George Washington's Ghost

However, the Goshawk was a conventional tail-dragger with a small fixed wheel just under the tail. Which was going to be really bad news if the mud was more than a couple of inches deep. If the mud was any deeper the scout was liable to dig in, pivot on its undercarriage and pitch forward onto its nose, where, its prop, still spinning at an ungodly speed would come to a grinding halt as it tore itself, and the engine – right in front of Greg Torrance and his passenger – to pieces. Thereafter, it was fifty-fifty that whatever fuel, and more dangerously, petrol vapour remaining in the main fuel tank, exploded.

In fact, one unsettlingly plausible scenario was that the Goshawk would get stuck in the mud on landing, still travelling at around a hundred miles-an-hour, pitch forward and land upside down, trapping the two men…

Bill Fielding shut his eyes and prayed.

Sometimes, no matter what crisis had afflicted one’s faith there was simply nothing else to do.

In the event, the scout had skidded, aquaplaned in a flurry of red mud and water for about a quarter of a mile – at one time sideways – before it came to a steaming, creaking halt in the scrub about thirty yards from the rain-swollen lake at the western end of the field.

Much to Bill’s surprise… upright.

Bill and his pilot had trudged out to inspect the mud-spattered Goshawk the next morning as the rain – apparently the leading edge of a tropical rainstorm which was sweeping west across the Texan hinterland – periodically a Biblical deluge, lashed down.

Nobody was going to be moving the scout until the ground around it, rapidly turning into a quagmire in which a man sank up to his lower calves with every step, eased and the southern sun had burned down for several days. The two men, and a couple of bedraggled fitters dragooned to accompany them, just took one look at the aircraft and turned away. They had discussed camouflaging the scout but even that was pointless, the Goshawk had already collected so much muck and mire as it skidded to a halt that from the sky it would almost certainly be indistinguishable from the desert and the scrub around it.

It had transpired that Greg Torrance was the senior pilot at Trinity Crossing. Before the war the country aerodrome, as neglected since the last Border War as their previous home – no more than a dirt strip and a few shacks, had been home to a pair of old Bristol Vs the locals used for finding lost cattle and keeping an eye on raiding Indian parties. In the last month the Army had half-heartedly taken over, basing a flight of four R-2 Fleabags, small, slow, unarmed canvas and dope single-seaters which had first taken to the skies nearly forty years ago, and only been retained in service as artillery spotters for no better reason than that the Army could not afford to replace them.

A couple of the Fleabags were still airworthy, as apparently were three of the other nine aircraft which had landed, or crash-landed at the field. It seemed that in recent days at least one Goshawk and one Sea Eagle, had over-flown the strip and decided they would take their chances elsewhere, or in the desert. So, apart from Greg Torrance’s, probably written off Goshawk, what remained of the CAF in the West seemed to be the two Fleabags, and two twin-engine Gamecocks, sturdily built metal skinned biplane scouts of a type which both the newcomers had thought to have been phased out of squadron service over a decade ago.

Returning from inspecting his Goshawk, Greg Torrance had summoned everybody at the field to a meeting in the one, leaking shack large enough to accommodate the thirty-three CAF men, and twenty or so local militiamen at the field. By then he and Bill Fielding were starting to get a better feel for their new home.

The township of Trinity Crossing was about three miles to the south west, straggling along the banks of the Trinity River just above its eastern and western forks. The population of the surrounding country had been, perhaps, around two to three thousand but a lot of people had fled east or into the desert, mostly heading north and east.  It seemed that a company of mounted men, supported by a mortar platoon which had been in transit west before the storm, now guarded the presently flooded ford across the Trinity River which had given the local township its name. These men were, it seemed, under the command of a local ‘old-timer’, a veteran of the last ‘couple of wars’, whom Greg Torrance had determined to set out and find that afternoon once they had ‘got a grip of things at the field’.

The land west of the river tended to flood most springs, although this year the rains had come early. Apparently, every two or three years a tropical rain storm swept the country hereabouts, usually the leading or trailing edge of a dying hurricane which had battered the Gulf coast. Once the storm had passed the desert would bake dry, stone-hard again within days.