George Washington's Ghost

‘Alex tells me the CAF are crying out for guys like you. Three square meals a day, a roof over your head, work clothes provided and, according to your big brother, the Service pays top rate for qualified men.’

Bill reckoned that Alex had put the newspaper man up to it.

At the time he could not afford to be prideful; truly, pride had gone before his fall from grace and now, somehow, he had to atone. If not to God, then to himself and his kith and kin, whether they still cared for him or not.

Citing his elder brother as a reference, he had breezed through the CAF’s candidate technician selection process. Notwithstanding, he had still had to do the normal ninety-day induction ‘square bashing’, to endure the interminable kit inspections, the calisthenics and the route marches carrying a combat pack, personal weapons – a rifle, a pistol and a bayonet – and pass a final selection panel to get into the Colonial Air Force Reserve. Most new recruits then got hived off to a training establishment to prepare them for their chosen branch of the service, or in quieter times, discharged straight back into civilian life on a small annual retainer or one-third pay; however, Bill had been posted directly to the newly re-activated Patuxent River Naval Air Station in the Colony of Maryland, located, blissfully in the middle of nowhere, far, far away from his creditors.

At first the CAF had had him working on re-conditioning old engines; mainly antique junkyard power plants like the ones which powered all those Bristol Vs, VIs and VIIs used by weekend pilots and amateur enthusiasts but within a couple of weeks he was transferred onto a crew servicing Goshawk scouts and Sea Eagle torpedo bombers; completely different beasts.

He had not looked back since. A month ago, they had put a third stripe on his sleeve, promoted him Flight Sergeant (Technician) signifying that henceforth he was responsible for his own crew and on Squadron service, for the ‘safe and appropriate maintenance’ of his allocated aircraft.

Assigned to the 4th Colony of Maryland Squadron, flying Goshawk Mk III scouts, he had boarded a rickety transport for the long, bumpy flight down to West Texas in February. In retrospect, he ought to have known that the storm was about to burst. They all ought to have known. On the other hand, the 4th Maryland was very newly formed, in the process of receiving its Goshawks literally as they came off the production lines back East, as soon as they could be ferried to Big Springs.

If the isthmus upon which the Patuxent River Naval Air Station had seemed to be in the middle of nowhere; Big Springs actually was. It was so named because several ‘big springs’ came to the surface within several miles of each other in the middle of what was, and to most intents, remained, extremely sparsely populated former Comanche tribal lands. In the last decade local cattle barons had attempted to fence off huge tracts of grazing land for their cattle; one enterprising rancher had even tried to stake a claim to the de-activated – to all intents, abandoned – airfield some miles north west of the town!

Bill and his crew joked that ranchers like that were the first ones to complain when the CAF did not defend them against the Dagoes!

Life at Big Springs, a ‘forward base’, was very basic.

Everything was under tents and if you walked anywhere at night you had to put your boots on and carry a flashlight. There had been a lot of rattlers slithering about the last few days, little ones, probably just hours old; but it was the scorpions that you really had to look out for. By day the dusty prairie seemed lifeless, at night every kind of malignant biting, poisonous beastie imaginable seemed to come out to play. Coyotes howled through the darkness, insects, and huge, bird-like moths formed in clouds around any source of light. Worst of all, even for men like Bill born and bred on the upper East Coast it was cold, really cold at night; all the more of a shock to the system when as the summer approached during the day a man needed to be a ‘real Englishman’ to be dumb enough to voluntarily go out in the noon day sun.

During the last Border War there had been a few solid, four-square permanent buildings: a boxy control tower, half-a-dozen small hangars – no use whatsoever for the Squadron’s big modern gull-wing Goshawks – and half-civilized barrack and messing accommodation, at Big Springs Air Station. No more. Either the locals had robbed out the wood or it had rotted away. There were still old-fashioned buried fuel tanks in the sand; they too had been abandoned after the last war, and never properly drained so when the ranchers had siphoned off the last of the good stuff, they had left the tanks open to the elements. All the piping was gone, presumably now plumbing the haciendas out in the wilderness.