The Mercenaries Read online

  Ira considered. He hadn’t the slightest idea. When the bottom dropped out of your world, ideas were hard to come by in a hurry.

  ‘I’ll need to think a bit,’ he said. ‘I’ll be all right.’

  Cluff looked unhappy. ‘O.K., Ira,’ he said. ‘I might as well clear up a few things.’

  ‘You’ve decided?’

  Cluff nodded. ‘I suppose so. Some time ago, in fact. I’ll look up a ship home. Do a bit of packing.’

  He waved and the taxi’s engine roared as it began to bump along the rutted road towards the bungalow. For a moment Ira stared after it, frowning, then he swung on his heel and began to walk along the melting tarmacadam in the direction of the airfield.

  Later, sitting down at the army-issue folding table in the shabby hut they used for an office, he brushed the dust away with his hand and, picking up a sheaf of papers, blew the fine red grains from them.

  There was nothing he could do across the field where the African labourers were already heaving the splintered spars of the RE8 aside and wrenching free the torn fabric so they could get at whatever might be salvageable, and he sighed and lit a cigarette. The idea of starting an air carrying company had come to him in the squadron mess after the Armistice in 1918. The place had been silent, terribly silent. The lack of noise had seemed strange at first, and the stillness across a land desolated for years by gun-fire was immense. At the end of the hazy autumn afternoon it had seemed overwhelming--like being buried alive. With the litter of war and the crooked crosses still about them, it had been almost as though every single hour of four wretched years had been coming back to bruise the memory and suddenly it had seemed a doubtful privilege to have survived.

  The squadron had long since dwindled almost out of sight as men had gone home for demobilisation, and skilled mechanics had vanished. Pilots had flown for the last time and packed up their kits. Canadians, South Africans and Australians had vanished for ever, and the silence had become too heavy for the few who were left to lift. On the last night before going home he’d talked to a few of the remaining pilots, Cluff, Manners, Brannon and Avallon.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he’d asked them.

  ‘Get a flying job somewhere,’ Brannon had said.

  ‘Back to the bank,’ Cluff had decided. ‘Play safe.’

  ‘Dunno.’ Manners had been dubious. ‘Can’t imagine ever settling down to work again.’

  ‘I’m staying on,’ Avallon had decided. He was married and had joined the Flying Corps from the Brigade of Guards and, with a title somewhere in the family, somehow it had been typical of him that he should stay on.

  As it happened, apart from Avallon, out of the four only Cluff was still flying. Brannon had settled for testing parachutes and had been killed almost immediately, and Manners, who had been unable to imagine settling down, had gone into a drapery business and now, with a wife and three children, was unlikely ever to change.

  As for Ira, afraid that flying was going to be lost to him, he had volunteered to go to Russia to fly Camels against the Bolsheviks, but the adventure had soon gone sour in muddle and stomach-sickening squalor, then he was back in England, exactly where he’d been before, and it had been Cluff, the least adventurous of them all, Cluff the cautious, Cluff the careful, who had been mad enough to join him in the hopeless attempt to start an air carrying company in East Africa.

  He frowned. Might have been, he thought. The company that might have been. Curiously enough, he didn’t feel half so depressed as he felt he ought to be. Poverty, somehow, seemed to go with flying.

  He’d grown up with it and lived with it as long as he could remember. He could still recall the family quarrels that had been brought on by his father’s obsession with what he called ‘the science of aviation’. There’d never been enough money for luxuries or even, sometimes, for necessities, because it had all been spent on the linen and spruce kites with their erratic engines he had built.

  But his father had been more right than he knew and at the age of twelve and already well used to planing, sanding and stitching the fragile wings of his father’s machines, Ira, to the envy of every boy in the neighbourhood, had been given a five minutes’ flight in Colonel Cody’s kite-like two-decker at Brooklands and, by 1913, had known everything there was to know about the strange new science of aerodynamics. Yet when one of his father’s dubious engines had finally failed him and sent him to his grave with a broken neck, and his mother had thankfully got herself remarried to a solidly earth-bound accountant, Ira had been dragged away to the opposite end of London and articled to a solicitor in the vain hope that he’d get the nonsensical new sport out of his system.

  His mother had already been too late, however. By that time he’d known every machine that had ever been built, from the Wright Brothers’ wavering Flyer through Bleriot’s monoplane to the frail Farmans with which the new air arm had gone to war. He’d made models and had already known the mysteries of bracing and rigging and had helped to push out the first Tabloid for its maiden flight at Brooklands. He’d been more air-minded than he’d known and had rushed to join the Engineers only because it had not really crossed his mind that anyone had been seriously using aircraft for hostile purposes in war.

  By the time they’d sent him, still under age, to France, he had fought his way out of the fitting and rigging sheds and aboard a BE2C as an observer, and by the middle of 1916 he was a pilot, less known for his skill as a flier than as a mechanic. Behind his back had been a 120-horse Beardmore and he’d sat in a cockpit which had felt like a pulpit, with his observer in front in what looked like a hip bath. Afterwards had come Bristol Fighters and then Sopwith Camels, and with his ability with engines and a gift for shooting, they had given him a small notoriety and a chestful of decorations.

  Curiously enough, he thought, staring unseeingly at the papers in his hands, he remembered remarkably little now about the war in the air, beyond the skill which after so many years had become instinctive rather than anything else. All he remembered about it now was the profound beauty of the sky, the loneliness, and the vastness of the great blue bowl where his duties had taken him.

  Pushing at the dusty papers, the insurances, the invoices for petrol and spares held down by rusty spanners, the copies of letters he’d sent to and the replies he’d received from the Johannesburg Finance Company, Ira felt bitter for a moment that such an auspicious start should have come to so little.

  As he thrust the papers aside, suddenly irritated by them, he heard the Avro returning and went to the door to see it land. It would be the last straw, he thought, if Sammy, who was still only a newcomer to the game, crashed this one, too.

  But there was no mistake about Sammy’s approach and the old machine came in surely, the Monosoupape engine poppling harshly, Sammy’s head leaning over the side of the cockpit into the spray of castor oil that fogged his goggles; and the aircraft slid neatly into position, the Mono’s crackling roar pounding brassily across the still air.

  Sammy had appeared on the airfield as a skinny fourteen-year-old in a shabby shirt and shorts when Ira had first arrived with Cluff five years before, with one old Curtiss JN4 and the RE8 which now lay wrecked across the field. Ignoring all attempts to shoo him off, he’d hung around the fringes of the field until, during a sudden violent storm, they’d called on him to help with aeroplanes that were flying wheels off the ground on their mooring ropes. From that moment, Ira had known they’d never shake him off. Sammy had been as much a dead duck as far as flying went as he himself had been in 1915.

  He’d been with them ever since, starting full time when the Jenny had crashed in a storm and put Ira in hospital with a broken ankle two years before. It had been one of Sammy’s relations who’d discovered the old Avro stored in a warehouse in Johannesburg, the damaged relic of an air display, and Sammy who had persuaded them to buy it. He had gone with Ira to fetch it, had helped him to put it together, spending days with him covering the wings with fresh fabric and patching the bat
tered sides. He had helped service the Monosoupape engine and unearthed a whole load of spares in Durban docks, and had learned to drive the aged Lancia, charging madly round the airfield, a broad delighted grin on his face, making agonised noises with the gears until he had mastered the controls. In Sammy there was an instinctive ability with mechanical things and a driving urge to fly, and he had been hooked from the first day Ira had taken him up on the test flight of the Avro.

  The aircraft sank lower, the engine poppling, its speed falling all the time, then the tail dropped and, as the machine lost flying speed, the wheels struck in a puff of yellow dust and the old biplane bounced gently, the long double-strutted wings swaying. Under Ira’s approving eyes it began to rumble to a stop, trailing a cloud of dust which drifted away behind in the prop wash.

  Sammy turned at the end of the field, his thumb pressing the cut-out, and the Avro swung, the comma-shaped rudder fish-tailing, the long ski-like skid shuddering between the wheels, and began to move swiftly back towards the hut As it jolted to a stop again, poppling and burping over the last dusty bump among the dried yellow grass, Ira threw away his cigarette and returned to the papers.

  He sat at the desk again, staring unseeingly at them for a while, then he threw them down again, disgusted. They were all bills, and, with his savings spoken for, all he’d have when he’d finished paying them would be the single plane, the car and the lorry and the workshop full of old tools. No tin-roofed bungalow and not a scrap of working capital to buy spares which, God knew, were hard enough to obtain at any time in East Africa. And not far away with a new steel hangar and a horde of technicians and a Midas store of capital in the bank, his rivals, Central Africa Air, were busy, he had no doubt, kicking the last underpinnings from beneath his feet.

  He became aware of Sammy standing in the doorway, his dark young face sombre in the fading light.

  ‘I made it,’ he said.

  Ira nodded without looking up. ‘Good,’ he grunted.

  ‘Mr. Penaluna’--Sammy addressed him nervously--’how’s it going?’

  Ira raised his eyes and the look in Sammy’s face made him smile. ‘It isn’t going, Sammy,’ he said. ‘It’s stopped. We’ve just gone bust .’

  Sammy drew in his breath sharply but he didn’t seem disturbed. He had an incredible faith in Ira’s ability to deal with things and he seemed to pause only to wonder how long it would take him to work out their salvation.

  The letter?’ he said.

  Ira nodded. ‘Sure, The letter. No loan, no airline. They made it good and final. It’s no good going back for another try.’

  ‘Does that mean we’re finished?’

  Too bloody right it does.’

  Sammy jerked his head. ‘What about Mr. Cluff?’

  ‘He’s pulled out.’

  ‘Didn’t he trust you?’

  Too much. He’s going to walk off with every penny I-own.’ Ira looked up and chuckled. ‘You can’t blame him, Sammy It’s no good going down with a sinking ship.’

  ’Are we sinking?’

  ‘We’ve sunk. Without trace.’

  Sammy frowned, not quite understanding Ira’s cheerfulness. ‘Does that mean we don’t ever fly again?’

  Ira looked up quickly at the note of tragedy in the boy’s voice. ‘Nobody’ll ever stop you flying, Sammy,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Not now. You ought to have been born with wings. I’ve seen birds that didn’t fly as well as you. You fly as if you were born in a cockpit and if I had a company you could always have a job with me. You’re one of God’s chosen few. You’ll never have a home or a steady job again.’

  Sammy was grinning now, then his face became serious again. ‘Have we really finished, boss?’ he asked again, as though he just couldn’t believe it.

  Ira nodded. ‘No one’s ever likely to want to fly with us again,’ he said. ‘We’ve folded up. Tight as a duck’s backside. Nothing in the world would convince the finance company that we stood a chance with Central Africa Air down at Nairobi with seven planes and an office in the city, pinching all our customers. They just didn’t believe me when I said we were fighting back. And they were right.’

  ‘And Mr. Cluff?’

  ‘Going home.’

  ‘What’ll we do, boss?’

  ‘We can always get a job with Central Africa Air.’

  ‘Perhaps if we hang on, boss . . .’

  Ira grimaced. He seemed to have been hanging on by the skin of his teeth for years now, trying to raise money out of bankers who wanted collaterals he couldn’t provide. Hanging on at first had been exciting but it had long since lost any charm it had ever possessed, and he’d begun at last to see some of the frustrations felt by that urgent, obsessed and impractical man. his father. Hanging on ceased to be a challenge when it finally dawned on you you’d be hanging on the next year and the year after that and for ever and ever, amen. Even a challenge could turn sour in time and, though Ira could be as dourly tenacious as anyone, he was young enough to feel it wasn’t much of a life.

  ‘I don’t think so, Sammy,’ he pointed out. ‘I don’t feel like hanging on. I’m no businessman.’

  ‘You’re a fine airman, boss. Tip-top. Gilt-edged.’

  ‘Doesn’t make me able to run an airline. I can strip any engine you like to show me and rig any plane, and if I couldn’t fly I’d have been dead in France. But that doesn’t make me a success in peacetime, Sammy.’

  Ira paused, shoving the papers about his desk. Telling Sammy there was no future for him with the company was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do. Moshi Air Carriers Ltd. had long since come to mean as much to Sammy as it did to Ira. It wasn’t so much loyalty as involvement. Sammy had become craftsman enough already to feel that it was his company, too.

  ‘You’d better get it into your head, Sammy,’ he went on slowly. ‘I can’t give you a job any longer.’

  ‘Perhaps something’ll turn up.’ Sammy leaned forward eagerly. ‘Let me help you run the show.’

  Ira studied the earnest young face with interest. Think you could?’

  ‘I’m a Jew.’

  Ira grinned, fished in his pockets and tossed a bunch of keys on to the desk. ‘It’s all yours, Sammy. If you can understand the bloody books you’ll be a miracle. Cluff never could.’

  3

  It seemed that Cluff couldn’t get away fast enough.

  He held an uproarious party in the hotel at Moshi the night before he left, as noisy as any mess celebration in France, but Ira remained sober all through it, trying hard to find pleasure in Cluff’s desire to smash things. He restrained him from throwing bottles at the lights and pouring beer into the piano and, with the help of Sammy, put him to bed in a hired room and left him with the South African girl, who’d occupied far too much of his time in the past few months, holding his hand and trying to decide whether it was worth while jumping in with him or not.

  ‘Where now, boss?’ Sammy said as they climbed into the old Lancia outside the hotel.

  ‘The field, Sammy.’

  ‘The airfield?’ Sammy’s eyebrows shot up. ‘At this time of night?’

  ‘I’d like to think. You can leave me there, if you like. I can sleep on the camp-bed in the office.’

  The breeze was blowing clouds of dust across the field but there was a moon as big and yellow as an orange as they stopped outside the hut. Sammy watched silently as Ira climbed out and stood among the trembling yellowed grass.

  ‘You all right, boss?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘Just leave me, Sammy. I’m fine.’

  Sammy drew back into the shadows, but he didn’t go. Instead he sat in the Lancia, huddled out of the flying dust, watching.

  For a long time Ira stood with his hands in his pockets, his trouser legs flapping in the breeze, staring at the Avro, all that was left of his company now, then he walked across to the old biplane and moved round it slowly, watching the long wings tremble in the gusty wind and noticing how from one angle the yellow of the moon gleamed across t
he doped surface and how from another the struts and the drumming wires stood out in silhouette against the silver-blue sky.

  After a while he put his foot on the step and climbed into the cockpit, and sat for a moment, working the control column idly and watching the ailerons move up and down, feeling the machine quiver in the breeze almost as though it were flying. The Avro had been the only sound aircraft the company had ever possessed. The Jenny and the RE8 had never been capable of hard commercial work, but they’d been all they could find and all they could afford, and Sammy’s discovery of the wrecked Avro had been the only thing that had saved the company from tottering to its grave eighteen months before. They’d been over-ambitious and underfinanced, and it was now all over.

  Ira stared at the compass, tachometer and pressure gauge, which, apart from the length of string he’d tied to a centre-section strut to indicate side-slip, were all the instruments the machine boasted, then he crouched down in the cockpit and stared forward, over the blunt snout. The Avro was a sound machine and, despite their age, dozens of them were still being flown all over England by nomad pilots who preferred putting on exhibitions of stunt flying to settling down. An Avro had been the first real aeroplane Ira had ever flown and, after a succession of curved-winged fragilities that were really only powered box-kites, it had had a reassuring stability about it. From the days of machines with an unenviable reputation for going into a spin on the slightest excuse, the Avro had taken flying a step nearer something with a future.

  Ira sighed, catching the stink of dope and the bitter nutty tang of castor oil with which the frame and fabric of the old machine were soaked. Things had come a long way in the few short years since it had been built, and the Americans had even got an aeroplane round the world. For a moment he was lost in a daydream, his mind filled with memories he hadn’t had for years. When the war had finished he’d put them all behind him and hadn’t suffered from a moment’s nostalgia. He’d joined up just one year older than the century and had ended the war still not much more than a schoolboy with a gift for survival.