The Mercenaries (22 page)

Fagan turned on him at once in a rage. ‘Who says?’

Sammy eyed him coolly. ‘Peter Cheng.’

‘How the hell does a Slant-Eye know?’

‘Because his family’s still at Hwai-Yang,’ Sammy pointed out, unruffled. ‘He says Kwei’s got new planes and that Chiang’s saying that soon all the warlords’ll belong to the Kuomintang. He’s going to start moving soon and he’s got the kids in Hwai-Yang telling ‘em he’s against the rich and that all their troubles are due to the foreigners.’ He grinned maliciously. ‘That’s you, mate. They’re forming unions down there and beating up anybody who won’t join, and when they’re organised they’ll be telling you what to do, not the other way round. Even Kwei does as he’s told because Chiang’s backing him now.’

‘Ach, who cares what Chiang and Tsu do? It’s not our war.’

Sammy snorted. ‘You’ve
made
it our bloody war,’ he snapped.

Fagan glared, on the point of fighting again, and, realising they were all in need of some sort of success, Ira made a quick decision.

‘Sammy,’ he said. ‘You once suggested mounting a gun on the Avro. On a cradle, with a socket in the rear cockpit.’

Sammy looked round and nodded, puzzled. Ira was standing alongside him, frowning, deep in thought.

‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it and let’s get the other Spandau on to the Fokker and a Lewis on a quadrant on the Albatros. We’ll go up as a squadron and stand guard.

Sammy sat up and beamed, but Fagan threw down his cigarette again and ground it out with his heel.

‘I don’t need a top guard to shoot down an unarmed balloon,’ he said, starting to light a third cigarette.

He looked like a bull, heavy, clumsy and past his prime, still trying to cling to some sort of pride, and Sammy’s eyes were full of contempt as he gazed at him.

‘Lor’,’ he said with a calmness that was insulting. ‘You aren’t half heavy on fags.’

While Fagan fussed uselessly about the Fokker and its guns, Ira took the Avro up and checked it. There was nothing very wrong with it but he needed to get away from the bickering on the ground. The fun had suddenly gone out of flying and he was growing desperately tired of Fagan. He and Ellie, both physically attractive people, only fed on each other’s miseries and would have been far better separated. Away from each other, they might have survived instead of sinking slowly together, locked by their emotions and weighed down by each other’s troubles.

They worked all night on the B.M.W., the full summer heat that was on them now hanging like a pall so that when the breeze dropped they sweltered, dripping sweat and slapping at the mosquitoes which headed in buzzing, pinging clouds for the lights they’d strung up in the shelters. By the second night, they had rigged a duplicate Spandau on the Fokker and a Lewis on a crude quadrant on the top wing of the Albatros. It looked odd and awkward but it worked, and they attached a cradle to the second Lewis and screwed iron-pipe sockets to the side of the Avro’s strengthened rear cockpit.

‘It won’t shoot much,’ Sammy said. There’s no room. It’ll be too easy to blow the wings off.’ He looked exhausted and was full of hatred for Fagan who, unable to help, had nagged incessantly about the delay. There was a lump raised by a mosquito bite on his eye and he was a little desperate-looking with fatigue.

‘When are them spares coming, Ira?’ he asked in a harsh voice. ‘Because if they don’t come soon, we might as well shut up shop.’

His face was defiant and there was the first hesitant hint of doubt in his manner, as if he were beginning to believe that the spares Ira had promised were as dubious as Fagan’s.

As he turned away, his shoulders drooping, his eyes dark-rimmed with fatigue and disappointment, Ira knew that Fagan wasn’t the only one who was living on his nerves. They were all in need of a run of good luck to put backbone into them. In all the weeks they’d been in China, they’d produced nothing but failure.

The following morning at first light, the engines roared to life. Lao and General Tsu came to see them leave and waited by their car with Ellie, while Ira fussed round the others like a hen with its chickens. Sammy looked excited and eager but desperately afraid he’d do his part wrong, while Cheng was quite obviously nervous. They both looked mere children, quivering with willingness but pathetically lacking in experience.

‘Listen, Sammy,’ Ira was urging. ‘No heroics. You don’t know much and Cheng knows less and we don’t take chances. If anybody comes down on us, remember all we can do is fly rings round them and pretend we’re dangerous. If there’s trouble, bolt for home.’

Sammy nodded, his face grave with concentration. ‘O.K., Ira. I’ll remember.’

Fagan was already roaring, tail-up, across the field, and as Ira swung into position, making his final cockpit check, he was climbing above the Chang-an-Chieh and swinging towards the east The labouring Avro was heaving itself up after him and, a few moments later, Ira opened the throttle of the Albatros and sped down the field after it.

Climbing to a position behind the others, Ira looked below him at a drab landscape that seemed devoid of population. Only one small comer, where Tsosiehn occupied a bend of the Yangtze, seemed to be inhabited. The rest of the land from the river to the mountains in the north seemed empty.

The Albatros was short on revolutions and answered the controls sluggishly but Ira took up a position to the left and rear of the Fokker, which was still drawing steadily away, approving as Sammy swung into place alongside him, the Avro wavering up and down in the eddies of the air like a horse on a roundabout. Cheng, his cheeks distorted by the wind, gave him the thumbs-up sign that all was well, and an old instinct that he’d not called on for years set him glancing up into the sun.

He was flying at five thousand feet now, falling quickly behind the faster Fokker, the ageing Mercedes throwing out oil alarmingly and blurring his goggles so that he had to push them up on to his forehead to see. Although a thin mist lay in the valleys, he picked out a long string of straggling figures below, moving westwards, and for a while he stared at them, imagining them to be troops before he realised they were refugees from the fighting round Wukang.

After a while, he saw smoke from burning houses rising in a steep slanting column to the east and then, here and there below him, small scattered groups of men that he recognised as fragments of General Tsu’s army in retreat.

His eyes were scanning the sky all round them now, staring into the iron glare of the sun, then he saw the Fokker banking and Fagan waving his arm and pointing, and in the distance below them, hardly discernible against the drab earth, the ugly patched shape of Kwei’s balloon.

He signed to Sammy and put the Albatros into a climb, and after a moment’s hesitation, he saw the Avro struggling after him. Over the rocker arms of the Mercedes, he saw the sun flash across the doped wings of the Fokker, catching the orange circle of Tsu’s insignia as Fagan began a long dive, and he grinned as it occurred to him what a crazy air force it was. Here he was, an Englishman, flying a German scout armed only with a British Lewis attached to the top wing, while opposite him was a young Jew and a Chinese flying a British machine, similarly ill-armed, their weapons like his charged with indifferent Japanese ammunition, their engines firing on American petrol.

Fagan was not far from the balloon now, and tracers were springing from the ground in a cone towards him. Kwei’s Russian advisers had not been long in setting up a machine gun cover for it after his first misdirected attack. Then Ira heard Cheng’s Lewis fire and, turning, saw the glitter of empty brass cartridge cases falling away through the air. Cheng was pointing and immediately beyond the Avro he spotted another machine, lower down and difficult to see against a ridge of hills. It was moving towards them with that peculiar crabwise motion of an aeroplane on a converging course and he recognised it with surprise as a Caudron, a machine which the French had stopped using ten years before.

He almost laughed out loud. China seemed full of every kind of aeronautical junk that could waddle into the sky. All things considered. General Tsu seemed to be in a good position to gain command of the air.

He pointed downwards and, pushing the stick forward, descended in a long dive, with the Avro swinging wildly in his slipstream. Fagan was above the balloon now and Ira saw the Caudron’s wings flash as it swung into a dive after him. There was a glimpse of the blue circle with the serrated white centre like a sun that he’d seen on the flags in Hwai-Yang, then, as he changed direction to intercept it, he heard Fagan’s guns rattle and the balloon seemed to shrivel indecently to nothing and began to drop out of sight, slowly at first then faster and faster, the flare of flame dwindling as it fell to the ground, trailing a column of smoke marked with scraps of burning fabric.

What the Caudron pilot hoped to do against the faster Fokker wasn’t clear but Fagan was in a bad position, low down over the column of smoke, enjoying his triumph, and as the Albatros shot between them the Caudron jerked up in a climb and swung away, and Ira saw the startled face of the pilot.

There were a couple of sharp taps near him on the Albatros and, glancing upwards, he saw torn fabric fluttering above the centre section, but Sammy was close behind him and, across the circle of the bank, he saw the Caudron’s observer swinging his gun for a shot at the Avro. Instinctively, he lifted the Albatros in a clumsy half-roll that set the wires twanging and sprayed his face with oil, and came back below the Caudron, with the Lewis pulled down on the quadrant and ready for firing.

For a second, it hung above him like a box kite in a perfect position for the kill, then the pilot, clearly deciding he needed time to work out tactics to deal with this new threat, banked steeply and dived to safety, pulling out just above the ground and heading east.

Fagan had already landed as the Albatros rolled to a stop. He had climbed from the Fokker and was standing by the farmhouse, gesticulating to Lawn and a circle of pupils and capering coolies. Ira sat for a moment after switching off, huddled in the big cockpit of the Albatros, staring at the Johannisthal works plate set on the dashboard and experiencing the old let-down feeling he’d had so often after a patrol in France, a sensation of relief and a relaxation of tension.

As he looked up, he was surprised to see Ellie alongside. She was smiling and, as he climbed from the machine, Sammy came running across and, grabbing him by the arms, began to dance round him, all his frustration and despair gone in the moment of triumph.

‘I thought you had him by the tripes that time when you were underneath him, Ira,’ he crowed. ‘Next time we’ll make no mistake.’

Fagan was strutting towards them now, his face grimed beneath his goggles from the cordite smoke where his guns had fired, a noisy mockery of a warrior home from the wars.

‘Champagne tonight,’ he yelled excitedly long before he’d reached them. ‘There must be somewhere we can get the bloody stuff! ‘

Lao arrived soon afterwards, bringing his congratulations and a bottle of whisky which didn’t hide the fact that he’d also brought a demand from Tsu that he wanted the illustrious foreign fliers to press home the victory with aid for his hard-pressed artillery. To Ira’s surprise, he claimed that the alliance of the northern warlords against Chiang K’ai-Shek’s growing power had finally been completed and that Tsu’s agreement with General Choy across the river was at last working well.

‘Old Dog-Leg Chiang is finished,’ he said gaily. ‘He cannot fight everyone at once.’

Fagan gestured wildly and, noisy and excited, grabbed an almost full bottle of rum Lawn had produced.

‘We’ve won the war!’ he shouted and took a gulp that was more demonstrative than wise. As usual, his triumph turned to farce at once as he collapsed in front of the pupils he’d been trying to impress, in an explosion of coughing that brought the blood to his face and tears to his eyes, and left him weak and gasping and leaning against the side of the Albatros in a daze

‘Sweet Sufferin’ J.,’ he said loudly as he recovered a little. ‘It’s a mortal sin to doctor the bloody stuff like that. What’s in it?’

Lawn eyed the half-empty bottle bewildered. ‘Best Jamaica rum,’ he said. ‘Or it was when I ‘ad a swig at it.’

Fagan gestured airily, his eyes on the sniggering pupils. ‘Hell,’ he shouted, ‘they diddled you. It’s raw alcohol, to be sure.’

Watched by a frozen-faced Ellie who, now that he was safe and triumphant, no longer appeared to be concerned, he seemed unable to divest himself of his leather coat and flying helmet, the trappings of his victory, and stood near the old patched Albatros, boastful and gesticulating, going again and again over his fight.’Lor’, into the Valley of Death,’ Sammy muttered. ‘You’d think that bloody balloon had been armed with whole batteries of cannon.’

It had been Fagan’s intention, while he could still savour the heady taste of his victory over the balloon, to work the following day with General Tsu’s artillery, but in an anti-climax that came as no surprise to anyone, he went down instead with a galloping hangover, which was not improved when his house-coolie helpfully offered him a cure from a herb doctor in the form of a brew of crystals of musk and child’s urine. Even if there had been any chance of a quick, recovery, the very thought of this concoction was enough to put him on his back at once and it was two days before he got off the ground again.

Even his return to the air--in the Avro, with Sammy unwillingly in the rear cockpit because of an unaccountable drop in revs in the Monosoupape that called for a mechanic aboard--was conducted with his usual flair for the melodramatic. He set off in a steep climbing turn round the Chang-an-Chieh that set Ira’s teeth on edge, and threw the whole airfield into a state of nail-biting anxiety by failing to return.

Greasy from working on the oil system of the Mercedes, Ira watched the sky with Ellie and Lawn, none of them suffering from much apprehension about Kwei’s air force--if the Caudron was an example of what he could put into the air even the unpredictable Fagan hadn’t much to fear--but all well aware that, with his ability to make the simplest thing difficult by showing off, he could easily still do a great deal of damage to himself and to Sammy.