Goshawk Squadron (6 page)

Woolley waved them in closer. He was flying toward the sun, and the glare off the cloud was painful. Gabriel moved his wingtip behind Woolley's, almost opposite his rudder. Delaforce twitched about, his position never steady. Woolley lost speed fractionally so that the others found themselves of necessity creeping in; then, when he decided they were close enough, he took them down in a dive.

Delaforce's first feeling was relief that they were going home. They had been flying for two hours, and the nervous excitement made him very hungry; he had been sick shortly before takeoff, also from excitement, and now his stomach insisted on food.

Woolley had led them around this stupendous universe of sky as if it were an estate which he had poached all his life. He showed them passing aircraft, often pointing them out
seconds before these tiny flecks became visible to them. He stalked planes through the naked sky, placing his own aircraft where the sun and the angle made them least visible, and closing in with endless, painstaking patience; until the quarry lay below, as shining-innocent and unaware as trout in a clear pool.

Then, when Woolley had made Gabriel and Delaforce understand how all things moved toward a favorable conjunction—height, sun, distance, angle of attack, drift of wind—he would take them right up to that perfect instant and drop on the droning French Nieuport or British two-seater RE8 or whatever it was, in a lethal gathering pounce that could have only one ending; except that he cut it short after a hundred feet and curled away to do it all over again somewhere else. It was fascinating and exhilarating and draining, and Delaforce wanted urgently to get some good food inside himself so that he could go up and do it all again.

Now they plunged through the first layer of cloud into a gray cavern where wisps and flecks floated up like bits of broken barricades. Woolley deepened the dive and waved Gabriel and Delaforce in closer. The brittle clatter of engines merged into a hoarse roar. Each airplane spoke its individual strains and pressures: loose fabric drummed furiously, struts wheezed or ticked, wires whistled. Delaforce sensed a steadily mounting throb which possessed his entire machine: it shivered his limbs. The flimsy obstacles grew bigger, and Woolley started swinging over or under each puffball; or sometimes he banked left and careered round it only to bank right and skid past another. Each decision he delayed until the very end, like a skier gauging the last inch he needed to whip round a rock.

The canyon narrowed, the barricading cloudlets grew, and still Woolley swept on down, skidding and skedaddling like a lunatic. Gabriel and Delaforce hung on, losing him a little more at every turn, but rarely clipping an obstacle, either. The dirty, blank wall at the bottom rushed up, and its gray face began to reveal cracks and hollows. Woolley flew right into it.

Delaforce hunched his shoulders as he smacked into the woolly gloom. At once all sense of speed dissolved, and then all sense of altitude or direction. He was going forward; that was all. The gloom slipped past, muffling his engine and burying his comrades. There was literally nothing he could do. He even closed his eyes and listened to the soft howl of the slipstream. Then he was out in the clear, hard open again, and Woolley was wheeling the dive into a long, slow corkscrew to the right, where a funnel of sky pushed a hole through the murk. He spiraled down the walls of this funnel, losing speed with each turn and flattening the coils until the three aircraft were lazily chasing their trails over a bank of cloud as firm as blancmange. Delaforce laughed aloud at the sheer pleasure of it.

Without warning, Woolley switched off his engine and let the plane slip sideways into the cloud. This caught Gabriel and Delaforce by surprise: he had told them to follow him, but they didn't expect this. They flew another circuit. Delaforce cut his engine and let the plane drop. Gabriel went round once more and followed him.

Delaforce came out of the cloud about three hundred feet above the ground. After the empty oceans, this seemed frighteningly close and definite. He grabbed the plane out of its side-slip and thrust it into a shallow dive. Then he saw that it was the airfield underneath. Down there on his left was Woolley, drifting in for the touchdown. Delaforce felt stupid: what was he doing up here? Hastily he side-slipped again. It never occurred to him to re-start his engine. Woolley hadn't. Delaforce landed as near the old man as he could. Gabriel came in about twenty seconds later.

Delaforce undid his straps. He stretched his legs and arms, and filled his lungs. He put his head back and rubbed his eyes, and luxuriated in doing absolutely nothing for the first time in two hours. Woolley said: “Get your fat ass out of there.” He turned and walked over to Gabriel's machine and spat on the hot exhaust. Gabriel, climbing down, looked at him like a private tutor meeting a difficult child for the first time.

“You piss-proud ponce,” Woolley said. “You drive that miserable sodding airplane around as if you're mowing the bleeding lawn. You
drive
it, you cruel bastard. You get your great horny hands on it and you
drive
it, you son of a bitch. Jesus, I'd hate to be the first woman you climb on top of.”

Gabriel listened carefully. “In what respects did you find my technique faulty?” he asked.

Woolley stared with a kind of weary disgust. “Your bloody technique is word-perfect,” he said bitterly. “It's just that you're sterile, frigid and impotent. You treat this aircraft as if it owes you money.”

Gabriel stood stiffly. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“Take off your gloves,” Woolley ordered. “Roll up your sleeve.”

Gabriel did these actions with a semi-medical air. Woolley took his wrist and felt the pulse. After a moment he let go. “Does flying bore you?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

“Doesn't excite you, does it? I don't suppose you ever get scared up there.”

“One tries to keep a clear head, sir.”

“Good Christ … Don't you ever lose your temper, you bloody fillet?”

“As I said, sir, one tries to stay in control of oneself.”

“Prick!”
Woolley swung his right leg, heavily booted, and swept Gabriel's legs from under him. Gabriel landed hard on his rump, on the frozen ground. Tears of pain came to his eyes. Woolley advanced on him, delivering short, jabbing kicks. Gabriel rolled away, but Woolley went after him, so Gabriel had to roll faster. “You craven little sod!” Woolley bawled. “Don't you have any balls at all?” His boots thudded into Gabriel's ribs. Gabriel grappled, seeking to smother, but Woolley was too strong: the kicks hurt more and more. “Fool! Infant! Coward! Lawnmower!” Woolley shouted. “Gutless bloody lawnmower!” He hounded Gabriel, going after the vulnerable parts of his body.

At last Gabriel lurched to his knees and grabbed Woolley's legs. Woolley pounded him about the head with his fists. Gabriel roared and tried to butt Woolley in the gut. They fell, rolled and punched, and came apart. Gabriel drew back his boot to lash out—and stopped.

Woolley, on his hands and knees, was watching him, looking into his eyes, searching. Gabriel stared back and hated him. Their breath gasped harshly in the cold air. “Did you keep a cool head then, lawnmower?” Woolley panted. “Were you in bloody control of yourself then? That's what you have to do up there. Turn into a bloody assassin! Kill! Understand, you bastard Boy Scout?
Kill.
Only a maniac would do this job, and you're too sane by half. You madden up, lawnmower, before some madman beats you to it, or I'll kill you myself. Understand? Understand?”

Woolley got up. Delaforce was open-mouthed, wide-eyed. “As for you,” Woolley said stonily, “you're putting your gallant little heart and soul into it, aren't you? Start using your tiny brain too, or you'll end up with your lights all over the cockpit floor.”

He trudged off to the marquee where the pilots ate their meals.

Half the squadron was eating lunch when Woolley went in. Dangerfield was reading a letter, Church was staring into space, Lambert was nursing a headache, and Kimberley and Killion were arguing.

“But there's millions of things that have nothing to do with sex,” Kimberley insisted. He was a farmer's son from Derbyshire: sturdy, skeptical, with the rapid, almost stuttering speech of his region. “Coal mines, for instance. Nothing sexy about them, is there? Or … or wood.” He rapped on the table. “Or anything around here. Flying. What's flying have to do with sex?”

“Starting with coal mines,” Killion said. He was twenty; a slightly built, intense-looking man who could have been a very young schoolmaster or a very old schoolboy. In fact, he
had failed his exams after a year as a medical student in a London hospital, and joined the RFC the same day, on impulse. “Here we have man creating, as it were, an opening in Mother Earth. What does he do then? He explores it, testing its limits. Goodness gracious, Kimberley, coal mining is practically an act of rape! You
force an entrance,
my dear chap, in order to reach the
source of all power.
Honestly, I blush at your innocence, I do really.”

“I went spelunking once,” Lambert said. “I never thought of it like that. Awfully mucky down there.”

“That,” said Killion, “only goes to show how much you have idealized and disinfected the act of penetration. If anything, I should say that you were in a worse condition than Kimberley. He has his eyes shut, but you are facing in the wrong direction.”

“You haven't done wood,” Woolley grunted.

“Wood? You seriously ask me to explain the sexuality of wood?” Killion looked at them. Dangerfield stopped reading his letter. “Wood is what trees consist of. Have you never
looked
at a tree?” He stood his knife on end. “Have you never appreciated the thrusting trunk …?”

“God, Killion, you've a mind like … like a …” Kimberley gave up.

“Like a choirboy,” Killion said. “Pure and sensitive and ready for anything.”

“Do flying,” said Lambert. Dangerfield went back to his letter.

“I'll do flying,” Woolley said. He slouched on the table, one hand rubbing his chest, the other forking stew into his thin-lipped mouth. Lambert studied him and saw that it wasn't really the skin that was grubby; it was the cast of the face that was sour. Woolley's expression could never be washed clean.

Woolley pushed his plate away and took a bottle of Guinness from his pocket. “Why is flying like sex?” Gabriel and Delaforce came in and stopped. “Because you get on top and batter away with your weapon until you've won.”

“Then you both go limp,” Killion said. Gabriel and Delaforce sat down.

“That's no good,” Lambert complained. “On that basis you couldn't shoot down two planes in five minutes.”

“Well, can you?” Killion asked.

“Me? No. But other people have.”

“Sex maniacs,” Woolley suggested.

“You
have,” Lambert said.

Woolley said nothing. He drank from the bottle and looked at Kimberley. Kimberley looked at a tent-pole. Dangerfield finished reading his letter and put it away. “I seem to have inherited a farm,” he said.

“What luck!” Kimberley cried. “Where?”

“Somewhere in Cumberland. It belonged to a cousin. He got shot by a sniper last month and it seems I'm the next in line.”

“Wonderful! Congratulations. Cumberland—that's probably sheep. Do you know the place? How big is it?”

“Not the slightest idea.” Dangerfield took out a pocket mirror and scissors, and trimmed his neat black mustache. “I shall sell it, anyway. Sell and be thankful.”

“Church!” Woolley called. “Church, have you had any lunch?”

Church looked up and smiled. His smile turned the corners of his mouth down, as if in self-deprecation. He had been leaning back, arms folded and head down, studying the grass beyond his feet; an attractively ugly little man, well muscled like an amateur jockey. First he smiled at Gabriel, who looked at Woolley. Church then smiled at Woolley and cocked his head a fraction.

“What will you do with the money?” Lambert asked Dangerfield.

“Go to dances, of course. What else is there to do with money?”

“Well …”
Kimberley was appalled. “I knew you were keen on dancing and all that, but to throw away a good farm for the sake of slithering about some stuffy dance-floor—”

Church got up. Dangerfield, who was next to him, feigned surprise. “With me?” he said, lisping. “You want to dance with little me?” Church stood awkwardly, trying to keep his smile steady, and gripped the back of his chair. Dangerfield rose, managing to make his neat figure look almost voluptuous. He took Church by the arms and led him into a hopeless waltz. Chairs went down, mess-waiters grabbed other chairs before Dangerfield could steer Church into them. Near the entrance to the tent Church ducked free and trotted out. He stumbled and fell, and took his time over getting up, and stood swaying. Woolley, his elbow on the table and his head propped against his hand, saw this and said nothing.

Rogers came in, swinging a cricket bat. “Ah, there you are, sir,” he said. “There's someone to see you. An enormous American. Chap we met last night.”

“Nothing to do with me,” Woolley said firmly. “Shove him on to Woody.”

“I have, sir.
He
wants to see you, too.”

“What about?”

“More pilots, I think.”

Woolley finished his Guinness and got up. “See me in ten minutes,” he told Delaforce. He went out. Delaforce tried to appear normal but he was so excited he could hardly eat.

Rogers glanced at the food on the table and moved away. “Funny, I don't feel very hungry,” he said. He played an imaginary shot with his cricket bat. Kimberley watched.

“Find something sexual in cricket, Killion,” he challenged.

Killion glanced at Rogers, who was now holding the bat low and facing an imaginary bowler. “Observe how the handle seems to emerge from the groin,” he said. “Then look at the remarkable length of the bat. Did you ever see such boasting?”