Exit Alpha (44 page)

PIM:
Point and intended movement.

Pri-Fly:
Primary flight control on a CV.

Prusiks:
Loops of thin rope which, when secured around a standing line, provide a moveable purchase or stirrup. Used in pairs. Now supplanted by jumars — mechanical devices with a gripping and releasing action.

PSI:
Pounds per square inch.

PSM:
A small, handy 5.45mm pistol first issued to Soviet Spetsnaz units. Its bottle-nosed cartridge has remarkable penetrative ability.

Radalt:
Radar altimeter.

Ripped:
Body-builders attempt to reduce as much body fat as possible before a contest so that muscles become more defined. The result is called being ‘ripped’.

RPM:
Usually revs-per-minute. But rounds-per-minute applied to weapons.

SAR:
Not search-and-rescue but a compact assault rifle made in Singapore.

Sastrugi:
Windblown and scoured snow and ice ridges.

SATCOM:
Fleet satellite communications. More properly FLTSATCOM.

Sedia gestatoria:
A portable papal throne carried on the shoulders of 12 footmen.

Shear-load:
The force a body can sustain before shearing.

SIG-Sauer:
Swiss handgun noted for excellent manufacture and extreme reliability.

Sikorsky S–76:
Large commercial twin-turbine helicopter.

Sitrep:
Situation report.

Sked:
Scheduled radio contact.

Slot:
Crevasse. Also known as a crack. A vehicle is ‘slotted’ if driven into a crack. Cracks are often invisible due to snow cover.

SNL:
Sandia National Laboratories.

SOF:
Generally sound-on-film but, in defence terms, Special Operations Forces.

Spetsnaz:
KGB special forces.

Sponson:
A structure projecting from the side of a vessel. On carriers, there are sponsons around the flight deck.

Spud in:
Slang for crash landing.

SS90:
Light bullet able to penetrate 48 layers of Kevlar at 100-metre range.

Transponder:
Radio transmitter triggered by a received signal. Can be used as a positioning device.

Traverse:
A convoy of vehicles travelling together for a considerable distance in Antarctica. Can refer to a train of large sleds supporting accommodation modules, stores, workshops and equipment. Pulled by converted bulldozers with very wide tracks.

Ventiles:
Windproof outer garments used in Antarctica. A material developed by the Ventile Corporation.

VHF:
Very high frequency.

VMC:
Visible meteorological conditions. IMC is the instrument version.

WSG:
Sir William Schwenck Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan fame.

Yaw:
A bullet’s base has more mass than its nose — a shape lacking static stability. When it leaves the barrel it develops yaw — tilts up in flight. The ‘angle of yaw’ is the angle between the axis of the projectile and the tangent to the trajectory. The gyroscopic effect of a spinning projectile fired from a rifled barrel partly corrects this.

Any story set in many countries is a conundrum where measurement is concerned. The metric system is dominant throughout the world but America remains imperial, as do many older minds in other countries. US aircraft manuals, for instance, perpetuate their system. Shipping and particularly aircraft now use a curious mix: knots for speed and wind speed; feet, metres and nautical miles for distance. In Australia, runways are measured in feet but visibility in kilometres. Small boats are still so many feet but Lloyd’s registers shipping in metres. Different flight zones require one system or the other. In
Exit Alpha
I have used both metric and imperial, adjusting for context — including the mindset of the characters — and hope this will not offend.

This enormous project would have been impossible without advice from experts in many fields.

The services: Firstly, and fittingly, I acknowledge my great debt to warriors both active and retired of the United States and New Zealand Armed Services who bore my enquiries with their usual patience and grace. Particular thanks to Flt Lt Greg Caie, Master Engineer Brett Shanks (both 40th Squadron RNZAF), Daniel Brooks (Captain, 17th Squadron USAF and now Logistics Engineer for Lockheed). To the late, great Gerald Harris (Major, 17th Squadron USAF Rtd) whose tremendous enthusiasm helped power this book. As well to Flt Lt Robert Saxton (VAW–120, Virginia USA), Lt John MacMichael (Safety Officer, E–2C Training Command), Loadmaster Garry Quick (109th Airlift Wing NY) and crew members of USS
Constellation
. I acknowledge assistance from the Hawkeye Association and my debt to excellent articles in the US Navy Safety Centre’s
Approach
magazine and the US Navy Institute’s
Proceedings
journal.

Experts on and in Antarctica: Busy professionals who provided invaluable advice were Rod Ledingham (Field Training Officer, Australian Antarctic Division), Mike Mahon (Science and IT Support ANZ) and the long-suffering Fred Parsons (Mechanic, Scott Base ANZ). I was assisted by the International Antarctic Centre staff in Christchurch, by Antarctica NZ and the Australian Antarctic Division in Kingston, Tasmania.

Catholic studies: I was helped by Bede Draper and a perceptive teaching Father in the Catholic Church who prefers not to be named. I thank him.

Other professionals: Gratitude to Rex Dovey (helicopter operations, Queenstown, NZ). Glad you’re still alive, Rex. To Anna Lewis (operating theatre techniques) and Siobhan McCammon (film production). For reading the manuscript, providing suggestions and corrections, I thank two brilliant friends — Diane Morgan and Jim Richards. Gratitude also to David Elfick for pointing out that the pope should interact with Nina in the tale.

I acknowledge brief quotes from
To Live Within
by Sri Anirvan and Lizelle Reymond, last republished, as far as I know, by Rudra Press, Portland, Oregon, USA.

Q: You’ve won awards for literary fiction, so why the thriller genre?

It’s good fun. Meaty. Engaging. I find most ‘blockbuster’ thrillers slow-moving and dreary, so take great pains to write something fast-paced, quirky, absorbing. I’m trying to produce intelligent escapism.

Q: Your descriptions are almost filmic.

After a lifetime writing TV spots and docos, I’m conditioned to visualise.

Q: I’m intrigued by your characters. They’re far from the stock types you expect. The hero Cain, for instance, loves a coarse woman who later has a double mastectomy. His mentor, and almost his mother, is a sixteen-stone lesbian whom he adores, and his virtual sister and ‘brother-at-arms’ is the beautiful Karen, another lesbian. You have an unusual take on the thriller.

And thank God for that. Rhonda and Karen needed a close bond, and Cain needed that link with them too. Although it’s partly plot-driven, I prefer interesting characters. And despite particular sexual, religious or political orientations or race, people are just people.

Q: How long does a book take you?

About three years all up. I don’t have to knock out one a year. I’m self-funded and technically retired so can take the time to do it as well as I can.

Q: EXIT ALPHA must have been quite a research task.

It was. I had to find out about systems and survival in Antarctica, Catholic Church hierarchy and doctrine, political life in Pakistan, C-130s, nuclear aircraft carriers, airships, weapons systems. Then there were arcane subjects such as electrocutions, poltergeists ... It takes enormous checking and the help of many experts. You do your best to keep egg off your face, not to slip up too much.

Q: Why the esoteric emphasis?

I’m interested in comparative religion and, of course, what interests you comes through in your work.

Q: Your first thriller, The Fourth Eye, is extremely dark and your second, The Godgame, quite disturbing.

So is the evening news — which the networks have reduced to the level of distraction, entertainment. However life’s often brutal. Should we ignore that? For instance, they’ve tried to attribute Titus Andronicus to everyone but Shakespeare, but there’s good evidence he wrote it and academics are stuck with that. The Fourth Eye was mostly social commentary. But The Godgame was a romp — described by the publisher at Hazard Press as ‘a romance for men’ and I agree with him. I love its cosy, sunny little world of terror. And every so often I have to peek into it and join that world.

Q: You speak as if someone else wrote your books.

You know you wrote them because they take enormous effort. But later you wonder where they came from.

Q: How do you work?

Patricia Highsmith said that a book is a process that should be interrupted only by sleep. Now I have a life organised for minimum distraction. Wife gone, children flown, pets dead. Freedom. Writing is rewriting and I endlessly rework.

Q: What are you writing now?

I’ve just finished the next book, Deep Six. It’s partly a forecast about the future of war. The Fourth Eye screenplay’s finished. A book of short stories is ready too – called Songs of a Second World.

Q: What’s it like adapting your own book to the screen?

Demanding — a distillation. I thought it would be a doddle but there’s been a lot to learn. For instance, a feature won’t work unless you stick strictly to the three-act structure. And you have to throw away your novel, reinvent, start again. Bit of a wrench, but you get over it.

Q: Why do you write?

It’s a character flaw. Writers are compulsive and their excretions are their daydreams.

Q: Are you being sardonic?

No. I mean it. Of course, there are kinder ways to put it. You write for the joy of constructing an imagined world that’s concrete, meaningful, real.

Q: What advice do you have for would-be writers?

Find something sensible to do. It took me forty years to get a book up. I dumped three in the garbage one day. If you can be discouraged, you won’t make it. If you can’t, you won’t either. And if you get published — equivalent to the chance of being struck by lightning — your book sits on a shelf for a few weeks, then it’s pulped.

Q: But you kept going...

Because it’s a compulsion. And I’ve lived my life. It’s playtime now.

Q: EXIT ALPHA isn’t your typical airport paperback — it implies a world view. What would you say is your take on the world?

It’s in chaos. Obvious enough. The population explosion’s made us locusts — stripping, denuding the planet. But we’re so egocentric, we still see ourselves as separate from nature. We agree that the problems we have — destruction of biodiversity, global warming and so on — are unsustainable. That means we’re unsustainable, that we’re becoming the only resource. Soon we’ll be farmed like cattle. You can see the indications now. Entrenched conglomerates disseminating misinformation to protect their franchises. The subversion of education by business. Drugs and the corporatisation of crime. The corruption of professions, institutions, governments. We’re victims of our own violence, inertia, mental slavery and greed. I’m not making anything up. These are hardly new ideas.

Q: And you’re trying to highlight these problems in your fiction?

I’m not trying to ignore them. It’s interesting that factual books are now becoming partly fiction. You recall the biography of Reagan that interposed a purely fictional narrator? And fiction is promoting fact — sometimes even posing as fact. Some forms of bastardry are too dangerous to tackle directly and fiction, being at one remove, can lift these into awareness. There are brilliant examples through the years. For instance 1984 is with us. The only mistake Orwell made was imagining it would be overt rather than covert. Popular fiction’s often predicted the future correctly. And it probably has a better strike-rate than most economists, futurists, historians. It can also have a devastating critical punch. For instance, The Good Soldier Schweick.

Q: But surely we’ve had it good in the last hundred years? The general standard of living in western democracies is —

Democracy’s had a grand run. Despite its twin foes, communism and capitalism, it’s still being kept afloat by advances in science and technology — but notice how each new solution spawns a dozen new problems? Progress is a myth. We’re moving in circles. Everything becomes its own opposite.

Q: Can you give an illustration of that?

Which century would you like? The religion of love spawning the inquisition and the crusades? The war to end all wars? Communism reverting to hierarchy and decimating the masses? There are examples on all scales. Antibiotics cause more resistant bugs. Claims exploitation makes the cost of insurance prohibitive. Cane toads. But people cling to this notion of progress — because the alternative is despair.