The Mercenaries (31 page)

‘I’ll dry you,’ she said.

‘Damn drying me.’

The towel dropped and she stared at him wide-eyed over the top of it. He took it from her slowly and as he reached for her she caught at his hands, but not to put them away. As she pulled him to her, mouthing little suffering sounds in his ear, he felt her flesh warm against his and the contact made him feel giddy, and as they sank to their knees, the night was shut out and their mouths began to search eagerly for each other.

2

Ira spent the rest of the night scratching unashamedly in the blankets, and awoke after a restless sleep, his skin blotched with red. The rain had stopped and the first of the daylight was already outlining the knuckly hills with gold under the sharp morning sky, and in the distance, a mile away, he could see the coolies from Hakau heading towards him, their cone-shaped hats bobbing as they picked their way across the fields.

The breeze had dropped and the sun was already warm after the rain. As he stretched, Ellie stirred alongside him and he realised she was crying--in a quiet soft weeping that was entirely devoid of histrionics.

He sat bolt upright and put an arm round her. ‘Ellie, what’s wrong?’

She turned a tear-stained face towards him, trying to smile. ‘It’s because I’m happy,’ she whispered. ‘I’m crazy, I guess, but I’ve never been so happy.’

He tried to console her and she stopped crying at last, and they began to joke weakly with each other.

‘I was going to bring my bed-roll in here,’ he said slowly. ‘And leave you the tent.’

Her mouth played over the skin of his arm. ‘Better the way it is,’ she whispered.

After a while he scratched himself. ‘I think I’ve been bitten,’ he said.

She smiled drowsily. ‘Come to think of it,’ she said, ‘so have I.’

The fire had burned low when he lifted himself to his elbow again. Ellie moved in the straw and sat up alongside him, her head against his shoulder, the perfume she used giving the skin above her breasts a warm fragrant lemony smell. They stared at each other’s nakedness, unembarrassed but shocked by the frightening violence of their love-making. There had been nothing else in the world for a time but the flaring darkness and their racing pulses, and they realised that what had happened had been inevitable almost from the day Fagan had died.

‘How’re the fleas?’ he asked at last. ‘Biting?’

She blinked at him, and managed a laugh. ‘Not too deep.’

‘I’m going for a swim in the stream. Wash some of ‘em away. Coming?’

She nodded and they ran together through the dewy grass, carrying their clothes, and began to splash among the rocks. The coolies had arrived by the time they had scrambled out, and Ellie, cooking eggs on the remains of the fire, gave them tins of corned beef to share.

Later, sitting over their plates, she looked up at Ira. Her shirt was unbuttoned so that he could see the cleft between her breasts, and her hair was still wet and curling on her forehead. She looked tranquil and calmer than he’d ever seen her.

‘You’re beautiful,’ Ellie,’ he said, as though he were seeing her for the first time.

She smiled, her face devoid of pain and frustration. ‘I’ve not been called that for a long time,’ she said. ‘Pat tried occasionally, but I guess he didn’t really mean it. Maybe I wasn’t, in fact--not then.’

She bent over the fire, her face flushed, her hair over her eyes, and he realised he’d never seen her looking happier, then she raised her head unexpectedly and caught his eyes on her.

‘Ira,’ she said. ‘When this is all over, when we’ve rebuilt the De Havilland, can we get the hell out? Go somewhere safe and civilised, somewhere I won’t feel scared and homesick and restless.’

She looked unexpectedly young and insecure suddenly, and he smiled and nodded. ‘Of course. We’ll get the company going again with the Avro and the De Havilland.’

She shook her head. ‘Not an airline, Ira,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘My brother was killed flying planes. So was my father and so was Ches and Pat. Not you, too, Ira.’

He gestured. ‘It’s different, Ellie, with an airline. You have time to check things. It won’t happen to me.’

‘Only to the other guy?’

Ira’s expression changed and he nodded slowly.

‘It’s always the other guy it’ll happen to, isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘I guess the other guy’s saying that, too--of you.’

He drew a deep breath, searching for words that wouldn’t hurt. She’d been too often hurt for him to wish more punishment on her. ‘Ellie,’ he said. ‘Like you, there’s only one thing I know and that’s aeroplanes. Before the war I was an articled clerk, and a poor one at that. But I’ve learned engineering now--the hard way, over the fitter’s bench, like Sammy. If it isn’t aeroplanes, it’ll have to be motor cars, and I couldn’t ever go back to motor cars--
not after aeroplanes
’

She sat up, buttoning her shirt, and managed a twisted smile. ‘Maybe it won’t be you, anyway,’ she said briskly. ‘Maybe it’ll be me. I’ll never grow old. I’ll never get the chance.’

‘Ellie, don’t talk like that!‘

She looked up quickly, the smile dying. ‘Why not?’ she said, a tremendous sadness in her words. ‘I’ve got no illusions. Happiness’s short and I can’t afford not to hang on to it when I get it. I haven’t had so goddam much.’

Ira sat for a moment, silent, knowing she was watching him anxiously, then he pushed his plate away. ‘Better get on with the work,’ he said gently. ‘We’ve got to have everything set up at Yaochow before the rains come.’

She watched him climb to his feet, a defeated expression on her face, then she pushed the plates aside and got to her feet, too.

During the morning Ira set the coolies to work building a sled to carry away the wings, and it was almost complete when Sammy returned late in the afternoon. He looked tired and was covered with dust from stoking Heloïse’s boiler.

‘Drove all night,’ he said shortly.

They secured the sound wings and what was sound of the two broken ones on the sled and roped them in position, with straw and strips of fabric to take the worst of the jolts. Then they began to pack the back of the lorry with the splintered struts and spars they’d collected.

‘Heloïse’s tremendous fast,’ Sammy warned with a grin. ‘You’ll have to drive in low gear to keep up.’

At Tsosiehn, Peter Cheng and the students greeted them ecstatically as they clanked on to the field, and Lawn, driven half-silly by loneliness, promptly celebrated their arrival by getting drunk.

With the fighting moving further east, things seemed to have settled to normality again in the city. Gunboats had opened the river once more and steamers were moving beyond the city into Hunan and Hupeh, and Tsu was down near Hwai-Yang with his yamen, too busy settling in to be interested in what happened at Yaochow.

He had not managed to move fast enough to cut off Kwei’s retreat and General Choy’s alliance had been half-hearted enough for him not to support him too obviously, but the defeat seemed to have shaken Kwei’s nerve and Kee came with a story that his Russian advisers had returned home and that Chiang, his boss, had broken with his friends to the north. Everything suddenly seemed to be going Tsu’s way.

The weather shut down almost overnight and the multitudinous roofs of the Chang-an-Chieh Pagoda sticking through the mists were suddenly dripping rainwater into the branches of the cherry trees.

They moved the De Havilland fuselage and the cumbersome wings across the airfield in drenching rain. Lawn had emptied the big barn so they could work in comfort, and with Wang’s family moved to one end, they cleared out the straw and manoeuvred the De Havilland into the steamy interior and began to set up a fitter’s bench. Sammy was bursting with excitement and enthusiasm as he brushed the wet hair from his eyes.

‘We can rig a Weston purchase from them beams, Ira,’ he said, jerking a hand upwards. ‘And use Heloïse outside the door for lifting. It’ll save us a precious lot of trouble, and we can get a few coolies under Chippie Wang sawing up logs and wedges to jack her up.’

By the time they got down to work properly, the weather had broken completely, with the rain pounding down in sheets and the days growing steadily colder.

‘We oughta give the engine an overhaul, too,’ Sammy advised, stretching a piece of canvas in a comer of the barn floor and beginning to dump pistons and valves and nuts and bolts on it. ‘Polish the valve seatings and decoke the cylinder heads. We’ll get a better performance out of her if we do.’ The fuselage seemed to have suffered remarkably little harm, though it looked forlorn and naked without its fabric or its engine as it hung from the great beams of the roof. The plywood round the cockpits hadn’t been much strained and what little damage there was they felt they could repair. The longerons, although they would probably have been condemned by any Royal Aircraft Factory inspector in England, were not broken and seemed sound enough to take the new undercarriage.

‘Oil gauge’s all right,’ Sammy said. ‘But we’ll need a new coil and the revolution indicator’s gone and the wheels and shock absorbers are bust.’

They discussed getting new parts sent out from England or the Middle East and arranged for Ellie to take the steamer to Shanghai to persuade Kowalski to find such spares as propellers, gaskets, pistons, tyres, wheels, high-tension coils, streamlined bracing wire, shock absorbers and, above all, plans.

‘The R.A.F.’s still got one or two D.H.9’s,’ Ira said, his mind roving eagerly over the snippets of news he’d heard on his visit to Shanghai. ‘And the Middle East air forces are still flying Fours, so there should be no difficulty. We’ll have finished rebuilding by the time they arrive and be ready to replace the spare parts.’

He stared at the wings, which they’d stripped of linen and laid out on the floor of the barn. ‘Christ knows how many different pieces of wood there are in those wings,’ he said, suddenly awed by the size of the task they’d set themselves.

‘We can do it,’ Sammy encouraged him. ‘We’ve done it before.’

Ira gave him a wry grin. ‘Nothing as big as this, Sammy.’

Sammy looked at him earnestly. ‘Ira,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking at them wings. Last night. I sat on a box looking at ‘em for hours. They’re intricate and we ain’t got many tools, but we’ve got two good wings to look at.’

‘What’ll we need, Sammy?’

‘Nothing we can’t get sent up from Shanghai. I made a list.’ Sammy fished in his pocket and dragged out a greasy piece of paper. ‘Screws. Millions of ‘em. Chisels. Glue. Waterproofing. Dope. Tape. Thread. We can get the wood around ‘ere, I reckon, if we look hard enough. It looks a lot, Ira, but I reckon we’ll pull it off.’

With the change in the weather, all the armies in China seemed to have retired to the villages and towns for the winter. Even Chiang K’ai-Shek, who had set off from Canton to conquer the north for the Kuomintang, appeared to have called a truce on all fronts for the cold months.

The airfield at Yaochow took on a bleak deserted appearance, the wheel marks and skid tracks filling with water and turning to muddy patches. Outside the farmhouse, a dip in the ground had become a large lake that attracted dozens of water birds from the marshy lands by the river, and little flying was done with the clouds almost down to the ground. When Peter Cheng did get the Avro off the ground, it trailed behind it a cloud of spray whipped up off the wet grass by the propeller and splashed through puddles that lifted over the wings in sheets.

With the rains, China seemed dead. No one was prepared to face the weather merely for the implacable jealousy of the military rivals for power.

The money that Tsu owed had still not turned up and Ira wrote numerous letters demanding payment before they got wind through Cheng that Tsu himself was about to appear, and they dropped the work they were doing on the De Havilland and made their way hastily over to the flying field.

Tsu’s cavalcade included Lao and his wife and son, and the usual assortment of yellow-braided assistants. He seemed preoccupied and distant, and Lao explained that General Kwei, far from accepting his defeat as final, had begun to recover his spirits and had been recruiting reinforcements, and with the aid of General Chiang, was reported to be rearming and re-equipping for the next spring’s campaigning. After his disastrous defeat at the hands of Ira, however, it seemed he was making no plans to rebuild his air force and so, it seemed, neither was General Tsu.

Ira sensed what was coming and he was already three jumps ahead of Lao, his mind moving quickly, making plans, weighing up the pros and cons.

‘General Kwei is acquiring artillery,’ Lao explained earnestly. ‘And the Warlord of the South-West must now direct his finances to prevent him gaining superiority in this field.’

Ira nodded and smiled and Lao seemed relieved that he understood.

‘He feels, therefore,’ he went on, ‘that he must terminate all other contracts. You will be paid off and all debts settled.’

‘When?’

Lao gave a shrug of irritation. ‘When the money arrives from Shanghai.’

Ira glanced at Sammy and saw the sudden excitement in his eyes, as though he could already read Ira’s thoughts. He’d been working with a file on a piece of copper tubing and he stood watching and grinning, his clothes covered with bright metallic flecks. Ellie stood alongside him, taller than Sammy, her slacks covered with oil, sensing that plans were forming under her nose, but, without Sammy’s intuition, unable to guess what they were.

Ira drew a deep breath. ‘What happens to what’s left of the aeroplanes?’ he asked cautiously.

Lao shrugged. ‘The General expects to dispose of them,’ he said.

‘I’ve got a suggestion to make. If the General will make over his aeroplanes to me, we’ll forget about the money he owes us.’

Lao looked suspicious and argued with Tsu for a while before he turned again to Ira.

‘The General says the aeroplanes are worth more than the money he owes,’ he pointed out.

‘I doubt it,’ Ira said shortly. ‘And we’ve been waiting a long time for our money now. However, I’m prepared to forget the interest that’s been growing on it--say at eight per cent--in return for the aeroplanes.’