Read Online The Mercenaries by John Harris - Free Book Online Page A

don’t know, Ira. Honest. They both of ‘em hopped it. I grabbed a wrench to hit him with but they’d gone. We’re on our own.’
     
    The expedition seemed to have got off to a somewhat inauspicious start. They had three unassembled aircraft, one of them damaged and all of them old and too often repaired, no fitters, no equipment, very few tools and at least one pilot who seemed to be slightly unbalanced.
    ‘This little tea-party appears to be jammed full of exciting possibilities,’ Ira observed ruefully to Sammy.
    He wasn’t far wrong. Within a week it had become quite clear that nothing, whether business or pleasure, could be done directly in China. Every approach was devious and protracted, and nothing could be achieved without a middleman’s rake-off, or ‘squeeze’, and, staring at the instructions given him by Lao at Moshi, at Kowalski’s letters, at the notebook that was suddenly full of things which had to be done, and the lists of all the things they were lacking, Ira was conscious of a sad letting-down of the spirit.
    ‘Let’s hope there’s a bit more bloody organisation in Hwai-Yang,’ he said with feeling.
    Fortunately, Kowalski was well used to the tortuous delays and the complex methods of working, and wasn’t in the slightest put out. He had conducted them to their hotel and had seen them installed, talking business with Ira all the time, filling a notebook with his lists of demands, unflurried by the need for urgency and the prospect of unfailing vacillation on the part of the Chinese. Though it took time, he began to find them tools, drills, hacksaws, lamps, batteries, oil, grease, paint, a lathe, and even a small petrol generator.
    ‘Tsu’s going to start squealing soon,’ he grinned as he turned them over to Ira. ‘He was never known for his generosity and this little lot’s going to cost him a packet of dollars, believe me.’
    ‘We haven’t even started yet,’ Ira commented grimly.
    To their surprise, and although they spent most of their time on the Chinese side of the Yangtze, their arrival had not gone unnoticed; and a few red-faced English matrons, picking up their wavelength on the grapevine of gossip, began to call at their hotel, leaving cards and inviting them to cocktail parties. For the most part they were large and frozen-faced and seemed to consider they were doing them a favour.
    Wealth and position were the criteria of virtue in white Shanghai and they were obviously expected to take up their proper place in an accepted hierarchy with the British Minister and his satellites at the top. The invitations were strictly formal and never failed to have Ira’s correct rank and every one of his decorations in the right order.
    ‘God, they do things right out here, don’t they?’ he observed to Kowalski, turning over a sheet of pasteboard as big as the blade of a shovel.
    ‘Brother,’ Kowalski laughed, ‘you just try and do ‘em wrong .’
    Ira tapped the pasteboard. ‘Think we ought to go?’ he asked.
    ‘It’ll maybe grease a few wheels and open a few doors.’
    The party was not the success they had hoped for, however, because Fagan drank too much, and Ellie--in a shapeless and old-fashioned dress that hung on her lean frame like a sack--reacted to the monumental British formality by being rude in the best transatlantic manner. The final straw was the appearance of Ira’s over-eager girl-friend from the voyage out, a clear knock-out in a dress that must have cost a fortune and her eyes gleaming at the sight of Ira. They called a taxi early and, bundling the protesting Fagan into it, headed for the safety of the Chinese side of the river. There were no further invitations, especially when it was discovered they were working for the Chinese instead of the Chinese working for them.
     
    From this point on, spares began to arrive in dribs and drabs on the bare marshy field at Linchu that seemed to be constantly swept by warm showers and high winds, to be followed