American Front (51 page)

“You have less faith in my card-playing than I do, and I didn’t think that was possible,” Stone said. He whacked the pilot on the shoulder with a length of rubber tubing to which a cheap tin funnel had been attached. “Stick this up to your ear and let’s see how it does.”

The rubber tubing was of the sort that ran from the speedometer to the pitot tube out at the far end of the wing. Moss undid the funnel and stuck it through one ear hole of his flying helmet, then fixed it to the tube again. Stone tossed him another length of rubber tubing with funnel. That one Moss left in his lap; his observer would have the other end pressed to one ear.

Stone’s voice sounded metallically in his ear: “Can you hear me all right?”

Moss spoke into the funnel of the second tube: “Yeah, sure, down here when it’s quiet. How we’ll do at eight thousand feet with the engine going is liable to be a different ball of wax.” He chuckled. “This isn’t a whole hell of a lot fancier than tying a couple of tin cans to a string, the way we did when we were kids.”

“Sure isn’t,” Stone agreed. “They don’t pay off for looks, though, not in this man’s army they don’t. If we can make it work, somebody else’ll make it pretty, sooner or later.”

The groundcrew men came out to help them get the two-seater started. Lefty grinned through gibes about bulges in his trousers that had more to do with his financial endowments than his masculine ones. He spun the prop. The Wright’s motor buzzed to life at once.

Tachometer, gasoline gauge, gasoline-flow indicator, gasoline feed system pressure indicator, oil gauge, oil-pressure gauge, radiator temperature indicator—all the instruments were good. Moss waved to the groundcrew men. Byron and another mechanic, a fellow named Edwin, pulled the chocks away from the wheels. Moss advanced the throttle. The Wright 17 bounced down the airstrip. After enough bounces, it didn’t come back to earth.

Percy Stone’s voice sounded in his ear: “Can you hear me?”

He shifted the other tube to his mouth. “I sure can. Can you hear me?” When the observer assured him he could, Moss went on, “Say, this is great. We can really talk to each other now.” Percy Stone promptly started singing “America the Beautiful.” Moss made a hasty amendment: “Maybe it’s not so great after all.”

Both young men laughed, pleased with their ingenuity. More seriously now, Stone said, “We have to spread the word about this. Biggest problem two-seaters have is that the pilot and observer can’t talk back and forth.”

“I’ve seen that with us working together,” Moss agreed. “Now that we know pitot tubing makes a good speaking tube, we could come up with better earpieces and mouthpieces than these funnels, I bet. Playing with them makes me feel like I’m home from school on summer vacation.”

“That’s not bad,” Stone said. “Better than thinking about this like it is school, anyway. If you flunk here, they don’t make you take the class over. You get expelled—for good.”

“Yeah,” Moss said; it wasn’t anything on which he cared to dwell. He peered ahead. “Front’s coming up. Get ready for some hate.”

Land over which the American and Canadian armies had already fought was barren, chewed to shreds, as if an insane giant had gnawed on it for a while and then, deciding it wasn’t to his taste, spit it out again. Over the front itself, smoke and dust rose high into the air, a legacy of the shelling the two sides kept trading. Percy Stone said, “You’d think we’d have fired enough shells by now to kill all the Canadians there are, by hitting them over the head if no other way.”

“Don’t I wish we had,” Moss said, “them and the Englishmen both.” British reinforcements for the dominion hadn’t come in any great numbers, but the ones who had come had stiffened the Canucks’ will to keep fighting in spite of being outnumbered and outgunned by the USA. And, in spite of being outnumbered and outgunned, the Canadians were a long way from out for the count.

As soon as the Wilbur flew over the front, the Canucks proved that. They gave the American aeroplane all the hate anyone could want. Black puffs of smoke filled the sky all around the Wright machine. The ones that burst close sounded like big, mean dogs barking:
waugh! waugh! waugh!

“Nice to know they love us,” Stone said. Moss laughed. He sped up and slowed down and turned now off to the left of his course, now off to the right, all in an effort to keep the gunners down on the ground from putting a lucky shell right where the aeroplane would be. He had never been sure dodging and changing speed did that much to improve the odds, but they couldn’t hurt.

“The front hasn’t moved much for a while,” he said sadly. He’d expected things to pick up with the coming of spring, but it hadn’t happened yet. He knew, from seeing the mud back at the aerodrome, how thick and clinging it was. Trying to advance in it was anything but easy. The Canuck and British offensive south from Winnipeg had started off alarmingly well, but the enemy proved to have no easier time advancing through muddy, broken country than did the Americans.

Once he flew past the reach of American artillery, the towns and rich farmlands of southern Ontario gave him much more attractive things to view than he’d had till then. The farms glowed green with early growth: the Canucks not yet at the front were getting in what crops they could.

Even the farmlands, though, bore scars. Looking down and seeing the same thing, Percy Stone said, “They’re digging in for a long fight.” Digging in the Canadians and British certainly were. Trench lines drew dark brown furrows across green fields every mile or so, with zigzag communication trenches running back from one set to the next. Just as in the Niagara Peninsula, if the U.S. Army blasted them out of one position, they’d fall back to the next and keep on fighting.

“They fight hard, too,” Moss said, giving the foe grudging respect. “I go to bed every night getting down on my knees and thanking God for not making me an infantryman.”

“Ahh-men!” Percy Stone sang out, as if at the end of a hymn. Then, in an entirely different tone of voice, he said, “Jesus!” He amplified that: “Bandit on our tail, and diving on us!”

Moss swung the Wright’s nose up till the aeroplane almost stalled, then rolled hard to the right, trying to slip away from the pursuer he hadn’t seen. Fear and excitement ran through his body, a jolt stronger than 151-proof rum. The rum wouldn’t kill you, even if, come the next morning, you wished it had. The enemy, though—

He thanked God for the speaking tube. Without it, Stone would have had the devil’s own time warning him they had company in the sky. They weren’t supposed to have had company; the enemy’s aeroplane force was supposed to have been so beaten down, one-aeroplane missions were allowed again. Like a lot of things that were supposed to have happened, that one hadn’t.

He gave the aeroplane full throttle, swinging through a quick circle in the sky to try and get on the foe’s tail instead of the other way round. Acceleration and centrifugal force threw him around in the cockpit.

Halfway through the turn, he got his first glimpse of the enemy bus: an Avro, an aeroplane whose performance closely matched the Wilbur’s. The Canadian pilot—or maybe, for all Moss knew, he was an Englishman—rolled through a maneuver like his own, so the two flying machines turned away from each other.

Behind him, Percy Stone squeezed off a burst with his machine gun. The Avro’s observer fired back; Moss saw flame burst from the muzzle of the enemy machine gun. Tracers sparked across the open, empty air.

Thwump! Thwump! Thwump!
Bullets punched through fuselage fabric, sounding like flung stones off a tightly stretched awning. Stone’s fire abruptly ceased. “I’m hit!” sounded tinnily in Moss’ car.

He couldn’t answer for a moment; he needed both hands to twist the aeroplane through a roll that had earth and sky twisting dizzily all around him. Where was the Avro? Were more enemy aeroplanes in the sky? With his observer wounded, he couldn’t fight back. He wished again for the Super Hudson he wasn’t flying any more. Of course, had he been in that bus, the bullets might have gone through him, not Stone.

His head swiveled wildly as he leveled off and scooted back toward the American lines. His altimeter was still unwinding; it hadn’t been able to keep up with his dizzying dive. He didn’t need it to tell him he’d shed several thousand feet. His ears ached dully. They’d popped several times in the descent, but, like the altimeter, hadn’t caught up with the rest of him.

He didn’t see any Canucks or limeys. Grabbing the speaking tube, he shouted into it: “Percy! You there? How bad are you?”

“One in the side, one ricocheted off the damn camera and nicked me in the leg,” Stone answered. A moment later, another word dragged from him: “Hurts.”

Moss flew straight and level, sacrificing everything for speed, till tracer bullets zipped past the Wright 17. Then he began dodging and swerving again. You couldn’t outrun a bullet; your best hope was to evade one. Behind him, the observer’s machine gun started chattering. He had no idea how accurately Percy Stone was firing. That he was firing at all seemed a good sign.

But tracers were coming from more than one direction, which, by unpleasant logic, meant he had more than one aeroplane on his tail. That
wasn’t
a good sign. Anything you did to evade one was liable to bring you right under the gun of another.

And then, like angels with flaming swords, a flight of American aeroplanes dove on the Canucks or limeys, who went from pursuers to pursued in seconds. “They’re breaking away.” Stone said. Moss didn’t like how quiet and tired he sounded. He should have been screaming for joy, leaning forward to pound his pilot on the back. Straight and level, that was the answer: get Stone to a sawbones on the double.

Enemy antiaircraft gunners sent up a storm of hate as Moss flew over the front line. He didn’t waste time on evasive action, not now. Odds weren’t so good as if he’d been dodging all over the landscape, but they were still on his side.

He got away with it. “Almost home, Percy,” he said. Stone didn’t answer. Moss looked back over his shoulder. The observer was slumped to one side, his eyes closed. Moss tried to fly even faster, but the Wilbur was already going flat out.

He landed at as high a speed as he could, using the whole airstrip and taxiing to a stop close to the barracks. He was waving for help before the aeroplane stopped rolling. As soon as it did, he scrambled back into the observer’s cockpit.

Blood was everywhere back there: on the walls, on the seat, on the floor, on the camera—and on Percy Stone’s flying togs. Moss yanked back the observer’s sleeve and jabbed his finger down on the inside of Stone’s wrist. He let out a whoop when he felt a pulse.

“Hurry up, dammit!” he shouted. “He’s hurt bad!”

By then the groundcrew were already at the bus. They had a stretcher with them. Lefty helped Moss unbuckle Stone and get his limp weight out of the cockpit and down to the ground. “Can’t let him die,” the mechanic said. “I need his money.” If he was kidding, he was kidding on the square.

He and Byron rushed Stone away. Jonathan Moss looked down at himself. His friend’s blood was on his flight suit, on his boots, on his hands. Wearily, he trudged in to make his report to Captain Franklin. No pictures to develop, not today; Stone had got hit before he had the chance to take any—and the camera looked to be
hors de combat
, too.

Somebody brought him a whiskey. He gulped it down without tasting or feeling it. After what seemed a very long time, the telephone jangled. Lefty got it before Moss could even move from his chair. “Yeah?” the mechanic said, and again: “Yeah?” All right. Good. Thanks.” He hung up, then turned to Moss. “Collapsed lung and he’s lost a lot of blood, but they think he’s gonna pull through.”

“Thank God,” Moss said, and fell asleep where he sat.

Stephen Ramsay sipped coffee from a tin cup, then said, “Captain Lincoln, sir, ain’t this a hell of a war? I’ve been a cavalryman a long time. When we got into Okmulgee here, I didn’t mind fighting like a dragoon, on account of that’s what you got to do when you fight in built-up country. But now they’ve dragooned us into the infantry—and it’s not even the Confederate States infantry. Well, not exactly,” he amended.

“You’re the captain now, Ramsay,” Lincoln said. “I’ll have you remember I’m a colonel these days.” His hand went to his collar. He didn’t wear the three bars of a Confederate captain any more, or the three stars of a Confederate colonel, either. Instead, he had two red costume-jewelry jewels, the newly devised insigne for a colonel in the equally newly devised Creek Nation Army.

Ramsay had shed his sergeant’s stripes, too. He wore one red costume-jewelry jewel on either side of his collar. Both he and Lincoln also had red armbands on the left sleeves of their tunics. Other than that, they, unlike the soldiers they were now commanding, retained ordinary Confederate uniform.

“Captain? Me?” Ramsay snorted. “Doesn’t seem real.” He drank some more coffee. It was hot and strong. Past that, he couldn’t think of anything good to say about it. After swallowing, he went on, “Last time I got paid, though, it was a captain’s money, so I can’t kick about that.”

“Same here—I got a colonel’s money,” Lincoln said. “And we’re earning what they pay us, by God. Do you doubt it?”

“When you put it that way, no sir.” Ramsay laughed a little. “Crazy how things work out, isn’t it? We were the first white soldiers in town, we helped the Creeks throw back the damnyankees, so Chief Fixico figures we’re the ones to turn his braves into real soldiers.” Under his breath, he added, “Stupid damn rank badges, anyone wants to know.”

“I told him the same thing.” Lincoln’s chuckle was wry. “They turned out to be his idea, so we’re stuck with them as long as we do this job.” He shrugged. “I hear tell English officers, when they get hired to bring an Indian maharajah’s militia up to snuff—their kind of Indian, I mean, not ours—they have to wear the native-style uniform, too. It could be worse—they could have put us in war paint and feathers.”

“Creeks don’t seem to go in for that kind of thing much,” Ramsay said. “You look around at this place—the way it was before the fighting started, anyway—and it could be anybody’s town. You wouldn’t know red—uh, Indians—had built it.”