Walk in Hell (13 page)

At last, he’d succeeded in troubling his son. “
Do
you think they’re going to win the war, Pa?”

McGregor had lain awake at night from that very fear. “I hope not,” he said at last. “It’s just that there are so blasted
many
of them.”

That put a sour twist on Alexander’s mouth; it was inarguably true. In Arthur McGregor’s mind’s eye, he saw endless columns of men in green-gray tramping north, endless queues of snarling canvas-topped trucks painted the same shade, endless teams of horses hauling wagons and artillery pieces, endless trains also bringing men and supplies up toward the front. True, there were also endless ambulances and trains marked with the Red Cross, taking wounded Yankees away for treatment, and, no doubt, endless corpses at the front. But somehow the U.S. military machine kept grinding on despite the wastage.

Alexander said, “What can we do?”

“Hope,” McGregor answered. “Pray, though God will do as He likes, not as we like.” He was as stern a Presbyterian as he looked. “Cooperate with the Americans as little as we can—though if they hadn’t bought our grain, however little they paid for it, I can’t imagine what we’d do for money.”

He scowled. A farm didn’t need much in the way of cash, especially when a war knocked deeds and land taxes all topsy-turvy. You could live off your crops and your livestock and you might even make your own cloth from wool and from flax if you’d planted any, but you couldn’t make your own coal or your own kerosene or your own glass or books or…a lot of things that made life come close to being worth living.

“It’s not enough,” Alexander said. “Not going along with the Yanks, I mean—it’s not enough. We shouldn’t be talking about not doing things with them—that’s why you don’t send my sister to the school they set up. Like I say, it’s good, but it’s not enough. We’ve got to figure out ways to do things
to
the Americans.”

“Like that bomb in Rosenfeld?” Arthur McGregor asked. His son nodded, gray eyes fierce. But McGregor sighed. “It’s possible, I suppose, but it’s not easy. They almost made me one of the hostages they took after that bomb went off, remember. They would have given me a blindfold, lined me up against a wall, and shot me. This is a war, son, and you can’t back out and say you didn’t mean it if something goes wrong.”

“I know
that
!” Alexander exclaimed. But the jaunty tone with which he’d replied gave him away. He didn’t believe for a moment that anything could go wrong in a scheme to tweak the Yankees’ tails. When you were fifteen, you knew everything always turned out fine in the end. Arthur McGregor was a good deal past twice fifteen. He knew how foolish you were at that age.

He addressed his son with great seriousness: “I want you to promise me you won’t go off on your own to try to do anything to the Americans. And once you make that promise, I expect you to keep it.”

Now Alexander McGregor looked most unhappy. “Aw, Pa, I don’t want to have to lie to you.”

“I don’t want you to have to lie to me, either,” his father said. McGregor was at the same time proud of his son for not taking a lie for granted and alarmed at how serious he was in wanting to do something to strike at the American soldiers holding—and holding down—Manitoba.

“Believe me, Pa,” Alexander went on, “I’m not the only fellow who wants to—” He stopped. Kerosene light was on the ruddy side, anyhow, but McGregor thought he turned red. “I don’t think I should have said that.”

“I wish you hadn’t, I’ll tell you that.” McGregor studied Alexander, who did his inadequate best to show nothing on his face. How many boys were there on the scattered farms of Manitoba—and boys they would have to be, for everyone of conscription age before the land was overrun had already been called to the colors—plotting heaven only knew what against the USA?

“Whatever these fellows have in their minds, you will not be a part of it. Do you understand me?” Arthur McGregor knew he sounded like a prophet laying down the Law. He hadn’t taken that tone with Alexander for years; he’d had no need. Now he wondered whether his son, who was nearly a man and who thought himself more nearly a man than he was, would still respond to it as he had when he was smaller. And, sure enough, defiance kindled in Alexander’s eyes. “I understand you, Pa,” he said, but that was a long way from pledging his obedience.

McGregor exhaled heavily. “I’m not just saying this for myself, you know. What do you suppose your mother would do if the Yanks caught you at whatever mischief you have in mind?” He knew that was a low blow, and used it without compunction or hesitation.

It went home, too. Alexander winced. “It wouldn’t be like that, Pa,” he protested.

“No? Why wouldn’t it?” McGregor pressed the advantage: “And how would you keep Julia out of it, once you got in? Or even Mary?”

“Julia’s just a girl, and she’s only twelve,” Alexander said, as if that settled that.

“And she hates the Americans worse than you do, and she’s stubborner than you ever dreamt of being,” McGregor said. Before Alexander could respond, he went on, “And one of these days you and your pals would decide that the Yanks couldn’t think she was dangerous because she’s a girl and she’s only twelve. And you’d send her out to do something, and she’d be proud to go.
And what if she got caught, son?
The Yanks are nasty devils, but Lord help you if you think they’re stupid.”

“We’d never—” Alexander began, but he didn’t finish the sentence. When you were in a war, who could say what you might be driven to do?

Neither of them spoke of Mary. That was not because she had but seven years. It had more to do with a certainty father and son shared that the littlest girl in the house would take any chance offered her to hurt the U.S. cause, and an equally shared determination not to offer her any such chance. Mary was very bright for her age, but unacquainted with anything at all related to restraint.

“I asked you once for your promise, and you would not give it,” McGregor said. “I’m going to ask you again.” He folded his arms across his chest and waited to hear what his son would say. If Alexander said no…He didn’t know what he would do if Alexander said no.

His son let out a long, deep sigh, the sigh not of a boy but of a man facing up to the fact that the world doesn’t work the way he wished it would. It was the most grown-up noise McGregor had ever heard from him. At last, voice full of regret, he said, “All right, Pa. I promise.”

“Promise what, Alexander?” That was Mary, coming out of the kitchen, where she’d been putting away the plates her mother had washed and her big sister dried.

“Promise to tickle you till you scream like there’s American soldiers coming down the chimney instead of Santa Claus,” Alexander said, and made as if to grab her. That could be dangerous; she fought as ferociously as a half-tame farm cat.

But now she hopped back, laughing. She turned to Arthur McGregor. “What did he promise, Pa?”

“To be a good boy,” McGregor said. Mary snorted. That sort of promise meant nothing to her. McGregor had to hope it meant something to her brother.

Jonathan Moss peered down at his whiskey, then up toward the ceiling of the officers’ club; the rafters were blurry not from the effects of drink—though he’d had a good deal—but because of the haze of tobacco smoke. He knocked back the whiskey, then signaled the colored steward behind the bar for another one.

“Yes, sir,” the fellow said, and passed him a fresh glass full of the magical amber fluid that inflamed and numbed at the same time.

His tentmates sat around the table: Daniel Dudley, who usually went by “Dud,” the flight leader; Tom Innis, fierce as a wolf; and Zach Whitby, new in the tent, replacing a casualty, and still a little hesitant on the ground because of that. None of the four lieutenants was far past twenty. All of them wore twin-winged pilot’s badges on the left breast pockets of their uniform tunics.

Tom Innis got a villainous pipe going. Its fumes added to those already crowding the air. Moss flapped a hand in his direction. “Here,” he said, “don’t start shooting poison gas at us.”

“You should talk, those cheroots you smoke,” Innis retorted, running a hand over his brown, peltlike Kaiser Bill mustache. “They smell like burning canvas painted with aeroplane dope.”

Since that was at least half true, Moss didn’t argue with it. He leaned back in his chair, almost overbalancing. Dud Dudley spotted that, as he might have spotted a Canuck aeroplane with engine trouble trying to limp back toward Toronto. “How are you supposed to handle a fighting scout when you can’t even fly a chair?” he demanded.

“Well, hell.” Moss landed awkwardly. “When I’m up in a fighting scout, I’ll be sober. It does make a difference.”

That struck all four men as very funny, probably because none of them was sober. The weather had been too thick to fly for several days now, leaving the pilots with nothing to do but fiddle with their aeroplanes and gather in the officers’ club to drink. As Moss had found the year before, winter in Ontario sometimes shut down operations for weeks at a time.

He sipped his fresh whiskey and looked around the club. Other groups of pilots and observers had their own circles, most of them raucous enough that they paid little attention to the racket he and his friends were making. On the walls were pictures of the fliers who had served at the aerodrome: some posed portraits, some snapshots of groups of them or of them sitting jauntily in the cockpits of their aeroplanes, a few with their arms around pretty girls. Moss hadn’t had much luck along those lines; most Canadian girls wanted little to do with the Americans who occupied their country.

A lot of the pilots in the photographs were men he’d never known, men killed before he’d joined the squadron as a replacement, new as Zach Whitby. Others had died after Moss came here: Luther Carlsen, for instance, whose place Whitby was taking. The rest were survivors…up till now.
The quick and the dead,
he thought.

Also on the walls were souvenirs of the aerial action that had accompanied the grinding, slogging American advance through southern Ontario toward—but, all plans aside, not yet to—Toronto: blue, white, and red roundels cut from the canvas of destroyed enemy machines. Some were from British aeroplanes, with all three colors being circles, others from native Canadian aircraft, where the red in the center was painted in the shape of a maple leaf.

Along with the roundels were a couple of two-bladed wooden propellers, also spoils of war. Seeing the souvenirs—or rather, noticing them—made Jonathan Moss proud for a moment. But his mood swung with whiskey-driven speed. “I wonder how many canvas eagles the Canucks and the limeys have in their officers’ clubs,” he said.

“Too damn many,” Zach Whitby said. “Even one would be too damn many.”

“We might as well enjoy ourselves,” Dud Dudley said, “because we aren’t going to live through the damned war any which way.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Innis said, and did.

The quick and the dead,
Moss thought again. The hell of it was, Dudley was right, or the odds said he was, which amounted to the same thing. Moss looked again at those photographs of vanished fliers. Back in the observers’ unit from which he’d transferred after his photographer was wounded, they’d had a similar display. One of these days, would Zach be explaining to some newcomer still wet behind the ears who he’d been and what he’d done? Contemplating things like that was plenty to make you want to crawl into a whiskey bottle and pull the cork in after you.

The door to the officers’ club opened. Captain Shelby Pruitt, the squadron commander, walked in. With him came a blast of cold Ontario air. Some of the smoke in the big room escaped, though not enough to do much good.

“I want to tell you miserable drunks something,” Pruitt said loudly, and waited till he got something approaching quiet before going on, “Word from the weathermen in Manitoba is that they’ve had a couple of days of clear weather, and it’s heading our way. We may be flying tomorrow. You don’t want to drink yourselves altogether blind.”

“Who says we don’t?” Tom Innis demanded.

“I say so,” Pruitt answered mildly, and Innis nodded, all at once meek as a child. The squadron commander hadn’t earned his nickname of “Hardshell” by breathing fire every chance he found, but he expected obedience—and got it. Like Moss’ previous CO, he not only commanded the squadron but also flew with it, and he’d knocked down four enemy aeroplanes on his own, even if he was, by the standards of the men who flew fighting scouts, somewhere between middle-aged and downright doddering.

Zach Whitby waved to the bartender. “Coffee!” he called. “I got to sober me up. We run into any limeys up there, I don’t want to do anything stupid.”

“Hell with coffee,” Innis said. “Hell with sobering up too much, too. I’d rather fly with a hangover—it makes me mean.”

“I’ll have my coffee in the morning, and some aspirin to go with it,” Moss said. “If I load up on java now, I won’t sleep for beans tonight. We go up there, we ought to be in the best shape we can.” Dudley nodded. Moss had noticed that he and his flight leader often thought alike.

Under Hardshell Pruitt’s inexorable stare, the officers’ lounge emptied. Fliers scrawled their names on bar chits and strode, or sometimes lurched, off to their cots. Pruitt sped them to their rest with a suggestion that struck Moss as downright sadistic: “Here’s hoping Canuck bombing planes don’t come over tonight.”

His was not the only groan rising into the chilly night. The thought of enduring a bombing raid while hung over was not one to inspire delight. As things were…“The groundcrew will be cleaning puke off somebody’s control panel tomorrow,” he predicted.

“Puke is one thing,” Dudley answered. “Getting blood out of a cockpit is a whole different business. But you know about that, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I know about that.” Moss remembered Percy Stone, his observer. He remembered how much blood had splashed Stone’s cockpit after he’d been wounded. He’d heard Stone had lived, but the photographer still hadn’t returned to duty.

Enough thick wool blankets stood on Moss’ cot to have denuded half the sheep in Canada. Living under canvas in Canada wasn’t easy half the year. It was, however, a hell of a lot easier than living in the trenches. Aviators who groused too much about how tough they had it sometimes got handed a Springfield, which did wonders for shutting them up.

He took off his boots, burrowed under the blankets like a mole, and fell asleep. Waking up in gray twilight the next morning was something he would sooner have skipped. He gulped coffee and aspirin tablets and began to feel human, in a somber sort of way. Tom Innis’morning preparation consisted of brandy and a raw egg, then coffee. One way probably worked about as well as the other.

Sure enough, the day dawned clear. The pilots swaddled themselves in the leather and fur of their flying suits. It was cold at altitude even in scorching midsummer; during the worst of winter, the flying suits rarely came off. Moving slowly—bending your knees wasn’t easy with all that padding around them—they went out to their aeroplanes.

Groundcrew men had already removed the canvas covers from the Martin one-deckers: U.S. copies of a German design. Also copied from the Fokker monoplane was the interrupter gear that let a forward-facing machine gun fire through the spinning propeller without shooting it off and sending the machine down in a long, helpless glide…or that let the machine gun shoot through the prop most of the time, anyhow.

Clumsily, Moss climbed into the cockpit. A couple of bullet holes in the side of the fuselage from his most recent encounter with an enemy aeroplane had been neatly patched. The machine could take punishment. Had the bullets torn through his soft, vulnerable flesh, he would have spent much longer in the shop.

He nodded to a mechanic standing by the propeller. The fellow, his breath smoking in the cold morning air, spun the two-bladed wooden prop. After a couple of tries, the engine caught. Moss studied his instruments. He had plenty of gas and oil, and the pumps for both seemed to be working well. He tapped his compass to make sure the needle hadn’t frozen to its case.

When he was satisfied, he waved. The airstrip was full of the growl of motors turning over. Dud Dudley looked around to make sure everyone in his flight had a functioning machine, then taxied across the field—ruts through gray-brown dead grass. Moss followed, watching his ground speed. He pulled back on the joystick, lifting the fighting scout’s nose. The aeroplane bounced a couple of more times. After the second bounce, it didn’t come down.

He climbed as quickly as he could, going into formation behind his flight leader and to his left. Zach Whitby held the same place relative to him as he did to Dudley. On the right, Tom Innis flew alone.

Down in the trenches, men huddled against cold and mud and frost. The line ran from southeast to northwest between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron. Behind it, on land the United States had had to fight to win, everything had been wrecked by stubborn Canadian and British defense and equally stubborn American attacks. On the other side, the terrain still showed what a fine country this was.

Machine guns spat fire at the aeroplanes from the enemy’s trenches. That was futile; machine-gun bullets reached only a couple of thousand feet, and the Martin single-deckers flew a good deal higher. But soon Canadian and British Archibald—or Archie, as he was more familiarly known—would start putting antiaircraft shells all around them. A lucky hit could bring down an aeroplane. Moss knew that, as he knew of a thousand other ways he could die up here. He did his best to forget what he knew.

Dud Dudley wagged his wings to draw the flight’s attention. He pointed to the south. The enemy was in the air, too. There, buzzing along contentedly, as if without a care in the world, was a Canadian—or perhaps a British—two-seater, an old Avro no longer fit for front-line combat but still good enough to take a photographer over the American lines to see what he could see.

As Moss swung into a turn toward the enemy reconnaissance aircraft, he glanced in the rearview mirror, then up and back over his shoulder. Were scouts lurking up there, waiting to pounce when the Americans attacked the Avro? Keeping an eye peeled for such was really Zach Whitby’s job, but you didn’t get to go back to the officers’ lounge and have more drinks if you took too seriously the notion that you didn’t have to worry about something because someone else would.

On flew the Avro, straight as if on a string. That meant the observer was taking his pictures, and the pilot, a brave man, wouldn’t spoil them even if he was under attack. Moss knew what that took, since he’d piloted observation aircraft himself. He prepared to make the enemy pay for his courage.

He’d just fired his first burst when tracers streaked past him—not from the Avro, but from behind. Zach Whitby’s fighting scout tumbled out of the sky, not in any controlled maneuver but diving steeply, a dead man at the controls, flame licking back from the engine. Sure as hell, the Canucks had had a surprise waiting.

Moss threw his own aeroplane into a tight rolling turn to the right. He was more maneuverable than the two-seater on his tail, but the biplane kept after him, firing straight ahead. That wasn’t right—the enemy wasn’t supposed to have an interrupter gear yet. And they didn’t, but this enterprising chap had mounted two machine guns on his lower wing planes, outside the arc of the propeller. He couldn’t reload them in flight, but while they had ammo he was dangerous any way you looked at him.

Then, all at once, he wasn’t. Tom Innis knocked him down as neatly as he and his chums had ambushed Whitby. Then Innis and Dudley teamed up against one of the other aeroplanes, which caught fire and fell like a dead leaf.

Moss’ own turn brought him close to the decoy observation aircraft. The observer, done with photos now, blazed away at him from a ring-mounted machine gun. He fired a burst that made the observer clutch at himself and slumped the pilot over his joystick, dead or unconscious. If he was unconscious, he would die soon; his weight on the stick sent the aeroplane nosing toward the ground.

Jonathan Moss looked around for more foes. He found none. The last enemy two-seater had streaked away, and had gained enough of a lead while the Americans were otherwise engaged to make sure it would not be caught.