Mr Campions Christmas by Mike Ripley

Author:Mike Ripley [Ripley, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2024-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

Twelve

Thor’s Other Hammer

It had often been said that Lady Amanda Fitton (as was) had made aeronautical engineering a peculiar choice of career, especially on the sole criteria of being a girl who liked tinkering with mechanical things. It was not that being female and a fondness for aviation were incompatible, for the globe-hopping aviatrix was a regular feature on the newsreels and usually greeted on each landing with the adoration normally reserved for Hollywood starlets. There was also an established coterie of society ladies who had the means to own their own aeroplanes and thought nothing of nipping over to Le Touquet for lunch. The young Amanda had neither the means nor the inclination to join a flying luncheon club and was far more interested in the oily mechanics and aerodynamics of their small private planes rather than the cocktail lounge gossip of their owners. The war, and the formation of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, made her chosen profession respectable, if not entirely understood by her peeresses. Females may not have been allowed to be part of the front line ‘Few’ in the Battle of Britain, but their role in ferrying fighters and bombers from factories to operational squadrons was a vital one, even if naturally undervalued – if not blithely ignored – by the male majority in RAF blue.

There were a few women, far fewer than the legendary Few, who worked behind the scenes and whose weapons were drawing boards and slide rules, designing new and improving existing aircraft. Amanda was one of them, and her work in Alandel Aeroplanes had attracted the attention of minds more interested in military than civilian applications of her talents. Her wartime work thus involved her signing the Official Secrets Act and in peacetime its provisions were, if anything, more strictly observed, as a hot war became a cold one and a former ally turned into a potential enemy. The evolution of jet engines and rockets with nuclear warheads hardly simplified matters. As much of Alandel’s, and Amanda’s, work involved close cooperation with the Royal Air Force and, inevitably this being East Anglia, the USAF, she was well aware of the existence of Thor.

Not, of course, the Germanic god of thunder with his magical and very deadly hammer Mjölnir, which returned to Thor’s hand whenever it had vanquished a foe. The Thor with which Amanda was familiar was far from mythical and considerably more dangerous than a hammer, however lustily thrown, though it did produce thunder of a sort.

The Thor in question was an American IRBM, though only a minority of the population could swear to those initials being shorthand for Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile, and those who did know preferred to deny they did or simply changed the subject. Since the Cuban Missile Crisis of that autumn, the topic was one only raised with trepidation, as few were reassured by the deployment on British soil of a rocket which could deliver a 1.44 megaton nuclear warhead over an ‘intermediate range’ of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.