by Sean Wallace
Flinder flinched away.
Patua cocked his head. “Haven’t even touched you yet. Where’s it hurt?”
Flinder stepped away from him, her pulse pounding, her throat tight. “No, don’t touch . . . I’m not hurt, it’s all Croft’s blood, I . . .” She clenched her teeth, her grief undercut with revulsion. “Honestly, I’m fine. Can I, maybe, just get out of the sun?”
Camera clutched to her chest, she walked toward the halftrack, giving Patua and Harawera both a wide berth. The sun pounded her into the ground, yet just for a moment she was cold, right to her core.
She eased herself down against the halftrack’s front wheel, thankful for the meagre shade. Laying the rifle on the dirt and resting the camera on her knees, she uncapped her canteen and swigged water that tasted like sand and oil, bitterness and blood. The taste wasn’t in the water, but in her mouth.
“Lieutenant?” Patua crouched beside her, his voice warm as the earth. “You survived being shot down. I gotta check to see if you’re hurt. Don’t want anything going septic, eh?”
“Don’t touch me,” she growled, low in her throat. The last thing she wanted right now was a Māori man putting his filthy hands all over her. She could feel the rage, building up like floodwater against riverbanks, her horizon black with rain. She wrung her hands, haunted by the memory of fingers slipping from hers; a memory she had crossed the world to escape.
Patua offered her the cloth. “Here you go. You do it then.”
She snatched the cloth. Through the heat haze, a clutch of soldiers were moving their way, carrying a limp figure between them, while a pillar of fire clawed the sky behind them. She bit her lip and began to wipe away the blood and the dirt, the water cool as death on her skin.
Harawera found Flinder pouring tea from a billy. The rest of the column was spread out behind the halftrack; two more anti-aircraft halftracks, six troop trucks, a supply truck, a fuel tanker, a water tanker, and two Holt tractors hauling eighteen-pounder cannons. The captain handed his cup toward her to be filled. Her spine stiffened. White-knuckled, she tipped the pot for him.
“I’d heard there were women flying missions in Europe. Never met one before now,” he said, tipping his cap to her.
Flinder fussed with the billy, avoiding his gaze. “Safer than being on the ground.”
“How long’ve you been flying?”
She sipped her tea. “I trained back home in ’sixteen, got shipped out to Europe and began flying recon missions over France.”
“So you’ve lasted six years? Reckon that must be some kind of record.”
Flinder paled, remembering the many she had known, now gone. “For combat pilots, maybe. Six weeks is a long run for fighters. Recon’s a bit different.”
“Still, you’re a target up there. That takes guts. Makes you wonder if the war’s just not done with you yet.” Harawera blew over his mug. “Lucky for us we found you, then. When we get to Tunis, I could use your skills. You know what we’re up against.”
Flinder shook her head. “No, I don’t really.” She never wanted to get that close to those gently bobbing shapes in the water again. The mere memory of them chilled her blood. “I’m not sure if I can be of any help, Captain.”
“You mean you can’t, or you won’t?” Harawera’s tone didn’t change despite the accusation in his words. “We’re all fighting for the same thing.” There was more he didn’t say, Flinder knew, which twisted her up on the inside, but she refused to bite. “If you’ve got a problem with me or my company, you leave it back there in the desert. We’ve all got each other’s backs. Yours too. Understood?”
Flinder glared, hating so many things about him she’d never voice. It was bad enough that she was a lone woman surrounded by men, indebted to them for her life, and that she felt as much a target here as she ever had in the sky. But of all the people to pull her out of the teeth of certain death, why did it have to be the Māori Battalion . . . ? “With all due respect,” she grated, “why have they sent you? Honestly? Tunis is a fortified city. It’ll take bombing raids and divisions of infantry and artillery and naval bombardment to push the Germans out. You’ve got what, a hundred men?” Even if High Command felt the same about the South Pacific natives as she did, they weren’t inclined to throw soldiers away for no good reason. “It’s suicide.”
Harawera shrugged. “You go to war. You follow orders, right?”
“Of course.”
Harawera nodded. The sound of a guitar and voices drifted across the dark, filling the void between them with song.
“You know what they’re doing out there?” He gestured toward the sound of singing, rising into the night in a language Flinder guessed was Māori. “They’re digging your boy a grave. Wishing him safe to the other side.” He handed her a shovel. “Why don’t you go show your appreciation?”
She took the shovel, tipped the dregs of her tea in the dirt, and stalked toward the low glimmer of gas lamps at the edge of the camp. Only when it was completely dark did she let a tear escape, and even then only one.
North of the Sahara, the foothills of the Atlas Mountains surrounding Tunis were largely wooded in stunted, dry trees that reminded Flinder of her Darwin home. They muffled much of the rumble of engines and the clatter of treads that would’ve otherwise signaled the company’s advance. Perhaps because the Fliegertruppen were looking east, to the Mediterranean and the Libyan desert, Māori Battalion Company E were able to bring their two eighteen-pounders, three anti-aircraft cannons, a few machine guns and roughly eighty rifles within range of the city, under cover of the paper-thin scrub canopy. Either that, or the German garrison never anticipated anyone would have the audacity to drive into range of the city and set up their guns.
Flinder lay on her belly a short distance from the infantry. The city and airfield spread out beneath them, the ancient Carthaginian walls dim moonlit silhouettes in the pre-dawn gloom. The wide black expanse of the two saltwater lakes that lay between city and sea; in one of those lurked the outline of a German dreadnought, bristling with cannons. In the other the hulk of a scuttled French tanker ship and, though Flinder couldn’t see them, a string of orbs like massive pearls, just below the surface. Each a dreadful promise.
“Lieutenant?”
Flinder flinched at the whispered voice at her shoulder.
“Sergeant.”
“Sorry Miss, didn’t mean to startle you.” Uninvited, Sergeant Rapu wriggled down beside her. “You’re not scared, are you? The Captain’s got it all worked out.”
“I’m not,” she lied. “But I’ve seen what happens when too few men try to take fortified positions. They end up in the ground.”
Rapu’s teeth gleamed in the darkness. “That’s not why we’re here.”
Flinder felt suddenly sick. Harawera had made sure she didn’t have her radio. She didn’t know if he’d actually transmitted her messages to Command, in the days it had taken them to advance on Tunis. He’d said he would, but had he? “Please don’t tell me this isn’t a sanctioned mission.”
“OK,” Rapu said, looking away. “I won’t.”
Flinder curbed a sudden nausea, a chill like the waters of the Blackmore River, rising around her while she screamed. “It’s them, isn’t it? The things in the lake.”
“ Taniwha, Miss.”
“What?”
“Monsters, if you like.”
She half coughed, half laughed, and shook her head.
“When did you stop believing in magic, Lieutenant? Was it before or after you first flew in the sky?”
Flinder was about to say something about how only ignorant savages believed in magic but, instead, she bit her tongue. Whatever their color, she owed Company E her life. She could at least show them some good manners. “That’s not magic. That’s mechanical.”
“Maybe it’s just magic with a different name,” Harawera said, behind her, as if he’d been there all along, corpse silent.
“But you’ve decided to commandeer Empire soldiers
and equipment and carry out an illegal combat mission, because you people still believe in magic?”
“We people? We people are here to do something that has to be done. The Māori are an ancient race. We haven’t lost our warrior ways, or forgotten our legends.You’ve seen the shadow on the lake. Stirs the blood, doesn’t it?” Harawera crouched and lifted a set of binoculars. “Even when memory fails, blood doesn’t. We haven’t forgotten our taniwha. We can feel them. I felt them when we landed in Tripoli.
“The British located this one and its eggs in a loch. Evidently the Kaiser learned about them when he was there, years ago. Mad old bastard’s been plotting this for a long time. Because it’s a sea creature, its eggs wouldn’t hatch. But it’s not a mortal creature either; it survived in the cold fresh water of the loch even if it didn’t thrive. It just waited for the world to turn, for its time to come again.”
Flinder shivered. “Pretending you’re right, and this isn’t some sunstroke delusion come from being too long in the desert, how did they move them, and why bring them here? Why Tunisia?”
“See, that’s the wrong question,” Harawera said.
“How about,” Rapu offered, “Why Carthage?”
Flinder gritted her teeth, irritation heavy in her voice. “OK, I’ll play along. Let’s say the Germans have gone to all the effort of surreptitiously kidnapping a sea monster and its eggs from a Scottish lake while they’re trying to hold Europe and fight a war in the Middle East and now Africa. How’d they move them anyway?”
“Blimps, apparently, and then a stolen French tanker ship. That one, down there.” He pointed to the scuttled hulk that blocked the seaward entrance to the southern lake.
“Then why dump them in Tunisia?”
“It’s all here,” Harawera said, his voice suddenly weary, like he’d only made it this far by feeding on his own fear and desperation. “The lake is warm, salty, but it’s more than that. The Romans sowed the land with salt after they destroyed Carthage, so nothing would ever grow here. But they sowed more than just salt. They sowed their hatred into the earth as well.”
Flinder could feel the weight of that hatred, crushing up against her, like the waters of the Blackmore breaking free, rushing over the gurgling earth, sweeping everything away beneath the raging black sky.
Matthew, riding out under those howling skies, because of the girl. The girl their father had said he wasn’t to see, because she was a filthy Abo, riddled with sin and disease. Because he’d catch the black off her, and no son of his was going to have mongrel kids, thank you very much. Black girl like that would only get a good white boy into trouble.
Elizabeth is only a minute behind him, riding through the thrashing rain, the trees screeching and bending in the gale, and he won’t turn back, not even with his sister screaming at him as best she can over the cyclone howl.
Flinder blinked away the memory. “So you’re here to destroy the eggs? And the monster? That’s all?”
Harawera frowned. “There’s a monster down there filled with hate, so that means we have to destroy it? That’s what you think, Lieutenant? Because that’s what this war is about, right? Bringing an end to the hatred?”
“Something like that.”
“Has it brought an end to yours?”
Matthew, running across the muddy plain to the low huts where the Abo families lived, dragging his horse behind him, calling Kirra’s name. Her small dark hand gripped tight in his as he tries to get her up on the horse. Lightning, right overhead, and his horse rears and is gone, running riderless into the flood. Matthew, seeing Elizabeth.
How she slows the horse. How she hesitates, seeing her brother and the girl, so imperfect, so tainted. How Daddy will thrash her if she helps him save the girl Daddy hates. Yet she’s riding on, closer, and they’re running toward her, smiling, the rain plastering their hair to their faces, even as the floodwaters rise, fast, so fast, the river spilling over the land and swallowing the world beneath it.
“How do we destroy them?”
“We’re not here to destroy the taniwha. We’re here to free them.”
Matthew, waist deep in water, grabbing the girl around the waist and passing her up to Elizabeth, his face full of furious hope. Sliding her over the horse’s shoulder to sit in front of her. Not a girl at all, a young woman, so much terror in her voice, not for herself, but for Matthew, still in the water, at the mercy of the torrent. Elizabeth, reaching for him, fighting for balance on the rain-slick saddle.
“Free them? You just said they’re monsters!”
“Given a choice, would you rather have hate, or freedom?”
Flinder took the binoculars and studied the dark waters. Moonlight rippled silver where something moved beneath the surface. She felt sick to her core. “What do you want me to do?”
Harawera nodded toward the airfield. “Anything down there you can fly? Something with guns?”
The Fokker D.VIII – known as the Flying Razor when it first started slicing up biplanes and pilots in the skies over Europe in 1918 – might have been practically a vintage by wartime standards, but it was still a deadly piece of hardware in the right hands. At Sergeant Rapu’s hissed command, Flinder and the rest of the squad broke cover and ran, crouching low, toward the lines of silent aircraft. Ground crew worked on the far side of the field, checking over a spotter plane just returned from patrol. A fuel truck idled nearby, while one technician rolled out a black rubber hose. None of them were looking toward the Razor, and the squad reached the shadow of the monoplane’s large rounded tailplane unseen.
Giving Rapu a nod, Flinder slipped along the fuselage and scrambled up the small ladder behind the cockpit. In a moment she was hoisting the camera over the lip and lowering herself into the pilot’s seat, sliding her arms through the parachute straps out of habit. She’d once had the chance to study the layout of a D.VIII, captured outside of Marseilles when its engine had failed and the pilot had landed in a paddock before being taken prisoner by the French. Not an auspicious or thorough introduction, but Flinder wouldn’t let that bother her. She took a moment to familiarize herself with the gauges and dials, and gave the stick an experimental tug to judge the tension in the aileron wires. The flaps and rudder shifted easily under her guidance. Taking a deep breath, she fastened her flight cap, tugged down her goggles and, hunkering in case anyone looked her way, waved over the side. Moments later, she heard the chocks being pulled from the wheels. While she waited for Rapu to signal the artillery, she tried to ignore the memories that refused to leave her alone.
Matthew, struggling to get a grip on the saddle, to haul himself up. A branch torpedoing out of the water, knocking him off balance. Elizabeth, lunging forward to grab him, her hands snatching at his. But the rain, so slick, so wet, his fingers slipping through hers. The floodwaters surging around them. The girl’s voice a ragged cry. Matthew, going under, surfacing, reaching, shouting, gasping. The tree, barreling through the deluge like a fist, a juggernaut crushing the soft, weak things in its path.
The first boom of artillery fire snapped her back to herself, and the real danger at hand. Smoke and dust burst from the seaward fringe of the darkened city. Flinder flicked the battery switch as someone ran alongside the plane and, with a heave, set the propeller to spinning. She gunned the throttle and the motor caught, roared. Immediately, the Razor rolled forward. Flinder nudged the stick over, easing onto the runway. As soon as she had the plane pointed down the runway, she pushed the throttle open, leaping forward with a thundering shriek. The silhouettes of Gothas, Fokkers and Hannovers whipped by. Even over the growling motor, she heard rifles firing, bullets ricocheting. The tailplane lifted and she pulled back on the stick, the earth dropping away, her stomach falling with it and her spirits rising, as they always did. She banked up, up, praying the German anti-aircraft gunners wouldn’t immediately realize one of their own planes ought to be a target. That wouldn’t last long.
Company E’s cannons fired, reloaded, fired again. Bright plumes of sm
oke and flame swelled along the breakwall, where the lake had been cut off from the sea by piles of rubble and the hulk of the French tanker. For a moment she glimpsed movement below the water.
Something moving in the water. The girl yelling. Elizabeth torn with the knowledge she has to get off the floodplain, that she won’t be able to find Matthew, can’t save him without being swept away herself. The dirty black girl, black as sin, whose fault this all is, shouting that she has to save Matthew, while the horse bucks and whinnies under them.
Elizabeth, tugging on the reins, trying to bring the horse under control, to get it moving to higher ground, to safety. The girl, fighting her for the reins.
The girl, screaming for Matthew.
Flinder pushed the stick over, easing the throttle back, coming around in a clean arc toward the besieged city and the rising clouds of smoke. She found the sweet spot where the plane would hold itself steady, freeing her throttle hand to grip the trigger of the twin motor-synchronized machine guns on either side of the propeller shaft. She lined up the airfield through the rotor blur. German soldiers were materializing on the city side of the runway, rifle-fire flashing in the gloom, while the ground crew hurried to evacuate the fuel truck.
This was the moment.
She could pull back, gain altitude, soar over the Atlas range and make for a friendly landing zone somewhere on the coast. She might even reach Algiers from here. She could abandon Harawera and his insane, treasonous mission. Report him to High Command. Let the dirty Māori boys get everything they deserved.
The Abo girl, a young woman, a mere slip of a thing. Elizabeth, a farmer’s daughter, raised hard by the north Australian desert. It made her sick, thinking what Matthew must have felt, putting his hands on her like he did. Tainting himself with her spittle, her sweat. Daddy would be so mad. But not as mad as he would be with Elizabeth, for taking the horses and riding out into the storm, and coming back not with Matthew, but with the girl. Barely more than a girl.