He whipped the Wright two-decker into a tight turn and bored in on the observation balloon, Stone behind him to the right, Bradley to the left. “There!” he shouted in savage exultation, as the hydrogen in the fabric sausage finally caught fire. “That’ll teach you, you bastard.”
Maybe nothing would teach the observer. Even as his crew on the ground at last began hauling down the flaming balloon, he calmly climbed over the edge of the wicker basket from which he’d fought so hard and so well and leaped off into space.
His parachute must have been connected to the basket by a static line, for the big silk canopy opened almost at once. Pilots of fighting scouts were not issued parachutes. Moss didn’t know whether to be jealous or to despise the device as a sissy affectation.
The latter, he decided, and swung the nose of his aeroplane down a little. A burst from his machine gun, and the observer hung limp and unmoving beneath the ’chute. Maybe Moss wouldn’t have done it had the fellow not shot down his friend. But maybe he would have, too; that Canuck or limey or whoever he was had been too damn good to let him live.
Moss swooped down below the thunderous Archie and streaked toward the spot where Hans Oppenheim’s aeroplane went down. His flightmate wasn’t inside the bus any more; dead or alive, the enemy soldiers had taken him away. A crowd of men in khaki were gathered around the Wright. Moss machine-gunned them, and whooped with glee to watch them scatter. Some didn’t scatter-some crumpled and wouldn’t get up again.
Then Moss and Stone and Bradley zoomed past the disabled two-decker and low over the front line. The Canadian and British troops in the trenches gave them a warm sendoff with rifle and machine-gun fire. And then, because they were coming out of the east, half the Americans assumed they had to be hostile and fired at them, too. More bullets pierced Moss’ aeroplane.
“Now wouldn’t that be bully?” he growled. “Hell of a mission to have to try and explain to Major Cherney: a balloon observer shot down one machine from the flight and our own ground fire made another one crash. He’d love that, yes he would. He’d love it a hell of a lot.”
But his two-decker kept flying, and so, he saw to his relief in the rearview mirror, did those of Percy Stone and Pete Bradley. U.S. antiaircraft guns opened up on them, too, but they made it back to the Orangeville aerodrome unscathed.
As Moss had known it would be, “What happened to Lieutenant Oppenheim?” was the first question the groundcrew asked after he shut off the motor and the sounds of the outside world returned to his ears. After he answered, the silence that fell made him wonder if he’d gone deaf.
“You’re joking, ain’t you, sir?” asked a fitter who was walking down the length of the fuselage and examining the bullet holes Moss had picked up. “I mean to say, you guys shoot at the balloons. The guys in the balloons don’t shoot back-that’s Archie’s job.”
“You know that, Herm, and I know that,” Moss said, “but nobody ever told this skunk. One thing, though-he won’t ever do it again.” The groundcrew man nodded at the grim emphasis he gave the words.
As they walked toward Major Cherney’s tent, Stone and Bradley sounded as disbelieving as had Herm. “The nerve of that son of a gun,” Bradley said, over and over. “The nerve!”
“Good thing you got him,” Stone said to Moss. “If somebody didn’t punch his ticket for him, he’d have ended up an ace, and he hasn’t even got a motor in that damn thing.”
When they told Major Cherney what had happened to Hans Oppenheim, the squadron leader looked at them for a long time without saying anything. At last, he did speak: “You really mean it.” Solemnly, Moss, Stone, and Bradley nodded. Cherney shook his head. “You go into a war. You fight it for damn near three years. You think you’ve heard every single thing that could happen. And then…” He shook his head again. “Shot down by an observer in a balloon. I will be goddamned. Maybe it’s just as well for him that he didn’t make it back to our side of the line. Nobody would ever have let him forget it.”
“I only hope he’s alive to try and forget it, sir,” Pete Bradley said. “I couldn’t tell when we flew over his aeroplane.”
“Neither could I,” Moss and Stone said together.
“I will be goddamned,” Major Cherney repeated. He let out a long, slow sigh. “Maybe the Canucks will let us know. They do sometimes when one of our boys gets forced down on their side, same as we do for them.”
Two days later, an enemy aeroplane dropped a note behind the U.S. line in a washed-out jam tin made more noticeable by the small ’chute taken from a parachute flare. It duly made its way back to the Orangeville aerodrome, where Major Cherney called in Moss, Stone, and Bradley. “Hansie died of wounds,” he said heavily. “The Canadians buried him with full military honors, for whatever it’s worth.”
“Thank you, sir,” Jonathan Moss said. With one accord, he and his flightmates headed for the officers’ club after they left the squadron commander’s tent. After they had the first of what would be many drinks in front of them, Moss turned to the men on whom his life depended-and vice versa-and said, “Well, boys, I wonder what sort of bird’ll join our flock next.”
“Won’t be long till we find out,” Bradley said. Soberly-for the time being-Moss nodded.
Time hung heavy in the hospital. Lying there with a rubber drainage tube coming out of the shoulder that still stubbornly refused to heal, Reggie Bartlett had plenty of time to think and very little chance to do anything else.
One of the things he thought about-and disapproved of-was the weather. “You all sure this is really Yankee country?” he asked the wounded U.S. soldiers who filled most of the beds in the big ward. “Richmond doesn’t get any hotter and stickier than this.”
“St. Louis, sure as hell,” Pete reminded him. The one-legged soldier winked. “You ought to feel at home, ain’t that right?”
“Doesn’t mean I liked the weather,” Reggie said. “Anybody who likes summer in the Confederate States is crazy.” He turned to his countryman for support. “Isn’t that right, Rehoboam?”
The Negro was scratching toes on the foot he no longer had, as he often did. He said, “Don’t know nothin’ ’bout what it’s like in Richmond. Out in the fields down around Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where I’s from, it gets powerful hot in the summertime. This ain’t a patch on that, I don’t reckon.”
“From what I’ve heard about Mississippi, I expect hell would look chilly in the summertime next to it,” Reggie said thoughtfully. His shoulder twinged. He grunted and thought some more till the pain faded. Then he added, “Working in the fields down there doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun.”
Rehoboam looked at him from across the aisle. “You ain’t the stupidest white man I ever did see.”
Pete whistled. “You gonna let him talk to you like that, Reggie? I thought a smoke who talked to a white man like that down in the CSA could go and write his will-except you wouldn’t let him learn to write and he wouldn’t own enough to bother leaving it to anybody.”
“You’re a natural-born troublemaker,” Reggie told him. “If you still had that other leg, I’d tear it off you and beat Rehoboam to death with it. That’d settle both of you. There. Are you satisfied now?”
“Minute I woke up and found out I was shy a pin, I was satisfied and then some, I’ll tell you that right now,” the amputee answered. “Right then, I knew I’d had all the fighting I was ever going to do.”
Reggie only grunted in reply to that. He still wasn’t satisfied, not in that sense. If he ever got healed up, he’d try to escape again. He’d done it once; he didn’t think doing it again would be so hard. But, while his leg wound bothered him less each day, pus still dripped from that shoulder. It left him sore and weak and feverish. There were lots of things he told himself he should be doing, but he lacked the energy to do any of them. Lying here was what he was up to, and lying here was what he did.