Libya, 1911

by Zach Neal

  Giulio bit back a sardonic grin, although he was actually against whole thing. They didn’t seem to have any idea of the dangers, which were very real. His machine had already failed him twice and the other ones weren’t much better, looking back over their record of the last few weeks.

  The sick old bastards could hardly take their eyes off of her.

  ***

  It took some wrangling, but by dropping Tomasini’s name all over the place, Captain Piazza managed to round up two understrength platoons of infantry from a nearby regimental headquarters. Their own detachment supplied the trucks, and Digby-Jones’ little band of Tuaregs spread out, rifles at the ready, riding in the van.

  Giulio rode in the back, with Alice turning in the passenger seat and making eyes at him from time to time. Every so often, he turned around and caught Crespo’s eye, the man’s eye-rolling expressions bringing a smile to his face. Luckily, Captain Piazza had, much like the general, figuratively and literally washed his hands of the whole thing and let them go off on their own.

  Now, of course, he would be wracked by doubts and wondering what was going on with them…

  It was only a few kilometres, and it had only been the day before. The trouble was those roads—Giulio, who presumably should have been able to find his way back, couldn’t pick out the proper track from the scores of choices available. There were a million goat-tracks when you really started looking. It might have been a lot easier if they were merely going on to the next station, as caravan-stops were called, but they were looking for something off the beaten track.

  Her hand kept stealing back, around beside the seat. The lady kept grabbing his leg and his ankle.

  “Here we are.” One of Digby-Jones’ escort was shouting from the top of a dune to their left.

  Pulling out of the way, for the Italian drivers had a certain attitude to speed and following in the dust, not hardly paying attention at all, he brought the car to a halt. Sure enough, the next truck braked right there at the door, bearded driver beaming raffishly, and eyeing up Mrs. Saunders in her thin, brightly-coloured sun dress, legs bare and shoes practically non-existent.

  The horseman waved his rifle back and forth and the men began jumping out of the trucks. Looking around, Ernest sort of remembered the place. Putting it back in gear, he moved on a little further and found the easiest way up and then down again. He had her in low gear, throttle matted, but she made it with a push from a couple of laughing troopers.

  As they crested the top of a low spot in the long, straggling dune, the fuselage, pointing up into the sky like a rude finger, came into sight.

  “Do you think we can get her out of here?”

  Giulio hung on for dear life as they bounded down the soft and sandy sides of the declivity. The car halted again as the first of their troops topped the rise and began streaming down again.

  “That, my dear, is a very good question.” The other thing was enemy opposition.

  Having much the same thought, Digby-Jones spoke to his men and they turned and set off up the hill again.

  Giulio got out of the car and approached the aircraft, seeing no signs of tracks other than his own. It was a bit surprising, but he had been a few kilometres from Ain Zara and there had been no one in sight when she coughed…no one except his present company.

  Digby-Jones stood beside him as Giulio looked down at the dirt, noting the firm feel of it.

  “How do you want to do this?”

  It was a good question, as the desert scrub stretched off in all directions in what was a fairly large flat, surrounded by low dunes and with one outcropping of black rock on the southeast side. They could try to drag the thing back on a rope, but the wings were so wide…all that scrub.

  They’d be all afternoon at it, maybe longer.

  Sergeant Crespo, taking charge where Giulio should have been a bit quicker on the ball, had the men over. After taking a quick look at the undercarriage, he came over to report.

  “We have one cracked member, but from what I can see of the prop, it’s all right.”

  As Giulio remembered, the blade had stopped in the near-horizontal position. Considering its diameter, if it had stopped in the vertical position, surely it would have caught the ground. At the very least the blade would have broken, and at the worst, he would have ripped the engine right off of its mountings.

  Giulio turned, encircled by a ring of men and boys, going by their attentive faces, seemingly out for the lark of a lifetime. The idiots had no idea of what a gunshot looked like, apparently. He heaved a quick breath.

  “Right. Let’s get her down and see what we can do.”

  ***

  With sixty or seventy men on hand, simple hand tools sufficed to cut and pull the brush right out of the ground and drag it aside. Giulio had asked for five hundred metres, but there was barely that much between his position and the wall of sand at the end of the flats. He was looking for a margin of safety, the plane would lift from hard ground in seventy-five or a hundred metres every time. The problem was the very soft ground, getting more pitted and torn-up by the minute. Yet some of the ground was pretty hard.

  It was interesting, in that waves of amorphous sand had enveloped mature desert hard-pack as the Army’s scouts called it, perhaps to move again before the wind, in a week or a month, leaving things behind much as they had been.

  As things stood, they had the Taube back on her tail-skid. Men had used planks and a couple of wooden step-ladders to jack up the left wing. Crespo and one of the other mechanics were putting a splint of hardwood and baling wire on the left-hand forward landing gear strut.

  “All you have to do is set her down nice and easy.” Sergeant Crespo had a screwdriver inserted in a knot of wire, twisting it and tightening it so as to keep the two strips of maple in place for what would be, ideally, a short trip back to the aerodrome. “Assuming it doesn’t break before you get off the ground, in which case I suggest throttling back as quick as you can.”

  “Ha. Nice. Can we do this?”

  “It’s up to you, sir.” Aldo, another good mechanic, shrugged. “But really, she ought to do it.”

  Other men, airframe mechanics, had patched some tears and holes in the fabric of the fuselage. According to them, there were no broken frame members in the wings or fuselage. There were one or two gashes in the tail empennage, but considering the stout and woody nature of the brush he had come down in, they had gotten off pretty lucky. The only real worry was the engine mounts. Crespo had peered down in the engine bay with a flashlight, but in the glare of the desert sun and the general shadows in there, he couldn’t see much. They were sort of hoping there were no hairline cracks in the frame members holding the engine. As for the propeller, the boys had filed it down, as there was some rough wood where it had been scuffed on one end…

  “Will she start?”

  “Ha. Probably.” If not, then they would tow it.

  The boys were huddling under the wing preparatory to setting her down on the wheels.

  “All right. Let me know when you’re ready.” Giulio went looking for Alice and not incidentally Digby-Jones, who was everywhere with that tripod and camera of his.

  ***

  The engine seemed fine. Holding onto the propeller hub, the plane rocked back and forth with no crunching or cracking sounds.

  It was so terribly hard to say. The sand, churned up by all those men, all of those stumps and bushes and clumps of tough vegetation removed, was not exactly confidence-inspiring, and the field was all too short. Giulio pulled his goggles down so that no one could look into his eyes properly.

  He lifted a foot and accepted a boost from a sallow young private.

  “Up we go, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  Once in the cockpit it all seemed so inevitable. He looked around. All was ready.

  He opened up the fuel cock, turned on the ignition and gave a nod. Crespo threw the prop. The infernal thing fired right up, blue smoke pooling up around them as she idl
ed against the stop. Giulio was intent on the feel of the motor when he throttled up and back.

  Was that engine vibrating more than usual?

  Did that exhaust sound rougher or more broken than usual?

  The day was unbearably hot, just like yesterday and tomorrow, and if he was going to get going, then it had better be soon. The longer they stayed here, the more likely they were to attract undesirable attention—and while the trucks were confined, for the most part, to the straight and level, they could only see a few hundred metres in any direction. Surrounded by sand-dunes, what lay on the other side of the hill was distinctly unnerving, as of course they had no idea. All they knew was that Digby-Jones’ men were out there and would probably come running if any sort of threat manifested itself.

  “Water.”

  “What?”

  “Water.” That was one thing in this place, Giulio didn’t go anywhere without a canteen.

  Antonio hastened off to the truck. There were two gunshots in the distance from somewhere off behind him.

  “Shit!” Digby-Jones was there at the wing-root. “Looks like we just ran out of time.”

  Two of his jezzailchis crested the dune to the south, racing down and shouting excitedly.

  Soldiers were running headlong towards the trucks and their rifles, properly-stacked in inwards-leaning cones, squad by squad and knapsack by knapsack.

  Giulio had two choices. He could fight or he could fly.

  His heart solidified briefly when he saw Alice standing at the wingtip, hand on her hat to keep it from blowing off. This would be a cross-wind takeoff…shit.

  He waved at her.

  “Get in!” She didn’t seem to comprehend, the engine sputtering away and the men shouting and running up the far end of the bowl to get a look at whatever was out there.

  “Digby-Smith! Get her in here.” Things might get very ugly and this was no place for a woman.

  Ernest gave him a quick nod and ran to get her. Dragging her over, he and Crespo boosted her up on the wing.

  “My purse. My purse…”

  “Forget it.”

  “No, wait.” Digby-Jones pelted over to the car, which was luckily right there.

  He ran back, almost slamming into another mechanic bearing two water-bottles for Giulio.

  Mrs. Saunders had clambered into the seat. Throwing in the purse, Digby-Jones was yelling.

  Craning his neck around, Giulio saw men, lying prone in the sand, lining the top of the dune and one of their sergeants rising up on his knees, binoculars in hand. Ernest was running to the car again.

  Digby-Jones grabbed his camera and a bag of exposed plates and came running back. They might not have much time—or much chance of survival.

  Oh, no. Shit. But Giulio said nothing as Ernest handed in his precious work, his vital equipment.

  It was going to be hard enough to get the plane off the ground, then there was the rise at the end. Mrs. Saunders wasn’t a big lady, but he’d just added a good seventy kilos to his all-up weight. The engine was up to temperature, there was a kinds of fuel for their short little trip and she seemed to be running well.

  “Digby-Jones. Crespo.”

  “Sir.”

  “Give us a little push, eh?”

  The half-dozen men still standing there by the plane lined up along the trailing edge, well out from the fuselage so as to avoid the tail when (or if) she cracked loose. Gradually increasing throttle, the roar filling the bowl of the valley, they all leaned into it, feet braced and muscles straining. Giulio anxiously waited for the unmistakable feel through the seat of the pants that she was going to go.

  It may have been the prop-wash which actually blew enough sand away from the wheels, anyhow she let go with a lurch and Giulio laughed aloud at the sublime sight of Digby-Jones in his pristine grey suit go face-first into a clump of something hopefully not too thorny. They had let some of the air out of the tires and it seemed to have worked, as he used the rudder pedals to keep her straight. She was already bounding along and the motor and prop seemed all right. She might be a bit out of balance, but they’d only smoothed the propeller blade. He held the throttle full forward.

  Alice was still hanging onto her hat as she turned and looked at him in triumph.

  “Ah!” She was screaming with joy, not fear, but Giulio really didn’t have time to think.

  The Taube was fully off the ground now, and just in the nick of time. The first of the un-cleared brush was coming up. It tugged at the wings or the wheels and then they were above it. He stared in sick fascination as Alice’s head, staring straight forwards at a wall of red sand, sank lower into the cockpit. Her hair flew straight out, and just at the last possible minute, with plenty of airspeed, he pulled strongly back on the stick.

  They might have cleared the top of the dunes by five feet, but clear it they did. The plane hesitated, and his heart stopped again. Lifting straight up in the breeze above the dune, practically hovering, he put the nose down. Slowly, her speed built, and then he knew they were flying down the opposite side with plenty of room to climb out before the next little range.

  Giulio smiled from ear to ear as she came up and turned around for another look.

  “See? I told you.”

  A piece of cake.

  ***

  Clawing for altitude, watching the instruments, Giulio circled to the left and came around to the south. Down below men were presumably cheering, one or two of the idiots even tossing their caps in the air like a bloody game of football or something.

  There was nothing down below, just men with rifles on the rim of the bowl, and four more of Digby-Jones men riding along the track, looking for the ruts of trucks and raising their guns to him in salute as he flew over at three hundred metres.

  There was no point in hanging about. Turning back on a heading for Tripoli, he waggled his wings gently to let them know it was all right and then they were disappearing into the haze behind them.

  Climbing steadily, the sun was already lowering in the west. They’d barely gotten five or six kilometres, and the outskirts, the small farms and dairy operations here in the littoral, where the moisture was somewhat less than occasional, i.e. every two or three years if you were lucky, when the engine sputtered again.

  “Aw, for fuck’s sakes.”

  Alice gave him a quick and startled look, and then scrunched down in the front cockpit again. The engine, running briefly and then stalling again, pulled them, metre by metre towards the huddle of pale buildings on the horizon. Home and safety, so near and yet so far.

  On some kind of inspiration, he pulled the throttle back and the engine ran properly.

  Unfortunately, it was barely producing enough power for flight. If only it didn’t stall. Again, Giulio looked for somewhere to set her down. And she wasn’t flying straight and level—she was gradually descending. Alice was certainly being very quiet up front now.

  When he opened up the throttle again, the motor died completely. This time it wasn’t coming back.

  He’d been heartened just a brief second earlier to see the buildings of some smallholding down below and up ahead. Now the focus shifted onto not hitting anything.

  One thing for sure, they were coming down.

  ***

  The sun was setting. The buildings turned out to be deserted, burned out shells of some unlucky family. The plane sat there, left wing down again as he’d cracked the landing gear again, or broken the repairs at least. She wasn’t getting out of there without Crespo again. On the plus side, they were down and uninjured. While there were still dangers for westerners alone out here, by his estimation they couldn’t be more than five or six kilometres from the outskirts of Tripoli and there was plenty of civilization between here and there.

  “So. We might as well wait until the temperature drops off. Then we’ll walk into town under cover of darkness.”

  She nodded, mopping sweat from her forehead, red locks stuck to it, and sighed.

  “Yeah—you got t
hat right. Giulio.”

  “We have the two canteens.” He offered her the first drink which she took gratefully.

  “That really should be enough. As for the camera, I would prefer not to carry it.”

  She nodded. It really wasn’t the lieutenant’s problem and she didn’t much feel like carrying it herself. Hot as it was, it was hard to visualize just how chilly it was likely to get. One way or another, they would be suffering to some degree. She had no doubt they could make it, or would make it.

  One just had to be patient.

  Giulio, studying a trail of dust on the western horizon, had rapidly concluded that they weren’t likely to be missed until their own men got back to the aerodrome.

  Captain Piazza would be shitting himself.

  “So.” She looked so innocent but he knew better by now. “What do we do until then, Lieutenant Gavroti?”

  She opened her purse decisively and pulled something out. His jaw dropped.

  It was a condom.

  Scene Three

  “So. Will I ever see you again?”

  They stood some ways off from Digby-Jones in the Ford.

  He had given them a moment, perhaps understanding the young man’s confusion. It’s not like he didn’t have a bit of his own, especially where Mrs. Saunders was concerned. She really was one in a million and it was no wonder that men fell in love with her in such droves.

  She was like nothing he’d ever seen before, or ever likely to see again.

  The hell of it was that he knew it—and had some idea of what that meant.

  “No. I suppose not.”

  He must have been at a low ebb physically and mentally. Water sprung unbidden from his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Giulio.” Her hand came up and touched his cheek.