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Do you read me? Shasa was searching the sky around him, trying to pick up David's aircraft, feeling the first prickle of anxiety.
Come in, Popeye two, he repeated, and looked down, searching for smoke rising from a wrecked aircraft in the broken brown land below. Then his pulse jumped as David's voice came in clearly through his headphones.
Leader, this is two, I have damage. David, where the hell are you? Approximately ten miles east of Kerene crossroads, at eight thousand feet. Shasa glanced into the easterly quarter and almost instantly picked out a thin grey line being swiftly drawn above the blue horizon towards the south. it looked like a feather.
David, I see smoke in your area. Are you on fire? Affirmative.
I have an engine fire. I'm coming, David, hold on! Shasa flung the Hurricane's wing up in a steep turn and rammed the throttle open to its stop.
David was a little below him, and he went screaming down the sky.
David, how bad is it! Roast turkey, David said laconically, and ahead of him Shasa made out the burning Hurricane.
David had his stricken machine in a steep side slip, so that the flames were not streaming back over the cockpit canopy but were being blown out to one side. He was going down fast, trying to build up speed to the critical point when the fire would be starved of oxygen and would extinguish itself spontaneously.
Shasa bore down on him and then eased back his own speed and kept slightly above and two hundred yards off. He could see the bullet holes in the other machine's engine cowling and wing. One of the Italian gu
,A jammed canopy and David will cook, Shasa thought, but at that moment the canopy came free and slid back easily and David looked across at him. The air around his head was distorted by the shimmering heat of invisible flames and a brown patch appeared on the sleeve of David's tunic as the khaki cotton scorched.
No good! I'm hitting the silk, Shasa. He saw David's lips move and his voice echoed in Shasa's earphones, but before he could reply, David pulled the helmet from his head and released his shoulder-straps.
He lifted one hand in a farewell salute, and then turned the burning Hurricane onto its back and fell out of the open cockpit.
He went down with arms and legs spread in an untidy sprawling starfish, begi
Shasa throttled his Hurricane back until he was losing height at the same rate as the descending parachute, and he circled David slowly, keeping two or three hundred yards separation from his dangling body, craning his head over the side of his open cockpit, trying to estimate where David would land, and then glancing anxiously at the fuel gauge
on his instrument panel. The needle hovered just above the
red line.
David's burning Hurricane smashed into the dusty plain below the soaring Ambas and exploded in a quick dragon's breath of smoke, and Shasa surveyed the ground.
Directly below were ridges of iron grey Which peaked into cones of darker rock. Between the ridges were stony hollows, rough as a crocodile's skin, and then, just beyond the last ridge, a softer smoother valley; as they descended he made out the regular furrows of primitive cultivation on the gentle slopes of the valley. David would come down on or very close to the final ridge. Shasa's eyes narrowed. Human habitation! There was a tiny group of thatched huts at the end of the valley, and for a moment his spirits rose. Then he remembered the photographs, those mutilated and desecrated lumps of human flesh, and his jaw clenched as he looked across at David, swaying and swinging on the parachute shrouds.
He banked the Hurricane away, turning and dropping down towards the valley, and he levelled out at fifty feet above the ground, and flew back between the rock ridges up the shallow valley. He roared over the rude fields of cultivation, scraggly stalks of sorghum standing in ragged lines, stunted and browned by drought, and then ahead of him he saw human figures.
A group of men were ru
As the Hurricane roared low over their heads, three or four of them stopped ru
Shasa needed no further evidence of their hostile intentions. The armed men were streaming along the bottom of the ridge, waving their rifles, racing to intercept the tiny figure on the floating parachute.
Shasa dropped down again, lined up the ru
Sheets of tracer and dust flew up around the group of robed figures in a raging storm, an saw four or five of them picked up and flung down again by the hail of machine-gun fire.
Then he was forced to climb out to miss the hills at the head of the valley, and as he came around once more he saw that the shufta had regrouped and were once again ru
Shasa dropped in for a second attack, but this time the shufta scattered before the approaching Hurricane and from the cover of the rocks they turned a furious fusillade on Shasa as he roared over their heads. His own machine-gun fire threw up clouds of dust and rock fragments, but did little execution.
He climbed up and levelled out, swivelling his head to watch David land. The parachute drifted over the ridge, missing it by only a few feet, then it hit the down-draught of the back slope and dropped sharply.
He saw David land heavily and tumble head over heels, bumping across the rocky slope until the parachute jerked him to his feet again. He struggled with the tangled shrouds and the billowing folds of silk, sawing and tipping it, spilling air from it until the parachute collapsed in a silvery heap and David threw off the harness.
He stood and stared down the slope towards the band of ru
Shasa dropped down almost to his level, and as he passed he pointed urgently down the slope. David stared up at him without comprehension. He looked very small and abandoned on the desert hillside, and Shasa was close enough to see the resignation on his face as he waved farewell to Shasa and turned to face the savage band coming up to take him.
Shasa fired another burst at the shufta as he roared towards them, and again they scattered for cover. They were still half a mile from David; he had delayed them for precious seconds. He put the Hurricane into a maximum-rate turn, his wingtip brushing the thorn scrub of the ridge as he came around, and the instant he levelled out he let down his undercarriage. With landing-wheels hanging he roared back over the spot where David stood and repeated his urgent signal, pointing down into the valley.