Hornet’s Sting (28 page)

Cleve-Cutler felt his heart begin another sprint. “Maniac!” he said.

The rat-warrens had been cleared under the cookhouse, and under the stores and under the billets. Now the hunt moved on, to the doctor's quarters.

The afternoon was fading fast. Woolley used a flashlight to find the biggest rat hole. “Stand by!” he called. He reached in, fired a signal flare into the hole and hurried around the hut. A ring of men and dogs waited. He was just in time to see a streak of burning yellow burst out of the ground. It ricocheted off someone's leg and raced into the dusk, a line of fizzing light, head-high. Shouts of astonishment, dogs yapping, the thud of clubs, and something else: the intermittent drone of an aeroplane engine.

Halfway across the camp, the C.O. heard it too, and stopped. “What's that?” he said. The adjutant listened, and heard only the rattle of the wind. “Not a Pup,” the C.O. said. A truck clattered across the field and spoiled everything. “Lost, probably. Like the fool in a Camel who landed here the other day.” They walked on and got a fine view of the runaway flare making its long horizontal streak. There was a bang of shattered glass. They began to run.

They found McWatters first.

“Christ on crutches!” Cleve-Cutler barked. “What the hell's going on?”

“We've got three sackfuls, sir. Dingbat shot a dog, and Dufee's not very well, but otherwise —”

“Get Woolley.” But Woolley was already approaching. “You crass clod,” Cleve-Cutler told him. “You feeble fart. You've turned my squadron into a fairground!”

“Sir, you ordered —”

“I didn't order this hooliganism.” Woolley cocked his head and looked at the sky. The pilots stood in a guilty circle, except for Dufee, who was held up by two men. “What's wrong with him?” the C.O. demanded.

“That last flare knocked him down, sir,” Woolley said.

“You shot one of my pilots.” Cleve-Cutler's voice was harsh with rage. “Is this your idea of war, captain? Big-game hunting?” He
booted a sack and it spilled dead rats. “Small-game hunting?”

“That machine may be trying to land, sir,” Woolley said. “As duty officer I should —”

“As duty officer you're not fit to clean latrines! Go, before you kill someone!”

Gazeran airfield had an ambulance. The crew saw Woolley jogging towards them and they started the engine. He jumped onto the running-board and they drove along the edge of the airfield until he told them to stop. The motor died.

No sound except faraway birdsong in the holes in the wind.

The cloud was lower, or maybe it just seemed lower in the gloom of dusk. The wind made fools of everyone: it blustered and then fell silent and then rattled in their ears. Woolley walked over to the nearest gun-pit.

“He's been wandering around up there for ten minutes, sir,” the sergeant said. “Wetting his breeches, I 'spect.”

They listened. A soft growl came and went with the wind. “Ration wagons,” the sergeant said. “Goin' up to the Lines.”

The growl hardened to a flat drone. “Not wagons,” Woolley said. The wind blustered. He turned and searched the sky downwind, the approach for a machine trying to land. Nothing in sight, only the specks of whirling crows. The sergeant shouted and pointed. Woolley saw the head-on outline of a biplane, its wings razor-thin. It was too low and too fast and it was coming in cross-wind. The ambulance engine started. The rescue truck arrived. Woolley blinked, lost sight of the machine and listened hard for a crash.

Then he saw the thing vault the hedge and skitter as a gust caught it, straighten out and turn towards the flights. The silhouette said Albatros exactly as its guns made their mechanical rattle. Six Pups stood in a row. Incendiary bullets swept along them in a gracious gesture, and in quick order they began to burn. The gun-pits were hard at work, and the air was dense with their hammering and cordite. But their bullets went too high because the enemy was too low, down where the guns dared not fire. And then the Albatros slipped between two hangars and was gone. The second Pup from the right exploded. All the others were burning briskly.

Six Pups in ten seconds, Woolley thought. That'll cost him a packet. Drinks all round in the mess tonight.

He found the C.O. and the adjutant watching a bucket-chain try to put out the fires.

“Didn't you see that Hun approach?” Cleve-Cutler asked quietly.

“Yes, sir. It was too dark to identify until —”

“Too dark?
He
identified
us
without any trouble. No doubt your firework display helped him. No doubt he saw signal flares blazing and thought that's a juicy target. Eh?”

The charred Pups hissed and steamed.

“I was wrong about you, Woolley. You're not fit to be a ratcatcher. You're fit for one thing: court martial. The adjutant will prepare the papers.” He walked away.

“I was court-martialled once,” Brazier said to Woolley, quietly. “It's nothing to get upset about.”

“My uncle Sid got hung for murder,” Woolley said. “Told me he never felt a thing.”

Something went bang, and blazing splinters flew. They moved to a safer spot.

“How on earth did you get a commission?” the adjutant asked, curiously.

“It's not mine. I'm looking after it for a friend.”

“That's a bloody stupid answer.”

“Well, it was a bloody stupid question,” Woolley said. Brazier snorted. “And if you want to fight over it,” Woolley said, “it's Very pistols at ten yards. I'm lethal. Ask Dufee.”

* * *

Lieutenant James McWatters could write his name and that was about all. He wasn't ashamed of his failing; plenty of boys he had known at school either couldn't or didn't write. They came from the upper middle class of Edwardian England and they assumed that somebody would always be there to write for them, just as somebody would always be there to clean the boots and lug buckets of coal up the stairs. You didn't have to be stupid to be semi-literate. All it took was perseverance.

His father was a minor Anglican bishop and his mother was the heiress to a shipbuilding fortune. She had become very active in the women's suffrage movement, which scuppered any chance of
advancement for the bishop. A man who couldn't control his wife didn't deserve a bigger diocese. At the age of six, James got packed off to prep school. He knew his father spent all day writing. He was damn sure he wasn't going to be like his father. “Bugger writing,” he told the master who gave him a slate. He had learned the word from stable lads, and enjoyed its impact. He threw the slate through a window.

The master had just come down from Oxford. He did not have the same steel as young McWatters. They made a silent truce: no writing, no slate-chucking. James had cracked the code. If you were bloody-minded enough, you never had to do what they wanted you to do.

He changed schools quite often. He liked reading. Sometimes the headmaster was more interested in fees than in academic performance, and James did nothing but read and talk. And play footer or cricket. If something must be written, he paid another boy to write it.

It worked until he was sixteen. Then he came to suspect that the rest of the school was treating him as a joke. He was the tallest boy in the school and he couldn't write: what a hoot! He got nicknamed Invisible Ink. He went to his housemaster and announced that he was leaving. “Good idea,” the man said. “I'll give you a lift to the station on my motorbike.”

Next day, his father asked him to come into the study. “I've been wondering,” he said. “What plans have you made for the rest of your life?”

The question caught James off-guard. “Motorcycling,” he said. It was all he could think of.

“Ah. Forgive my ignorance – how is that likely to increase the sum of human happiness?”

“Well, sir, last year a chap rode from Land's End to John O'Groats in less than two days.”

“And was there an ethical element to this journey?”

“Um ... He didn't cheat, if that's what you mean. He used the pedals on the steep hills, but that's allowed.”

He bought a motorcycle, found a mechanic, and made a small reputation in local races, scrambles, sprints. Got bored. Bought a car, raced that, got bored. Took flying lessons, got his Royal Aero Club certificate, and might have become bored with flying if Europe had not stumbled into war.

In the autumn of 1916 he was transferred to Hornet Squadron. When he arrived, the doctor examined him for venereal disease. “The old man's very hot on this,” Dando explained. “He'd had to sack two pilots. You're clean. Put your bags on.”

McWatters dressed slowly. “Girls, and so on. They're the very devil, aren't they?”

“Here's my professional advice. If you can get a girl, she's probably got the pox. If you can't get her, she probably hasn't. That's Dando's First Law of Motion.”

“Thanks. I'll stick to poker.”

Dando recognised that tone of voice, brave yet brittle. It meant McWatters was a virgin and resented the fact. Dando had heard it before, often. Most pilots had left one all-male environment – school, sometimes university – for another: an R.F.C. camp, where women were never seen and seldom spoken of, never in the mess.

This made Charles Dash's erotic adventures at the nunnery of Sainte Croix all the more fascinating. Some officers refused to believe him. “He's got a neck like celery,” Snow said. “He's got more freckles than my kid sister. He thinks his dick is there to stir his tea with. That's what they teach you at your famous public schools, isn't it?”

“If he made it all up,” McWatters said, “why isn't he boasting about it?”

“Because he knows it's bullshit,” Maddegan said. “That's a very, very old Australian word. You can borrow it provided you promise not to get it dirty.”

“Something definitely happened,” McWatters said. “I mean, he went to see Dando. Something must have happened.”

Charles Dash came back to his billet from the officers' bathhouse and found McWatters lying on Dash's bed, reading Dash's mail. “Perhaps you should move in here,” he said, “and I'll live in your hut and read
your
letters.”

“The doctor's wife died, pneumonia. And the daffodils look splendid. Otherwise, nothing special from home. However ...” McWatters waved a letter. “Chlöe Legge-Barrington has come up trumps.”

“Give it here, or I'll report you to my flight commander.”

“She's found where Jane Brackenden and Laura da Silva are. It's nowhere near here. I have a car.”

Dash's hatred was great, but his lust was greater. “No poaching,” he said, “or I'll kill you.”

After an hour of taking wrong turnings and backing up muddy lanes, they found a F.A.N.Y. unit in a field of ambulances. McWatters reluctantly stayed in the car while Dash went looking. Laura da Silva was in a tent, unpacking medical supplies. “Hullo,” she said. “Come to help?”

They chatted for a while. Dash had a mouth full of words he couldn't find a way to use. Finally a thought blundered into his head. “Unusual name, da Silva. Are you Catholic, by any chance?”

“Yes.”

Oh well, that's that, he thought. But he blundered on: “It's just that, when I was staying at the nunnery, someone left ... um ... left an earring in my . . . um ... bed.”

“Ah.” She linked her hands behind her head and looked him in the face. Treacherously, it turned red. “Well,” she said, “the priests would give me hell, so it wasn't me. And no-one in F.A.N.Y. wears earrings, so maybe it was something else she left in your bed.”

“Maybe,” Dash mumbled.

“Poor you,” she said. “Men get no rest, do they?” She kissed him on the forehead. “That's all you get! Goodbye.”

He went back to the car. McWatters wanted a detailed report. “Go to hell,” Dash said. “I'm sick of this nonsense. I quit.”

“Do you, indeed? Well, I don't.”

The address given for Jane Brackenden was only twenty minutes away. It turned out to be a primary school, requisitioned by the Medical Corps. In the playground a few walking wounded played walking football. “Be frank,” McWatters urged. “Be blunt. Women like that sort of thing.” But Dash had already slammed the car door.

He met her coming down a corridor. “Charles! Good heavens . . . I was just thinking of you.” Optimism soared like a skylark. She was stunningly beautiful: red hair, delicate features, healthy chest. “Not half as much as I have,” he said. “You were awfully keen on women's suffrage, weren't you?”

“Still am.”

“Equality now, that's what you said ...” The corridor was suddenly busy. She saw the strain in his eyes and took him into a classroom where empty stretchers were stacked head-high. “The thing is,” he
said, “somebody at the nunnery really believed in equality between the sexes.” Already his ears were hot. “And that somebody practised it in my bed.” Her eyes widened and he heard her gasp. Fuck fuck fuck, he thought. Wrong again.

“It's a lovely idea,” she said, “but I'm afraid I'm not nearly brave enough to ... Dear oh dear. And you've come all this way.”

“It was dark, you see. Pitch black.” Dash felt that he had been saying this to everyone he knew.

“Such a shame. I wish we could go somewhere and talk, but I'm in charge here. Can't leave, not for hours.”

McWatters was not discouraged by his failure. “Now it's better odds,” he said. “Only three to one.”

* * *

The six Pups destroyed by the strafing Albatros were quickly replaced: another squadron was getting Camels and its C.O. cheerfully donated his ageing Pups to Cleve-Cutler. Pilots were not so easily found. Dufee's leg had been broken by the signal flare. One man was in Amiens having a wisdom tooth pulled. Another had double vision, the result of smacking his head on the gun butt in a heavy landing. Two had 'flu.