by Mark Hayes
Staring at the Romanoff Imperial Eagle on its side, I found myself recalling some snipping I had read in The India Times back in Calcutta some weeks ago. Some minor report of a Russian airship vanishing along the Afghan border a month before, but that had been a liner according to the ever unreliable Times, not a gunship.
Was it possible, just to add to my problems, the Imperial Russian Air Navy were in cahoots, to quote my employers The Ministry, ‘that most despicable enemy of the British Empire H.G. Wells’?
Or at least that is how The Ministry would describe him if they were pantomime villains, which I can assure you they’re not, very much not. Just in case you were labouring under any illusions on that score.
Pantomime villains are set up to lose and played for laughs and jeers from the cheap seats. The Ministry, it has been my experience, don’t care for laughter…
I thought about that for a moment. The thought that the Imperial Russian Navy might be in cahoots with that former writer of incredulous fictions. It seemed unlikely, but by now little in all this would’ve surprise me.
Well, I say that, but considering the number of times I’d suffered mild concussions of late it possibly isn’t true. People seemed to have developed an irritating habit of surprising me, normally from behind with something heavy, but I digress…
I suspected rather that H.G.Wells merry bunch of pirates, which as you know took the Johan so easily, had taken this Russian craft too. Though exactly how they had managed that little trick was another question entirely, because it was no out of date steamer consigned to the back route patrols in rural India like the Johan.
If I can be clear about this, the Russian craft was a beast, a real bloody big bastard of a beast at that. If it helps you picture it, let me say it bore some similarities to our own Dreadnaught class, and by our own, I mean Queen ‘Iron Knickers’ Victoria’s Royal Air Navy’s. The organisation in which I’d formally served, so vaingloriously.
I guess it says something of me that even after all that had happened, I still more or less considered myself a RAN man. As such I still tended to think of Dreadnoughts, the super heavy airship of the British fleet, as ‘our own’.
What it says about me, I am not entirely sure.
Dreadnaughts are the backbone of the British fleet, flying the flag for old Britannia herself, and putting the fear of god into anyone, indeed everyone, who would cross The British Empire.
I’ve long suspected the sight of a RAN Dreadnaught in the sky would be enough to take the fight out of all but the most committed of the crown’s enemies. So when I say this beast of a Russian airship reminded me of those fine craft I say so with some admiration.
Except, that is, this big bastard of a Russian ship was half as big again as a Dreadnought, and sported more guns than any air-ship had a right to carry.
As such it was hard to believe Wells’s ragtag band of bandits could have taken her. I say this even while bearing in mind how easily they’d taken the Jonah from my former captain and his crew. Not to mention from me, for that matter…
The Russians, if I recalled my old RAN intelligence briefings correctly, called this class of ship their Iron Tsar’s. Though, as the military intelligence boys told us, with a rye smile and what for them was an attempt at humour, these were no pampered Romanoff princeling air-ships, like the Russian Tsar’s who routinely got pictured in the scandal sheets and tabloids. These weren’t ships named for those pamper playboy peacocks. These were Ivan the Terrible air-ships. The old-fashioned kind of Tsar. The kind of Tsar known for angry rages and occasional bouts of mental instability. RAN briefings had a habit of verbosity when talking about our Russian ‘friends’, as I recall this particular comparison drew quite a few laughs in briefings.
As I stood in that cell looking at her I realised just how apt that description really was. Any craft with that many guns on it was bound to have stability issues for a start…
As far as I was aware, no Dreadnaught had ever gone toe to toe with an Iron Tsar. The British and Russian fleets tended to dance around each other almost as much as their respective political masters. A damn good thing in my opinion, for if the Lion and the Bear ever came to blows, it would surely be a battle of stamina over strength and both empires would end up weaker for it.
Of course, as far as the Iron Tsar’s were concerned, as a British airman, I’d long been assured fleet intelligence briefings a Dreadnaught would win out in any such engagement. Though looking at an actual Iron Tsar from that cell it struck me those briefings mightn’t have had the right of it. A broad side from that bear of a ship would likely rip through anything. I knew there and then that I for one wouldn’t want to be facing it in battle. Indeed, if I’d anything to do with it, I wouldn’t want to come within a hundred miles of one of those buggers, let alone the whole Russian fleet.
What it did confirm to me though was this. If Wells’s little army was up to the task of taking a ship like that, then I could understand The Ministry’s concern. You could, after all, start a small war with one of those bastards.
More to the point, you could win one too.
I was also struck by another unpleasant thought. I doubted there was a single British Dreadnaught in the whole of India. The air superiority of the East India Company’s rag tag navy had always been enough to put down rebellions for the last hundred years or so. When your enemies are peasants crawling in the mud, any old rust bucket ship will do. But I was fairly sure none of EIC’s old rust buckets would last more than a few minutes against that Iron Tsar.
You’ll have to forgive me somewhat if I sound like I’m drooling a little but I’m an airman after all. The big Russian may’ve been a beast, but it was a magnificent beast. It made the Jonah and those old Fearless class ships I used to fly in RAN look like… Well, I’d venture the nautical equivalent would be paddle boats.
Eventually, when I dragged my eyes away from the Russian death and thunder machine, I took a closer look at the two liners. It’s not like I’d much else to do while stuck in that cell. If you remember my first thought was their captors were stripping them of valuables. But as I looked again I realised I was only half right. They may well be stripping them of their tacky interiors, but they were also making alterations to the airframes and the sleek-looking gondolas that hung below them.
Work gangs on rudimentary scaffolds were welding this, or cutting holes in that, in the early morning sunlight. Turning those sleek passenger craft into something else entirely. Slow though I may be, it didn’t take me long to figure out what they were up to. I knew what to look for, after all. I’d spent enough years around navel craft to figure it out.
They were adding armour to the flanks and building in gun ports. They were, in short, weaponising the big liners. Which could only mean the big Russian and my own little gunship weren’t going to be the only fighting machines moored on this mountainside before long.
It came horrifyingly clear to me then that H.G. and his merry band of cutthroats weren’t hijacking liners for funds, though I’m sure the money did them little harm. They were instead building an air armada, a war fleet, and that, in case you can’t guess what that’s means, let just say it didn’t bode well for anyone. Peasants throwing mud at red coated soldiers was one thing, but peasants in a fleet of gunships, well, that could set India aflame, and that was the least of it.
Even with my slim grasp of politics, I knew there was more to it than that. Given that beast of an Iron Tsar his men were busy with. Wells didn’t care if he made enemies of the Russians as well as the British. In which case, I reasoned, he was preparing for something more than just an Indian insurrection. If you wanted to free India from its benevolent overlords you would want the Russians to stay neutral rather than set them up as your enemies. Whatever he was up to, up there in the middle of nowhere, it was something big. Something that, it seemed to me, was all too obviously also likely to end badly for someone.
I decided there and then to try to make sure that someone wasn’t me.<
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That realisation of what appeared to be underway in that remote Himalayan valley sent a shiver running down my spine that was nothing to do with the light snowfall drifting in through the open side of the cell. Britain and Russia were probably the two most powerful nations in the world. Certainly they had the two largest air fleets in the world. Yet here in the mountains of Nepal a mad scribbler of fatuous fictions come want to be rebel overlord was, one way or another, spoiling for a fight with both of them. Whatever Wells true aims were, he was going to set off a powder keg. But more than that, when the fighting started there was all the chance in the world it would only be a matter of time before the superpowers turned their guns on each other.
I mightn’t be the sharpest political knife in the drawer, but even I knew that the peace between the two empires was fragile at best. Alliances had long been drawn on either side. Plenty of lesser nations hung to the coattails of that delicate balance. The wise ones were of course pro Britain. But others, foolishly, had strong ties to Moscow. Then there were the other big players as well, Japan, Spain, Greater Mexico and others all had treaties tying them to Russia. While the Canadians, the Brazilian Confederacy, the tattered remains of the North Eastern American States all depended on British strength to keep the Russians and their allies at bay. Even those nations which chose to not chose a side like France and China leaned a little one way or the other. If Wells started a shooting war in India with a fleet of gunships the whole house of cards that was Imperial diplomacy could come crashing down.
I read once about a failed politician called Churchill or something. He’d been nothing much, just a half-baked foreign secretary at best, but he’d famously warned that the world always stood on the brink of disaster. According to him the long peace between the great nations was nothing more than a convenient fiction. The hundred year detente was ‘A powder keg waiting only on a single flame.’
As I recalled he’d been laughed out of the commons at the time, what was that fifty odd years ago, more, seventy perhaps? No one, they’d all said, would be mad enough to start a war between the great powers. ‘They’ in this case being the powers that inevitably be, those with the most invested with the status quo. But, I realised on that mountain side, for all mad old Winston had been seen as a flake, he was right about that one thing. It wouldn’t take much to bring everything crashing down. This fleet Wells was building on a Himalayan mountainside, might just be the spark the powder keg needed…
So, let’s recap a moment shall we. Just to take stock of all this. There was I, in a cell on a Nepalese mountainside, looking at a rebel air fleet in the making. Me, the man The Ministry sent as their foil. The pawn they’d moved to counter whatever Wells was up to in the back of beyond.
Me, Hannibal Smyth, a man happy to admit, with a certain degree of self-loathing, he is at best a liar, a thief and on occasion a murderer. A condemned man loathed by everyone, and as you may have surmised by now, one with all the moral fortitude of a tory politician with a bag of cocaine in his pocket, stood in the doorway of a Whitechapel brothel.
I said at the start I would be honest with you, I never said that honesty would be pretty…
Meanwhile, here we have Herbert George Wells, a man who it seemed to me as I stood in that cell on the mountainside was bent on bringing the whole world to its knees. And one who despite all the odds you’d have expected against such a thing, might well have the means of doing just that.
I will not lie, what after all would be the point in doing so. I found the idea of all this terrifying.
I may have muttered something to myself as the realisation of the scale of everything I’d been dumped in the middle of dawned upon me.
Something ungentlemanly.
Something that rhymed with duck.
For what dawned on me right at that moment was this. The Ministry had sent me right into the heart of a mad man’s base. They had made me no so much their pawn as their only move. Their agent charged with stopping this maniac H.G.Wells in his tracks.
Me, Hannibal Smyth and me alone, Great Britain’s only line of defence against the madness of this man. On balance things weren’t looking good, to be frank, I no idea how I was going to get out of this alive... I was after all alone, and armed with nothing but the cutthroat razor in my boot and my own raw courage.
So let’s face it…
Just the cutthroat then.
THE END…
Not bloody likely!
Hannibal Smyth will return in
‘From Russia with Tassels’
Passing Place: Location Relative
Praise for Passing Place
5.0 out of 5 stars A journey to nowhere and everywhere. Loved it…
This book is a gem as far as I am concerned. It’s a very interesting mixture of fantasy, horror, a doorman with a past, a club with a forest attached, an engaging personal journey…all mixed with a bit of suspense.
…oh, and there is a cat. An odd one…
In summary, it combines many different things with a story that goes nowhere and everywhere, and I will be waiting impatiently for the sequel….
F. de Vocht
5.0 out of 5 stars lovingly brought to life within a creepily beautiful, surreal setting
Passing Place is full of interestingly colourful (and also achromatic) characters, and they are lovingly brought to life within a creepily beautiful, surreal setting. The story and characters can all be related to on many levels, and the way that challenging material is approached is delicately put before the reader.
I would recommend this charming book to anyone.
Christopher Hill
Cider Lane: Of Silences and Stars
Praise for Cider Lane
5.0 out of 5 stars delicately handled storylines are woven together beautifully and sensitively
Right from the first chapter I got hooked into this novel and from there on in I didn’t want to stop reading.
Highly original characters, great setting and storyline – a must read!
Lynne Henderson Fisher
5.0 out of 5 stars A first time writers hidden gem
A book that you have to read more than once as you just keep discovering new little gems hidden with it.
Don't forget your tin opener is one word of advise
Robert Treadwell
5.0 out of 5 stars November 2015 Book of the Month
It's a difficult feat to write emotion. First, you must submerge yourself within the walls of the pain that we try so desperately to avoid. Hayes does this without flaw as he describes the car crash as witnessed.
It is a macabre beginning to a story that is beautifully told and easily relatable.
Publisher's Book Club
A Scar Of Avarice
A Passing Place/Hannibal Smyth Novella
Praise for A Scar of Avarice
5.0 out of 5 stars A Collection of Short Stories form the bar
We return to the warmth of the bar
For those who haven’t discovered Mr Hayes - these stories give them a glimpse into his style of storytelling and for those who have enjoyed his previous books - a warm embrace to keep the chills out and give us a taster of what might be to come
Robert Tredwell
5.0 out of 5 stars Added Goblins
It's back to the bar of Eskwiths again with Richard tickling the ivories and the introduction of Hannibal Smyth, a Victorian hero very much in the Flashman mold who relates a tale of avarice.
Andrew Hawley
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Hayes was born in Yorkshire on the day Julius Caesar was murdered. Though these two events are unrelated, he has occasionally been known to mention the assassination in relation to his birthday all the same. He considered this to be witty. No one knows why…
He has been known to update his blog far less often than he should, and he writes far too much about H.P.Lovecraft while getting constantly distracted by Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, PC Games and the internet in general.
; He would procrastinate more if only he could find the time to do so, and he always reads the About the Author section of a book. He just wishes he could write a better one
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @darrackmark
Blog: https://markhayesblog.com/