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Authors: Derek Robinson

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BOOK: Hornet’s Sting
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“Is nice little machine. In Russia we have much bigger machines.”

“So you've told me. Now will you for God's sake do what I tell you?”

“These generals,” the duke said, “on court of inquiry. Tell me names, I have English cousins in your War Office, dukes, only small dukes but —”

“Shut up.” Ogilvy shoved the Russian in the chest and sent him staggering. “Shut up! Until you learn to land properly I will not permit you to go on patrol. Hear me? Now go up and do it properly.”

Nikolai was blinking as if he had dust in his eyes. “This is serious matter.”

“Life and death.”

“I am cousin of Nicholas sent by God to be Tsar of Holy Russia. When you strike me, you strike face of God.”

“Good,” Ogilvy said. “Maybe God will wake up and decide which side he's on. He hasn't been doing your cousin any favours lately, has he?”

The duke was shocked. Ogilvy realised he had gone too far. He walked away. Andrei was coming in to land, far too fast. Ogilvy rammed another cartridge into the pistol and fired a red flare. Andrei flew past, waving cheerily.

* * *

Major Cleve-Cutler sat in his office, watching Captain Dando make his report on the health of the squadron.

Since the surgeons had reassembled his face, it was hard to tell what the C.O. was thinking, but Dando knew he wasn't listening because his eyes had gone out of focus. “No sickness among the mechanics,” Dando said. “The man with influenza has recovered.”

The C.O. grunted.

“All's well in the cookhouse, apart from a spot of botulism, maybe a touch of anthrax. High mortality rate, of course, but then so was the Somme.”

The C.O. grunted.

“Look,” Dando said, “if you're not listening, I might as well go and lance a boil on somebody's backside.”

Cleve-Cutler got up and wandered away from his desk. He stared at the floor. “Rats,” he said. “Hear them?”

Dando held his breath and heard a faint squeaking. “No,” he said.

“Little bastards couldn't stand the shelling at the Somme. Ran like mad. Didn't stop until they got here.” He stamped, and raised straight lines of dust.

“What the British Army calls a planned withdrawal to a superior defensive position,” Dando said. “I remember doing it at Mons in 1914.”

The C.O. was kneeling. He pulled a champagne cork from a knothole, put his mouth to the hole and shouted: “Go away!”

“Waste of time,” Dando said. “You know what French rats are like, they pretend they don't understand.”

“This lot are Huns. I can speak Hun.” Cleve-Cutler got up and took a revolver from a desk drawer and was back at the knothole when Dando said, “Think of the smell if you hit. Think of the shame if you miss.”

The C.O. squatted on his heels while he thought of that. Then he hammered on the floor with the butt. “You haven't heard the last of this!” he shouted into the hole.

“Exactly what I told General von Kluck at Mons,” Dando said. “And that really put the wind up him, that did.”

The C.O. went back to his chair. “Mons,” he said. He scratched the back of his head with the revolver sight. “What a lot has happened since then.”

“No, it hasn't,” Dando said. “The same stupid thing has happened again and again and again.”

“Buzz off, doctor.”

“This war's going to run longer than Chu-Chin-Chow.”

As Dando got his papers together, there was a knock and the adjutant came in. With him was a young man who had to duck to get through the door. “Lieutenant Morkel, sir,” he said. “From South Africa. Replacement pilot.” Morkel saluted.

“My goodness,” Cleve-Cutler said. “A replacement and a half.” Morkel was as tall as Brazier. He had a bushy blond moustache and intensely blue eyes. A fading tan made the most of teeth that were startlingly white. “Welcome to Hornet Squadron,” the C.O. said. “What can I tell you about us? Let me see ...” Dando cleaned
his fingernails; he had heard this speech before, many times. “If you wish to play ping-pong, there is ping-pong to be played,” the C.O. said. “If you wish to fly an aeroplane, we have the incomparable Pup. And if you wish to kill Huns, there is an endless supply of eager victims.”

“When can I start, sir?”

Cleve-Cutler looked at his watch. “If it doesn't rain, you can start in two hours. You're in A-Flight. Captain Gerrish is your commander. The adjutant will introduce you. Good luck.”

Morkel saluted and the adjutant took him away.

“What are you hanging around for?” the C.O. asked.

“When did you begin talking to the rats?” Dando said.

“We're all rats,” Cleve-Cutler said. “We all scuttle and squeak and breed in the dark. Try to understand that, doctor, and don't ask such bloody silly questions. Sometimes I think you're starting to lose your nerve. How old are you?”

“Thirty-one.”

Cleve-Cutler nodded wisely. “Ga-ga,” he said.

* * *

Either from winding the starting handle, or from sitting in Sarah Beverley's lorry, Charles Dash had got stains on his best uniform. He had also lost his hat: probably left in the cab. His servant, Private Bugler, was more concerned with removing the stains.

“Never saw nothin' like this before,” he complained. He sniffed cautiously. “Smells like ‘orse but looks like blood. Was you in contact with a bleedin' ‘orse, sir?”

“Just do the best you can.”

“That's easy for you to say, sir, but different stains need treatin' different.”

Dash gave him five francs.

“You can't go around without an ‘at,” Bugler said. “Go an' see Sergeant Lacey in the orderly room.”

Lacey was reading a letter. “My aunt in County Cork is in despair,” he told Dash. “She thinks the entire British war cabinet should be shot for treason. Without trial.”

“Good Lord.” Dash was taken aback; sergeants didn't usually talk
like this. “Why?”

“She feels they blundered by exposing the Zimmermann telegram.” Lacey saw Dash frown. “German Secretary of State,” Lacey said. “Sent a telegram. Germany offered to help Mexico invade the U.S.A. and recapture New Mexico.”

“Yes? Pretty dotty idea.”

“My aunt believes the British government should have secretly encouraged the plan. We should have offered to ship the entire German Army to Mexico, where it would sink in a bog of dago intrigue, corruption and folly. Her words.”

Dash felt that he was being patronised. “Sergeant,” he said, leaning a little on the word, “I need a hat. Private Bugler seems to think …”

Lacey pulled open a filing cabinet. It was full of officers' caps, representing Guards and county regiments, gunners and engineers, Australian and Canadian units. There was even a bright Glengarry. “Nothing here from the Herefordshire Yeomanry,” he said. “But try this one: North Somerset Yeomanry. Somerset's quite adjacent, isn't it?”

Dash tried it on. “Too tight,” he said.

“That's odd,” Lacey said. “Jessop complained that it was too loose.” He took back the cap and removed a strip of folded blotting paper from inside the lining. Dash tried again. Perfect fit. “Who was Jessop?” he asked.

Lacey shut the filing cabinet.

“I don't suppose it matters,” Dash said. He took off the cap and looked at the name written inside. It was J.B.K. Rickman-Ellis. “Jolly handy, these spares,” he said. “In case a chap loses his hat.”

Lacey nodded.

“Any charge,” Dash said, “put it on my mess bill.”

“Compliments of the management,” Lacey said. “However . . . may I ask: does anyone in your family manufacture or distribute cigars, whisky or gramophone records?”

“No.”

“Quel domage.”
Lacey turned away.

“There's a cousin in Worcester,” Dash said. “His factory makes pork sausages.”

“Does it, indeed? Here in France your genuine pork sausage is a currency worth more than diamonds. Kindly ask him to send you ten pounds in weight, urgently.”

“All right. Look: where's the adjutant?” Dash didn't want the adjutant; he just wanted to change the conversation from hats and sausages to something more military.

“Captain Brazier is drilling the burial squad,” Lacey said. “He feels their slow march is not up to snuff. Nor is their quick march.”

“Who is being buried?”

“Nobody,” Lacey said, “but the adjutant never lets a little thing like that stand in his way.”

Earthquake Strength 2:

Tremors felt by persons at rest
.

The rain held off, and Plug Gerrish took Morkel on patrol, together with Lieutenant Heeley.

Heeley was a veteran of two months. He had fired at the enemy perhaps a dozen times, and claimed a share in one Fokker which A-Flight might have destroyed, or which might have disintegrated under the strain of violent combat manoeuvres. Or a bit of both. At any rate, Heeley had seen his bullets raise a string of rosettes in the fabric of the Fokker, and then one of its wings had crumpled, so that was good enough. He was nineteen and he thought it unlikely that he would reach twenty, but he kept such thoughts to himself. His sole ambition was to score one kill that was undeniably his alone. Sometimes he wondered why this killing should matter so much to him, a chorister at Salisbury cathedral until he joined the army shortly before the army would have claimed him anyway. But he had other discoveries to wonder at, whisky and women being the most exciting, and so he took his life a day at a time. That, after all, was how death operated, and death was doing very well.

There was a delay while a search was made for flying gear that was big enough for Morkel.

“I have three rules,” Gerrish told him. “The first is: stay in formation. So are the other two. If you lag behind I won't come back for you, and the odds are you won't come back at all. The Huns love stragglers. How many hours have you done solo?”

“Fifteen, sir.”

“On Pups?”

“Eight.”

“Air-firing?”

“None, sir. It was foggy, so —”

“I don't care. It doesn't matter.” Gerrish went off to select an old
and unloved Pup for Morkel to fly.

“Don't mind Plug,” Heeley said. “He was born with a rat up his arse. You're from South Africa?”

“Yes. The Transvaal, if that means anything.”

“I must say it's jolly decent of you to come all this way to rally round the old country.”

“I have shot every kind of animal that exists in Africa. It is time to shoot some Germans.”

Heeley found that amusing. Morkel smiled gently.

“Is that what you told them,” Heeley said, “when you applied to join the R.F.C.?”

“No. I said I had played a lot of rugby football. They seemed impressed.”

“The Kaiser was an absolute duffer at rugger,” Heeley said. “Poor devil hasn't got a hope, has he?”

Three sweaters, a sheepskin flying coat, fur-lined gauntlets and thigh-length flying boots made Morkel look as big as a gorilla. The Pup creaked and groaned when he got into the cockpit. Gerrish told him to take off, and stood well clear to watch. Morkel used up almost all the runway just getting off the ground. When he had done two circuits without crashing, Gerrish and Heeley followed him into the air. The three Pups droned eastward.

Cleve-Cutler had watched, too. He felt grateful to Morkel for not crashing on or near the airfield. A pilot who made a nonsense of his take-off was like a Guardsman who fainted on parade. The C.O. went back to his office and found Duke Nikolai waiting at the door.

The Russian saluted. He said nothing until they were inside. His face was as stiff as a statue. He read from a piece of paper. “It gives me pain to report,” he said, “that Captain Ogilvy has insulted His Imperial Majesty, the Tsar of Holy Russia, to whom I have sworn allegiance.”

“Something Spud said? A slip of the tongue, no doubt. A misinterpretation.”

“He struck me. I am Tsar's representative. Therefore struck Tsar.”

“Bit far-fetched, that.”

“Struck me. I am Tsar's —”

“Yes, yes.” Cleve-Cutler knew the Russian's powers of repetition. “Point taken.”

Nikolai relaxed slightly. “We agree. Tsar demands satisfaction.”

“In Russia, perhaps. Here, in the British Army, duelling is illegal.”

“Honour has no boundaries, major. I know my duty. I shall do it.” He glanced modestly at his shining boots. “Not for first time.”

“Duelling is illegal in the British Army. And Captain Ogilvy has sworn an oath of loyalty to
his
monarch. If he duels with you, he breaks his oath.”

“I kill him quickly. Then he avoids disgrace.”

Suddenly Cleve-Cutler was tired of the whole stupid argument. “You can't have a duel without seconds, can you?” Nikolai nodded. “Well, I'll find a second for Spud. I'll also decide the time and place.
And
the weapons. It may take rather a long time. I'm frightfully busy. The war, you know.”

Nikolai saluted.

“Where did he hit you? I don't see any sign of damage.”

“Honour was damaged,” Nikolai said.

“Honour, eh?” Cleve-Cutler opened the door for him. “Fragile stuff. They don't make it like they used to, do they?” he said.

* * *

Morkel had grown up on the
veldt
, where space was vast and every day a friendly sun rose in an optimistic sky, and nothing was impossible. He had come to Europe because the war wouldn't last for ever. Now was the time to seize its challenges.

When the English taught him to fly, he went no higher than two thousand feet, where it was still possible to make out teams of horses drawing ploughs across fields, and smoke from chimneys, and sheep scattered like snowflakes. Now Plug Gerrish took the patrol up to twelve thousand feet, into a wilderness of cloud. Sky and earth were lost. The air was frigid. In Africa and in England, Morkel's big strong body had performed everything he asked of it, but now he discovered that it was not made for a Pup cockpit at twelve thousand. The windscreen was tiny; his head stuck out in the arctic battering of the airstream until it ached with cold and he beat his fist against his flying helmet. After an hour blundering through the gloom of canyons in the cloud, searching tattered gaps that changed shape as he looked, Morkel was lost. He had no idea where they were, or what they
were looking for, or what they would do if they found it. Staying in formation was a waking nightmare.

BOOK: Hornet’s Sting
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