Goshawk Squadron (7 page)

“What nonsense,” Rogers said angrily. “Utter nonsense. If that's all you know about cricket, Killion, it's no wonder you failed your exams.”

“Medicine's loss,” Killion said, “is aviation's gain.”

“That's what I like about you, Killion,” Lambert said. “You quit while you were still behind, and it shows.”

Woolley found the adjutant in his tent, drinking Scotch with a truly enormous American.

“Sir, this is Mr. Martin, of the United States Army. He was extremely kind to us last night in Montigny.”

“How do you do?” Woolley shook hands. “I don't understand your American ranks.”

“Stameetcha. That's all right, Major. Just call me Chuck.”

“Dudley promised our friend a flight,” Woodruffe said.

“Dudley's a bloody fool,” Woolley told him. “I'm sorry you've had a wasted journey. My squadron only flies SE5as, and they're all single-seat planes.”

“Oh, well,” said Martin. “Give me enough Scotch and I'll fly home anyway.” The adjutant topped up his glass.

“If I could have a word with you, sir,” he said. They went outside.

“Bad news, I'm afraid,” Woodruffe said. “O'Shea died in the hospital last night. There must have been some hidden brain damage, they think.”

Woolley scratched his face and looked in his fingernails. “Who?” he asked.

“O'Shea. You know, yesterday morning. He went through those trees.”

“I thought you were going to get them chopped down.”

“I am, as soon as—”

“Was that aircraft a complete write-off?”

“No,” Woodruffe said miserably. “Just the wings. The wings were smashed.”

“Oh.” Woolley lost interest.

“I wondered if you intended to write to O'Shea's parents,” the adjutant said.

“Have they written to me?”

Woodruffe set his teeth. “No, sir. But—”

“The hell with them. What d'you say his name was?”

“O'Shea.”

“Never heard of him. Useless goddam pilot, too. Do you have a replacement yet?”

“I wanted to ask you about that. D'you think I should get two?”

“What for?”

“Well … in anticipation, so to speak.”

Woolley stared at him stonily. “Good idea,” he said. “Get three.”

Delaforce came over. Woolley went to meet him. “I'm starting you on combat practice,” he said. “Draw a Very pistol, take off and climb to five thousand feet. I'm going to fly to Montdidier and back. If you can surprise me and shoot a flare so that it falls within fifty feet of my plane, I'll give you a medal. Understand?”

Delaforce couldn't speak for joy. He nodded, saluted, and sprinted away to Stores, to get his pistol. He hadn't felt so wonderful since he got elected Head Boy at school, last year.

After he had flown around for an hour, Delaforce had a sick feeling that Woolley had played a joke on him.

It was not his first misgiving. After twenty minutes Delaforce had developed a sudden doubt about the destination which Woolley had named. Was it Grandvilliers, or was it Montdidier? Perhaps he was patrolling the wrong piece of sky.

Five minutes later Delaforce had convinced himself he was in the right place. Five minutes after that, he began to wonder if the wind had blown him off Woolley's route. He had flown a consistent box pattern, with a slight overlap on one side to compensate for wind-drift. Maybe the wind was stronger than he thought.

Or weaker.

Delaforce thrust the stick forward. He came out of cloud at about eight hundred feet and immediately recognized landmarks. He was a mile or so off course, not enough to make any difference if he kept his eyes open. He climbed hard and won back the mile of drift. It took a long time to reach five
thousand feet again. By the time he'd made it, Delaforce was worrying whether Woolley might have gone overhead while he was down below.

From then on, he searched the sky in both directions. Because he wasn't tall enough to get a good look over the side of the cockpit he flew at a slight angle, one wing dipped. This made one buttock stiff and numb. He reversed his flight pattern and rested on the other cheek. It too became stiff and numb. The other merely stayed numb.

Then Delaforce began to suspect a joke. Woolley thought him too cocksure … Or maybe this was some kind of squadron initiation … If so, it was a feeble rite. And passive jokes didn't sound like Woolley's way of doing things. Then maybe Woolley's plane had given trouble. An important visitor. A phone call.

An SE5a came out of a cloud about a thousand feet below him and a mile behind, heading for Montdidier.

Delaforce swung hard away and climbed, presenting as small an outline as possible. Viewed from either end, an SE was skimpy: just a barrel with thin wings and fins. If he could hide quickly and lie in wait, he could dive on Woolley from above and behind—the hardest angle for a defending pilot to turn his head. Delaforce bounced excitedly in his seat.

He flew behind a bank of cloud and throttled back to just above stalling speed. Woolley had been a mile behind, so he would take well over a minute to catch up. Delaforce loaded the Very pistol.

After a minute and a quarter he couldn't wait. “Right, chaps?” he asked himself. He dropped one wing in a steep side-slip. When he cleared the cloud he was diving almost vertically.

Woolley wasn't there.

Delaforce pulled up quickly and went into a searching circle, looking everywhere. The sky lay bare for two thousand feet below. Delaforce felt cheated. A flicker of black on gray, no more than a wandering eyelash, caught his attention. Half a mile away and climbing straight at him was Woolley's
SE. He'd been seen. Delaforce opened the throttle and roared around in a hard-climbing turn.

Crimson fire bloomed on his right and seemed to leap toward him, trailing smoke, before it curled sharply and dropped away out of sight under his tail plane. He was so astonished that he first looked backward, trying to see what it was; then down, suspecting anti-aircraft fire; and then—too late—up. An SE5a hurtled over the top wing and curved up and away in a celebratory loop, at the top of which it half-rolled and flew complacently on.

It couldn't be Woolley; Woolley was still climbing. It looked like Gabriel. How humiliating, to be scored against by Gabriel! The memory of that hot-red flare made Delaforce flinch and sweat. He must have been blind.

What mattered now was to get Woolley. That mattered more than ever.

Delaforce flew into cloud and turned back toward where he had last seen Woolley. He flew straight and level through the murk while he counted to twenty, and then eased up into daylight.

Gabriel was off to one side, cruising around, so that was all right. Delaforce took out the Very pistol again, and slipped down the side of the cloud, eyes wide open.

Woolley, exasperatingly, was now a thousand feet below, and flying the opposite way. So perhaps he'd already been to Montdidier after all. For the second time, Delaforce pushed the stick forward and leaned the airplane into a dive. The whistling of air became a screaming; the clatter of the engine a bellow. As Woolley's machine came into view through the shimmering arc of the propeller, Delaforce concentrated on nursing the controls toward a precise intersection. There would be only one chance. If he fluffed this, Woolley would never let him get close enough again.

At five hundred feet range he raised the Very pistol and thumbed the safety-catch back. He held his angle, letting Woolley pull away just a bit. He would fire the flare dead ahead and over the top of his own propeller when he was
about four lengths away, and then drop behind him. The flare should fall under Woolley's wing. Three hundred feet.

A sound like tearing canvas made Delaforce grab at the stick: was his SE breaking up? Again the angry crackle. It wasn't his plane. He was being machine-gunned.

Delaforce twisted violently and saw flames spurting from the gun mounted high over the upper wing of yet another SE5a, diving behind him, fifty feet to one side. The pilot signaled, pointing forward. Delaforce recognized him.
That
was Woolley.

He jerked round to see his target looming up fast but now off to one side. Angrily he corrected, bullying his plane over, kicking it for his mistakes, and fired; the flare trailed badly wide: not within a hundred feet; a miss. He pulled out of the dive. Woolley flashed past him, heading for home. Instinctively, Delaforce climbed. Making height gave him something to do: a substitute for success, or competence, or something.

At six thousand feet he found Gabriel, fell in alongside him and fired a shot from his Very pistol. The flare actually went between the wheels and Gabriel dived away in a great hurry. Delaforce took little comfort in the achievement. He had flown very stupidly. He wondered who had been flying the plane which he had missed. Richards, probably.

Woolley was waiting for them when they landed. “A right old cock-up you all made of that,” he said. “Not one of you got near me, and I could have pissed into your cockpits, all three of you, one after the other, and drowned you, which you might say is a wonderful way to go, but it's still a bloody awful waste of government money. What did you think you were doing at five thousand feet?” he asked Delaforce.

“Sir, I was patrolling,” Delaforce said. “That was what you said. I was waiting for you. To intercept you, sir.”

“Who told you to piss about at five thousand? I told you to
get up there.
What you did after that was up to you. You could have come back here and gotten me as I took off. You could have gotten me over Montdidier. You could have hung
around and sneaked up on me as I came in to land. Come to that, you could have walloped one past my nose while I was still on the ground. Couldn't you, you mental pygmy?”

“Yes, sir,” Delaforce said, white and blinking.

“But you didn't, did you? You did exactly what you
thought I wanted
you to do.” He turned to Richards. “I said five thousand feet, so you all flew at five thousand feet, forever. Combat practice, you horseman, is practice for combat. It's not sodding pistols at dawn. Just now, I was your enemy. En-em-y.” Woolley screwed up his face and shut his eyes and took a little stamping, circular walk. “Oh Christ, what words do you understand? You wouldn't know an enemy if he bit you in the ass, you'd think he was a great big affectionate dog …” He heaved a deep breath. “An enemy,” he declared, speaking with tremendous clarity, “is a man … who is trying … to kill you … before you can … see … him.” Woolley stared hard at Gabriel. “Has anybody ever tried to kill you, lawnmower?”

“Only drunkards,” Gabriel replied.

“Why did they fail?”

“I suppose I saw them coming.”

“You didn't see
me
coming, this afternoon.”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“I'm afraid I was concentrating too much on Delaforce. Besides, I didn't expect you.”

“Why not? You expected to attack him, but you weren't prepared to be attacked yourself?”

Gabriel said nothing.

“When nothing happened after an hour, sir,” Richards said, “I rather assumed that combat practice had fallen through, you see, so I went home. That was when I was … well,
dived upon.”

“Do you expect the enemy to stop fighting when you stop fighting?” Woolley asked.

Richards said nothing.

“Every second you are in the air,” Woolley said, “someone is
trying to kill you. If he does it properly you will never know.
You
must look for
him,
because he's always there.” He stared at them, and his black, pouchy eyes were full of anger at their stupid humanitarianism. “God damn it,” he said, “you're murderers turned loose against murderers! Some will come at you head-on with an ax. But the ones that
think,
the good ones, the professionals—they hide behind a tree and stick you through the ribs from behind. They are up there
now.
They go up every day and murder nice chaps like you,” Woolley made
nice chap
sound like a genetic defect.

Gabriel studied him thoughtfully. “Speaking for myself, sir,” he said, “I feel sure that I could have given a better account of myself if I had been aware of the true circumstances.”

Woolley licked his narrow lips. When he spoke, it was in a harsh whisper. “There are no true circumstances in this war,” he said. “There is only what happens.”

“Well, exactly.”

“No, not
exactly,”
Woolley said, “there is no
exactly,
God blast you! You want me to tell you the rules of this tennis club, don't you, and I am trying to make you see that the first rule is to stop looking for any bloody rules. Up there you will live among murderers and victims. Now make up your decent, law-abiding little minds which you want to be.”

Delaforce felt sick. All the excitement of the hunt had turned sour; Woolley made it seem squalid and callous, vicious and cold. Delaforce desperately wanted to rescue something from this shabby summary. “I can see now, sir,” he said, “that I could have gone after you when you were taking off, but I suppose I didn't think of that at the time because I sort of wanted it to be more of a fair fight, you see.”

Woolley grabbed him by the lapels and slammed him hard against the side of Gabriel's plane. His twitching face was thrust so close that Delaforce could smell the Guinness on his breath. “You will never use that word again,” Woolley said thickly. “That is a filthy, obscene, disgusting word and I will not have it used by any man on my squadron. That word disgusts me.”

He let go and turned round and walked away. Outside the adjutant's tent he saw Woodruffe and Chuck Martin. They were still drinking whisky. Woolley went over and took Woodruffe's glass and sipped the Scotch. “Mr. Martin has been telling me about America, sir,” the adjutant said. “It seems that he has done quite a bit of flying himself.”