Silent War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘Why are there so many bloody snakes up here?’ I asked Hudd. ‘I hate the damned things.’

  ‘Plenty o’ food, and damn few predators I’d guess . . . and I’d also guess we arrived the weekend they came out of hibernation, cold and cranky. Come back in a fortnight’s time and you might not see one.’

  ‘Can we go away, and come back in a fortnight’s time then?’ I asked. That raised a weak smile from Hudd’s man. I guessed he was suffering.

  Hudd replied, ‘Don’ be so squeamish, Charlie; you sound like a drama queen.’ That raised another smile. We drank a few mouthfuls of water, and ate a couple of squares of something hard that tasted like third-rate chocolate. It was so tough you had to suck it.

  I asked, ‘How much do your packs weigh?’

  ‘ ’bout sixty pounds,’ Hudd told me.

  ‘. . . and mine?’

  ‘Half that.’

  ‘Why don’t we even out the load?’ I was thinking of Hudd’s man, who glanced up quickly, and shook his head.

  Hudd said, ‘ ’cos I need you to keep up with us, Charlie. You wouldn’t get a mile with fifty pound on yer back.’ At least he’d told me straight. His man grinned up, but didn’t say anything. He might have just appreciated the thought.

  ‘How far are we from the aircraft?’

  ‘Two mile, say; less than three. Get there in time for tea.’

  ‘I didn’t realize we were that close. I didn’t see it at all on the way down.’

  Hudd grunted.

  ‘Good. That means you were doin’ what you were told.’ He stood up and stretched. ‘C’mon, time to move on.’ He reached out a hand to haul his man to his feet, taking care to choose his good arm, but even so Hudd’s man winced as he stood. After six paces he stopped, bent over and vomited.

  ‘Teach you not to drink so much before a job,’ Hudd told him. ‘You had a skinful o’ beer last night.’ It was a light enough comment, but as he turned away from us I could see that our glorious leader was worried.

  We came out upon the plateau suddenly, an hour later. Both Hudd and I had matched ourselves to his man between us, and our pace had slowed. This was one of the strangest places in the world: it could have been invented by Conan Doyle or Mr Rider Haggard. We were surrounded by horrible brown mountains on all sides, with only one pass to the north. Great crumbling crags of brown rubble. The pass looked narrow, but it was obviously wide enough for a fairly big aircraft, because Tony Frohlich had brought his Stirling bomber through there. It was as far as you’d get, though: for anything other than a V2 rocket or a modern helicopter, the mountains around us were a ring of death.

  The floor of what was now obviously an old volcanic basin rose up a few hundred feet from the mountain roots, until it levelled out to form a large flat plateau of stony red and ochre earth, covered in terrible sawgrass that tried to cut through your trousers as you passed. If I had seen lost dinosaurs grazing in the distance, I wouldn’t have been all that surprised.

  . . . and a mile away sat a black aircraft, glinting in the sun where the frosts and the winds had stripped its paintwork. I examined it through a small pair of bins that Hudd’s man handed me. Even at that distance, I knew that a part of my job had been completed: I’d seen this patched and cranky old cow before. So, there was Watson’s pot of gold, but where was the bleeding rainbow?

  An hour later I sat in her shadow, and whistled ‘Jazz me blues’. The only other sounds were the wind sighing through the grass, and the cries overhead from a few high-circling birds of prey. Hudd called them eagles, but I could see their long necks. They looked like bloody vultures to me, and I reckoned they were sizing us up.

  I tell a lie. Frohlich’s old bus was also singing her own sad song; but very quietly. She was probably pleased to see some Anglos again. I picked up on it as we walked towards her from perhaps half a mile away, and oddly it became no louder or clearer as we approached. It was her death song, and its noise level remained level once you were in range: a gentle keening sound of the wind flowing over her surfaces, punctuated by an occasional creak from her flying planes, or her aluminium skin expanding in the heat. After all of this time there was no pressure in her hydraulics, and all of her lines had slackened off, so her elevators and ailerons moved fitfully in the breeze, without proper restraint – just as if she was airborne. I’ll bet the old lady still wanted to fly. She made me want to weep.

  Even from a mile away, I could see that Frohlich’s mob had achieved a perfect landing. In places you could still see the fat grooves in the earth made by her huge landing wheels, and smaller doubled tail-wheels. I took Hudd’s man’s pack from him around then, and Hudd took mine. I still don’t know how he dragged a hundred-pound burden and helped me steer his man at the same time. We propped his man up in the shade – against one of those main wheels. It was flat, and the rubber was cracked and perished. It was beginning to settle into the ground, pressed down by its own thirty-ton deadweight.

  Hudd gave his man one of the water bottles, then bent down and ruffled his hair.

  ‘You gonna be OK, mate?’

  ‘Sure. Give me an hour. Quick recovery times my speciality.’ He actually looked grey, and was still sweating.

  ‘Charlie ’n me’s gonna walk around an’ have a shufti – see what’s left. You stay here.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll see it later.’

  Hudd began to walk in shadow towards the nose of the great beast, but I knew there was no way in for us there, so I stopped him and turned him round. We walked aft.

  As we did I told him, ‘There’s something in the rear turret. I think it’s a body.’

  ‘I know. I saw it as we marched up. The guns are gone as well. Would they have flown without them?’

  ‘No. That would have given the game away that they were up to something. We’ll have to check the front turret as well. I think the local tribesmen have probably stripped out the guns and ammunition, so we’ll have to go canny if we meet them. They could now have some decent fire power.’

  ‘Ye’re starting to think like an Aussie soldier, Charlie boy. I’m proud of you.’ We were at the small rear hatch by now. It was set into the side of the body near the tail, and had rounded corners. If my memory of the type served me well, there should be a short metal ladder we could pull down. Up close, the old girl had lost more of her paint than it first looked – the winter storms had flailed her for eight years after all – and under the relentless sun her flanks were warm; you’d think she was still alive. But appearances, they say, can be deceiving. Like Hudd’s man, for instance; he still looked alive as well. The door wasn’t dogged shut: it was open about an inch. I paused.

  Hudd asked, ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I wanted a look at what’s in the tail turret first; and then I was thinking about snakes. This old bugger could be full of them.’

  ‘OK . . . but don’t worry about the snakes. I haven’t seen one since we got up here on the flat. Less cover for them, I guess. Anyway, if you think about the effort they’d have to make, climbing up the undercarriage before they could get inside, I don’t think it would be worth it. It’s not as if there’s anything here for them.’

  By then we’d walked around the tailplane and were peering into the rear gun turret. What was in there had once indeed been a man. He’d also been dead some while. The Plexiglas of the gun turret had clouded over the years, but I could look into his eye sockets through the spaces that his machine guns would have once occupied. He didn’t look back at me.

  ‘Well?’ Hudd asked.

  ‘He’s not in flying clothing. I don’t know what the locals wear, but he could be one of them, or someone who came looking for her.’

  ‘Snakes?’ This was the part of the aircraft closest to the ground.

  I scrutinized the floor of the turret. ‘No.’

  ‘Told yer! They got more sense. Let’s get inside.’

  The door creaked as I pushed it open, and we had to wrestle with the ladder. This old bitch did what all larg
e empty aircraft do when you get up inside them. She moaned and groaned a bit, and occasionally you could feel her shift as our weight transferred from rib to rib. I was pleased that Hudd ignored the body in the library at first. Instead we moved forward, through shafts of light from her fuselage windows. They were surprisingly large for someone brought up on Lancs, like me. There were animals inside, but they weren’t snakes. They were small lizards that darted into the dark as soon as our shadows fell on them. The inside of the aircraft was fairly gutted: I told you appearances can be deceptive. The radios were gone – that was the first shack forward that we came to, and someone had ripped out the navigator’s table and all of the crew seats. It meant that somewhere in a Kurdish house Papa was proudly sitting in the pilot’s seat. Most of the internal wiring had been hacked out and carried away.

  Hudd was impressed by the space inside. ‘You could make a fair-sized airliner out of this.’

  ‘They did that with a few after the war: a row of seats on either side and a corridor between them. I don’t think they caught on.’

  ‘Where did the bombs go?’

  ‘Downwards most of the time: mainly over Germany or France.’

  ‘Ha. Ha. Bloody ha. You know what I mean.’

  ‘In the bomb bay under us, and in four separate bomb cells in the wings between the inner engines and the fuselage: the main spar took their weight.’

  ‘I haven’t a clue what that means.’

  ‘Good: it probably means you were paying attention to all of your other lectures. I thought you were a qualified pilot?’ It was good to get one back.

  ‘I am, after a fashion – I jest passed up on the lessons in airframe construction. You don’t need to be a vet to ride a horse.’

  There was something wrong with that, and I hadn’t liked the way he eyed me up. I asked him, ‘Why are you interested in the bombs anyway? She wasn’t carrying any, as far as I know.’

  ‘I’m interested in the bomb spaces, sport, because I can’t see no boxes of dosh. Wasn’t that what we came for? Can we get into the bomb bay from here?’

  ‘I don’t know the Stirling, but there’s bound to be access; probably from those plates on the floor – because the engineer had to release the bombs by hand if they hung up in the racks.’

  ‘But there are not likely to be any there at present?’

  ‘If there are, then I’m off. A fused bomb sitting in the heat and cold up here for years is likely to be pretty unstable: not a nice bedfellow. Why don’t we finish our walk around the outside, and see what we can see?’

  Hudd’s man was where we’d left him, now sleeping like a baby. He was breathing slowly and regularly and had a quiet smile on his face, which was good. He was also perspiring profusely, which was bad.

  Hudd said, ‘Leave him be. He probably needs it.’

  We walked around the black bomber on the ground. They say that when an aircraft looked right, it was right. You wouldn’t say that about Frohlich’s Mk III Stirling. She had long spindly legs like a heron, a snub nose like a bulldog, a long thin fuselage and short, fat wide wings. It was as if her four main design components had been borrowed from different airframes and bolted together in somebody’s backyard . . . but before the Lanc and the dear old Hallibag came along, she was considered state-of-the-art. Maybe that’s the right phrase. Maybe Picasso or Roland Penrose had a hand in her somewhere.

  ‘What an ugly bastard!’ Hudd remarked.

  ‘Beauty, Hudd, is in the eye of the beholder and not skin-deep.’ Two clichés in one sentence; not bad, Charlie. ‘She could leave more bits in Germany, and still get home, than any other aircraft in the 1940s or since. She is one tough old bag, believe me.’

  ‘But she had her bad points as well?’

  ‘She had to fly around mountains, couldn’t carry all that much, and was slow.’

  ‘But she got here . . .’

  ‘Yeah she did, didn’t she?’

  By that time we’d completed our walk round. The only interesting thing I’d noticed was that the starboard tyre was not only deflated, but there were huge pieces of it missing – cut out and half-inched by whoever had robbed her out in the first place. I wondered what they could possibly make from bits of aircraft tyre.

  Hudd asked me, ‘Well?’ He was good at saying well.

  ‘The bomb doors haven’t been opened.’

  I’d tried to slide a knife blade between them and failed. I’ve still got the knife; it sleeps between my mattress and the bed frame. The dirt that I scraped from the junction of the bomb doors was bonded with grease; nothing had been there for a long time.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘They don’t look it. Another part of my brain is saying that if anyone had opened them, what would be the point of closing them again . . . and would they have had the means anyway?’

  ‘So the stuff could still be here?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘. . . but you thought it, just like me.’

  Hudd must have been an optimist. I actually was thinking it unlikely that anyone had left that amount of dough hanging about, so it must have been in boxes in the cabin.

  ‘If you say so, Hudd.’

  ‘We got homework to do. Let’s have some grub, get sorted and work out where we’re going to spend the night. Then we can start in at it.’

  ‘We can sleep inside her if you’re sure there are no snakes . . .’

  ‘There you go: halfway there already . . .’

  Hudd cooked up a stew and brewed a pan of char on a stove no larger than a can of baked beans; it was a remarkable little thing. I decided not to ask him what the meat in the stew was . . . I found I was ravenously hungry anyway. He only made enough for two. I nodded at Rip Van Winkle and said, ‘What about him?’

  ‘He couldn’t keep the last lot down, could he? No point wasting it, so let him sleep instead – it will do him good.’ Will it? I thought. As if he could read my mind, Hudd looked up and added, ‘He’s had as much antivenom as he can take. Any more than that will kill him. All we can do is wait.’ Cheerful bastard, wasn’t he?

  As the sun sank beneath the mountain tops, the air cooled quickly. We wrapped Hudd’s man up, and then climbed back in the bus.

  Hudd said, ‘The way I see it is that we’ve got to lift all these plates one by one, and look underneath them.’

  ‘I can’t see how they lift. It might take ages.’

  ‘You got a better idea, mate?’

  ‘Up in the office; I might be able to work out how the bomb door release works: it might still work.’

  ‘I doubt it; it’s not a bloody Volkswagen.’ The evil little Jerry cars were already earning a reputation for reliability and longevity. ‘Look: you go try that, and I’ll get to work down here, but before you do anything get a signal off to Mr Watson. Tell him we found a black bird, but no golden eagles, and keep it short.’

  ‘Golden eagles?’

  ‘The Yanks used to put eagles on all their golden dollars.’

  ‘We’re not looking for golden dollars, Hudd, we’re looking for paper ones . . . and the gold coins were sovereigns, weren’t they, not dollars?’

  ‘So it’s a mixed metaphor, Charlie: stop being so literal. He give you a code pad?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then get on with it: we got an hour o’ daylight at least, if we’re lucky.’

  I set my dinky radio up not far from Hudd’s man, and ran the copper aerial up to one of the massive propeller blades. That way the whole of Frohlich’s monster would become my aerial – the resulting signal would probably burst Watson’s eardrums. Hudd’s man stirred just as I was packing it down again.

  I walked across to him, and squatted down. ‘How you feeling?’

  ‘Better, but crook. Those little bastards pack quite a punch.’ He showed me his bitten hand. It was swollen and mottled dark-red in places. ‘I’m thirsty.’ I gave him a drink before I climbed back inside the aircraft. The last thing he said before he closed his eyes agai
n, was, ‘This is silly.’

  Hudd still hadn’t got into the bomb bay by the time we quit at dark. I had identified the bomb-door release handle, and a heavy-duty cable leading from it. There was also a hydraulic line, but in the half-light I couldn’t see if that was associated with the gear for the bomb doors. I skinned my knuckles half a dozen times before it became too dark, swore, and gave up. If I’d expected Hudd to be sullen or downcast at our failures I was wrong. We made a fire with dried thick grass, and wood from scrubby bushes no higher than it. The tree wood popped and sparked in the flames. Hudd said it was juniper. He sat across the fire and told tales of his service in Malaya and Indo-China. Most of the tales were funny and ribald, almost as if he thought soldiering was a way of extracting as much fun out of life as possible.

  The stew tasted the same, though, and his man managed a couple of mouthfuls. His temperature had dropped, but he shivered for Australia, no matter how much we swaddled him in all the stuff we had. Late on we scuffed the fire out, and loaded our gear into Frohlich’s Stirling. We had a sleeping sack each: thin canvas cotton treated on the inside with a rubber solution: once you were inside and buttoned up none of your body heat escaped.

  Hudd’s man groaned as we loaded him into his. We played that kids’ game, Sardines, sleeping side by side and touching, with Hudd’s man in the middle . . . stretched out on the plates which had so far defeated us. The wind got up a bit; the airframe creaked and groaned, and but for the roar of four engines, and the fingers of searchlights probing the night skies, I could have been back over Germany.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Just a closer walk with thee

  I woke in a cold dawn, put a hand out of my sack but pulled it back quickly after contact with the aircraft’s cold, damp flank. Hudd was snoring. I thought his man was breathing more peacefully. He stirred as I pulled away from them to get up, and gave me a quiet smile. For a moment he looked as innocent as a schoolboy.