Ack-Ack Macaque Read Online Free Page A

loped over to a corner table and climbed onto a chair. After a moment, the Mess Officer shuffled over.
    “Tea or coffee, squire?”
    Ack-Ack Macaque fixed the man with his one good eye and spoke around the remains of the cigar still clamped between his yellowed teeth.
    “Bring me a daiquiri.” He undid his belt and slapped his holsters onto the table. “And see if you can scare up a banana or two, will you?”
    “Right-o, sir. You sit tight, I’ll be right back.”
    As the N.C.O. scurried away, Ack-Ack Macaque unzipped his flight jacket. Around him, heads turned away and discussions resumed. In the corner of the tent, someone started bashing out a Glen Miller tune on the old upright piano.
    Ack-Ack Macaque settled back in his chair and closed his eye. The cigar had helped clear the reek of aviation fuel from his nostrils, and now all he wanted was a rest. He used a dirty fingernail to worry a strand of loose tobacco from his oversized incisors, and yawned. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept. He seemed to have been awake forever, flying one sortie after another in an endless string of confused dogfights, fuelled only by nicotine and sheer bloody-mindedness.
    Of course, it didn’t help that the front line kept shifting, and nobody knew for sure where anything was. Planes defected from one side to the other, and then back again, on an almost daily basis. People who were your most trusted comrades on one mission might become your deadliest opponents on the next, and vice versa. He glared around the Mess, wondering which of these young upstarts would be the first to betray him.
    He used to find it easier. In the early days, he’d capered around like one of those cartoon characters from those shorts they sometimes screened in the ready room. A smile and a cheeky quip, and somehow the war hadn’t seemed so bad. But then his quips had dried as the death toll rose. The shrinks called it ‘battle fatigue’. He’d seen it happen before, to other pilots. They lived too long, lost too many comrades, and withdrew into themselves. They stopped taking care of themselves and then, one day, they stopped caring altogether. They took crazy chances; pushed their luck out beyond the ragged limit; and died.
    Was that what he was doing? He’d gone up against that pair of ’schmitts this morning, even though they’d had the height advantage. He should have turned and fled. If one of his squad had been so reckless, he’d have boxed their ears. He’d been fortunate to make it home in one piece, and he knew it. Was he pushing his luck? With a sigh, he dropped the soggy butt of his cigar and ground it with his boot.
    “What’s up, skipper?” The Scottish accent belonged to Mindy Morris, a new recruit to the squadron. “I heard you took a bit of a battering out there.”
    He opened his baleful eye. They were always new recruits, all these kids. Yet Mindy was one of the youngest he’d seen. She couldn’t have been much over fourteen years old.
    “Stop smiling,” he said. “If you bare your teeth at me like that, I’m liable to rip your face off.”
    The girl’s eyes whitened.
    “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
    “Don’t take it personally.” He kicked a chair out for her. “It’s a primate thing. Now, sit down.”
    The Mess Officer brought over a daiquiri in a cocktail glass, which he placed on the table.
    “Will that be all, squire?”
    Ack-Ack Macaque scowled at him. “What, no bananas?”
    “I’m afraid not, sir. There’s a war on, you know. Can I get you something else instead?”
    Ack-Ack Macaque picked up the cocktail glass in his hairy hand and tipped the contents into his mouth. He smacked his lips.
    “Bring me rum.” He turned back to Mindy Morris, where she sat perched on the edge of her chair.
    “You might want to watch it with the eye contact, too,” he warned her. “If I get drunk, I might take a stare as a challenge.”
    The girl dropped her gaze to her hands, which were knotted in her