The Challenging Heights by Max Hennessy

never been finished and now terminated in mid stream, with a bridge of boats taking over its function instead. The population was largely Kurdish, straight-featured wiry people quick to use their knives, who wore striped baggy trousers, short jackets and brightly-hued turbans. The place was smelly and busy and in ancient days had been an international crossroads. Xenophon had passed by with his Ten Thousand, as had Alexander the Great on his way to meet Darius the Persian. Nearby was the birthplace of Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria who had defeated Richard Coeur de Lion and his Crusaders, and a group of mounds marked what was left of Nineveh where Sennacherib had ruled.
    Among the work of the armoured cars was the guarding of the route across the desert from Cairo to Baghdad and the building of landing areas for aircraft carrying mail. Because the tracks of wheeled traffic could be seen from the air and were used as navigational aids, it had been decided to plough a double furrow the whole thousand miles of the route, with petrol stored at points along it for emergency landings. The country consisted of endless miles of nothing, though after heavy rain it could look green in places and its changing moods had a strange impelling beauty.
    Apart from the terrain, the chief problems were raids by tribesmen led by Kerim Fatah Agha, known to the RAF as KFA, a Wahabi outlaw who could raid a village and be thirty miles away over mountain tracks before word of his depredations could reach the authorities; and Sheikh Mahmoud, who was a Kurdish patriot who didn’t care a fig for the League of Nations mandate and carried on a good-natured war with the British without any real signs of ill feeling. Because he gave the RAF so much experience in the planning and execution of air operations, he was known as ‘the Director of RAF Training’.
    For the most part the raiders were dealt with by aircraft dropping leaflets on to the villages of the chief trouble-makers, warning them to disappear, and then bombing the villages to ruins so that the raiders would have no base. Since the villages were easily rebuilt there were no hard feelings, but the Bedouin, who lived in tents and couldn’t be harmed by bombing had to be dealt with by the worn-out armoured cars.
    Dicken had been in Iraq for six months when Hatto appeared to take Almonde’s place running the detached Bristol flight.
    ‘News for you, old son,’ he said immediately. ‘Diplock’s on his way here, too.’
    ‘I’d have thought someone as clever as Parasol Percy would have managed to dodge that.’
    ‘Iraq’s the RAF’s sackcloth and ashes. Everybody has to do their whack out here to scourge themselves of all vanity. It shouldn’t be too hard for him, though. He only leaves the ground these days to climb into a car. We brought mail, by the way. There’s a letter for you.’
    Zoë’s letter had its usual dashed-off look. She was a poor correspondent and most of the time left Dicken only half-aware of what she was doing at home, merely dropping hints as if she preferred him not to know. They left him irritated and frustrated and longing for her to tell him she loved him, but he was beginning by this time to doubt even that and no longer really expected anything more than bare news.
    Charley Wright was dead at last, having crashed while trying to fly after having one too many swigs from his flask. Zoë didn’t seem too heartbroken, and the sting came in the last part of the letter. Casey Harmer had written offering her a job and she was wondering whether she ought to take it.
    Suspecting Dicken’s misery, Hatto immediately offered to let him get his hand in once more by placing an aeroplane at his disposal, and he was at last able to get into the air again in control of his own machine. The Bristol was a superb machine, the most agile two-seater in the Service, fast, strong, amenable to as many adaptations, alterations and refinements as the squadrons chose to add.