After I had read the blurb on the jacket of this hefty volume I felt
drained of emotion. On the front jacket the book is described as ‘Taut,
vivid writing.’ I wouldn’t say it is unputdownable, but it is a splendid,
gripping yarn nevertheless.

Nick Cook is aviation editor for the extremely serious Jane’s Defence
Weekly. His chief objective is to avoid writing fiction, yet with this tale
he has shown a rare talent for creating characters and plots that would
keep most readers on the edge of their seats. We have met them all before,
of course. Piet Kruze, the tall, tanned Rhodesian squadron leader; Marshal
Shaposhnikov, the iron-hard master of strategy; Christian Herries, the English
traitor serving in the SS Freikorps .. well, maybe we have not encountered
him very often. The men are all real men, and the nasties really nasty.
And the basic thread that ties these and many other characters together
is at once gripping and plausible.

Much of the action is set in Czechoslovakia in March 1945. We soon get
the hang of what is happening, but then keep finding that it was not quite
the way we thought. You can never predict what is going to happen. If you
try, I guarantee you will get it wrong. And there are one or two people
left alive at the end.

Cook manages well with the difficult task of blending pure fiction,
and fictitious characters, with real places, real events and real people.
What I am still uncertain about is how far you can say there is such a thing
as an error in a work of fiction. For example, the book opens with one of
the chief heroes strapping into a Spitfire. I was irritated that Cook’s
idea of preflight checks, and almost everything else, was sheer nonsense.
I wondered if it was the typesetter who gave the Spit ‘propellers’ and ‘rudders,’
when most of the ones I flew had one of each. It would not have detracted
from the story to have made it a little more accurate.

Indeed, so many were the errors that I took to annotating them. By page
200 (on which we have a chap running into ever-worse Mach trouble despite
the fact that he is diving into warmer air) I had listed 74. For example,
I think most readers will know that the word ‘cryogenic’ means exceedingly
cold, and applies to liquefied gases. Cook thinks it a nice-sounding adjective
for rocket propellants, even though his (methyl alcohol and hydrogen peroxide)
were at room temperature. And, though concentrated H₂02 is nasty
stuff, it doesn’t give off poisonous fumes, just steam and free oxygen.
When a V2 rocket hit, you didn’t get a bang followed by ‘an eerie, high-velocity
whistle’; you heard a bang followed by thunder, indistinguishable from natural
thunder, which slowly died as its source retreated back up the rocket’s
path (I timed one thunder at over 15 seconds, which took the source back
into very thin air indeed). And by March 1945 nobody said anything about
explosions of gas mains; that was the short-lived cover story back on 8
September 1944, when the government – influenced by the pig-headed Lord
Cherwell – simply refused to believe such a rocket was possible.

Reviewers like to collect mistakes, perhaps to show how clever they
are. Then I woke up and realised that in this book it simply does not matter.
It doesn’t matter in the slightest that the tide really ‘turned against
the Nazis’ in the winter 1942/43, not 1941/42, nor that the island off the
cost of north Wales is not spelt Anglesea. A reviewer who nitpicks on fact
when dealing with a tale like this completely misses the point. Forget about
fact, and just enjoy the fast-moving action.

‘Herries whipped round and pulled the Panzerfaust away from the wall
before Hartmann or the guards could react. He pointed it roughly in the
middle of the group, briefly registered the horror on their faces, and squeezed
the trigger, preparing himself for the detonation of the anti-tank round
as it rocketed towards it target. In the frozen silence of the moment, everyone
heard the soft click. The round never left the tube .. In the same instant
that Herries realised the Panzerfaust was a dud ..’ Rattling good stuff.

Bill Gunston has written more than 250 books on aviation.

THE DANGERS of flying as an airline passenger have, to my knowledge,
given rise to at least nine English-language books since 1953. At that time
the number of passenger flights was around 12 million a year; today the
annual total is not far short of 400 million. So the market – the people
with a direct personal interest in air safety – is considerable. The same
figures show how important it is to make air travel safer.

I may be a bad choice as reviewer, because, beginning as an RAF pilot,
I have spent the last 45 years flying. So I do not regard flying with any
apprehension; unless the weather is dreadful, I love it. I instinctively
adopt a smug attitude of total belief in the whole gigantic system of manufacturers,
airlines, regulatory bodies, highly professional flight crews, duplicated
and triplicated ‘belt-and-braces’ design, inspectors in white coats who
use cunning tools to search for hidden faults and all the other artifices
devised to ensure that you get there safely. Then comes a sudden disaster,
and you realise the system is far from infal lible.

Patrick Forman has excellent credentials, with a long record as an investigative
journalist – a breed he considers not what it once was – including a spell
on the Sunday Times Insight team. He also has flown 1000 hours as a private
pilot.

Invevitably, he adopts the role of the good sleuth uncovering wicked
cover-ups. He might perhaps have reported somewhere that almost everyone
in the business of making or operating aircraft is actually absolutely dedicated,
honest and doing his or her best, whereas the impression the lay reader
would get is that they are mainly totally unscrupulous and dishonest. A
very few are – or were – while many others have been placed in a position
of terribly divided loyalty, to colleagues, to maker or operator, or to
a particular country.

The book is divided into three main sections: the dangers of flying,
secrecy and into the 21st Century. The quality of the writing is much better
than the proofreading, and where Forman falls down on his facts it is seldom
of any importance. The basic format is a general dissertation on a host
of relevant topics, frequently punctuated by case histories of accidents,
often horrifying, to keep the reader interested. Hundreds of people being
mangled or roasted in tubes of aluminium is the sort of thing to make people
angry, and it is clearly hard for Forman to be objective.

For example, a passenger had his spine broken when the aircraft flew
into severe turb ulence. Obviously, no captain is going to fly wilfully
into violent turbulence, but the passenger managed to sustain an action
for damages against the unfortunate airline. This judgment was then reversed
on appeal. Forman clearly finds this outrageous, but I do not believe that
you can really adopt a stance that applauds every decision taken against
the big boys – the builders and operators.

Years ago writers of such books sounded off at length about things as
aft-facing seats, the need for specialist navigators/ engineers/radio officers,
and the dangers of JP-4 fuel. Today there are different targets. On the
subject of reducing the unacceptable death toll from fire – caused mainly
by asphyxiation – I am with Forman all the way. But he has a bee in his
bonnet about long transoceanic flights by aircraft with only two engines
(rather than three or four), and here I think his criticism is misplaced.
In the field of supersonic fighters there have been years of argument about
the better safety of two engines, yet the single engined aircraft have a
better safety record.

Forman has much to say about the media, which unquestionably plays a
crucial role in ensuring that nobody can ever be sure they will get away
with secrecy or the distortion of facts.

In March this year, the new Official Secrets Act was published. To my
amazement and horror it appears to regard the public-spirited, whistle-blowing
sleuth as just as liable to prosecution as the spy for a foreign power.
We need more Formans.

I am certainly not competent to review Kahn, because I am not medically
trained, and so found it hard going. So far as I know, his exposition of
the hazards of typical airline flight are accurate. He explains that, if
you are already so sick that you ought never to walk upstairs or are nine
months pregnant, then maybe you ought not to fly.

Moreover, Kahn regards aviation medicine as something new; I have a
pretty fair outline of it in a book published in 1938.

Having said that, this is the first time I have seen such a comprehensive
coverage in a commercially published book. I cannot help feeling that Kahn
is trying to turn a molehill into a mountain; for all that, he has performed
a service in getting a publisher to accept a doubtfully profitable manuscript.

Bill Gunston has written more than 250 aviation books.