The Mercenaries (15 page)

‘Here we go,’ he shouted. ‘We’re going down. Touch wood, Sammy. There’s plenty around you.’

They began their slow float downwards, the throttle back, the machine making a soft rustling sound as it sailed through the air. With the utmost gentleness, expecting the Farman to drop to pieces at any moment, Ira pulled back the handlebars, treading uncertainly on the pedals to keep the nose into wind. The front elevator rose and the noise of the wind through the wires died. Sammy was staring ahead, still hypnotised, then from directly underneath came a reassuring rumbling sound and the machine lurched. Fragments of grass flew over the lower wing as the machine came to a stop, wires twanging, the wings seeming to sag with relief.

Wang was capering and dancing with glee and giving the thumbs-up sign he’d picked up from Sammy. ‘Ding hao, Peng Ah-Lun! You fly!’

Ellie came running towards them, her fair hair blowing, her face vital with excitement. ‘You did it, Ira,’ she screamed, laughing with pleasure and flinging her arms round him as he jumped down. ‘You flew the goddam thing! ‘

‘Well’--Ira was grinning with the sheer joy of achievement --’we’ve got one of their aeroplanes to teach ‘em on at last. The Avro makes two and the Fokker three. If we can get a second seat in the Albatros and the Aviatik off Yang we’re in business.’

As they walked back, chattering noisily, to where the pupil-pilots were chirruping and dancing with excitement by the tables, they saw Captain Yang’s machine being pushed out. Yang himself followed, dressed in skin-tight breeches, leather coat and helmet decorated with ribbon streamers.

Sammy stopped dead. ‘Oh, Gawd,’ he said. ‘Who’s he think he is? Richthofen?’

Yang came towards them, his head up, studying the sky. ‘Not much bite in the air today,’ he said as he passed. This climate, I guess.’

Sammy gaped at him and then at Ira. Yang was heading towards the Aviatik in a strut-like walk.

‘I think our intrepid birdman’s actually going to take off,’ he said.

Yang was studying the sky again, under the adoring gaze of the Chinese pupils, sniffing the air like a gundog, so that Ira almost expected him to snatch a handful and test it between finger and thumb.

The clouds towards the east were building up again and the sky was full of cumulus as the Aviatik’s engine was started up with an uncertain popping and banging and clouds of blue smoke. Yang climbed into the cockpit and began to wave to the pupils to remove the chocks.

‘In a hurry, isn’t he, Ira?’ Sammy asked. ‘She’s hardly warm. And she’s rigged like a circus tent.’

Ira was watching with narrowed eyes. He’d seen men like Yang before, self-satisfied young men who knew remarkably little, showing off before eager young men who knew nothing. ‘I think Captain Yang’s going to show us a thing or two,’ he said, indicating the gaping pupils. ‘We’ve stolen his thunder a bit since we arrived.’

The Aviatik was lumbering into wind now, past the old Maurice Farman which almost disintegrated in the propeller blast as the Aviatik’s tail swung. There was only a short pause, then Yang opened the throttle, taking off obliquely towards the sheds, and the machine rose immediately and began to climb.

Sammy was chewing a piece of grass. ‘Too steep,’ he said critically. ‘And his engine sounds like a bag of bloody nails, man.’

The Aviatik circled and Yang waved importantly to the pupils as he buzzed over their heads fifty feet up, heading towards the cloud banks. Against the sun, the machine was difficult to see, and even as they shaded their eyes, they heard the engine splutter, and the roar of the exhaust fade into a broken clattering. The nose of the machine dropped sickeningly.

‘Don’t turn back, you fool!’ Ira roared instinctively.

Ahead of Yang there was a loop of the river and a few broken fields, but Yang had been eager to show off his prowess and the thought of a crash-landing after such a striking take-off obviously never entered his head.

The sun glowed through the translucent wings as the old machine turned down-wind, held course for an instant, then made another short flat turn. As it came towards the sheds, however, the engine was missing badly and Yang was already losing flying speed and stalling even as he banked for his final run-in.

The nose went down with a lurch in the first turn of a spin and the machine’s wing caught the edge of the shed. They saw fragments fly off in erratic arcs, then the engine caught again, and for a second it gave a scream of terror as the Aviatik disappeared, then it died in a series of diminishing pops followed by a rending crash.

There was a stunned silence and even the birds seemed to stop singing, then Ira was running as hard as he could, with Sammy, Ellie and all the Chinese following in a long string and Lawn lumbering along in the rear. As they rounded the shed, they saw the Aviatik spread on the ground, steam coming from the engine that had fallen clear of its housing, a mass of splintered spruce and shreds of yellow fabric. Yang was still in the cockpit and two or three coolies working nearby had reached him and were leaning over him when a sly flicker of flame and smoke started beneath the fuselage. With a roar a great flower of red burst from the split petrol tank and the coolies flopped back on the ground, screaming and beating at their blazing clothes.

As the flames reached Yang, he seemed to try to free himself but he didn’t move from the cockpit. There were no extinguishers, no axes, nothing to pull away the wreckage, not even an ambulance. The breeze was blowing the flames into the cockpit and, still moving from time to time, he was roasted to death before their eyes.

‘My God! ‘ Ellie’s face was ashen and Ira put an arm round her shoulders to turn her away.

‘Poor bastard,’ she whispered, her face buried in his jacket. Sammy’s epitaph was longer but more to the point. ‘You shouldn’t never turn back,’ he said in a fiat voice. ‘Not if your engine cuts on take-off. It says so in the book.’

3

They were still shovelling up Yang’s remains when Ira and Lieutenant Kee, performing the doleful task of packing up his possessions, came across his log book. It showed only fourteen hours’ flying time, including instruction.

Without waiting to allow anyone to get an attack of nerves, they started work at once, but the perplexities of horizon, side-slip and engine torque were beyond the powers of Kee to interpret and even with a blackboard it was virtually impossible to explain thrust, lift and angles of attack. It seemed wiser simply to push the youngsters into the air as quickly as possible in the Avro or the Farman and hope that some of them had the same instinct for flying as Sammy, who had learned to manoeuvre an aeroplane long before he’d ever opened a flying manual.

The first flights, to show them how to keep straight and hold the nose steady, did not achieve much, however, and one pupil, clearly deciding he wasn’t fitted by temperament for the new element after all, left immediately on landing and was never seen again. Even on bright days the Chinese seemed to find it hard to keep their heads and on grey days the absence of a clear horizon threw them into a panic. The idea of putting on rudder to fly straight because of the twist of the rotary engine was beyond their grasp and they continued to clutch to them in flight the instruction to hold the stick back while taxying as if it were set down in the writings of Confucius, so that whenever Ira took his hand off the dual control column it went back in the grip of the pupil until the machine was in danger of standing on its tail.

It was quite impossible to get his instructions across without an interpreter and explaining bank and stall was utterly beyond him. With the same Chinese word meaning half a dozen things from a pig to a prayer, according to tone, it was difficult to put over the complicated instructions needed for flying. While the few words he had picked up and the pidgin they all used were enough to get the coolies to do menial tasks on the ground, they were useless for teaching aeroplane handling and he could only throttle back and shout out the few instructions the Chinese had learned by heart.

With most of the pupils even this seemed to go in at one ear and out at the other and he had to keep landing, explaining the difficulties to Lieutenant Kee, who passed them laboriously on to the pupil, and then take off once more and do it all over again. On the second trip, the pupil usually did the opposite of what he’d done before and an inbred Oriental stubbornness seemed to prevent them from progressing. More than once, with the machine on the point of stall, Ira found the controls clutched in a state of panic in the other cockpit and had to hammer on the fuselage and shout as he kicked at the rudder bar and heaved at the joystick to stop them from killing themselves.

Although two very battered Peugeots that looked on their last legs and a thirty-hundredweight Peerless lorry that had a tendency to cast its drive-chain above a speed of ten miles an hour arrived, as Lao had promised, they were still desperately short of equipment. Nevertheless, riding to the field in the morning in a car was a great improvement on the shaggy ponies they’d obtained for themselves, which were bad-tempered and short in stride and, with the long-gowned attendant who looked after them, somehow never quite seemed the correct form of transport for twentieth-century aviators, though they had often been useful for wild races through the streets from the bars at night with cheering coolies looking on from the sidewalks. Twice the excitable Sammy had ended, shedding bottles and suddenly sobered, in the deep dry moat near the city walls, once on his own and once with his pony.

The weather remained poor and, in addition, petrol was in such short supply, flights had to be cut to a minimum; and, plagued by language difficulties, mechanical and structural failures and a still heart-breaking shortage of spare parts, the training programme limped along in sporadic fits and starts, the field at one moment a hive of activity, the next a waste land with the ageing machines all grounded with dead engines and the pupils trying to take an interest in lectures they didn’t understand. Only Ellie’s pupil, the English-speaking Peter Cheng, looked promising.

It was a pathetic achievement after all their efforts, but only to be expected with the difficulties they had faced. Sitting with a mug of weak Chinese tea in one of the huts, waiting for the showers and a rash of defective valve springs to die out, Ira reviewed the past weeks, trying to find a faint spark of hope

There wasn’t much to be proud of, though none of them had had much rest and there had been times when he and Sammy in particular had not left the field for days.

‘We’ve got to get these kids off on their own soon,’ he said. ‘Otherwise we’ll never have ‘em able to shoot down Kwei’s balloon.’

‘Let’s you and me take the Avro up, Ira,’ Sammy suggested cheerfully. ‘And do the job for ‘em. I’ve got a couple of them old guns working now. I can strengthen the cockpit with a piece of plywood and make a cradle and sockets for one of ‘em with iron piping.’

Ira grinned at his enthusiasm. ‘You don’t know the first damn thing about air-firing.’

‘Soon learn.’

Ellie looked at Sammy with an expression of affection and warmth. When she didn’t realise they were watching, they had often caught her staring at them with an interested, concerned gaze that was still a little puzzled.

‘Maybe she’s never seen anybody work hard,’ Sammy had suggested. ‘Fagan never does, that’s a fact.’

Without Fagan near her to fret her with his thoughtlessness and irresponsibility, the tautness had gone from Ellie’s face. The wide curling mouth had begun to smile more and the little crease of strain had disappeared from between her brows.

But although Fagan’s absence had reduced the tension and the quarrelling, their problems hadn’t diminished because it was suddenly impossible to get fresh supplies of petrol in Hwai-Yang and the stocks that Kowalski had laid in ahead of them were falling lower all the time. The Chinese compradores along the bund were all smiles and gestures, but they made no promises of producing more.

‘No petlol, mastah,’ they insisted. ‘Velly difficult. All come in dlums. Student double in south. Junks not sail.’

It was true there had been one or two sporadic outbreaks of shouting along the bund, even in Hwai-Yang, and the mat-shed roofing of the market had been set on fire, so that they had been treated to the spectacle of a company of Tsu’s troops clad in brass firemen’s helmets marching towards the blaze in style, swinging their arms and singing to a military band that was trying to play ‘Colonel Bogey’ in a braying cacophony of sound. The bucket chain they had set up, however, had become disorganised so that the full buckets had returned to the river and the empty ones to the fire, but they had seemed satisfied with their efforts and had marched away, grinning and boasting, and the demonstrations had proved to be nothing much--certainly nothing to cause river traffic to stop--and the bland inability to produce petrol only made Lao’s insistent demands for progress more irksome.

He seemed to be at the airfield every day, bumping and rattling in his car towards the hangars and demanding reports and insisting that time was growing short, his handsome Manchu face tired and worried.

‘Tsu’s getting nervous,’ Sammy said knowledgeably. ‘Kwei’s on the warpath.’

They turned on him at once. He always seemed to be a fountain of information that was denied to everybody else, full of news and snippets of interest that he could have obtained from no one but the coolies.

‘Who says he’s on the warpath?’ Ellie demanded.

Sammy shrugged ‘People,’ he said. ‘Picked it up. Peter Cheng, Mei-Mei, Chippy Wang, the coolies.’

While everyone else in China seemed to be suffering from uncertainty and frustration, Sammy appeared to be flourishing. He had found four steel-studded solid tyres in a godown by the river and had got the old Crossley working at last--though it was still so unreliable they couldn’t send it far beyond the field--and with the help of Peter Cheng had actually begun to get movement into more than one of the aged engines. It seemed possible, in fact, that eventually the Parasol might be flying alongside the Farman Longhorn.