Strong Man

by H. R. F. Keating

  Ascough carried out the preliminaries of his part of the operation in true Keig style, inspecting his men in a way that reminded me forcibly of Keig’s inspection of us before our first battle, giving each man a sharp scrutiny and making sure he knew exactly his part in the general scheme.

  But I wondered watching him—Keig and I had arrived at the quarry in the middle of his inspection—how much he was longing to have every man smartly lined up and to march along the ranks criticizing the angle of the orangey-grey woollen caps which many of our force were now beginning to wear in open imitation of Keig.

  By this time all the ambush Parties for the patrolling scout-cars were, we had heard, in position and everything seemed to be going beautifully. It was five minutes past three—fifty-five minutes before the plan was due to be put into operation.

  Keig went over to talk to Ascough, and I was left with young Alan Duckan, who to my slight annoyance, had tagged along with us on this trip as on so many others. He was sitting cheerfully now on one of the stubby random pillars of stone that had been left jutting up here and there on the floor of the quarry when working had been abandoned. I thought that perhaps I ought to take the opportunity of asking him whether he had heard from his parents at the farm recently, or, my real object, of finding out by implication whether he had written to them.

  But suddenly he interrupted my tentative beginnings.

  ‘What’s that?’ he said sharply.

  ‘What’s what?’ I asked, somewhat irritably.

  ‘A noise.’

  The boy sat there, a little puzzled look on his fresh-complexioned face, his head cocked at an angle under the orangey cap that he had been one of the first to acquire.

  ‘What sort of noise?’ I asked again. ‘I can’t hear anything.’

  ‘A sort of buzzing. In the sky, I think.’

  ‘What do you mean? An insect or something?’

  ‘No, no.’

  He shook his head angrily. He seemed more than perplexed. A sort of premonition flickered up inside me.

  ‘Some sort of motor,’ he said.

  ‘A scout-car?’

  I turned, half ready to run up the steeply sloping side of the quarry, plunge through the bramble thickets and look out, although we should have had ample warning from our advanced guards if anything suspicious had been approaching.

  ‘It sounds as if it’s in the sky,’ Alan said.

  ‘In the sky?’

  Odd as it may seem, aeroplanes were very rare objects over Oceana. Occasionally an airliner on an unusual course might pass high above the long narrow spiny island, and at one time years before there had been talk of building an aerodrome and starting a regular air service to Ireland or perhaps England, but then Mylchraine had taken power and had begun deliberately cultivating the isolation of the island and the weekly steamer had been thought contact enough with the rest of the decadent world.

  Now Alan was staring hard into the clear sky and I automatically turned to stare with him. As I did so I too heard the sound. It was a tiny regular droning. And, of course, I knew at once that it came from the engine of an aeroplane.

  And nor was it the sound of a distant high whining airliner. It was the buzz, less familiar to Oceanan ears, of a petrol-engined light aircraft.

  I ran over to Keig. But he had heard the sound before I reached him.

  ‘It’s maybe Mylchraine’s,’ he said. ‘Get under cover, you men.’

  But this was an order difficult to obey. There was precious little cover in the quarry. All that grew on that dark bluish stone floor were a few tufts of grass. At the edge of the quarry, true, here and there the brambles tumbled down the steeply sloping sides, and as many men as could ran and huddled in their faint shadows. But the majority of us were caught in the open. There were few places where it was possible to get up out of the quarry at all, and at most of these it was only by scrambling on all fours. Some of the men began attempting this, but I thought the dust they scuffled up and their frantic movements were more likely to be spotted from above than if they were to stand stock-still.

  As yet we had none of us seen the plane. In the sharp-sided basin of the quarry it was bound to be out of our line of vision until it was almost on top of us. But we had all heard it, and there could be no doubting what it was now. A light aircraft of some sort was steadily droning its way at a low height across the countryside. And as far as we could tell it was, in fact, making more or less directly for our hiding place.

  ‘Keep still,’ Keig roared. ‘Every man like a stone.’

  It was the best order that could be given in the situation. And it was wonderfully well obeyed. Within seconds every trace of movement died out in the fifty men or so standing in that small steep-sided arena.

  ‘Keep your heads down,’ Keig called.

  More sensible advice. At least there would be no blur of white faces for the pilot to spot as he droned above us.

  And then the plane was there. I twisted my head round cautiously as the noise of its engine suddenly doubled at the point at which it came directly to us unhampered by the sides of the quarry.

  I saw a light high-wing monoplane, swooping round in a low arc. It was a mere club machine, a toy.

  But I realized, standing there, head lowered, nape of the neck exposed, like some penitent awaiting sentence, that for all the machine’s toy-like air it held absolute power over us. Would it be armed, I wondered. Or was it only being used to locate us? One man with a machine-gun in its cabin could practically finish the lot of us off.

  The noise of the engine was abruptly cut to half-volume and we all seemed to realize simultaneously that we were out of view again. Heads were raised. Faces looked grim.

  And then the pitch of the engine-note changed.

  It’s banking, I thought. It’s spotted us, and it’s turning to have another look. Or to open fire.

  ‘Heads down,’ Keig called.

  He did not need to use a Particularly loud voice. In the tense silence in the quarry a whisper almost would have been heard.

  ‘Heads down. He’s maybe not sure of us. If we don’t move, we’ll fool him yet.’

  He sounded masterfully calm. But I knew that, with his gift of swiftly seeing the consequences of things, he must have already been sure his fight against Mylchraine had taken an appalling turn for the worse.

  Now came the jump in engine volume that meant we were in direct line of vision once more.

  And then the answer to my question: would it be armed? It was. And more thoroughly, more terribly, than I had ever guessed. There was a sudden flash of light from somewhere just inside the edge of the quarry, immediately followed by a wild roar of sound.

  I stood with my eyes riveted to the spot it had come from.

  A wide splash of flame was leaping high from the wall and floor of the quarry. Dark, greasy, devouring flame, which turned suddenly into heavy black smoke. By all that was lucky no one had been very near that Particular patch of ground or they would have been enveloped at once in the foul stuff. One or two of the men nearest it were already beating at small blazing patches on their clothing and low flames were biting into the brambles on the quarry lip.

  And now I knew what it was, though I had never seen it before. It was napalm.

  Above us in the sky the plane had gone out of sight. But again I heard that change in engine-note which meant it was banking steeply round to come in for another run.

  ‘Out. Out of the quarry. Out.’

  Keig was yelling like a maniac. And he had need to. The men were gripped by fear. Some of them were shouting, others cursing, some even whimpering.

  In a moment Keig’s yell sent them tearing at the sides of the quarry to get at least into the open where they could run and feel they had some semblance of control over their own destinies. Those few nearest the places where an ascent was at all possible were making some progress, but so many men were attempting to get out at the same time that they were pulling each other down. At other points men were tr
ying desperately to climb the sheer quarry sides, but to do that except with the utmost care and patience was a simple impossibility. And no one dared be patient or careful now, with the engine-note of the little bombing plane getting louder and louder at every instant.

  A few yards away I saw Jack Ascough scrambling up on to one of the round stubby pillars of unquarried rock. I had just time to wonder what on earth he was doing, and then I saw. He had a rifle with him, one of our captured Lee-Enfields, a weapon that must have been familiar to him as his own face from his army days. And he was taking a solid stance on the top of the short pillar and bringing the weapon up to fire. It was pathetic.

  He stood there, an isolated figure with almost all the rest of us trying to get up the walls of the quarry all round, and he had about him something of the look of a stiffly-drawn figure in some small-arms manual. His attitude epitomized correctness: the butt of his rifle was tucked with exactitude into his shoulder, his left hand was gripping the stock firmly in the correct place, the forefinger of the right hand was curled round the trigger inside the guard ready, not to pull, but to squeeze. He was a lesson to every man he had ever drilled in his sergeant days.

  And he was helpless. What harm could a single rifle bullet do to a plane that, for all the oppressiveness with which it had borne down on us, was still keeping to a prudent height above the ground?

  Now it was on us again. I watched it transfixed. I could see through the front of the cabin the black helmet-encased head of the pilot, intent and unmoving. I could not see anyone ready to loose the next consignment of napalm on us. How were they going to do it?

  Through some sort of trap-door in the underside of the plane, I supposed. How did it come? I had no idea. A bomb? Was there a bomb-rack in the plane? Perhaps the pilot was the only person on board.

  Then I heard the crack of Jack Ascough’s rifle. But the plane flew on as if nothing had happened.

  And now came the answer to my frenzied needless questions about how precisely the napalm came down. It came down in a sort of pod-like canister. I saw the black object actually leave the plane. It did indeed come from the underside, and tumbled through the air towards us.

  I had time to calculate that on this occasion the bomber had aimed better. The canister was not going to strike the side of the quarry. It was going to land somewhere in the middle. And with not far short of fifty men still milling round trying to get out it was bound to do terrible damage.

  I buried my head in my arms and waited, hunched and tense as if I was on the point of bursting.

  The flash came and the roar. I sprang to life, ready to flap desperately with my bare hands if any spot of the malignant stuff should fall on me.

  But the black canister had landed some way away. I turned to see just where.

  I shall never forget the sight that met my eyes. Jack Ascough, on his flat-topped stubby rock platform, had been transformed in one instant into a pillar of flames.

  They enveloped him entirely as if a tall thin cone had been dropped over his head and had gone right down to his feet. Even as I watched the dark greasy tongues of fire licked higher, and the rifle, covered with the sticky clinging stuff too, fell away in a separate blazing line of its own.

  And the next moment Keig was beside the little round platform beating at the flames with both hands outstretched. But he could not endure the proximity of that heat. He dropped back curled up in pain.

  For a few instants longer the thin pointed flame-cone stood there alone in triumph. Then it too slowly keeled over and crashed to the ground.

  Above us the plane had banked once more and was coming in for a third run. I blundered my way over to Keig, who was on his knees with one scorched hand under each armpit, and helped him stumbling to the edge of the pit. We stood there together while the third canister landed, again in the middle of the target from which by now everyone had mercifully run clear.

  And that was it. The plane did not bank again. It flew off into the afternoon sunshine, its supplies evidently exhausted. But it had done its work.

  9

  From the moment that that little light aircraft had droned into the sky above us things took an abrupt, almost catastrophic turn for the worse in our affairs. It was acridly ironic that Mylchraine’s panic reaction to our success at the Keepers’ camp should have brought this about. Had he struck back simply with his scout-cars, as we had expected, we should have had a harder time to begin with but, with either guns from Cormode or Fred Quiddie’s improvised weapons, we would have fought our way back to parity before long. Now with Mylchraine equipped in this hysterically obliterating way there was no hope of that.

  We had been lucky that his first air-strike against us had not been a great deal worse. I imagine that the plane must have loaded only three canisters of napalm because this was in the nature of a trial run. Later it carried more, as did the other two machines that Mylchraine had acquired. Had the first taken on its full load that day the core of Keig’s forces might have been wiped out in one afternoon.

  As it was our total casualties were: Ascough killed, Keig burnt on both hands, five other men suffering from burns on various Parts of their bodies. In this light my fingertip injury, already completely healed, was trifling indeed. I seldom noticed it in fact, though the small deformity is still there to this day. I can see it as I write.

  But the damage done to us was not to be measured by our list of casualties. Other strikes followed fast and furious on the first. The two remaining days of fine weather when all three aircraft could roam at will high up above us, nosing down to investigate the slightest suspicious movement, were hell for us, no less. We were reduced at once to dodging about in ones and twos, to pretending to be farm labourers again, to abandoning the small amount of headquarters equipment we had contrived to gather in our palmy days.

  Indeed, with the Keepers sweeping back under their air protection into the territory they had until that day been excluded from, it was only the ending of the unremittingly fine weather that saved us all from capture. Under the cover of merciful cloaky days we were able to hurry back to the mountains where pursuit was difficult and the broken craggy rocks, narrow ravines and shallow caves gave us shelter from above and a breathing space.

  Not that Keig apparently needed time for thought. The very night that our small headquarters group dropped once more thankfully down into that same glen where we had spent our first days in the island some seven months earlier, he knew what we had to do. He made it all sound simple too.

  ‘Mylchraine’s got the whip hand now all right,’ he said. ‘With him able to drop that ungodly stuff of his on us whenever we show our heads we’ll never get at him at all.’

  Fred Quiddie was one of those listening.

  ‘Thanks for making it all look so dandy,’ he commented, with a hollow echo of his usual ebullience.

  But Keig’s newly won, or newly self-permitted, gift for rough humour had deserted him.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘What we’ve got to do is this. We’ve got to destroy that stuff and break up the planes.’

  It went on from there, of course. But this was the nub of his plan. And in a remarkably short time plan had been turned into action. The long and tenuous chain of couriers from the remoter Parts of the island had eventually brought in the piece of information Keig had at once asked for: the planes flew from a field in Mylchraine’s own huge estate of Gilvinneck, a rich slice of wold occupying most of the centre of the island stretching far south. Once Keig knew where to attack he studied such maps as we had and worked out a route down to the area, if route it could be called running as it did where no roads or even tracks existed. Then he selected three of us to go down and destroy the planes and napalm with him—Fred Quiddie, doubtless because we were to use his famous anti-scout-car weapons, a man called Pat Boddaugh, one of our island recruits, a huge burly fellow, taken no doubt because of his sheer strength, and myself.

  Why was I taken? I still find it hard to say. Because Keig wanted me. That
was only the outward shell of the explanation, though certainly I was neither so tough nor so expert a fighter that I would have qualified on those grounds. But why did Keig want me? I never knew. It was not that he consulted me, and certainly not that he confided in me. But he chose me to go, and I went. Naturally.

  The route we had to take was quite simply to go along the chain of mountains that runs like a spine all down the Atlantic coast of Oceana. The mere fact that the hills stand peak jammed against peak, and that at that time of year snow begins to lie on the higher slopes, did not discourage Keig a whit. A way to those killer planes and their stock of napalm lay through the mountains: we would take it.

  Our route measured just sixty miles in a direct line on the map, not such a great distance. But how many miles we had to walk in fact I do not know. We were always either climbing or descending and we were seldom on the direct line of our march. If we were not snaking sideways up a slope to ease the ascent, we were having to make a long hopelessly maddening detour to get round an impassable obstacle like the occasional sheer wall of rock or the more frequent deeply cut mountain stream often uncrossable for miles. And we were ridiculously ill-equipped to be out in the open day and night in that pretty bleak time of year. Oceana’s mountains are no Himalayas, but people have died from exposure in conditions no worse than ours.

  Little wonder then that the sixty miles took us five days to traverse.

  But at last we did reach the edge of the wolds again. And it was as if we had stepped back from killing winter into kindly autumn. There was a smell of woodsmoke lingering in the air and under the mantle of a golden-leaved tree it felt warm.

  We waited till darkness had fully come and then we cautiously pushed forward.

  The scanty reports we had had from unknown sympathizers here in the southerly part of the island proved to be right: conditions were very different. There were no arrogant armoured cars, no hornet-buzzing motor-cycle patrols of Keepers.