The Mercenaries (26 page)

Sammy stared at him, startled, then he took a swing at him with the oily rag and the tenseness passed.

‘I’m going to write out a report, Sammy,’ Ira said as he began to walk to the office, his arm over Sammy’s shoulder. ‘You can take it over to Lao and bring the money back with you. And while I’m doing that, let’s have the machine refuelled and rearmed and I’ll get off again. I’ll take Cheng this time. He’s good enough now and it’ll give him confidence. He can sit up above and watch. He’ll have to do it himself before long.’

The Fokker took off again, with the Albatros trailing doubtfully behind, and as soon as they had passed Tsu’s villages, machine gun fire came up at them. Signalling to Cheng to stay where he was out of range, Ira went down in a shallow dive. Beyond the exhaust manifold and the blur of the propeller, he could see a speckled group of unidentifiable moving objects among the buildings changing to soldiers blazing away at him with rifles, then he caught sight of a machine gun among the ruins and banked towards it. Bullets came up at him and he climbed away, skidding and turning for a better look, gravity driving the seat against his back and draining the blood from his cheeks.

He spotted a second machine gun on a house with a green roof and decided to approach from the opposite side where the trees at the end of the village would hide him. Climbing away, keeping his eyes on the house with the green roof, he banked beyond the village and came roaring back from the east. Almost at once, it seemed, the machine gun was ahead of him with the frightened gunners turning to stare over their shoulders. He dipped the nose in a steep dive and pressed the trigger. Tiles flew into the air in splinters and the gun swung slowly on its own, untended, then almost at once he saw the first gun again, alongside what appeared to be a pigsty.

The Kwei soldiers were changing the ammunition pan but as they saw him coming they slammed it home and swung the gun round and he saw the yellow flashes at the muzzle. Diving more steeply, he pressed the trigger with one hand and with the other lifted the nose slightly to bring his sights to bear. It was quicker to aim a moving gun than to manoeuvre an aeroplane and tracers flashed past his head and he saw splinters fly off the centre section struts. As he fired, he saw dust filling the pigsty and chips flying off the stone wall, and men in dark green uniforms diving for shelter.

He picked up Cheng above the village and they turned west towards Tsosiehn, shooting up a group of sampans loaded with Kwei soldiers who were crossing the river. There was no sign of General Choy’s troops and he dived repeatedly, flattening the reeds and stirring the surface of the water with his fire until the sampans were empty or overturned and the Kwei soldiers were hidden in the swampy marshland under a circling cloud of scared white birds.

At Tsosiehn, Lao was waiting on the airfield for them with Kee. Ira jumped down from the plane, his face marked below his goggles where the burnt cordite had blown back on him.

“Tell Tsu he’ll be paying out again tonight,’ he said.

Lao’s face was unsmiling. ‘General Tsu is grateful,’ he said. ‘He is pleased that the illustrious British airmen are doing so well. However . . .’ He paused and Ira looked up sharply.

Lao seemed to be searching for words and even managed to look faintly apologetic. ‘General Tsu feels the time has now come,’ he continued slowly, ‘when his own airmen should take part in the fighting. He requests, therefore, that you should return to instructing and that his machines should be placed at the disposal of his best pupils.’

Ira stared at him for a second and glanced at Cheng. Then he shrugged and gave a short bark of laughter. Paying out was beginning to hurt already.

‘O.K.,’ he said crisply. ‘I’ll get Cheng and Tsai on it at once, and God help ‘em both.’

5

Cheng’s first offensive patrol was an undistinguished affair in which neither he nor Tsai seemed to know what to do. Cheng was a little scared of the speedy Fokker after the old box-kite Farman and Tsai in the Albatros seemed to have the greatest difficulty even in keeping station.

Ira followed them in the Avro, trying to give them confidence but now cynically indifferent to whether Tsu’s plans succeeded or not. It hadn’t taken long for the Baptist General--Pride of the Missionaries and Warlord of the South-West--to back out of his agreements when money was involved. He clearly wasn’t in the fighting for any patriotic motive and if he could save a few hundred silver dollars by risking the neck of an inexperienced boy instead of an old hand blooded ten years before in a bigger war he was going to.

At Ningyan. where Kwei’s troops were making life miserable for the peasants, Cheng went down in a steep dive, Tsai following in a wavering glide behind. There seemed to be no machine-gun fire coming up at them but Cheng didn’t appear to be doing much damage either. He killed a horse in a cart but it appeared to belong to a peasant and not to Kwei’s army, and Tsai, with his single Lewis on the upper wing, was able to do no more than fly a wavering line backwards and forwards above him.

From then on, with Ira pouring out his experience and advice every morning for no other reason than to give the two boys enough confidence to stay alive, three uncertain patrols a day were flown. Judging by the number of times Lao arrived on the field in a fury, however, nothing much seemed to be achieved.

‘Mistah Ira,’ Cheng said in an agony of frustration in his halting English, ‘I cannot do this. Eyeh, I do not know how!‘

Ira, however, was suddenly surprisingly happy. The war seemed to have slipped back again into the serio-comic situation of both sides being apparently as lacking in initiative as each other.

Over the whole of China the warlords were trailing disease and terror from valley to valley in campaigns that were as farcical as they were barbarous, colourful bizarre brigands with few standards of human decency and a great gift for being unconsciously funny, living joyfully in their great mansions with their concubines and eunuchs and their extorted wealth, adding land to their already great estates and serving their country only when they killed each other off. The cities reeked of the opium they encouraged, and with cholera, dysentery, syphilis and trachoma going unchecked, industry was almost non-existent. But these tragedies were China’s and the uncertain manoeuvrings along the borders of Tsu’s province hardly touched the Europeans at Yaochow.

It had been quite clear for some time that they weren’t going to get any more of the old guns they possessed into working order, and the most they could do was keep the two scouts flying and continue the instruction on the Farman and the Avro. The weather was good, however, with warm sunny days and bright skies, and flying the fluttering old Longhorn was enjoyable because it was slow enough to enable them to look round and take in the plum trees and the cherries and the banks of yellow willows. By the end of a fortnight both Lieutenant Sung and Lieutenant Yen had reached the point when they were due to fly solo and life seemed good once more.

Cheng’s unhappy patrols were proving of so little value, however, that at the end of the first week, news came through that Tsu had had to give up another two villages before Kwei’s superior artillery and was preparing to pull back even further, and Lao descended on the airfield in a rage to castigate the two Chinese boys with threats and urge them on with promises of rewards. He waited, his face grim, until they flew off again, Cheng leading, Tsai following an uncertain course close behind. He remained after the two machines had disappeared, putting on a face-saving inspection of the few remaining pupils, and talking unconvincingly of enlisting more as he toyed with Sammy’s array of tools and studied the motley collection of vehicles they’d gathered around them, from the tiny Peugeot to Heloïse’s majestic bulk.

‘My gracious goodness,’ Kee said gaily as they climbed into their car to leave. ‘A very impressive performance, you know, Major Ira.’

Ira caught Sammy’s eye and winked, no more convinced by Lao than Lao was by the airfield. Only the Avro was serviceable because on Sung’s final flight in the Farman before going solo, they had descended with the engine shedding parts and petrol jetting out behind them in a vapoury cloud, and Lao had no sooner disappeared than the laundry coolies were back with their buckets and their irons, hanging the washing on the bracing wires and the booms, and the smell of cooking was coming from behind the farmhouse. With Kwei’s ancient Caudron a heap of splintered spruce and torn fabric, there appeared to be no opposition at all in the air, however, and since Cheng and Tsai seemed to be totally incapable of inflicting damage the musical comedy campaigning with each side as farcically unlethal as the other appeared to have returned.

The reedy note of a flute floating over the hammering of Wang and his makee-leam boy added to the illusion and Ira could hear Sammy singing tunelessly as he struggled with a spanner over the Longhorn’s engine.

‘I’ve heard these Renaults are supposed to be bloody fine engines,’ he was saying cheerfully as he wrestled with a recalcitrant nut. ‘
I
reckon they’re more bloody than fine.’

As the morning progressed, the hot summer sun made them sweat and they were lying with a beer under the shelter of the Farman’s wide translucent wings when they heard the low hum of an aeroplane engine from the direction of the Chang-an-Chieh. Scrambling into the sunshine, they saw the Fokker returning low over the willows by the river. There was no sign of the Albatros and as Sammy began to frown, the illusion of farce that had laid so heavily over everything they’d done, disappeared at once.

‘Something’s happened, Ira,’ Sammy said.

The Fokker came in cautiously, the engine missing badly, and they saw at once that fabric was fluttering on the wings. As it settled almost to the ground, the B.M.W. spitting and uneven, the exhaust note died in a final cough and the propeller stopped. The machine’s nose went down and immediately the wheels caught the tufty grass at the top of the ditch that circled the field. The nose dug in and the Fokker stood on its propeller boss and turned over slowly to whack down on its back in a cloud of dust and flying scraps of wood.

Cheng was hanging upside down from his harness in the cockpit when they reached him, and they dragged him out, spitting teeth from his bloodied mouth and staring at the butt end of the guns where he’d banged his face. His appearance was frightening but the only damage appeared to be broken teeth and, for a long time, as they felt over him, he said nothing then he turned his head slowly as though it were weighted.

‘Plane,’ he lisped through the blood that was filling his mouth and making gestures with his hands. ‘Much shooting.’ He moved his hand round in a circle. ‘Tsai.’ His hand descended in a spiral and smacked hard against his knee. ‘Fire. Eyeh, much fire, Mastah Ira.’

Ira watched as Sammy crouched over the Chinese boy, dabbing ineffectually at his face with a piece of dirty rag, and Cheng lifted his head again.

‘New, Mastah Ira,’ he snorted through the blood. ‘Fast. Very fast.’

Ira hoisted him to his feet and slapped his shoulder. ‘You’ll have a scar on your lip you’ll be proud of to your dying day, son,’ he said briskly. ‘It matches my nose. You’ve crash-landed and survived.’

Cheng nodded and grinned painfully, and Ira turned to Sammy.

‘Sammy,’ he said. ‘Fuel up the Avro. Kwei must have got those planes we heard about. Let’s go up and have a dekko.’

They took off quickly past Lawn struggling profanely with Wang to get a rope round the dusty tail of the Fokker and climbed towards the east. There seemed to be remarkably little movement on the ground and no sign of any aircraft, and for an hour and a half they flew backwards and forwards without seeing a thing. On their way home, they passed the wreckage of the Albatros, crumpled and burned on the edge of a paddy field, and landed alongside it.

An old man with a headcloth round his narrow skull, who was poking among the wreckage, gestured towards his house and beckoned to them to follow him. Tsai’s body lay in a mud and wattle shed, almost unrecognisable, and the old man made signals with his hand to indicate that he’d jumped clear before the blazing machine had struck the ground.

Ira gave the old man a few coins, and promised to collect the body, then they searched among the wreckage for anything worth salvaging. The home-made quadrant had been wrenched clear and the Lewis seemed undamaged apart from a bent cocking handle, but the engine was only scrap metal beneath the burned-out fuselage, and apart from a few turn-buckles and one of the wheels there was remarkably little worth saving. Landing back at Yaochow with the Lewis in the rear cockpit, they found Lawn grunting under the Fokker.

‘She’ll mend,’ he said. ‘Needs a new wheel and there’s damage to the elevators and stabiliser, but the prop’s all right and there’s nothing that can’t be fixed.’

They helped him get the machine under cover and turned the Maurice Farman over to Cheng. When it was repaired it would give him confidence to teach Sung and Yen.

They collected Tsai’s body in the Crossley that same afternoon and buried him the following day. The city was quiet and, watched by crowds of gaping coolies, they walked in a vast procession of lanterns, gongs and a military band provided by Tsu which played ‘John Brown’s Body’ discordantly all the way to the cemetery and back. There were wreaths and effigies of horsemen and favourite pets, and even a crude aeroplane, all made of paper so they could be burned and waving in the breeze, a smiling portrait of the dead boy carried by Peter Cheng and boards with his virtues printed on them in gold paint. Professional mourners in white, sitting in rickshaws in traditional attitudes of grief and hawking and spitting into the gutters as they passed, were accompanied by hired musicians forcing sobs from long instruments like huge garden syringes, and pigeons with lute-like reeds attached to their backs were released in a flock to add their wailing cries to the din. A few Buddhist and Taoist monks gave solemnity to the occasion, carrying gifts of money, lacquer boxes, songbirds and wooden dragons for the dead boy to take with him to paradise.