The Challenging Heights by Max Hennessy Page A

scream blue murder. The pilot turned and started to run after the aeroplane but tripped and fell and, with the crowd watching aghast, the machine took off in a wobbly lift-off and staggered into the air. As it climbed higher and higher, the spectators yelled with fright, then it plunged downwards with a great gasp of horror from the ground. When it appeared on the point of smashing into the earth it pulled up into a perfect loop, then climbed again and began a series of stunts that took the breath away, and the crowd’s terror gave way to delight.
    ‘It’s Charley dressed up,’ Zoë said.
    The performance ended with a display of wing-walking, a parachute descent and a Gretna Green elopement with Zoë and one of the mechanics dressed as the bride and groom in an old Model T Ford and Charley Wright, as an irate father, chasing them all round the field in an Avro and bombarding them with bags of flour and rolls of toilet paper.
    ‘It always gets a laugh,’ he said as the crowd finally streamed away. Extracting a hip flask, he took a long swig before offering it to Dicken.
    ‘Booze doesn’t go with flying,’ Dicken said as they drove away. ‘Does he put much of it away?’
    ‘Charley’s safe as houses.’
    ‘Until the day he puts too much away. Do you go up with him?’
    ‘I’ve done my share of wing-walking.’
    ‘You’ve what?’
    ‘I have a harness on that you can’t see from the ground. I can’t fall off. Don’t be stuffy. You sound like an RAF wife.’
    He knew she disliked the other RAF wives she met and was unpopular with them because she made no secret of the flying she did with Charley Wright, so that they considered she was letting the side down. One CO had even quietly mentioned it to Dicken.
    ‘They’re so boring,’ she complained. ‘They expect me to go along and drink tea and talk about babies. I prefer coffee and I don’t know anything about babies.’
    ‘You could soon learn.’
    ‘Babies would stop me flying.’
    ‘You’ll have to stop some time.’
    ‘Why will I?’
    ‘Well, eventually you’ll want a family.’
    ‘I’m not so damn sure I will, Dicky Boy. Women in America are beginning to make a business of flying. Ruth Law. The Stinsons. Phoebe Fairgrave. If they can make a career in aviation, so can I.’
     
    The disagreement came to an abrupt end two months later. In an attempt to pin her down, Dicken rented a furnished house near the airfield but within two days of signing the contract he received orders for a posting to Iraq.
    ‘Iraq!’ Zoë stared at him in horror. ‘You said it would be India or Egypt. Good conditions. Lots of servants. Isn’t Iraq what they used to call Mesopotamia? All flat and hot.’
    ‘That’s about it. The RAF are policing the place.’
    She stared at him, pink-faced with anger. ‘I’m not coming with you,’ she snapped.
    He shrugged. ‘They wouldn’t let you, anyway,’ he said. ‘Wives are forbidden.’
    And rather to his surprise, he found he didn’t feel angry about it.

 
     
Six
    The ranges to the north, snow-clad crests rising one behind the other, were serried white bastions of inscrutable majesty. As the Bristol Fighter flew at 8000 feet, on the same level stretched the high peaks of Kurdistan, Turkey and Persia, a breathtaking wall of mountain filling the whole horizon and dominated by the pinnacles of the Hakkari Range which soared up into the thin layer of cirrus that filled the sky.
    It was largely thanks to Almonde that Dicken was enjoying the view. He was leading a detached flight of Bristols and his job was to patrol the Iraqi police posts strung along the borders of Turkey and Iran where sabre-rattling Kurdish tribesmen were in the habit of appearing from the hills to kill everyone in sight before bolting back to shelter with whatever loot they could grab.
    As Almonde throttled the Rolls Falcon engine back and they dropped down to 1000 feet, they entered an area of disturbed air that came from the buffetings of strong