The Challenging Heights

by Max Hennessy

  Over the low rumble of the engine, he heard feet pounding on the hard earth and, looking round, he saw that the figures who had appeared from the trees were soldiers, Chinese in khaki cotton uniforms. The man in black was coming up behind him, obscured from view by the tail surfaces and, occupied with preparations for a quick take-off, he reached over with his hand to indicate exactly where he should put his feet to climb aboard.

  There was the scrape of a foot on the wing root and Dicken looked up and round, just as the wind from the turning propeller caught the clerical hat and whisked it away. He just had time to be aware that the wearer was a Chinese when something heavy hit him on the head and he was vaguely conscious of an arm reaching past him to switch off the DH9’s engine.

  Three

  Sitting in the corner of the field, holding his head, Dicken watched the Chinese soldiers lift the tail of the De Havilland and pull it round. He was circled by men holding pointed rifles, all of them obviously eager to be the first to pull the trigger.

  The man who had appeared behind him had divested himself of the black alpaca suit now and was wearing the khaki cotton uniform and baggy trousers of a Chinese officer. He was only young but his face was hard, his eyes black as boot buttons.

  ‘Please don’t attempt to move, sir,’ he said in good if stilted English. ‘Or, my goodness gracious me, I shall be obliged to order my men to shoot you dead.’ He smiled. ‘You must be jolly unhappy,’ he went on. ‘Because I have you a prisoner and a hostage and I also have a brand-new aeroplane to add to our air force. My name, by the way, is General Lee Tse-Liu, and I shall probably win a medal for this. It is a good job that I once had a flight in England when I was there as a student and knew how to switch off the engine.’

  He smiled. ‘I shall send to General Chiang for a pilot to come and take it away,’ he went on. ‘It may take some days but it will give you plenty of time to stare at the twigs and branches camouflaging your splendid aeroplane and to think how sad you will be to lose it.’

  ‘You’ve got another guess coming,’ Dicken growled. ‘The RAF will be out looking for me.’

  Lee smiled. ‘What a pity they will be unable to find you.’

  Satisfied that the aeroplane was safely secured to stakes in the ground and covered by foliage from the trees around, he gestured to Dicken to rise and they set off across the field towards the road.

  ‘When I was in England during the war,’ Lee said, ‘I was called a wog by a fat man with a khaki suit. But, my goodness me, I am not a wog. I am a Chinese of good breeding and we shall see, I think, what the West thinks of us before very long.’

  Dicken was pushed into an elderly Crossley tender, its bonnet red with rust, its canvas hood missing, and they drove through the nearby town. The place stank of incense and was noisy with the hawking and spitting of the inhabitants – what was known to Europeans as the Chinese National Anthem. People sitting in doorways eating coloured sweets, spitting out sunflower seeds or having their ears cleaned by professional aurists, pushed forward to see. Camels and sorebacked mules plodded through the crowded pedestrians, picking their way round heaps of dirt where babies, dogs and scavenging pigs wallowed together. A group of soldiers, slovenly with their festoons of teapots, saucepans and umbrellas, watched from a doorway where they were guarding a group of criminals tied together by their pigtails. Old ivoried men with long whispy white beards and peasants carrying aged relatives on their shoulders all stopped to stare at the European face in the car.

  Leaving the town, they pushed out into the countryside beyond, rattling along a road through a plain set with rice and maize and broken with paddies smelling strongly of human manure. Here and there a wooden pump was rotated by blindfolded donkeys or sinewy coolies on treadmills, and from time to time tombs could be seen among the pines with small poverty-stricken farms.

  The village of Wuhsi was a place of one-storey buildings with curved tiled roofs. A gutter ran down the centre and rubbish was piled against the walls, and there was a smell of decaying vegetation, ammonia and something else that was probably the odour of the unwashed bodies. There was little sound, none of the tinkling of Chinese voices, the honking of cars or the cheerful shouting of wheelbarrow men. The people here seemed subdued and wary and watched with black blank eyes.

  Removing a bar from the door of one of the hovels, Lee kicked it open and a hand shoved Dicken through. As he fell to his knees, the alpaca suit Lee had worn hit him in the face, then he heard the door slam and the bar replaced.

  A hand caught his elbow and raised him gently. ‘I very much regret, me boy,’ a soft Irish voice said, ‘that you should find yourself in this predicament because of me.’

  Sitting up, Dicken found himself staring at Father O’Buhilly. He was dressed only in a shirt with a clerical collar, his long bare legs ending in huge laced boots.

  ‘You all right, Father?’ he asked, scrambling to his feet.

  ‘Sure, I’m all right, my son. But gasping for a cigarette. I’ve finished all mine long since. You wouldn’t have one about you, would you?’

  Fishing in his pockets, Dicken produced a packet. He was about to offer them when he changed his mind, took one out, lit it, drew a deep puff at it and handed it to the priest. ‘I think we’d better smoke half each,’ he suggested. ‘I haven’t many and we don’t know how long we’re going to be here.’

  O’Buhilly took the cigarette, drew one or two deep puffs from it, so deep the smoke seemed in danger of coming out of his ears, and handed it back.

  ‘’Tis a wonderful thing, the weed,’ he said, coughing. ‘I’m sorry you’re in this mess, me boy. I’m to blame. Sure, they took me clothes while I was asleep, which is why you find me in fancy dress.’

  Puffing at the cigarette alternately, they exchanged questions as Father O’Buhilly dragged on his trousers and reached for his jacket.

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Six days.’ The priest’s face was bruised but he managed a smile.

  ‘Did they beat you up?’

  ‘But of course, me boy. They’ll probably beat you up. Not so much to hurt you as to humiliate you, to make you lose face.’

  As they talked, the door opened and wooden bowls of rice and a jug of water appeared. Lee stood behind the man who carried them.

  ‘Kneel,’ he ordered. ‘Say please.’

  ‘Not bloody likely,’ Dicken snapped.

  Father O’Buhilly smiled, took his hand, and, with a surprisingly strong grip, pulled him down alongside him as he knelt. Dicken was about to scramble to his feet but the priest clung on to his hand and held him firmly on his knees. As the food was placed on the floor and the door slammed, Dicken scrambled to his feet.

  ‘Damn it, Father,’ he said, ‘I’m a British officer! I don’t go down on my knees to people!’

  ‘You do here, me boy, or you’ll go hungry. I’ve discovered hunger’s a wonderful persuader and, sure, nobody’ll ever know.’

  ‘It’s so bloody humiliating!’

  ‘Loss of face exists only in the mind, me boy, and if you feel you’re their master, it is no humiliation at all.’

  ‘It’s all right for you–!’

  ‘It is also all right for you, my son. You are no good to your country if you are dead, and while you’re alive to pray to the Almighty for rescue there’s hope. The Via Crucis is a long one and was never intended to be easy. Besides–’ Father O’Buhilly smiled – ‘there’s no sense I see in unnecessary suffering. I saw the Calvary in France ten years ago and I have too much to do, me boy, to be ready to die merely to please an egoist like Lee. Besides–’ he smiled ‘–I have plans of me own that he doesn’t know about.’ He indicated the window which was covered by a grille. ‘’Tis typical Orientals they are. Inefficient and careless. And these houses are old. This was once a village jail here, but doubtless it hasn’t been used since Kw
ang-Hsü was Emperor. The bars are loose and I have found a piece of iron under the soil I use as a chisel.’

  Dicken’s head jerked round. ‘They’re loose?’

  ‘Keep your voice down, me boy.’ The priest’s voice was gentle and monotonous, almost as if he were praying. ‘I’ve been workin’ on them. We shall get out of here when we wish, and walk home to Shanghai.’

  Dicken stared out of the window, thinking of the grounded aeroplane. ‘Much better to fly back,’ he said. ‘Safer.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to hurry, me boy,’ O’Buhilly said. ‘Lee’s Chinese pilot will be here soon to take it away. There are plenty of them, I gather, trained by the Russians and Germans. It should take another day or two to get free but it will take longer than that for Lee to find himself a pilot.’

  The next days were spent sweating in the humid heat in the narrow-gutted little prison. Several times, they heard aircraft and once saw a DH9 flying about a thousand feet above them on a north-south course. It was close enough to see the roundels on the wings and fuselage, but nothing came of it and they could only assume that the camouflaged machine hadn’t been seen. Eventually, they became aware of shouts and the capering of excited coolies and, looking out, they saw a lorry towing Dicken’s captured DH9 along the road to the field alongside their prison. Then it dawned on them that, because they had no idea how to detach the wings, the Chinese soldiers were chopping down any tree that was in the way and prevented it passing. As it turned towards the field, it proved impossible to manoeuvre it by the tumbledown home of a peasant farmer and immediately the soldiers started knocking the house down. When the farmer, dancing with rage, began to shout his protests, the officer in command simply drew his revolver and shot him, then the house was razed and the aeroplane bumped into the field past the wailing wife and family.

  ‘Pray to St Jude, me boy,’ Father O’Buhilly growled, as they watched through the window. ‘He is the patron saint of lost causes and, Holy Mother of God, it is surely needing his help the Chinese peasants are.’

  When Lee came again it pleased him to see Dicken go on his knees with the priest and thank him for the bowl of rice he was given to eat.

  ‘I am glad you have jolly well changed your attitude,’ he said cheerfully. ‘For your entertainment, this afternoon we have arranged a little spectacle.’

  The spectacle turned out to be the execution of several captured Communists, who were forced to kneel outside the window of the jail.

  ‘No parties outside the Kuomintang,’ Lee said. ‘No factions inside the Kuomintang. That is our leader’s slogan. As our friends out there will soon find out.’

  The kneeling men were dispatched one by one, the peasants by shooting in the back of the head, the officials by strangling or beheading by a brawny headsman carrying a huge curved sword. Held to the window by bayonets pricking their backs, Dicken and Father O’Buhilly were obliged to watch every minute of it. Dicken was shaking with rage but the priest quietly muttered prayers to himself from beginning to end.

  ‘Sure, if the poor heathens are anything at all they’ll be Taoists,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think the Almighty will mind a Catholic prayer being offered for their souls.’

  Wailing women collected the bodies. Those who had bribed the guards were allowed to have the heads which they then sewed back on to the severed necks so that their menfolk could go to their ancestors without losing face. Those who could not afford the bribes or had refused to pay found the heads were hung from poles with cords pushed through a slit in the ears. Nevertheless, Lee allowed the funerals to take place and there was a procession of lanterns and gongs, and Lee provided a mockery of a military band which played ‘John Brown’s Body’ in front of the wreaths and effigies of horsemen and favourite pets, while the local orchestra of hired musicians blew sobs from long instruments like huge garden syringes.

  That night Dicken worked all the harder with the scrap of metal Father O’Buhilly had found, digging at the crumbling plaster round the base of the bars in the window. In between, when they rested, he found himself discussing religion.

  He had never been a religious man and had always regarded God as a sort of benevolent commanding officer but, falling in love with Nicola Aubrey, listening to her talk about her Catholicism, had made him think about it because she had often worried what would happen to her if she married a Protestant. The priest listened carefully, nodding and saying little.

  Then Dicken lit a cigarette, took a puff and handed it to the American. ‘How does one become a Catholic, Father?’ he asked.

  Father O’Buhilly smiled and returned the question with another. ‘Are you a good Protestant, me boy?’ he asked.

  ‘I try to be, though I reckon I’ve not always been successful. I seem to have been too busy.’

  Father O’Buhilly smiled as he took his turn again with the cigarette. ‘Then the first thing to do, me boy, is to become a good Protestant. When I first came East, I, too, had doubts and I once asked a Taoist priest how to become a Taoist. He advised me first to become a good Christian.’

  Dicken smiled back. ‘Does your religion allow you to escape, Father?’ he asked.

  ‘Most certainly.’

  ‘With a Protestant?’

  ‘God’s more broadminded than most people give Him credit for, my son. Contrary to what many think, provided you’ve been a good man – and I’m thinkin’ you have – he’d even allow you into the Kingdom of Heaven, whether you’ve been a Catholic or not, a good churchgoer or not. He couldn’t possibly raise any objection to me goin’ with you.’

  Dicken grinned as he took his turn with the cigarette. ‘Even if it meant clocking that sentry over there by the aeroplane? We might have to.’

  ‘Even with that, me boy.’

  ‘How do you reckon He feels about revenge, Father? Because if I bump into Lee again, I might lose my temper.’

  ‘Pride, me boy, is the spring of malice and the desire for revenge. Does your anger spring from pride?’

  Dicken grinned and passed over the last of the cigarette. ‘No, Father. Just a strong desire to punch him on the nose.’

  The priest finished the cigarette and tossed it through the window. ‘So long as it is no more than a calm, cold-blooded, non-denominational straight left to the jaw,’ he said, ‘I feel He would not object.’

  Four

  Two nights later they had the bars loosely held in place in their sockets with mud which they had made by the simple procedure of urinating on the dirt floor. Over it they had sprinkled dust so that it looked like old cement.

  ‘You’re quite sure,’ Father O’Buhilly asked nervously, ‘that it would be unwise to make the journey back to Shanghai on Shanks’ pony. I have never flown, y’see, and I have to confess that the idea strains the fastenings of me faith.’

  ‘Listen, Father,’ Dicken said quietly. ‘It’s a waste of time trying to walk from here to Shanghai. We must be a hundred or so miles away and Lee will get his men out as soon as he finds we’re gone. They’ll have horses and cars and I doubt if we could shelter with the local people. Even if they wished to help us, they wouldn’t dare in case he comes down on them with reprisals. It’s the aeroplane or nothing.’

  ‘We can start it, me boy?’

  ‘I think so. But it’ll have to be quick. And that means you’ve got to learn what to do. I shall dispose of the sentry–’

  ‘We’ll discuss that later.’

  Dicken grinned. ‘When he’s disposed of, we chuck his rifle away so he can’t grab it if he comes round, then I climb into the cockpit. Your job will be to swing the propeller. But there’s a bit of rigmarole to go through before you do that, and you’d better do it properly or you’ll get your head whipped off.’

  ‘It would be a most unusual way for a servant of God to go to his Maker, my son.’

  ‘Right, then. You handle the prope
ller. I hope you’re strong because you have to be to swing a DH9. When I’m in the cockpit and I’ve checked the controls, I’ll stick my thumb up. Like this. Then you call out “Switch off. Petrol On. Suck In,” and turn the propeller to get rid of excess petrol, leaving it horizontal. Then wipe your hands – spit on ’em if you like for good measure – scrape your boots on the ground a bit to make sure you’ve got a good foothold, then lean well forward, with your hands on the blade of the propeller and try your balance. Like this.’

  Demonstrating, he waited until Father O’Buhilly had understood. ‘All this is a safety measure,’ he explained. ‘So that when you’re fiddling about with the propeller, I don’t allow the engine to fire and whip your block off. Understood?’

  Father O’Buhilly nodded. ‘It is terrible dangerous by the sound of it.’

  ‘Not if you do as I suggest. Right, then, when you’re ready, you call out “Contact”. That’s to let me know you’re ready and I can switch on. That’s when I switch on the magnetos and the engine’s ready to fire. Right? I reply “Contact” to let you know I’ve heard, and then, and not until you hear that word, you heave down and away on the propeller, leaning back as you do so, so that you’re out of the line of the blades. Think you can do it?’

  ‘Perhaps a little rehearsal will do no harm.’

  ‘It might not fire straight away, of course.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t fire at all?’

  ‘In that case we shall be Lee’s guests for a lot longer, because it looks very much as though nobody’s going to stage a rescue for us.’

  They decided to go the following night when there would be a slight moon to enable them to see.

  ‘We’re going to be taking off in the dark, Father,’ Dicken pointed out. ‘I’m going to be doing it by the seat of my pants.’

  ‘And I, me boy, will be in the other seat with my eyes tight shut prayin’ to the Almighty to make the seat of your pants a good guide to the two sinners who’re dependin’ on ’em.’