The AOP – or rather, its weary radio – spoke to me a couple of hours later, halfway up a mountain in the Troodos the army called Mount Menelaus on account it was shaped like a king’s head; crown and all. The signal was weak – but that was obviously a battery problem, wasn’t it? I read the compass bearing off against the strongest signal to Collins as we came to a point where a forest track split. He drew a line on his chart. All I could see was a mixture of pine trees. Some short, with a thick canopy. Some high and lofty, like cypresses or cedars of Lebanon, climbing in lines underneath steep ridges. Even though I was cold and my leg ached from its old bullet wound, the sky was a brilliant blue and the low sun hurt my eyes. I needed sunshades – something to ask Pat about when we got away.
After that, it was my job to hold on to the signal as the track climbed and twisted. The whole thing reminded me of Shangri-La, without beautiful people playing the extras. The air was thinner: I hadn’t expected that. Pat was breathing through his nose. Even the vehicles didn’t like it, crawling from rise to rise in first. The moment I heard a genuine dip in the signal I shouted, ‘Stop. Stop here.’
Pat stopped the Land Rover, and Collins rose in his seat to wave down those following: they were spread out over a couple of hundred yards, and took minutes to get up with us. Collins asked me, ‘Here?’ He stared around. Like me he could see nothing that had once been an aircraft.
‘Near enough, Captain. This is as firm as your signal gets.’
‘How far?’
‘Can’t tell you. Not far. Their batteries are going flat.’ He looked at me as if hoping for a suggestion. Didn’t get one, and made up his own mind. I could get along with officers like him. He had a dozen men excluding me and Pat, and the gunners on the Dingoes. He left the four of us with the wagon train, and deployed the others in a circle around us – then he had them walk away, into the scrub and the trees. The rock underfoot was grey and crumbly; I reckoned we’d be lucky to get away without a busted ankle or two. We soon lost sight of them, but could hear them from time to time, moving away from us in a widening circle. And the occasional curse as someone went down over a hidden obstacle. Pat pointed out to the captain that he and I could provide another two pairs of eyes, but Collins smiled back, and said, ‘No, thank you, lads. You’ve done what you were brought up here for. Just stay here, and mind your box of tricks for the next time.’ He must have seen the doubt in our eyes, because he swung back and added, ‘You’ve done what you’re good at, now let us do what we’re good at – army business.’ Then he sat on the lorry’s running board, and waited for contact.
It took about twenty minutes, and then a yellow flare popped low into the sky down the slope from where we’d parked up. Collins got to his feet, dropped the cigarette he had been smoking and said, ‘Come on,’ to me. When Pat made to move he was waved back.
‘I know the radios,’ I told Pat. ‘He’ll need me for the diagnosis.’
It took less than ten minutes for Collins to lead me to the wreck. Neither of us bust an ankle. The Auster was tipped up on its nose at the edge of a steeply inclined clearing, making it appear to stand almost upright to the sky – its tail like a signpost to nowhere. There was a strong smell of aviation spirit, but it hadn’t burned. The Dingo driver who had found it was just about to light a fag he had dangling in his mouth, when I yelled at him. The Auster’s fuel had soaked into the very ground he was standing on. I think I scared him. Collins dragged him away, and delivered a tasty few words out of my earshot. The poor guy, having found what we were all looking for, had expected to be hailed a hero: instead Collins’s tirade left him white and shaking. The captain crossed to me again, and we went over to the aircraft to look in through the opened cabin door.
The Auster didn’t look too bad except for a dozen bullet holes: two through the engine cowling had done the damage. The observer curled up behind the seats didn’t look too bad either. Not bad for a dead man, that is. His head was at a very odd angle to his fuselage, and a small trickle of blood had fallen from one ear, and dried in a thread. Collins sniffed.
‘What do you think?’
‘Broke his neck in the crash – what a pity. It was a very survivable impact in every other way. After all, the pilot seems to have got away.’ I wasn’t exactly sure of that: the front windscreen panels had caved in, and some recent dark smears on the cowling could have also been his blood. I was half inclined to think we might find him in the woods some yards ahead. While I was talking I leaned in to switch off the observer’s radios. It seemed an oddly religious thing to do – completing his last duty for him. The radio man’s final prayer.
Collins had obviously been only half listening to me, because he asked, ‘What was that again?’
‘I said the pilot might still be around here somewhere . .
