The Mercenaries (37 page)

When daylight came the place looked like a battlefield, with the skid marks and lorry ruts bleak on the rimed ground. The charred tent, the ruined Fokker and the burnt-out Peugeot were like the wreckage of war, and the great blackened circle where the petrol dump had been, now nothing but melted snow, charred grass, and the split, still-hot fragments of metal that had been drums, looked like a bomb crater. There were scattered blankets everywhere with broken camp beds and chairs and pots and pans.

The ate breakfast silently, sitting on boxes and drinking coffee out of chipped tin mugs. A thousand feet above them, the lowering clouds threatened more sleet. Ira was deep in thought, frowning at a scrap of paper on which he was making calculations. Ellie watched him, her face grey with shock and tension. She’d put a splint on Sammy’s arm and bound it in a sling and he was prowling tirelessly round the aeroplanes now, peering at them lopsidedly, sucking his teeth, his eyes cold and frowning as he made mental calculations and adjustments.

After a while, a thin rain started that changed the snow to slush, and they unloaded one of the tents from the lorry and erected it so they could collect their belongings inside it.

‘We’ve got to get petrol, Sammy,’ Ira said grimly. ‘Even if we emptied the lorries and the cars, there wouldn’t be an hour’s flying for the Four.’

They found a couple of puddles of blood on the grass and the body of a coolie near the sagging framework of the Fokker. He was lying in a hollow in the ground, his face thrust into the earth, the back of his head blown off, the breeze playing with the torn edge of his blue smock.

‘That must be the one I got,’ Sammy said without a trace of compassion in his voice.

‘We’ve got to hide him,’ Ira pointed out. ‘If the students find out, they’ll have the mob back again within an hour.’ They needed time to repair the damage, to sort themselves out, and above all to find petrol, and the last thing they wanted was another visit from the crowd.

Without telling the Chengs or Wang, Ira wedged the body along the mudguard of De Sa’s Ford and drove over to the grave they’d dug the previous day. Working in the rain, he dragged out the body of the coolie the aeroplanes had killed and laid the man Sammy had shot underneath him. As he shovelled the earth back, Sammy watched him, his face grim.

‘What now, Ira?’

He looked like a wizened, starved child with his thin face grey with pain, his eyes dark and exhausted. His stance was lopsided because of his broken arm and Ira’s heart went out to him, for his courage and tenacity and loyalty.

‘Get that wing of yours put right,’ he said. ‘That’s first.’

He siphoned what petrol they could find into the tank of the Crossley and, leaving Ellie with Lawn, pushed Sammy--not very willingly, because he was itching to start work--aboard, and with Peter Cheng as interpreter, drove cautiously into Tsosiehn.

There was a feeling of impending doom over the city and enormous crowds were on the bund, spreading like an ugly fungus along the river’s edge, smothering everything and shouting over the water at the gunboat. The market was a ruin, and the remains of the matshed roofs swung in the breeze, whacking the wooden walls with a soft intermittent clapping. Broken earthenware, water jars, pots and rice bowls were trampled into the dirt and the booths where the metal-workers had laboured, their lemon bodies lit by the furnaces, were wide open and empty in a debris of sheet metal, rusty chain and broken forges.

A few Tsu soldiers in filthy uniforms and umbrellas, straggling through the paper-strewn streets, were helping themselves from the shops they’d broken into. There was one man with a couple of chickens hanging from his belt, and another with a wheelbarrow with a sewing machine on it. At one corner they saw a pigtailed soldier in the distance struggling with an old man who was trying to prevent him dragging off a girl, whose jacket was ripped from her body and hung in tatters round her naked waist. Growing angry, the soldier let the girl go and the old man pulled her away, but the soldier shot him in the back, and as the girl bent over his body, the soldier slung his rifle again, grabbed her by the wrist and wrenched her away between the houses, a harsh dry scream coming from her throat as they disappeared.

They found a Chinese doctor for Sammy, but he made them go to the back of the house, because he was afraid of being seen with them, and his inspection and bandaging were perfunctory and hurried.

‘Ellie did a better job than that,’ Sammy said caustically.

The doctor shrugged. ‘I am busy,’ he said. Typhoid has broken out in the city.’

What he said was clearly true. Bodies were lying in doorways and families were carrying their dead towards the burial grounds, headed by the Rev. Alwyn Rees, his eyes wild with thwarted fervour.

Near the river, Tsu soldiers were shooting prisoners. Four men were kneeling on the ground, hatless, their hands tied behind their backs, and as the car passed, an officer walked along the line, put his revolver to each head in turn and pulled the trigger. As he holstered his weapon, a sergeant called a squad of soldiers to attention and they began to move off after him.

De Sa’s store was a mere heap of smoking timbers and scorched bricks stinking of burned grain. The big shed where he’d kept his petrol, oil and paraffin had disappeared from the face of the earth, and they could see the roofs had been blasted off the houses all around, so that it wasn’t hard to guess what had happened when the mob had fired it. A few stunned-looking householders were moving between the ruins, and a couple of blue-clad bodies lay among the stones.

‘Let’s try his godown by the river,’ Ira suggested, more determined with every hour to get clear of Tsosiehn with what aircraft the mob had left him.

But the warehouse had been broken open, too, and looked as if it had been stripped clean by an army of locusts. There wasn’t a sack of grain, a drum of kerosene or a tin of meat, nothing but an abandoned blue blouse and one of the conical straw hats the coolies wore.

For two hours they moved round the city, their revolvers loose in their holsters, searching for petrol. A bleak sun shone on the wintry streets, deserted factories and lacquer works, and by the river, abused by the yelling students, the naval men were ferrying out groups of apathetic missionaries with their suitcases and bundles and wailing children. For the most part they wore Chinese clothing and several of them had bloody bandages on their heads.

There wasn’t a can of petrol to be bought in the city, and they recognised at once that what had happened in Hwai-Yang was now happening in Tsosiehn. Chiang agents had been at work and what hadn’t been stolen or burned or poured into the gutter had been hidden or smuggled east to Kwei. The student committees had been round all the usual sources, warning and threatening and, at one point, they were accompanied by a horde of chanting youngsters who yelled insults both at Ira and Sammy and at anyone who looked a likely prospect of help.

‘No petrol for foreign devils!’ they screamed. ‘Foreign devils go home!’

They picked up Peter Cheng, whom for his own safety they’d left to forage alone, and were just on the point of giving up in despair when Ira noticed several huge rafts moored on the mud flats down-river, as big as islands and made of logs bound together with twisted bamboo cables, whole villages of wood-and-reed houses erected on them.

‘Peter,’ he said, stopping the tender with a jerk that made Sammy yelp with pain. ‘The raft! ‘

Cheng nodded. ‘Yes, Taipan! Sail to Siang-Chang. Many white people there. Treaty port.’

A spark of hope flared in Ira’s breast. He jerked a hand at the raft. ‘Will they take
us?’
The other two stared at him, startled, then Cheng’s face broke into a wide smile.

‘We have money, Taipan. Fire melt money. Money melt raft-boss’s heart. They will take us.’

6

Red-eyed with lack of sleep, grimy with grease and oil, his fingers bleeding from wrenching at spanners, Ira watched Jimmy Cheng make the last lashings as they fastened the tail of the stripped and wingless Avro across the dropboard of the thirty-hundredweight. The De Havilland stood nearby, lashed to the trailer of De Sa’s traction engine. Stripping her after all the work they’d put in on her had almost broken their hearts.

‘Well, this is it,’ Ira said grimly. ‘With a bit of luck, we ought to make it.’

Sammy looked up from where he crouched on a box, and nodded, too exhausted to reply. His face was drawn with strain and he hugged his injured arm to his chest with trembling fingers. All night, refusing help, he had struggled one-handed with spanners and wrenches, not uttering a word of complaint or a moan of despair, simply clamping his lips tighter, even in the final moment of desperation when the always-uncertain Crossley had finally given up the ghost at the most inconvenient moment of its career, so that they had had to off-load it and re-distribute everything just when they’d believed they’d finished.

Ellie stood nearby as Ira climbed into the traction engine’s cab, and he could see her fighting back all the warnings she was wanting to give him. Deliberately, he made his farewell brief.

‘So long, Ellie,’ he said. ‘Back for supper.’

She managed a shaky smile but made no reply and he waved to Wang and Peter Cheng on the trailer and released the brake.

Tsosiehn had grown quieter by the time they clanked past its fringes towards the river. The mobs were still chanting up and down the bund by the pagoda, throwing rocks and filth at the stony-faced sailors pushing the missionaries into the sampans, but the log raft lay on the mud-flats in a muddy loop of the river just outside the city, its owner a diminutive Szechwanese with an independent turn of mind, to whom, money was worth more than all the ideologies offered by the students a mile away along the river bank.

The children from the raft poured ashore as Heloïse hissed and snorted towards them, running alongside, cheering and shouting and screaming with delight, and the raft-boss’s small face wrinkled as he welcomed them, surrounded by yelling dogs and excited women, his little goatee beard jiggling as he offered them the hospitality of his command.

Aided by the raft boss’s sons, they unhitched the aeroplanes and began to prepare a ramp for them down the slope from the roadway to the mud flats. With spades, they dug channels for the wheels, then fed a rope through a block attached by a wire strop to one of the trees growing at the top of the bank and led it back to Heloïse. Fortunately, the mob was too occupied further along the river, waving Chiang flags and shouting insults at the European refugees, to notice their preparations, and only a few curious coolies, uninterested in politics, turned up to watch. Flourishing money, Ira immediately set them to work and by the late afternoon, they had the ramp ready and a mat of reeds and rushes laid along the mud to the planks they had stretched across to the raft.

Using Heloïse as a brake, they lowered the Avro just as darkness began to fall and got it aboard the raft in record time. The De Havilland followed immediately, nose first, its tail secured by the rope and guided by a horde of chattering coolies. Darkness had fallen by this time and they were working by the flaring light of rush torches held by children from the raft. The fires were still burning in Tsosiehn and Ira was looking over his shoulder all the time, in the direction of Yaochow waiting for the glow there that would tell him that the mob had invaded the airfield again.

In their haste to get the De Havilland aboard the raft, the coolies were too enthusiastic and bounced it down the bank too fast so that a great rent was torn in the fabric against the tree and a longeron strut was broken, but, urged on by Ira, they manhandled her across the mats and on to the raft and, draping tarpaulins over her, covered any exposed parts with sacks and reeds. Fishing out a handful of Shanghai dollars, Ira paid the coolies, warning them he was returning the following day, then, almost falling asleep at the controls, he clanked back with Wang and Peter Cheng to Yaochow.

Sammy was waiting, drawn-faced and nervous.

‘All right, so far, Ira,’ he said.

The wind had grown bitterly cold while they’d been away, and little flurries of snow and rain kept falling, but while Ellie made coffee, they began to assemble the sled they’d used to salvage the De Havilland from Hakau and load the dismantled wings. Because of the shortage of rope, they had to strap them in place with wire and lashings made of rushes fashioned by Wang.

‘We’ll just have to chance it,’ Ira said as they wolfed cold corned beef and coffee. ‘If anything’s broken it’ll have to stay broken for the time being.’

As dawn was breaking, they dragged the De Havilland’s wings to the river bank and stored them among the reeds, and went back for the Avro’s, and finally with the field once more a bare patch of ground littered with straw and blown paper, they took their last look round. The charred Peugeot sagged against the old farmhouse that had been their headquarters for so long, with the Fokker, a mere skeleton of spars now, minus its engine and anything they could use or sell. The Crossley, clearly never likely to move again, stood with its doors open, the engine stripped of anything of value.

They packed the last of the spares into the remaining crates and grabbed up every scrap of equipment they could possibly use--even the Peking rug from the farmhouse--and stuffed it into any available comer they could find on the lorry.

Sammy tossed the coffee pot aboard with a twisted grin. ‘We’ll still need coffee,’ he said.

The exhausted little cavalcade left the field in the middle of the afternoon, mud-covered, greasy and hungry, Sammy muttering softly to himself as he crouched over his sling, Ellie alongside him, her eyes dark-ringed with weariness but excited to be leaving and fussing over his needs. Heloïse led, with the wings of the Avro dragging behind, followed by the lorry loaded with everything they possessed, and the old Ford De Sa had left, towing the generator. Ira heaved a sigh of relief as they bumped cautiously on to the dirt road from the field.

They still had their airline.