Even with the earphone muffs on, it sounded at once, as Watts described. At first, I thought the earphones lacked any protection, with the constant hammering and beating of every facial and cranial bone I had.
But when I lifted a phone with caution to find out the intensity of the noise, I found out what Watts meant about perforated eardrums. But even after a few hours, my head felt on the verge of falling apart.
Our first run northwards along the mainland coast produced nothing. Here, the Norfolk coast dominated the scenery, although it was barely visible by the driving rain and low cloud. We flew over a cliff-top golf course, where Watts explained earlier that even the gulls had difficulty finding a foothold.
When I saw it close up, I realized why. At the foot of the cliffs, an almost unbroken mass of foaming white, large white-capped rollers marched eastwards across the darkened North Sea, long creamy lines of spume torn from the wave tops that veined the troughs between them.
Not a single boat in sight, and the buffeting gale-force wind battered our chopper. I wondered about the sense of all this. An hour of violent shaking and swaying like an out-of-control express train in the last moments before it left the track had turned me against whirlybirds for life.
I wondered if I preferred to sail in the seething maelstrom below or where I sat. Perhaps I start to feel a positive bond between me and the flying machine.
We headed twenty miles south - if jarred and flung through the air could be called flying but covered sixty miles. Every fishing boat twelve miles out, examined, from two hundred feet.
Sometimes the heavy rain and the strong wind forced us to a hundred feet as they battered the streaming windscreen. The wipers were useless, so Watts took us down as low as possible to see anything.
I don't think we missed a boat around the exclusion zone. We saw everything and we saw nothing.
I looked at my watch. Nine-thirty. The day wearing and nothing achieved.
"How much more of this can this beast stand?"
"I've been 150 miles out over the Atlantic in weather a bloody sight worse than this."
Watts showed no sign of strain, anxiety, or fatigue, if anything, he seemed to enjoy himself.
"The point is how much more can you take?"
"Very little, but I have to. Let us try and head direct out from the DEFRA complex. If you see anything suspicious, let me know."
"Suspicious?"
"Like a submarine."
"What type?"
"Russian and nuclear."
Watts did a double-take before bringing the helicopter round to the north-west in a swinging side-slipping movement didn't do my stomach any good.
"In the box I have coffee and sandwiches. Help yourself."
I left the sandwiches and coffee in the box.
It took almost forty minutes to cover twenty-five miles of the Suffolk coast. The wind took us two steps back for every three forward. The conditions so bad that Watt flew on instruments all the way, and with the violent cross-wind blowing, I thought the likelihood of finding our goal impossible.
Instead, we came across the trawler hiding in a narrow break in the cliffs. A small bay, about the size of a couple of tennis courts, almost enclosed from the sea, the entrance not more than the yards wide.
Hiding there was the Russian trawler, anchored fore and aft in the middle of the bay. Not on the whole, large, her hull better suited to the landlocked Black Sea than to the open waters of the North Sea. Based on the project ST 192 series, the design enabled it to fulfil a comprehensive list of technical requirements that included seakeeping, endurance, fishing, and transport capacities. This resulted in favourable results, in particular greater efficiency in the handling, processing, storage, unloading and delivery of high-quality fish products to end users.
The true merit of this trawler was not the ability of the vessel to catch and process fish. The gleaming white dome and several antenna towers were mounted on their upper decks. A Primorye-class surveillance ship and high-speed satellite data link back to Moscow, patrolling the Suffolk coast outside the 12-mile limit.
Above the spy ship, half a square mile of solid rock with no blade of grass in sight, made Alcatraz appear a green and beautiful holiday resort.
"Onehouse Island."
Watt told me.
Despite the barren scene, we looked at a house with smoke rising from a chimney. Beside this, a boat-shed, but no boat. The smoke meant an inhabitant, at least one, and although they earned their living, they did not do it by cultivating the good earth. A boat-shed may well signify fishing be their livelihood, a boat for transportation to the mainland, for one certain thing among the manifold uncertainties of this world that no passenger vessel had called at Onehouse Island since the invention of the steamboat. Watt set me down twenty yards from the shed.
I rounded the corner of the boat house and abruptly stopped. I always stop abruptly when I'm struck in the stomach by a battering-ram. After a few minutes, I managed to whoop enough air into my lungs to let me straighten up again.
Tall, gaunt, grey, in his mid-sixties, and without shaving for a week or changing his collarless shirt in what seemed like a month.
The battering ram he used, after all, a good old-fashioned double-barrelled 12-bore shotgun, the kind of gun at close range of six inches in this case, would blow my head off. He had it aimed at my right eye. Like staring down a tunnel.
"Who the hell are you?"
He snarled.
"Put the gun away."
"Why?
"Using a gun as a threatening weapon could lead to a prison sentence."
"What about spying for a foreign country?"
"What?"
"Bloody Russians, thinking about world dominance all the time."
"I'm not Russian!"
"I don't believe a word of it. Now piss off my island."
"Okay, I'm going."
We rose from the island, and I watched as the man disappeared back into his humble abode.
"I just caught a glimpse."
Watts said.
"I did see a gun in our friend's hands, didn't I?"
"Afraid so."
"Who is he?"
"He is an undercover agent for the Suffolk Tourist Board in secret training to be their goodwill ambassador."
Watt laughed.
"He needs a lot more training."
"He is a very worried man and a desperate one."
"Didn't get a chance to look in the boat shed?"
"No. I think he might have had a gun pointing at him, but I could have taken the gun from him."
"He would have blown your head off."
"Guns are my business. The safety catch remained in the 'On' position."
"Sorry."
Watt's face showed how out of his depth he seemed, and he couldn't conceal his expression.
"What now?"
The helicopter juddered.
"A bit of turbulence."
When Watt pushed hard on the cyclic and pulled on the collective, we experienced a bone-shaking vibration that proved too strong for the airframe. The torque reduced the nose faster than the big blades could follow, as the long tail boom rapidly soared. In a moment, the whirling blades struck the tail, their tips slamming into the drive shaft of the tail rotor at 650 feet per second. It couldn't stand the impact and sheared off.
Watt felt the helicopter start to spin. The engine churned out full horsepower as he maxed the throttle, torquing against the still-turning blades and spinning the fuselage faster and faster. However, the helicopter had no lift and no directional control. It fell from a few hundred feet like a swirling one-ton stone.
Watt's hands were still on the controls and demanding more lift. With his feet on the pedals to counter the spin, the broken remains of the helicopter slammed into the North Sea.