Jonathan Moss’ thumb stabbed the firing button. The tracers his machine gun spat helped him guide the line of fire across the fuselage of the British biplane whose pilot hadn’t spied him coming till too late. The flier slumped over his controls, dead or unconscious. His aeroplane spun down, down, down. Moss followed it down, on the off chance the limey was shamming. He wasn’t. The aeroplane crashed into the battered ground of no-man’s-land and began to burn.
Moss pulled up sharply. Down there in the trenches, men in khaki were blazing away at him. He didn’t take them for granted, not any more. They’d brought him down once. He wanted to give them as little chance of doing it again as he could.
A couple of bullets punched through the fabric covering his single-decker’s wings. The sound brought remembered fear, in a way it hadn’t when the Englishman put some rounds through there. No aeroplane had ever knocked him out of the sky, which meant he could make himself believe no aeroplane could knock him out of the sky. He couldn’t pretend, even to himself, that the infantry, which had got lucky once, might not get lucky again.
Small arms still aimed his way. Looking back in the rearview mirror mounted on the edge of the cockpit, he saw muzzle flashes bright as the sun. But his altimeter was winding steadily. By the time he passed twenty-five hundred feet, which didn’t take long, he was pretty safe.
Up above him, Dud Dudley waggled his wings in a victory salute. Moss waved back to the flight leader. His buddies had covered for him while he flew down to confirm his kill of the British biplane. He waved again. Good fellows, he thought.
Looking around for more opponents, he found none. Dudley waggled his wings again, and pointed back toward the aerodrome. Moss checked his fuel gauge. He had less gas left than he’d thought. He didn’t argue or try to pretend he hadn’t seen, but took his place in the flight above, behind, and to the left of Dudley.
One after another, the four Martin single-deckers bounced to a stop on the rutted grass of the airstrip outside Cambridge, Ontario. Groundcrew men came trotting up, not only to see to the aeroplanes but also to pick up the word on what had happened in the war in the air. “Johnny got one,” Tom Innis said, slapping Moss on the back hard enough to stagger him. Innis’ grin was wide and fierce and full of sharp teeth, as if he were more wolf than man.
“That’s bully, Lieutenant!” The groundcrew men crowded around him. One of them pressed a cigar into a pocket of his flying suit. “Knock ’em all down, sir.” “The more you sting, the fewer they’ve got left.”
Eventually, the fliers detached themselves and headed for Captain Pruitt’s office to make their official report. “That was really fine shooting, sir,” Phil Eaker said. He was skinny and blond and unlikely to be as young as he looked. Nobody, Moss thought from the height of his mid-twenties, was likely to be as young as Phil Eaker looked. He also hadn’t had enough flying time to harden him yet. That would come-if he lived.
“I dove on him out of the sun,” Moss said, shrugging. He could smell the leftover fear in his sweat now that the slipstream wasn’t blowing it away. “If he doesn’t know you’re there, that’s the easiest way to do the job. He only got off a few rounds at me.”
When the war broke out, he’d thought of himself as a knight of the air. Nothing left him happier now than a kill where the foe didn’t have much chance to kill him. He suspected knights in shining armor hadn’t cried in their beer when they were able to bash out a Saracen’s brains from behind, either.
Hardshell Pruitt looked up from the papers on his desk when Dudley and the men of his flight ducked into his tent. The squadron commander pulled out a binder, dipped his pen into a bottle of ink, and said, “Tell me, gentlemen. Try to give me the abridged version. I spend so much time filling out forms”-he waved at the documents over which he’d been laboring-“I haven’t been getting the flight time I need.”
“Yes, sir,” Dudley said. Concisely and accurately, he reported on the flight. The most significant item was Moss’ downing the British flying scout. Moss told a good deal of that tale himself.
“Well done,” Captain Pruitt said when he’d finished. “Let me just see something here.” He shuffled through some manila folders, opened one, read what was in it, and grunted. Then he said, “Very good, Moss. You’re dismissed. I have some matters I need to take up with your pals here. You may see them again, or I may decide to ship them all out for courts-martial.”
“I’m sure they all deserve it, sir,” Moss said cheerfully, which got him ripe raspberries from the other men in the flight. He ignored them, making his way back to his own tent. When he peeled off his flight suit, he realized how grimy and sweaty he was. The aerodrome had rigged up a makeshift showerbath from an old fuel drum set on a wooden platform. The day held a promise of summer. He didn’t even ask to have any hot water added to what was in there. He just grabbed some soap and scrubbed till he was clean.
Dudley, Innis, and Eaker still hadn’t returned from Captain Pruitt’s office by the time Moss got back to his tent. He scratched his freshly washed head. Maybe Hardshell hadn’t been joking, and they really were in Dutch.
He smoked the cigar the groundcrew man had given him, stretched out on his cot, and dozed for half an hour. His tentmates weren’t back when he woke up. He muttered under his breath. What the devil had they done? Why the devil hadn’t they let him do some of it, too?
He got up, went outside, and looked around. No sign of them. Hardly any sign of anybody, when you got down to it. He ambled over to the officers’ lounge. You could always find somebody there. It was nearly sunset, too, which meant the place ought to be filling up for some heavy-duty, professional drinking, the way it did every night.
Except tonight. Oh, a couple of pilots from another squadron were in there soaking up some whiskey, but the place was dead except for them. “Somebody get shot down?” Moss wondered out loud. It was the only thing he could think of, but it didn’t strike him as very likely. When a fellow died up in the sky, his comrades usually drank themselves stupid to remember him and to forget they might be next.
Drinking alone wasn’t Moss’idea of fun, and the other two pi-lots didn’t seem interested in company. Having nothing better to do, he was about to wander off and sack out when a groundcrew corporal poked his head into the lounge, spotted him, and exclaimed, “Oh, there you are, sir! Jesus, I’m glad I found you. Hardshell-uh, Captain Pruitt-he wants to see you right away. I was you, sir, I wouldn’t keep him waiting.” He disappeared.
Moss hopped to his feet. Whatever trouble his flightmates were in, maybe he’d found a piece of it after all. He hurried over to the captain’s tent, which was only a few feet away, wishing he hadn’t been so blithely agreeable about Hardshell’s court-martialing his friends. He was liable to be seeing a court himself.
Captain Pruitt stood outside the tent. Moss didn’t think that was a good sign. Shadow shrouded the squadron commander’s face. He grunted on seeing Jonathan approach. “Here at last, are you?” he growled. “Well, you’d better come in, then.”
Rudely, he ducked through the tentflap by himself and didn’t hold it for Moss. Shaking his head, Moss followed. He was going to get it, all right. Braced for the worst, he lifted the canvas and followed Captain Pruitt inside.
Light blazed at him. All the fliers he hadn’t been able to find packed the inside of the tent. They lacked only a coating of olive oil to be sardines in a can. Tom Innis pressed a pint of whiskey into Moss’ hand. “Congratulations!” everybody shouted.
Moss stared in astonishment. “What the devil-!” he blurted.
Laughter erupted and rolled over him in waves. “He doesn’t even know!” Dud Dudley hooted.
“Clear a space and we’ll show him, then,” Captain Pruitt said.
Clearing a space wasn’t easy. A few people, grumbling, had to go outside. When Moss finally saw Pruitt’s desk, it was for once clear of papers. A cake sat on top of it instead, a rectangular cake with white frosting. A big chocolate symbol turned it into an enormous playing card, with chocolate A’s at the appropriate corners.