Read Chapter 2: NUMBER SIX

Luc spent his first week learning that a squadron was less like a military unit than a village built around dangerous animals.

The pilots lived at the centre of it because they could die most spectacularly. Around them moved mechanics, armourers, riggers, drivers, clerks, cooks, orderlies, fuel men, doctors, photographers and the men who repaired the field after every bombardment. Everyone knew everyone else's habits. Everyone borrowed tobacco. Everyone stole tools.

And everyone watched the casualty board.

Vautrin flew Number Six twice a day when weather allowed. Luc rose before him, inspected before breakfast, watched takeoff, waited through the patrol, and listened for the returning engine.

By the third day, he could identify it without seeing the aircraft.

The problem with the oil mist came from a warped breather fitting. Luc replaced it and added a small deflector cut from sheet aluminium. The stiff rudder pedal was not the cold but a pulley bracket slightly out of alignment. The gun vibration took longer. The Vickers mount had accumulated tolerances from repeated repairs. Luc inserted a thin shaped shim between mount and bracket, then insisted the armourer recheck synchronization.

Vautrin returned from the next patrol with two bullet holes in the upper wing and a grin.

"The gun stays where I point it now."

"Try pointing it away from German bullets."

Perrin choked on his coffee.

Vautrin looked at Luc for a moment, then laughed. "You were wasted in a garage."

"My father says the same thing about the army."

There were other pilots. Captain Étienne Delorme commanded the escadrille, a decorated veteran with twenty-one victories and the polished manners of a provincial magistrate. Lieutenant Armand Cazeneuve was his deputy, blond and careful, from a family that owned textile mills near Roubaix. Sous-lieutenant Paul Lemaire was nineteen and wrote to his mother every evening. Marcel Dufour had been a cavalryman before the war and still wore his boots too beautifully polished for the mud.

The quietest was René Valette, who had seven victories and a habit of dismantling his service revolver when anxious.

"You know what they call this place in Paris?" Valette asked Luc one evening.

They were standing beside the tool bench while rain hammered the hangar roof.

"No."

"The knights of the air. Newspapers love it. Scarves, duels, chivalry."

He held up an oily spring from his revolver.

"Knights did not freeze at four thousand metres while sitting on a tank of petrol."

Luc smiled. "Perhaps the poets left that out."

Valette did not smile back. "The poets leave out most things."

That night, one of the Nieuports crashed on takeoff.

Luc heard the engine rise, falter, rise again. Then came the wooden crack of undercarriage striking a drainage ditch. Men ran with extinguishers.

The pilot, Corporal Girard, survived with a broken arm and burns on one hand.

The engine had stopped less than fifty metres above the ground.

Perrin and Luc inspected it after midnight.

"Fuel starvation," Perrin said.

Luc removed the filter. Fine particles glittered in the lantern light.

"What is that?"

They spread the contamination on a white cloth. It was not dirt. It was something fibrous, pale, almost like cotton mixed with shellac.

"Tank sealant?" Perrin guessed.

"Not from this tank."

Luc checked the cap. Locked before flight, according to the card.

The maintenance sheet showed three signatures.

One belonged to Besson.

Again.

Perrin saw Luc looking.

"You think too much."

"That is what people say before an engine fails."

"Besson has been here eight months. He was a millwright in Nantes."

"Then he knows what a filter looks like."

Perrin lowered his voice. "Listen. We lose machines. We lose men. Parts arrive from five factories. Petrol arrives with water in it. Canvas rots. Clerks mislabel boxes. Shells land in the fuel dump. If you start seeing intention in every broken bolt, the war will make you mad faster than the Germans can kill you."

Luc folded the cloth.

"And if there is intention?"

Perrin's expression hardened. "Then you had better know before you speak."

The next morning Girard was sent to hospital. His Nieuport was marked for salvage.

At noon Captain Delorme gathered the pilots. A replacement was arriving. Girard's place in the patrol roster would go to Lemaire.

Lemaire looked pale with pride.

Cazeneuve clapped him on the shoulder. "A chance to make your name."

Luc, passing with a crate of spark plugs, saw Valette watching from the doorway.

That afternoon Vautrin shot down an Albatros north of Beine. His twelfth confirmed victory.

The squadron opened champagne at dinner.

Luc did not drink. He went back to the hangar and checked every fuel connection on Number Six twice.

At the bottom of Vautrin's inspection card, someone had added a note in blue pencil:

CARBURETTOR MIXTURE ADJUSTED. L. MOREAU.

Luc stared at it.

He had made no such adjustment.

The initials were his.

The handwriting was close enough that, at a glance, he might have believed it himself.

He tore the card from the board and carried it to Perrin.

The sergeant read it without speaking.

"Now," Luc said, "may I think too much?"