Silent War

by David Fiddimore

  I took a leak over the twin tail-wheels for luck, just as we used to on the squadron. It’s one of those memories that make you smile. Then I walked round the old bitch a couple of times, flinging my arms around my body to warm myself up and get rid of the stiffness from sleeping on a hard surface. I wouldn’t have noticed that when I was sixteen. Then I stood underneath her crew compartment in the nose, and imagined the cables and lines running down from the bomb-door release, and how they crawled through the airframe to the hydraulic rams against the doors. Then I collected scraps of old wood and dried grasses, and started a fire under the high port wing, and climbed back inside to search for breakfast makings in the pouches.

  Hudd, squatting a couple of feet from his man, turned and said, ‘You should have told me. Given me a shake.’

  ‘Told you what?’

  ‘That Freddy was gone.’

  I knelt by Hudd’s man, who was indeed quite dead. He looked peaceful, but when I touched his good hand, which was outside the sleeping sack, it was icy cold, and stiff – he’d been dead for hours.

  ‘But that’s not possible. I saw him a few minutes ago when I got up. He looked better. He even smiled at me.’

  Hudd just stared at me. There was nothing either malevolent or friendly in his stare. Eventually he said, ‘Maybe you’ve been outside longer than you think.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, maybe you were still asleep, and dreamed it. That happens. ’

  There was no point in arguing. ‘Yes, Hudd: I’m sorry. He was a friend of yours. I didn’t even know his name until you just said it.’

  ‘He didn’t use it all that often,’ was all Hudd said. ‘He was secretive.’

  We buried Hudd’s man under the shadow of the other wing, using our small entrenching tools to dig and scrape him a decent grave. The soil was stony, but very loose, so we managed a decent depth: probably four feet. Hudd made us dig another then, because it had always been his intention to get the guy out of the rear turret before we left . . . and the two graves took us the best part of half a day.

  Hudd didn’t seem in any hurry now. I figured out why: we probably had plenty of stores – by his definition – now that there were only two of us. We examined Hudd’s man’s bad arm before we tied him into his sleeping sack. From the fingertips to the shoulder it was twice the normal size, and a mottled deep red and black. At his shoulder, major veins stood out a steely blue. He must have been in agony, and kept his trap shut all that time.

  ‘Lesson learned,’ Hudd said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘First one of us that gets snake-bit, the other one shoots him.’

  I’ve never been a brave man, but looking at that terrible arm convinced me for the time being. ‘Agreed. Do you want a marker on the grave?’

  ‘No, we never do that sort o’ thing in my mob. I’d say a prayer if I could. I’ve seen Fred pray for others: he always had the words. I can’t seem to remember any.’

  ‘I know the words of a slow jazz number they used to do at funerals in New Orleans. I think it was a hymn. I can speak them if you like?’

  ‘Yes, please, Charlie. That would do.’

  I started to give Hudd’s man the words of ‘Just a closer walk with thee’, but somehow they didn’t seem to come out right, so I ended up singing them for him. I’ve never had much of a voice – kind of harsh and tuneless – but maybe hearing a human voice at all up on that awful plateau was something, though. The noise was lost in the vast basin.

  Hudd said, ‘That was good, Charlie; let’s find a coupla big stones to put on him, an’ make a cuppa char.’

  The Aussies are as bad as us: the only other race in the world which attacks overwhelming sadness with cups of tea.

  There was a big cotter pin behind the bomb-door release up in the Stirling’s office. Hudd walked forward to join me after he had become bored with the floor plates, and pointed at it. ‘What’s that do?’

  ‘Don’t know. Could be something to do with the bomb-door locks. I haven’t looked at it yet.’

  He reached over my shoulder with a pair of pliers, and yanked it out. The result was immediate: a rumbling sound somewhere beneath us, and several dull thuds one after the other.

  ‘Let’s go outside and look,’ he ordered.

  The bloody doors under the fuselage were gaping open of course. Long, narrow parallel doors which had covered the cells in the narrow bomb bays. Dust was still filtering down in the sunlight. A number of gold coins, which hadn’t been there the day before, glinted at our feet close to the remains of a wooden box.

  ‘About a dozen each,’ Hudd said. ‘That should get us a few beers.’

  ‘It’s not ours, Hudd. The Treasury will get very humpy if we nick it.’

  ‘No they won’t: Watson said we could keep the coin. It was the paper money he was after, and that’s not bloody here, is it?’

  ‘Apparently not; so what do we do next?’

  ‘Tell Watson, and find out what his plan B is. He always has a plan B. Then set off north, I guess. The first village is over the foothills; it will take us all day.’

  ‘What about the thing in the back turret?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Forgot about him. Eat first, then stick ’im in the ground.’

  ‘I don’t want to be walking in the dark with all those snakes around.’

  ‘If it’s cold they’ll be coiled up; they won’t move.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. They’ll get our big feet all over them, and start getting mad.’

  Hudd sucked on a piece of grass he had cut. ‘See what you mean; let me think about it.’

  When we were sitting and eating I asked him what was in the stew: it was growing on me.

  ‘Roo meat. Kangaroo. Pound for pound, the most nutritious meat in the world. We carry it dried in strips like jerky. It worry you, mate?’

  ‘Meat’s meat, Hudd. We ate whales in the war.’

  ‘Never did that. What’s it taste like?’

  ‘Whale.’ I remembered the flavour of that fishy meat. ‘Disgusting. Only morons or Japs would eat it unless they had to.’

  When I lit my pipe he said, ‘Wish you wouldn’t do that, Charlie. It’s not good for you.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Gives you lung diseases. Smokers die early.’

  ‘That so, Hudd? I suppose drinking’s not good for you either.’

  ‘That’s right. Drinkers die early, too. Look what happened to Fred.’

  ‘That was nothing to do with drinking. It was because a snake bit him.’

  ‘How do we know that?’ Hudd asked me. ‘All I know is that Fred drank too much all his life, an’ he died early. The statistics speak for themselves.’

  I got my pipe stoked up and going well, before I asked him, ‘Who doesn’t die early, Hudd?’

  He considered the question for so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he shrugged and said, ‘Old folks, I guess.’

  It was time for us to get that bag of bones out of the rear turret.

  I showed Hudd how the door in the back of the turret opened. It didn’t, so we had to take a hammer to it. When it eventually moved aside the thing in there fell back towards us. I instinctively jumped back. Hudd didn’t. It had desiccated in the sun for so long, and the turret was ventilated of course, that it didn’t smell too bad. Just that dusty putrefactive smell that grabs at the back of your throat. He was curled up like a homunculus: there hadn’t been much room for him. He had no shoes on, and one copper-brown foot was three times the size of the other. Snakes two, humans nil. Hudd must have thought the same.

  ‘Snake-bit; but he’s been up here a year at least. Recognize the uniform?’ He was dressed in plain KDs without any markings, and hadn’t been too old. His shrunken face had been younger than mine when he died. Dark crinkly hair, which was falling out in clumps – it looked as if something was getting at it – and bad teeth. I shook my head.

  ‘No. What do you want to do with him?’

  ‘Find out who he
was, mate; then bury the bugger. Maybe he can tell us where the dosh has gone.’

  We found an ID bracelet on his wrist. The metal had discoloured, but it was possible to make out the writing on it, which wasn’t in a Western script.

  ‘Arabic?’ Hudd asked.

  ‘Dunno. It’s quite like the Egyptian Arabic, but not quite right. Keep it; we’ll check it later.’

  Watson did not take the news well. I’d forgotten he used to be an operator himself in the cat’s-whisker days. The Morse came back from him like machine-gun fire. I told Hudd, ‘He thinks it’s our fault.’

  ‘No, he doesn’t . . . but he’s got to take it out on someone. We’ve lost one man already, and we haven’t found the money. That’s not going to look very good in his memoirs, is it?’ I re-examined this statement in my head and came to the conclusion that I didn’t like the word already. Nor would you.

  I sent back, ‘If you can’t be civil, be quiet,’ and pulled the aerial out. That would give Watson apoplexy. ‘I’ll try him again in an hour,’ I told Hudd, ‘. . . after he’s calmed down. He’s bound to think of something for us to do: he hates idle staff.’

  He looked at me quizzically.

  ‘Aren’t you taking a bit of a chance talking to your SO like that?’

  ‘Not really. He got me out here under false pretences – I was already time-expired, but didn’t know it – and, despite the bluster, I think the only thing he can do with me is send me home in disgrace.’

  ‘What if you’re wrong?’

  ‘I’ll end up in the nick again. My old man’s probably inside even as we speak: it goes in the family.’

  I may have been wrong, but after that I think Hudd looked at me with a new respect. Well done, Dad! We buried the dead soldier alongside Hudd’s man. Hudd wanted me to sing the same words over him, but I turned him down.

  ‘He wasn’t one of us: besides he probably had some dago religion and wouldn’t have appreciated it.’

  ‘You’re all heart, Charlie: as sensitive as a fucking brick.’

  I thought that was a bit rich coming from him. So I flung back, ‘That’s what all the girls say,’ and showed him my pearlies.

  While we were brewing up he asked me, ‘Show me that bracelet again: I’m sure I’ve seen writing like that somewhere.’

  I looked from where we were sitting in the shade of the black bomber towards the two graves, and for the first time took in that it was just me and him now . . . and this fucking wilderness. I asked myself what my dead pal Tommo would have done in this situation, but the answer that came back was that he didn’t know, either. All he could come up with was that I’d better watch out for myself. Thanks, Tommo; I could have worked that out for myself.

  Hudd threw the lees of his tea on the fire, stood up and stretched. While I had brewed up he had been sorting his man’s effects. He gave me a small pair of binoculars and a Fairbairn-Sykes dagger. I still have them: throwing your history away isn’t that easy. I’m looking at the knife as I write, right now.

  He said to me, ‘I want you to go around the other side,’ he gestured at the Stirling, ‘. . . and examine the countryside carefully, from the foothills of the mountains right up to where we’re standing.’

  ‘What will you be doing?’

  ‘This side: I’ll take the south and east, you take the north and west.’

  ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘Horses: small horses. Wild ponies maybe, or wild asses.’

  ‘Why? We haven’t seen any so far.’

  ‘Nah, but we seen their tracks; all over the shop. Some small hoofs have been chopping up the ground: didn’t you notice?’

  ‘No. Show me.’

  He did. In places the signs were clear. I was angry with myself that I hadn’t noticed, and he must have picked up on that.

  ‘Don’t fret, Charlie: it’s my job – just like the radio’s yours.’ It didn’t help. I was determined to do a decent job now, so I scanned the brush and the mountains for at least twenty minutes. When I walked back, he was waiting for me. ‘Anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither. You know what that means?’

  ‘No.’ Again.

  ‘That maybe they weren’t wild. Maybe somone rode them up here, or maybe they were pack animals?’

  ‘And they were used to carry the money away on.’

  ‘Right. Getting a vehicle up here would be bloody nigh impossible.’

  ‘How old are the tracks?’

  ‘Fuck knows, Charlie. I’m not Geronimo.’

  ‘What next?’

  ‘Phone God; ask him what he wants us to do . . .’

  We didn’t have a telephone. I tapped out a placatory message to Watson with my key: his hour was almost up anyway. He still had an immaculate hand in terms of his Morse sending, and his first return was to ask if we were OK, which meant that he had it back together again. I replied so far so good, and told him the rest. He asked me to wait five, which meant that he and M’smith would be scrutinizing the charts. When he came back he asked us to look out for animal tracks out between north and NNW . . . on a heading of say, 330 or 340 – and if we found them to follow them out. The afternoon was drawing in, so I sent, tomorrow. He replied, OK. No dissent from Watson was unusual: he probably realized that another day wasn’t going to make any difference.

  When we looked carefully where Watson had told us to look, we could see the scrub and the grass had been trampled or broken more frequently than any of the stuff around it . . . not that the breaks looked all that recent.

  I muttered, ‘I hate it when he’s bloody right all the time.’

  ‘We’ll be heading in the right direction anyway, Charlie,’ Hudd pointed out. ‘We have to head north to Van or Tatvan before they can get us out.’

  ‘Tatvan and Van? I take it that they are towns rather than ruined trucks parked in the desert somewhere.’

  ‘I don’t know as you’d quite say towns, Charlie. Depends on yer definition.’

  At least Hudd had spoken about getting us out. That was a start. I don’t know why I hadn’t worried about it before. We sorted ourselves out in preparation for our second night on the plateau. Hudd showed me how to set snares in the brush.

  ‘What for?’ I asked him.

  ‘Rabbits maybe; the snakes have to live off something. Rabbit for breakfast is brilliant.’ I thought that the vipers were more likely to catch lizards and mice, and I wasn’t going to start chewing on those: you could take the Special Forces thing too far in those days. But I kept my mouth shut.

  We had to range a bit further this time for scraps of dead wood and clumps of grass, and we made a bigger fire that evening, further away from the aircraft. Hudd cooked us another pan of Roo Stew which we washed down with warm tea.

  ‘Last tea,’ he warned me, ‘until we find water. There are melt streams down in the foothills, but I won’t take any chances.’

  ‘I was trying to remember what beer tasted like.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t put any more stuff on the fire. When it burns down, we’ll turn in.’

  He climbed up into the black bomber before me. I sat by the embers of the fire and smoked a last pipe. I thought about the boys. They would have been asleep for a couple of hours already. The bar in Maggs and the Major’s pub would be smoky and noisy. Maybe someone was playing the out-of-tune piano in the corner. I wondered if Flaming June had made up with her lost soldier, and if Captain Holroyd and his lovely wife were propping up the bar at Abu Suier. When I crawled into my sack up in the black bitch’s belly, I was thoroughly dissatisfied, and it was all my own fault.

  When I was in my fifties, and living in a decent-sized city for the first time in my life, I found myself drawn to the art galleries. I had an immediate affinity with the surrealists, because, as far as I was concerned, they were actually realists in a deeper sense. Surreality is all around you; all you have to do is look . . . and if you’re already wondering where thi
s is going, it’s all because of the guy who knocked on the door the next morning.

  The knocking on the aircraft’s door wasn’t assertive; it was just a polite knock. The sort a neighbour uses when he comes to call. Neither Hudd nor I had heard him approach, but we managed to scramble up to the door together. I opened it. Hudd poked his Stirling out, and when nothing happened, his head. Nobody shot at it. My head was there after a decent interval, but then I always was a nosy bastard. A small man, in an immaculate grey lounge suit with a pinstripe, was sitting astride a donkey. He had a parasol to ward off the sun, and a beaming smile on what looked almost like an Asian face. About thirty, narrow-featured and exceptionally handsome. I’d bet he never had a problem with the girls.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said in an exquisite English accent, ‘. . . beautiful morning.’

  Hudd was momentarily speechless, so I took over. ‘Good morning.’

  ‘I saw your fire last night, and thought I’d ride over to say hello.’ Then he laughed and said, ‘Hello.’

  Hudd said, ‘Wotcha.’

  ‘We brought you some breakfast.’

  ‘Nice of you.’

  Then our visitor enquired, ‘I suppose you’ve come for the money?’

  I started to laugh; couldn’t help myself. Hudd snarled, ‘Shut it, Charlie.’

  But the Asian, Indian or whatever he was, said, ‘He’s English, sir . . . let him laugh. English passengers told jokes as the Titanic sank; quite admirable actually.’ He’d expressed our dilemma quite neatly, I thought, because my problem was with one of the words he’d used. He’d said, ‘We brought you some breakfast.’ The we in question were a dozen tribesmen sitting around us in a half-circle on small ponies and donkeys, and they were armed to the teeth. One even had what looked like one of the .303 machine guns from the Stirling slung across his back.

  I said, ‘I don’t suppose our goolie chits are any use?’

  Smiler replied, ‘None of them can read. I could read it to them if you liked, but you’d have no way of knowing that I did so faithfully. You’d have to take me on trust. They say it’s difficult to trust a Kurd.’

  Hudd sniffed, and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. Only real men do that. It’s probably a dominance gesture they teach them at Special Forces school. Smiler didn’t seem to notice.