“This is the one that didn’t get away,” Schramm said.
“Yes sir.”
“It comes to us all, in the end. I’ve just helped to bury a few friends. Not as deep as this, of course. I was a pilot once, you know.” The other man glanced, and was polite enough to suppress his surprise. “Different war,” Schramm said. “Just as messy, though. I’m surprised you feel the need to study the gruesome remains.”
“Just killing time. Besides, it’s only strawberry jam, isn’t it?” He chewed at a bit of tough skin on a finger. “When you go in at full bore with a pair of bombs in your armpits, even the strawberry jam doesn’t have any pips.”
A sling of steel rope was being maneuvered under the engine. A crane driver inched his machine nearer the crater.
“What do you fly?” Schramm asked.
“Gustavs, out of Beda Fomm.” The Gustav was the 109G. “I’m just waiting to pick up a replacement.”
He looks about sixteen, Schramm thought. Probably nineteen or twenty. Ruthless little thug. “Scored yet?” he asked.
The young man nodded. “Five confirmed kills. Two Hurricanes, a Blenheim and a couple of MC200s.”
The crane revved, its cable tightened, the engine came out of the earth with a slow, wet, sucking sound, and gently revolved.
It was not unknown for the enemy to capture aircraft and fly them. Transports usually, not fighters; but anything was possible in war. Schramm pulled a splinter off the barrier and tossed it in the pit. “That’s an Italian machine,” he said, “the MC200.”
Again the young man nodded. “Their squadriglia gave us some grief. They jumped a bunch of our Gustavs and shot holes in them. Deeply apologetic. Poor visibility, mistaken identification. They thought we were Spitfires. Next day, we jumped them. Two down in flames. Problem solved.”
The crane had hauled the engine up to ground level. “Excuse me,” Schramm said, and walked around the crater. Men were hosing dirt off the twisted metal. He soon saw what he was looking for: the manufacturer’s name, Allison. That meant it had to be a P-40. The hose washed off something that was not dirt.
The adjutant went over to Kit Carson’s tent and cleared it out. That didn’t take long. He put Kit’s belongings on his bedroll and rolled everything up. Everything except his notebook. Kellaway sat on the folding bed and let the notebook fall open.
The CO ran away from home when he was a kid, so Mick O’Hare says. Uncle told him. Mick ran away from home too. I know Tiny Lush and Billy Stewart got kicked out of school, like me, except I got kicked out twice. Pinky was an orphan, at least that’s what he says, but you can’t believe everything Pinky tells you. Sneezy and Greek George are like refugees, so most of the squadron has no home to go to. Makes you think. Dunno what it means, but it makes you think.
Kellaway skipped a few pages.
Big joke. Butcher force-landed in the desert and got his Tomahawk towed back to the LG by a couple of camels. Turned out he needn’t have force-landed anyway. He forgot to switch over fuel tanks, so he thought he ran out of petrol when he didn’t. Butcher reckoned he deserved a gong but Fanny fined him two weeks’ pay for being such a berk. Butcher said it cost him a month’s pay to hire the camels. Fanny asked the Arabs to give the money back, in exchange for an IOU they could take back to Desert Air Force HQ. The Arabs said OK, they’d give the money back, but only after they’d towed the Tommy with Butcher in it back where they’d found it. Big joke.
Kellaway skipped some more.
Billy Stewart sits outside his tent and watches flies. Why?
And some more.
Dreamt about T. I wish he’d go away. It’s over a year since he bought it. Everyone knew he was going to buy it, he was such a bloody awful pilot. Poor bugger.
He skimmed to the last entry.
Uncle’s gone doolally again. I suppose that’s what happens when you get old. Not for me, I hope.
It was Kit’s last entry. Kellaway discovered that his eyes were crying. He was not overwhelmed with grief for Kit, but evidently his eyes felt otherwise. He let them cry, wiped his face, picked up the bedroll and the notebook and trudged off to see the doc.
“Next time I go batty,” he said, “kick me out.”
“All right. It’s only the desert, you know.”
“I know.”
“If you spend too long in the blue and you don’t go mad, there’s something seriously wrong with you.”
The adjutant thought about that. “Billy Stewart used to spend all his spare time watching flies,” he said.
“He did indeed. Come on, we’ll take ourselves over to the mess. The Bombay brought some beer in.”
Supper that night was fried eggs and potatoes, also flown in on the Bombay.
“Why did Billy Stewart watch flies all day?” the adjutant asked.
“He was exercising the muscles of his eyes,” Barton said. “He reckoned that if he could count the corns on the feet of a fly at ten paces, he could easily spot a 109 at five miles.”
“Billy had terrific eyesight,” Pip said.
“He was a good type.”
“I’ve been thinking about Kit,” Pip said.
“Any beer left?” Hick asked. Barton tossed him a tin.
“What about Kit?” the adjutant asked.
“I watched him fall. It was all wrong. The parachute popped open, but he kept going. It didn’t check him at all. Ever heard of a parachute strap breaking?” Nobody had. “They’re made to carry an elephant.”
“Maybe the buckle bust,” Hick suggested.
“Buckle’s twice as strong,” Barton said. “Two elephants couldn’t bust a buckle.”
“I think he undid it,” Pip said.
There was silence while the pilots reviewed the routine of leaving a cockpit, of leaving it in a tearing hurry, of the flurry of acts while smoke gushed by, the kite skidded, the enemy squirted tracer and panic made the hands accelerate.
“Force of habit,” Pip said.
“Look,” the doc said to Skull, “I hope you’re not going to play that bloody dirge again tonight.”
“‘Empty Saddles’?” Hick said. “National anthem of the American West.”
“The potency of the homely metaphor,” Skull said, and sang:
“You can’t beat the simple declarative sentence in English prose,” he said. “It goes right back to Chaucer.”
“I wish it would,” the doc said grimly. “I’d pay its bloody fare.”
There were some good vehicles in Lessing’s camp. Jack Lampard picked out two Mercedes-Benz and a Fiat, all of them tough-looking trucks with fat tires and reinforced springs, and had them loaded with German fuel, water and food. Lester saw what was going on and came over. “Risky, isn’t it?” he said. “We might get shot up by the Desert Air Force.”
“They’d shoot us up if these were Swiss ambulances,” Lampard said. “They shoot up anything they see.”
“Bastards.”
“Tell you what,” Lampard said. “If they shoot us up, we’ll shoot ’em down. That’ll make a good story, won’t it?”
Malplacket had been less than honest with Lester about his knowledge of Randolph Churchill’s weekend in Benghazi. Before Malplacket left England, Blanchtower had made it very clear to his son that this was an example of the kind of daring that he expected him to uncover in the Middle East. “It’s all part of the English buccaneering tradition, Ralph,” he told him. “Just as our ancestors held sway over the high seas, so Randolph and Fitzroy slipped ghost-like through those arid wastes.”