The Unfinished Soldiers

The most peculiar thing about this charade of air war that Kerr was fighting for the Daytona Film Company over the ripening vineyards of France was his mothering fear and concern for the five other pilots and planes who followed him in a close but very insecure and quite unreliable formation. He hardly knew the four Englishmen and one American lined up behind him in the flight of Hurricanes, yet he was far more nervous on their account than he ever remembered being for his fellow pilots in the original Battle of Britain, almost 30 years before. The danger then was a cannon shell; the danger now was an accident. Every day, the six Hurricane pilots had to get through all the mock entanglements of a prearranged encounter with six Messerschmitts and survive nervously and with considerable relief the dangers of collision, of wing tip clipping wing tip, of too much inverse stress tearing off an old wing. It was all theatrical and unbloody, but it had been a strain.

"Kev. You're in view."

That was Jack Sherman, the American, calling him from the Wellington, where the seven cameras were, and Kerr wanted to tell Sherman that his name was Kerr or Kevin, not "Kev"; but why bother; and anyway, he did not want to diminish that indestructible friendliness of the American.

"I can't see you yet," Kerr said into his old unbuttoned microphone, which in his youth had always tasted of someone else's sweat; but this one, with its oxygen mask, tasted--or, rather, smelled--of coffee.

"We're way below you," Sherman said. "You look as if you're about five hundred feet too high."

"I'm not too high. You're too low," Kerr said dryly.

"OK, OK. Keep your shirt on," Sherman said, and Kerr heard that professional, appeasing laugh that sounded better when you could see Sherman's good-natured face with it.

Sherman was what the Daytona Film Company called "flight directions manager, second unit," and it was Sherman who worked out with Kerr and the cameramen and the German, Helmut Muehler (who was approaching somewhere from Cannes with his six Messerschmitts), all the operational behavior for each day's flying. Sherman was a pilot himself. He had fought in the Korean War and had somehow survived the ravages of MIG Alley with credit and skill; but what he had fought out there with jets was not the same sort of thing as this straining, light-fingered and more butterfly war of piston engines and variable-pitch propellers. In fact, if there was a gap between the American on the one hand and the Englishman and the German on the other, it wasn't continental but mechanical. Sherman had no respect for the Hurricanes and the Messerschmitts, because he did not treat them seriously. That was because Americans always seemed to have scant respect for the engines between their legs, as if they were built carelessly but completely into them; whereas Europeans like Muehler and himself were still, fundamentally, artisans of the clock.

"You were right, old man," he heard Sherman's kidding voice admit. "There's Helmut tootling in on your altitude, and Helmut's never wrong."

Who did that flatter? Kerr wondered. Himself, who could be wrong, or the German, who was always right? He wiped an imaginary smear off the Perspex hood of the cockpit and looked at the sky where Helmut and the Messerschmitts should be, and they were there.

"My God ..." Kerr said involuntarily.

For a shivering, perceptive moment, they were real, and his whole body responded with a sickening memory of youthful elation and fear at the sight of that well-ordered flight of square-cut, bulletheaded little planes. But it passed and, instead, he was relieved to be matched on the other side by that rather untouchable and impenetrable German, who would not make a stupid mistake. In this kind of flying, it was only a mistake that would kill.

"Helmut," he said into the coffee microphone. "There's a French Mirage floating around above twenty thousand. I mean above six thousand meters."

"Yes," Muehler said sharply.

"Is that French bastard peeking in again?" Sherman interrupted angrily. "I complained the other day to the French commandant about that nut." Then Sherman said: "Come in, helicopter."

The air now began to get noisy with radio talk as Sherman mustered camera planes and combatants into the right position at the right time, so that there were not all those untimely false starts and the dangerous chaos of their first week. It was a miracle that someone had not been killed. It was the helicopter that worried Kerr now. Like the old Wellington, it was packed with complex camera equipment; but whereas the Wellington was always somewhere in the stream of traffic, the helicopter was more like a dog sitting down in the middle of a busy highway. He could see its red and yellow blades chopping up swaths of the faint white haze 1000 feet below them. The Wellington had almost nothing but cameras along both sides of its geodetic body; big gaps in its skin were filled with lenses and cameramen wrapped up like polar explorers.

"Kevin. I can't hear you," Sherman suddenly said.

"Because I'm not talking," Kerr said offhandedly.

"All right. Everybody calm down," Sherman shouted. "I know we're all het up, as usual, but this is the last day of formation flying, and if we do it right, we're through. First the old peel off. Helmut. Remember, right to left. And, Kev, you from left to right. Then, when you come up and reform, you both come in with your flights under the Wellington and over the chopper, face to face. Helmut, you go over Kevin; and, Kevin, your lot go under the 'smitts.' And remember your camera buttons. OK? Come in...."

"All clear," Kerr said.

"Verstand ..." he heard from the laconic German.

"And, for Christ's sake, please, please try to keep the camera positions in mind. Just be that much of actors--otherwise, it's all money down the drain."

Kerr heard Helmut say something in German but did not understand.

"OK. Take your positions and wait till I count you down to zero. And no anticipating. Good luck, you rickety old bastards; and, lor Christ's sake, be careful."

They had been flying around in a perfect circle while helicopter and Wellington took up their exact positions and Jack Sherman talked everybody into place again. Now Kerr leveled out his flight and swung inland high over the foothills, and he wondered again, as he had every day, how this molded, upward landscape and these exotic red hills and lovely green vines could be made to look on the screen like an English spring landscape. But the experts were sure that all their lenses that pointed down were so focused that they would never show the earth long enough or in that much detail.

He began a long and slow turn and watched the Messerschmitts do their first act of the day. Helmut took his flight into that 30-degree sector between Wellington above and helicopter below; and, knowing perfectly where the cameras of one would not foul up and photograph the cameras of the other, he chose his moment and then peeled off in a perfect sample of the maneuver that was a model for the others to follow. Right to left.

"One, two, three...." He could hear Sherman counting aloud for the next man to flip over and upend the whole horizon.

Again: "One, two. three...."

Sherman was counting to satisfy his nerves, because only two of the Messerschmitts had working radios--Helmut's and his American tail man's. The rest had simply collapsed to the point of being irreparable. Kerr's own flight had had three working radios when they took off this morning from St. Raphaël, but one had gone, and it was stupidly his tail man's--Stan MacGregor's. He had thought of telling Purdell, number three, with the good radio to go around to replace MacGregor, but he would sooner have a good pilot at the end of the line than a mediocre one, and MacGregor was an artisan who kept all his movements clean and workmanlike.

"One, two, three ... four, five.... You bastard, you're late. What's the matter with you? Helmut," Sherman shouted angrily. "You'll have to do it again. Your tail man was maybe five seconds late. Look at him; he's way out of sight. You'll have to do it again, after the Hurricanes."

"You tell him," Kerr heard Helmut say in his American-German-English. "He is your man Bob Beker."

Bob Beker was one of the three Americans Sherman had brought with him into this, hoping, no doubt, to have some (continued on page 159)Unfinished Soldiers(continued from page 78) recognizable and controllable influence; but though two were good pilots, the third, like Purdell the New Zealander, was rotten. But it wasn't Bob Beker. Beker was one of the best aerobatic pilots Kerr had ever seen.

"You son of a bitch, Bob," Sherman shouted and crackled. "What happened to you?"

"My mixture control jammed," he heard Beker reply. "I can't get it up high enough, but I'm undoing that silly, bloody friggin' pin that acts like a governor."

He listened to Helmut telling Beker what to do and to take no risks if the control failed to pass the little gate, because they wanted no accidents.

"Yes, for Christ's sake," Sherman echoed. "No accidents."

There were no accidents. Their 40 minutes, even 50 minutes of flying time were absorbed by repetitions of their planned maneuvers, mostly copies of earlier sequences that had been bad. Finally, Kerr and the German went through a head-on, guns-blazing sequence; and Kerr literally felt the hot wash of Helmut's exhausts as their planes met from opposite directions and passed each other with gun ports shivering realistically and tapes burned to ribbons as their split-second contest ended. Originally, they had been too unsure to make this close enough, but now they both were confident enough, not only of themselves but of each other, to make it so close that Jack Sherman shouted enthusiastically: "Jesus Christ! Do it again."

They did it again, as if it were an Anglo-German announcement of faith in each other. In fact, the real product of this peculiar marriage of their trust would come tomorrow, when Helmut Muehler and Kerr would involve themselves, just the two of them, in an unscripted and unrehearsed and totally unplanned contest representing some incredible finale in the unseen story.

It was Sherman's idea that it would be done on the last day, as if he knew that by then the two principals would be at their peak of understanding and would give him the unmatched flying of two old hands who knew exactly what the other thought in the air, even though they didn't know each other at all on the ground.

At first Kerr had demurred at the scheme, because there were better aerobatic fliers than himself in his group, and younger men, too. But two days before, Jack Sherman, stirring a glass of whiskey and water with a long and still-grimy finger that went around and around the lump of ice, had explained his American psychology to them.

"I know all about those aerobatic boys like Bob Beker. They do everything the way a prostitute makes love. They're out on their own. All that egoism and mechanism mixed. If you get two like that mixing it, what you really have is a contest of prima donnas, which is what I don't want. Anyway, they'd kill each other for sure, because they wouldn't have the kind of coordination that you two wily old bastards have got."

Helmut had bowed sardonically to that remark, but Sherman had ignored the response and concentrated on his own requirements.

"What I want is the real and original thing. The best! You've got about fifty minutes' gas, but if you can keep it up for twenty minutes, in tight, not way out and away but always in tight, right in at each other, that'll give us what we need, which will probably be at most four minutes of screen time, even though it'll be one of the biggest things in the film. I'm counting on getting it all from you guys in those twenty bloody minutes of the best flying you've ever done, so that nobody's going to be sitting in their seats when they watch it."

Kerr had simply nodded in his unsmiling, unbothered sort of way, but the German had said from the nagging logic of his German soul: "And who's supposed to go down?"

"You mean which one of you is going to win?" Sherman laughed at the German and said: "I should have expected that from you, Helmut, but you'll have to see the film to find out. You just break it off when I tell you. We've already got enough victors and victims on film to finish it off in the editing."

This reluctance to tell them how their flying fitted into the film story was a deliberate policy of the Daytona Film Company. Who the characters in the story were, and what happened to them, and how their own flying roles fitted into the drama they would only know when they saw the epic, which was being made in rivalry to a similar one being filmed in Spain, not France. The film company had even kept the "English" and "German" units separated. The "English" were based on an old French navy airport at St. Raphaël; 20 kilometers away, the "Germans" were flying from La Bocca, the pretty little airport near Cannes. It was Sherman who brought to them each evening the outline for the next day's flying; and though someone else handed them to Sherman, it was he who made the sequences flyable and filmable, and Sherman not only did it well, he worried about the pilots and insisted on their keeping to the prepared flying maneuvers, so that there would be no accidents. Tomorrow would be different, but only because the German and the Englishman needed no instruction in safety, because they were two men who knew how to look after themselves.

"OK, you guys," Kerr heard Sherman's voice. "Believe it or not, we're through. You can all go home now. But when you walk away from your aircraft, don't take half the bloody thing with you as a souvenir, and leave your authentic flying kits with the wardrobe man. OK?"

Several voices made pleasant but obscene comment.

"And don't forget our party tomorrow night at the Ermitage du Riou in La Napoule," Sherman went on. "That's when we'll wrap it up in gin. And no nonsense flying between here and home. We want the planes intact, and no accidents. We've all survived the greatest Battle of Britain ever, thanks to God and Helmut and Kevin and myself...."

There was a secondary relief in that for the three principals, because it meant an extra $5000 each in "no accident" bonuses for preserving these old and valuable crocks. That made it $15,000 clear for the six weeks that had gone over into eight weeks. And that for Kerr meant a big change in his life; and if his wife would let him have a clear and unbothered six months, he might emerge with something new that, at 50, his future might depend on.

"I'll join your wingman, Helmut," Kerr said into his mask.

"Ok," the German replied in that military voice.

Kerr caught up with the Messerschmitts and joined the flight at the end of the queue. He was going back to La Napoule with them because he would spend the night there; and tomorrow, early, he and Helmut would take off together and commit themselves to the finale above the sun, above the sunrise, above the blue mist that lifted off these green vines and purple-red hills every morning. Kerr trimmed the Hurricane and took a notebook out of his Irvin jacket (authentic) pocket and began to write about work. What he had learned about flying in his middle age was the creativity of it, as distinct from the specter of a dream, which was what most writers made of flying. They had missed, or, rather, confused the point. In fact, it was somewhere in this sphere of workmanship that he and the German met and comprehended each other. They had made that particular contact without a word being spoken or a signal being exchanged. But Kerr was doubtful if the German was thinking as he himself was thinking--that it all needed inspired explanation.

• • •

The German was not thinking of their mutual artisanship. Helmut was counting his money and thinking unhappily of a lost war and regretting both and confirming that, with his $15,000, he would finally go home. After 27 years, he would walk across the frontier in Berlin and simply take a train for Weimar. And thereafter....

"If they eat me, they eat me," he thought morosely.

He had done nothing wrong, nothing criminal. He had once been a soldier, but half the population of the Eastern Zone had been soldiers, so there was nothing frightening in that. Only his father ... his father.... Sometimes a stupid heritage like that made it almost a curse being German. It was always a preoccupation, the sort of thing the American and men like Kerr did not have to think about. Did Kerr have to bother one way or the other about being English? He doubted it. In fact, Kerr had that almost insufferable English manner of being so sure of himself that he didn't have to bother much about anything, which was, of course, a lie, because the past eight weeks had shown that he was a careful and professional pilot to his bootlaces, and Helmut was grateful to him for that. In fact, underlying that casual yet irritable English indifference was a serious man.

"There's the Frenchman," Helmut heard the Englishman's voice in his knobbly little earphones now.

Helmut looked up, but he hardly needed to, because the French navy Mirage flew stormily along the line of Messerschmitts, almost riding along on their cockpit canopies; and as the jet pulled up vertically, the hot rush of its turbulent engine drove the Messerschmitt down 50 feet in its jet exhaust. In 30 more seconds, the Frenchman was out of sight.

"I hope he didn't have eggs for breakfast," the Englishman said.

Helmut understood. "Exactly," he replied seriously.

That four-g or five-g force would push the stomach down into your abdomen and then, when the gs were relaxed, would bring the taste of your undigested breakfast up into your mouth, where it lingered until you were able to get down and taste something else. They ought to make a rule that such flying should only be allowed an hour after eating, like swimming. Particularly for the young. How many of those young Greeks, to whom Helmut had taught the rudiments, had arrived at the crack of dawn on a heavy breakfast, and high over the beauties of their classic landscape and in the air above the old Olympiads, had been violently sick into their helmets. At 30,000 feet, that could cost you your life; in fact, it had killed two of them in a collision when one boy had brought up his stupidly greasy, Greek breakfast and crashed into his neighbor as he did so.

The thought almost made Helmut ill. He had ulcers now--the result of 32 years of this passionate marriage to airplanes and of trying to instill the German mind into pilots who did not like Germans, and certainly did not behave like Germans.

"Helmut. Can you see that Frenchman coming back on your left from about nine o'clock?" the Englishman said.

Helmut had already seen the speck. Almost immediately, it was burning up the air over them, as if it had simply changed places in time and space. The Frenchman must have been near the maximum, on the very border line of the sound barrier.

"Idiot," the Englishman said dispassionately, but he was obviously worried.

The German was looking at the rest of his flight through his canopy mirror. They were raggedly uneven, not liking this situation at all. They certainly did not want to be the target for a Frenchman's sporting life, and Helmut knew that what worried the Englishman was the same thing that worried him.

"Keep in," he ordered the others, and wiggled his wings insistently as the signal to those without radio to tighten up the line.

"But listen, Helmut, we're sitting ducks," the young American complained.

"It will be worse if we separate," Helmut insisted.

His unmilitary pilots were still calm enough and unangry enough to obey; but they were not soldiers and there would be no shame or punishment in it for them if they did break away. He was amazed that they had stayed in line so long, and he felt that it was partly due to the Englishman sitting tightly on their tails, almost herding them together behind him.

"There is Le Trayas," the English voice said in his ear.

The Englishman was really telling him that they were halfway.

Helmut relaxed again, although he disliked being reminded that he was halfway to anything. In two months' time, he would be 50, which signified the halfway stage in life, even though your chances of living to 100 were remote. In the past few years, however, as he had approached 50, he had felt it to be a natural warning: an announcement, if you read it right, that life now was almost desperately in your own hands, because time was starting to go down, instead of forever continuing to go up.

That, as much as anything, was what had decided him to go home. He was nearly 50 and he had lived too long with the world's recollection--not of German defeat but of German skill and strength and discipline and order and soldierliness and passionate hardness. That had been his livelihood outside Germany for almost 27 years, and he was finally tired of the deception. Now he not only wanted to go back to Germany and stay there, he wanted to go back to where he had come from, to Weimar, which was in the Eastern Zone. And though he knew it was an unnecessary extension of his problem to imagine that he could simply walk into the Eastern Zone and say he had a right to be there, it was the very fact that it was difficult that seemed to make it necessary. He was not afraid of that kind of self-discipline. He had lived with discipline all his life, all Germans had. It was the foundation stone of Germany's 1000-year history; it was in the depths of their myths, their music and their religion; but in the Eastern Zone they no doubt had some other sort of image of it: Russians, communism, Ulbricht, and look what had happened to John, the double spy. But he was determined to go home. On his 50th birthday, he would simply drive to the Berlin check point and announce to those peasant policemen, who at least looked like Germans with guns strapped to their shoulders, that he had been born and brought up in Weimar and that he simply wanted to go back there.

"And what will you do there, Herr Muehler?" some functionary was sure to ask him cynically, or suspiciously, or simply unbelieving.

"I don't know," he would insist stubbornly. "But I will find something."

"He's back, Helmut," the Englishman warned. "Off my right wing...."

The Frenchman was coming in broadside on this time, nose down in a shallow high-speed dive. The problem was whether to anticipate him going under them, over them, behind them or in front of them. Helmut wiggled his wings quickly to warn the others to keep formation. He flew on, flapping like a butterfly to keep them in, but he knew they were all watching that blue-black jet that looked like a fat little bumblebee.

"Achtung!" Helmut said in involuntary German. "He's passing in front, twelve o'clock."

Almost by instinct, he knew that the Frenchman would swing off in a skidding turn as he reached them; and almost as Helmut said it, the Mirage began the high-speed turn that, for a frightening moment, looked as if it would wipe the jet's belly right along the line of Messerschmitts. But that chipped underside flashed by Helmut's starboard wing like an arrested frame in a moving picture. It was there and it was gone, and Helmut's Messerschmitt almost tipped over in the wash.

"Jesus Christ!" the American shouted into the phone. "If I ever get hold of that bastard, I'll beat his brains out."

"We'll go down," Helmut said into the Bakelite at his lips, and he lifted his tail for a moment to tell the others, and then adjusted the trim as he pulled back the throttle with his middle finger, and the engine softened and the nose dipped and he changed the pitch and began the descent. He was calculating on getting onto the sea way out, but in line for the approach to that tight little airfield at Cannes. It was a northerly breeze, so the approach would be in from the water. The Frenchman would probably make one more playful pass, but at his speed, he would be afraid of that hard wall of the sea.

"I suppose this is like the real thing for you, old man," the young American said in Helmut's ear. He had acquired the "old man" from Sherman, a slightly mocking jest of the relaxed race to the stiff and self-conscious German. "Keep the old formation flying...."

The boy laughed, but he had made a point. For a moment, Helmut had forgotten that they were play-acting, because the need for a little discipline had restored an old reality. He was still the unfinished soldier. The War was not yet out of him, because his 32 years of calculated Germanism had kept it alive. In fact, it had been very useful when he was teaching the youth of Spain, Portugal, Greece, Israel and Egypt the real German basis of combat: that you must always think yourself the victor, never the victim. In pilotage, that meant you must never let an opponent get away; and if by some accident he got on top, you must never flee, never run, but invent a way of reversing the roles. Invent! Invent!

"There's that French bastard again."

The Mirage pilot made his last attack from sea level. The Messerschmitts were too low, so the Frenchman could not pass under them; but when he burned up the air over their cockpits at 800 kilometers per hour, the hot air bounced off the sea, and Helmut's cockpit was suddenly covered in spray that blinded him until he pulled the top back.

"Not bad," he heard the American boy laugh appreciatively--youth to youth.

But it was all over now, and there had been no accident; and as the others broke away to land, Helmut climbed and watched the Englishman slip a little to lose altitude, so that he did not waste time or energy, and in a few moments he was on the ground before the others. A serious man. He, too, must be about 50, and what had his life come to? Certainly not the problem of being German without Germanism.

" 'I'll be loving you, always....' "

The exuberant American was singing as he took the Messerschmitt up in a slow vertical climb, wafting it in the air in time to his singing until it stood upright, poised for a moment tail down. Helmut was astonished. He had never seen a Messerschmitt in that position, and he did not see how it would recover itself at that altitude.

" 'Always....' "

The Messerschmitt fell beautifully forward and slightly to one side in a perfect and miraculous recovery. It was too much for Helmut.

"Wunderbar!" he said aloud.

He was filled with admiration for the wonderful German plane that could get itself out of that situation; and as he dropped his flaps and undercarriage, he nursed his own plane in gently and appreciatively. Tomorrow he would end all his flying with this old and wonderful little plane, and he would take his $15,000 and end all that lying German Wanderlust--that false German word for the dream of mythical golden hills and deep Gothic valleys. He would discipline it, all of him; otherwise it would be too late and he would be too old to know anything else but failure.

• • •

In the evening, the German and the Englishman sat outside under the vines at one of La Mère Terrat's tables, eating with the care--or was it the disinterest?--of two lean, introverted, middle-aged and rather laconic and withdrawn men for whom food was a necessity, even a pleasant one, but not a religion. Maybe, Kerr decided as he noted their similar restraint with food, maybe that was simply their mutual Anglo-Saxonism, as distinct from the French, who gave pagan devotion to the table. Nonetheless, the meal had been relaxed, even without the help of liquor. They would be flying tomorrow, and they had learned that much about alcohol to the brain since the War, and he wondered how many pilots had been killed in combat--not for inferior flying but because they had had one or two hard drinks the night before. Personally, he could do without it anyway.

"Would you share a small cognac?" the German said to him.

"If you like," Kerr said, surprised.

"I don't often drink anymore," the German explained. "I have ulcers. But we ought to drink to the end of all this performance. Fix und fertig, as we say in German."

"Why not?" Kerr said.

Kerr was glad enough to close it by clinking glasses with the German in silent relief that the worst was over, and that after tomorrow they could take their money and go. They did not talk about it, and Kerr doubted if either of them would say a word to each other about flying. What they had talked about during the meal was the world's cities they knew and the unfailing similarity, in the long run, of all terrain and weather and people, not simply of nations but of continents. The only essential difference, they decided, was that of wealth and poverty. It was also amazing to discover, as they talked, how often their paths had crossed; but whereas Helmut had remained something of a military flier (though not entirely), Kerr himself had been a plane deliverer, a flying surveyor, a flying miner, a flying chauffeur, a flying measurer and a dozen other things that a pilot could get an aircraft into, though always for someone else. The one thing he guessed from Helmut was that the German had never been an airline pilot, and neither had Kerr. That was one thing he had always avoided.

"What will you do now?" he asked the German.

"I am going home to Weimar," Helmut said in his rather ominous way.

"Your family?"

"No. I have an American wife in Texas, but I gave her all my money and left everything there. Finished...."

"Bad luck," the Englishman said, fiddling with a bowl of wet cherries.

"Weimar," Helmut added, "is in the Eastern Zone. I have not been there since 1942."

"I see," Kerr replied. He only half saw, but he did not question further. If the German wanted to tell him more, he would.

"Tomorrow will also be the end of all my flying, I think," Helmut added.

"I suppose it has to come sometime," Kerr said slowly. "Are you sorry?"

"Of course," the German said abruptly. "But I have finished with it."

That was all, and though it looked for a moment as if the German would say more, he asked instead what Kerr would do.

Kerr had lived too long in his own skin, in the private and untouched quarters he had locked himself up in for the past five or six years, to worry about a question like that. He had a thousand lying answers ready that would politely satisfy but say nothing. But he felt like telling this German the truth, as if that peculiar adjustment they had found in the air was, in fact, a genuine and rare sort of understanding that continued with their feet on the ground.

"Income tax will take about half my fifteen thousand dollars," he said, "but with what I have left, and a bit more I've put aside, I want to see if I can write something."

"About airplanes?"

"About flying."

The German did not force a laugh or make a joke about profitable adventure stories for boys, although Kerr- had braced himself for it. Helmut simply nodded and blinked his hard blue eyes, as if he, too, were waiting for more.

"I don't mean romantically," Kerr added with difficulty. "I'm not Saint Exupéry or Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Actually, flying now is work. And if there's any point or pleasure in it, that's where it begins...."

The German simply nodded again and signed the bill that would be added to whatever millionaire arrangement Jack Sherman (who stayed at the five-star Ermitage du Riou, a little farther on) had with La Mère Terrat to feed his "German" wing of fliers out of season. The other "German" pilots were eating on the other side of the terrace, and Kerr realized that Helmut Muehler was no more part of them than he himself was part of the five "English" pilots he had shared the Bella Vista Hotel with in St. Raphaël. These boys probably mistook the German's standoffishness for a remnant of his militarism, just as the "English" wing took his own indifference to them as a sort of professional contempt. But it was neither militarism nor contempt; it was, if they only knew it, simply age.

"Let us walk to the sea," the German said, as if the sea were miles away. It was just across the road.

Under the pale night shadows of the old Château de la Napoule, they leaned on the stone wall and looked across the little sandy bay at the glow of Cannes, which was not in its full, blistering summer light because it was not the season yet. It was spring, and in the daytime the beaches were empty and the hotels only half full. Sherman had chosen his moment down there very well. In fact, it was only now that Kerr was able to appreciate their American "flight directions manager," who had obviously protected his fliers from all kinds of ignorant interference from the wild world of film makers. Even Sherman's American psychology was right. It was Sherman who had said to the two of them: "Tomorrow is your big day, so I'm going to leave you two children to have dinner together and get to know each other a bit. You deserve it." He was right, and obviously their eight weeks of flying tricks had gone very smoothly, because under that flushed American skin was a man who knew other men and respected them, despite the façade of soap and smoothness and often execrable good nature.

Helmut had lit a cigar after offering one to Kerr, who said he had given up smoking. "Are you married?" Helmut asked him.

"Yes."

"Englishwoman?"

"Yes."

"You have a Haus and children?"

"Yes, two daughters."

"It's very difficult not to make mistakes about marriage," Helmut commented sadly, taking the cigar out of his mouth and then putting it back again, as if he had said everything on that subject. But he said between his teeth: "And did you have good luck or bad luck?"

"A bit of both," Kerr answered casually.

Perhaps that was the truth of any marriage, he decided, and the real differences only began when the fortune ran out. That was about to happen to him, if it had not already been happening, because what he wanted of his wife now was something she was probably incapable of giving him. They had had their troubles. Who hadn't? And economically they had been through some very bad moments. But he had managed to give Katy a cottage-cum-house near Princes Risborough, a garage, a field big enough to keep a calf in (which she did), central heating, and all the manufactured refinements of English semi-country, near-city life, with the children (whom he hardly knew) in a good local school: a life that, with a Mini, served a whole swath of similar Englishwomen who wanted to live that near-London life, which brought them nothing except eating up the countryside in a hot little motorcar less than 30 miles from London. That was what Katy wanted, and that was what he had gladly paid for with ten years of flying dirty, dusty and often dangerous surveys over Libyan deserts and Red Sea coast lines, and down the thousand wind-swept valleys of oil-bearing, rain-making New Guinea. He was a pilot, and Katy was pleased with that, too. It fitted everything she did, and it also arranged his long absences and her satisfied restraint and her completeness without him.

But now it was he who wanted a moment to himself, and he did not want it in some perfect little English halfway house. He needed to be naked and alone somewhere, so that he could assemble all those hard-wrung words he had accumulated in the past five years. He was a lonely man, anyway, and he knew it and even wanted to be that. It was the price of habit: too many years of isolation in gray little compartments over vast areas of nothingness. But he had learned late in middle age that he was not at all the kind of man he had been pretending to be. He had discovered one day, without any apparent reason, that he was living his life behind a thick character disguise of casual disinterest, as if his profession were all he was and the rest vacant and empty. But apparently he was also another man as well, and the difference began to appear only as youth began to disappear. It was this that had been getting a crablike grip on him now, at 49.

But he knew that Katy would take it as a personal blow if he gave up that wearable façade of his profession, which was, in fact, the foundation of her own normal life. What he wanted to do now would be something so abnormal to her that she would probably say incredulously: "I can't believe it. It just doesn't fit you, darling." It was therefore going to be a matter of....

"What I think...." He had forgotten the German, who was saying to him now: "What I think about the English is that you have good order and no mess."

"Not so true these days," Kerr said, dragging himself back to this foreigner.

"But you are better than the Germans," Helmut said slowly. "Every German is thinking all the time, all his life, of what we were and of what we should be."

"I don't think we're much different," Kerr insisted.

"But you do not believe in myths." Helmut waved his cigar angrily across the French sky.

"Maybe not," Kerr said. "But, like Germany, we're also losing something we always had."

Helmut sighed. "Maybe it's a good thing," he said. "Maybe everybody should lose everything. Then we could all start again without any lies."

"You think so?" Kerr said.

They watched a DC-8 making its long approach to Nice airport, its wing and tail and belly lights blinking alternately, like a man winking one eye and then the other. The point was, of course, to distinguish man from the stars. Kerr mentally wrote that down as he watched the plane, knowing everything that the pilot was doing in the cockpit, knowing that, as with all night landings, there was going to be a moment before he touched down when he seemed to lose contact with everything: with light and dark and earth and air. That little black grip of the wheels digging into the cement would be a relief, because the most satisfying thing about flying was still the reality of the ground when you came back to it.

He guessed that the German, staring at the sky full of Oriental stars, was also thinking about the DC-8, and it amused Kerr as well as surprised him to think that they were two serious men who had not only finished with the frivolous but, in their clumsy way, were probably beginning a genuine friendship based on what they didn't have to say to each other, rather than on the things they did say. The only thing lacking was warmth, which, almost the moment Kerr thought of it, the German supplied.

"I think, my friend," he said rather sadly, "that we should be careful tomorrow. It would be a mistake if we killed each other now."

That was suddenly a tired man talking, and Kerr knew that they had both been hiding their real exhaustion from each other, although it was not physical exhaustion. They both seemed simply to be bringing something of themselves to an end, as if tomorrow would be a reluctant finale to their youth before they tried to rearrange themselves in some other way.

• • •

It was a classic, rosy-pink dawn when they took off for Fréjus from the dewladen airport and climbed in the early-morning air that was so light and still that they hardly seemed to be in it. Kerr was flying a few feet from Helmut's right wing, a little back, a little inside, so that the two men were physically quite close, and the onus was on Kerr to anticipate the German, which he did almost without thinking. Once Helmut turned around and a brief, rare smile warned Kerr that he was going to begin to turn inland from the sea, but Kerr had already anticipated the moment. They did not bother with their radios, neither man had his mask strapped on yet.

But reluctance was already making this difficult for Kerr. He had to think himself back into the rhythm and intent of their eight-week charade, and it was far more difficult now than it had been yesterday with five other men lined up behind him. The play, in fact, had gone out of it, and so had the work, and today was going to be an effort.

"Hello, you guys," Sherman's voice said. "You're four seconds late, Helmut," he joked. "What a fabulous bloody morning."

"Did you tell that Frenchman to keep away?" Kerr asked him.

"I screamed down the telephone at that French commandant last night and told him to leave us a bit of the sky free of all that juvenile arseplay."

"You will have to warn us," Helmut told Sherman. "With just two of us, we may not see him in time."

"I'll keep my eyes open," Sherman said. "Don't worry."

They were still climbing steadily, and Kerr came back to the business of flying, almost burying his head in the cockpit to build up his interest and commitment. The metallic signs of wear inside the cockpit were comfortably familiar--its thin layer of green paint was scratched and chipped and patches of alloy showed through. It was, he insisted (as if he had not fully developed the theory properly), a place of work. The simple and well-organized instrument panel kept the record in clocks and dials and gauges of what he was doing up there. "Doing" was not quite the right word; in fact, he had not found the right word yet. What he had tried to keep in his flying, which was why he had kept to the variations of comparatively small planes and the inventiveness of work-horse flying, was the creativity of it. And though he knew that now, it had taken him many years to realize why he had chosen that kind of flying. Any flight, in fact, had a considerable degree of art in it, because it not only had a beginning, a middle and an end like a good conventional piece of theater, but the best decorations of it (a good landing) were almost brushlike, and the identity you gave to it was always your own. He had known what sort of workman Helmut was after half an hour of flying with him--the German understood detail, even though he had refined his flying down to the strictest considerations of what he wanted to do. The edges of his maneuvers were clearly defined, his lack of waste was something that might have seemed mechanical or too automatic to a younger man; but applying his own artisan theory to pilotage, Kerr knew he was watching a profound and organized reflection of what must be two of the soundest traits in the German character--a clear sense of finish and a hatred of disorder.

The little Messerschmitt itself, with its square, workmanlike silhouette and clipped wings and the wonderful way its wheels came up like a musician's hands when it took off--it was really a product of something far better than the brutal system that had used it. Just as his own Hurricane was a more subtle compromise between the practical and the imaginative--the whole concept lighter in appearance and form than the German plane, with something almost subtly unmilitary about it, as if it were really built to fly rather than to be used as a weapon.

"I can now see you guys," Sherman's voice said. "You look as if you're stuck together, like copulating butterflies. Can't you get any closer?"

That was a compliment.

"I now see you," Helmut replied.

"So do I," Kerr said, a necessary confirmation.

Another few moments and they would be over their battlefield, or, rather, in it, because they were no longer pinned to earth by the legs but were more like fighting fish, uninhibited by any dimension. Kerr took out his notebook and made his last notes before they began their work. He had to write everything down up there, because it all came so clearly to him. When he was on the ground, he lost it all, which was why he needed to take his money and isolate himself to see if he could simulate the flavor and remember the discoveries.

"Don't forget," Sherman was saying. "You can go up an extra five thousand feet" (they had asked for that) "but don't go lower than the helicopter, and just keep it going until I tell you to break off. And don't use up all that fake ammunition on each other in the first five minutes, and don't get back into the habit of using your camera button like a gun button. Ten to twenty seconds for the camera is what we need. Can you both see the helicopter?"

"Yes," they both said, almost together.

"OK. Then break off, and don't worry about the Frenchman."

Kerr saw Helmut lift his face, smile and wave and he waved back as he lifted the Hurricane out of the inside slot of the Messerschmitt's wing and did a slow, wide turn that took him in the opposite direction to Helmut. He gave himself 45 seconds, and then he turned again and saw Helmut also turning back, a speck, and they began with the opening bow to many of their previous performances--the guns-blazing confrontation.

He saw the Messerschmitt's little bee nose and held his course so that, in effect, they were dead on the same line and at the same height; and at the last unmeasured second, he clipped his nose a little as Helmut lifted the Messerschmitt, and their judgment was so fine that he knew if he had put his hand out he could have touched the belly of the Messerschmitt as it roared over. They both had barely deflected their course, and they heard the appreciative Sherman say, "Jesus...."

The inventor and the brush artist were thereafter at war.

Kerr climbed instantly, as he knew Helmut would, but he knew that the Hurricane could just outclimb the Messerschmitt, and he did not simply aim for altitude but hoped to catch Helmut on the top of his climb. He "bent" the Hurricane over and flew almost on his back, upward, until he saw that upside-down view of the Messerschmitt; and though there was a moment when he had Helmut in his sights, there would have been no chance for a deflection shot before the Messerschmitt fell away from the climb and tumbled out of sight.

He knew that the Messerschmitt was better and more controllable in a dive and could turn tighter and, because it was heavier, could pick up more speed going down. That was what Helmut would use instead of altitude, so Kerr flipped over on his back and followed blindly without knowing where Helmut was, following by instinct, hoping to catch sight of the German before he came up again or swung around behind him. He went down almost vertically, but because he did not want to lose too much altitude, he pulled out with about six gs on the aircraft, and he blacked out as this reversal of gravity pulled the blood from his brain. When that compressed and dizzy, gray moment passed, he felt the Hurricane protesting at the stress, and his controls were like bits of old string; but he suddenly saw Helmut, already out of his second climb and turning over on him from that high blue bowl where the little Messerschmitt looked more like a thrown stone than a plane.

"Get out of this one, Kevin," he heard Sherman laugh in his earphones.

He realized that he had been hearing a steady stream of Sherman talking to the helicopter in his earphones, but he had not really heard a word. Being addressed himself was a sudden shock and a good one, because he knew he was being a little slow.

He just had time to force the Hurricane into a climbing roll, and though it was dangerous with those limp controls, he felt the Hurricane go over. As he was on his back, he pulled the nose over and down, and he knew that he had avoided Helmut and was, in fact, well in behind him.

"Merde!"

Sherman was making continuous noises of pleasure and astonishment in their ears, but both men knew that it was not perfect flying, because they were still trying to overcome their lack of real interest.

But for ten minutes, they performed the best of the classic maneuvers of aerial combat, getting better and better; and because they were confining it to the limited perimeter of the cameras, there was a kind of compression to it that made it seem even more spectacular. Every climb was more vertical, every dive more deadly-looking, every turn tighter, every swinging roll or half roll and large and small looping reversal was the work of men who could do exactly what they wanted to do with an airplane. Only rarely did they manage to fire any of their fake, burning cannon shots into the other; although that was, after all, the point, because success in combat depended not only on the tenacity and inventiveness and experience of the pilot but also on his ability to shoot well at a fast-moving target. One of the first things that had frightened Kerr in real combat was the realization that he had not been trained to shoot properly, whereas the Germans were excellent shots. And what made the gun button fascinating now was that since the War, Kerr had become a fairly good wing shot with a 12 bore, and he had often longed to see whether it had made him any better in the air--something he might find out now in this intimate and concentrated flying with a dedicated perfectionist like Helmut. They compressed and twisted and tied up their air streams in tighter and tighter knots of brilliant flying, and they heard Sherman announcing in their ears: "I'm going to make sure you guys get an extra thousand bucks each, just for this crazy bloody performance."

But a few minutes later, they did not seem to hear him when he told them to bring it to an end.

"Break off," he was telling them. "We've got enough now, and I don't want one of you to start cracking up under pressure."

They took no notice. Helmut, at that moment, was spiraling upward in a repetitive roll, almost vertical. He was avoiding what was really an outside loop, which Kerr had just come out of with a brief moment for his sights to cut the German in two, if his shooting had been good.

"Listen, you guys," Sherman was appealing, "will you please break it up so that we can all go home?"

There seemed to be a touch of panic in Sherman's voice, as if he realized that the German and the Englishman had abandoned contact with him and were engaged now in something that had nothing to do with him. Sherman tried again, but gave up and watched the Messerschmitt fall like a leaf onto what looked like a perfectly simple but fast-curving turn by the Hurricane. When it looked as if the German had the drop on him, Kerr spun the Hurricane around and around in a series of barrel rolls that came to an end when he went halfway over a roll and simply switched the plane back on the side he had come over on, and the effect was startling.

It was then that Sherman saw the Frenchman--a delicate dark-blue drop gradually transforming itself into a stiff-winged phoenix diving on two old but graceful ducks.

"That bloody Frenchman's back," he shouted at his pilots. "Look out...."

He knew that neither the Englishman nor the German heard him. There was no pause in their entanglement. The Hurricane was curling over at the top of the loop, so that for a moment the two planes were flying belly to belly before they pulled away from each other in a wide skidding turn and, as if in an agreed finale, they did what they had started out with. They were coming back at each other in the guns-blazing formula, head on.

"The Frenchman ..." Sherman screamed at them.

The French Mirage plummeted down between the two planes as if it were trying to skin their noses; and yet even as the Mirage cut between them, Sherman knew that neither the German nor the Englishman had seen it or heard his warning. In any case, it didn't matter; because in that last thin layer of air that they had always defined between them, with Helmut going over and Kerr going under, there was no space left; and in their devilish preoccupation with each other, the Hurricane and the Messerschmitt simply smashed into each other nose to nose, wing to wing, cockpit to cockpit, guns to guns, eyes to eyes, so to speak, and in effect cheek to cheek, so that both planes blew up in a hot bubble of flame and then smoke before they fell into pieces of black and burning and tiny fragments in which there was no human portion discernible, no limb or blood vessel left intact.

Sherman, the Korean War pilot, his hands over his earphones as if to blot out a noise he didn't hear, died the same death with both his pilots, and in that poetry that he had kept secretly locked away from the money and the theater and the investment and the vulgarity of his hard life, he knew what had killed them, and it wasn't the Frenchman.

They had been killed, he knew, by their long-dead past. They had been betrayed by the years that were gone, by that awful fascination in the skills of death that had returned and brought them back to the callousness and passion and conviction of their lost youth. They were once again the metal of war, the substance of it and the tool of it and the cattle of it, and finally the victims of it, and they had killed each other in the folly of their Faustlike rejuvenation as soldiers.

Sherman sat down on the cold, geodetic floor of the Wellington, not wanting ever again to look at that innocent blue battlefield; and as he took off the old-fashioned goggles that had kept his eyes locked away from the permanent winds that make birds of these arid lumps of metal, he said sadly to the Wellington pilot: "All right, Pete. Take us home. There's nothing left for us up here."