The Mercenaries

by John Harris

  It had been quite clear for some time that they weren’t going to get any more of the old guns they possessed into working order, and the most they could do was keep the two scouts flying and continue the instruction on the Farman and the Avro. The weather was good, however, with warm sunny days and bright skies, and flying the fluttering old Longhorn was enjoyable because it was slow enough to enable them to look round and take in the plum trees and the cherries and the banks of yellow willows. By the end of a fortnight both Lieutenant Sung and Lieutenant Yen had reached the point when they were due to fly solo and life seemed good once more.

  Cheng’s unhappy patrols were proving of so little value, however, that at the end of the first week, news came through that Tsu had had to give up another two villages before Kwei’s superior artillery and was preparing to pull back even further, and Lao descended on the airfield in a rage to castigate the two Chinese boys with threats and urge them on with promises of rewards. He waited, his face grim, until they flew off again, Cheng leading, Tsai following an uncertain course close behind. He remained after the two machines had disappeared, putting on a face-saving inspection of the few remaining pupils, and talking unconvincingly of enlisting more as he toyed with Sammy’s array of tools and studied the motley collection of vehicles they’d gathered around them, from the tiny Peugeot to Heloïse’s majestic bulk.

  ‘My gracious goodness,’ Kee said gaily as they climbed into their car to leave. ‘A very impressive performance, you know, Major Ira.’

  Ira caught Sammy’s eye and winked, no more convinced by Lao than Lao was by the airfield. Only the Avro was serviceable because on Sung’s final flight in the Farman before going solo, they had descended with the engine shedding parts and petrol jetting out behind them in a vapoury cloud, and Lao had no sooner disappeared than the laundry coolies were back with their buckets and their irons, hanging the washing on the bracing wires and the booms, and the smell of cooking was coming from behind the farmhouse. With Kwei’s ancient Caudron a heap of splintered spruce and torn fabric, there appeared to be no opposition at all in the air, however, and since Cheng and Tsai seemed to be totally incapable of inflicting damage the musical comedy campaigning with each side as farcically unlethal as the other appeared to have returned.

  The reedy note of a flute floating over the hammering of Wang and his makee-leam boy added to the illusion and Ira could hear Sammy singing tunelessly as he struggled with a spanner over the Longhorn’s engine.

  ‘I’ve heard these Renaults are supposed to be bloody fine engines,’ he was saying cheerfully as he wrestled with a recalcitrant nut. ‘I reckon they’re more bloody than fine.’

  As the morning progressed, the hot summer sun made them sweat and they were lying with a beer under the shelter of the Farman’s wide translucent wings when they heard the low hum of an aeroplane engine from the direction of the Chang-an-Chieh. Scrambling into the sunshine, they saw the Fokker returning low over the willows by the river. There was no sign of the Albatros and as Sammy began to frown, the illusion of farce that had laid so heavily over everything they’d done, disappeared at once.

  ‘Something’s happened, Ira,’ Sammy said.

  The Fokker came in cautiously, the engine missing badly, and they saw at once that fabric was fluttering on the wings. As it settled almost to the ground, the B.M.W. spitting and uneven, the exhaust note died in a final cough and the propeller stopped. The machine’s nose went down and immediately the wheels caught the tufty grass at the top of the ditch that circled the field. The nose dug in and the Fokker stood on its propeller boss and turned over slowly to whack down on its back in a cloud of dust and flying scraps of wood.

  Cheng was hanging upside down from his harness in the cockpit when they reached him, and they dragged him out, spitting teeth from his bloodied mouth and staring at the butt end of the guns where he’d banged his face. His appearance was frightening but the only damage appeared to be broken teeth and, for a long time, as they felt over him, he said nothing then he turned his head slowly as though it were weighted.

  ‘Plane,’ he lisped through the blood that was filling his mouth and making gestures with his hands. ‘Much shooting.’ He moved his hand round in a circle. ‘Tsai.’ His hand descended in a spiral and smacked hard against his knee. ‘Fire. Eyeh, much fire, Mastah Ira.’

  Ira watched as Sammy crouched over the Chinese boy, dabbing ineffectually at his face with a piece of dirty rag, and Cheng lifted his head again.

  ‘New, Mastah Ira,’ he snorted through the blood. ‘Fast. Very fast.’

  Ira hoisted him to his feet and slapped his shoulder. ‘You’ll have a scar on your lip you’ll be proud of to your dying day, son,’ he said briskly. ‘It matches my nose. You’ve crash-landed and survived.’

  Cheng nodded and grinned painfully, and Ira turned to Sammy.

  ‘Sammy,’ he said. ‘Fuel up the Avro. Kwei must have got those planes we heard about. Let’s go up and have a dekko.’

  They took off quickly past Lawn struggling profanely with Wang to get a rope round the dusty tail of the Fokker and climbed towards the east. There seemed to be remarkably little movement on the ground and no sign of any aircraft, and for an hour and a half they flew backwards and forwards without seeing a thing. On their way home, they passed the wreckage of the Albatros, crumpled and burned on the edge of a paddy field, and landed alongside it.

  An old man with a headcloth round his narrow skull, who was poking among the wreckage, gestured towards his house and beckoned to them to follow him. Tsai’s body lay in a mud and wattle shed, almost unrecognisable, and the old man made signals with his hand to indicate that he’d jumped clear before the blazing machine had struck the ground.

  Ira gave the old man a few coins, and promised to collect the body, then they searched among the wreckage for anything worth salvaging. The home-made quadrant had been wrenched clear and the Lewis seemed undamaged apart from a bent cocking handle, but the engine was only scrap metal beneath the burned-out fuselage, and apart from a few turn-buckles and one of the wheels there was remarkably little worth saving. Landing back at Yaochow with the Lewis in the rear cockpit, they found Lawn grunting under the Fokker.

  ‘She’ll mend,’ he said. ‘Needs a new wheel and there’s damage to the elevators and stabiliser, but the prop’s all right and there’s nothing that can’t be fixed.’

  They helped him get the machine under cover and turned the Maurice Farman over to Cheng. When it was repaired it would give him confidence to teach Sung and Yen.

  They collected Tsai’s body in the Crossley that same afternoon and buried him the following day. The city was quiet and, watched by crowds of gaping coolies, they walked in a vast procession of lanterns, gongs and a military band provided by Tsu which played ‘John Brown’s Body’ discordantly all the way to the cemetery and back. There were wreaths and effigies of horsemen and favourite pets, and even a crude aeroplane, all made of paper so they could be burned and waving in the breeze, a smiling portrait of the dead boy carried by Peter Cheng and boards with his virtues printed on them in gold paint. Professional mourners in white, sitting in rickshaws in traditional attitudes of grief and hawking and spitting into the gutters as they passed, were accompanied by hired musicians forcing sobs from long instruments like huge garden syringes, and pigeons with lute-like reeds attached to their backs were released in a flock to add their wailing cries to the din. A few Buddhist and Taoist monks gave solemnity to the occasion, carrying gifts of money, lacquer boxes, songbirds and wooden dragons for the dead boy to take with him to paradise.

  During the night, they were awakened by a series of thuds to the east.

  ‘Guns?’ Sammy asked, appearing stark naked on the verandah and staring over the cherry trees at the swathes of stars that hung over their heads like fields of daisies.

  ‘Bombs, I think,’ Ira said. ‘If it is, Lao’ll be round in the morning.’

  They were sitting over the coffee pot in the office when the car arrived, bouncin
g and rattling over the uneven ground towards the tents. Lao climbed out, accompanied by Kee. It was hard to tell from his stiff features whether he was angry or merely amused.

  ‘General Tsu’s headquarters were bombed during the night,’ he announced at once. ‘General Tsu’s air force is not doing its duty.’

  Ira snorted. ‘General Tsu’s air force isn’t doing its duty because General Tsu’s pilots don’t know how to. And if General Tsu’s interested he has one less pilot and one less aeroplane than he had yesterday.’

  Lao looked disconcerted. ‘Could you not repair it?’

  ‘There isn’t enough to repair.’

  ‘General Tsu will be very angry to have lost an aeroplane.’

  ‘Isn’t he interested in the bloody pilot?’ Ira snapped. The poor little bastard never had a chance. He couldn’t even fire in the direction he was flying.’

  Lao blinked and stiffened. ‘War consumes youth and beauty like a tiger,’ he said.

  Ira grunted and Lao gestured at the sky.

  ‘General Tsu wishes to have the enemy bombing aeroplane destroyed,’ he said. ‘He wishes the illustrious foreign flier to do it at once.’

  Ira grinned. ‘Me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  Lao frowned and nodded. ‘It is the General’s wish.’

  Ira turned away, then he stopped and spoke over his shoulder. ‘O.K.,’ he said cheerfully, ‘but, by God, it’ll cost General Tsu something this time. The newer the plane, the higher the price. This one’ll cost him seven hundred dollars at least--because of Tsai.’

  That night they heard the thud of bombs again and within an hour of daylight, Lao was back on the airfield demanding action, and Ira began a routine that took up every minute of his time, patrolling with Sammy in the Avro at ten thousand feet with the sun behind them, on the look-out for Kwei’s plane. When they landed they didn’t bother to take off their leather flying jackets before they rolled out the petrol drums and began to refuel. As soon as they’d finished, they were off again, climbing towards the sun.

  There was no sign of Kwei’s bomber, however, though they still occasionally heard the thud of bombs in the early morning and even took to leaving in darkness along a line of home-made paraffin flares and waiting above the airfield as the first rays of light stole across the horizon. But the sky was immense and Tsu’s territory enormous, and Kwei’s pilot crafty enough to change his targets and his timing. In their efforts to cover every eventuality, they fell into a routine of leaving for their first patrol at dawn and slipping to the ground after their last with the final streaks of daylight, until Tsu’s men, watching from the villages where they were billeted, got used to seeing the single aeroplane buzzing above them several times a day, the sun luminous on the undersurface of the wings and the curve of the engine cowling.

  They had no idea what sort of aeroplane it was, nor even if it was a friend or a foe, but in their cheerless billets they guessed that the regularity of its passage indicated something of enormous importance, and burned joss-sticks to placate the demons so that it would not concern them.

  Since telephones were almost unheard of in the area, and communication could only be carried on by telegraph along the railway or the river or by means of a man on a horse or a bicycle or even on foot, it was impossible to be forewarned of the approach of the Kwei bomber. But fitting an extra tank increased the cruising range of the Avro and allowed them a wider coverage of the sky, and they flew high enough to feel the cold, singing as they searched or, when the immensity of the heavens seemed too heavy a weight, brooding through the entire flight in silence, obsessed, hoping and praying for the sight of that one small insect-like dot sidling towards them that would indicate where Kwei’s bomber flew.

  When they returned, chilled and stiff, they ate quickly and turned to work on the Farman and the Fokker, absorbed, so concentrated on what they were trying to do that Ellie returned almost unnoticed from Shanghai.

  She was in good spirits and seemed to have recovered completely from Fagan’s death As she had promised, she had deposited every penny of the insurance money in the bank in their joint account.

  ‘We’re in the money, kids,’ she said, smiling.

  Ira and Sammy, not long down with the Avro, were working on the Fokker, both growing daily more involved with the search for Kwei’s bomber. They nodded and exchanged a few brief words, and as they returned to their work, Ellie’s face fell. She’d been looking forward to returning and had expected to be welcomed, and the two stubborn tired faces that greeted her knocked all the enthusiasm out of her. No one had any time to talk much and she began to suffer from the frustration of having news no one would listen to. But she said nothing as they turned to, between flights, to help Lawn with the damaged machines and tired motors, interrupting them only to pour their coffee and light their cigarettes. Almost unnoticed, Tsu’s ridiculous little war had been stepped up and grown deadly serious.

  At night, when they returned to the bungalow, they wanted only to sleep and neither Ellie nor Mei-Mei saw much of them. Mei-Mei had little to say--her affair with Sammy seemed to be going through a certain amount of difficulty--but out at the field, Ellie finally rebelled.

  ‘What’s the goddam hurry?’ she asked loudly. ‘Don’t we ever get to rest?’

  For a moment there was silence in the dope-and oilsmelling interior of the marquee where they’d wheeled the Fokker, then Ira smiled and, seeing the tension relax, Sammy smiled too.

  Ellie was watching them, her eyes big and angry.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘What is the goddam hurry?’

  Ira drew a deep breath. ‘Sorry, Ellie,’ he said. ‘It’s begun to get hold of us.’

  ‘You’re telling me, it’s begun to get hold of you.’

  ‘It’s not just that.’ Ira tried to explain the idea that had been growing at the back of his mind. ‘One day Tsu’s going to lose interest in aeroplanes because he doesn’t know the first thing about them. And when he does I’m hoping the Avro’ll still be around and serviceable so I can buy it back. As for the Fokker, it’s no good for transport but a hell of a lot of good for what I’m doing now.’

  For a while her eyes moved over his face, then she nodded.

  ‘O.K., Ira,’ she said, ‘you’re the boss.’

  As soon as they had replaced the lost parts of the Farman’s engine, she took it over and restarted the training programme, pushing the ancient machine to the limit and working herself on the always-dubious rigging with Lawn and Wang.

  They got the Fokker repaired and re-rigged at last and Ira stared round at the sky. Clouds had begun to appear to the north, small puff balls as yet, broken and torn by a wind in the upper spheres, all garish colours in the soft lavender of the evening.

  ‘I’ll test her straight away,’ he said. The weather’s breaking and I want to get this job over before it’s too late.’

  The following morning, he filled the Spandau belts himself, selecting and measuring each cartridge carefully. One faulty bullet could mean a split case and a jammed gun, and if Kwei’s bomber were half as good as Cheng seemed to think it was, it might be a good idea to take no chances of that kind.

  Ellie’s eyes were worried as she watched him.

  ‘Ira . . she began, then, as he looked up, she half-turned, unable to meet his eyes.

  ‘Go on, Ellie,’ he prompted.

  ‘Hell, it’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Only--only, for God’s sake, Ira, let’s have no more dying. Take care of yourself. You’re the reliable sort of guy who gives meaning to the world for people like me.’

  She was on the field as he left, her eyes troubled, her fingers nervous with her cigarette. The routine of patrol started all over again, and from time to time they even tried sending out the Avro with Sammy at the controls and Cheng in the rear cockpit, with Ira waiting in the sun, hoping it would bring out Kwei’s plane. But Kwei’s advisers seemed to suspect a trap and nothing happened, though they continued to hear th
e occasional thud of bombs at night and Sammy got news from Mei-Mei, who picked it up in the market, that Tsu’s troops were beginning to sneak off to join Kwei.

  ‘A whole regiment cut and run the other day, Ira,’ he said. ‘Any day now, Tsu’ll take off for Shanghai before they capture him.’

  Lao stopped coming and they put it down to sheer frustration, until Tsu himself turned up, with his son in the car beside him, to insist on results.

  The bombs continue to fall,’ Lao interpreted icily. The General insists that the enemy machine is destroyed.’

  The following day, acting on an idea of Sammy’s, they picked up Kee and went to see Tsu’s artillery commander. Colonel Tong.

  Tell him,’ Ira said to Kee, ‘that I want one gun from every battery mounted so it will fire into the air.’

  There was a lot of high-pitched Chinese chatter, and Kee turned.

  ‘Colonel Tong says that the guns will never be able to hit the enemy aeroplane. They are too old and the rifling is worn smooth.’

  Tell him I don’t want to hit the bloody aeroplane,’ Ira snorted. ‘I just want them to fire into the air. So that the shells explode at extreme range.’

  There was more chattering, then Kee turned, grinning. ‘I say, the Colonel thinks the illustrious airman has jolly well gone off his head,’ he said.

  Ira grinned with him. ‘Tell him if he’ll help me I’ll help him. I want to stop Kwei dropping bombs, but Kwei’s fly-devil is very crafty and I’m never in the right place at the right time, and I can’t see him against the cloud because there isn’t any real cloud yet and there won’t be for another month when the rains come, and then it won’t be possible to fly. But’--he gestured--’if I wait high in the sky and Colonel Tong’s guns fire whenever they see Kwei’s fly-devil near, then I shall see the shell bursts and know where to search.’

  He seemed to get his idea across at last and Colonel Tong began to smile his gold-toothed smile. They stayed for a meal of chicken and rice and drove off again, half-drunk on samshui.