The Mercenaries (18 page)

Sammy was back within an hour, with the smiling girl alongside him, clutching her birdcage and her bundle. She looked small and drab in grey cotton and, without make-up, like any girl from any provincial town anywhere in the world. To Ira she didn’t seem to have understood the possibility of danger and had come merely because Sammy had asked her.

‘You’ve explained, Sammy?’

Sammy shrugged. ‘She’ll go on the lorry,’ he said shortly, as though he’d not found explaining easy.

The Avro took off in the early afternoon with Cheng in the passenger cockpit. It was stuffed with tools and personal belongings and there were canvas-covered shapes roped into the wing-roots. It bumped along the uneven field, the long wings swaying, the engine crackling and throwing out clouds of blue castor oil smoke, then it rose into the air over the willow-fringed river and began to head south-west.

Ira watched it growing smaller, knowing that nothing in the world would make Sammy let him down. Sammy would do exactly what he’d been told and do it properly, and he knew he could trust him as he could trust the sun and the moon to rise. But aeroplanes were pernickety things and there was no guarantee that something would not go wrong with the Monosoupape that would throw all their plans awry.

As he turned away, he almost bumped into Wang, the carpenter. At the last moment he had decided that servicing aeroplanes had suddenly become more important to him than carving wooden screens, but he wasn’t prepared to accompany them further inland without his family.

Ira threw him into one of the Peugeots before he could argue. Wang had become an asset to the little squadron and, despite the tardiness of his decision, it was well worth the risk of getting his family out of Hwai-Yang to have him with them.

They found the city in a turmoil. Stragglers from Tsu’s army were busy in the streets, but there was no one in authority and they controlled only the areas where they looted. The dusty cobbles were littered with paper and fluttering pamphlets and half the shop windows were broken. In the main street the crowd was so thick they had to stop, the shaven Chinese skulls in front of them like a sea of pebbles on a beach.

There was a big placard, ‘Go Home, Japanese’, wavering above the yelling crowd and they could see a little Citroen with a Japanese merchant in it, being heaved to and fro. The Citroen went over at last and they saw the Japanese running for his life, then the mob surged round the car like water in a whirlpool, the students in the lead, ardent for anything but study, willing to have anyone hurt or maimed for an ideology, and there was a puff of smoke, a flower of crimson flame and a howl of glee. Carrying poles began to whack the remaining shop windows into showers of shining splinters, then, as the mob paused, looking for more to destroy, its eyes fell on the Peugeot and the noise rose to a screech. ‘Sha! Sha! Kill! Kill! ‘

Ira gave Wang a quick grin. ‘Time we left,’ he said.

Behind them the American gunboat was anchored in midstream and they could see hoses being operated from the decks to keep a way clear through the sampans which circled it, filled with coolies and students yelling abuse. The river bank was packed tight with Chinese rent-collectors, and landlords, all pensioners of Tsu and the objects of the crowd’s dislike, all being ferried off with the missionaries in ship’s boats. The sampans that waited off shore, none of them quite daring enough to come to close quarters, carried flags Ira had never seen before--red with what looked like a serrated sun on a blue field in the corner.

The American sailors on the bund, most of them young and looking like schoolboys in their white shorts and caps, were setting up a machine gun on a tripod now and the officer waved to Ira.

‘This way,’ he yelled over the din.

As they reversed, the back of the Peugeot hit a fruit stall that collapsed in a welter of baskets and rolling fruit, and the proprietor began to screech abuse and slammed his stick with a clang against the tonneau. A coolie joined him, bringing down his steel-tipped carrying pole on the bonnet, then another, but just as the mob surged forward to hammer the car to wreckage, it swung away and fled with howling engine and honking klaxon to safety.

‘Kinda tough,’ one of the sailors grinned as they took up a position behind the machine gun. ‘New kinda riot.’

It was an hour before the mob moved on, hitching up its cotton pants, to wreck warehouses along the bund, an hour that Ira spent dancing with anxiety with Wang alongside the car, staring at his watch and glancing at the smoke-filled sky, knowing that in the time he was away Fagan could be doing something stupid enough to wreck his plans, or that the mob could have changed direction and headed for the airfield.

Eventually they were given the all-clear and they made their way to the back streets where Wang lived near the railway in a little hovel that was filled with smoky paraffin lamps. They brought out his family--ten of them, including a grandmother and eight children, all with their hair in elaborate tufts--and a whole pile of pots and pans, and packed them hastily into the back of the car. It was a desperate squeeze, with the excited children chirruping like a lot of young birds and Wang dealing out cuffs with both hands, but although several of them had to ride on the mudguards, Ira had no intention of leaving them behind. Wang had fallen in love with aeroplanes and if it meant taking his family to keep him, then the family would go, too.

Back at the field, they found Ellie growing uneasy and Fagan almost gibbering with impatience. The airfield coolies, scenting disaster, had departed while they’d been away, and the high-pitched chattering and laughter had gone with the creak of barrows and the clatter of picks and shovels. With one or two exceptions they hadn’t ever been much use for anything but labouring and had always had a habit of doing ridiculous things like looking into petrol tanks with a cadged cigarette in their mouths, but the absence of their noise and cheerfulness made the place ominously empty.

General Tsu’s motor-car entourage passed the field as they threw the last of their equipment aboard the lorry, and stopped to find out what was happening to the aeroplanes.

Ira indicated the pupils dragging the ancient Bleriot and the Parasol and the wingless, engineless, gunless Fokker from the hangars and pushing them together, nose to nose. They were a shorn and dreary lot now. Propellers and rudders had been taken off, wheels had gone and the wings drooped because bracing wires and turnbuckles and even struts had been removed.

‘You can tell the General,’ Ira said to Lao, ‘that he won’t be losing anything worth while. We’re going to set them on fire.’

Lao looked shaken and, when he told Tsu, the Baptist General was visibly shocked. He stood by the car, with his French wife and the little dark-eyed, grey-gowned boy clutching a violin case, and the amah who went everywhere with them, gesturing and yelling at Lao, and it required a good quarter of an hour of arguing before they could convince him that the old machines weren’t worth saving. Even then he gave his consent reluctantly.

As the motorcade rattled off, trailing dust, the first of Tsu’s soldiers began to straggle past the airfield on the way west. They were only a horde of undisciplined men now, holding umbrellas and parasols and even wearing boaters to protect them against the sun, slouching along with their rifles slung and most of their equipment missing. Their officers jogged by on shaggy ponies and at the end, among the ragtag and bobtail of the army, the wives and the children and the camp followers, came the artillery--the ancient Maxim and the .75, and the battered Russian guns--and finally the ox-carts with the luggage and equipment.

‘I don’t give much for their chances,’ Fagan grated. He had sobered up abruptly but he was nervous and irritable and he and Ellie were sparking off each other’s ill-temper again.

Several of the pupil-pilots were rushing through the Bessoneaux and the wooden barracks now, yelping and whooping as they set fire to straw mattresses with torches, then they heard the ‘whoof’ as they put a torch to the two old aeroplanes. The two Peugeots were started and began to tick and rattle as they were lined up alongside Lawn’s chain-driven Peerless and the Crossley tender, the pupils excited and yelling to each other from the tops of the crates and canvas and valises.

One or two of the less ardent had already begun to drift away on their ponies or on bicycles they’d commandeered from Kailin. They had instructions to join up again at Tsosiehn but Ira had a feeling he’d never see half of them again, and he was not unwilling to be rid of them. One of them, in fact, wearing a Manchu gown instead of uniform, didn’t even trouble to turn west but headed on his bicycle straight towards Hwai-Yang, clearly intent on joining General Kwei.

There was no point in hanging on any longer and Ira gave the signal to start engines. His eyes alert for any sign of drinking in Lawn, he helped the remaining pupils to push Mei-Mei and the Wangs on top of all the equipment. There was an immediate crisis as one of the smaller Wangs slipped out of sight between the generator and the lathe and set up a frantic screeching as if he were being boiled in oil, and they had to off-load half the equipment to get at him before they could free him.

They were ready at last and Lawn started the engine.

‘Keep an eye on the cars and keep the thirty-hundredweight behind,’ Ira advised. ‘If the Crossley conks and you can’t start it, the most important things are spares. Not tents or food or personal belongings--or people.’

With Wang and the pupils draped across the tails, they got the two German machines started and facing into wind, and Ira climbed into the high wicker seat of the Farman and set the throttle.

‘Ding hao, Peng Ah-Lun!‘ Wang gave him a quick smile and heaved on the propeller. The engine fired, spluttered and stopped, and Ira’s heart missed a beat. Twice it failed to start, with Fagan like a cat on hot bricks and yelling from the cockpit of the Fokker.

‘For Sweet St. Paddy’s sake ...!‘ Though they couldn’t hear a word he said over the buzzing of the engine, it was clear that he was in a froth of nervous impatience.

Ignoring him, Ira calmly instructed Wang to turn the propeller back to get compression. The second time, as he heaved, the familiar noise of the ticking lawn mower started and the pupils began to grin and chatter as the machine quivered and shook and splinters of sunlight sparkled through the propeller. With Fagan still shouting at him above the roar of his revving engine, Ira strapped himself in, working slowly and methodically, then he looked round at the field in a last check to make sure they’d forgotten nothing.

Fagan was waving his arm now and Ira could see smoke hanging over Hwai-Yang, and a stream of Chinese moving along the road towards the airfield.

He raised his hand and at once Fagan opened the throttle with a roar. The two scouts taxied to the perimeter of the field and he saw the crowd on the road come to a stop, gaping. Fagan was gesturing to him to start, and he opened the throttle cautiously. With a twanging of wires and a creaking of struts, the old machine staggered into the air and at once the two German machines, first the Fokker and then the Albatros, began to roll across the grass.

The lorry, the Crossley and the two old cars were already heading for the western perimeter of the field and immediately the crowd on the eastern fringe began to spread out like a lot of ants. The pupil who had set off on his bicycle for Hwai-Yang had thrown away his Tsu bus conductor’s hat now and had turned round in front of them, waving, gesturing and pointing at the sky until his gown caught in the spokes of his bicycle and he went head-first into the ditch.

The Fokker began to climb swiftly towards the Farman and in no time had passed it and climbed above as the old machine groped its way upwards towards the west. Ahead of him, Ira could see the broad expanse of China with its tiny squares of lukewarm water intersected by dykes where women in blue cotton splashed to transplant the tender rice shoots.

The Bessoneaux were collapsing now into red ruin that sent up flying scraps of charred canvas, and the flames were roaring through the barrack huts. Outside the burning hangars, he could see the pall of smoke where they had pushed the three cannibalised machines together, and even as he watched, one of them blew up and he saw scraps of burning wood and fabric whirl upwards.

To the east, beyond Hwai-Yang, smoke was rising in long drifting spires against the flat blue of the sky, above a column of marching men. Kwei’s troops would be in Hwai-Yang in an hour and at the airfield an hour later.

Sitting in his little wickerwork seat, exposed to the wind, with the wires singing and the fabric ballooning on the wide spars, Ira could see the Albatros rising and falling just beside the wing-tip and, beyond it, the Fokker with Fagan clearly irritated at having to provide an escort. The crowd had surged across the field now and was milling in a large crescent-shaped mass in front of the burning huts. Every now and then he saw a figure dart towards the flames and run back again, as though they were trying to salvage what they could.

The lorry and the Crossley and the two overburdened cars were moving steadily to safety beyond the field, and beyond them there was a little cluster of pupils on their shaggy ponies, one or two of them already turning into the fields as though they had long since given up hope of ever reaching Tsosiehn.

There was a bewildered feeling in Ira’s mind as he stared down. It had been a short campaign, so swift they’d not seen a single sign of it at Kailin, and so far they’d achieved nothing. They’d got only one of General Tsu’s decrepit machines into the air and not one of his pupil-pilots.

As he turned west, with the wind in his face, the old Farman rising and falling in the eddies that rose over the river, Ira wondered ruefully what would happen next.

1

Sammy Shapiro had not failed them and when, after half an hour’s flying that was an exasperating chore in the frail underpowered Farman, the field at Yaochow came into view, there was a landing strip already marked off and a wood-fire smoking at one end to indicate the direction of the wind. Beneath a little clump of trees on the fringe several carts were parked near the Avro, and Ira could see a group of people standing alongside a small farm building with a curved roof from which patches of tiling were missing.