Three

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 worthwhile, 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’ 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 compradore,’ 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 BMW 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.

‘OK,’ 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 BMW, 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. ‘OK, 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 corner, 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 were 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.

There were a couple of sharp taps near him on the Albatros and, glancing upwards, he saw torn fabric fluttering above the centre section, but Sammy was close behind him and, across the circle of the bank, he saw the Caudron’s observer swinging his gun for a shot at the Avro. Instinctively, he lifted the Albatros in a clumsy half-roll that set the wires twanging and sprayed his face with oil, and came back below the Caudron, with the Lewis pulled down on the quadrant and ready for firing.

For a second, it hung above him like a box kite in a perfect position for the kill, then the pilot, clearly deciding he needed time to work out tactics to deal with this new threat, banked steeply and dived to safety, pulling out just above the ground and heading east.

 

Fagan had already landed as the Albatros rolled to a stop. He had climbed from the Fokker and was standing by the farmhouse, gesticulating to Lawn and a circle of pupils and capering coolies. Ira sat for a moment after switching off, huddled in the big cockpit of the Albatros, staring at the Johannisthal works plate set on the dashboard and experiencing the old let-down feeling he’d had so often after a patrol in France, a sensation of relief and a relaxation of tension.

As he looked up, he was surprised to see Ellie alongside. She was smiling and, as he climbed from the machine, Sammy came running across and, grabbing him by the arms, began to dance round him, all his frustration and despair gone in the moment of triumph.

‘I thought you had him by the tripes that time when you were underneath him, Ira,’ he crowed. ‘Next time we’ll make no mistake.’

Fagan was strutting towards them now, his face grimed beneath his goggles from the cordite smoke where his guns had fired, a noisy mockery of a warrior home from the wars.

‘Champagne tonight,’ he yelled excitedly long before he’d reached them. ‘There must be somewhere we can get the bloody stuff!’

Lao arrived soon afterwards, bringing his congratulations and a bottle of whisky which didn’t hide the fact that he’d also brought a demand from Tsu that he wanted the illustrious foreign fliers to press home the victory with aid for his hard-pressed artillery. To Ira’s surprise, he claimed that the alliance of the northern warlords against Chiang K’ai-Shek’s growing power had finally been completed and that Tsu’s agreement with General Choy across the river was at last working well.

‘Old Dog-Leg Chiang is finished,’ he said gaily. ‘He cannot fight everyone at once.’

Fagan gestured wildly and, noisy and excited, grabbed an almost full bottle of rum Lawn had produced.

‘We’ve won the war!’ he shouted and took a gulp that was more demonstrative than wise. As usual, his triumph turned to farce at once as he collapsed in front of the pupils he’d been trying to impress, in an explosion of coughing that brought the blood to his face and tears to his eyes, and left him weak and gasping and leaning against the side of the Albatros in a daze.

‘Sweet sufferin’ J,’ he said loudly as he recovered a little. ‘It’s a mortal sin to doctor the bloody stuff like that. What’s in it?’

Lawn eyed the half-empty bottle bewildered. ‘Best Jamaica rum,’ he said. ‘Or it was when I ’ad a swig at it.’

Fagan gestured airily, his eyes on the sniggering pupils. ‘Hell,’ he shouted, ‘they diddled you. It’s raw alcohol, to be sure.’

Watched by a frozen-faced Ellie who, now that he was safe and triumphant, no longer appeared to be concerned, he seemed unable to divest himself of his leather coat and flying helmet, the trappings of his victory, and stood near the old patched Albatros, boastful and gesticulating, going again and again over his fight.

‘Lor’, into the Valley of Death,’ Sammy muttered. ‘You’d think that bloody balloon had been armed with whole batteries of cannon.’

 

It had been Fagan’s intention, while he could still savour the heady taste of his victory over the balloon, to work the following day with General Tsu’s artillery, but in an anti-climax that came as no surprise to anyone, he went down instead with a galloping hangover, which was not improved when his house-coolie helpfully offered him a cure from a herb doctor in the form of a brew of crystals of musk and child’s urine. Even if there had been any chance of a quick recovery, the very thought of this concoction was enough to put him on his back at once and it was two days before he got off the ground again.

Even his return to the air – in the Avro, with Sammy unwillingly in the rear cockpit because of an unaccountable drop in revs in the Monosoupape that called for a mechanic aboard – was conducted with his usual flair for the melodramatic. He set off in a steep climbing turn round the Chang-an-Chieh that set Ira’s teeth on edge, and threw the whole airfield into a state of nail-biting anxiety by failing to return.

Greasy from working on the oil system of the Mercedes, Ira watched the sky with Ellie and Lawn, none of them suffering from much apprehension about Kwei’s air force – if the Caudron was an example of what he could put into the air even the unpredictable Fagan hadn’t much to fear – but all well aware that, with his ability to make the simplest thing difficult by showing off, he could easily still do a great deal of damage to himself and to Sammy.

Six hours overdue, the Avro came back in the late afternoon just when the sun was beginning to disappear behind the pagoda. As the low hum of the Mono became audible towards Tsosiehn the hard knot of apprehension in Ira’s chest melted, and eventually he saw the wide double-strutted wings coming past the Chang-an-Chieh. The Avro bumped down in a clumsy landing that put Ira’s heart in his mouth, and was taxied with Fagan’s usual dangerous aplomb up to the other machines to swing wildly into line, its wing-tips narrowly missing the Fokker’s rudder.

Immediately, Sammy climbed out and began to take off the engine cowling.

‘Bit of busted plumbing,’ he said cheerfully over his shoulder. ‘Fixed it with some tape and a piece of copper tube we got from one of Colonel Tong’s gunners.’

Ira pushed a Gold Flake packet at them and, as Sammy lit the cigarette with greasy fingers, Fagan gestured melodramatically with the match. ‘We conked,’ he said loudly. ‘Miles from nowhere. Thanks be to God we dodged Kwei’s troops.’

Sammy put the story in perspective. ‘Nothing much,’ he said. ‘Petrol feed. Kee came in a motorbike and sidecar with one of his men, so we left the bloke to guard the bus and went to collect the copper tube from Colonel Tong. We tried to tell him where Kwei’s artillery was.’

The way Fagan lit his cigarette indicated how unsuccessful they’d been and as he grabbed Ellie’s arm and began to stalk away, Sammy began to laugh.

‘There was His Nibs,’ he said. ‘Yelling and screeching and banging away at the map where the guns were, with Kee translating and old Tong with a face like a piece of cold rice pudding, smiling his gold smile and trying to pretend he understood. But he didn’t know a map from a menu and wouldn’t admit he couldn’t read one for fear of losing face. I thought Fagan was going to bust with rage.’

‘Any ground fire?’ Ira asked.

Sammy grinned. ‘Only from Tsu troops. Honest, Ira, this war’s enough to make you weep blood in bucketfuls. The Boy Scouts back home could do better. Fagan says he’s going to have a go with grenades tomorrow and do the job himself.’

 

The following morning brought a high wind that raised great clouds of yellow dust and set the birds whirling like scraps of blown paper; and, unable to fly, Fagan fashioned a home-made rack which, with Wang’s assistance, he fastened clumsily underneath the Avro’s fuselage. To it Lawn attached a dozen grenades with looped wires. A further wire was attached to the grenades to remove the firing pins.

‘Suppose we don’t pull the right string?’ Sammy asked with a grin.

As the wind dropped, the Avro took off past Peter Cheng circling solemnly in the Farman; and Ira, sitting in the square coffin fuselage of the Fokker, watched uneasily as it bumped across the ground after him, half-expecting one of Fagan’s home-made bombs to break free and explode under its tail.

A milky scum of cirrus had drained all the colour from the land and the ground had a drab neglected ashen look about it, but they found a battery of Kwei’s artillery without difficulty near a group of wood-and-wattle buildings on the edge of a clump of trees, and Fagan immediately slammed the Avro into a steep dive that almost threw Sammy out. A fusillade of shots came up at them at once as they roared along the line of guns, the comma-tail of the Avro wagging, and following close behind, Ira saw Sammy push up his goggles and busy himself with Fagan’s wires and tapes.

Unfortunately, something seemed to go wrong with the gadget and half the grenades dropped away together, to explode harmlessly in a series of flashes on a hut fifty yards from the target, and as the pieces of wood and wattle whirred away, the argument that had started in the Avro grew furious. Ira smiled as Sammy began to shout and gesticulate in disgust, then as they came round for a second try, he saw him start to beat the side of the machine in frustrated fury as the rest of the grenades dropped away in a second batch long before he was ready.

As the Avro’s nose lifted, Fagan began to gesture wildly at Sammy, using both hands so that the aeroplane seemed to be flying itself, then pointing to the Lewis gun, he swept round once more, clearly determined to do as much damage as possible. The Lewis rattled briefly but they didn’t appear to hit anything, then, as they banked, Sammy laboriously lifting the gun and its cradle to the opposite side of the cockpit, Fagan saw a team of ponies hauling the end gun away, and the blunt heads lifted in fright as the Avro buzzed over them. Sammy’s Lewis rattled again but neither horses nor men fell, though one of the ponies seemed to have been nicked by a ricochet and started to kick its shafts to pieces.

As the Avro came round once more, Kwei’s gunners were too busy quietening the frantic animal to take much notice of him and Ira found himself shaking with laughter at Sammy’s desperate attempts to bring the Lewis to bear against Fagan’s clumsy failure to place the Avro on the correct side of the guns. Once again, no damage was done and they flew backwards and forwards for a while, humiliatingly unlethal, until the dusty fields emptied and Ira saw Sammy gesturing and pointing furiously at his empty weapon.

 

The argument that had started in the Avro and continued all the way home was still going on when Ira landed, but it was cut short by the arrival of Lao, his solemn face smiling with delight. Fagan, still wearing his leather coat and helmet, gave him a highly colourful and exaggerated account of what had happened and saw him off, swearing to do even better the following day.

‘Bombs, me old boisterous boy,’ he insisted earnestly as he closed the door of the car behind Lao. ‘You’ve got to get us those bloody bombs I ordered.’

He was showing off wildly, watched by a po-faced Sammy, and Ira laughed.

‘I wouldn’t have thought that one pony shot up the backside was worth the risk,’ he said as Lao left. ‘There aren’t enough aeroplanes or bombs in the whole of China to do the job properly.’

Fagan’s face was a mixture of anger and frustration, and Sammy grinned, unable any longer to look solemn.

‘Aw, come off it, Pat, do,’ he said. ‘Face up to it. On today’s showing, you were probably no good even dropping bags of flour in that air display of yours.’

Fagan’s simmering fury exploded into an elaborate display of histrionics.

‘Ach, the gay one!’ he shouted at the top of his voice as he stalked away. ‘The knowing one! The bloody rotten aim of him! Sure, I can do it on me own, then, with the proper tools, and divil a bit of help I’ll ask, either!’

As the day progressed, however, his failure to inflict any harm began to sit heavily on his shoulders and, as he pulled his flask more frequently from his pocket, his rage changed to frustration and finally to a belief that he had signed up to fly for the wrong army.

His mood lasted only until the Cooper bombs arrived the following evening, badly packed and looking none too safe, and quivering with excitement, he gingerly picked out the best and with Lawn’s help, fixed them to a rack under the wing of the Fokker. He was obviously itching to get into the air again, an indifferent flier and a worse shot, but with something in his make-up that seemed to need to create mayhem.

Sammy was standing by the Albatros as he pulled his helmet on the next morning. He was stripping down the cylinders, and dismantling the valve mechanism on the table by the machine, and had flatly insisted that flying with Fagan was a waste of time.

‘He gets too bleddy excited,’ he observed.

He watched Fagan climb into his seat, his expression its usual mixture of indifference, humour and contempt. Ellie stood nearby, hugging her elbows in that odd angular stance she affected, her face expressionless so that it was impossible to tell what she was thinking.

Sammy lit a paraffin-smeared cigarette and glanced at the bits and pieces of engine laid out on the table, still dripping from the wash he’d given them, then he looked at Ira, his eyes calm as though he’d considered some of the problems of life and come up with a few of the answers.

‘I’m glad I’m not Pat Fagan,’ he said sombrely. ‘It’s all right being an intrepid birdman, but he has to be more intrepid than anybody else. The bangs he makes are always a bit louder than anybody else’s and the blood he spills is always a bit redder.’

His voice was full of scorn as Fagan worked the throttle of the Fokker and the machine swung round spectacularly against the weight of Lawn and the terrified coolies hanging over the tail.

He replaced his grimy cigarette in his mouth and shrugged. ‘I’ve decided I like engines better than guns,’ he said gravely. ‘When someone moves the prop round and I’m standing up there, listening to the bits move – all the click-click-clicks as them bright little parts slide up against each other – that’s what I think’s exciting.’

 

Fagan returned, with his bombs gone and elated enough to fluff his landing so that the machine stood on its nose and wrote off the propeller.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Sammy yelled furiously, dancing with rage. ‘We haven’t got all that many spares. You ought to know your job’s to get the machine down in one piece, not show off for the bleddy pupils!’

Fagan gave his mad laugh as he dusted himself down. ‘Ach, up your kilt, you mundane little man,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a soul like a pile of sand. I’m making money. I caught a regiment on the march and if I’d had a full belt of ammo, sure, I could have blown ’em all to Kingdom Come and back.’

Ellie’s eyes flickered unhappily, but he grinned, delighted with himself.

‘It was like knocking over toy soldiers with a shillelagh,’ he boasted. ‘I shot the colonel off his horse just like a rag doll.’

Ellie swung away, angular, lean and hostile. ‘I don’t like this goddam killing,’ she said sharply. ‘It isn’t what we came for.’

As Fagan swung round to argue, Ira bent by the tail of the Fokker and traced with his forefinger a line of torn holes in the fabric of the fuselage.

‘See that?’ he asked quietly.

Fagan stopped abruptly, his shouting cut short, and turned, his face falling. He obviously hadn’t realised he’d been hit.

‘What did that?’ he asked.

‘Mice,’ Sammy said.

Fagan stared at the holes for a moment then he gave a hoot of excited laughter and began to shrug them off with a blustery nonchalance that seemed forced.

‘Ach,’ he shouted. ‘It’s nothin’ but a few chance shots from a Chink with a Lewis. Divil a bit to worry about.’

His excitement seemed to be building up, moving him faster and faster like a fly-wheel under its own weight and, sensing that it was getting a little out of control, Ira was half-tempted to ground him for a few days.

But he was boasting now how much money he was making, taking a pathetic pride in totting it up in front of the unimpressed Ellie, so that he decided in the end to allow him to continue a little longer, feeling partly that somehow they owed Ellie something and partly that, when Fagan was finally satisfied, he’d probably take his fortune and disappear.

They patched the holes with fabric, dope and glue, and Fagan took off again with more bombs, climbing steeply past the tower of the pagoda.

‘Here we go, boys, into the Valley of Death,’ Sammy said in a flat voice from his trestle alongside the Albatros. ‘One day he’s goin’ to hit that thing.’

Fagan came back as elated as ever but it was possible now to sense a tenseness in him that hadn’t been there before. There were more bullet-holes in the tailplane and the need to protect the few old machines they possessed seized Ira’s mind.

‘For God’s sake, take it easy, Pat,’ he urged. ‘Kwei’s supposed to have new machines from the north, and you’re a bloody sight easier to replace than the Fokker.’

‘Leave it to me,’ Fagan said, lighting a cigarette with awkward fingers. ‘I can look after meself.’

Ira wasn’t so certain. ‘Tsu won’t mind if you stop one,’ he pointed out. ‘But he’ll mind like hell if he loses a machine. And so will I.’

Fagan gestured. ‘Hell, what’s Kwei got?’ he demanded. ‘Another Caudron? I can run rings round a Caudron with a Fokker.’

Sammy looked up from the engine compartment of the Albatros. ‘Cheng told me that old Caudron crashed,’ he warned. ‘He says Kwei’s got some scouts in its place. Chiang got ’em for him.’

Fagan’s smiles vanished as they always did when anyone suggested caution, and as he disappeared towards Tsosiehn with Ellie, driving the Crossley fast and dangerously as usual, Sammy stared after him, his eyes puzzled.

‘Blowed if I know why he does it, Ira,’ he said. ‘I know he’s scared stiff, and so do you, and so does Ellie. What’s he trying to prove?’

 

The following morning, with the last of the bombs on board, Fagan flew off into a thin band of lemon sky that hung in the east like a sword blade. He’d seemed unable to relax and his chatter to Lawn as he’d climbed into the cockpit had been brittle and shallow, as though he were simply trying to avoid thinking.

‘He isn’t tough, Ira,’ Sammy said with a surprising show of compassion. ‘You can see the nerves sticking out and vibrating like piano wires. But he likes killing. It does something to him. I’m glad I only blew up a cookhouse and a latrine. It stops you getting it into your system.’

While Fagan was away, Ellie’s pupil, Cheng, a gentle-faced youth who looked no more than fifteen, flew his first solo. Ira stood by the farmhouse with Ellie, his hands in his pockets, smoking a cigarette, watching him, suffering every one of the tense moments the boy was living. Put your nose down before shutting off…the words he’d repeated again and again came automatically into his mind… Keep the speed up… Ease her back… Back again.

Nervously, Cheng made his shaky circuit and floated the old Farman down to the ground again and, as Ira ran across to him, he found him sitting in the wicker seat, breathless, his soft girl’s face dazed, his large dark eyes as joyous as Sammy’s had been.

‘Eyeh, Mister Ira,’ he grinned, beside himself with pride. ‘I fly!’

They crowded round him, pumping his hand, delighted with him, their first successful pupil. Lawn sent a coolie into Yaochow for Hong Kong beer to celebrate, and they were all in a group with the bottles in their hands when the Fokker returned. It was behind schedule and, though no one had said anything, they had all begun to look at their watches.

Ira and Sammy were sitting on the trestle by the Albatros and after a while Ellie climbed on to the wing root, her arm round a bracing wire, the beer bottle in her hand, trying to look unconcerned. Beyond the field, the sun was still low on the horizon, shining past the Chang-an-Chieh with its frilly roofs and curving eaves.

After a minute or two, Sammy climbed down from the trestle, wiping his hands on a piece of rag and reaching for his beer. He was followed by Ira and Ellie. Lawn joined them, then Cheng and Wang, and the six of them waited, none of them saying anything, smoking and pretending not to have noticed that Fagan was late. From behind the tents came the clang of a hammer on the morning air as one of the coolies tried to beat out a dented panel, and the whining sound of a two-stringed fiddle like a courting tomcat, and the shouts of the pupil-pilots in some sort of game.

After a while, with the increasing sun shining into their eyes, they heard the low-pitched hum of the BMW and the tension disappeared at once.

‘There ’e is,’ Lawn said, pointing. ‘Over the trees. Right of the Chang-an-Chieh. Low down.’

The look of unconcern had vanished from Ellie’s face and Wang was crowing with pleasure, but Ira, with his longer experience, was still staring at the sky. The Fokker was flying one wing low on an uneven course past the pagoda and, with instincts honed sharp in France and not yet dimmed, he sensed that something was wrong.

His tenseness seemed to transmit itself to Sammy. ‘Think he’s all right, Ira?’he asked quietly.

Ira said nothing, and he noticed that Lawn and Ellie and the others were alongside him now, staring at the sky again.

The Fokker came in low over the field, and they saw at once that wires were trailing and fabric was flapping. The engine throttled back, one wing still low, Fagan making no attempt to turn the nose into wind, it came over their heads, settling fast, the engine emitting a peculiar whistle as the throttle was opened and shut.

Ira tossed aside his empty beer bottle and began to walk after it, while Sammy ran for the old Peugeot which stood near the Albatros.

The Fokker’s wheels banged heavily and they fully expected Fagan to open the throttle and take off again, but there was no response from the engine and the machine bounced. A wing touched but it recovered, the puff of dust it had raised disappearing astern. Again it bounced, then it began to settle once more, veering from side to side as though Fagan was having difficulty working the rudder bar.

It came to a stop at the opposite end of the field, the propeller wash flattening the grass, and they knew at once that something was wrong because Fagan’s trademark was his spectacular turns and dangerous taxying. The engine died and the blur of the propeller vanished as the blades came to a stop, and Ira began to run. The Peugeot passed him, going fast, then Sammy clapped on the brakes and Ira fell inside as the engine roared again.

Fagan was still sitting in the machine as they stopped alongside. He looked pale and sick underneath the grime from the guns.

‘All right?’ Ira asked.

‘Sure.’ The crazy laugh was cracked and feeble. ‘Help me out.’

There seemed to be no blood on him and for a while Ira wondered if it was a recurrence of the malaria. Then, as they helped him to the ground, just as the others panted up, he swayed slightly, his face grey.

Ira’s eyes had travelled over the machine. The fabric was torn in several places round the tailplane, along the wings and round the cockpit, and wires trailed on the grass from among the fluttering fabric.

‘For God’s sake…’ he began.

‘They were waiting for me, I bet,’ Fagan whispered in apology to Ellie.

‘Did they hit you?’

Fagan managed a twisted grin at Ira that changed into a spasm of agony. ‘God have mercy on me wicked soul,’ he panted. ‘Right up the bottom.’