The Challenging Heights (16 page)

‘Cross all disengaged fingers,’ he muttered to himself. ‘And hope for the best.’

Everywhere outside the International Settlement the Kuomintang banners flapped against the walls and windows and upriver outrages persisted against Europeans, directed mostly at the missionaries who had been trying to convert the Chinese to Christianity. In Shanghai, however, the situation seemed to have quietened down and from time to time when off duty, Dicken took a rickshaw to the Louza district and called on Father O’Buhilly’s mission. Nothing had been heard of him until finally it was learned that the nuns he’d gone to rescue had been released and had made their way to the coast near Fenghsian, and Dicken took off to pinpoint their position so that a gunboat could move in and lift them off.

He found them without difficulty. Clustered on the shore, they looked dirty and ragged and, circling while his observer sent a wireless message, he was able to see a whaler heading shorewards before he was obliged to turn south. The nuns reappeared in Shanghai the following day, overcome by heat, exhausted, shocked and dirty, with sickening tales of their humiliations under General Lee.

They also brought a story that Father O’Buhilly had been taken prisoner but had been turned loose near the town of Yatien, where General Lee had his yamen. The last they knew of him was that he intended to aim for the flat land near Wuhsi where he hoped to be picked up by an RAF machine.

‘I’d like to have a go at finding him,’ Dicken said.

‘He seems to be worth it,’ Orr agreed.

They didn’t bother to acquaint Air Headquarters with their plan but somehow they found out and Diplock appeared, plump, pink and self-important, to say that the Air Officer Commanding absolutely forbade the attempt.

‘The man’s American,’ he insisted. ‘It’s not our affair. It’s the Americans who should be providing the rescue attempt.’

‘The Americans don’t have any aircraft here,’ Orr snapped. ‘And by the time the AOC decides to do something, General Lee will have changed his mind and the damned man will have been recaptured and probably murdered!’

‘I’m sorry but the AOC insists. Yatien’s outside Concession territory.’

Orr glared. ‘Have you ever been a prisoner of a Chinese warlord?’ he demanded. ‘Well, for your information, neither have I. But I
was
forced down on the North-West frontier two years ago and held prisoner for a month and I didn’t enjoy it. The machine goes.’

Diplock glanced at Dicken almost as if he were seeking an ally. ‘The AOC will want to know why if the attempt fails,’ he muttered. ‘We have no authority over the area.’

‘We’ll worry about it
if
it fails,’ Orr growled. ‘I’d rather be kicked out of the service for trying than get promotion for sitting on my arse doing nothing. You can tell the AOC that. From me.’

With the rear cockpit of the DH9 ballasted with sandbags, Dicken took off the following morning. The land near Wuhsi was well away from the rice paddies by the river and was flat and hard and provided a good landing area and, picking up Yatien, he circled slowly at a few hundred feet, his eyes on the ground. Suddenly he spotted a man in a black suit wearing a clerical hat waving his arms in the middle of the field. Side-slipping in, he touched down without trouble and saw the man in black begin to run towards him.

As the machine rolled to a stop, he swung it round and headed down the field to turn into the wind. Several figures had appeared from a group of trees on his left and he saw that the man in black was running faster. He looked strangely smaller than Father O’Buhilly but it was impossible to see his face under the clerical hat.

Over the low rumble of the engine, he heard feet pounding on the hard earth and, looking round, he saw that the figures who had appeared from the trees were soldiers, Chinese in khaki cotton uniforms. The man in black was coming up behind him, obscured from view by the tail surfaces and, occupied with preparations for a quick take-off, he reached over with his hand to indicate exactly where he should put his feet to climb aboard.

There was the scrape of a foot on the wing root and Dicken looked up and round, just as the wind from the turning propeller caught the clerical hat and whisked it away. He just had time to be aware that the wearer was a Chinese when something heavy hit him on the head and he was vaguely conscious of an arm reaching past him to switch off the DH9’s engine.

Sitting in the corner of the field, holding his head, Dicken watched the Chinese soldiers lift the tail of the De Havilland and pull it round. He was circled by men holding pointed rifles, all of them obviously eager to be the first to pull the trigger.

The man who had appeared behind him had divested himself of the black alpaca suit now and was wearing the khaki cotton uniform and baggy trousers of a Chinese officer. He was only young but his face was hard, his eyes black as boot buttons.

‘Please don’t attempt to move, sir,’ he said in good if stilted English. ‘Or, my goodness gracious me, I shall be obliged to order my men to shoot you dead.’ He smiled. ‘You must be jolly unhappy,’ he went on. ‘Because I have you a prisoner and a hostage and I also have a brand-new aeroplane to add to our air force. My name, by the way, is General Lee Tse-Liu, and I shall probably win a medal for this. It is a good job that I once had a flight in England when I was there as a student and knew how to switch off the engine.’

He smiled. ‘I shall send to General Chiang for a pilot to come and take it away,’ he went on. ‘It may take some days but it will give you plenty of time to stare at the twigs and branches camouflaging your splendid aeroplane and to think how sad you will be to lose it.’

‘You’ve got another guess coming,’ Dicken growled. ‘The RAF will be out looking for me.’

Lee smiled. ‘What a pity they will be unable to find you.’

Satisfied that the aeroplane was safely secured to stakes in the ground and covered by foliage from the trees around, he gestured to Dicken to rise and they set off across the field towards the road.

‘When I was in England during the war,’ Lee said, ‘I was called a wog by a fat man with a khaki suit. But, my goodness me, I am not a wog. I am a Chinese of good breeding and we shall see, I think, what the West thinks of us before very long.’

Dicken was pushed into an elderly Crossley tender, its bonnet red with rust, its canvas hood missing, and they drove through the nearby town. The place stank of incense and was noisy with the hawking and spitting of the inhabitants – what was known to Europeans as the Chinese National Anthem. People sitting in doorways eating coloured sweets, spitting out sunflower seeds or having their ears cleaned by professional aurists, pushed forward to see. Camels and sorebacked mules plodded through the crowded pedestrians, picking their way round heaps of dirt where babies, dogs and scavenging pigs wallowed together. A group of soldiers, slovenly with their festoons of teapots, saucepans and umbrellas, watched from a doorway where they were guarding a group of criminals tied together by their pigtails. Old ivoried men with long whispy white beards and peasants carrying aged relatives on their shoulders all stopped to stare at the European face in the car.

Leaving the town, they pushed out into the countryside beyond, rattling along a road through a plain set with rice and maize and broken with paddies smelling strongly of human manure. Here and there a wooden pump was rotated by blindfolded donkeys or sinewy coolies on treadmills, and from time to time tombs could be seen among the pines with small poverty-stricken farms.

The village of Wuhsi was a place of one-storey buildings with curved tiled roofs. A gutter ran down the centre and rubbish was piled against the walls, and there was a smell of decaying vegetation, ammonia and something else that was probably the odour of the unwashed bodies. There was little sound, none of the tinkling of Chinese voices, the honking of cars or the cheerful shouting of wheelbarrow men. The people here seemed subdued and wary and watched with black blank eyes.

Removing a bar from the door of one of the hovels, Lee kicked it open and a hand shoved Dicken through. As he fell to his knees, the alpaca suit Lee had worn hit him in the face, then he heard the door slam and the bar replaced.

A hand caught his elbow and raised him gently. ‘I very much regret, me boy,’ a soft Irish voice said, ‘that you should find yourself in this predicament because of me.’

Sitting up, Dicken found himself staring at Father O’Buhilly. He was dressed only in a shirt with a clerical collar, his long bare legs ending in huge laced boots.

‘You all right, Father?’ he asked, scrambling to his feet.

‘Sure, I’m all right, my son. But gasping for a cigarette. I’ve finished all mine long since. You wouldn’t have one about you, would you?’

Fishing in his pockets, Dicken produced a packet. He was about to offer them when he changed his mind, took one out, lit it, drew a deep puff at it and handed it to the priest. ‘I think we’d better smoke half each,’ he suggested. ‘I haven’t many and we don’t know how long we’re going to be here.’

O’Buhilly took the cigarette, drew one or two deep puffs from it, so deep the smoke seemed in danger of coming out of his ears, and handed it back.

‘’Tis a wonderful thing, the weed,’ he said, coughing. ‘I’m sorry you’re in this mess, me boy. I’m to blame. Sure, they took me clothes while I was asleep, which is why you find me in fancy dress.’

Puffing at the cigarette alternately, they exchanged questions as Father O’Buhilly dragged on his trousers and reached for his jacket.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Six days.’ The priest’s face was bruised but he managed a smile.

‘Did they beat you up?’

‘But of course, me boy. They’ll probably beat you up. Not so much to hurt you as to humiliate you, to make you lose face.’

As they talked, the door opened and wooden bowls of rice and a jug of water appeared. Lee stood behind the man who carried them.

‘Kneel,’ he ordered. ‘Say please.’

‘Not bloody likely,’ Dicken snapped.

Father O’Buhilly smiled, took his hand, and, with a surprisingly strong grip, pulled him down alongside him as he knelt. Dicken was about to scramble to his feet but the priest clung on to his hand and held him firmly on his knees. As the food was placed on the floor and the door slammed, Dicken scrambled to his feet.

‘Damn it, Father,’ he said, ‘I’m a British officer! I don’t go down on my knees to people!’

‘You do here, me boy, or you’ll go hungry. I’ve discovered hunger’s a wonderful persuader and, sure, nobody’ll ever know.’

‘It’s so bloody humiliating!’

‘Loss of face exists only in the mind, me boy, and if you feel you’re their master, it is no humiliation at all.’

‘It’s all right for you–!’

‘It is also all right for you, my son. You are no good to your country if you are dead, and while you’re alive to pray to the Almighty for rescue there’s hope. The Via Crucis is a long one and was never intended to be easy. Besides–’ Father O’Buhilly smiled – ‘there’s no sense I see in unnecessary suffering. I saw the Calvary in France ten years ago and I have too much to do, me boy, to be ready to die merely to please an egoist like Lee. Besides–’ he smiled ‘–I have plans of me own that he doesn’t know about.’ He indicated the window which was covered by a grille. ‘’Tis typical Orientals they are. Inefficient and careless. And these houses are old. This was once a village jail here, but doubtless it hasn’t been used since Kwang-Hsü was Emperor. The bars are loose and I have found a piece of iron under the soil I use as a chisel.’

Dicken’s head jerked round. ‘They’re loose?’

‘Keep your voice down, me boy.’ The priest’s voice was gentle and monotonous, almost as if he were praying. ‘I’ve been workin’ on them. We shall get out of here when we wish, and walk home to Shanghai.’

Dicken stared out of the window, thinking of the grounded aeroplane. ‘Much better to fly back,’ he said. ‘Safer.’

‘Then we’ll have to hurry, me boy,’ O’Buhilly said. ‘Lee’s Chinese pilot will be here soon to take it away. There are plenty of them, I gather, trained by the Russians and Germans. It should take another day or two to get free but it will take longer than that for Lee to find himself a pilot.’

The next days were spent sweating in the humid heat in the narrow-gutted little prison. Several times, they heard aircraft and once saw a DH9 flying about a thousand feet above them on a north-south course. It was close enough to see the roundels on the wings and fuselage, but nothing came of it and they could only assume that the camouflaged machine hadn’t been seen. Eventually, they became aware of shouts and the capering of excited coolies and, looking out, they saw a lorry towing Dicken’s captured DH9 along the road to the field alongside their prison. Then it dawned on them that, because they had no idea how to detach the wings, the Chinese soldiers were chopping down any tree that was in the way and prevented it passing. As it turned towards the field, it proved impossible to manoeuvre it by the tumbledown home of a peasant farmer and immediately the soldiers started knocking the house down. When the farmer, dancing with rage, began to shout his protests, the officer in command simply drew his revolver and shot him, then the house was razed and the aeroplane bumped into the field past the wailing wife and family.

‘Pray to St Jude, me boy,’ Father O’Buhilly growled, as they watched through the window. ‘He is the patron saint of lost causes and, Holy Mother of God, it is surely needing his help the Chinese peasants are.’

When Lee came again it pleased him to see Dicken go on his knees with the priest and thank him for the bowl of rice he was given to eat.

‘I am glad you have jolly well changed your attitude,’ he said cheerfully. ‘For your entertainment, this afternoon we have arranged a little spectacle.’

The spectacle turned out to be the execution of several captured Communists, who were forced to kneel outside the window of the jail.

‘No parties
outside
the Kuomintang,’ Lee said. ‘No factions
inside
the Kuomintang. That is our leader’s slogan. As our friends out there will soon find out.’