The Challenging Heights by Max Hennessy Page B

winds swirling among the tumbling mountains. Turning in his seat, Almonde pointed downwards. ‘Kash,’ he shouted.
    Kash was the most northerly of the police posts and, finding it under the lee of a mountain, Dicken spotted the straight red strips of American cloth laid out in the snow in the form of an E to let them know all was well. From Kash they flew on to Haibu and Harzan and other snowbound outposts before returning to a splashy landing on a field sodden with water after the melting of the winter snows.
    After three years on the ground, Dicken had confidently expected a flying job but, once again, had instead found himself riding in worn-out Rolls Royce armoured cars dating from Lawrence of Arabia’s operations against the Turks in 1918. When the League of Nations had handed to Britain the mandate for Iraq, to avoid stationing a large army there, which would always have been liable to ambush as it marched about the sandy wastes, the job of policing the country had been handed to the RAF, because Trenchard had claimed he could do it with a few squadrons of aircraft, a few companies of armoured cars and a few Assyrian and Arab levies.
    ‘Out here,’ Almonde had explained, ‘Pax Britannica has become Pax Aeronautica.’
    The journey from England had been made with 1500 other men on a troopship built to carry 800. Dicken had slept on a settee in a cabin he shared with two other officers who had had the good fortune to arrive first and claim the only bunks, and the conditions were appalling, with hammocks hung three and four deep above each other so that the duty officer making his round at night had to crawl on hands and knees. The smell was nauseating and the outside temperature as they moved down the Red Sea was over a hundred. Having to change into mess kit with stiff collars for dinner every night, Dicken made a habit of slipping out halfway through the evening to change into a fresh collar and place the limp worn one between the leaves of a book for use the next day. From Basra, the journey had been continued by slow train to Baghdad where the group had arrived itching agonisingly from sandfly bites.
    The squadrons flew Snipes, Bristols, DH9as powered with the American Liberty engines, or Vickers Vernons, heavy snub-nosed aircraft with twin tails, four wheels, two Rolls Royce Eagle engines and a forest of interplane struts. They looked vaguely like whales with wings, but in addition to the two pilots sitting in an outside cockpit they had a cabin which could hold ten soldiers complete with their kit. Though their cruising speed when fully loaded was little more than that of the armoured cars, they had an endurance of seven hours.
    Everybody likely to come into contact with the natives of the country carried what was called a blood chit, a piece of paper printed in Arabic which offered a reward for the return unharmed of the bearer.
    ‘Known to the coarse-minded as a gooly chit,’ Almonde explained. ‘Because if you have to come down in their territory and get captured, they hand you to the women who take a delight in making a few modifications on you with their knives – such as rearranging the position of those small spherical appendages which usually mean a great deal to a man. The chit promises that if you’re handed over intact, the finder will be rewarded beyond all his dreams, and financial gain usually has the ascendancy over the simple pleasure of mutilation.’
    ‘But not always,’ he added. ‘The Wahabi are inclined to be a bit fanatical and then the gooly chit doesn’t carry a lot of weight.’
    Mosul, from where they operated, was built of white houses rather than the mud brick of the rest of Iraq, because the area around abounded with a local soft marble. It was a maze of narrow streets except in the centre where during the war the Turks had cut a road through towards a bridge over the Tigris. Unfortunately, since the river had changed its course during the building of the bridge, it had