The Mercenaries (3 page)

He became aware of Sammy standing in the doorway, his dark young face sombre in the fading light.

‘I made it,’ he said.

Ira nodded without looking up. ‘Good,’ he grunted.

‘Mr. Penaluna’--Sammy addressed him nervously--’how’s it going?’

Ira raised his eyes and the look in Sammy’s face made him smile. ‘It isn’t going, Sammy,’ he said. ‘It’s stopped. We’ve just gone bust .’

Sammy drew in his breath sharply but he didn’t seem disturbed. He had an incredible faith in Ira’s ability to deal with things and he seemed to pause only to wonder how long it would take him to work out their salvation.

The letter?’ he said.

Ira nodded. ‘Sure, The letter. No loan, no airline. They made it good and final. It’s no good going back for another try.’

‘Does that mean we’re finished?’

Too bloody right it does.’

Sammy jerked his head. ‘What about Mr. Cluff?’

‘He’s pulled out.’

‘Didn’t he trust you?’

Too much. He’s going to walk off with every penny I-own.’ Ira looked up and chuckled. ‘You can’t blame him, Sammy It’s no good going down with a sinking ship.’

’Are we sinking?’

‘We’ve sunk. Without trace.’

Sammy frowned, not quite understanding Ira’s cheerfulness. ‘Does that mean we don’t ever fly again?’

Ira looked up quickly at the note of tragedy in the boy’s voice. ‘Nobody’ll ever stop you flying, Sammy,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Not now. You ought to have been born with wings. I’ve seen birds that didn’t fly as well as you. You fly as if you were born in a cockpit and if I had a company you could always have a job with me. You’re one of God’s chosen few. You’ll never have a home or a steady job again.’

Sammy was grinning now, then his face became serious again. ‘Have we really finished, boss?’ he asked again, as though he just couldn’t believe it.

Ira nodded. ‘No one’s ever likely to want to fly with us again,’ he said. ‘We’ve folded up. Tight as a duck’s backside. Nothing in the world would convince the finance company that we stood a chance with Central Africa Air down at Nairobi with seven planes and an office in the city, pinching all our customers. They just didn’t believe me when I said we were fighting back. And they were right.’

‘And Mr. Cluff?’

‘Going home.’

‘What’ll we do, boss?’

‘We can always get a job with Central Africa Air.’

‘Perhaps if we hang on, boss . . .’

Ira grimaced. He seemed to have been hanging on by the skin of his teeth for years now, trying to raise money out of bankers who wanted collaterals he couldn’t provide. Hanging on at first had been exciting but it had long since lost any charm it had ever possessed, and he’d begun at last to see some of the frustrations felt by that urgent, obsessed and impractical man. his father. Hanging on ceased to be a challenge when it finally dawned on you you’d be hanging on the next year and the year after that and for ever and ever, amen. Even a challenge could turn sour in time and, though Ira could be as dourly tenacious as anyone, he was young enough to feel it wasn’t much of a life.

‘I don’t think so, Sammy,’ he pointed out. ‘I don’t feel like hanging on. I’m no businessman.’

‘You’re a fine airman, boss. Tip-top. Gilt-edged.’

‘Doesn’t make me able to run an airline. I can strip any engine you like to show me and rig any plane, and if I couldn’t fly I’d have been dead in France. But that doesn’t make me a success in peacetime, Sammy.’

Ira paused, shoving the papers about his desk. Telling Sammy there was no future for him with the company was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do. Moshi Air Carriers Ltd. had long since come to mean as much to Sammy as it did to Ira. It wasn’t so much loyalty as involvement. Sammy had become craftsman enough already to feel that it was his company, too.

‘You’d better get it into your head, Sammy,’ he went on slowly. ‘I can’t give you a job any longer.’

‘Perhaps something’ll turn up.’ Sammy leaned forward eagerly. ‘Let me help you run the show.’

Ira studied the earnest young face with interest. Think you could?’

‘I’m a Jew.’

Ira grinned, fished in his pockets and tossed a bunch of keys on to the desk. ‘It’s all yours, Sammy. If you can understand the bloody books you’ll be a miracle. Cluff never could.’

3

It seemed that Cluff couldn’t get away fast enough.

He held an uproarious party in the hotel at Moshi the night before he left, as noisy as any mess celebration in France, but Ira remained sober all through it, trying hard to find pleasure in Cluff’s desire to smash things. He restrained him from throwing bottles at the lights and pouring beer into the piano and, with the help of Sammy, put him to bed in a hired room and left him with the South African girl, who’d occupied far too much of his time in the past few months, holding his hand and trying to decide whether it was worth while jumping in with him or not.

‘Where now, boss?’ Sammy said as they climbed into the old Lancia outside the hotel.

‘The field, Sammy.’

‘The airfield?’ Sammy’s eyebrows shot up. ‘At this time of night?’

‘I’d like to think. You can leave me there, if you like. I can sleep on the camp-bed in the office.’

The breeze was blowing clouds of dust across the field but there was a moon as big and yellow as an orange as they stopped outside the hut. Sammy watched silently as Ira climbed out and stood among the trembling yellowed grass.

‘You all right, boss?’ he asked eventually.

‘Just leave me, Sammy. I’m fine.’

Sammy drew back into the shadows, but he didn’t go. Instead he sat in the Lancia, huddled out of the flying dust, watching.

For a long time Ira stood with his hands in his pockets, his trouser legs flapping in the breeze, staring at the Avro, all that was left of his company now, then he walked across to the old biplane and moved round it slowly, watching the long wings tremble in the gusty wind and noticing how from one angle the yellow of the moon gleamed across the doped surface and how from another the struts and the drumming wires stood out in silhouette against the silver-blue sky.

After a while he put his foot on the step and climbed into the cockpit, and sat for a moment, working the control column idly and watching the ailerons move up and down, feeling the machine quiver in the breeze almost as though it were flying. The Avro had been the only sound aircraft the company had ever possessed. The Jenny and the RE8 had never been capable of hard commercial work, but they’d been all they could find and all they could afford, and Sammy’s discovery of the wrecked Avro had been the only thing that had saved the company from tottering to its grave eighteen months before. They’d been over-ambitious and underfinanced, and it was now all over.

Ira stared at the compass, tachometer and pressure gauge, which, apart from the length of string he’d tied to a centre-section strut to indicate side-slip, were all the instruments the machine boasted, then he crouched down in the cockpit and stared forward, over the blunt snout. The Avro was a sound machine and, despite their age, dozens of them were still being flown all over England by nomad pilots who preferred putting on exhibitions of stunt flying to settling down. An Avro had been the first real aeroplane Ira had ever flown and, after a succession of curved-winged fragilities that were really only powered box-kites, it had had a reassuring stability about it. From the days of machines with an unenviable reputation for going into a spin on the slightest excuse, the Avro had taken flying a step nearer something with a future.

Ira sighed, catching the stink of dope and the bitter nutty tang of castor oil with which the frame and fabric of the old machine were soaked. Things had come a long way in the few short years since it had been built, and the Americans had even got an aeroplane round the world. For a moment he was lost in a daydream, his mind filled with memories he hadn’t had for years. When the war had finished he’d put them all behind him and hadn’t suffered from a moment’s nostalgia. He’d joined up just one year older than the century and had ended the war still not much more than a schoolboy with a gift for survival.

For the first time in years he found himself listening for the broken revving of Clerget engines as the Camels came back from patrol, side-slipping in their familiar crablike movement over the poplars, and the shouts of the mechanics as they raced forward across the stiff frosted grass to seize wing tips and swing them into line. Curiously the memories of combat refused to materialise. Instead, it was the blinding light that dominated the dome of heaven and the sun flashing fire across the wings of his machine; the fabric bellying in the slipstream and the quivering of the fuselage about him and the tang of lacquer, exhaust, oil, leather and clean hot metal. It was the cumulus castles rearing into the blue, full of bumps and nodules and buttresses, all piled one on top of another in vast cloud mountains with their own misty crags and cornices towering thousands of feet above the minute speck of his machine. He had watched their birth a hundred times, seeing them grow before his eyes, alive with light, knowing all the time that they were as transcendent as a moment in time, as frail and ephemeral as his own ability to hang suspended in the air, obsessed by loneliness and beauty.

He recalled the scroll that had been given to him when he’d first been commissioned. ‘George, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and of the British Dominions beyond the seas. ... To our trusty and well beloved servant, Ira Abel Penaluna . . . reposing especial trust and confidence in your loyalty, courage and good conduct, do by these presents constitute and appoint you to be an officer in our special reserve of officers... .’

George, by the Grace of God, had been glad to have him in 1915. Now, ten years, a great deal of killing and several promotions later, George by the Grace of God couldn’t have cared less what happened to Ira Abel Penaluna. As far as George by the Grace of God was concerned, his trusty and well-beloved servant could fiddle for a living.

Probably flying was out of his reach now, and who would employ a man still young--not much older, in fact, than Sammy Shapiro crouched out of the dust clouds in the Lancia by the hut--who knew only one trade, the handling of an aeroplane? Central Africa Air might have offered him a job but he had no real wish to heave into the sky the big metal Junkers they owned He could go back to the R.A.F.--with his string of decorations, they’d still have taken him like a shot--but he couldn’t see himself standing on parade again or going through the motions of discipline. The very nature of his calling made it one for individualists and, from what he’d heard, the R.A.F. wasn’t what the old Flying Corps had been. They learned their trade by numbers these days and the man who flew by the seat of his pants was already in a minority.

He thought for a moment of finding a job in an office somewhere, but he rejected it without really considering it, and climbing out of the aircraft again, walked back towards the hut. Sammy moved towards him out of the shadows

‘Mr. Penaluna. You all right?’

‘Sure. Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘I thought--I thought . .’

Ira swung round to the puzzled face of the boy. ‘God, Sammy, you didn’t think I was going to sit in the plane and shoot myself or something, did you?’

Sammy frowned, looking faintly irritated with him. ‘I didn’t know what to think, man.’ he said. ‘It ain’t every day a bloke goes bust.’

Ira slapped his shoulder. ‘Well, you needn’t have worried,’ he said. ‘I don’t tick over like that, Sammy.’

Sammy managed a twisted grin and Ira put an arm round his shoulders.

‘Sammy, you know what Foch said. “My centre’s giving way. My right is in retreat. Situation excellent. I shall attack.” Let’s go and find a drink. It’s not too late, even now, I’ll bet.’

Sammy stared at him again, his expression changing slowly, then as Ira climbed into the car, his mouth split wide in his great grin and he started the engine and swung it round with a careless crash of gears, and went roaring across the field towards the road, the moonlit dust it trailed drifting slowly among the thorn trees and sparse grass.

A week later, with the imminent and inevitable sale of the Avro hanging round their necks like a dead albatross, Sammy turned up at the airfield, his eyes sparkling with joy and affection, his expression mysterious and conspiratorial so that Ira knew immediately he had something up his sleeve. It was a special look Sammy always wore when he was about to announce anything of particular importance. He’d worn it when he’d arrived with the information that he’d found the Avro and he invariably wore it before announcing any modification he’d worked out. He was already an intelligent craftsman who could be relied on to think up advanced refurbishing as if it were part of the job, and his improvements had always been heralded by the look he wore now. He liked to savour his surprises and hated giving them away too soon.

‘Still no hope, boss?’ he asked.

Ira shook his head. ‘You’ve seen the books,’ he said. ‘I went to the bank again. They wouldn’t play. If we stay here much longer there won’t even be an aeroplane to fly, because I’ll have to sell it to eat. You’d better start looking for a job. What are you going to do? Find some great fat millionaire and persuade him he needs a private aeroplane and you to fly it?’

Sammy didn’t answer at once. ‘Perhaps you ought to fly for him instead,’ he said, pushing at the dust on Ira’s desk as though his life depended on it.

Ira grinned. ‘Come on,’ he urged. ‘What is it? You’ve been looking like a sick calf for a couple of days now. What have you got on your mind?’

Sammy looked up abruptly and grinned back at him. ‘A bloke,’ he said. ‘He’d heard of you. He might have a job for you.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Flying an aeroplane.’

Ira stared. ‘Here?’

‘Perhaps not here.’

‘Why didn’t you grab the job?’

‘I couldn’t do it. That’s why.’

Ira’s eyes narrowed. ‘Out with it, Sammy,’ he said.

Sammy shrugged. ‘One of my cousins in Jo’burg told me about him. I’ve been writing round.’