The Challenging Heights

by Max Hennessy

  ‘Good luck, sir.’

  Assisted by the headman’s personal bodyguard, huge men armed to the teeth with rifles and swords, their chests draped with ammunition belts, they pushed the Bristol up the slope, then with the aid of an English-speaking Kurd, Dicken explained exactly what he wanted and left it to Babington to give the word when he raised his hand.

  Starting the engine, he revved it until he was satisfied then sat for a while in the cockpit, thinking of the down-draughts along the slopes when the wind was coming over the ridges, and the fact that a DH9a had recently flown into a ridge in very similar circumstances while flying to Sulamainiya and Halebja. If he got the aeroplane over and safely back to its base, there’d be a few congratulations and then the incident would be forgotten because it was the sort of thing that was being done every other week. If on the other hand he failed and hit the ridge and was killed, he’d be forgotten equally quickly, but his epitaph would be nothing more than ‘Stupid bugger. He should have dismantled the engine and set fire to the airframe, which is only wood and canvas anyway.’

  Before he could depress himself further, he opened the throttle, noticing as he did so that the Kurds had all moved down the slope and were waiting close to the spot where they expected him to hit the hill. Raising his hand, over the roar of the engine he heard Babington shout as he yanked away the chocks and the men holding down the tail in the blast from the propeller, their robes whipped tight against their bodies, released their holds and fell backwards. One of them, slower than the rest, was carried forward as the aeroplane began to move but, ducking under the moving wing, Babington grabbed his leg and yanked him off so that they rolled together in the dust as the machine gathered speed.

  The tail lifted at once and the Bristol took up its flying attitude. Its speed rose quickly and, immediately, praying that the petrol wouldn’t let him down, Dicken pulled back the stick and lifted the machine off the ground in a steep climbing turn. The ridge of hills in front approached at alarming speed but, lightened of all its extras, the Bristol soared magnificently and he scraped over the top with only a few feet to spare.

  Circling, he slipped down to the landing ground alongside the Vernons and within an hour Babington appeared, riding on a donkey and towing a string of other donkeys carrying the wireless, spare equipment, guns and ammunition.

  That afternoon a squadron of armoured cars arrived, bringing spares and a corporal rigger and two men, who started at once to replace the chair-leg tail-skid and the broken fuselage members. By this time, the situation in Jehuddin was under control. Its injured, sick and old were being moved and the town was safe, and the army was on the move again.

  By now Dicken and Babington were shaving with borrowed razors and living on a permanent diet of goat. Their stay had done a lot of good because hostile tribesmen had suddenly become friendly and were swearing eternal allegiance to King George. The repairs to the Bristol had just been completed when a wireless message arrived, indicating that the Wahabi had been driven into the town of Suqeiwiya in the north-eastern corner of the country. The army was in a position either to finish them off or drive them over the border into Persia, and Dicken was ordered to fill up with fresh fuel brought by the Vernons and rendezvous with another Bristol south of Katchi. He was in position when the second Bristol arrived and he identified it at once as Hatto’s. As they formed up on each other and headed north-east, the searching column of Feisal’s army was strung across the plain in groups of camels, horses and vehicles.

  They found the Wahabi heading down a narrow wadi, hundreds of men filling the narrow gorge in a dense mass of camels, and Hatto left Dicken to keep an eye on them while he returned to the plain to drop a message to the advancing column. The camels, the tassels of their headropes swinging, the riders clutching their rifles, their red and green banners fluttering above them, were moving at a racing trot, half-obscured by a cloud of dust. As Dicken flew over them, he saw the riders lifting their rifles. Most of the firing was wild, but a flag of canvas lifted in the wing to show that some of them were on target.

  As the other machine reappeared, Hatto pointed downwards and they dived at the head of the column. Hatto’s bombs exploded in bright flashes that flung up small yellow puffballs like melting cream buns. Camels went down in a crumpling crash, legs flying, long necks flailing, their riders hurled under the feet of the following animals. With the head of the racing column disrupted, the rest wavered and tried to turn back, only to become a more closely-packed target as Dicken arrived. As the bombs exploded, the tribesmen milled around, then broke free and fled towards the open plain where the armoured cars of Feisal’s army were forging ahead. As the machine guns started, more camels went down and the desert was filled with running men and riderless animals.

  As they circled over Suqeiwiya well ahead of the army, a strong wind was blowing from the east, sweeping down on the town from a low range of hills that lay behind it, to send the dust flying in clouds with uprooted bushes and bundles of torn grass. Beyond the first range of hills, a second lifted up its peaks, and as they turned over them they hit an area of vicious turbulence.

  Hatto’s machine was snatched by the currents to lift two hundred feet then drop again so swiftly it seemed the wings would be torn off. A moment later, Dicken’s machine was flung skywards as if it were no weightier than a moth. The first jolt was not severe but it was enough to make everything on the machine rattle and clatter. The next jolt was harder, then they began to come like the blows of giant fists to press them against their safety belts and plummet them downwards so that the altimeter unwound crazily and the airspeed increased to an unbelievable figure before flinging them upwards again, draining the blood from their brains and making their arms leaden. All the time the plane was shuddering and swinging with an exhaustingly violent motion that put a strain on muscles and nerves and set the wires twanging and humming. Babington was being violently sick over the side of the rear cockpit and there seemed no relief from the torment when, below them, Dicken saw a small open space near the town, which seemed empty of Kerim Fatah Agha’s men. Moving alongside Hatto, he gestured to indicate they should land. Even the chance of meeting a few of Kerim’s followers was preferable to sitting up above the town in the angry sky.

  Landing one after the other, they waited at the end of the field, their engines running in case they had to make a hurried take-off, but after a while the motors began to boil and they had to switch off, Babington and the other wireless operator, still green after the circling over the town, staying by the Lewis guns. By this time, a few people had begun to appear and, as they increased in numbers, Hatto flourished his revolver and indicated that they should not approach any nearer.

  After a while, five old men arrived. One of them stopped in front of Hatto and began to make a speech. From the few words they had learned, they gathered that Kerim Fatah Agha had vanished and that the old men were anxious to hand over the town. Cigarettes were exchanged and, as someone lit a fire, coffee was produced. When the army arrived half an hour later, they found that the RAF had completed the arrangements and the town was secure.

  Hatto glanced at Dicken.

  ‘I think they ought to give us a gong for this,’ he said. ‘We won the war on our own.’

  Part Two

  One

  ‘Dear Dicky Boy,

  This letter is being written to you from Baltimore. I am flying now with Clyde Richards. I left Murphy’s outfit because he was getting serious and becoming involved with mid-air refuelling. Any goddam fool knows it can’t be done but he persists. We do regular shows, as well as a few other things which are financially good and the weather here is always okay for flying…’

  Dicken tossed the letter aside. Zoë was not only in America, she was even beginning to sound American. Not that there was anything wrong with Americans, but it was a poor sort of marriage with himself in Iraq and his wife in the States. She didn’t seem to b
e suffering from missing him but, he had to admit, neither did he miss her.

  His position with Hatto’s flight was still only temporary when they heard that a nationalist insurrection had broken out against the Western Powers in China and that Shanghai was likely to be besieged. The insurrection, led by a man called Chiang Kai-Shek, had been growing for some time but as usual, because the politicians in Westminster thought more of economy than safety, the air force had been cut to the bone and volunteers had to be asked for from men serving abroad who could be rushed to China to help.

  When the notice appeared on the board, Dicken was immediately reminded of Nicola Aubrey. The last he had heard of her was that she was heading for China, where her diplomat father had been posted from India, and he remembered bitterly that the only show of affection he had received from the family had been an ill-spelt letter from her youngest sister, Marie-Gabrielle. Now, suddenly, he saw a chance of finding them again.

  ‘I’d like to put my name down,’ he told Hatto.

  Hatto eyed him shrewdly. They had known each other long enough for him to be aware of Dicken’s problems. ‘What about going home?’ he asked. ‘You’re due.’

  Dicken shrugged. ‘I don’t think it matters all that much,’ he said.

  China was in a state of unrest. With all the foreign concessions and treaty ports that had been set up in the last century in a turmoil, the Chinese had suddenly realised that the western nations who had battened on to them were holding areas of their country with nothing more than a few soldiers and gunboats and, led by Chiang Kai-Shek, they were suddenly aware that there were enough of them to drive out the foreign devils.

  The journey was by air to India, in easy stages via Basra, Bushire, and Bandar Abbas, then from Karachi across India to Calcutta. At Calcutta Dicken picked up a ship to Hong Kong, and from there to Shanghai took a Chinese-owned coastal vessel called the Shuntien, whose vital areas like the bridge and the engine room were enclosed by pirate-proof grilles. Because another ship had been taken over only two weeks before by men hidden among her passengers and burned out to the water-line, all her officers wore arms and there was a great deal of speculation about each other among the passengers.

  Among them was a burly American Catholic priest, Father Bernard O’Buhilly who, with the aid of a group of nuns, ran a mission in the Louza district of Shanghai. He had been to Northern India for a holiday and was returning refreshed and ready to take up the cudgels again on behalf of his faith.

  ‘’Tis a dreadful country, boy,’ he insisted. ‘But, sure–’ his arm waved expansively ‘–just take a look at it and you’ll know why I always come back.’

  The sunset was flooding the heavens with crimson, the sea with amaranth. Bathed in the glare, the whole ship was red, the black hull as if rusty, the white upper works coral, the brass flashing crimson sparks. For a moment they stood in silence as the ship drove through a sea like a field of jewels, scattering flashes of amethyst, garnet and ruby, then the priest sighed.

  ‘If only the human element were half as beautiful,’ he said. ‘And by that, me boy, I mean the white human element as well as the yellow.’ He glanced at Dicken. ‘You wouldn’t be one of us, would you?’ he asked, and when Dicken shook his head, he sighed and smiled. ‘Ah, well, you can’t win every time.’

  It was O’Buhilly, an ardent cigarette smoker and lover of Irish whiskey, who explained the situation. ‘When the Manchu dynasty was overthrown by revolutionaries in 1911,’ he said, ‘the first president was Yuan Shih-K’ai but, sure, when his generals rose in revolt and he had to flee, it occurred to the generals that, since they had the troops, they, not the politicians, were the holders of power. Since then China’s become the sport of the military. At the moment ’tis two governments there are, a ghostly one with no power and few troops, clankin’ its chains in Peking, and one in Canton. But, sure, both are controlled by their generals who support or betray for money whichever they represent. They organise the opium trade, sell positions, tax the people and finally retire to Japan or Singapore with immense fortunes. They don’t fight – they prefer to accept or offer bribes – and the poor are oppressed while the soldiers are like bandits. The whole of China’s become a battlefield.

  ‘However–’ the burly priest held up a finger ‘–’tis now all changed. Chiang Kai-Shek is a touch different from the rest. He is educated. Trained in Russia and head of the Whampoa Military Academy. And he’s quarrelled with the Russians and the Chinese Communists and wants the whole of China for himself.’

  ‘Will he get it?’

  ‘That, me boy, remains to be seen. But ’twould be a better chance than most he had, I’d say.’

  They knew they had reached the Yangtze hours before they saw land because of the oozy yellow nature of the sea and eventually they found themselves in the mouth of the river, still thirty miles wide with a thin brown line in the distance that was all there was to be seen of the land.

  The Whangpoo, where the ship dropped anchor, was a muddy tributary twelve miles up the Yangtze. The surface of the water boiled with life, sampans moving across it in ones, twos, groups and fleets like swarms of water beetles. Tugs nudged at vessels anchored in midstream, and river steamers, black-and-red-funnelled and looking as if, with their tiers of decks, they had far too much freeboard for safety, trudged westwards into the hinterland, their sirens rumbling indignantly at the junks which swept indifferently across their course on the tide, huge eyes painted on bows and poops that lifted from their decks like those of Elizabethan galleons.

  The sun was going down like a burst pomegranate behind the city, the anchored steamers grey silhouettes on a yellow background. The Shuntien’s arrival alongside set off the most tremendous din, the noisy greetings and farewells of the old China hands indicating that they felt that they, not the Chinese, owned the country. Multitudinous Chinese clerks, compradores and shore workers poured through the ship, high-pitched voices chirruping cheerfully in their own language as they grinned and kow-towed to the Europeans in the hope of a good tip. Ashore, it was even more ear-battering, more dazzling to the eye with the garish Chinese symbols outside the shops and the bright red and yellow banners billowing over the doors, more offensive to the nose with the smell of drains, night-soil barges moving downstream, and the odour of thousands of unwashed bodies. The high-pitched yelling of the street traders and coolies was interspersed with the fretful honking of motor car horns, and the rising and falling song of working gangs unloading sacks from a merchant ship further up the Bund where the junks covered the water like a heaving mat.

  The city itself was a strange mixture of Orient and Occident, and more American than European with its big square hotels, huge advertisement hoardings and brash electric signs. There were hundreds of motor cars, many of them large American importations, hooting their way in and out of the rickshaws, the wheelbarrows, the flooding pedestrians, the trams that groaned and shrieked round unbelievably tight corners packed with coolies, luggage, vegetables and live poultry.

  The biggest city in China, it was built in two parts, the old city and the modern area built round the International Settlement and the French Concession. Skyscrapers towered above wide modern boulevards where the luxury of the Westerners contrasted sharply with the ant-like life of the Chinese who swarmed through the streets. Surrounded by the cancerous growths of Chinese towns, the city was the centre of all business in the Far East, and occupying it with honest people doing honest business were men controlling piracy, slavery, drugs, and, ironically, all Christian missionary effort. Alongside bankers and businessmen and earnest churchmen were touts, pimps, white slavers, thieves, smugglers and pickpockets and, in spite of the Sikh policemen and a ferociously efficient Customs service, every morning the newspapers carried some new sensation of murder, gang rivalry, smuggling or the sacking of some upcountry town.

  With every kind of currency available, the city’s constitution had been found
ed less on law than do-as-you-please-and-no-questions-asked, and the streets stank at night of opium and were filled with the chatter of singsong girls and streetwalkers, many of them White Russians who had found their way south after the Revolution.

  The Chinese population was as mixed as the European, consisting of people who had sold their lands and migrated to the city, and the younger sons and daughters from the impoverished countryside of China, in Shanghai to earn money as sweated labour in the factories that had been pushed up by European financiers. As they went about their business, the wealthy had to pick their way between the starved corpses of the poor.

  The city had the tallest buildings in the East, but it also had the most scrofulous slums, and running off the finest boulevards were narrow alleys with open drains. The climate was extreme, with sleet, snow, fog and frost in winter to kill off the poor in their thousands, and a humid heat in summer pressing like a blanket over the buildings. The Bund, one of the most famous streets in the East, curved along the river bank for nearly a mile to the British Consulate, with the great trading houses – Jardine Matheson, Sassoon, Butterfield and Swire, the Glen Line, the Chartered Bank, the North China Daily News office – stretching in between. The smell was of cooking from the thousands of tiny stalls offering food, and every street held its quota of hawkers, letter writers, boot black boys, sellers of illicit silver dollars and dirty photographs, and blind, deformed or mutilated beggars, among them occasionally even a White Russian driven to poverty and trying to raise the price of a bottle of booze.

  With trouble expected, there were soldiers from France, Annamites from French Indo-China, Japanese, Italians, Swedes, Norwegians, Portuguese, United States marines, Punjabis and Gurkhas, and half a dozen famous British regiments. To say nothing of the Shanghai Defence Force, a locally-raised unit comprising every nationality in the East, which had commandeered the rooftops of high buildings on the city’s outskirts and placed machine guns and even light artillery up there where they could command the entrances to the city.