The Mercenaries

by The Mercenaries (The Jade Wind) (retail) (epub)

  * * *

  One evening, aeroplanes appeared over the city – new De Havilland Nines with tapered snouts, the sun picking out the blue markings with Chiang’s sunrays on them. A few bombs were dropped but most of them fell either in the river or in the paddy fields at the far side, and nothing was damaged and no one hurt, but, for safety, they decided to disperse the machines at once and finally to drain the petrol tanks.

  Two nights later, the De Havillands came again, just before dark, and this time they ignored the town and roared across the field at Yaochow. They came low over the trees, their bullets bouncing up from the hard earth, their bombs going off in flashes across the field, so that they all had to dive for the ditch, clawing frantically at the frozen ground.

  ‘If they touch my aeroplanes,’ Sammy was yelling bitterly, ‘I’ll kill the bastards!’

  As the sound of engines died away, they scrambled to their feet and ran to where the aircraft were parked, Sammy in the lead, the coolies trailing along behind. They were still running when the last of the planes came over, an American Curtiss, its engine missing badly so that it had fallen behind the others. As it appeared over the trees, so low they felt the backlash of the propeller, Ira flung himself at Ellie and dragged her to the ground. One of the coolies near them went over like a shot rabbit, end over end over end, until he stopped, sprawling face-down in the dust, and Ira saw the bullets ricocheting round the Avro as the Curtiss banked.

  The Chiang plane vanished as suddenly as it had come, leaving holes in all the machines but no serious damage, and they buried the dead coolie at the edge of the field, hacking a hole from the hard earth with picks, and left him with his friends wailing and burning joss sticks over the grave. They were still patching the planes and packing the last of their equipment when darkness came, and it was only as they stopped to eat that they noticed the coolies had gone. One minute they were there alongside them, moving among the tents, carrying spares and tools and cans of oil, then the next there was utter silence. Where there had always been the high yelling of Chinese argument, now there was nothing except shadows and the hollow sound of their own voices bouncing back at them from the tent walls, and scared looks on the faces of the Wangs and the two Chengs.

  They finished loading the lorries and stuffed what they could aboard the De Havilland, then they snatched a hurried meal of corned beef and coffee and lay down to wait for morning. Over Tsosiehn there was a glow in the sky that silhouetted the tower of the pagoda, and Peter Cheng, who had sneaked into the city on a bicycle, came back to say that the mob had set fire to De Sa’s store again and that the gunboat had returned at last and was gathering rafts and sampans to ferry Europeans out to the ship.

  Afraid to go to sleep and half-dozing in his blanket in a tent against the lorry, with Ellie huddled in his arms, Ira could feel no other sensation but relief that it was all over. The enthusiasm for their projected air carrying company had gone, and all their happiness with it, in the hatred of the Chinese.

  They seemed not to have had their clothes off for days, and he was longing for sleep, but it was bitterly cold and had started to rain, and in addition to having a mind busy with all the things he had to remember, he knew it had now become unsafe to sleep. Then the rain changed to sleet and flurries of snow, and within an hour everything was coated with a patchy white, the wings of the aeroplanes like grey gashes across the black sky.

  There was a feeling of defeat in the air and he was overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness. Tomorrow, they’d be on their way to Nanching, well to the south and off the route of the armies, and from there even further, and he couldn’t wait to put it all behind him. At least their future was secure because his back was against a suitcase containing Shanghai and American dollars, and they could afford to pay off all their outstanding debts and still be in business with a little capital behind them.

  He felt Ellie stir in his arms and as he lifted his head he noticed that the red sky over Tsosiehn seemed to be growing brighter, and he became aware of the yells of the mob and occasional shots. Then Sammy, who was prowling round the perimeter of the field with a revolver strapped to his waist, yelled suddenly.

  ‘Ira! I think the bastards are coming!’

  A shot whined across the airfield, then as Ira reached under the blankets for his own revolver, all hell broke loose. His ears were filled with a high-pitched yelling, and as he burst out of the tent, he heard Sammy fire, then he was bowled over by a rush of figures in the darkness. Another shot rang out and he took aim from the ground as another bunch of dark shapes hurried by, black against the snow, but they continued past him to the aircraft without apparently noticing.

  ‘The planes, Sammy,’ he yelled, scrambling to his feet.

  Flaring torches seemed to be all round him, lighting up the thin snow and, as he fired again at the shadowy figures, he saw the tent where Lawn had been sleeping go up in flames. Sammy was yelling and swearing somewhere in the darkness and he could hear Lawn’s boozy voice in the background, then he saw that the Fokker, which had never flown since his crash-landing after his fight over Hakau had grounded it for lack of a propeller, was surrounded by yelling shapes with paraffin cans and torches and he began to run. There was a flare of flame from the cockpit, and even as he ran to put it out, he knew it was useless, and almost immediately he heard the sound of metal on metal and guessed the mob was trying to puncture the stacked petrol drums.

  Shouting, he whirled on his heel and ran towards the dump. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw old Lawn lumbering towards him, then a flaring torch was swung in the darkness and there was a ‘whoosh!’ and an explosion that threw them both over. As he lifted his head, he saw running figures black against the flames and a youth whose clothes were alight being dragged away, screaming in agony.

  He rushed to the lorry for the fire extinguishers and bumped into a student just climbing into the cab. He swung the revolver and the boy reeled away with a shriek, and grabbing extinguishers with Lawn, he ran to the drums of petrol. But there was another explosion and another fountain of flame and he saw at once that the extinguishers were useless. Racing back to the lorry, he saw a coolie with a torch trying to set light to the tarpaulin hanging over the back and lashed out with his foot. As the man collapsed with a grunt, he jumped into the cab and roared away from the blaze with screaming gears.

  As he climbed down again, he saw the remaining Peugeot was burning now and snatched up the extinguisher again in a vain attempt to put it out. As he turned away, his hair and eyebrows singed, his face black with smoke and runnelled with sweat, he realised their assailants were gone.

  He could see Ellie in the shadows at the other side of the blaze, then Sammy appeared through the darkness, his face streaked and a smear of blood down one cheek. He was staring at the burning Fokker, already only a glowing framework devoid of fabric, its wings sagging and its fuselage broken-backed.

  Ira stood alongside him, his eyes hard. The Fokker had never been a good aeroplane by the standards of any aeronautical society, and she’d arrived patched and battered and darned like a poor relation even to the old Avro. But her engine and construction had been basically sound and they’d made a reliable machine of her, and it was heartbreaking now to see her burn.

  ‘The bastards,’ Sammy was sobbing, the tears wet on his face, ‘She was a tip-top little aeroplane.’

  ‘And they were too bloody well organised,’ Ira grated. ‘They were everywhere at once.’

  It was only as he turned away that he realised that Sammy was hugging his right arm to his chest and that he was in pain.

  ‘What happened, Sammy?’

  ‘Me arm’s bust, I think. Some bastard with a carrying pole got me. I think I shot him. He’s over there somewhere.’

  ‘What about the other planes?’

  ‘They’re OK It’s a bleddy good job we emptied the tanks. They’ve both lost a bit of fabric but that’s all. There’s no real damage. They’ll fly again.’

  Ira shook his head.
‘Not just yet, they won’t.’ He indicated the flare where the petrol dump had been. Patches of grass were still burning fiercely.

  As they moved towards the dump, he saw Ellie coming towards them. Her shirt was torn off her shoulder and she stared at them numbly, her expression full of shock and horror.

  ‘They tried…’ She choked on her words, her throat working, then as Ira stepped forward, she flung herself into his arms, sobbing.

  * * *

  When daylight came the place looked like a battlefield, with the skid marks and lorry ruts bleak on the rimed ground. The charred tent, the ruined Fokker and the burnt-out Peugeot were like the wreckage of war, and the great blackened circle where the petrol dump had been, now nothing but melted snow, charred grass, and the split, still-hot fragments of metal that had been drums, looked like a bomb crater. There were scattered blankets everywhere with broken camp beds and chairs and pots and pans.

  They ate breakfast silently, sitting on boxes and drinking coffee out of chipped tin mugs. A thousand feet above them, the lowering clouds threatened more sleet. Ira was deep in thought, frowning at a scrap of paper on which he was making calculations. Ellie watched him, her face grey with shock and tension. She’d put a splint on Sammy’s arm and bound it in a sling and he was prowling tirelessly round the aeroplanes now, peering at them lopsidedly, sucking his teeth, his eyes cold and frowning as he made mental calculations and adjustments.

  After a while, a thin rain started that changed the snow to slush, and they unloaded one of the tents from the lorry and erected it so they could collect their belongings inside it.

  ‘We’ve got to get petrol, Sammy,’ Ira said grimly. ‘Even if we emptied the lorries and the cars, there wouldn’t be an hour’s flying for the Four.’

  They found a couple of puddles of blood on the grass and the body of a coolie near the sagging framework of the Fokker. He was lying in a hollow in the ground, his face thrust into the earth, the back of his head blown off, the breeze playing with the torn edge of his blue smock.

  ‘That must be the one I got,’ Sammy said without a trace of compassion in his voice.

  ‘We’ve got to hide him,’ Ira pointed put. ‘If the students find out, they’ll have the mob back again within an hour.’

  They needed time to repair the damage, to sort themselves out, and above all to find petrol, and the last thing they wanted was another visit from the crowd.

  Without telling the Chengs or Wang, Ira wedged the body along the mudguard of De Sa’s Ford and drove over to the grave they’d dug the previous day. Working in the rain, he dragged out the body of the coolie the aeroplanes had killed and laid the man Sammy had shot underneath him. As he shovelled the earth back, Sammy watched him, his face grim.

  ‘What now, Ira?’

  He looked like a wizened, starved child with his thin face grey with pain, his eyes dark and exhausted. His stance was lopsided because of his broken arm and Ira’s heart went out to him, for his courage and tenacity and loyalty.

  ‘Get that wing of yours put right,’ he said. ‘That’s first.’

  He siphoned what petrol they could find into the tank of the Crossley and, leaving Ellie with Lawn, pushed Sammy – not very willingly, because he was itching to start work – aboard, and with Peter Cheng as interpreter, drove cautiously into Tsosiehn.

  There was a feeling of impending doom over the city and enormous crowds were on the bund, spreading like an ugly fungus along the river’s edge, smothering everything and shouting over the water at the gunboat. The market was a ruin, and the remains of the mat-shed roofs swung in the breeze, whacking the wooden walls with a soft intermittent clapping. Broken earthenware, water jars, pots and rice bowls were trampled into the dirt and the booths where the metal-workers had labored were wide open and empty in a debris of sheet metal, rusty chain and broken forges.

  A few Tsu soldiers in filthy uniforms and umbrellas, straggling through the paper-strewn streets, were helping themselves from the shops they’d broken into. There was one man with a couple of chickens hanging from his belt, and another with a wheelbarrow with a sewing machine on it. At one corner they saw a pigtailed soldier in the distance struggling with an old man who was trying to prevent him dragging off a girl, whose jacket was ripped from her body and hung in tatters round her naked waist. Growing angry, the soldier let the girl go and the old man pulled her away, but the soldier shot him in the back, and as the girl bent over his body, the soldier slung his rifle again, grabbed her by the wrist and wrenched her away between the houses, a harsh dry scream coming from her throat as they disappeared.

  They found a Chinese doctor for Sammy, but he made them go to the back of the house, because he was afraid of being seen with them, and his inspection and bandaging were perfunctory and hurried.

  ‘Ellie did a better job than that,’ Sammy said caustically.

  The doctor shrugged. ‘I am busy,’ he said. ‘Typhoid has broken out in the city.’

  What he said was clearly true. Bodies were lying in doorways and families were carrying their dead towards the burial grounds, headed by the Rev. Alwyn Rees, his eyes wild with thwarted fervour.

  Near the river, Tsu soldiers were shooting prisoners. Four men were kneeling on the ground, hatless, their hands tied behind their backs, and as the car passed, an officer walked along the line, put his revolver to each head in turn and pulled the trigger. As he holstered his weapon, a sergeant called a squad of soldiers to attention and they began to move off after him.

  De Sa’s store was a mere heap of smoking timbers and scorched bricks stinking of burned grain. The big shed where he’d kept his petrol, oil and paraffin had disappeared from the face of the earth, and they could see the roofs had been blasted off the houses all around, so that it wasn’t hard to guess what had happened when the mob had fired it. A few stunned-looking householders were moving between the ruins, and a couple of blue-clad bodies lay among the stones.

  ‘Let’s try his godown by the river,’ Ira suggested, more determined with every hour to get clear of Tsosiehn with what aircraft the mob had left him.

  But the warehouse had been broken open, too, and looked as if it had been stripped clean by an army of locusts. There wasn’t a sack of grain, a drum of kerosene or a tin of meat, nothing but an abandoned blue blouse and one of the conical straw hats the coolies wore.

  For two hours they moved round the city, their revolvers loose in their holsters, searching for petrol. A bleak sun shone on the wintry streets, deserted factories and lacquer works, and by the river, abused by the yelling students, the naval men were ferrying out groups of apathetic missionaries with their suitcases and bundles and wailing children. For the most part they wore Chinese clothing and several of them had bloody bandages on their heads.

  There wasn’t a can of petrol to be bought in the city, and they recognised at once that what had happened in Hwai-Yang was now happening in Tsosiehn. Chiang agents had been at work and what hadn’t been stolen or burned or poured into the gutter had been hidden or smuggled east to Kwei. The student committees had been round all the usual sources, warning and threatening and, at one point, they were accompanied by a horde of chanting youngsters who yelled insults both at Ira and Sammy and at anyone who looked a likely prospect of help.

  ‘No petrol for foreign devils!’ they screamed. ‘Foreign devils go home!’

  They picked up Peter Cheng, whom for his own safety they’d left to forage alone, and were just on the point of giving up in despair when Ira noticed several huge rafts moored on the mud flats downriver, as big as islands and made of logs bound together with twisted bamboo cables, whole villages of wood- and-reed houses erected on them.

  ‘Peter,’ he said, stopping the tender with a jerk that made Sammy yelp with pain. ‘The raft!’

  Cheng nodded. ‘Yes, Taipan! Sail to Siang-Chang. Many white people there. Treaty port.’

  A spark of hope flared in Ira’s breast. He jerked a hand at the raft. ‘Will they take us?’

  Th
e other two stared at him, startled, then Cheng’s face broke into a wide smile.

  ‘We have money, Taipan. Fire melt money. Money melt raft-boss’s heart. They will take us.’

  Chapter 6

  Red-eyed with lack of sleep, grimy with grease and oil, his fingers bleeding from wrenching at spanners, Ira watched Jimmy Cheng make the last lashings as they fastened the tail of the stripped and wingless Avro across the dropboard of the thirty-hundredweight. The De Havilland stood nearby, lashed to the trailer of De Sa’s traction engine. Stripping her after all the work they’d put in on her had almost broken their hearts.

  ‘Well, this is it,’ Ira said grimly. ‘With a bit of luck, we ought to make it.’

  Sammy looked up from where he crouched on a box, and nodded, too exhausted to reply. His face was drawn with strain and he hugged his injured arm to his chest with trembling fingers. All night, refusing help, he had struggled one-handed with spanners and wrenches, not uttering a word of complaint or a moan of despair, simply clamping his lips tighter, even in the final moment of desperation when the always-uncertain Crossley had finally given up the ghost at the most inconvenient moment of its career, so that they had had to off-load it and re-distribute everything just when they’d believed they’d finished.

  Ellie stood nearby as Ira climbed into the traction engine’s cab, and he could see her fighting back all the warnings she was wanting to give him. Deliberately, he made his farewell brief.

  ‘So long, Ellie,’ he said. ‘Back for supper.’

  She managed a shaky smile but made no reply and he waved to Wang and Peter Cheng on the trailer and released the brake.

  * * *

  Tsosiehn had grown quieter by the time they clanked past its fringes towards the river. The mobs were still chanting up and down the bund by the pagoda, throwing rocks and filth at the stony-faced sailors pushing the missionaries into the sampans, but the log raft lay on the mudflats in a muddy loop of the river just outside the city, its owner a diminutive Szechwanese with an independent turn of mind, to whom money was worth more than all the ideologies offered by the students a mile away along the riverbank.