The Mercenaries

by John Harris

Ira showed no sign of having heard and Fagan stumbled to silence. He glanced at Ellie standing beside him, her mouth twisted with contempt.

  ‘Well, hell, what’s wrong with that?’ he asked lamely.

  3

  The warm summer rains had finished and the weather seemed set fair with high brassy suns over the flat jade greenery of the paddy fields and the darker green of camphor and mulberry. The countryside seemed to be bursting into rich new colour with the hillsides pink and white with flowers.

  Colonel Lao almost lived at Yaochow because General Tsu, scared by the unexpected appearance of Kwei’s aged plane over his villages at Wukang, had no intention of allowing his air force to back down on the agreement Fagan had made. Smarting under Ira’s fury, Fagan became apologetic to the point of tears, then defiant and finally drunk.

  ‘You could always quit,’ Ellie pointed out flatly to Ira. ‘And go home.’

  Ira eyed her coldly. Whatever else his father had been, he’d been a rigid disciplinarian when it had come to lies and kept vows. Ira’s head had often ached with the thumps he’d received for not telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, or for making promises he’d only half intended to keep.

  ‘He signed an agreement, didn’t he?’ he said.

  Ellie shrugged. ‘What’s an agreement? What’s a contract?’

  ‘Precisely what it says--an agreement, a contract.’

  Ellie stared at him, her grey eyes appraising. She had been on the point of pushing the argument a little further. ‘The slopeheads don’t expect you to keep to them,’ she’d been going to say, but seeing the look in his eyes, she changed her mind.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said instead. ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right.’

  The Lewis and the two German Spandaus turned up shortly afterwards, but they were damaged and rusty and didn’t look at all like the weapons Ira had seen in the warehouse in Shanghai.

  He shrugged, suddenly depressed by the whole business. ‘We’d better get ‘em working, Sammy,’ he said. ‘The bloody fool seems eager to get himself killed.’

  By this time, Fagan’s drunkenness and noisy defiance had changed to a desperate eagerness to do the job he’d agreed on, but he was still full of explanations and apologies, promising not to involve Ira, and swearing to the point of being a bore to take care of himself.

  Ira sighed. ‘If we’re going to do the job,’ he said to Sammy as they began to strip the weapons, ‘we might as well have guns that function. Otherwise he’ll only get himself knocked off and then we’ll have Ellie to look after, too.’

  They set to work with oil and fine emery paper and, finding a metal lathe on one of the river steamers, Sammy obtained permission through De Sa from the Chinese captain to use it for a day. The captain was distinctly uneasy about it, as he felt it would mean he had thrown in his lot with General Tsu and, with things as they were along the river, he had no wish to commit himself that far. A handful of Shanghai dollars convinced him it was worth while, however, and not long afterwards, the Fokker was in service again and equipped with an uncertain gun and a rough sight of wire, ring and bead.

  With the dew still wet on the tiles of the curving roofs and the early sun burnishing the carved wood of the Chang-an-Chieh, it took off, moisture from the wet grass spraying out behind in the prop wash, and headed east to look for General Kwei’s balloon.

  They had struggled for days repairing and installing the damaged interrupter gear from the Wingless Wonder and bolting the single Spandau into place and checking the crude sight. Fagan had smoked cigarette after cigarette as they had worked, first full of despair and then full of an almost hysterical hope, but because of his inability with machinery unable to do much to help them.

  ‘It’s only one,’ Ira said as he had finally climbed into the cockpit, his face taut from lack of sleep. ‘Remember that. And there wasn’t enough decent ammunition to fill the belts--only the Japanese stuff and some defective Buckingham Lao dug up. But you shouldn’t have any trouble. There’ll be no opposition.’

  Fagan managed a shaky smile, nervous with strain. ‘And no anti-aircraft fire, either,’ he said. ‘No reports to make out and no explanations if it doesn’t come off.’

  They all stopped work and turned to watch as the little machine bumped and bucketed along the uneven ground, rising slowly over the river to circle and return over the field. The Chinese pupils stared with open-mouthed admiration as it snarled across the field, its wheels just above the grass, the sun making the wings translucent, and seeing the look on their young faces, Ira found himself remembering his own early innocence and joy in flight.

  Fagan waved to them as he lifted the Fokker above the trees, then he roared up in a steep climb towards the east. Ira stared after it with Sammy, then he became aware of Ellie alongside him, her expression enigmatic.

  ‘He’ll be all right, Ellie,’ he said.

  He wasn’t being honest with her, he knew, because Fagan was crazy enough to get himself into trouble, even in a clear sky devoid of enemies, and she was aware he wasn’t telling the truth. She gave a shrug of indifference that was still touched with unhappiness, as though she couldn’t ever make up her mind whether to regard Fagan as a lover or a rather stupid child.

  Ira glanced again at the dwindling shape of the Fokker, suddenly conscious of the old empty sick feeling of wondering if it would come back.

  ‘He’s determined to burn this goddamned balloon,’ Ellie said slowly. ‘I guess he wants to prove something--that he can or that he’s a man’--she shrugged--’maybe just that he can earn money.’ Unpredictably, she suddenly sounded concerned for Fagan and anxious that he should succeed.

  Ira gestured. ‘There’s not much to be afraid of, Ellie,’ he pointed out. ‘All he’s got to do is get to it before they wind it down.’

  Ellie looked at him and her mouth twisted in a wry smile. ‘Sounds easy,’ she said. ‘Except he’s not so hot.’

  Fagan returned after an hour, his engine spluttering, and as he slammed the Fokker to the ground, clumsily and hurriedly, he almost hit the Farman that was circling cautiously with Ellie and Peter Cheng aboard. Taxying fast and dangerously towards the farmhouse, he switched off, and as the propeller jerked to a stop, he climbed out and stood by the cockpit, fishing in his pockets for a cigarette and lighting it with the swift, jerky movements of a marionette that told them at once that something had gone wrong and that he’d not done what he’d set out to do.

  The gun,’ he choked, barely able to speak for fury. ‘The bloody gun jammed! I couldn’t clear it.’

  Sammy was clambering on to the machine already to examine the Spandau. ‘Split case,’ he said at once. ‘This rotten ammunition Tsu gets.’

  Fagan flung away his cigarette unsmoked. ‘I’ve got to have two guns,’ he said. ‘We can’t rely on one bloody weapon when it’s as old as this one is.’

  Ira caught Ellie’s eye on Fagan, almost willing him to succeed, and he made his mind up quickly. ‘We’ll mount you another one,’ he said quietly. ‘Did you see the balloon?’

  ‘I saw it.’ Fagan was lighting another cigarette now with shaking hands. ‘Ach, the self-importance of it! And divil a machine gun for miles and no sign of opposition. Then the gun jammed and I had to clear it with the cocking handle. By the time I came round for another try, it was almost on the ground, looking like a bloody hippopotamus’s appendix. Then the gun stopped altogether and a cartridge case got stuck under the bottom of the control column somewhere. There I was, licked entirely and all despairin’, and when I worked it free, sure, the bloody engine started sounding like someone kickin’ trash-cans around.’

  Sammy had unscrewed the panel from the side of the engine by this time and was peering inside. ‘P’r’aps it wouldn’t have,’ he said bitterly, no forgiveness in his voice, ‘if them spares of yours had turned up when they should.’

  Fagan glared and flung his cigarette away. ‘Some rat-faced bloody skunk of a comprador,’ he shouted. ‘I expect they got pinched on the
way. I fixed ‘em.’

  ‘I believe you,’ Sammy said calmly. ‘Thousands wouldn’t, though.’

  Fagan stepped forward, his fists clenched. Sammy, in the cap, waistcoat and stiff collar that seemed to be his uniform, put up his own fists, glaring, and Ira stepped between them, giving them both a shove.

  ‘Cut it out,’ he said.

  Sammy turned without a word and Ira pulled Fagan to one side. Behind them, the B.M.W. cooled, contracting with little unexpected ticks and clonks.

  ‘Any anti-aircraft fire?’ he asked.

  Fagan allowed himself to be drawn away. ‘No, divil a bit of it,’ he muttered. ‘Divil a plane. Not even a whistle of rifle-fire. If the gun had worked, I couldn’t have failed.’

  Ira looked at him wearily. He was making a lot of fuss, he knew, to hide the fact that he was inefficient, inexperienced and uncertain.

  ‘You won’t fail next time,’ he encouraged.

  Sammy lifted his head from where he was sprawled over the engine compartment and spoke over his shoulder, his face still unrelenting.

  ‘Watch it, man,’ he said. ‘They say old Kwei’s got a couple of Russian fliers with him now and they know what they’re up to.’

  Fagan turned on him at once in a rage. ‘Who says?’

  Sammy eyed him coolly. ‘Peter Cheng.’

  ‘How the hell does a Slant-Eye know?’

  ‘Because his family’s still at Hwai-Yang,’ Sammy pointed out, unruffled. ‘He says Kwei’s got new planes and that Chiang’s saying that soon all the warlords’ll belong to the Kuomintang. He’s going to start moving soon and he’s got the kids in Hwai-Yang telling ‘em he’s against the rich and that all their troubles are due to the foreigners.’ He grinned maliciously. ‘That’s you, mate. They’re forming unions down there and beating up anybody who won’t join, and when they’re organised they’ll be telling you what to do, not the other way round. Even Kwei does as he’s told because Chiang’s backing him now.’

  ‘Ach, who cares what Chiang and Tsu do? It’s not our war.’

  Sammy snorted. ‘You’ve made it our bloody war,’ he snapped.

  Fagan glared, on the point of fighting again, and, realising they were all in need of some sort of success, Ira made a quick decision.

  ‘Sammy,’ he said. ‘You once suggested mounting a gun on the Avro. On a cradle, with a socket in the rear cockpit.’

  Sammy looked round and nodded, puzzled. Ira was standing alongside him, frowning, deep in thought.

  ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it and let’s get the other Spandau on to the Fokker and a Lewis on a quadrant on the Albatros. We’ll go up as a squadron and stand guard.

  Sammy sat up and beamed, but Fagan threw down his cigarette again and ground it out with his heel.

  ‘I don’t need a top guard to shoot down an unarmed balloon,’ he said, starting to light a third cigarette.

  He looked like a bull, heavy, clumsy and past his prime, still trying to cling to some sort of pride, and Sammy’s eyes were full of contempt as he gazed at him.

  ‘Lor’,’ he said with a calmness that was insulting. ‘You aren’t half heavy on fags.’

  While Fagan fussed uselessly about the Fokker and its guns, Ira took the Avro up and checked it. There was nothing very wrong with it but he needed to get away from the bickering on the ground. The fun had suddenly gone out of flying and he was growing desperately tired of Fagan. He and Ellie, both physically attractive people, only fed on each other’s miseries and would have been far better separated. Away from each other, they might have survived instead of sinking slowly together, locked by their emotions and weighed down by each other’s troubles.

  They worked all night on the B.M.W., the full summer heat that was on them now hanging like a pall so that when the breeze dropped they sweltered, dripping sweat and slapping at the mosquitoes which headed in buzzing, pinging clouds for the lights they’d strung up in the shelters. By the second night, they had rigged a duplicate Spandau on the Fokker and a Lewis on a crude quadrant on the top wing of the Albatros. It looked odd and awkward but it worked, and they attached a cradle to the second Lewis and screwed iron-pipe sockets to the side of the Avro’s strengthened rear cockpit.

  ‘It won’t shoot much,’ Sammy said. There’s no room. It’ll be too easy to blow the wings off.’ He looked exhausted and was full of hatred for Fagan who, unable to help, had nagged incessantly about the delay. There was a lump raised by a mosquito bite on his eye and he was a little desperate-looking with fatigue.

  ‘When are them spares coming, Ira?’ he asked in a harsh voice. ‘Because if they don’t come soon, we might as well shut up shop.’

  His face was defiant and there was the first hesitant hint of doubt in his manner, as if he were beginning to believe that the spares Ira had promised were as dubious as Fagan’s.

  As he turned away, his shoulders drooping, his eyes dark-rimmed with fatigue and disappointment, Ira knew that Fagan wasn’t the only one who was living on his nerves. They were all in need of a run of good luck to put backbone into them. In all the weeks they’d been in China, they’d produced nothing but failure.

  The following morning at first light, the engines roared to life. Lao and General Tsu came to see them leave and waited by their car with Ellie, while Ira fussed round the others like a hen with its chickens. Sammy looked excited and eager but desperately afraid he’d do his part wrong, while Cheng was quite obviously nervous. They both looked mere children, quivering with willingness but pathetically lacking in experience.

  ‘Listen, Sammy,’ Ira was urging. ‘No heroics. You don’t know much and Cheng knows less and we don’t take chances. If anybody comes down on us, remember all we can do is fly rings round them and pretend we’re dangerous. If there’s trouble, bolt for home.’

  Sammy nodded, his face grave with concentration. ‘O.K., Ira. I’ll remember.’

  Fagan was already roaring, tail-up, across the field, and as Ira swung into position, making his final cockpit check, he was climbing above the Chang-an-Chieh and swinging towards the east The labouring Avro was heaving itself up after him and, a few moments later, Ira opened the throttle of the Albatros and sped down the field after it.

  Climbing to a position behind the others, Ira looked below him at a drab landscape that seemed devoid of population. Only one small comer, where Tsosiehn occupied a bend of the Yangtze, seemed to be inhabited. The rest of the land from the river to the mountains in the north seemed empty.

  The Albatros was short on revolutions and answered the controls sluggishly but Ira took up a position to the left and rear of the Fokker, which was still drawing steadily away, approving as Sammy swung into place alongside him, the Avro wavering up and down in the eddies of the air like a horse on a roundabout. Cheng, his cheeks distorted by the wind, gave him the thumbs-up sign that all was well, and an old instinct that he’d not called on for years set him glancing up into the sun.

  He was flying at five thousand feet now, falling quickly behind the faster Fokker, the ageing Mercedes throwing out oil alarmingly and blurring his goggles so that he had to push them up on to his forehead to see. Although a thin mist lay in the valleys, he picked out a long string of straggling figures below, moving westwards, and for a while he stared at them, imagining them to be troops before he realised they were refugees from the fighting round Wukang.

  After a while, he saw smoke from burning houses rising in a steep slanting column to the east and then, here and there below him, small scattered groups of men that he recognised as fragments of General Tsu’s army in retreat.

  His eyes were scanning the sky all round them now, staring into the iron glare of the sun, then he saw the Fokker banking and Fagan waving his arm and pointing, and in the distance below them, hardly discernible against the drab earth, the ugly patched shape of Kwei’s balloon.

  He signed to Sammy and put the Albatros into a climb, and after a moment’s hesitation, he saw the Avro struggling after him. Over the rocker arms of the
Mercedes, he saw the sun flash across the doped wings of the Fokker, catching the orange circle of Tsu’s insignia as Fagan began a long dive, and he grinned as it occurred to him what a crazy air force it was. Here he was, an Englishman, flying a German scout armed only with a British Lewis attached to the top wing, while opposite him was a young Jew and a Chinese flying a British machine, similarly ill-armed, their weapons like his charged with indifferent Japanese ammunition, their engines firing on American petrol.

  Fagan was not far from the balloon now, and tracers were springing from the ground in a cone towards him. Kwei’s Russian advisers had not been long in setting up a machine gun cover for it after his first misdirected attack. Then Ira heard Cheng’s Lewis fire and, turning, saw the glitter of empty brass cartridge cases falling away through the air. Cheng was pointing and immediately beyond the Avro he spotted another machine, lower down and difficult to see against a ridge of hills. It was moving towards them with that peculiar crabwise motion of an aeroplane on a converging course and he recognised it with surprise as a Caudron, a machine which the French had stopped using ten years before.

  He almost laughed out loud. China seemed full of every kind of aeronautical junk that could waddle into the sky. All things considered. General Tsu seemed to be in a good position to gain command of the air.

  He pointed downwards and, pushing the stick forward, descended in a long dive, with the Avro swinging wildly in his slipstream. Fagan was above the balloon now and Ira saw the Caudron’s wings flash as it swung into a dive after him. There was a glimpse of the blue circle with the serrated white centre like a sun that he’d seen on the flags in Hwai-Yang, then, as he changed direction to intercept it, he heard Fagan’s guns rattle and the balloon seemed to shrivel indecently to nothing and began to drop out of sight, slowly at first then faster and faster, the flare of flame dwindling as it fell to the ground, trailing a column of smoke marked with scraps of burning fabric.

  What the Caudron pilot hoped to do against the faster Fokker wasn’t clear but Fagan was in a bad position, low down over the column of smoke, enjoying his triumph, and as the Albatros shot between them the Caudron jerked up in a climb and swung away, and Ira saw the startled face of the pilot.