“Yes. For blipping the engine. Switching it on and off to get the speed right on landing.”
“Learn the art. You have a fine aristocratic nose. Make a crash landing and you’ll bash your nose against those gun-butts and spend the rest of your life, if you live, with what we call ‘Camel Face’. Not pretty. Are you ready to taxi? That’s what you’re going to do now. Simply taxi up and down the field a dozen times. Learn the basics.”
Dextry walked away. He sat on the grass and watched Borodin go through the starting routine with Charlie. The engine roared, belched a smell of castor oil, idled, roared again, settled down to a steady note. The chocks were removed. Borodin taxied away. Within fifty yards his tail was up. Within a hundred, he was flying.
Fifteen minutes later, the C.O. came out and joined the flight leader. They watched the Camel make its approach, shedding height as it blipped its engine, until it seemed to flare its wings, nose up, while the wheels felt for the ground, made the smallest bump, and ran.
“I told the idiot to taxi,” Dextry said. “Learn how to walk before he runs.”
“Chew him out, if you like,” Wragge said. “He’s a natural. He joins the Flight.”
Dextry walked to the Camel as Borodin was climbing down. “Nice machine,” Borodin said. “She wished to fly, so I went along for the ride.”
“Understand this,” Dextry said. “That’s the last order you disobey. Briefing in half an hour.” He walked away. Charlie was waiting. “Arm and refuel, Charlie,” he told him.
“He seems a nice gentleman, sir.”
“Lovely manners,” Dextry said. “But can he kill?”
Briefing took less than a minute. The Camels would climb to ten thousand. Form a very loose arrowhead. Count Borodin is in the Flight. We take a look at Belgorod, see what’s happening. H.Q. says the Whites have three squadrons based there. Do they know we’ve arrived? Maybe not. Stay awake. Questions? No? Good.
The Camels were labouring at eight thousand feet, and toiling after another five hundred, so Wragge cut his losses and levelled out. He was gasping for breath, he had sparks before his eyes. Maybe the air was unusually thin today. Anyway, even a new Camel couldn’t fight worth a damn much above ten thousand. Huns just ran away from it. And these were not new Camels.
Belgorod was in sight — little more than a small market town, not big enough to be fortified; probably owed its existence to the railway — when Wragge noticed a glitter down there. To get a better view he eased the Flight into a glide, but the glitter vanished. Then it returned. Sunlight off water. He tried to trace the river, but it wandered and he lost it. Then his eye caught another flicker of light, nowhere near the river, and he squinted hard and saw yesterday’s Halberstadt two-seater. Sun on its windscreen, probably. The machine was as tiny as a moth, almost camouflaged against the soft green countryside.
Wragge waggled his wings and made sure everyone saw the Halberstadt. He thought about the situation. Assume it was a Red machine, up to no good, maybe reconnaissance, counting the troop trains. Maybe bombing. It must have seen Merlin Squadron being unloaded yesterday, so bombs were likely. But no escort? Already, Wragge was searching the blue immensity above him. Suppose the Halberstadt was bait. Those Spads — if they were Spads — had 200-horsepower Hispano-Suizas, big enough to outclimb any Camel. He had specks of oil on his goggles. What was that up there? A Spad or a speck? A short rattle of gunfire made his pulse jump. Dextry was waving, pointing. Far on the left-hand quarter was a smudge of aircraft, only slightly higher than the Camels.
It matured and separated into a group of six. Three were the brown Spads. The others were a mixture: a Fokker Triplane, an all-red Nieuport, and what might be an Albatros. A mongrel lot. Flown by scruffs or aces? Wragge wondered and waited. His Flight was flying broadside-on to their approach. At four hundred yards all the Spads opened fire. Tracer probed and lost heart and fell below the Camels. “Optimistic,” he said, counted to three, and banked hard towards the enemy. Now it was a head-on charge.
Jessop crouched and made himself small. Dextry kept his head up and looked for a gap to aim at. Maynard shouted: “Come to Daddy!” and was glad no-one heard. Borodin murmured a soldier’s prayer for a merciful death if death it must be. And the two formations met in a crash of noise and nothing else. They merged and separated in an instant. Nobody had fired. Firing was stupid if you were about to collide and aimless when you were not.
Wragge banked hard right, the Camel’s trump card, and the Flight followed him. The Reds had scattered. The Spads climbed in three different directions and he chased the middle one until it was a distant blur in his gunsight. He turned and dived back to the fight, but there was no fight: just a huge and empty sky. No surprise. Air combat was like that. He searched and saw dots swirling with the pointlessness of bugs at dusk. He headed for them. One bug turned a hot red and dropped, trailing smoke. Not so pointless after all.
When Jessop came out of the vertical bank, the Triplane swam into view, so he turned and fired and his bullet-stream bent as if blown sideways and nearly hit Maynard. Jessop shouted, and reversed bank, which created a huge skid that washed the Triplane out of sight. Not possible, bloody great Tripe couldn’t disappear like that. Jessop turned the bank into a roll and made that into a sweet barrel-roll and at the top he looked down at Maynard going the opposite way and firing at something, and simultaneously red and yellow tracer chased itself past Jessop, nibbled at his wingtip, made his Camel twitch, and for an instant Jessop was puzzled, how the devil did Maynard do that? He completed the barrelroll fast and Good Christ All Bloody Mighty the Tripe was back again. No mistakes this time. He worked to get behind it. Difficult. Damn thing never kept still.
Maynard was looking the other way when Jessop missed him. He didn’t know whose guns they were, could have been one of three Bolos, not the Spads, they were gone. He banked and turned, looked left and right, banked again, looked up, looked back, banked again, never flew straight for more than ten seconds, never stopped searching. Maynard knew little about girls and sex but much about how to creep up behind an enemy and blow holes in him. He saw an all-red Nieuport chased by a Camel and an Albatros chasing the Camel, and he joined the hunt. He fired brief bursts at the Albatros, very long range but the Albatros took fright, put its nose down, and the Nieuport blew apart.
Dextry was chasing it and the explosion amazed him: who did that? Maynard whooped with glee but he knew he hadn’t scored. He joined Dextry and they circled the fluttering bits of burning debris, the drifting smoke. Warplanes were dangerous. Sometimes incendiary bullets misfired, touched off a fuel tank, a pilot sat in a wooden frame covered with doped linen and stuffed with explosives behind a red-hot engine, of course some machines blew apart. Nobody said flying was safe.
The flight was over. The Spads were out of sight, the Nieuport no longer existed, and the two survivors had quit in a hurry. Wragge chased them, for sport, and was outpaced. He returned and led the Flight to their landing ground next to the siding. On the way, they met the Halberstadt and shot it down. Its pilot made a brave attempt at a forced landing but the machine was hopelessly lopsided when it touched the ground, and it cartwheeled with surprising ferocity, every impact ripping off a part until there was little left but a trail of wreckage.
Lunch was taken. The Dregs was unusually quiet.
When they landed, the C.O. had talked to Dextry. “We all got back,” he said, “but that’s the best that can be said.”
“Sloppy. Half the time we got in each other’s way.”
“We’ve forgotten what a real scrap is like. I don’t count the Halberstadt. To tell the truth, I felt sorry for the bloke.”