Page 21 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)

A ll eight planes returned forty minutes later according to Basker’s pocket watch, except one’s engine keened at a higher pitch than the others and it trailed a thin train of smoke.

Once they had all landed and taxied, the mechanics were there again, swarming around the planes to check for damage and to give the pilots help getting down from the cockpits.

A forty-minute patrol didn’t sound like a lot, but Bell knew the cramped confines and unrelenting cold would stiffen their joints as though they were old men.

It turned out that they hadn’t come up against any German patrols and the damaged plane just had a faulty seal. Bell legged himself over the fence to join Crabbe as he debriefed his men in the gathering darkness.

The squadron commander pointed to one of the pilots, a man who looked even younger than his CO. “I’m sorry, what’s your name again?”

“Cotswold, Captain. James Cotswold.”

“Since this is my first time up with you, I watched your performance. You fly straight enough and keep the formation, but you were staring straight ahead like you’d gotten ahold of one of those naughty daguerreotypes they sell in Paris.

You’ve got to keep watch all around you, sides, above, below, everywhere and all the time.

Head on a swivel, as they say. The sky’s usually lousy with Huns and our best chance is to spot them before they get the jump on us. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Speaking of Huns, I didn’t see any at all. Anyone spot a stray one?”

His pilots all shook their heads in the negative.

“Damned curious,” Crabbe remarked. “No Germans aloft since yesterday morning. Queer, to say the least. All right, lads, get cleaned up and we’ll eat the ducks Bigalow shot this morning over on the millpond.”

There were eleven men including Bell for dinner and only three ducks, so they supplemented their meal with tinned beef and locally made crusty bread that wasn’t so old to have gone completely hard.

Bell observed that even though they were all young, the pilots had picked up curious habits and tics like old men.

Crabbe’s was drinking without seeming to get drunk.

The fellow who bagged the ducks, Bigalow, blinked so rapidly his lids were like a hummingbird’s wings.

Another massaged his fingers in the direction of their tips as though they had stiffened from arthritis.

Several others had juddery legs or cracked their knuckles every few minutes.

They lived in the most stressful atmosphere Bell could imagine, risking their lives on aerial patrol twice a day, every day for months on end.

It was slowly driving them crazy, and what Bell saw was only the outward signs.

He could only guess what went on behind the fake smiles and easy banter and shuddered to think of the torture they faced in their sleep.

After dinner, they gathered around the bar and piano.

One of them played some up-tempo rags while Crabbe’s batman acted as bartender.

Knowing he would need his wits for the next day’s flight, Bell had only a single whiskey.

The pilots were little more than boys and so Bell had no problem keeping them entertained with some of his adventures, especially his own flying tales and his stories about tramping around the deserts of the American Southwest.

He finally turned the attention away from himself. “Did I notice the smell of burning castor oil when you landed?”

“Indeed,” Bigalow replied. Like Crabbe, he was an ace, and was the oldest pilot in the squadron at twenty-six.

“I thought by now you’d be using some of the new synthetic oils to lubricate your motors.”

“Too expensive, we’re told,” Crabbe answered. “War Ministry says castor works just fine.”

“It’s one of the reasons for the silk scarves,” another of the veteran pilots said. “Helps us filter out the worst of the raw fumes.”

“Let’s not fool ourselves, gentlemen,” Bigalow said. “Since the laundress can’t look any of us in the eye, we all know we breathe in plenty of castor fumes.”

“On the bright side,” one of the younger men ventured, “it’s cleared up my acne in no time.”

“I do love a diapered optimist,” another drawled.

“Evening, gentlemen,” a uniformed pilot called as he came into the room. Unlike the others, his clothes looked clean and recently pressed. He was wiry, with a thin mustache and an easy air about him.

“Thistledown,” they called as one. Someone added, “I thought your leave doesn’t end until tomorrow.”

“It doesn’t, but alas I spent my last sou and was asked to leave mon petit hotel . I’m now denied a final night in the embrace of a lovely coquette.”

“Wait, you were playing lawn games?”

Someone handed Thistledown a glass. He said after a quick sip, “That’s croquet, you philistine. I said coquette.”

“I thought he was talking about hugging a ham sandwich,” another pilot shot out.

“No, that’s not right,” said a third. “You’re thinking of a croque monsieur.”

“I thought he was fondling some swamp monster.”

Thistledown replied, “That’s a crocodile, and I’ve lugged my fair share in the form of matched luggage from Globe-Trotter.” He spotted Bell. “Who’s this, then, a new uncle?”

“An American observer,” Crabbe told his second-in-command. “Isaac Bell, this miscreant is Reginald Thistledown, a middling pilot and lousy wit. Reg, can you take him up tomorrow in the Bristol after dawn patrol?”

“Sorry, bwana. My leave isn’t officially over until noon, and I plan on sleeping until eleven fifty-nine.”

Crabbe looked him up and down in a theatrical exaggerated manner. “You do look a bit piqued, old man.”

“Oh, I peaked every single night of my leave.” He chuckled at his own double entendre. “Besides, Whiddle is more qualified to fly the Bristol.”

“God, that man is an insufferable prig.”

“Also true. So that makes him a qualified insufferable prig.”

“I’ll tell him in the morning,” Crabbe said.

“Problem?” Bell asked.

“No,” Crabbe replied. “Lieutenant Whiddle is a flight instructor sent out with the Bristol to train pilots on its characteristics and the best tactics the Flying Corps has devised for her. He tends to think he knows more about combat flying than we do, even though he hasn’t been on the front line in two years. ”

Bell nodded. “I’ve met the type before. In my line of work it’s usually retired cops who work as bodyguards to rich nobodies and act like they still have the backing of an entire police department.”

“That’s our man, exactly,” Crabbe said. “A sense of unearned superiority.”

The pianist finally packed it in for the night and the pilots left the room in ones and twos, each reluctant to sleep for fear of their dreams. Bell remained behind with Crabbe and his friend Thistledown and accepted a second short whiskey.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Bell said, giving voice to that which should never be discussed.

“We do it,” Crabbe said without looking at him, “because we have to.”

Thistledown added, “And because if we don’t, some other poor sod would be here in our place.”

“We also do it,” Crabbe said, his voice a little slurred from an entire day of drinking, “because the War Ministry was smart enough to promote men young enough to believe in their own immortality. At least we believed in it when we arrived. A few weeks of seeing squadron mates pancake into the ground or catch fire in the cockpit and jump rather than burn and you become all too familiar with mortality.”

“By then it’s too late,” Thistledown said, knocking back the last of his drink.

“You’re at once horrified and desensitized to death and just carry on.

You just try not to think that your number is ever going to come up, but know deep down that it already has.

It’s just that fate hasn’t caught up with you yet. ”

“Also,” Crabbe said with a gleam in his eye to turn around the solemnity of their previous answers, “and my man Thistledown can attest that nothing peels off a French girl’s knickers faster than a man in a Royal Flying Corps uniform.”

“Truer words have never been spoken. And also let’s not forget the pay, Geoff. That twenty-five shillings a day makes it all worthwhile, eh?”

“A king’s ransom.”

Bell shook both airmen’s hands. “I don’t know if I will have a seat at the table here in Europe when America enters the war, but if I do I hope to face it with both your integrity and your humor.”

“You think you will throw in with the Allies?”

“I don’t think the Germans have left us much choice.”

“Good.” Thistledown grinned. “?’Bout time you’re the poor sods taking our place.”

The following morning, Bell watched with Uncle Baskers as the patrol left the airfield.

This time, the two-seat Bristol joined the patrol, though there was no gunner in the rear cockpit.

The instructor, Whiddle, watched it fly off while leaning against the doorframe of the hangar across the grass strip.

He noticed Bell standing with Baskers, shook his head, and turned away before the fighters flew out of view.

As before, all the planes returned in under an hour, and as before, they hadn’t spotted a single German aircraft.

“Are the Huns taking a holiday we know nothing about?” asked one of the pilots as they huddled around Crabbe in the shadow of his S.E.5. “National Sauerkraut Day, or something?”

“I bet their new lederhosen are too tight,” offered another.

“I say they got some bad food, and all the pilots have the schnitzel shitzens.”

Crabbe chuckled before giving his opinion. “My guess is they were moved north in order to support their defenses against our spring push. They need to protect their observation planes and balloons as best as they can in order to blunt our attack. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

The others nodded at their leader’s assessment.

“Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth,” Crabbe added. “If the Huns don’t want to come up and play, that is perfectly fine with me. Gives the new boys more hours in the cockpit and our mechanics a break from having to fix up our kites. Oh, and Cotswold, much better today.”

“Thank you, sir,” the boy said, beaming.

Since dogfighting wasn’t something best done on a full stomach, the pilots ended their meeting to go and get some breakfast in the big stone barn.

“Ready for your tour, Isaac?” Crabbe asked after a sip from a silver hip flask. “Won’t be as fancy as a Thomas Cook outing, but you’ll see the highlights.”

Crabbe’s batman, a lance corporal whose name Bell never caught, came out with a spare flying suit while mechanics topped up the Bristol’s fuel and oil tanks as well as its radiator.

Bell pulled the bulky fleece-lined suit over the clothes he already wore.

He understood how cold it would be up at the operational ceiling of the Bristol fighter, somewhere above fifteen thousand feet.

He was sitting on the grass putting on his boots over a second pair of socks when Lieutenant Whiddle made his way over at a leisurely pace.

His eyes gave Bell a dismissive flicker before turning to the squadron leader. “For the record, Captain Crabbe, I want you to know my opposition to this irregular request.”

“Noted, along with your other protest at this morning’s ops meeting,” Crabbe said a little tightly.

Bell finally got his left boot on comfortably and stood.

Bell was a tallish man at six feet, but when he stood he felt like one of the Brobdingnagian giants from Gulliver’s Travels .

Whiddle barely reached the level of his Adam’s apple.

He was reminded of some of the professional jockeys he’d known.

He was also reminded how many of them resented a world in which they were forever looked down upon, literally, if not figuratively at times.

Bell extended his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant. Bell is the name. Isaac Bell.”

Whiddle reluctantly took it. “Know anything about flying?”

Crabbe answered for Bell. “I told you this morning that Isaac is a pilot. He showed me his card from the Aero Club of America. Claims five hundred–plus hours.”

“Not only that,” Bell said with a note of pride, but not boastfulness, “I’ve downed two planes.

One from the deck of a ship with a Lewis gun like the one mounted there in the rear cockpit and the other in aerial combat.

” He omitted the fact that during the dogfight over San Francisco his opponent actually blew apart his propeller with a blast from his own shotgun.

Whiddle showed little interest. “The gun is loaded, but you are not to charge it or fire it. You’re likely to blow off our tail or shred our upper wing.

By the odd chance you spot another plane, tap me on the shoulder and point.

Too much noise to shout back and forth. And just don’t do anything stupid.

Bloody civilians in a combat plane. What’s next?

A new iteration of the Children’s Crusade? ”

Bell let the pilot’s gripes go unanswered.

There was no point. Whiddle had his orders and in the British military that was final.

A mechanic held a ladder steady for Bell to climb into the rear cockpit, while Whiddle vaulted up to the forward slot right behind the engine and the big Vickers machine gun.