The Mercenaries by John Harris

Author:John Harris [Harris, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

While Fagan fussed uselessly about the Fokker and its guns, Ira took the Avro up and checked it. There was nothing very wrong with it but he needed to get away from the bickering on the ground. The fun had suddenly gone out of flying and he was growing desperately tired of Fagan. He and Ellie, both physically attractive people, only fed on each other’s miseries and would have been far better separated. Away from each other, they might have survived instead of sinking slowly together, locked by their emotions and weighed down by each other’s troubles.

They worked all night on the B.M.W., the full summer heat that was on them now hanging like a pall so that when the breeze dropped they sweltered, dripping sweat and slapping at the mosquitoes which headed in buzzing, pinging clouds for the lights they’d strung up in the shelters. By the second night, they had rigged a duplicate Spandau on the Fokker and a Lewis on a crude quadrant on the top wing of the Albatros. It looked odd and awkward but it worked, and they attached a cradle to the second Lewis and screwed iron-pipe sockets to the side of the Avro’s strengthened rear cockpit.

‘It won’t shoot much,’ Sammy said. There’s no room. It’ll be too easy to blow the wings off.’ He looked exhausted and was full of hatred for Fagan who, unable to help, had nagged incessantly about the delay. There was a lump raised by a mosquito bite on his eye and he was a little desperate-looking with fatigue.

‘When are them spares coming, Ira?’ he asked in a harsh voice. ‘Because if they don’t come soon, we might as well shut up shop.’

His face was defiant and there was the first hesitant hint of doubt in his manner, as if he were beginning to believe that the spares Ira had promised were as dubious as Fagan’s.

As he turned away, his shoulders drooping, his eyes dark-rimmed with fatigue and disappointment, Ira knew that Fagan wasn’t the only one who was living on his nerves. They were all in need of a run of good luck to put backbone into them. In all the weeks they’d been in China, they’d produced nothing but failure.

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