Spare

And yet I was on time every day. I showed up with my three-ring binders full of info about the Apache engines, and listened to the lectures, and fought like crazy to keep up. I tried to draw on everything I’d learned from my flight instructors, from Booley to Nige, and treated the classroom as an aircraft going down. My job was to regain control.

And then one day…it was over. They said I’d be permitted at long last to strap myself into an honest-to-God Apache.

For…ground taxiing.

Are you joking?

Four lessons, they said.

Four lessons…on taxiing?

As it turned out, four lessons was barely enough to absorb all there was to know about ground taxiing that massive bird. I felt, while taxiing, as if the aircraft was on stilts, set on a bed of jelly. There were moments when I truly wondered if I’d ever be able to do it, if this whole journey might be at an end here, before it had even begun.

I blamed part of my struggle on the seating arrangement. In the Firefly, in the Squirrel, the instructor was always right next to me. He could reach over, fix my mistakes straightaway, or else model the correct way. Booley would put his hand on the controls, or Nige would do the pedals, and I’d do the same. I realized that much of what I’d learned in life had come through this sort of modeling. More than most people I needed a guide, a guru—a partner.

But in the Apache the instructor was either way up front or way in the back—unseen.

I was all alone.

35.

The seating arrangement eventually became less of an issue. Day by day the Apache felt less alien, and some days it even felt good.

I learned to be alone in there, to think alone, function alone. I learned to communicate with this big, fast, nasty, beautiful beast, to speak its language, to listen when it talked. I learned to perform one set of skills with my hands, while doing another with my feet. I learned to appreciate how phenomenal this machine was: unthinkably heavy, yet capable of ballet-like suppleness. The most technologically complex helicopter in the world, and also the most nimble. I could see why only a handful of people on earth knew how to fly Apaches, and why it cost millions of dollars to train each of those people.

And then…it was time to do it all at night.

We started with an exercise called “the bag,” which was just what it sounded like. The Apache’s windows were covered and you felt as if you were inside a brown-paper bag. You had to take all data about conditions outside the aircraft through instruments and gauges. Eerie, unnerving—but effective. You were forced to develop a kind of second sight.

Then we took the Apache up into the actual night sky, made our way around the base, slowly expanded beyond. I was a bit trembly the first time we sailed across Salisbury Plain, over those desolate valleys and woods where I’d crawled and dragged my arse through those first exercises. Then I was flying over more populated areas. Then: London. The Thames glistening in the darkness. The Millennium Wheel winking at the stars. The Houses of Parliament, and Big Ben, and the palaces. I wondered if Granny was in, and if she was awake. Were the corgis settling down while I did these graceful whirls over their fuzzy heads?

Was the flag up?

In darkness I became fully proficient with the monocle, the most astonishing and iconic part of the Apache’s technology. A sensor in the Apache’s nose transmitted images through a cable, up to the cockpit, where it fed into the monocle, which was clipped to my helmet, in front of my right eyeball. Through that monocle I got all my knowledge of the outside world. All my senses were reduced to that one small portal. It felt at first like writing with my toe or breathing through my ear, and then it became second nature. And then it became mystical.

Circling London one night, I was suddenly blinded, and thought for half a second that I might drop into the Thames. I saw bright colors, mostly emerald green, and after a few seconds I realized: someone on the ground had hit us with a laser pen. I was disoriented. And furious. But I told myself to be grateful for the experience, for the practice. I was also perversely grateful for the stray memory it knocked loose. Mohamed Al Fayed, giving Willy and me laser pens from Harrods, which he owned. He was the father of Mummy’s boyfriend, so maybe he was trying to win us over. If so, job done. We thought those lasers were genius.

We whipped them around like light sabers.

36.

Near the tail end of my Apache training, at Wattisham Airfield in Suffolk, I got one more instructor.

It was his job to put on the finishing touches.

Upon meeting, shaking hands, he gave me a knowing smile.

I smiled back.

He kept smiling.

I smiled back, but started to wonder: What?

I thought he was about to pay me a compliment. Or ask a favor.

Instead he asked if I recognized his voice.

No.

He was part of the team that extracted me, he said.

Oh, back in 2008?

Yes.