Spare (20 page)

I’m not certain Colonel Ed believed my threat. I’m not certain I did. Still, politically, diplomatically, strategically, he couldn’t afford to discount it. A prince in the ranks was a big public-relations asset, a powerful recruiting tool. He couldn’t ignore the fact that, if I bolted, his superiors might blame him, and their superiors too, and up the chain it might go.

On the other hand, much of what I saw from him that day was genuine humanity. The guy got it. As a soldier, he felt for me. He shuddered at the thought of being kept from a scrap. He really did want to help.

Harry, there might be a way…

Iraq was permanently off the table, he said. Alas.
No two ways about that, I’m afraid.
But maybe, he added, Afghanistan was an option.

I squinted.
Afghanistan?

He muttered something about it being “the safer option.”

Riiight…safer…

What on earth was he banging on about? Afghanistan was worlds more dangerous than Iraq. At that moment Britain had seven thousand soldiers in Afghanistan and each day found them engaged in some of the fiercest combat since the Second World War.

But who was I to argue? If Colonel Ed thought Afghanistan safer, and if he was willing to send me there, great.

What job would I do in Afghanistan, Colonel?

FAC. Forward air controller.

I blinked.

Highly sought-after job, he explained. FACs were tasked with orchestrating all air power, giving cover to lads on the ground, calling in raids—not to mention rescues, medevacs, the list went on. It wasn’t a new job, certainly, but it was newly vital in this new sort of warfare.

Why’s that, sir?

Because the bloody Taliban is everywhere! And nowhere!

You simply couldn’t
find
them, he explained. Terrain was too rugged, too remote. Mountains and deserts honeycombed with tunnels and caves—it was like hunting goats. Or ghosts. You had to get the bird’s-eye view.

Since the Taliban had no air force, not one plane, that was easy. We British, plus the Yanks, owned the air. But FACs helped us press that advantage. Say a squadron out on patrol needed to know about nearby threats. The FAC checked with drones, checked with fighter pilots, checked with helicopters, checked his high-tech laptop, created a 360-degree picture of the battlefield.

Say that same squadron suddenly came under fire. The FAC consulted a menu—Apache, Tornado, Mirage, F-15, F-16, A-10—and ordered up the aircraft best suited to the situation, or the best one available, then guided that aircraft onto the enemy. Using cutting-edge hardware, FACs didn’t simply rain fire on the enemy’s heads, they placed it there, like a crown.

Then he told me that all FACs get a chance to go up in a Hawk and experience being in the air.

By the time Colonel Ed stopped talking I was salivating.
FAC it is, sir. When do I leave?

Not so fast.

FAC was a plum job. Everyone wanted it. So that would take some doing. Also, it was a complex job. All that technology and responsibility required loads of training.

First things first, he said. I’d have to go through a challenging certification process.

Where, sir?

At RAF Leeming.

In…the Yorkshire Dales?

Early autumn. Drystone walls,
patchwork fields, sheep snacking on grassy slopes. Dramatic limestone cliffs and crags and scree. In every
direction, another beautiful purple moor. The landscape wasn’t quite so famous as the Lake District, just over to the west, but it was still breathtaking, and still inspired some of the great artists in British history. Wordsworth, for one. I’d managed to avoid reading that old gent’s stuff in school, but now I thought he must be pretty damn good if he spent time around these parts.

It felt like sacrilege to be standing on a cliff above this place and trying to obliterate it.

Of course it was pretend obliteration. I didn’t actually blow up one single dale. Still, at the end of each day I felt I had. I was studying the Art of Destruction, and the first thing I learned was that destruction is partially creative. It begins with imagination. Before destroying something you have to imagine it destroyed, and I was getting very good at imagining the dales as a smoking hellscape.

The drill each day was the same. Rise at dawn. Glass of orange juice, bowl of porridge, then a full English, then head into the fields. As first daylight poured over the horizon I’d begin speaking to an aircraft, usually a Hawk. The aircraft would reach its IP, initial point, five to eight nautical miles away, and then I’d give the target, signal the run. The aircraft would turn and commence. I’d talk it through the sky, over the countryside, using different landmarks. L-shaped wood. T-shaped dike. Silver barn. In selecting landmarks I’d been instructed to start big, move on to something medium, then pick something small. Picture the world, I was told, as a hierarchy.

Hierarchy, you say? Think I can handle that.

Each time I called out a landmark, the pilot would say back:
Affirm
.

Or else:
I am visual.
I liked that.

I enjoyed the rhythms, the poetry, the meditative chant of it all. And I found deeper meanings in the exercise. I’d often think: It’s the whole game, isn’t it? Getting people to see the world as you see it? And say it all back to you?

Typically the pilot would be flying low, five hundred feet off the deck, level with the rising sun, but sometimes I’d send him lower and put him into a pop-up. As he streaked towards me at the speed of sound, he’d pull back, shoot upwards at a forty-five-degree angle. Then I’d begin a new series of descriptions, new details. As he reached the top of his climb and rolled his wings, as he leveled and started to feel negative g-force, he’d see the world just as I’d painted it, then swoop down.

Suddenly he’d cry out:
Tally target!
Then:
In dry!

Then I’d say:
Clear dry.

Meaning, his bombs were but spirits melting into air.

Then I’d wait, listening keenly for the pretend explosions.

The weeks just flew by.

Once I was a trained
FAC, I had to become combat ready, which meant mastering twenty-eight different combat “controls.”

A control was basically an interaction with an aircraft. Each control was a scenario, a little play. For instance, imagine two aircraft come into your airspace.
Good morning, this is Dude Zero One and Dude Zero Two. We’re a pair of F-15s with two PGMs on board, plus one JDAM, we’ve got a playtime of ninety minutes and we are currently two nautical miles east of your location at Flight Level 150, waiting for talk-on…

I needed to know precisely what they were saying, and how to respond to them precisely in their own jargon.

Sadly, I wouldn’t be able to do this in a normal training area. The normal areas, like Salisbury Plain, were too out in the open. Someone would see me, and tip off the press, and my cover would be blown; I’d be back where I started. Instead, Colonel Ed and I decided that I should learn the controls somewhere remote…somewhere like…

Sandringham
.

We both smiled when the thought occurred. Then laughed.

The last place anyone would think of Prince Harry getting himself combat ready. Granny’s country estate.

I got a room at a small hotel near Sandringham—Knights Hill. I’d known the place all my life, driven past it a million times. Whenever we visited Granny at Christmas, our bodyguards would sleep there. Standard room: hundred quid.

In summers, Knights Hill tended to be full of bird-watchers, wedding parties. But now, in the autumn, it was empty.

The privacy was thrilling, and would’ve been total, if not for the older lady in the pub connected to the hotel. She watched me, goggle-eyed, every time I passed.

Alone,
almost
anonymous, my existence narrowed to one interesting task, I was delirious. I tried not to say so to Chelsy when I phoned her in the evenings, but it was the kind of happiness that’s hard to hide.

I recall one difficult chat. What were we doing? Where were we heading?

She knew I cared about her. But she felt unseen.
I am not visual.

She knew how desperate I was to go to war. How could she not forgive my being a bit detached? I was taken aback.

I explained that this was what I needed to do, the thing I’d wanted to do all my life, and I needed to do it with all my heart and soul. If that meant there was less heart and soul left over for anything or anyone else, well…I was sorry.

Pa knew I was
living at Knights Hill, knew what I was up to. And he was just down the road at Sandringham on an extended visit. And yet he never dropped in. Giving me space, I guess.

Also, he was still very much in his newlywed phase, even though the wedding was more than two years prior.

Then one day he looked up in the sky and saw a Typhoon aircraft doing low passes along the seawall and he figured it must be me. So he got into his Audi and hurried over.

He found me in the marshes, on a quad bike, talking to a Typhoon some miles off. While I waited for the Typhoon to appear in the sky overhead we had a quick chat. He said he could see how good I was getting at this new job. Above all, he could see how hard I was working at it, and that delighted him.

Pa had always been a worker. He believed in work. Everyone must
work,
he often said. But his own work was also a kind of religion, because he was furiously trying to save the planet. He’d been fighting for decades to alert people to climate change, never flagging, despite being cruelly mocked by the press as a Henny Penny. Countless times, late at night, Willy and I would find him at his desk amid mountains of bulging blue postbags—his correspondence. More than once we discovered him, face on the desk, fast asleep. We’d shake his shoulders and up he’d bob, a piece of paper stuck to his forehead.

But along with the importance of work, he also believed in the magic of flight. He was a helicopter pilot, after all, so he particularly loved seeing me steer these jets over the marshy flats at ungodly speeds. I mentioned that the good citizens of Wolferton didn’t share his enthusiasm. A ten-thousand-kilo jet roaring just over their tiled roofs didn’t exactly cause jubilation. RAF Marham had received dozens of complaints. Sandringham was supposed to be a no-fly zone.

All complainants were told: Such is war.

I loved seeing Pa, loved feeling his pride, and I felt buoyed by his praise, but I had to get back to work. I was mid-control, couldn’t tell the Typhoon to please hold on a moment.

Yes, yes, darling boy, back to work.

He drove off. As he went down the track I told the Typhoon:
New target. Gray Audi. Headed southeast from my position down track. Towards a big silver barn oriented east-west.

The Typhoon tracked Pa, did a low pass straight over him, almost shattering the windows of his Audi.

But ultimately spared him. On my orders.

It went on to blow a silver barn to smithereens.

England was in the
semifinal of the 2007 Rugby World Cup. No one had predicted that. No one had believed England was any good this time round, and now they were on the verge of winning it all. Millions of Britons were swept away with rugby fever, including me.

So when I was invited to attend the semifinal, that October, I didn’t hesitate. I said yes immediately.

Bonus: The semifinal was being held that year in Paris—a city I’d never visited.

The World Cup provided me with a driver, and on my first night in the City of Light I asked him if he knew the tunnel where my mother…

I watched his eyes in the rearview, growing large.

He was Irish, with a kindly, open face, and I could easily discern his thoughts:
What the feck? I didn’t sign on for this.

The tunnel is called
Pont de l’Alma
, I told him.

Yes, yes. He knew it.

I want to go through it.

You want to go through the tunnel?

At sixty-five miles per hour—to be precise.

Sixty-five?

Yes.

The exact speed Mummy’s car had supposedly been driving, according to police, at the time of the crash. Not 120 miles per hour, as the press originally reported.

The driver looked over at the passenger seat. Billy the Rock nodded gravely.
Let’s do it.
Billy added that if the driver ever revealed to another human that we’d asked him to do this, we’d find him and there would be hell to pay.

The driver gave a solemn nod.

Off we went, weaving through traffic, cruising past the Ritz, where Mummy had her last meal, with her boyfriend, that August night. Then we came to the mouth of the tunnel. We zipped ahead, went over the lip at the tunnel’s entrance, the bump that supposedly sent Mummy’s Mercedes veering off course.

But the lip was nothing. We barely felt it.

As the car entered the tunnel I leaned forward, watched the light change to a kind of watery orange, watched the concrete pillars flicker past. I counted them, counted my heartbeats, and in a few seconds we emerged from the other side.

I sat back. Quietly I said:
Is that all of it? It’s…nothing. Just a straight tunnel.

I’d always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel.

No reason anyone should ever die inside it.

The driver and Billy the Rock didn’t answer.

I looked out of the window:
Again.

The driver stared at me in the rearview.
Again?

Yes. Please.

We went through again.

That’s enough
.
Thank you
.

It had been a very bad idea. I’d had plenty of bad ideas in my twenty-three years, but this one was uniquely ill-conceived. I’d told myself that I wanted closure, but I didn’t really. Deep down, I’d hoped to feel in that tunnel what I’d felt when JLP gave me the police files—disbelief. Doubt. Instead, that was the night all doubt fell away.