Goshawk Squadron (20 page)

Like a tortured donkey, the klaxon brayed its amplified signal. The noise ruptured the afternoon, shattered the parade, sent men pounding across the tarmac, colliding, cursing, racing for the trenches on the edge of the airfield. Nobody hesitated. A low-flying German plane could hop over a hangar and massacre a squad with one sudden burst. It had happened.

Hawthorn blinked and flinched as men sprinted past him. He held his swagger-stick in his left hand and massaged it with his right. As the parade vanished, his confidence went with it, leaving a flatfooted, overweight colonel with poor eyesight and a build that suggested two sets of underwear.

The last man dashed around a corner. Hawthorn turned and saw Woolley. For a moment they stared at each other, while the klaxon remorselessly threw out a yard and a half of raucousness every two seconds. Hawthorn signaled to him. Woolley stood where he was.

Hawthorn's dispatch-case lay where it had been knocked over. He picked it up and walked across. “Colonel Hawthorn,” he announced. “From Corps.” He looked pointedly at the solitary and tarnished crown on Woolley's shoulder. Woolley did not move. “I'm Corps Liaison Officer for Admin. and Supplies. I take it you're Major Woolley, the CO here.”

Woolley took out an old, soiled handkerchief and blew his nose. He looked into Hawthorn's restless, enthusiastic eyes and found no intelligence.

“Air-raid warning?” Hawthorn inquired. Woolley turned it off. Echoes from the last blast bounced off hangar walls and escaped into the vastness of the airfield.

“You blocked this squadron's booze order,” Woolley said.

Hawthorn looked away. “I'd advise you to give your chaps half an hour's rifle drill every day. I wouldn't care to be in your shoes if the general took it into his head to inspect you now.
Very
rusty.”

“I want that booze delivered today,” Woolley said.

“No doubt you do, Major.” Hawthorn chuckled grimly. He could afford to. “You're going the wrong way about it, though. Don't you usually salute a superior officer?”

“Yes.”

Hawthorn flushed. “You'll get your beverage allocation when I'm satisfied with it, and not a damn day before. I know all about irregular units like you Flying Corps wallahs. There's been a sight too much laxity permitted with stores and equipment. If you ask me, some of you odds-and-sods
have been playing the old soldier. Well, Corps happens to think so too.” He held up his dispatch-case and tapped it with his swagger-stick. “From now on, all your indents and proformas and requisitions go through
here.”

Woolley took out his revolver and blew a hole through Hawthorn's dispatch-case.

The man staggered. For a moment the flesh hung slackly on his face as he gaped at the damage, and then he sucked up his lips and took a deep breath. “My God, Woolley, you'll pay for that!” he said in an astonished, passionate whisper. “You'll pay a thousand times over. Put yourself under close arrest, Major. At once.”

“Nonsense. I want that booze.”

“Somehow I don't think you're going to need it!”

Woolley raised the revolver and pressed the muzzle against the glittering badge on Hawthorn's peaked cap. “My men need it,” he said. Hawthorn's brow furrowed with the effort of evading the weapon. His hands squeezed tightly on his case and stick. “These pilots can't fly without it.” Woolley pulled the trigger, and Hawthorn's cap spun to earth ten feet behind him.

The explosion made the man's mouth gape and his eyes water. “I warn you, Major,” he croaked, and had to clear his throat. “I warn you, Major, you may think you are acting in the interests of your men, but all you are doing is ruining your own career.”

“If you don't get that booze here soon,” Woolley said, “I'll kill you.”

A couple of airmen had come out of the trenches to see what the shooting was about. They watched from a distance.

“You're a little mad, Woolley,” Hawthorn said. He breathed deeply, playing for time. “But not completely insane. Not completely. Not so foolish as to put your head in a noose. Even in wartime, murder is still murder.”

“I'll kill you now,” Woolley said flatly, “and stick your fat body in my plane, and in ten minutes I'll throw you out behind the German lines, unless you get me my booze and my scarves.”

“Cut your losses, Woolley.” Hawthorn indicated the airmen. “Too many witnessed now.”

Woolley reached down and shot the spur off Hawthorn's left boot. The impact knocked his feet from under him. He got up very slowly. The airmen did not move.

“This is the most arrant, selfish, unpatriotic swindle I ever heard of,” he said thickly. “Don't talk to me about your bloody pilots. They don't need a bottle of Scotch a day and new silk scarves every week.”

“I don't know why I bother to tell you,” Woolley said. “They need booze because the stink from the engine gives them the runs. They also need booze to stop them from thinking about what they do all day. And you, you po-faced runt, you've no idea what they do.”

“On the contrary.” Hawthorn had trouble with that word. “Artillery observation. Take photographs. Spot for us.”

“Shit. They go up and try to fry the enemy alive, two miles high. You never even set fire to a man on the ground, so you don't know what it's like to burn one.”

Hawthorn lifted his dispatch-case and looked at the hole, and said nothing.

“The silk scarves go around the neck.” Woolley rested the hot barrel against Hawthorn's neck. “The neck must turn. The enemy is trying to creep up behind and fry you. The head rotates. The silk lubricates. The machine goes on working. Remove the lubricant and it seizes up. Overheats. Catches fire.”

“All right,” Hawthorn muttered. “But you can't tell me your hardworking pilots wear out a silk scarf every other week, so you don't need new ones all the time.”

“The scarves wear out when the pilots do,” Woolley said. “Unless you want us to use nonflammable silk?”

Hawthorn took out a handkerchief and mopped his face. Woolley touched it with the muzzle of his gun. “Silk,” he said.

On the way to the adjutant's office, Hawthorn said bitterly: “You'll never get away with this. How am I going to explain the holes in my hat and case? And a broken spur …”

“Tell them you got shot up by enemy aircraft,” Woolley said. “You'll probably get a medal.” He pushed open the door. “Woody, this officer will telephone Corps HQ and have everything delivered today.”

“How splendid,” the adjutant said. “May I sound the ‘All Clear' now, sir?”

“Yes.” Woolley went away.

“I wonder if you could ask them to send us some decent toilet paper?” the adjutant asked. “I can't believe the general staff use the same quality they send us here. Could you?”

Hawthorn nodded dumbly.

After forty minutes at his ceiling of fifteen thousand feet, Killion felt drowsy and slow, like his airplane. The air up there was too thin to support either of them properly.

He tugged at the flask of whisky inside his tunic and eventually worked it out. It took a long time to open it and when he drank, it tasted warm against his mouth, as if it had been in the sun; only there was no sun, not even at fifteen thousand. Cirrus at more than twenty thousand screened it out. Killion felt the encouraging, rewarding liquid charge slowly down his throat. He drank another toast to himself. It was his twentieth birthday. He was going to get a Hun.

Killion should not have been flying; he was supposed to be on reserve. But it was his birthday, so he invented a hiccup in the engine to let him take it up for height testing. It was his birthday; he had letters from his mother and his grandmother, who sent a five-pound note and a newspaper photograph of the royal family. And tonight he was going to meet a magnificent girl called Jane Ashton who worked in the YMCA canteen in the village of Chavigny. It was a happy day for Killion, too happy to be spent on the ground.

Down through the drifting cloud he could sometimes see the hazy plan-view of a German airfield. Sooner or later, something had to land there. Meanwhile Killion let the SE bumble along, barely dragging enough air under her wings to maintain height. Occasional planes crossed the landscape, far
beneath, but nobody toiled up to challenge him. The enemy was oddly restrained these days. Killion was too exhausted by the feeble air, and the cold, and the need to watch the airfield, to try and think of a reason. He held the control column between his legs and sprawled across the cockpit, his frozen nose over the edge, and allowed Jane Ashton to drift around inside his head like smoke.

He dozed momentarily: his legs relaxed and the plane wobbled him awake; and there was a whole squadron of tiny Huns wheeling toward the tiny airfield. Killion immediately put the nose down. The engine stopped its fretful clacking and began to bellow with satisfaction as the air became stronger. He steered through the middle of every cloud in his path. With all that activity below it was unlikely that any German pilot would look upward. The ground staff must have seen him, but what could they do? He streaked out of a thin patch and saw the aircraft bigger now and shinier, curling around in a wide arc to start landing. They were too big to be fighters, even two-seaters. They were bombers. Twin-engine German bombers. Probably Gothas. Another birthday present.

Red flares began coming up from the airfield, but the first bombers were committed: they had nowhere to go but down. Killion steepened his dive and began picking his targets. He still had five thousand feet to go. One bomber was just touching down; three others were strung out in approach; the rest were reforming. He decided to attack right down the landing path, diving from behind them, and he nudged his throbbing aircraft slightly to one side. He could feel the warmer, stronger air rushing past, making the whole machine vibrate. Anti-aircraft guns opened up, hopelessly off-target, nervous of hitting their own planes. Three thousand feet. Killion reached up in a panic; he'd forgotten to cock his gun. Two thousand feet. Tracer laid stitches across the sky: the bombers still in formation were firing long shots at him. Now machine guns on the ground showed flame, and as he curled around to line up with his targets he saw smaller
aircraft—Rumplers or maybe Aviatiks—taxiing across the field. One thousand feet. The rearmost bomber was shooting at him, but its pilot was dodging to spoil Killion's aim, and the bullets sprayed wildly. Killion cackled with pleasure at the trouble he was causing. He plunged on the bomber and raked it from tail to nose; then let his dive carry him under it and pulled up in time to plant a burst in its belly before climbing into a half-roll which brought the next plane almost within range.

This time the enemy pilot could not even dodge: he was almost on the ground. Killion raced down at almost three times the German's speed, and saw his shots plucking and smashing at the lumbering fuselage. Bullets from somewhere rapped his own aircraft, and then he was hurdling the bomber and flattening out above the battered grass of the field. He flew through a wild cross-fire of small-arms and caught up with the third bomber just as it was taxiing toward a hangar. That had to be slaughter. Killion opened fire at a hundred yards and emptied this drum in a series of probing bursts that brought a bloom of flames to the aircraft just as he skimmed over it.

Now Killion was defenseless. A Rumpler, straining to make height, saw him coming, turned panicking away and hit a tree. Killion jumped over a barracks through a cross-hatching of furious ground fire, and fled to the west. A huge explosion drowned the enemy fire and Killion caught a glimpse of a burning bomber slowly sliding along on its nose. Then he was over a railway line, over a wood; out of sight and reach of the guns. He hedge-hopped all the way home.

Men were shoveling dirt into steaming bomb-craters when he landed. He was told that Woolley wanted to see him right away. Killion found the pilots in the armorer's stores, silent and resentful, checking the rounds in Lewis drums.

“Where the shit have you been?” Woolley demanded.

“Height-testing, sir,” Killion said. He felt apprehensive yet jubilant.

“You're a cunt, Killion. You were supposed to be here, on reserve. While you were farting about, we got bombed.”

“Yes, sir.” Killion saw that he was very angry.

“Three mechanics dead, Killion. Three.”

Killion stared at the rounds in Woolley's dirty hands and said nothing. He felt that Woolley had no right to be so contemptuous, so damaging; Killion alone could not have stopped a bombing raid; besides, hadn't he just destroyed two, maybe three of the enemy? You couldn't talk to Woolley, you couldn't live with him. Killion felt hatred flare inside his whisky-bound guts. He refused to speak, or move, or do anything.

“Too many guns jam,” Woolley said. “From now on you'll check every bullet before it goes into your drum.” He looked at Killion as if urging him to argue so that Woolley could knock him down. Killion shuffled over to a box of ammunition. “Look out for oversize or deformed rounds,” Woolley said, and managed to make the advice sound like a curse.

Killion got to work. For a while there was nothing but the click of ammunition, the scrape of boots, and the stink of Woolley's rancor. Then Callaghan came in.

“I was told you wished to see me, sir,” Callaghan said stiffly. “My batman was just running a bath.”

“Start looking for oversize rounds,” Woolley said. “Your batman can scrub his own ass for once.”

Lambert tittered, then laughed aloud. Callaghan frowned. “Could it possibly wait for half an hour, sir? I'd rather like—”

Woolley dropped a box of ammunition. Rounds spilled and ran across the floor. Everyone stopped work. “Get outside,” Woolley ordered.

“Really, sir, I—”

“Get out!”
Woolley drew his revolver and drove Callaghan through the doorway. “You'll get a bath, you stinking schoolboy, like they get in the goddam trenches.
Run!”
Callaghan stood, hanging on to the rags of his self-respect. Woolley lashed out with his boots. Callaghan ran.