so as long as I kept the cold stinging rain on the back of my neck, I'd be heading in the right direction.
Alas for me the rain-laden wind swirled on a whim as the wood in turn thinned and became dense again, and as a result I lost a great deal of time. Half an hour before dawn – by might watch, despite it still being as black as the midnight hour – I started to wonder if I could make it in time.
I also wondered if the helicopter would make it as well. No doubt in my mind it could land, the rendezvous point appeared sheltered. But the other question is whether it could get there at all.
With a vague idea helicopters were unmanageable above certain wind speeds but no idea what those wind speeds were. And if the helicopter didn't turn up, I faced a long cold wet trudge back to the village, and an even longer, colder, and hungry wait until darkness fell at night and I could get out to the shingle spit unseen. Even now, only twenty-four hours left. By nightfall, I would have only twelve. I began to run.
Fifteen minutes and God knows how many iron-hard tree trunks later I heard it, faint and intermittent at first, swelling in strength – the clattering roar of a helicopter engine. Early for fuck's sake, far too early, he would land, find the place deserted, and take off again.
It says much for my sudden desperate state of mind it never occurred to me how he could even begin to locate, far less land in a condition of darkness only a degree less than total. For a moment, I even contemplated lighting a flare to let the pilot know my actual location. With the flare half-way out of my pocket before I shoved it back again.
The arrangement been the flare would be lit only to show the landing strip. However, if I lit one there, the pilot might head for it, strike the tops of the pine trees, and would be the end.
I ran even faster. Years since I'd run more than a couple of hundred yards, and my lungs were already wheezing and gasping like a fractured bellow in a blacksmith's shop. But I ran as hard as possible. I cannoned into trees, I tripped over roots, fell into gullies, my face whipped repeatedly by low-spreading branches, but above all I cannoned into those fucking trees. I stretched my arms before me, but it did no good. I ran into them all the same.
I picked up a broken branch I'd tripped over and held it in front of me, but no matter how I pointed at the trees, it always seemed to come at me from another direction. I hit every tree in Rendlesham Forest. I felt the way a bowling ball must feel after a hard season in a bowling alley, the only difference, and a notable one, being whereas the ball knocked me down.
Once, twice, three times, I heard the sound of the helicopter engine disappearing away to the east, and the third time gone for good. But each time it came back. The sky lightened to the east now, but I still couldn't see the helicopter. For the pilot, everything below would still be as black as night.
The ground gave way beneath my feet, and I fell. I braced myself, arms outstretched, for the impact as I struck the other side of the gully. But my reaching hands found nothing. No impact. I kept falling, rolling, and twisting down a grassy slope. For the first time in the night, I would have welcomed the appearance of a pine tree, and kind of tree, to stop my progress.
I didn't know how trees might be on the slope, but I missed the lot. It must be the biggest gully on the Suffolk coast. I rolled and bumped over a sudden horizontal grassy bank and landed on my back in soft wet sand. Even while I whooped, gasped, and tried to get my knocked-out breath back into my lungs, I still had enough time to appreciate the fact, kind providence, and a few millions of years changed the jagged rock fringing the shore into a nice soft yielding sandy beach.
I got to my feet. I knew I found the meeting point. The helicopter came in from the east, not, as far as I could judge, more than three hundred feet up. I ran half-way down to the water's edge, pulled a flare from my pocket, slid away the waterproof covering and tore off the ignition strip. It flared into life at one, a dazzling blue-white magnesium light so blinding I clapped my free hand over my eyes. It lasted only thirty seconds, but this proved plenty. Even as it fizzled and spluttered its acrid and nostril-wrinkling way to extinction, the helicopter flew directly overhead.
Two vertically-downward pointing searchlights, mounted fore and aft on the helicopter, switched on simultaneously, interlocking pools of brilliance on the pale white sand. Twenty seconds later, the skids sank into the soft beach, the rackety clangour of the motor died away, and the blades idled to a stop.
The right-hand door opened, and a torch shone in my face as I approached.
"Chief Pilot Paul Watts of the National Police Air Service, sir."
We shook hands.
"Can I come aboard?"
"Have you any ID, sir?"
"Have you sense, Pilot Watts? Some people in our business never carry any means of identification. Do you think I like standing here, five miles from nowhere, carrying flares in my pocket?"
"Ordered to be careful, sir."
He looked as worried and upset as a cat snoozing on a sun-warmed wall.
"Step up, sir."
I stepped up and closed the door and sat.
Watts flicked on an overhead light.
"What the hell's wrong with your face?"
"What's the matter with my face?"
"Blood everywhere. Hundreds of little scratches."
"Pine needles."
I told him about my journey to our rendezvous.
"Why a machine this size? You could ferry a battalion in this one."
"Fourteen men, to be precise, sir. I do lots of crazy things, sir, but I don't fly tiny two-bit choppers in this kind of weather. Be blown out of the sky. with only two of us, the long-range tanks are full."
"You can fly all day?"
"More or less. Depends on how fast we go. What do you want from me, sir?"
"How well do you know this coast-line?"
"From the air?"
"Yes."
"I've been here twenty months now. I know this area as least as well as any man alive."
"I'm looking for a Russian spy ship posing as a trawler."
"Whereabouts?"
"Twelve miles off-shore."
"Have you any idea how many hundreds of miles of coastline we will need to cover? How long do I have for this job? A month?"
"By sunset to-day."
"Bloody hell."
"Sorry. I realize it's a big ask."
"We can only try, sir."
"Thanks."
"Fast your seat-belt and get on those earphones. Going to get thrown around quite a bit today."
"What's with the earphones?"
They were huge. Four inches wide with inch-thick linings and a spring-loaded swing microphone attached to the headband."
"For the ears, sir."
Watts said with kindness.
"To ensure you don't get perforated eardrums and won't be deaf for a week afterwards."
I looked at him with an expression of disbelief.
"Imagine sitting inside a steel drum, with a dozen pneumatic chisels hammering outside, is the racket this beast makes once we start up."