The Fire Baby

Overhead he heard the familiar rumble of a transatlantic air tanker flying into Mildenhall, the air base from which the fateful flight had taken off that summer’s evening more than a quarter of a century earlier. The aerodrome had opened as an RAF base in 1934 but by the fifties the Americans had moved in in force. By the time of the Black Bank crash the base, with its outliers at Lakenheath and Feltwell, was already the US ‘gateway to Europe’. Today, with 100,000 passengers a year and billions of gallons of fuel ferried in to support US operations in the former Yugoslavia, the Mediterranean and the Near East, it was an exotic American township of nearly 7,500 people.

The sight of a shadow dashing across the Fens as one of the giant B-52s flew in to Mildenhall was now as familiar as the turning sails of a windmill had once been. And up there, beyond the clouds and on the edge of the stratosphere, something else circled. Two airborne command centres were kept aloft in a shift pattern providing a permanent flying nerve-centre from which a putative war in Europe would be waged. From this impossibly distant metal cylinder the US would direct the death rites of a continent. By that time, Dryden comforted himself, he’d be a small pile of radioactive ashes beneath an atomized cloud of best bitter.

He dragged himself back to the night of the Black Bank air crash, trying to imagine the scene as the transatlantic flight took off that June night. He’d been up in one of the new transporters that summer, a Lockheed Starburst, on a facility trip from Lakenheath, just north of Mildenhall. Passenger space was small and cramped, the noise terrifying, the porthole view obscured by racks for kit and stores. But that night in 1976 most of the passengers on flight MH336 would have been just happy to be flying home. Marlene, though, would have been struggling with two competing emotions, grief for her father and the coming ordeal of the funeral, and her excitement and pride in showing her mother the new boy. For Jim, Vietnam behind him for at least a period of extended leave, the flight must have offered a rare opportunity to collapse into sleep, haunted perhaps, thought Dryden, by the rhythmic thud of turning helicopter rotor blades.

Dryden saw the scene as the dust storm hit the aircraft. All the servicemen would have heard the sudden change in the engine noise, the metal of the turbine blades screaming as they were shredded in the diamond-hard dust. He tried to shut out the image of the aircraft stalling, the fuselage tilting violently, nose down, into a dive, a sickening spiral fall into the black peat below. A savagely short journey, but not short enough for Marlene and Jim, joined, Dryden imagined, in a single embrace across the tiny body of their infant son Lyndon.

He re-focused on the microfiche with tired eyes. The only survivor from amongst the air passengers had been Lyndon Koskinski, aged thirteen days. Maggie Beck had found him in the rubble of the farmhouse, still secure in a travelling cradle strapped into his seat. She’d walked out of the flames with him wrapped in a USAF blanket, having seen her own child trapped, and clearly dead, in the ashes of the farmhouse. She’d saved Lyndon’s life, thought Dryden, and now he was here to see hers end.

The next day – 3 June 1976 – the Cambridge Evening News had a picture of Maggie Beck coming out of the mortuary at Cherry Hinton. The caption caught the horror of the moment: ‘Maggie Beck leaves the city mortuary after identifying the bodies of her parents, William and Celia Beck, and her 15-day-old son Matthew John’.

The good news came two days later. James Koskinski, Snr, and his wife Gale were shown holding their grandson at a photocall at USAF Mildenhall. They had flown the Atlantic to take custody of the child, saved from the ashes of Black Bank. ‘We have met Miss Beck and extended our thanks for her courage in saving Lyndon’s life,’ said Koskinski, according to the Daily Telegraph. Both tried and failed to deliver a smile for the cameras. They didn’t look thrilled to be parents again, and certainly not a few days before the funeral of their only child Jim. They flew home with their grandson, and two coffins.

Inquests on all those killed were held on the same day. The Crow’s reports were the most detailed, but given the cataclysmic forces involved in the disaster the verdicts – of accidental death – were a foregone conclusion. The heat of the crash had made most post-mortem examinations on the passengers impossible and irrelevant. Dental records were required for formal identification of most victims.