“Stokes is a fool,” the adjutant said. “I knew him in France. Wears a hairnet in bed.”
“He says he needs a complete audit of squadron stores.”
Brazier grunted. “Stop the war, H.Q. wants to count the bullets.”
“The impertinence of it. I shall put Master Stokes in his place.”
While Lacey wrote, Brazier wound up the gramophone and played Scott Joplin records. “Fig Leaf Rag” was good. Sprightly was the word for it. He liked “Magnetic Rag” too, you could imagine the regiment stepping out in style behind a smart band doing its best with “Magnetic Rag”. He wasn’t so keen on “Gladiolus Rag”. Didn’t have the same pep. Might make a slow march.
Lacey stopped tinkering with his first draft, made a clean copy and showed it to him.
Squadron is fighting for its life against Bolsheviks by day and tribal warriors of Georgi Godunov by night stop Inflicting heavy casualties stop Instances of gallantry too frequent to mention stop Morale holding good but where is trombone trumpet E flat banjo requested in last signal query stop Regret audit squadron stores impossible while under fire stop Suspect Red high command are intercepting signals stop If s o suggest communicate in Welsh Gaelic Portuguese Cherokee stop Squadron Leader T. Wragge Officer Commanding.
Brazier read it. “The C.O. is losing his wits.”
“The strain of battle.”
“If Stokes comes here to see for himself you’re skewered.”
“We’re hundreds of miles by rail from H.Q. Two days’ travel, at least. Stokes won’t leave Taganrog.”
Brazier yawned, and returned the paper, holding it by a corner between finger and thumb. “I’ve seen officers court-martialled for less than this. The war isn’t made so that you can write your Comic Cuts.” He put on his cap and picked up his blackthorn stick.
“You may be right, Uncle,” Lacey said. “But if not for Comic Cuts, then what is it for?” Brazier didn’t stay to argue.
The C.O. sat in his Pullman and wondered how to improve the success of his Camels.
Height and surprise were always a good start. If the Camel Flight could claw its way up to, say, eleven thousand, and place itself between the sun and the enemy, there was a good chance of surprising a formation at, say, eight thousand. The Camel was a small aeroplane. Even four might well get lost in the dazzle. But when the Camels dived for a great distance, they built up a great speed, at least a hundred and fifty miles an hour or more. Some said two hundred.
That’s where the trouble began.
Controlling the plunge became progressively harder. If the airflow started to spin the propeller faster than the power of the engine to turn it, the entire Le Rhône rotary might fail, might even blow up. Or the propeller might fly off and shatter. So — no long, full-blooded dive. It must be held in check.
Even so, the guns were aimed by aiming the aircraft, and the Camels would reach the enemy at a speed that gave their pilots only brief seconds to fire before they must alter course. What’s more, their targets would not be steady as a rock, they would be swerving and sliding out of the gunsights. Next, their dive would put the Camels below the target. Now the enemy had the advantage of height.
Wragge drew sketches of an interception. He closed his eyes and imagined the sequence of events, again and again. Always the Camels were too fast, always they had too little time. An idea presented itself so clearly that it had obviously been waiting patiently to be summoned from a corner of his brain.
He sent for Jessop and Borodin.
“See what you think of this,” he said. He had a sharp pencil and a fresh sheet of paper. “Here we are, high, lurking in the sun. Some Bolo machines appear below us, here. We let them fly on, and then we follow after them and dive, not at the enemy but behind him. Two or three hundred yards behind, where he’s still unlikely to see us. We continue with the dive until we’re below them and going in the same direction, and we pull out, use our speed to climb hard, bloody hard, almost vertically, so we’re pointing at their bellies. As we stall, we fire. Or, if you prefer, we fire as we stall. And keep firing as they fly through our bullet-stream. Then we fall out of the stall and the enemy, we hope, falls to pieces.”
“And he never even saw us,” Borodin said. “In theory.”
Jessop traced with his finger the final part of the Camels’ dive and their climb into a stall. “That’s the trick,” he said. “Getting that bit right.”
“Distances are crucial,” Borodin said. “If we dive too far behind the target we might not catch it because it’s flying away. Dive too near and we might climb and overshoot it. This distance…” He took the pencil and drew a line from the start of the climb to the stall. “That must be exactly right.”
“We’ll practise,” the C.O. said. “The Nines can be Bolos.”
It took a long day’s work to find the right formula.
The Nines cruised at four thousand and the Camels attacked from five thousand, sometimes more. Wragge experimented with angles and speeds of dive and distances of climb. Sometimes the Camels stalled too soon. Sometimes they stalled at the right height but the Nines were no longer there.
They landed, ate lunch, and went up again, this time to eight thousand for the Nines and nearly ten for the Camels. Here the air was thinner and every action had to be adjusted. But at 3.45 p.m. they made the perfect, speedy, unseen interception and all three Camels hung in the air, aiming at the silhouettes of the Nines close above them, and then fell away. Everyone landed. Wragge had his formula in his head.
He knew it wouldn’t last. Combat without violence was a nonsense, and violence had a way of making fools of planners. And the enemy wouldn’t cruise up and down as placidly as Tusker Oliphant’s Nines. But Merlin Squadron had not performed well lately, indeed not since Griffin vanished in a fit of futility; and Wragge wanted to do something they could all feel proud of.
They had tea. Chef had baked muffins, which were ideal with the Gentleman’s Relish that Lacey had found in the bottom of a crate of tinned marmalade.
A locomotive arrived, pulling nothing but carrying a lieutenant from Denikin’s staff. The squadron’s aid was requested. The White advance had been checked at a river between Orel and Tula, where the Red Army presented an unusually strong defence. Denikin’s armies would attack, of course, and scatter the enemy, an excellent opportunity for ground-strafing and bombing. A suitable landing field had been identified, six miles behind the lines. It was unmistakeable: three large flags had been erected in the middle of the field.
Wragge thanked the lieutenant, asked him to have the flags reerected at the edge of the field, and said he hoped to arrive before sunset. The locomotive carried the lieutenant back to the battle.
Next morning it rained, the first interference with Wragge’s formula. Cloud, as grey and woolly as an old blanket, didn’t help either: it shut out the sky at two thousand feet.
The ground crews tested the engines, mopped out the cockpits, kept the bombs and bullets in the dry until ordered to arm. Everyone could hear the battle, rumbling away, six miles to the north. The adjutant listened. “Heavy artillery,” he said. “Red or White, impossible to say. Maybe both. God help the Poor Bloody Infantry.”
Wragge and Oliphant sat over a pot of coffee in The Dregs. “This muck isn’t going to clear,” Wragge said. “Even if it does, your target must be the Red big guns.”
“They’ll chuck all kinds of filth at us, there’s no escaping that. I mean, I hope to hell we do escape. Where will you be?”