Spare (26 page)

Time?

For you to solo.

Oh. OK.

Up I went. (After first making sure my parachute was strapped on.) I did one or two circuits round the airfield, talking to myself all the while:
Full power. Keep the wheel on the white line.
Pull up…slowly! Dip the nose. Don’t stall! Turn in the climb. Level off. OK, now you’re downwind. Radio the tower. Check your ground markers.

Pre-landing checks.

Reduce power!

Start to descend in the turn.

There you go, steady now.

Roll out there, line up, line it up.

Three-degree flight path, get the nose on the piano keys.

Request clearance to land.

Point the aircraft where you want it to land…

I made an uneventful one-bounce landing and taxied off the runway. To the average person it would’ve looked like the most mundane flight in the history of aviation. To me it was one of the most wonderful moments of my life.

Was I a pilot now? Hardly. But I was on my way.

I jumped out, marched up to Booley. My God, I wanted to high-five him, take him out for drinks, but it was out of the question.

The one thing I absolutely didn’t want to do was say goodbye to him, but that was what needed to happen next. Now that I’d soloed, I needed to embark on the next phase of my training.

As Booley was so fond of saying, it was time.

I shipped off to
RAF Shawbury and discovered that helicopters were much more complex than Fireflys.

Even the preflight checks were more extensive.

I stared at the galaxy of toggles and switches and thought:
How am I going to memorize all this?

Somehow I did. Slowly, under the watchful eyes of my two new instructors, Sergeant Majors Lazel and Mitchell, I learned them all.

In no time we were lifting off, rotors beating the frothy clouds, one of the great physical sensations anyone can experience. The purest form of flying, in many ways. The first time we ascended, straight vertical, I thought: I was born for this.

But
flying
the helicopter, I learned, wasn’t the hard part. Hovering was. At least six long lessons were devoted to this one task, which sounded easy at first and quickly came to seem impossible. In fact, the more you practiced hovering, the more impossible it seemed.

The main reason was a phenomenon called “hover monkeys.” Just above the ground a helicopter falls prey to a fiendish confluence of factors: air flow, downdraft, gravity. First it wobbles, then it rocks, then it pitches and yaws—as if invisible monkeys are hanging from both its skids, yanking. To land the helicopter you have to shake off those hover monkeys, and the only way to do that is by…ignoring them.

Easier said. Time and time again the hover monkeys got the better of me, and it was small consolation that they also got the better of every other pilot training with me. We talked among ourselves about these little bastards, these invisible gremlins. We grew to hate them, to dread the shame and rage that came with being bested by them yet again. None of us could work out how to restore the aircraft’s equilibrium and put it on the deck without denting the fuselage. Or scraping the skids. To walk away from a landing with a long, crooked mark on the tarmac behind you—that was the ultimate humiliation.

Come the day of our first solos we were all basket cases.
The hover monkeys, the hover monkeys,
that was all you heard around the kettle and the coffee pot. When it was my turn I climbed into the helicopter, said a prayer, asked the tower for clearance.
All clear.
I started her up, lifted off, did several laps around the field, no problem, despite strong winds.

Now it was zero hour.

On the apron were eight circles. You had to land inside one. Left of the
apron was an orange brick building with huge glass windows where the other pilots and students waited their turn. I knew they were all standing at those windows, watching, as I felt the hover monkeys take hold. The aircraft was rocking.
Get off
, I shouted,
leave me alone.

I fought the controls and managed to set the helicopter inside one of the circles.

Walking inside the orange building, I threw out my chest and proudly took my place at the windows to watch the others. Sweaty but smiling.

Several student pilots had to abort their landings that day. One had to set down on a nearby patch of grass. One landed so hot and wobbly, fire trucks and an ambulance rushed to the scene.

When he walked into the orange building I could see in his eyes that he felt as I would’ve felt in his shoes.

Part of him honestly wished he’d crashed and burned.

During this time I was living
in Shropshire, with Willy, who was also training to become a pilot. He’d found a cottage ten minutes from the base, on someone’s estate, and invited me to stay with him. Or maybe I invited myself?

The cottage was cozy, charming, just up a narrow country lane and behind some thickly canopied trees. The fridge was stuffed with vacuum-packed meals sent by Pa’s chefs. Creamy chicken and rice, beef curry. At the back of the house there were beautiful stables, which explained the horse smell in every room.

Each of us enjoyed the arrangement: our first time living together since Eton. It was fun. Better yet, we were together for the decisive moment, the triumphal unraveling of Murdoch’s media empire. After months of investigation, a gang of reporters and editors at Murdoch’s trashiest newspaper were finally being identified, handcuffed, arrested, charged with harassment of politicians, celebrities—and the Royal Family. Corruption was being exposed, finally, and punishments were forthcoming.

Among the soon-to-be-exposed villains was the Thumb, that same journalist who’d long ago published an absurd non-story about my thumb injury at Eton. I’d healed up nicely, but the Thumb had never mended his ways. On the contrary he’d got a whole lot worse. He’d moved up the ranks of the
newspaper world, becoming a boss, with a whole team of Thumbs at his command (under his thumb?), many of them hacking willy-nilly into people’s phones. Blatant criminality, which the Thumb claimed, laughably, to know nothing about.

Also going down? Rehabber Kooks! The same loathsome editor who’d cooked up my rehab charade—she’d been “resigned.” Two days later the cops arrested her.

Oh, the relief we felt when we heard. For us and our country.

A similar fate was soon to befall the others, all the plotters and stalkers and liars. Soon enough they would all lose their jobs, and their ill-gotten fortunes, amassed during one of the wildest crime sprees in British history.

Justice.

I was overjoyed. So was Willy. More, it was glorious to finally have our suspicions validated and our circle of closest friends vindicated, to know that we hadn’t been stark, staring paranoid. Things really had been amiss. We’d been betrayed, as we’d always suspected, but not by bodyguards or best mates. It was those Fleet Street weasels yet again. And the Metropolitan Police, who’d inexplicably failed to do their jobs, refusing time and again to investigate and arrest obvious lawbreakers.

The question was why? Pay-offs? Collusion? Fear?

We’d soon find out.

The public was horrified. If journalists could use the mighty powers vested in them for evil, then democracy was in sorry shape. More, if journalists were allowed to probe and foil the security measures that notable figures and government officials required to stay safe, then they’d ultimately show terrorists how to do it too. And then it would be a free-for-all. No one would be safe.

For generations Britons had said with a wry laugh: Ah, well, of course our newspapers are shit—but what can you do? Now they weren’t laughing. And there was general agreement: We need to do something.

There were even death rattles coming from the most popular Sunday newspaper, Murdoch’s
News of the World
. The leading culprit in the hacking scandal, its very survival was in doubt. Advertisers were talking about fleeing, readers were talking about boycotts. Was it possible? Murdoch’s baby—his grotesque two-headed circus baby—might finally expire?

A new era was at hand?

Strange. While all this put Willy and me in a chipper mood, we didn’t talk much about it explicitly. We had loads of laughs in that cottage, passed many happy hours talking about all kinds of things, but seldom that. I wonder if it
was just too painful. Or maybe still too unresolved. Maybe we didn’t want to jinx it, didn’t dare pop the cork on the champagne until we saw photos of Rehabber Kooks and the Thumb sharing a cell.

Or maybe there was some tension under the surface between us, which I wasn’t fully comprehending. While sharing that cottage we agreed to a rare joint interview, in an airplane hangar at Shawbury, during which Willy griped endlessly about my habits. Harry’s a slob, he said. Harry snores.

I turned and gave him a look. Was he joking?

I cleaned up after myself, and I didn’t snore. Besides, our rooms were separated by thick walls, so even if I did snore there was no way he heard. The reporters were having fits of giggles about it all, but I cut in:
Lies! Lies!

That only made them laugh harder. Willy too.

I laughed as well, because we often bantered like that, but when I look back on it now, I can’t help but wonder if there wasn’t something else at play. I was training to get to the front lines, the same place Willy had been training to get, but the Palace had scuttled his plans. The Spare, sure, let him run around a battlefield like a chicken with its head cut off, if that’s what he likes.

But the Heir? No.

So Willy was now training to be a search and rescue pilot, and perhaps feeling quietly frustrated about it. In which case, he was seeing it all wrong. He was doing remarkable, vital work, I thought, saving lives every week. I was proud of him, and full of respect for the way he was dedicating himself wholeheartedly to his preparation.

Still, I should’ve figured out how he might have been feeling. I knew all too well the despair of being pulled from a fight for which you’ve spent years preparing.

From Shawbury I moved on
to Middle Wallop. I now knew how to fly a helicopter, the Army conceded, but next I needed to learn how to fly one
tactically
. While doing other things. Many other things. Like reading a map and locating a target and firing missiles and talking on the radios and peeing into a bag. Multitasking in the air at 140 knots—not for everyone. To accomplish this Jedi mind trick, my brain would first need to be reshaped, my synapses rewired, and my Yoda in this massive neuro-reengineering would be Nigel.

A.k.a. Nige.

It was he who drew the unenviable task of becoming my fourth, and arguably most important, flight instructor.

The aircraft on which we’d be conducting our sessions was the Squirrel. That was the colloquial name for the little French-made single-engine helicopter on which most British students trained. But Nige was less focused on the actual Squirrel in which we sat than the squirrels inside my head. Head squirrels were the ancient enemies of human concentration, Nige assured me. Without my being aware of it they’d taken up residence in my consciousness. More devious than the hover monkeys, he said, they were also far more dangerous.

The only way to get rid of head squirrels, Nige insisted, was iron discipline. A helicopter is easily mastered, but the head takes more time and more patience.

Time and patience, I thought impatiently. I don’t have much of either, Nige, so let’s crack on…

It also takes a kind of self-love, Nige said, and this manifests as confidence.
Confidence, Lieutenant Wales. Believe in yourself—that’s everything.

I saw the truth in his words, but I couldn’t imagine ever putting that truth into practice. The fact was, I
didn’t
believe in myself, didn’t believe in much of anything, least of all me. Whenever I made a mistake, which was often, I was quite harsh with Harry. It felt as if my mind were seizing up like an overheated engine, the red mist would come down, and I’d stop thinking, stop functioning.

No, Nige would say softly whenever this happened.
Don’t let one mistake destroy this flight, Lieutenant Wales.

But I let one mistake ruin many a flight.

Sometimes my self-loathing would spill onto Nige. After having a go at me, I’d have a go at him.
Fuck it,
you
fly the damn thing!

He’d shake his head.
Lieutenant Wales,
I’m not touching the controls. We are going to get down on the ground and you’re going to get us there and then we’ll talk about it all afterwards.

He had a herculean will. You’d never have guessed it from his appearance. Average height, average build, steel-gray hair combed neatly to one side. He wore spotless green overalls, spotless clear spectacles. He was a Navy civvie, a kindly grandpa who loved sailing—a top bloke. But he had the heart of a fucking ninja.

And at that moment I needed a ninja.

Over several months Nige
the Ninja managed to show me how to fly a helicopter while doing other things, countless other things, and, what was more, to do so with something approaching self-love. These were flying lessons, but I think back on them as life lessons, and gradually there were more good ones than bad.

Good or bad, however, every ninety-minute session in Nige’s Squirrel Dojo left me hooped. Upon landing I’d think:
I need a nap
.

But first: the debrief.

This was where Nige the Ninja really put me through it, because he sugarcoated nothing. He spoke bluntly and wounded blithely. There were things I needed to hear, and he didn’t care about his tone when he told me.

I got defensive.

He pressed on.

I shot him hate-you-forever stares.

He pressed on.

I said,
Yeah, yeah, I get it
.

He pressed on.

I stopped listening.