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GROUNDSPEED
DIRTY BUSINESS
THE CHINA MOON
GIDEON'S BIBLE
S'END FOR BRADEN
THE GRACE OF GOD
EXIT POINT
THE HOUSESITTER
STOP LINE
EXCLUSION ZONE
NINE TENTHS
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GROUNDSPEED
Introduction I used to read a lot of Nevil Shute (1899-1960), a name that's not so well known these days, but was once one of Britain's greatest novelists, and still a great novelist according to legions of fans of all ages around the world. His full name was Nevil Shute Norway. Aside from penning some wonderful books including A Town Like Alice; No Highway, So Disdained; Trustee from the Tool Room; On the Beach; and Pied Piper, Nevil Shute was also a great aero engineer who worked on the R100 airship under Barnes Wallis (who developed the famous bouncing bomb and tall boy bomb) and later founded his own company, Airspeed Ltd. Nevil Shute's books were a tremendous inspiration, and I still dip into them every now and again and relive those wonderful moments when you find a novel that you simply can't put down - and feel a great sense of loss when you turn the last page. Nevil Shute's books take you to places that TV, somehow, just can't reach (although radio gets close at times). GROUNDSPEED was originally called WASHOUT. The title refers not only to the fact that everything goes wrong for my two heroes, but is also a microlight aviation term. A literary agent. however, suggested that WASHOUT wasn't a good title. Apparently it sounded too downbeat. So I looked for something more positive and came up with GROUNDSPEED. Maybe, at some level, I was thinking of Nevil Shute's Airspeed Ltd. It's possible. In any case, GROUNDSPEED (or WASHOUT) was a kind of homage to Nevil Shute - and like most homages, it's not always easy to see the path or even the source of inspiration. But Nevil Shute generally wrote about fairly ordinary men (and women) in extraordinary situations. His characters were mainly decent, British types with a strong sense of fair play, albeit with occasionally peculiar moralities. And pretty much all his books feature aviation. Those themes crop up in many of my own novels, but (so far at least) haven't got me anywhere near as far as they carried Nevil Shute. GROUNDSPEED was written very quickly. A matter of weeks rather than months. Then it sat for a while while I tried to get some interest. Then I reworked much of it. However, I was shot down very quickly by a literary agent who didn't like one of my characters who, I was advised, was too petulant and juvenile (which was exactly what I was trying to portray - and which sounded a bit like telling me that a comedy character was too funny). But you can't argue with the Great Big Literary Machine, not whilst you're not even a small cog in it but just a smudge of grease. So I toned down my character and made him only mildly petulant and juvenile. The novel got some good feedback from long established agents. But no offers of representation, and not even a near miss by a publisher. Which is too bad. As the novel ages, so I like it more. It's not perfect. It may not even be good. But it's a milestone on the road to wherever I'm going. I won't say that I'm proud of it, partly because pride is such a silly thing. But I'm not dissatisfied, and if it never gets published, I won't cry into my beer. Now I suggest that if you haven't discovered Nevil Shute, then you should go forth and discover him. But if you do read him, remember to think about the context of his work; 1930s to 1950s, Britain at War, end of Empire, German National Socialism, the atom bomb, and the golden age of flight. Find a cosy place and drink a cup of Ovaltine or something. You may be pleasantly surprised at both .
GROUNDSPEED 125,000 words Plot: Two aviator brothers (one with severe emotional problems) are engaged to fly a daring mission to Portugal to recover two children snatched by their father following a custody battle. Trouble is, the mother of the children hasn't told the brothers everything about the father - notably that he happens to be a notorious Essex gangster with psychotic tendencies. Pretty soon, he returns to the UK seeking a bloody revenge ...
Chapter One
‘IF SHE ISN'T HERE in the next five minutes,’ said my brother Crispin, ‘I vote we clear off.’ He kicked irritably at the ground sending up puffs of dry red earth. ‘She’s twenty minutes late already!’ Easing back the cuff of my flying suit, I glanced at my watch. 7.45pm. Which meant we’d been there for only forty minutes. But it felt longer. Much longer. ‘Did you hear me? I said she’s twenty bloody minutes late already!’ ‘I heard you,’ I said mildly. ‘We can wait a little more.’ ‘Yeah? Well I don’t want to wait a little more.’ ‘Well I do.’ ‘Well I don’t.’ Ignoring that, I peered into the darkness. But he was right. She was twenty minutes behind schedule and was still nowhere to be seen. Like most men, I’ve waited a lot longer than that for a woman. But never when there was so much at stake. My night glasses were hung around my neck. I raised them to eye level. Scanned the horizon. Saw where the road, looping away through the scrub-desert, disappeared over a ridge about a mile away. Beyond it, the evening sky hung like a sheet of burnished copper. If she was coming at all, it would be from that direction. ‘Well?’ ‘Well what?’ ‘I said if she’s not here in five minutes, I vote we clear off.’ I glanced round at him; a slim, gawky figure wearing a matching dark blue flying suit and brown rigger boots. ‘What’s your hurry?’ ‘I don’t like it here.’ ‘Me neither. But we’ll wait a little longer. Okay?’ ‘Not okay. Not okay at all. I want to know how much longer?’ My brother Crispin likes things precise. Right down to the final millisecond. The last millimetre. The nth degree. I met his gaze. Said calmly, clearly; ‘I don’t know exactly how long. But when I do know, you’ll be the first person I tell. Fair enough?’ ‘You never know anything,’ he grumbled. ‘You know that? You never bloody-well know! You don’t know you’re alive, and you won’t even know it when you’re bloody dead!’ Ignoring him again, I turned round. Saw the wind testing the microlights. They were pegged down, but the pegs were apt to quickly work loose in this sandy soil. And if the kites blew away, it was all over. I pointed at them. ‘Why don’t you stop worrying and check on those?’ ‘I just checked.’ ‘Then check again.’ He hesitated, then muttered something abusive and went over to deal with it, kicking weeds and clumps of soil all the way. I watched him for a moment, wondering if his general irritation of late had anything to do with the fact that he was going to be thirty in a couple of months. It seemed to fit. Shrugging, I trained my glasses on the road again. Heard the screech of gulls behind me. Wondered what other creatures lived around here. Lizards probably. Scorpions maybe. God only knew what else. A few hours ago, the temperature was in the high eighties. Now it was down thirty degrees and still falling. I gave a shudder and hoped the Atlantic forecast was right. I continued to watch the road. A few minutes later I heard the sound of my brother’s footsteps on the way back. ‘They’re both bloody-well alright.’ ‘Good.’ He sidled up to me and started making that irritating tongue-clucking noise of his. Sometimes it was intolerable. Tonight I let it pass. My brother Crispin, I should explain, has what people euphemistically call ‘problems’. So does everyone else, in my opinion. But his are more difficult to catalogue. There’s no real name for whatever it is that prevents his plugs firing evenly. The diagnoses vary according to the postcodes and whatever’s in fashion. One psychiatrist suggested schizophrenia. Another disagreed and said it was a form of autism. Yet another hinted, in the most delicate terms, that he was just immature. Which is true, but isn’t necessarily the truth. I don’t know what the truth is. But he’s not an idiot. Far from it. According to his last assessment report, he’s actually very ‘high-functioning’. Which makes him sound like a desk calculator. And in a way that’s perfectly true. But that’s not the truth either. His problems are emotional rather than intellectual. He keeps them hidden from almost everyone but me, which is why I get ninety-five percent of his disgruntled output. I should be flattered, I suppose. But there are times when I wished he didn’t flatter me quite so often. I looked round at him. Heard the clucking reaching a crescendo. ‘Worried?’ I said, knowing that engaging him verbally helped short-circuit his misgivings. ‘Of course I’m fucking worried. Who wouldn’t be?’ ‘Bruce Willis.’ ‘Fuck Bruce Willis!’ I smiled and nudged him playfully with my elbow. He held out his hand for my night glasses. I gave them to him. He spent a moment adjusting them for fit and focus. ‘So where should I be looking then?’ ‘See down there beside those olive trees?’ ‘No.’ I put my hand on the glasses. Nudged them a fraction to the right. Caught a glimpse of the bold Rider nose, nostrils flaring impatiently. ‘What about them?’ he said presently. ‘Just to the right of those by those boulders there’s a road. You can just about see it if you look carefully. She’ll be in a Mercedes probably. Or a Peugeot.’ He lapsed into silence, an intent expression on his face. I left him to it and went back to check the kites for myself. I needed to walk off some worry and kick a few weeds myself. The aircraft were secure. For now. I stamped on all the pegs. Gave all the ropes a tug and mentally rehearsed releasing them in a hurry when the time came. The microlights were old-generation machines. Old, but tried and tested. My brother and I designed them between us. Built them too. But all the really hard, technical stuff was actually down to him. That’s how his weird mind works. It’s filled with load factors, aspect ratios, dihedrals, chords, coefficients and so on. Me? I’m different. I go by feel. By instinct — which is as unfamiliar to him as calculus is to me. He gets tied in knots about seemingly trivial things and detonates like a teenager when you least expect it. I generally take life as it comes without getting too worked up. His glass is always half empty. Mine is usually whatever he leaves at the bottom. Between us we do okay. I gazed round to the east beyond the taut wing of my kite, now painted in dark grey emulsion, the numbers blanked out. We were on a cliff about five hundred feet above sea level. But the wind was swinging round to the south west, and from the look of things even the gulls were having a hard time negotiating the thermals. I decided to take a closer look. ‘I’m going to check over there,’ I called. ‘Back in a minute.’ He didn’t answer. He doesn’t bother when he doesn’t want to. There’s a kind of shutter in his head, and when that comes down, nothing gets in that hasn’t got an invitation. Cautiously, I walked over to the precipice. It was around forty or fifty yards away; a thin seam of darker darkness dividing earth from the sky. I stopped ten or twelve feet short. Stood for a moment. Closed my eyes. Enjoyed the feeling of cool night air on my face. All the flying instruments and windsocks in the world can’t tell you the things you learn just by listening to the wind, the way it gusts and whips and slyly creeps over you, the way it tugs and pulls and whispers warnings in your ears. What was this wind telling me tonight, I wondered? I had a fair idea. It was telling me that this was a mistake. That there was still time to abort and get the hell out of here. It was reminding me that the maximum penalty for kidnapping was fifteen years. But the time for doubt was gone. We were in it now and had to see it through. And so, firming my resolve, I made my way back to Crispin. ‘See anything yet?’ ‘I’d bleedin’ tell you if I did, wouldn’t I?’ I said nothing to that. Merely gazed into the darkness keeping a tight lid on my fears. ‘I wish we hadn’t fucking come.’ ‘You don’t mean that,’ I said, relieving him of the night glasses. I readjusted them. Looked back at the road. ‘Yes I bloody-well do mean it,’ he replied, now sounding the way he always did when he was approaching a tantrum. ‘I don’t know why we fucking-well agreed to do this.’ ‘Well I do,’ I replied softly. ‘I can give you ten thousand bloody reasons.’
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