He drew a deep breath, searching for words that wouldn’t hurt. She’d been too often hurt for him to wish more punishment on her. ‘Ellie,’ he said. ‘Like you, there’s only one thing I know and that’s aeroplanes. Before the war I was an articled clerk, and a poor one at that. But I’ve learned engineering now – the hard way, over the fitter’s bench, like Sammy. If it isn’t aeroplanes, it’ll have to be motor cars, and I couldn’t ever go back to motor cars – not after aeroplanes.’
She sat up, buttoning her shirt, and managed a twisted smile. ‘Maybe it won’t be you, anyway,’ she said briskly. ‘Maybe it’ll be me. I’ll never grow old. I’ll never get the chance.’
‘Ellie, don’t talk like that!’
She looked up quickly, the smile dying. ‘Why not?’ she said, a tremendous sadness in her words. ‘I’ve got no illusions. Happiness is short and I can’t afford not to hang on to it when I get it. I haven’t had so goddam much.’
Ira sat for a moment, silent, knowing she was watching him anxiously, then he pushed his plate away. ‘Better get on with the work,’ he said gently. ‘We’ve got to have everything set up at Yaochow before the rains come.’
She watched him climb to his feet, a defeated expression on her face, then she pushed the plates aside and got to her feet, too.
* * *
During the morning Ira set the coolies to work building a sled to carry away the wings, and it was almost complete when Sammy returned late in the afternoon. He looked tired and was covered with dust from stoking Heloïse’s boiler.
‘Drove all night,’ he said shortly.
They secured the sound wings and what was sound of the two broken ones on the sled and roped them in position, with straw and strips of fabric to take the worst of the jolts. Then they began to pack the back of the lorry with the splintered struts and spars they’d collected.
‘Heloïse’s tremendous fast,’ Sammy warned with a grin. ‘You’ll have to drive in low gear to keep up.’
At Tsosiehn, Peter Cheng and the students greeted them ecstatically as they clanked on to the field, and Lawn, driven half-silly by loneliness, promptly celebrated their arrival by getting drunk.
With the fighting moving further east, things seemed to have settled to normality again in the city. Gunboats had opened the river once more and steamers were moving beyond the city into Hunan and Hupeh, and Tsu was down near Hwai-Yang with his yamen, too busy settling in to be interested in what happened at Yaochow.
He had not managed to move fast enough to cut off Kwei’s retreat and General Choy’s alliance had been half-hearted enough for him not to support him too obviously, but the defeat seemed to have shaken Kwei’s nerve and Kee came with a story that his Russian advisers had returned home and that Chiang, his boss, had broken with his friends to the north. Everything suddenly seemed to be going Tsu’s way.
* * *
The weather shut down almost overnight and the multitudinous roofs of the Chang-an-Chieh Pagoda sticking through the mists were suddenly dripping rainwater into the branches of the cherry trees.
They moved the De Havilland fuselage and the cumbersome wings across the airfield in drenching rain. Lawn had emptied the big barn so they could work in comfort, and with Wang’s family moved to one end, they cleared out the straw and manoeuvred the De Havilland into the steamy interior and began to set up a fitter’s bench.
Sammy was bursting with excitement and enthusiasm as he brushed the wet hair from his eyes.
‘We can rig a Weston purchase from them beams, Ira,’ he said, jerking a hand upwards. ‘And use Heloïse outside the door for lifting. It’ll save us a precious lot of trouble, and we can get a few coolies under Chippie Wang sawing up logs and wedges to jack her up.’
By the time they got down to work properly, the weather had broken completely, with the rain pounding down in sheets and the days growing steadily colder.
‘We oughta give the engine an overhaul, too,’ Sammy advised, stretching a piece of canvas in a corner of the barn floor and beginning to dump pistons and valves and nuts and bolts on it. ‘Polish the valve searings and decoke the cylinder heads. We’ll get a better performance out of her if we do.’
The fuselage seemed to have suffered remarkably little harm, though it looked forlorn and naked without its fabric or its engine as it hung from the great beams of the roof. The plywood round the cockpits hadn’t been much strained and what little damage there was they felt they could repair. The longerons, although they would probably have been condemned by any Royal Aircraft Factory inspector in England, were not broken and seemed sound enough to take the new undercarriage.
‘Oil gauge’s all right,’ Sammy said, ‘But we’ll need a new coil and the revolution indicator’s gone and the wheels and shock absorbers are bust.’
They discussed getting new parts sent out from England or the Middle East and arranged for Ellie to take the steamer to Shanghai to persuade Kowalski to find such spares as propellers, gaskets, pistons, tyres, wheels, high-tension coils, streamlined bracing wire, shock absorbers and, above all, plans.
‘The R.A.F.’s still got one or two DH9s,’ Ira said, his mind roving eagerly over the snippets of news he’d heard on his visit to Shanghai. ‘And the Middle East air forces are still flying Fours, so there should be no difficulty. We’ll have finished rebuilding by the time they arrive and be ready to replace the spare parts.’
He stared at the wings, which they’d stripped of linen and laid out on the floor of the barn. ‘Christ knows how many different pieces of wood there are in those wings,’ he said, suddenly awed by the size of the task they’d set themselves.
‘We can do it,’ Sammy encouraged him. ‘We’ve done it before.’
Ira gave him a wry grin. ‘Nothing as big as this, Sammy.’
Sammy looked at him earnestly. ‘Ira,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking at them wings. Last night. I sat on a box looking at ’em for hours. They’re intricate and we ain’t got many tools, but we’ve got two good wings to look at.’
‘What’ll we need, Sammy?’
‘Nothing we can’t get sent up from Shanghai. I made a list.’ Sammy fished in his pocket and dragged out a greasy piece of paper. ‘Screws. Millions of ’em. Chisels. Glue. Waterproofing. Dope. Tape. Thread. We can get the wood around ’ere, I reckon, if we look hard enough. It looks a lot, Ira, but I reckon we’ll pull it off.’
* * *
With the change in the weather, all the armies in China seemed to have retired to the villages and towns for the winter. Even Chiang K’ai-Shek, who had set off from Canton to conquer the north for the Kuomintang, appeared to have called a truce on all fronts for the cold months.
The airfield at Yaochow took on a bleak deserted appearance, the wheel marks and skid tracks filling with water and turning to muddy patches. Outside the farmhouse, a dip in the ground had become a large lake that attracted dozens of water birds from the marshy lands by the river, and little flying was done with the clouds almost down to the ground. When Peter Cheng did get the Avro off the ground, it trailed behind it a cloud of spray whipped up off the wet grass by the propeller and splashed through puddles that lifted over the wings in sheets.
With the rains, China seemed dead. No one was prepared to face the weather merely for the implacable jealousy of the military rivals for power.
* * *
The money that Tsu owed had still not turned up and Ira wrote numerous letters demanding payment before they got wind through Cheng that Tsu himself was about to appear, and they dropped the work they were doing on the De Havilland and made their way hastily over to the flying field.
Tsu’s cavalcade included Lao and his wife and son, and the usual assortment of yellow-braided assistants. He seemed preoccupied and distant, and Lao explained that General Kwei, far from accepting his defeat as final, had begun to recover his spirits and had been recruiting reinforcements, and with the aid of General Chiang, was reported to be re-arming and reequipping for the next spring’s campaigning. After
his disastrous defeat at the hands of Ira, however, it seemed he was making no plans to rebuild his air force and so, it seemed, neither was General Tsu.
Ira sensed what was coming and he was already three jumps ahead of Lao, his mind moving quickly, making plans, weighing up the pros and cons.
‘General Kwei is acquiring artillery,’ Lao explained earnestly. ‘And the Warlord of the South-West must now direct his finances to prevent him gaining superiority in this field.’
Ira nodded and smiled and Lao seemed relieved that he understood.
‘He feels, therefore,’ he went on, ‘that he must terminate all other contracts. You will be paid off and all debts settled.’
‘When?’
Lao gave a shrug of irritation. ‘When the money arrives from Shanghai.’
Ira glanced at Sammy and saw the sudden excitement in his eyes, as though he could already read Ira’s thoughts. He’d been working with a file on a piece of copper tubing and he stood watching and grinning, his clothes covered with bright metallic flecks. Ellie stood alongside him, taller than Sammy, her slacks covered with oil, sensing that plans were forming under her nose, but, without Sammy’s intuition, unable to guess what they were.
Ira drew a deep breath. ‘What happens to what’s left of the aeroplanes?’ he asked cautiously.
Lao shrugged. ‘The general expects to dispose of them,’ he said.
‘I’ve got a suggestion to make. If the general will make over his aeroplanes to me, we’ll forget about the money he owes us.’
Lao looked suspicious and argued with Tsu for a while before he turned again to Ira.
‘The general says the aeroplanes are worth more than the money he owes,’ he pointed out.
‘I doubt it,’ Ira said shortly. ‘And we’ve been waiting a long time for our money now. However, I’m prepared to forget the interest that’s been growing on it – say at eight per cent – in return for the aeroplanes.’
‘Suppose General Tsu needs his aeroplanes?’
‘He can pay pilots’ fees and hiring in the usual way. We maintain them, we pay for them. We draw no salaries, but the aeroplanes are ours.’
There was a long argument in Chinese then they saw that Tsu was glancing at the two battered and patched machines – the Fokker still grounded for lack of a propeller – that were all that was left of his air force, assessing their value and shrewdly working out his profit. He nodded at last and Lao turned to give his assent.
The quick grin that Sammy gave Ira was only half-concealed. He felt Ellie’s fingers touch his hand in congratulation, then Tsu, to hide the fact that he knew he’d been out-manoeuvred, insisted on inspecting what few pupil pilots remained.
While he shook hands with everybody within reach, his ivory face inscrutable, Madame Tsu touched Ira’s arm and drew him to one side. She looked nervous and tired.
‘If I ever need you, Major Ira,’ she said quietly, ‘promise me you’ll come.’
‘Need me, madame?’
She drew a deep breath and went on quickly. ‘As you know,’ she said, ‘I had hoped I might take my son to Europe. But it will not now be this year. However, the general has promised me he will retire before long and then’ – her sad face brightened – ‘then we shall be able to go to Paris.’
She paused as Tsu finished his inspection and turned to the cars, and spoke quietly to Ira so that no one could hear.
‘If I need you,’ she repeated, ‘I will send for you.’
Ira nodded, waiting, and she gave a very Gallic shrug that was full of weariness. ‘The fighting has only finished for the winter,’ she pointed out. ‘Who knows what will happen next spring when it starts again? General Chiang grows stronger every week.’
Ira still looked puzzled, and she explained quickly.
‘Last year,’ she said, ‘we had to escape from Hwai-Yang by river. But suppose General Kwei controlled the river? There is only one way then – by air. You see’ – she gestured with a tired movement of her hand – ‘I am not concerned for myself and I am not afraid. But I am concerned and I am afraid for the boy. It would be such a waste of talent, would it not, if anything were to happen to him?’
* * *
When they’d gone, Sammy grabbed Ellie, kissed her and swung her round in a clumsy, capering dance.
‘We’re made, El,’ he said. ‘We’re made, girl!’
Ellie laughed and, escaping, flung herself into Ira’s arms. ‘I don’t know how your airline failed in Africa,’ she said. ‘For a Limey, you’re goddam quick.’
‘We’ve got money in the bank,’ Sammy crowed, ‘two tip-top aircraft and another building. What we all going to be? Ira’ll be the taipan, o’ course. Lawn can be chief engineer and Ed Kowalski can be treasurer. I’ll be chief pilot and Ellie can be secretary and sit in a bloody great office behind all the papers. It’ll be a smashing airline.’
He stopped as he saw that Ellie’s smile had faded and the warmth had gone from her face. The fooling stopped immediately, then, as they were staring after her, puzzled, they saw Cheng standing alone, his long Northern face miserable.
Tsu had made no provision whatsoever for him.
* * *
With the deteriorating weather the whole countryside seemed to descend into a period of silence and stillness. The last of Tsu’s regiments disappeared from Tsosiehn east, while General Kwei had set up headquarters round Kenli.
It was a remarkably happy period for them all. While Ira and Sammy worked on the De Havilland, Ellie, clad in her cheap cotton dress with her flying coat for warmth, set off downriver on the steamer to arrange for all the things they needed to be sent up.
The weather had suddenly become colder, with periods of wind when the ground dried out and the dust blew in clouds across the plain, and they had to drape the exposed engines with tarpaulins. To warm the freezing barn, they knocked a hole in one end, edged Heloïse inside and got Wang to build a shelter round her. One of the younger Wangs was paid to keep her boiler filled and her furnace going, and while she heated the barn, she also kept them in hot water for bathing and, coupled to a dynamo which Sammy’s squirrel-like tendency to collect scrap had gathered to him months before, provided light and instantaneous power for lifting.
In spite of the grey days, Sammy remained excited and enthusiastic about what they were doing, quite undeterred by the knowledge that they had to work to hundredths of an inch. He never seemed to be tired or without a smile on his face, and was never downhearted when things weren’t going according to plan. He was always ready with new ideas, efficient with any kind of tool they put in his hand, whether for metalwork or woodwork, and always chivvying Wang and the coolies to extra efforts with good-natured bullying in a strange mixture of English, Chinese and pidgin.
Tsu appeared to have abandoned the pupil pilots and they heard that Kee, their liaison officer, had gone east. Since Cheng had been as much caught by the flying bug as Sammy, he made no attempt to follow when the other three pupils set off for Hwai-Yang, determined to find glory as infantry officers once more. None of them had ever shown any real aptitude for flying. Only Peter Cheng, out of the lot of them, had produced any real ability, and he was now joined by his younger brother Jimmy, a sloe-eyed round-cheeked civilian of seventeen, who came up from Hwai-Yang and flung himself wholeheartedly into the business of sweeping shavings, coiling hoses, fetching petrol drums and washing off dirty oil with paraffin.
Ira was delighted with the turn of events. They had had a remarkable stroke of good fortune and he went into the repair of the De Havilland wings with a feeling of tremendous confidence. Apart from the smaller strengtheners of the leading and trailing edges, every rib in all four wings was made up of many pieces of spruce, some of them no thicker than cardboard, and each had to be glued and tacked and screwed into the right place between the main spars. But despite the size of the task, he felt sure they could do it and Sammy went off with Wang to find wood, searching the countryside and the stores and the timber rafts along the riverbank
halfway down to Yung-an-Chou.
* * *
The countryside was still quiet as the armies recuperated from the summer campaigning. In spite of the uncertainty reflected in the South China newspapers about Chiang’s growing strength, there was still no sign of activity along the Yangtze and the crews of the patrolling gunboats were directing their energies to shooting at snipe again instead of Chinese insurgents. After the excitement of the summer, when half the European families along the banks had packed up their belongings and sailed for Shanghai, everything seemed to be safe again, and the white women began to reappear with their families to rejoin their husbands who did business round Tsosiehn, and the missionaries began to push out into the country regions once more, heading back to their distant stations, tiny groups of Bible-carrying preachers living on the edge of poverty but driven on by their stubborn faith and a self-immolating belief in themselves. The province seemed on the surface to be settling down again after the summer and Tsosiehn began once more to look like Tsu’s city.
In spite of the calmness, however, it was difficult for anyone living as close to the Chinese as Sammy and Ira did to see that behind the scenes the agents the Nationalist leaders had planted in every town and village were still at work, and that agitators were whispering in the teashops, converting the area into a quicksand for Tsu. The tenuousness of his grasp on Hwai-Yang began to show again as Kuomintang flags cautiously reappeared and flapped wetly against the walls, then the students, encouraged by the apparent indifference of the Tsu officers to this initial cautious sign of their allegiance, held their first parade along the bund for weeks.
It started with paper lanterns and strings of popping fireworks and ended with a riot. In spite of the derisive comments of the Europeans in the treaty ports, a vast revolutionary feeling was tearing China apart from inside, and the insurgents of the Kuomintang were helping their cause by blaming the white people as much as the warlords. Smouldering feelings were fanned into flames and in a sudden spontaneous combustion of emotion, stalls were upset in the market among the rush-mat booths, and ducks, pigs, chickens and even fish were released because the stallholders had started selling to the returning Europeans again.
The Mercenaries Page 25
