“Sack them,” Griffin said.
“No replacements.”
“What have they got against General Wrangel?” Oliphant asked. “He’s a baron, isn’t he? Isn’t that imperial enough for them?”
“Alas, no. We have many barons. Wrangel is from the Baltic, which is Russian but not old Russia. These pilots are from true Russian nobility. They look down on Baltic barons. A question of breeding, you see.”
“Extraordinary,” Oliphant said.
“Yes. I think you have something similar with Ireland. I shared rooms at Cambridge with the son of an Irish peer. Not a happy man. The British police kept reading his letters, he said. He grew quite bitter and went to America. Texas.”
“Big mistake, that,” Hackett said. “In France the Yankee infantry attacked wearing cowboy hats. Texas is cowboy country. I expect they shot your Irish friend.”
“Yes, they shot him.” The count’s brief, bleak words silenced them. “An argument in a bar.”
“Bad luck,” Griffin said. “Back to business. Today’s raid. Pity the Red fighters were yellow but we strafed the machines on the ground and then we saw off that crowd that bothered the bombers. Good. Any observations?”
“They know we’re here,” Oliphant said. “Maybe they’ll come and strafe us.”
“We’ll go back there tomorrow,” Griffin said. “Last thing they’ll expect. Catch ’em with their pants down.”
“They’re not stupid. They tricked us today,” Hackett said. “If we’d stayed with the bombers—”
“We wouldn’t have strafed the aerodrome.”
“Those Red fighters weren’t interested in us. They wanted the Nines and they caught them. Same fighters.”
“No. Different crowd.”
“I thought I recognized a few,” Oliphant said.
“Not important,” Griffin insisted. “Anything else?”
“They fooled us,” Hackett said. “Our job—”
“Your job is to do what you’re told.” Griffin turned to Borodin. “And someone should kick your boys’ backsides until they learn to fight. Don’t look at me, I’m not going to volunteer. Not my job.”
“They probably wouldn’t listen to us anyway,” Oliphant said. “We haven’t got the breeding. Some of us are scarcely bred at all. I mean, Bellamy’s Canadian.”
“Bellamy’s dead,” Borodin said. “Your medical sergeant told me an hour ago. It wasn’t malaria, it was typhus. I advise a speedy burial.”
“Sweet Jesus suffering Christ AllbloodyMighty,” Griffin said.
“And General Wrangel invites you to a banquet to celebrate Tsaritsyn’s capture. Seven tonight. Carriages will call.”
The village was only a mile from the crash, but it was hidden in a long fold in the ground. It had about a hundred houses, all small and mud-coloured. Pedlow and Duncan were taken to a slightly larger house, built of brick, and invited to enter. They were given stools to sit on. The room was gloomy. The windows were tawny with dirt. In one corner, a small and flickering lamp cast a weak light on a pair of icons, drab with age.
Cobwebs hung thickly from the roof. The warm air smelled of dried dung. Duncan suddenly sneezed, twice, and a long, thin cobweb detached itself from a rafter. “Now look what you’ve done,” Pedlow said. They watched it drift down, slower than time, and reach its end. “Too thrilling,” Duncan said. “It’s more than a chap can take in.”
Outside, a crowd was gathering. The man who had found them climbed onto his cart and made a speech, with much gesturing at the sky. His words aroused his listeners. One by one they entered the room. A brief prayer to the icons, and then the wings on Pedlow’s tunic got their full attention. The men touched them, the women kissed his boots, everyone stood around and put their hands together and prayed, loud and strong.
“I seem to be doing rather well,” Pedlow murmured. “Don’t you wish you were a pilot?”
“That woman on your right is fascinated by your groin,” Duncan said. “She can’t get enough of it.”
Pedlow looked. “Perhaps her head is bowed in deference.”
“No. They all took a good squint at your crotch. Is your fly unbuttoned? Wedding tackle on display?”
Discreetly, Pedlow felt his fly. This small action startled the crowd. Some gasped, some moved to get a better view, faces brightened. “All correct,” he said softly, and folded his arms. The onlookers slowly relaxed. There was a sense of anticlimax.
“Maybe they plan to eat us,” Duncan said. “I’m told the family jewels are considered a great delicacy.”
“I wish they’d stop staring. They expect something. Maybe I should make a speech.”
“I’ll do it.” Duncan stood. All eyes swivelled to him. “On the breast of a barmaid from Sale,” he announced, “was tattooed the price of brown ale. And on her behind, for the sake of the blind, was the same information in Braille.” Their eyes were wide. They said nothing. He sat down. They turned and shuffled out of the room. “They’ve gone to tell it to their friends,” he said.
After a while, men brought milk, black bread and boiled eggs. Also armfuls of sheepskins. Pedlow and Duncan ate and drank and stretched out on the sheepskins. When in Rome, take a siesta. That’s what everyone else was doing.
The search party landed and reported no success. “We flew up and down and round and round,” Jessop said. “Nothing but steppe, I’m afraid.”
“Very empty,” Maynard said. “Jolly hard on the eyeballs, looking at nothing.”
“Not good enough,” Griffin told them. “Get yourselves a sandwich and go back and look again. That Nine’s got to be somewhere.” He watched them trudge away. “The squadron never gives up!” he shouted. “It could be you lying out there. Or me.”
“Then why don’t you bloody well come and help?” Jessop said, very quietly. As the day had grown hotter, the air had got bumpier. The Camel was not built for comfort. After two long flights his backside ached. Now they were going back again. This wasn’t why he came to Russia.
Captain Brazier was bored because he had nothing to do. In France, when he was adjutant of an R.F.C. squadron, he had had power: he was the man to whom new arrivals reported, he told them the drill, allocated their billets, chose their servants. He organized funerals, trained the pallbearers, made sure the firing party discharged in unison, and God help anyone who cracked a smile. He met visiting generals, inspected latrines, forwarded recommendations for decorations, blasted mechanics who needed a haircut. In France, he mattered.
Now he was what the Army called a ‘useless mouth’, a commander with nothing to command, as bad as a pay clerk or a bandsman, fit only to be evacuated when the battle approached. He lived in a railway train among a waste of prairie, surrounded by natives who never washed, never shaved, and talked gobbledegook. It was a pity the Kaiser’s war had to end. It wasn’t perfect, but at least it was fought in the King’s English. In France, if you told a chap the Boche had put the kibosh on the frogs, the other chap understood you. God knows what it would sound like in Russian.
He sat in his Orderly Room and rolled a bit of blotting paper into a pellet. Only half the Pullman car was his, the other half was Lacey’s office and radio room. He flicked the pellet at Lacey but it fell short. Lacey, listening on headphones, noticed nothing. Brazier made another pellet and fired again, but too hard: it flew over Lacey’s head. “Alright,” he growled. “One under, one over. Now watch out.” He fired again, just as Lacey reached down to open a desk drawer, and the pellet flew through the space where his head had been. “Hell’s teeth!” Brazier roared. “Play the white man, can’t you? I blew your head off, dammit.”
“I’ll call you in fifteen minutes,” Lacey told someone.