African Sky

by Tony Park

  ‘What?’ she asked. ‘No, let me guess – money?’

  ‘Right again. Cavendish is a gambler. Catherine’s rich. He wouldn’t confirm it, but I’ll wager Catherine offered to pay him to let her fly his Harvard.’

  ‘Lucky for him he crashed, otherwise it’d be his body in the morgue instead of Smythe’s.’

  ‘Yeah, well, Smythe must have fallen for her. I flew to her place to try to find some evidence that Smythe or his aircraft had been there, though I still had no idea what her plan or motivation might have been for stealing his kite or doing away with him.’

  ‘So what is this evidence that you found at her place?’ Pip asked.

  ‘A newspaper cutting – the story about the death of her husband.’

  ‘I found the same story, from the Chronicle. I used it to show Nkomo a picture of Catherine.’

  ‘“The grieving widow”, right?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ she said.

  ‘Well, you should have checked out the next page. On it there’s a picture of the South African hunter who accidentally shot old Hugo De Beers in the back.’

  ‘Don’t tell me . . .’

  ‘Hendrick Reitz. Ossewa Brandwag stormjaer and Nazi spy. You’ve probably got a picture of him on your most-wanted board. I recognised him from a picture circulated to us by the intelligence people. They’ve been concerned for some time about a possible OB attack on one of our air bases.’

  ‘I’m sorry I wasted so much time trying to get you arrested, Paul,’ she said, and he could tell she meant it.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. I was set up by an expert. We both were. I don’t think my crash yesterday was an accident, either. I think someone – maybe Reitz – sabotaged my kite while I was searching for Catherine. If that’s right, it means he’s in position at Isilwane and the next phase of whatever the two of them have cooked up is coming right up.’

  ‘How much damage can they do with one aircraft?’ Pip asked.

  ‘Plenty,’ Bryant said. ‘The final piece of the puzzle was the belts.’

  ‘Not trouser belts, I assume?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘machine-gun ammunition belts. The rounds are slotted into long canvas belts, which feed the guns in the Harvard’s wing and nose. Cavendish had been on his way to gunnery practice when he stopped by Catherine’s ranch. He had a full load of ammo on board, but when we went to fetch the wreckage there were hardly any rounds in the guns. At first I thought that someone – some African poachers, maybe – had stripped the wreck. But that seemed odd, because if it was the work of thieves, why would they leave some rounds still in the guns?’

  ‘So it would seem, to the casual observer, that the guns hadn’t been tampered with?’ Pip said.

  ‘Correct. You should be a copper. Cavendish couldn’t account for the missing rounds, although he had personally checked the guns before taking off. Catherine fobbed me off when I asked her, by saying she had a storeroom full of .303 bullets and that some poachers probably took them. I took her at face value, which was a mistake. True, she had no need of bullets, but what she didn’t have was ammunition belts. Smythe had been on a navigation training solo flight, so his guns were empty. Now Catherine’s not only got an air force trainer, she’s got several hundred rounds of ammunition. With the way Rogers has got the runway lined with aircraft, she could take out a dozen of them with one pass, if she knows what she’s doing. If she strafed the parade . . .’

  ‘Horrible,’ Pip agreed. ’But even so, it seems that two people with one aircraft and a couple of machine-guns can only do so much damage. I’m worried, Paul, that there may be more to this. What else do you know about this Reitz character?’

  ‘We got a rundown on him at the base as part of an intelligence update. He’s a soldier – fought with the Jerries in Spain before the war, then joined the paratroops. Also, he’s a chemist. Worked in pesticides, I think.’

  ‘Poisons? Do you think the Germans would use something like poison gas on the base?’ Pip asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ Bryant said. ‘They did during the last war – and so did our lot. Anything’s possible. Wiping out today’s parade of trainees and graduates would be the same as shooting down about eight hundred aircraft, in terms of pilot losses. It’d be a devastating blow and a big morale boost for the Germans.’

  ‘Smuts and Huggins are going to be there as well – perhaps they’re the main target. It wouldn’t take much for the Afrikaners in South Africa to rise up against their government if Smuts were assassinated. The Germans have already tried it once.’

  ‘This is getting bigger by the minute,’ Bryant agreed.

  ‘How do we stop the parade?’ Pip asked.

  ‘Search me. Wing Commander Rogers thinks I’m a lunatic, and your police friends still think I’m public enemy number one. We can’t stop the parade, so —’

  ‘We have to stop Catherine and Reitz,’ Pip concluded.

  Bryant glanced at his watch. ‘If they’re using Isilwane as their base for an attack, they’ll have to be airborne soon. Catherine knows the timings for the parade, as she was on the guest list. Keep your eyes peeled for an aeroplane like this one.’ Bloody near impossible, he thought. He looked ahead and out each side of the cockpit. For miles and miles in every direction there was nothing but scrubby brown bush.

  The aircraft shuddered and Pip let out an involuntary squeal. ‘What was that?’ she said, alarmed.

  ‘Relax. Just testing our guns. Should have warned you.’

  Catherine and Reitz knelt on the wing of the Harvard. ‘There, that’s the last of it,’ she said as she folded the ammunition belt into the bin next to the machine-gun. Reitz had been able to figure out how to chamber the first round in each belt into the guns, but it had taken them a couple of gos to lay the belts of bullets in their bins. ‘Now, what do we do with the bombs?’

  ‘Nothing very scientific there,’ Reitz said as he screwed the gun compartment panel shut. ‘When I thought we were going to be using your biplane, I looked back to the First World War for a delivery system for the gas. Come, I’ll show you.’

  When they had finished at the Harvard he led her back to where the two metal cylinders lay in the grass, beside the hangar.

  He stood one of the tubes on its end and began unscrewing a cap. Catherine took a wary step backwards.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, smiling. ‘I checked them this morning, while wearing my gasmask. Both cylinders have weathered the journey well, and the contents are in perfect order. There are no leaks, I can assure you.’

  ‘All the same, the sooner we’re rid of the stuff, the better,’ she said, not moving any closer.

  ‘I agree with you there,’ he said.

  As he spoke, he reached into the cylinder and slowly slid out what appeared to be a bomb. It had tail fins, like a normal aerial bomb, but the other end was bulbous rather than pointed.

  ‘The fins stabilise it in flight. This,’ he added, pointing to a metal ring attached to a pin in the tail assembly, ‘arms it. On the outside, it’s the same type of crude device both sides used to drop during the first war. The observer in an aircraft simply leaned out the rear cockpit, pulled the pin, which activated a timed fuse, and then dropped it’.

  ‘I’ll have to fly low and slow, I suppose,’ she said, looking at the bomb but not touching it.

  ‘Correct,’ he said. ‘As I explained when we met in South West, if you drop it from more than two hundred feet it will arm while still in midair, too high up and, if there is a strong breeze, the gas may drift away before it reaches its target. Ideally we want to drop at a hundred and fifty feet. At that height, the small charge inside the body of the bomb will detonate after four seconds, just before it hits the Tarmac. It will disperse the nerve agent but not allow it to dissipate too much.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘With luck they’ll think a low, slow flight by a Harvard is part of the graduation show. You said one bomb will be enough, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To kill
eight hundred men?’ She sounded dubious. ‘I know this sarin stuff is deadly, but that’s amazing.’

  ‘The second bomb is a back-up only, in case we are way off target. This agent is amazing, Catherine. Just a milligram of sarin will kill a man in less than a minute. The skin will easily absorb it in vapour form. The first symptoms are a runny nose and then difficulty in breathing. Next the victim starts to vomit and then he loses control of his bodily functions. The poison induces convulsions so violent that the victim becomes comatose and can’t breathe.’

  She said nothing, just stared at the bomb, and then him, in awe.

  A far-off drone made them both look skywards. ‘Hell,’ she said.

  ‘Aircraft?’

  As a pilot she was used to searching the sky for other aeroplanes. She saw the black dot before he did. ‘Yes, coming from the south, see it?’

  ‘Should we hide?’ he asked.

  ‘No, if they’re onto us we won’t get a second chance to take off. Let’s go!’

  He worried about her last remark but had no time to challenge her. She had assured him that she had covered her trail. Perhaps Felicity had been able to warn someone else of her discovery.

  *

  ‘So why would Catherine kill Felicity?’ Pip asked. They had been talking about Catherine’s possible motive.

  ‘There’s something I didn’t tell you,’ he said into the intercom.

  ‘She tried to contact you on the night of her death,’ Pip said.

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘I checked your comings and goings with the front gate at Kumalo. They told me you’d left the base at some time that night . . .’

  ‘It was about five in the morning, to collect some illegal fuel for Catherine,’ he explained.

  ‘Yes, I know that now. Anyway, the duty NCO said you’d also had a message to call someone that night and your Corporal Richards confirmed it was Felicity.’

  ‘I didn’t get that message until the morning, until it was too late,’ he said. ‘God,’ he added, ‘if I’d got it, I might have been able to save her life, and foil Catherine’s plot at the same time. I guess the mess steward didn’t try to wake me because he thought I’d be passed out – dead drunk. And normally he would have been bloody right.’

  After a while Pip said, ‘So it’s possible Felicity was not part of the plot, but that she somehow got wind of it.’

  ‘And Catherine killed her to silence her. I could have saved her, Pip.’

  ‘What’s to say you would have made it in time?’

  He shook his head. ‘We’re almost there. That’s the Deka River below.’ He pushed the stick forward and the Harvard started to dive.

  Pip felt the aircraft vibrate. ‘Going a bit fast, aren’t we?’

  ‘I want to jump them – take them by surprise if they’re still on the ground. Pip! Look down, one o’clock. There’s our missing aeroplane!’

  Pip craned her head but saw nothing until he lowered the starboard wing a fraction. ‘Got it! Paul, what are you going to do?’

  ‘No one’s supposed to be up here today, Pip. That’s got to be Smythe’s kite, and whoever’s in it, is in it illegally. We’re at war, Constable, so I’m going to do the only thing I can.’

  Pip gripped the sides of her seat as she felt the angle of their Harvard’s dive steepen. Ahead of her she saw Paul pull down the goggles attached to his flying helmet so that they covered his eyes. He fastened the oxygen mask across his face, presumably so he could use both hands, and she copied him.

  ‘Hold tight,’ he said, ‘this is going to be fast and noisy.’

  Below them, Catherine’s Harvard trundled down the grass airstrip, gaining speed.

  Bryant had to concentrate on everything at once – the target, his airspeed, his altitude. He flicked the switch on the armaments panel to the left of the other gauges to ‘guns’.

  Pip felt herself being pushed into the seatback behind her and her stomach churned as Paul flattened out a little. She heard the rattle of the machine-guns and felt the airframe judder.

  The Harvard filled the sight in front of him and he thumbed the firing button on the stick again, but in an instant the target was gone. He watched his bullets raise puffs of dirt and grass behind the taxiing aeroplane. ‘Shit!’ he said. He hadn’t allowed enough deflection in his aim for the speed of Catherine’s aircraft and the fall of his bullets.

  ‘Stay calm, Paul, you can do it,’ Pip urged. In truth, she felt absolutely helpless and terrified.

  He yanked the stick back into his belly and the Harvard climbed back into the cloudless sky. He kicked the rudder pedal and brought the aircraft around in a steep port turn that he fancied had rivets popping in the wings.

  Pip felt nauseated and swallowed repeatedly. She wanted nothing more now than to be back on the ground.

  ‘Damn, I’ve lost her,’ Bryant said. He had only ever fired an aircraft’s guns once, before he was kicked out of fighter-pilot school. On that occasion, the target had been a brightly painted wooden panel laid out in the centre of a field. It wasn’t moving, but he, like most first-time gunnery students, had missed it by a mile. He took his hat off to the Brylcream boys in their spitfires. This was no easy job for a bomber pilot.

  Pip’s head lolled against the right-hand side of the cockpit, and she wiped a string of drool from her lips. A flash of movement against the unending brown bush caught her eyes. ‘There!’ she croaked, and the mere act of speaking almost made her throw up.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Below, right, um; two, no, three o’clock.’

  ‘Good girl!’ he said. He rolled the Harvard over on its right side. Pip tore off her oxygen mask and vomited between her knees. Paul sensed what was going on. ‘You’ll live,’ he said to her. I hope, he prayed silently.

  Pip wiped her mouth and streaming eyes, and tried to see over Paul’s shoulder.

  ‘Got you,’ Bryant said as the other Harvard filled his gun sight. He aimed ahead of Catherine’s aircraft, guessing how much he would have to lead her to compensate for the speed at which she was travelling. He pressed the firing button with his thumb, and the aircraft shuddered.

  He held his breath, then cursed again as he saw the glowing tracer rounds sail harmlessly to the right of the other Harvard. Catherine had sensed his next move and jinked hard to the left just in time to save herself. ‘Damn, she’s a good flyer,’ Bryant said.

  Just end it, quickly, Pip thought to herself. She saw a flash of sunlight glint off the other aircraft’s cockpit, to their left. ‘She’s climbing, Paul,’ she forced herself to say.

  ‘I see her,’ he said. He banked to the left to try to follow her, but Catherine had started her turn much earlier. He realised she was turning inside him and, if they both kept on the same course, she would end up behind him. He turned the Harvard on its back and pulled the stick into his stomach. His vision started to grey out as the G-forces drained the blood from his vital organs.

  ‘Oh, God, noooo!’ Pip yelled.

  ‘Hold on,’ he gasped.

  Catherine started climbing, but Bryant stayed low and cut his airspeed. Pip revelled in the moment of straight, level flight, but was then instantly alarmed. ‘She’s above us, Paul. Aren’t we sitting ducks like this?’

  ‘That’s what I want her to think,’ he replied. He put the Harvard into a slow, gentle left-hand turn. Ahead of him, in the distance, he saw Isilwane’s airstrip. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘At least we’ve kept them from flying south.’

  ‘Good plan,’ Pip said, ‘but look behind us. Here she comes!’

  He looked behind and above him and saw Catherine’s Harvard enter a steep dive. He held the stick steady, flying straight and level. He moved his hand over the undercarriage lever.

  Pip glanced back over her shoulder and screamed. ‘She’s shooting at us, Paul!’ The aircraft juddered and there was a noise like ferocious hail on a tin roof as a neat line of holes was suddenly stitched on their port wing. ‘We’re hit!’

  Br
yant was ready for it. He pulled back on the stick, lifting the nose and closed the throttle, slowing their aircraft from a hundred and forty-five to a hundred and twenty knots. The gap between the two aircraft started to narrow. He pulled down on the lever and the Harvard’s wheels dropped. The aircraft lurched and bled off even more speed. Pip screamed in his headphones as the nose dropped sickeningly.

  Catherine’s plane whizzed past them, on the right, close enough for Pip and Paul to see the startled faces of pilot and passenger.

  Bryant’s left hand flashed across the instruments as he raised the landing gear and opened the throttle again. With his right he pulled the stick into his belly, bringing the nose back up. He was under her now, and slightly behind. Perfect position. He pressed the firing button. He was pretty sure this would be his last burst, so he made it count. He kept his thumb hard down, even after the last of the rounds had left his guns.

  ‘Hennie, I’ve been hit!’ Catherine wailed. The aircraft slipped violently to the right. ‘I’m bleeding!’

  ‘Where? How bad is it?’

  ‘Pretty bloody bad,’ she retorted. It hurt like hell, and felt like a hot poker had been rammed into her calf. ‘Left leg. Hard to keep my foot on the rudder pedal.’ Tears filled her eyes as she pushed down on the left pedal in order to straighten the aircraft. ‘Can’t . . .’

  ‘You have to, Catherine. Take the pain.’

  ‘Can’t go on like this, Hennie. I have to put her down.’ As if to ratify her decision, a jet of oil hit the front of the cockpit and was smeared all down the left side. ‘Losing oil pressure now. He must have hit the engine as well. That’s it, we’re finished.’