Zach Neal
Aleisha’s firm right hip was warm in Giulio’s hand, as
she kneaded his leg just above the knee.
Overhead, the fans turned, barely stirring the air.
Every door and window in the place was open.
Insects and moths circled endlessly around the lighting
fixtures.
The girls didn’t drink much but the men were pretty
sauced. Here was a kind of peace and serenity, cool after the long hot day
where the sweat just flowed and your shirt stuck to you and the underwear was
even worse.
The air was blue with smoke and the hour was late. The
music was alien and unfamiliar and the atmosphere bizarre. It was a repressive
culture, even more so than home, and yet the girls were mostly naked and very
accessible. Back home, women were presumed to be angels, here they were
property and capable of anything. They were not exactly up on a pedestal, sold
into servitude as they were.
He was far from home and they did things differently
around here. Perhaps things would change under more enlightened rule. These
women were whores and the more respectable, matrons and virgins alike, were
veiled and sequestered well away from profane eyes. You had to bear it in mind.
Giulio had to fly tomorrow, which meant that if
anything was going to happen they’d better get on with it. Jesus, it was only
about ten lire. It was the sort of thing you didn’t put in a letter home to
your little (or at least younger) brother. Which your mother and sister would
undoubtedly read as well.
According to letters from home, Emilio had grown an
inch since he’d seen him last.
It was the dance of the Seven Veils. The girl front
and centre was a bit skinny for his liking.
Aleisha was as comfortable as an old couch, something
he had read once and always remembered. He remembered her from before, when it
seemed she was the only one in this whole Godforsaken place with a shred of
kindness, or perhaps it was merely weakness.
He wasn’t particularly horny, and the Turks were
getting pretty good at shooting at low-flying aeroplanes. The music droned on
and on, interminably. At one time he had found it fascinating.
As it was, it was merely different.
Giulio leaned over towards Cacciatore.
“I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid.” With that, he
rose, taking Aleisha by the hand, leading her towards the cramped and dingy rooms
at the back where the ladies, (and the Italian officers were nothing if not
gentlemen), plied their trade.
For
tomorrow, we may die.
We have to have our priorities.
Even then, he found it hard to get the aeroplane out
of his head. Now that was true love.
The motor had sputtered once or twice that morning and
he was wondering what it could possibly be.
***
The chill of the night was wearing off. The shimmering
orange ball that was the sun had just topped the horizon.
“I’ve checked every little thing. There’s nothing
wrong with the motor.” Crespo, his mechanic, shrugged. “Maybe the fuel.”
They had strained and filtered it three times, and yet
it was a constant concern.
“Very well.” The Taube had only let him down once
before, and he’d been able to safely set her down in territory controlled by
the Army.
A few words tapped out in Morse, a few hours of
waiting, and Crespo and the boys had gotten her going again. Giulio had climbed
aboard and flown her the last few kilometres.
Today he could do without such complications.
Generally speaking, the Mercedes inline four-cylinder
was one of the most reliable power-plants available. Perhaps he’d merely
imagined it, but the engine had stumbled, ever so briefly, the previous
afternoon. The heat of the day was considerable, and it was possible that the
fuel had gotten a little too warm and begun to boil off in the lines. There was
such a thing as vapour lock, although the Taube was not known for it.
The conditions in Libya were completely different from
Italy, and certainly Germany, and native design faults would make themselves
known. The mechanics were always fiddling around with the motors, speaking
their own arcane language. While he understood much of it, there were times
when his eyes glazed over.
Giulio took off his coat, and someone took it away. He
snapped his flying helmet tight and, with his goggles on his forehead, used a
small step-ladder. One had to step carefully or risk putting one’s feet right
through the thin fabric of the fuselage. No tie today, and the top buttons of
his tunic were undone. To hell with tradition.
He made sure the ignition was off. Giulio opened up
the fuel cock. He stuck his head over the side.
“Okay.”
Crespo, with his assistant standing by, rotated the propeller
through two turns and stopped.
With fuel in the cylinders, the feel was
completely different.
He looked up at Giulio.
“Ready.”
He turned the switch on.
“Ignition on, fuel on, ready to start.”
Giulio pulled down his goggles and made sure the map was
secure.
Crespo stood, as was his habit, with his assistant
holding his belt to pull him out of the way.
Giulio had always wondered what good that would do.
It’s not like the aeroplane would lunge forward, not on idle, but an accident
or two over the years and people were very aware of the dangers. A mechanic had
walked into a spinning propeller just weeks previously, dying almost instantly
in one of the few casualties so far among the air service. How in the hell a
person could actually do that, was
another question.
Must have been brain-dead.
That was the general consensus.
Crespo threw the propeller against the compression and
she fired right up. This was both a relief and not a relief at one and the same
time. It was always the same. Blue smoke spurted and drifted away on the light
breeze, with the engine mixture rich and the choke full on.
Checking the spark
advance, she was right where she should be.
Assistant mechanic first class Antonio came up beside
the cockpit as a half a dozen other hands stood in front of the wings, holding
her back as Giulio watched the engine temperature.
“Here we go, sir.”
Giulio took the leather bag of four bomba, unfuzed, (safety first!), and placed
them on the floor, where if he was lucky they wouldn’t interfere with his feet,
the pedals or the control cables.
Antonio handed in the fuzes, separate for
safety. Wrapped in thick rags, Giulio put one in each side pocket of his
battledress jacket, one in each upper pocket, and then he was pretty much ready
to go.
“Ah, yes.”
Crespo had his water-bottle.
Someone was standing there with a rifle but he waved
them off. He would have enough on his hands without that thing rattling around
in what was already a pretty restricted cockpit. He had his pistol, which was
more to prevent capture and torture rather than any serious defense against the
irregular troops the Turks were mostly using.
In other words, the suicide option.
The cylinder head was up to temperature and Giulio
shouted at the men, his words lost in the roar of the propeller, which wasn’t
so much the engine as the big wooden paddle blades slapping aside the air.
More men came and held the plane. He revved her up,
pulling the throttle back sharply. The motor was responding well in the
relatively cooler air of morning. It was all in your guts, at some point.
Again, he revved it up and pulled back, as he tried to stall her deliberately.
The motor sounded sweet, the vibration strong through
the pedals, the stick and the seat of his pants. People’s mouths were moving
but he couldn’t hear them anyways. Now she idled quietly away.
With the map and his mission foremost in mind, Giulio
waved them off. When he advanced the throttle again, the wheels struggled
momentarily against the soft sand. The tail came up on her own. The aircraft broke loose. They went
bumping and jouncing as he kicked at the pedals, trying to keep her straight
and narrow, and when he had cleared the small flight-line area, with its bare
half-dozen serviceable aircraft, he turned into the wind and opened up the
throttle. Within a hundred metres she broke the surly bonds of Earth, the
airspeed indicator holding strong at seventy-five kilometres per hour.
They were airborne. With a little luck, he’d be back
in an hour and a half and then he could have a proper breakfast.
***
Libya was an arid hell, described as lush, green and
well-watered in the press back home. In their patriotic fervour for war with a
more primitive society, people were presuming victory with little knowledge of
actual conditions.
The population, also described in the press as
anti-Ottoman, which may have been true to some extent, was even more vehemently
anti-Italian. Especially since the invasion…tribesmen they might be, but the
whole pastoral existence was a kind of disciplined camp life, and camp life was
the one essential element of both modern and ancient warfare.
You really couldn’t go to war without moving men and
materiel to temporary quarters and sustaining them in the field—hopefully
someone else’s field and not your own—for extended periods of time.
It would be a learning experience.
Giulio grinned ferociously, climbing out, circling the
field once, with its flagpole, its lines of tents. Even at this relatively late
hour of the day, there was not a single senior officer on hand, in other words,
no generals. The parking spaces in front of their one permanent building were
empty, and he waved at the mechanics on the ground.
The tall, spare figure of Captain Piazza was there as
well.
He was up early—he must have shit the bed.
Came
to say goodbye, did you.
We
have to give him credit for that.
Six or eight kilometres out, Giulio steadied her up at
a thousand metres to evade the bulk of ground fire. He pointed her nose to the
southeast. Following the roads was always problematical in Libya. Half of them
were unmarked, or in the wrong place, or didn’t really look much like a road at
all.
The map was folded and paper-clipped into a stiff
oblong. Only the section he needed was available without major refolding,
impossible anyways in the heavy buffeting of the cockpit.
He pulled it out but
it was essentially meaningless. He knew where he was going. It was either there
or it wasn’t.
Tobruk, Derna and Khoms had been easily conquered,
Benghazi was quite another story.
The twenty thousand troops put ashore had been deemed sufficient
for the task of taking what the Ottomans called Trabluscarp—Libya, in a tongue that Giulio had found harsh and
barbaric when privileged to sit in on one of their infrequent interrogations of
a captured Turkish officer.
The modern army, the Regio Esercito, had been curiously unprepared for a war that
everyone had seen coming. The only ones who hadn’t seen it coming were those
commanders most likely to be tapped for the duty and (of course) those
political types voted most likely to initiate such a useless endeavour. The
press were just screaming for it, and the reading public nothing if not
malleable…Giulio didn’t care either way. The politics really didn’t matter.
He had wanted to fly and had no real love of the noble
savage, which he had long suspected was a contradiction in terms. Civilization
was a thin-enough veneer over human passion and pretension.
He was heading out over the vast wasteland, sweat
already pouring down his armpits, heading for a rumoured enemy troop
concentration at Tajoura. On the way back, he would fly over the oasis at Ain
Zara, another good staging point for an attack on Tripoli. So far the
opposition had been fairly well organized, and this was without much support
from the Sublime Porte. If nothing else, the Italians were heavily outnumbered,
in a land where pretty much everyone who was anyone, all of them nobody at all,
hated their new masters.
One of the more heavily populated areas, the roads lay
out before him and he followed his usual route, with the dull patches of green
small and forlorn in the greater desolation. The shadows of clouds lay on the
land in dark patches and the unthinkable might even happen, a bit of rain later
if this kept up.
Aleisha was a whore, of course, and yet she did so
much for him—thinking ahead, as to what he might need, what he might like, and
what he might want. She listened so much better than Marice.
The wife, back home and putting all of her petty
angst, all of her bullshit, every stinking word of it, all of that bourgeois sturm und drang, into every interminable
letter she ever wrote, stood out in stark contrast, and she was a lot more
expensive to boot.
So someone snubbed you at the flower show. Big deal.
Out here, the price of a mistake was very high.
 |
| Roberdan, (Wiki.) |
Out here, this was real. It was something Marice would
never understand and maybe that was the problem.
All of a sudden, one day, for no particular reason, he
had suddenly hated his wife, someone he had nicely tolerated, even genuinely
liked, up until this point and only so far before that.
Not that he was making
sense much lately. It was a guilty feeling, to be the only one that knew that.
All of that drink. All of that isolation, all of those
people afraid to make a decision, but God help you if you were of a different
mettle. They were very good at fucking things up…
When all of this was over, he would sign himself in
someplace for a nice, long rest.
It occurred to Giulio that in spite of all the promise
of the morning, he was having a bad day.
None of them bastards
were out here this morning. The very thought helped for some reason and he
brightened. The plane was good, very good. Small black dots caught his eye.
There were small, spidery figures below, the forms and shadows of men and
horses.
“So you don’t want to be conquered, eh?”
Ha.
He stared as tribesmen on the backs of camels
unlimbered their weapons. They were probably shooting at him, the rifles,
little black sticks one minute, now disappearing due to perspective and
foreshortening.
The horizon shimmered in the haze of heat and what
little moisture there was in the air. One must assume that the air was being
torn by bullets, and yet the idiots were probably shooting at him, when they really ought to have been leading him by quite a
bit.
It wasn’t much comfort, but it was at least something.
END
(Apologies to the literary agents of this world. - ed.)
