The Mercenaries by John Harris

half-witted joke suddenly irritated Ira.
    He began to think of what lay ahead. It wasn’t going to be easy. For a lot of the time at Linchu they had worked under leaking tents which had not helped them with their ignition problems, and testing had had to be done when the marshy state of the field had enabled them to get off the ground. The ageing German machines were as likely to fade under them as not, and he was surprised in fact that something of the sort had not happened already. Whatever servicing had been done under Fagan’s rule--and he suspected that so long as the motors had fired he had considered them serviceable--had not been much more than perfunctory.
    Now that they were preparing to operate away from the coast, however, they could no longer afford to take chances because damaged parts were going to be virtually irreplaceable, and to add to his troubles, not surprisingly there had been no telegram from Hwai-Yang and he had had to take the decision to leave, not knowing what they were going to.
    He frowned, suddenly beginning to understand all the warnings that had been offered to him at all the farewell parties that had been thrown for them. Through all the tearful goodbyes and the long female faces and the offerings of silk stockings to tie to the struts as keepsakes, it had become quite clear that nobody expected to see them in Shanghai again for a long time, and Kowalski, arm-in-arm with a couple of short-skirted, long-legged shingled American girls from the Consulate, had summed it all up.
    ‘It’s a goddam queer situation you’ve got yourself into, Ira,’ he’d said. ‘Make no mistake about that.’
    Ira grimaced, realising for the first time what Kowalski meant. Fagan was going to be no help, and Ellie, a homeless embittered girl who’d lived out of a suitcase for so long she’d forgotten what it was to have roots, was likely to be as uncomfortable a companion as Fagan himself, with the mixture of hardness, gaiety and misery that showed in her deep, sad eyes.
    Mixed in with Geary and Lawn, whom he knew he couldn’t trust an inch, a chaotic political situation and a general who seemed about as trustworthy as a snake, it seemed to have all the elements of a comic opera. Out of the lot of them only Sammy seemed reliable.
     
    Apart from the single metal track, there seemed to be nothing in the flat sunlit country below to give them their bearings. All roads seemed to end within a few miles of Shanghai and only the thin ribbon of steel moving north in great loops indicated where the solitary railway lay. The hills soon slipped behind, and beyond them there was nothing but the featureless plain with innumerable small villages round Lake Tai, all of them surrounded by maize and sorghum fields and rice paddies where docile peasants laboured with ancient tools. There were no woods, no highways, nothing but lakes and interwoven cart-tracks spreading starfish-like from each village to connect it with those about it. A forced landing would leave them fifty miles from any modern form of transport or communications, and they would have to dismantle the aeroplane themselves and rely on ox-carts to return it to civilisation.
    But the Monosoupape roared out in a steady beat, and the three machines, rising and falling slowly together like horses on a roundabout, pressed further north. Once, his goggles up on his forehead, Ira saw a group of tombs, relics of the Emperors, the road to them through the horsetail pine and sweet gum lined with marble dragons and elephants, but nothing else to mark the empty land.
    Fuel had been arranged at fields ahead of them and they eventually stopped for the night near the city of Nanking which threw its grey rope of wall round hills, fields, mud huts and tiled roofs. Leaving the aeroplanes in the custody of an awed constable in a long gown and carrying a sword, they bedded down in a shabby inn with dirt floors built round a courtyard that was filled with people cooking, eating