It’s all your fault for letting me buy it.’
The cotton was piling up on the piers in Egypt, and nobody wanted any.
Milo had never dreamed that the Nile Valley could be so fertile or that there would be no market at all for the crop he had bought.
The mess halls in his syndicate would not help; they rose up in uncompromising rebellion against his proposal to tax them on a per capita basis in order to enable each man to own his own share of the Egyptian cotton crop.
Even his reliable friends the Germans failed him in this crisis: they preferred ersatz.
Milo’s mess halls would not even help him store the cotton, and his warehousing costs skyrocketed and contributed to the devastating drain upon his cash reserves.
The profits from the Orvieto mission were sucked away.
He began writing home for the money he had sent back in better days; soon that was almost gone.
And new bales of cotton kept arriving on the wharves at Alexandria every day.
Each time he succeeded in dumping some on the world market for a loss it was snapped up by canny Egyptian brokers in the Levant, who sold it back to him at the original price, so that he was really worse off than before.
M & M Enterprises verged on collapse.
Milo cursed himself hourly for his monumental greed and stupidity in purchasing the entire Egyptian cotton crop, but a contract was a contract and had to be honored, and one night, after a sumptuous evening meal, all Milo’s fighters and bombers took off, joined in formation directly overhead and began dropping bombs on the group.
He had landed another contract with the Germans, this time to bomb his own outfit.
Milo’s planes separated in a well co-ordinated attack and bombed the fuel stocks and the ordnance dump, the repair hangars and the B-25 bombers resting on the lollipop-shaped hardstands at the field.
His crews spared the landing strip and the mess halls so that they could land safely when their work was done and enjoy a hot snack before retiring.
They bombed with their landing lights on, since no one was shooting back.
They bombed all four squadrons, the officers’ club and the Group Headquarters building.
Men bolted from their tents in sheer terror and did not know in which direction to turn.
Wounded soon lay screaming everywhere.
A cluster of fragmentation bombs exploded in the yard of the officers’ club and punched jagged holes in the side of the wooden building and in the bellies and backs of a row of lieutenants and captains standing at the bar.
They doubled over in agony and dropped.
The rest of the officers fled toward the two exits in panic and jammed up the doorways like a dense, howling dam of human flesh as they shrank from going farther.
Colonel Cathcart clawed and elbowed his way through the unruly, bewildered mass until he stood outside by himself.
He stared up at the sky in stark astonishment and horror.
Milo’s planes, ballooning serenely in over the blossoming treetops with their bomb bay doors open and wing flaps down and with their monstrous, bug-eyed, blinding, fiercely flickering, eerie landing lights on, were the most apocalyptic sight he had ever beheld.
Colonel Cathcart let go a stricken gasp of dismay and hurled himself headlong into his jeep, almost sobbing.
He found the gas pedal and the ignition and sped toward the airfield as fast as the rocking car would carry him, his huge flabby hands clenched and bloodless on the wheel or blaring his horn tormentedly.
Once he almost killed himself when he swerved with a banshee screech of tires to avoid plowing into a bunch of men running crazily toward the hills in their underwear with their stunned faces down and their thin arms pressed high around their temples as puny shields.
Yellow, orange and red fires were burning on both sides of the road.
Tents and trees were in flames, and Milo’s planes kept coming around interminably with their blinking white landing lights on and their bomb bay doors open.
Colonel Cathcart almost turned the jeep over when he slammed the brakes on at the control tower.
He leaped from the car while it was still skidding dangerously and hurtled up the flight of steps inside, where three men were busy at the instruments and the controls.
He bowled two of them aside in his lunge for the nickel-plated microphone, his eyes glittering wildly and his beefy face contorted with stress.
He squeezed the microphone in a bestial grip and began shouting hysterically at the top of his voice. ‘ Milo, you son of a bitch!
Are you crazy?
What the hell are you doing?
Come down!
Come down!’
‘Stop hollering so much, will you?’ answered Milo, who was standing there right beside him in the control tower with a microphone of his own.
‘I’m right here.’
Milo looked at him with reproof and turned back to his work.
‘Very good, men, very good,’ he chanted into his microphone.
‘But I see one supply shed still standing.
That will never do, Purvis—I’ve spoken to you about that kind of shoddy work before.
Now, you go right back there this minute and try it again. And this time come in slowly… slowly.
Haste makes waste, Purvis. Haste makes waste.
If I’ve told you that once, I must have told you that a hundred times. Haste makes waste.’
The loudspeaker overhead began squawking. ‘ Milo, this is Alvin Brown.
I’ve finished dropping my bombs.
What should I do now?’