The Mercenaries (2 page)

‘How do you feel?’ he asked.

Cluff grinned. ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘The pill-roller said I could go home. Nothing at all to worry about.’

Ira’s smile died abruptly as he realised Cluff had used almost the same words as he had himself to Sammy a little while before. Cluff looked sharply at him.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

Ira told him. He still hadn’t recovered from the blow of Sammy’s news. Five years of hard effort had vanished at a puff of wind, five years of debt and worry, five years of fighting to keep old uncertain inflammable machines like the RE8 flying when they were long past their best. It was all over now.

Cluff’s smile had vanished, too, now. ‘That’s it, then,’ he said heavily. ‘We’re finished. No more Moshi Air Carriers.’ Ira nodded. ‘Yep,’ he agreed.

‘God, Ira, it’s not really as bad as that, is it?’

‘Yes, it is. It’s just as bad. I’ll have to get a job and so will you. What’ll you do?’

Cluff stirred the dust with the toe of his boot. ‘I suppose I’ll go back to Blighty,’ he said slowly.

‘What to do?’

‘Thought I’d rejoin.’ Cluff gestured, faintly embarrassed. ‘The R.A.F.’s still expanding.’

Ira frowned.
I
’m not going back,’ he said. ‘There’s a depression on in England. People out of work.’

‘Glad to have you in the Services, though,’ Cluff pointed out. ‘I’ll be all right. I had a medical. I’m still up to scratch.’ ‘
You had a medical?
’ Ira stared. The thought that Cluff had been considering desertion even before the final disaster to the RE8 had put paid to the company seemed like treachery to him.

Cluff gestured. ‘Hell, Ira,’ he said, ‘I was only looking ahead. It was coming. We could both see it coming a mile off.

We weren’t blind. I mean--one RE8 and one old Avro, and East Africa Air with an office in the town and a fleet of Junkers.’

Ira stared at him a second longer, then, because he had never been one to cry over spilt milk, he nodded. What Cluff said was the truth. It wasn’t so much desertion as plain common sense.

He pulled a wry face. ‘How’ll you get home?’ he asked. ‘You’ve got no money. You always spent everything you earned on that girl of yours.’

Cluff pushed at the sunbaked dust with his foot. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘when we started you always said you’d buy my share if I wanted to throw my hand in.’

Ira caught his breath to hold back his bleat of protest. Buying out Cluff would take every last cent he owned. Their possessions amounted only to the old Avro, the insurance on the crashed RE8, which wouldn’t come to much, the Lancia, a second-hand typewriter, a shabby tin-roofed bungalow in Moshi, a solid-tyred lorry they’d bought from the army, and a workshop full of old tools. But he accepted the responsibility without comment.

‘I’ll give you a cheque,’ he said.

Cluff smiled again and Ira knew he was relieved. He’d been unhappy and unsettled for some time. He wasn’t the type for responsibility. He never had been. ‘Thanks, Ira,’ he said. ‘I’ll not forget. You always were an honest bastard, I’ll say that. What about you? Why don’t you go in for instructing somewhere? You’re one of the best I ever came across.’

‘Teaching Sammy frightened me to death.’

Cluff paused awkwardly. ‘Why don’t you go back in the Service?’ he asked. ‘They’d jump at a chap with your record.’

Ira laughed. ‘I’ll stick to being a pauper,’ he said.

2

They took a taxi back to the tin-roofed bungalow where they’d been living, a shabby little place in the cheapest part of the white quarter of the town. Its fans and its plumbing didn’t work, the tin roof made them gasp in the heat of the day, and the garden was overgrown and covered with dust.

Ira dropped from the taxi on the main road by the junction of the weed-fringed cul-de-sac where it was situated. ‘Get inside and pour yourself a stiff drink,’ he advised. ‘I’m going out to the field.’

‘I’ll come too, if you like,’ Cluff offered, and Ira shook his head.

‘Not much point, is there?’ he smiled. ‘Not now.’

Cluff stared at him uncomfortably. ‘Perhaps I can help,’ he said.

‘I should stay here,’ Ira suggested. ‘You’ve had a shaking. You’ll probably feel it later.’

Cluff nodded. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked. ‘About the company, I mean.’

Ira considered. He hadn’t the slightest idea. When the bottom dropped out of your world, ideas were hard to come by in a hurry.

‘I’ll need to think a bit,’ he said. ‘I’ll be all right.’

Cluff looked unhappy. ‘O.K., Ira,’ he said. ‘I might as well clear up a few things.’

‘You’ve decided?’

Cluff nodded. ‘I suppose so. Some time ago, in fact. I’ll look up a ship home. Do a bit of packing.’

He waved and the taxi’s engine roared as it began to bump along the rutted road towards the bungalow. For a moment Ira stared after it, frowning, then he swung on his heel and began to walk along the melting tarmacadam in the direction of the airfield.

Later, sitting down at the army-issue folding table in the shabby hut they used for an office, he brushed the dust away with his hand and, picking up a sheaf of papers, blew the fine red grains from them.

There was nothing he could do across the field where the African labourers were already heaving the splintered spars of the RE8 aside and wrenching free the torn fabric so they could get at whatever might be salvageable, and he sighed and lit a cigarette. The idea of starting an air carrying company had come to him in the squadron mess after the Armistice in 1918. The place had been silent, terribly silent. The lack of noise had seemed strange at first, and the stillness across a land desolated for years by gun-fire was immense. At the end of the hazy autumn afternoon it had seemed overwhelming--like being buried alive. With the litter of war and the crooked crosses still about them, it had been almost as though every single hour of four wretched years had been coming back to bruise the memory and suddenly it had seemed a doubtful privilege to have survived.

The squadron had long since dwindled almost out of sight as men had gone home for demobilisation, and skilled mechanics had vanished. Pilots had flown for the last time and packed up their kits. Canadians, South Africans and Australians had vanished for ever, and the silence had become too heavy for the few who were left to lift. On the last night before going home he’d talked to a few of the remaining pilots, Cluff, Manners, Brannon and Avallon.

‘What are you going to do?’ he’d asked them.

‘Get a flying job somewhere,’ Brannon had said.

‘Back to the bank,’ Cluff had decided. ‘Play safe.’

‘Dunno.’ Manners had been dubious. ‘Can’t imagine ever settling down to work again.’

‘I’m staying on,’ Avallon had decided. He was married and had joined the Flying Corps from the Brigade of Guards and, with a title somewhere in the family, somehow it had been typical of him that he should stay on.

As it happened, apart from Avallon, out of the four only Cluff was still flying. Brannon had settled for testing parachutes and had been killed almost immediately, and Manners, who had been unable to imagine settling down, had gone into a drapery business and now, with a wife and three children, was unlikely ever to change.

As for Ira, afraid that flying was going to be lost to him, he had volunteered to go to Russia to fly Camels against the Bolsheviks, but the adventure had soon gone sour in muddle and stomach-sickening squalor, then he was back in England, exactly where he’d been before, and it had been Cluff, the least adventurous of them all, Cluff the cautious, Cluff the careful, who had been mad enough to join him in the hopeless attempt to start an air carrying company in East Africa.

He frowned. Might have been, he thought. The company that might have been. Curiously enough, he didn’t feel half so depressed as he felt he ought to be. Poverty, somehow, seemed to go with flying.

He’d grown up with it and lived with it as long as he could remember. He could still recall the family quarrels that had been brought on by his father’s obsession with what he called ‘the science of aviation’. There’d never been enough money for luxuries or even, sometimes, for necessities, because it had all been spent on the linen and spruce kites with their erratic engines he had built.

But his father had been more right than he knew and at the age of twelve and already well used to planing, sanding and stitching the fragile wings of his father’s machines, Ira, to the envy of every boy in the neighbourhood, had been given a five minutes’ flight in Colonel Cody’s kite-like two-decker at Brooklands and, by 1913, had known everything there was to know about the strange new science of aerodynamics. Yet when one of his father’s dubious engines had finally failed him and sent him to his grave with a broken neck, and his mother had thankfully got herself remarried to a solidly earth-bound accountant, Ira had been dragged away to the opposite end of London and articled to a solicitor in the vain hope that he’d get the nonsensical new sport out of his system.

His mother had already been too late, however. By that time he’d known every machine that had ever been built, from the Wright Brothers’ wavering Flyer through Bleriot’s monoplane to the frail Farmans with which the new air arm had gone to war. He’d made models and had already known the mysteries of bracing and rigging and had helped to push out the first Tabloid for its maiden flight at Brooklands. He’d been more air-minded than he’d known and had rushed to join the Engineers only because it had not really crossed his mind that anyone had been seriously using aircraft for hostile purposes in war.

By the time they’d sent him, still under age, to France, he had fought his way out of the fitting and rigging sheds and aboard a BE2C as an observer, and by the middle of 1916 he was a pilot, less known for his skill as a flier than as a mechanic. Behind his back had been a 120-horse Beardmore and he’d sat in a cockpit which had felt like a pulpit, with his observer in front in what looked like a hip bath. Afterwards had come Bristol Fighters and then Sopwith Camels, and with his ability with engines and a gift for shooting, they had given him a small notoriety and a chestful of decorations.

Curiously enough, he thought, staring unseeingly at the papers in his hands, he remembered remarkably little now about the war in the air, beyond the skill which after so many years had become instinctive rather than anything else. All he remembered about it now was the profound beauty of the sky, the loneliness, and the vastness of the great blue bowl where his duties had taken him.

Pushing at the dusty papers, the insurances, the invoices for petrol and spares held down by rusty spanners, the copies of letters he’d sent to and the replies he’d received from the Johannesburg Finance Company, Ira felt bitter for a moment that such an auspicious start should have come to so little.

As he thrust the papers aside, suddenly irritated by them, he heard the Avro returning and went to the door to see it land. It would be the last straw, he thought, if Sammy, who was still only a newcomer to the game, crashed this one, too.

But there was no mistake about Sammy’s approach and the old machine came in surely, the Monosoupape engine poppling harshly, Sammy’s head leaning over the side of the cockpit into the spray of castor oil that fogged his goggles; and the aircraft slid neatly into position, the Mono’s crackling roar pounding brassily across the still air.

Sammy had appeared on the airfield as a skinny fourteen-year-old in a shabby shirt and shorts when Ira had first arrived with Cluff five years before, with one old Curtiss JN4 and the RE8 which now lay wrecked across the field. Ignoring all attempts to shoo him off, he’d hung around the fringes of the field until, during a sudden violent storm, they’d called on him to help with aeroplanes that were flying wheels off the ground on their mooring ropes. From that moment, Ira had known they’d never shake him off. Sammy had been as much a dead duck as far as flying went as he himself had been in 1915.

He’d been with them ever since, starting full time when the Jenny had crashed in a storm and put Ira in hospital with a broken ankle two years before. It had been one of Sammy’s relations who’d discovered the old Avro stored in a warehouse in Johannesburg, the damaged relic of an air display, and Sammy who had persuaded them to buy it. He had gone with Ira to fetch it, had helped him to put it together, spending days with him covering the wings with fresh fabric and patching the battered sides. He had helped service the Monosoupape engine and unearthed a whole load of spares in Durban docks, and had learned to drive the aged Lancia, charging madly round the airfield, a broad delighted grin on his face, making agonised noises with the gears until he had mastered the controls. In Sammy there was an instinctive ability with mechanical things and a driving urge to fly, and he had been hooked from the first day Ira had taken him up on the test flight of the Avro.

The aircraft sank lower, the engine poppling, its speed falling all the time, then the tail dropped and, as the machine lost flying speed, the wheels struck in a puff of yellow dust and the old biplane bounced gently, the long double-strutted wings swaying. Under Ira’s approving eyes it began to rumble to a stop, trailing a cloud of dust which drifted away behind in the prop wash.

Sammy turned at the end of the field, his thumb pressing the cut-out, and the Avro swung, the comma-shaped rudder fish-tailing, the long ski-like skid shuddering between the wheels, and began to move swiftly back towards the hut As it jolted to a stop again, poppling and burping over the last dusty bump among the dried yellow grass, Ira threw away his cigarette and returned to the papers.

He sat at the desk again, staring unseeingly at them for a while, then he threw them down again, disgusted. They were all bills, and, with his savings spoken for, all he’d have when he’d finished paying them would be the single plane, the car and the lorry and the workshop full of old tools. No tin-roofed bungalow and not a scrap of working capital to buy spares which, God knew, were hard enough to obtain at any time in East Africa. And not far away with a new steel hangar and a horde of technicians and a Midas store of capital in the bank, his rivals, Central Africa Air, were busy, he had no doubt, kicking the last underpinnings from beneath his feet.