It creeps up on you, he realised. This list of things that you have to live with. He didn’t just mean the long list of stuff that aches, hurts or doesn’t work, He thought also of the things that nobody cares about any more.

Nobody cares, for example, about what he once did for a living, why would they? How is any of it relevant to anybody? Even if he had once been the Prime Minister, who would really give a damn now? Old Prime Ministers aren’t the dynamic, hopeful, coming men of the brave new world that they wanted to usher in. All anyone would remember is what they hadn’t managed to do, what they buggered up. They were all in it for themselves anyway.

Things change, he thought. He realised he was looking back, which is probably not a good thing when you’re trying to sleep. That was then and this is now. Then was a foreign country.

He lay there, at three in the morning, listening to the whooshing sound of tinnitus, pulsing ceaselessly with his heartbeat. Fifty eight beats per minute. Each beat as high pitched as he could possibly hear through those rubber headphones they use in hearing tests. But loud, really loud, on the edge of uncomfortable. He counted them in time. Sometimes, although not often, they seemed to jiggle a bit, like one of those snow-storm paper weights with a Santa sledge magically suspended. Strange palpitations in his chest. But then they settled down again to that steady pulsing clamour. It never ended though, not for a moment. On and on. Night and day.

The pulse of it reminded him of his younger years. Headphones, cathode ray tubes, listening, recording to twin tape recorders. It was all about the pulses then too. This new Soviet ship, sneaking down past the Iceland-Faroes Gap into the North Sea. Strange bulges on its superstructure. New kit for sure. His job to figure out what new kit. Exciting stuff back then. No satellites or computers to help, so he recorded the pulses. Flew crossing patterns at a distance. Measured the amplitude and repetition rates of the pulses. Nearer in, further away. Fly out till it’s undetectable then in again. Over and over. Listening, watching, prodding them to turn the stuff on then off, then on again. Then towards them, low and then high. Fly some doctrinal attack patterns, see if it locks on, see if the pulses change, record it all. Recede, watch what happened when they went back to standby. Run in again, how long from standby to acquisition? When in acquisition could they ping a second aircraft? All about pulses. Pulses full of other frequencies. Just like the damned tinnitus, screeching, full of noise, regular.

Bang all the data into the radar ranging equation. Twist it, bend it, manipulate it. Solve it. Come out with a capability envelope-is it new or seen before? Blend it with those tiniest snippets of information somebody talked about in a bar in Karl Marx Stadt or Minsk or Novgorod. Slowly filtered back across the dark green East German forests and over the wall, some never arriving, some enjoying a hold in a gulag somewhere. Look at the photographs meticulously taken at a set speed, at a set height and distance. Throw some countermeasures at it and see what it does. Give it a name and a number. Pass it on. Up the chain.

All so long ago now, a different world, a different time. He remembered.

He calculated fifty eight beats per minute as the pulse repetition frequency, guessed that each pulse was an envelope of fifteen kilohertz noise. Pretty poor klystron, he thought. Still, the Soviet’s had better ones. Lossy transmission, constant temperature, no matter what antenna gain might be, he could call it unity because it doesn’t matter in this case. Eventually he calculated that tinnitus would not be a viable threat to the Nation.

He wished it would stop though. Then he was glad it hadn’t because if it did he would likely be dead, which would be why he couldn’t hear it anymore.

Who cares anyway? Nobody remembers. It all ended back in 1989. Nobody did it for years after that. We were all supposed to be the best of chums. All rubbish, of course, but the politicians wanted their bloody ‘peace dividend.’ Idiots. He realised suddenly that today’s generation’s parents weren’t even born when that all happened. Was it really all that time ago? More than thirty years? Good grief. His hip went to sleep, unlike his brain, which was momentarily dealing with a cramp in his calf muscle.

And now it’s all starting again, he thought. Now they have computers to work it all out. Satellites by the dozen. Drones. Nobody needs to risk their life bobbing around in the cold Northern seas, or stealing sonar buoys from under the Soviets noses or crunching numbers with a slide-rule whilst throwing up in a blue bag, on an aeroplane doing low level circuits for thirteen hours at a time. Nobody needs run the risk of being sent to a gulag or shot. No World War Two thermionic valve noise to measure, it’s all made with our tech anyway, so we know what it does.

It’s just not interesting anymore. Four in the morning he fell asleep, his tinnitus the slow march beat to his dreams of long forgotten fears.