IC Roleplaying Thread

[Gesar]

Another poster appeared across Europe and North America, although it likewise reached Australasia and South Africa. Predominantly concentrated around the locales of Iranian embassies and consulates, it could also be found near select churches and areas settled by the survivors of the Armenian diaspora.

COULD THIS BE YOUR CHILDREN?



THE WORD OF CHRIST SAYS "YES"

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28)

TWENTY YEARS AGO, the nations of the world -BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN CHRIST- wept bitter tears and called out in anger for the deaths of the Armenian and Assyrian CHRISTIANS of Turkey and Persia at the hands of the SAVAGE SULTAN, just as he did the Greeks and Bulgarians! Before that, Europe stood together with the NOBLE Persians and BRAVE Arabs in resisting the encroachment of the Turks, who brought ENTIRE EMPIRES to their knees in their perversion of the GODLY Moslem faith.

That's right! Millions of men, women, and children were MURDERED OR STARVED, forced to seek refuge among the soldiers of the Kaiser and King alike, while Persia and the Arabs barely resisted the onslaught themselves. Wives were separated from their husbands and young girls crucified, while the world saw the TURK MENACE dance atop piles of skulls. We were outraged, seeing in them an image of OUR OWN FAMILIES.

WHAT CHANGED? NOTHING!

The LAWS OF GOD are not finite. To this day we remain in BROTHERHOOD with the Christians of the Near East and their allies, who are once more under attack from Istanbul. But DAVID stands strong against the GOLIATH of the old order, promising liberation for Christian, Moslem, and Jew, and now all GOOD CHRISTIAN NATIONS have their back!

DO YOU?

YOUNG CHRISTIAN MEN, the Saint Bartholomew's Brigade needs YOU. GODLY HOUSEWIFE and DUTIFUL WORKER, donate supplies TODAY. STUDENTS, tell your local politicians about OUR CAUSE.

For we have not FORGOTTEN that striving against the horrors of this world will bring SALVATION in the next. We have not FORGIVEN. And with YOUR HELP, the peaceful and progressive Moslems of Egypt and Persia can END the REIGN OF TERROR over our families in the East.

[Coin]

What was the Battle of Blood River?

100 years after the Great Trek, all South African schoolchildren have been learning about this important part of our history. We asked the children primary schools in the Traansvaal to submit their answers to the above question - here are some of the hundreds of answers we received!

Andries Pretorius was a big man who saved lots of people. He was a Trekboer. That means he was a farmer who went on a trek to find farms. When he was finding farms there were lots of bad men. The baddest bad man was called Dingane. He asked a Trekboer called Piet Retief to go get him some cows back, then he would get Natal. Piet got the cattle back and Dingane said he could have land so they could farm without being made English. But then the bad men went even badder and betrayed Piet Retief, so Andries Pretorius came and saved everyone and killed all the bad men. My daddy says that we should all be like the Andries. There were 20'000 bad men who are called Zulu. Pretorius killed them all and the rest ran away and killed each other. I am thankful that there were Trekboers because if there weren't there wouldn't be any South Africa.

- Jan, Class 3

There was a river that all the Trekkers had to cross. It is called Bloodriver because it was where our ancestors beat the Zulus. The Boers were finding new farms so they could live in peace, but they had lots of rivers to cross and they forgot to bring bridges. The Zulus hadn't invented bridges yet or writing and were all running around killing other blacks. They tried to kill all the whites too and lied to a man called Piet Retief, and stole all his cows. This made a man called Pretorius angry so he went to war to defend the women and children and cows from the Zulus. All the Zulus tried to kill us near the Bloodriver because they are stupid and didn't use guns. But the Boers were smart and used guns, and were brave and God was with them and that is why the Afrikaners all know the story of the Battle of Bloodriver and now there is a bridge.

- Catharina, Class 5

Dinga was a black man who murdered Piet Retief and all the children. He was called a Zulu. Miss Botha says murder is a sin and the Zulus did a lot of sinning. They were sinful. The Boers were us and they were good and followed God's word. They all prayed to God and God said yes so then the Zulus all fell into the river when Andries Pretorius came.

- Pieter, Class 2

[CarpeVerpa]

The bitter cold of Petrograd seemed colder still today, though it was not unusually colder. Perhaps, the man thought, this was what it felt like to be a walking corpse. He had already committed to the deed he was about to perform, and he knew there would be no surviving for him, whether he succeded or not. Too open, to public. He had thought about doing it some other way, some way that could conceal his identity, ensure his survival, do something for him.

But no, this was his best chance at doing this. Perhaps, on some level, he wanted to die, as well. One rarely considered political assassination as a course of action when everything was going well in their life. And frankly, nothing was going right for him.

He kept to the shadows, looking about to ensure he wasn't being observed before conducting one last check of his pistol. It had cost him his last few rubles to purchase it, but that was fine. There was no need for rubles where he was going. Everything appeared to be in order. Loaded, everything in place and working condition. If his aim was true, he'd be able to pull this off. Even wounding his target might have been a happy turn. It would be hard for an infirm man to retain his position. But maybe-

His internal monologue was halted by the sound of an approaching vehicle. That had to be him. Taking a deep breath and depositing the pistol in his pocket, the man took one last mental preparation. He had planned this for so long, but now that the day was finally here, he still wasn't sure if he could do it. Had he the nerve to walk up to an unarmed man and shoot him, even if it was Kerensky?

He finally decided. He had to. Emerging from the shadows, he'd walk out to meet the approaching car which housed the man responsible for all of Russia's woes. All of his woes. Hands dipped in his pockets, his hand fingering his pistol, as if to check it were still there. He attempted to look calm and collected, even as his mind raced.

He knew he wouldn't be remembered, even if he did this. All who knew his name were gone, and so history would only know him as a stranger. He hadn't decided to do this for the notoriety, but it was a strange thought, to be so powerful and yet so unknown.

As he took his final steps toward the slowing vehicle, he wondered if God would forgive him for what he was about to do.

[profesoradino2]

"It's a bit wet, isn't it, Fritz?"

The joke flew past the smoking man like a bullet, the calm Caribbean winds and waves, their deep blue colour mesmerising. Suddenly, like coming out of a trance, Fritz responded with his usual dryness.

"Yes... I guess it is."

The other man scoffed, obviously bothered by the lack of humour his crewmate showed. As if trying to revive the already dead conversation, he took a canteen full of schnapps, ready to invite the man to some drinks. As he looked up from his bag, he saw that his crewmate was no longer there.

"Ugh. Classic Fritz."

The alarms sounded. It was time for action. The men boarded their landing crafts, as they approached the coast of Panama, more specifically, the city of Colón, and the prized Panama Canal. As they approached the coast, they felt... underwhelmed. Apart from the Canadian, Australasian and Japanese soldiers already stationed there, there was not a lot of... anything, really; or at least, so they thought.

The calm tropical breeze soon turned into a storm, with raindrops the size of sugar cubes falling on the soldier's helmets and uniforms. Thunder and lightning almost masked the weird noise of shouting coming from one of the Canal's sides. The noise suddenly became louder, louder, and even louder, until it was accompanied by a clearly visible mob of straw hat-wearing men carrying machetes and rifles charging at the confused soldiers.

As confused as they were, the soldiers quickly started shooting at the mob, with machine guns doing most of the work by trimming down the mob to a few men, who quickly surrendered. The international coalition was... shook, to say the least, as they hadn't expected such an attack. Fritz was sitting inside an explosion crater when his crewmate approached him with a canteen full of schnapps, the bodies of Panamanian men littered in the mud in front of them.

"It's a bit wet, isn't it, Fritz?"

"Yes... I guess it is."

[Serenissima]

“Contact!”

“Contact!”

With a brief puff of dark petrol smoke, the Bristol Perseus engine at the front of the Skua jumped to life, starting the entire aircraft vibrating, like a horse chomping at the bit. The deckhand had, thanks to the yells, cleared out of the way of the now-spinning propeller with more than enough time, and gave the pilot a wave and a thumbs-up, a shout unheard over the throbbing sound. Lieutenant-Commander Aiden Moore, of the Royal Canadian Navy’s Fleet Air Arm, nudged the stick and rudder pedals to and fro, checking in the mirror and out of the corners of his eyes that the ailerons were responding correctly. Once this was confirmed, he pulled on his flying-helmet, stuffing his somewhat-too-messy-for-regulation blonde hair underneath it. With the first wartime operations for Canada since 1925, down here in the Caribbean, the Captain was willing to let haircuts slide a little in the interests of a higher sortie rate.

Briefly, in the mirror, he caught the eyes of his navigator, Sub-Lieutenant Grenville Walker, in the opposite mirror that allowed the rear-facing navigator to see forwards. Moore and Walker had never quite got along, or seen eye to eye in the metaphorical sense. Walker was the son of an exile Royal Navy man - just a boy when the revolution had come, tearing him out of boarding school and forcing millions out of their homes for the crime of their birth, their politics, or their religion. A tall, dark-haired boy of nineteen, fortunate enough, at least, to have the space to stretch his legs out beneath the radio in the rear cockpit, it had bred a bitterness in him, and other than their shared love for the Royal Navy, he had little in common with the hardy Nova Scotian scholarship boy - now a grown man, older by a couple of years - who was his pilot and his superior officer. Outside of the cockpits and their briefings, they spoke little. Walker’s clipped, patrician accent came through on the internal telephone.

“Communication check, sir.” he said, dryly, with the slightly insolent air on the ‘sir’ he always gave, a subtle and deniable show of resentment at being ranked lower than a Canadian.

“Loud and clear, Walker.” Moore replied. “Check your gun. The Syndies haven’t brought any aeroplanes to the table yet, but there’ll always be a first time.”

“Yes, sir.” Walker responded, before shutting off the intercom. It was just as well, because the chocks were being tugged out from beneath the aeroplane’s wheels, and the launch signals officer had begun firmly waving his checkered flag. Moore throttled up to WEP, pushing the engine through the gate, and the dive-bomber began rolling down Leviathan’s deck, first slowly, and then at increasing speed. It always felt dicey to him, taking off in these modern monoplanes, heavier, even if more powerful, than the naval biplanes that he’d trained on. With a five-hundred-pound bomb under the fuselage and four fifty-pound anti-infantry bombs under the wings, the Skua took off with less room to spare than he might like.



Yet take-off it did, and he guided his aeroplane into the air, checking back in the mirrors and spotting the other three aircraft of B Flight beginning their runs. It was a cloudy day, welcome compared to the burning Caribbean sunshine that had often graced them and caused burns when ground-crews touched metal that had been exposed to the sun, though what it lacked in heat it made up for in humidity. With the initial need to take precautions against a potential failed take-off, Moore slid his cockpit canopy shut, dulling the roar of the engine and the rush of the air, and checked the W/T, ensuring the other three had their radios working correctly, then gave the order to form up and follow.

It was the first sortie of the day, and without any aerial or seagoing opposition, the Panama campaign, for the Navy, at least, had become something of a live-fire training exercise. He knew the compass headings by now without even having to ask. Steer due south for Panama, one-eighty degrees, and take up a holding pattern over Gatun Lake when they reached it, circling lazily - though keeping a lookout - until some of the Royal Marines on the ground radioed in via the forward air controllers, giving their coordinates and requesting support. Then it would be Walker’s job to navigate the flight there swiftly - and the entire procedure, thanks to the endless loitering and then the sudden calls, was nicknamed the ‘cab rank’. Other than keeping the radio tuned and listening in for the call, that was all he had to do - and on some of the longer, hotter patrols, the boredom could be intense, further adding to the young navigator’s irritation. This time, it did not take long. The radio crackled, and he relayed the message to the lieutenant-commander.

“Recce is reporting a troop-train bringing up Mexicans to the front, sir. On the Chepo-Miguelito line, by the time we arrive. Heading, nine-eight degrees, for three-five miles.” For all the boy’s faults, he’d worked fast.
“Roger. Nine-eight degrees, three-five miles.” Moore confirmed, and gave the order to the Flight. They turned east, putting the morning sun ahead beginning to break through the clouds, the lake below sparkling vividly. All the way up here, at ten thousand feet, Panama looked peaceful, but down below was a wracked country, filled with conflict after the Syndicalist assassination of an elected President and the chaos that had followed. It was rare for the Syndicalists to move their forces during the day, in the face of the alliance’s air supremacy, but the recent fighting in Tocumen had presumably forced their hand and made reinforcements a necessity.

B Flight began a glide downwards, their speed picking up as they did so. The mountains to the port side began to join up with the cockpit edge. They’d been briefed about the railway-lines in the east of the country - built by American investors to help supply the Canal with food and workers, and the benefits of international trade to the deprived eastern half of the country. By all accounts, it hadn’t been a spectacular success in spreading the wealth, as the briefing-officer had said - and privately, Moore had thought that the Syndicalist uprising, however much it had been poked and prodded into being by the Mexicans, proved the point far more strongly than words could.

It wasn’t long before he spotted the tell-tale white puffs of smoke along the dark, meandering line of the railway. Lowering the nose, he could see it chugging along, beetle-like, pulling a great number of cattle-cars behind, too many for such a small locomotive to drag with ease. Moore keyed the W/T to his Flight, with a successful effort to keep his voice steady and level. “This is Bee leader. Tally ho. Heading one-four-zero, coming up to the Pacora river bridge. Attack in sequence, then break to engage. Good hunting, over.” Behind him, Walker stowed away the map-board and his instruments, and slid back the canopy, bringing the Lewis gun to readiness, and the rushing of the wind again filled the cockpit.

He waggled the Skua’s wings, and the four formed into a line behind him, making a flat turn around to line up along the railway-line and following the train’s direction of travel. A glint off the wings of another orbiting aircraft showed where the report of the train had come from. Careful nudges of stick and rudder brought the lines on the periscope bombsight in alignment. With a final check of the air brakes - given that for dive bombing, a failure of that system would be quite fatal - he radioed in again to the other aircraft.
“This is Bee leader. I’m beginning my run, over.”

With that, Moore reduced the throttle, activated the dive-brakes and nudged the Skua’s nose down, the image of the locomotive’s smoke far below filling the reflector-sight before the crosshair converged. A gentle backward pressure on the stick kept his dive slightly curved, the aiming-point fixed upon the laden locomotive winding its way along. The bomber began to shake with the strain as it dropped, the airspeed indicator needle increasing sharply despite all of the precautions. His eyes flicked between the altimeter and the sight, ignoring the tracer-rounds that had begun to rise alarmingly towards him, and at three thousand feet, he pushed the main bomb release switch and pulled the stick back hard. The aeroplane leapt upwards as the five-hundred-pound weight was released, and he felt himself crushed back into his seat, blackness starting to intrude on the edges of his vision as blood drained into his feet, pulling out of the dive. Behind him, he felt a double-shockwave shiver through the aircraft, and, though strained, Walker exclaimed excitedly on the internal telephone a moment later. “Bloody good hit, Moore! It’s gone up like a bloody firework!”

His vision clearing, he began to turn the aeroplane around, deactivating the dive-brakes and flaps, as the three others made their dives, in succession, albeit with somewhat less precision, given the smoke and flame obscuring the view. The damage on the ground must have been horrific, despite the inaccuracy, with two thousand pounds of high explosive and shrapnel shredding train and man alike. As the smoke cleared, he saw that the furnace and coal-bunker had detonated, reducing the locomotive to mangled metal and jolted off the rails, derailing the first few cattle-cars. But not the whole train had been derailed, and even now, the surviving soldiers from the rear carriages were grabbing their rifles and scrambling for cover, firing volleys at the marauding aircraft. The Skuas had broken off in four different directions, to prevent the concentration of anti-air fire in any given direction, but as the lowest and first into the engagement, it was inevitable that Moore’s bomber would be the priority target. He took aim at the firing-lines of soldiers in the grass, and thumbed the firing-stud, his own .303 Brownings rattling their displeasure back at them in return. Jerking the secondary bomb-release switch as he was about to pass over, the remnants of his ordnance sailed the short distance downwards, sending up small gouts of earth and flame before the Skua’s shadow crossed the carnage.

Small-arms fire was little danger to the aeroplane, but it could rattle a green pilot, and Moore began to turn around for a third pass, providing cover while the rest of his Flight made their runs. “They’re like rats in a barrel!” Walker commented, still unable to keep his youthful, and political, enthusiasm out of his voice. The Canadian, for his part, was more equivocal. He took no pleasure in killing, it was an unpleasant necessity of war, but all the same, he’d soon had to learn to view the scurrying, armed figures below as targets, rather than men. But Moore was broken from his brief reverie, soon enough, as the angry sound of heavy bullets striking the aircraft shuddered the plane. He threw the plane into evasive, and glanced towards the source of the tracers. The undamaged rear carriage of the train had mounted a jury-rigged anti-aircraft gun, looked like four heavy water-cooled Maxims in a line on a turntable. But the Skua began to be sluggish, and when he looked back, heavy black motor oil was beginning to splatter the windscreen, the engine warning lights all coming on at once. It was a knockout blow, and he knew it immediately, starting to pull the aircraft up to gain whatever altitude he could manage on the failing radial. Tracers still whipped through the air below, but he was already out of effective range.

“This is Bee Leader. My kite is hit badly, we’re going down, over.” Moore said, the W/T crackling, damaged and useless, his efforts at calm and stiff-upper-lip beginning to fail. He saw Walker shake his head in the rear-view mirror. The radio was shot, quite literally. The aircraft shuddered unpleasantly, and he reached for the Gosport tube, the back-up if the internal telephone failed. “Walker,” Moore yelled, over the protests of the engine. “We’re going to have to bail out!”

The radial finally died, at that moment, and all there was was the whistling of the air around the aeroplane, and the distant sound of gunfire, engines and fire behind. Walker shouted back, abandoning the tube, and tossed the Lewis gun off its mounting, to smash into the earth below, freeing up the space for his escape. Bailing-out procedure was easy enough in a stationary position on the ground, or even from a dual-cockpit aircraft with an instructor controlling it up front, but from a damaged, shaking bomber, it was quite another. The sub-lieutenant shouted his well-wishes, but they were carried away by the wind, and he jumped, jolting the aircraft. As soon as Moore let go of the stick, it began to droop alarmingly downwards, despite the upward trim he’d swiftly set on the flaps. He undid his four-point seatbelt and slid back the canopy, and black, hot oil began dribbling in, streaked by the wind, and stood up in the cramped cockpit.

It was now or never, before long, it would be too low for the parachute to function.

Steeling himself, he jumped as clear as he could, and the falling sensation was overwhelming, for a few moments, before he was suddenly grabbed by a giant and wrenched in the parachute-straps. Despite the discomfort, it was reassuring. The white, silken canopy had opened above him, and he saw Walker’s, too, some hundreds of feet below, drifting into a thicket of trees. The reassurance lasted little, however. Carried on the wind, he heard shouts, gunshots, saw soldiers advancing towards his navigator’s parachute, and heard the snap of bullets whizzing past his own parachute, pot-shots fired by enterprising men with their bolt-action Mondragón rifles. As he might put it dryly, it made the entire experience ‘a little bit hairy’.

Moore guided his own descent as best he could, but all the same, still came down altogether too ungently into the midst of an overgrown banana plantation. Slicing his way free of the parachute pack, which threatened to drag him along the ground with any gust, and tugging off his now-useless flying helmet, it was the first time he’d felt glad that regulation insisted he carry the heavy Smith & Wesson service revolver whenever he flew over hostile territory. For a moment, he was tempted to make off in the other direction - but the boy, irritating as he might be, was still his brother-in-arms, and the Canadian’s conscience would not permit him to abandon him. Despite the overwhelming sense it was ill-fated, he began to walk towards the thicket where he had seen his navigator come down, pushing through the thick foliage, and the scent of rotting fruit. The heat was sweltering, and he soon discarded his thick leather flying jacket. Flies buzzed everywhere, feasting. Aircraft engines still hummed in the distance, though with the canopy above, he couldn’t see them.

Once Moore arrived, he was not even the first to speak, nor to spot his comrade.
“Good to see you, old boy.” Walker smirked, with faint insolence put up as a front to conceal his pain and fear, a shaking hand having lit a cigarette and now holding it against his thin lips. The navigator had landed hard, the chute caught up in a tree, then his ankle turned and perhaps broken in some warren as he’d tried to correct the swing. Moore was about to reply, but then, on the other side of the thicket, there began shouting, in coarse, hoarse Spanish, the sound of beating the foliage in search. “No time, Grenville.” he said. “They aren’t far, we have to get moving. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like our chances in a Syndicalist prison camp.” Drawing out his pocket-knife, he wrapped his arm around the navigator to support him and cut the parachute-cords, the weight suddenly transferred off the tree and onto Moore’s shoulders. Walker groaned in pain at having to put weight on his ankle, but did his best to cover it up. “Stiff upper lip, hm?” he said, self-mockingly, and wrapped his arm around his commander’s shoulders, drawing his own sidearm and carrying it loosely in his left hand.

The shouting in the forest behind them got louder, and even a few misdirected rifle-shots, as the soldiers shot at whatever movement in the forest they spotted they suspected might be an enemy aviator. They were out for blood, and it was no surprise, men whom had been sent to a foreign country to attack a superior enemy, without any air support, logistical organisation, or any of the other myriad requirements of twentieth-century warfare to give them a chance of success. They had been sent to die by their ‘revolutionary’ leaders, in the hopes that they would cause bombs and bullets that might be expended elsewhere to be used against them instead, with precious little chance of retaliation against the artillery and air attacks. As he helped half-carry Walker back into the banana plantation, the overgrown foliage becoming a mercy rather than a hindrance, Moore reflected that for all of their grubby pamphlets and angry shouting on the radio about warmongering, the Syndicalist governments were not so very different from that which they claimed to be opposing.
“I don’t mean to question you, old boy.” Walker hissed, through gritted teeth, breaking Moore out of his train of thought, “But where are we going?”

“West, towards our own lines. If we can find a way across the Pacora river, or somewhere to lay low until nightfall, we might stand a chance of finding some allied forces.” Moore replied, quietly. He didn’t have to say the hope was slim, they both knew it, understood it well. The walk was a quiet agony for the navigator, their haste all the more necessary due to the searching soldiers behind them. The flies swarmed them, going for their eyes, their mouths, seeking the soft membranes, waved away constantly with pistol-wielding hands. Both were grateful for the breathable cotton tropical uniforms of the Navy, with their shorts and light boots, but less grateful for the bright white colour. Emerging on the other side of the grove, they came upon the plantation’s buildings, cored out by arson, the remnants of the signs in English and Spanish declaring it to have once been owned by the United Fruit Company. If either man had been much of a reader of the business section of the newspapers in the past, they might have been aware of the reasons this place had been targeted for such hate. But their minds were not on the plantation, or its history, for beyond the ruin and downhill, though some distance away, glinting through the trees in the morning sunlight, was the river, fast-flowing out into the Pacific to the south.

“Over there. If we follow the river south, we might be able to signal the Australasians off-shore.” Moore muttered. But their relief was short-lived, as the sound of combat knives and machetes slicing their way through the banana grove, and further shouting, spurred them to action once again, no matter how tempting a rest in the shade might be. They staggered on down the hill through the brush even faster, Walker sharply inhaling and exhaling at times as his ankle was wrenched further. Catching his injured foot on some bump in the ground, he fell, white uniform front splattered with mud. Moore dragged him up by the scruff of his shirt quite forcefully, urging the boy on. He needed no reminding, the angry Spanish voices getting even closer - though they knew they had not been spotted, as there were no rifle-shots. An aeroplane still lazily droned overhead, its engine sounding like of the many artillery-spotting and reconnaissance machines the fleets deployed. Onwards at a pace far beyond comfort for an injured man, the aviators practically tumbled down the last section of the slope and into the muddy riverbank, and they quickly ensconced themselves with their backs against it, taking what little concealment it offered.

Walker glanced at Moore in the nervous quiet, after a few moments of inaction and rest after their flight. “Help me light… a cigarette?” the boy panted, wincing in pain and trying to suppress any signs of weakness, by now, unsuccessfully. The commander shook his head. “They might smell the smoke.”

There was an uneasy quiet after, punctuated by the occasional talk up the hill behind them, drifting on the wind. The Pacora river continued its rapid flow south, the section they had happened upon being long, wide, and straight.The initial heat of the pursuit might have lessened under the blazing summer heat, as the molten anger the soldiers directed towards the pilots evaporated and solidified into a firm, cold resentment. But the sound of the aircraft engine got louder, and it parked their ears. A louder reverberation, and the firework-like crackling rifle-fire again, the engine circling, lower and lower, closer and closer. Suddenly there was an almighty splash, a great plume of spray, and the sound of an engine being throttled down. The two looked over, saw the Seagull V amphibian biplane splashing down in landing upriver.
“Thank God.” said one, and neither could remember whom had said it.

The Seagull’s front gunner was scanning the river-bank, his hand raised above his eyes to shield them from the sun. With their white uniforms, he spotted the downed aviators rapidly rapidly, and waved to them, banging on the flying-boat’s fuselage to signal the pilot to halt. ”We saw you hit the silk. Tried to follow you ever since.” he yelled, once they were close enough, and the engine’s din had lessened enough to begin to be heard. “Bloody stroke of luck that you made it here to the river. There aren’t any fields we could land in for miles! Come on, get in!” He tossed a knotted rope.

Walker dragged himself into the water along the rope first, the ankle still giving him hell even in the water. The river flowed fast enough to not become stagnant, but the water-plants along the bottom were still entangling, and the rapid waters meant that there was a real risk of being dragged away, the floatplane’s anchor keeping it steady enough, for now. Moore stayed on the riverbank, pistol in hand, as the radio operator dragged the groaning navigator into the entrance-hatch, as the floatplane rocked with the current. But there was a shout above him, the crack of rifle-fire once more, and men in the brown Mexican bandolier jackets, pointing, yelling, taking aim at the aircraft and himself. He flung himself into the river, his white uniform instantly stained brown by the muddy water, grabbing at the rope and hauling himself along it, half-swimming and kicking his shod feet, bullets zipping down and splashing the water around him, striking the metal hull of the Seagull with loud clangs.

The front gunner crouched low in his position, swinging the pair of K-guns around on their circular mount, and began firing back, the long, fragile-looking barrels designed for range and accuracy to defend against aircraft, not infantry. But the chatter of the machine-guns was enough to send the soldiers above diving for cover, lessening their fire, and gave Moore a chance to finally haul his sodden body through the hatch, dragged by the radio operator and falling head-first with a thump. “Raising anchor!” the operator shouted, and started hauling up the anchor with the winch, even as the seaplane’s pilot ahead began to throttle up the engine. The aircraft jerked as the anchor’s pendulum-weight kept it off-kilter, but as the crewman finally got the anchor stowed away, it bumped on the water, taking a hop, skip, and finally a jump into the air, laden with its two additional passengers, rifle-shots still crackling all around. The aircraft swung evasive, left and right, until they were free and clear, out of range of the small-arms from the ground.

Walker looked up at Moore and the radio operator, and let out a laugh that let go of nervous tension. “I have to say, I’m craving a fag.” he muttered, loudly, above the vibration of the engine above them, and was swiftly handed a cigarette as requested, his long-fingered, shaking hands struggling to hold it still in the flame of the Zippo that was held out for him. Finally, he managed, and took a long drag, with a shuddering, pained sigh. Moore gazed out of the small circular porthole, as Panama’s familiar territory, so often seen from above and never, until now seen from the ground, receded behind them. They had been down less than thirty minutes, and take-off from that rolling deck had been less than two hours ago, albeit not by much. The faces of the enemy, visible to him for the first time. Men, not scurrying targets. Put simply, he did not know how to feel. Even when he heard the steady pumping pressure of the landing-gear being lowered, felt the momentary weightless falling and then the bump as the Seagull touched down on Vindictive’s deck, and was arrested by the wire, it was a subject still whirling in his mind. It was not something that would fade for some time.