Dogfighters: Under the Hill

by Alex Beecroft

  Archie had done that once. That time when they’d lost two engines and been coned in that spotlight, and he’d had to throw the great weight of the plane through acrobatics she hadn’t been designed for for half an hour. When he’d been so weary afterwards he’d tried to jump, Archie had stopped him with a punch to the jaw. Best bloody friend a man could have.

  “Chris!”

  There was a hand beneath his shoulder, pulling him. He made a heroic effort to pull himself together, sniffed and rubbed his cuff over his eyes. He’d been a boy fresh out of school in those days and had some excuse. Now, he should know better.

  He tried to sit up, but his right arm seemed stuck. When he looked down, he found that Ben was holding him around the wrist. Wiping his face again, he got his feet under him and lurched up to standing, looked at Ben with incredulity, with a feeling that he’d fallen down the rabbit hole, left sense and reason behind. Ben’s eyes were clear, the wrinkles of a smile about them, full of intelligence and a fine new self-confidence Chris hadn’t seen before.

  He didn’t understand. “But I failed.”

  Ben exchanged his grip on Chris’s wrist for a supportive arm around his shoulders, and showed him the circlet that he held in his other hand. “You knocked it off,” he said. “At the end there. Accidentally, maybe, I don’t know. But you knocked it off, and after that I was able to hold on to you.”

  “S-so it worked?” Chris had been so crushed, so defeated, the sudden reversal gave him seasickness. His mouth watered with nausea.

  “Well…” Ben laughed, and the high-pitched sound proclaimed bad news. “Yes, it worked. And thank you.” He gestured at the darkness that surrounded them, a darkness filled with the plumes of dragonfire, the pale glimmer of elvish armour. “But we’re still in the middle of a war.”

  Chris looked for the queen, found her atop her dragon, looking out with a grim expression, her lips a thin blue line. She caught him watching and gave him a distracted salute, an ironic mimicry of his RAF days. “The rules say nothing about who lets go first,” she said. “But if ever I needed a champion—if ever I needed your aid, it is now.”

  Chris took a few deep breaths, trying to still the trembling in his legs, the muscle memory of all that pain. “You expect me to help you? After you put me through all that?”

  He turned his back and walked away, scrambling up the side of the hill, but all that did was to give him a better view of the battle, and she was right. The eagles had proved no match for the white army’s dragons. This horse queen’s small force were surrounded by the larger, better drilled and better armed forces of the white queen.

  Wheels in his head turned reluctantly, almost despite him. Wasn’t it after all the woman on the white dragon—the white queen—who had come through first, who had only been stopped from marching her forces to the nearest town by the timely intervention of two chance-met Typhoon pilots? And didn’t that make hers the invasion force, and this woman’s intervention something in the nature of a counterstrike?

  “It’s true.” Ben threw the circlet on the ground, where it lay like an ancient treasure dug from a barrow mound. He scrambled up the bank beside Chris, grabbed his arm again, as if despite his no-nonsense speech he could not quite stop himself from touching. “Liadain is the aggressor here—that’s the one on the white dragon. Oonagh’s trying to stop her.”

  “Normally I’d believe you implicitly, but that thing…” An arrow hit the ground by Chris’s foot and two others hummed past him with a sound like swan wings.

  He jumped back down into the shelter of the fosse and kicked mud over the mercury shimmer of the crown’s central diamond. A star on his forehead, eh? That explained why Tam Lin had not tried to get away on his own before his sweetheart could rescue him.

  Ben followed, something about his face older, grimmer than it had been. “She didn’t need to do that. I would have helped her anyway. I suppose she just needed to be sure.” He took a quick breath. “Listen. I am a reincarnation of someone called Karshni. Their world is dying. Oonagh has this plan to build ships to take them to another world, but she needs Karshni’s father’s help to do it and he won’t give it. She thought I could persuade him, that’s why she needed me.

  “But Liadain is a traditionalist—she doesn’t believe in spaceships and new worlds, she wants to take back the world that humans drove her people from in prehistory. She wants to take our world. Oonagh came to stop her.”

  One of the white queen’s dragons was headed their way, trying to outfly one of the Typhoons. A second dragon rose up stealthily as the plane passed, folded its wings like a hawk and plummeted out of the moonlight, a thousand tonnes of beast impacting with the smaller, faster dart of the jet.

  Built for agility and speed, the plane was not designed to be rammed midair, nor equipped to be torn at by meter-long, diamond-tipped claws. There was a roar as the dragon aimed point-blank flame at the plane held like a toy in its claw. All the incendiaries and missiles left on the airframe exploded at once. Chris heard the punch and hiss of an ejector seat and was just feeling good about the white parachute spreading in the steel-grey moonlit sky when the dragon shook off the flaming mess of aircraft from its paw and turned to incinerate the silk as it slowly floated down.

  He couldn’t possibly have heard the thud of the pilot striking the ground at hundreds of miles an hour over the battle cries, but imagination provided it nonetheless.

  “I cannot afford for my political enemies to gain a victory here,” Oonagh had followed them. Her chilly observation cut calmly through Chris’s grief. “Not when many of my people would be happy to take the easier option and follow her to your world. That way proved disastrous the last time, and I am not willing to take the risk again. My strategy was to avoid this, to avoid war. That’s where you come in. You and your crew. You were to prevent this happening.”

  “You might have told us. You might have asked,” Chris said, sullen, because he had treasured his grievances over the past fifteen years. He didn’t want to think that she might just have been acting for the best. “It didn’t occur to you to just be honest with us both? And what about Red? Archie? They were just collateral damage? Friendly fire?”

  The elf woman looked at him, her head on one side and her brows twisted. “I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

  He had to laugh. It was that or cry again, and he’d done enough of that for one night. “Of course you don’t. Very well. For the sake of the world, count me in. I don’t know what I can do, but you’ve got me. You’re fucking lucky I don’t bear a grudge.”

  He looked out. It didn’t take the extra rise of the hill to see the enemy now. Oonagh’s forces had thinned and drawn back, there were barely three ranks of warriors between her and the front line of the enemy troops. Her lips moved as she directed the commanders by her thought, but it was growing close enough that she could as well have shouted.

  The arrows had been spent and it was hand-to-hand work out there. Chris watched as a white rush of fog on his left turned into one of the taloned women, who reached out a languid arm to a knight in full armour, absorbing every blow of his sword with nothing more than a slow seep of black blood. She snapped his neck with one hand and then lowered her face to his throat and ripped it out with her perfect white teeth.

  “Shit! Ben, I’m going to have to…” He turned back, found Ben offering Oonagh a small pouch of dirt.

  “I should contact my father,” Ben was saying. “Does anyone here have water?”

  “Where did you get this?” Oonagh asked, turning the thing over in her palms as if it were a small bird—as if she feared to frighten it. “A queen made this, but it has a price that few would be willing to pay. Oh, this explains much. Yes, talk to him. Tell him… Tell him that I have news he needs to hear.”

  “He’s going to be pissed at you.”

  “I am willing to take that chance.”

  “Right then,” Chris said, again with a feeling of ill-use. So that rescue had been completely
pointless, had it? Damn it all, if he survived this, he was going to have a lovely long sulk afterwards. “I’ll just go then, shall I?”

  Keeping low, dodging from place to place and threading through the gaps between combatants, his only defence a quick flinch away and legging it fast, Chris made his way back to the hedge.

  Over the stile, he dropped onto the tarmac of another world. That was how it felt. If he looked back, it was to see a battlefield like something out of myth, if forwards, it was a seldom-used country road, with its white lines recently repainted, and a single orange streetlamp.

  This night’s work would take a lot of reflection to get straight in his head, but he didn’t have time for introspection now. He dashed back to his Mosquito, took off and surveyed the damage in the air. Dragons fought around him, filling the slatey sky with multicoloured plumes of flame. Four of them had boxed in the second Typhoon, were trying to get him to hold position enough to be caught in the same manoeuvre that had finished the first. There was no sign of any RAF reinforcements.

  “You still there, boys?” Chris whispered as he circled above the action, wondering what he could do without ordnance, and the hiss of static in his ears became the deeper, infinite echoey hiss of the afterlife.

  “Still here, Skipper.” The voice brought back the moment he’d broken down there. It wasn’t fair, was it, that you could decide you couldn’t take any more, and the world would just go ahead and give you more regardless.

  “I’m sorry, Archie. All of you. It was my job to bring you home… I’m sorry.”

  From under his feet, Archie said, “Oh, can it,” just as Red remarked, “Less chitchat, we’ve got work to do,” and he found himself surrounded by ghostly laughter.

  He joined in because apart from the fact that he was alive and they weren’t, this was almost exactly like old times. “All right then, skipper to gunners, can you give me weapons?”

  A chorus of two “Hell, yes!” and one “Affirmative” answered him. “What d’you think we’re here for, Skip?” said Red, their enthusiasm palpable. Outside the cockpit, the moon shone once more on the pale, ethereal fuselage of a phantom Lancaster, enveloping the real plane and subsuming it.

  Through the radio, Chris could hear the whining of servos as the gunners made sure their turrets moved smoothly, and he was grinning as he swung her about, found the white dragon, starlit in the leaden sky. High above the action, she observed and controlled her forces like a careful general, far away from danger herself.

  Not far enough.

  “Right you are, chaps. Target is the big white bastard. I’ll get you close, you do the rest.”

  Chris leaned back on the yoke, slicing upwards, grabbing altitude, with the engines thundering and throbbing and every rivet rattling in its socket. Painted black against a black sky, the Lanc was nothing more than an onrushing wave of sound. Liadain, intent on the fight below, did not spot them swinging around behind her until the front and mid-upper gunners opened fire, bullets white as vapour from the guns and the muzzle flame a pale cold blue.

  Occe’s guns blazed, tearing into a wing. A pattern of dark holes opened in the membrane, and white blood fell like snow from where the shots had lodged in the long bones.

  The creature screamed, its injured wing flapping loose and fast. It began to lose height. But as Chris roared past so that Red, in the tail gun, could take his shots, it craned its neck hard and an inferno of flame roared from its jaws, enveloping the tailplane and the rear turret. Chris pictured the Perspex melting, all the bullets on their belt bursting… Too many rear gunners he’d known had had to be washed out of their cockpits with a hose—there being nothing solid left.

  Then Red gave a whoop of laughter, and peppered the dragon’s nose with bullets, chipping teeth. “I’m dead already, sucker! Can’t touch me now!”

  This was not entirely true. The steering felt strange, and if Chris twisted round to look he could see, beneath the sooty cloak of Lancaster, a suggestion of red light where the Mosquito’s rudder should be. “We’re on fire!”

  He disengaged, leaving the white dragon to flap itself pathetically to the ground, sit there hunched and insulted as a wet cat, the woman on its back raising her fist in defiance at him.

  The moonlight was scattered over Bakewell by long lines of mare’s-tail clouds, and along the railway cumulus had begun to pile up, the night’s clear cold air turning damp. Chris took the Mosquito into the cloudbank, circled in there until the glow on the tail had gone down. The rudder felt loose beneath his feet, but he still had control. Some of it must be left, at least.

  When he burst back out into clear skies his long-distance view of the battlefield looked like a fireworks display. There was even a red glow on the ground where another dragon had finally succumbed to the Tornado’s missiles. The radio crackled in his ear. “Control, I’m serious, we need those reinforcements. I’m running out of ammo and we have one man down. What the hell are you doing back there?”

  Chris couldn’t hear the reply, but the pilot’s “Shit, what’s that!” came through loud and clear. He came down to one hundred feet, scoured the ground, looking for whatever had prompted the response, and saw the whole side of the hill bulge out. Something flew through. It was hard to see in the dark. He caught glimmers from claws sheathed in diamonds, a flicker of aquamarine fire along a long jaw, and eyes, molten gold as the eyes of a toad.

  The hill closed up behind it. It was already in flight, climbing with powerful wing beats. Looking down, it hadn’t seen him. The very tip of one great wing snapped up and punched the Lanc in the bomb bay, and as he hauled back on the stick, tearing the plane up and to the side, shearing away from it, he saw two small figures clinging to its back, their faces upraised to gawp at him, mouths open.

  He gained altitude, looped the tightest turn he could manage, the skin pulling away from his cheeks with the g-force, intended to skim straight back over the creature’s head, see if he had ghost bombs in the bay. A 500-pound incendiary, dropped through its spine, should give even this massive brute some trouble.

  The second pass gave him the chance to study the figures on its back. Gave him the chance to do a double take, check three, four times more. A dark-haired girl in a pair of RAF coveralls and…

  Good God, it wasn’t, was it? Couldn’t be Geoff, still in the outfit he’d worn seventy years ago, curls pressed flat by his flying helmet, wiping the soil off his goggles as the dragon passed beneath the Mossie and looked up as if it knew it had shivered his world to the roots.

  “Skipper to bomb aimer, tell me that’s not Flynn?”

  “Bomb aimer here. Looks like our navigator to me, sir.”

  He’d breathed in something fizzy, it could be the only explanation for the effervescence he could feel in his chest or the fact that something was making it hard to get out any words. “Fantastic! Let’s give him covering support, yes?”

  But Geoff and the girl had got their bearings now, taken a slow sweep over the battle and lined up on Oonagh. They were flying straight at her. She’d noticed, launched her own mount into the sky. Whip thin, it looked by comparison, a long slender lizard by the side of the black dragon’s bulk. It flamed a green burst of territorial fire, but it was like watching a lion cub swipe at the nose of the pride’s king—childish, doomed.

  Damn! It didn’t occur for a moment to Chris that Geoff might be in Liadain’s pay. Lied to, he thought. Misled. He switched on the radio, thought of telling the remaining Typhoon pilot to defend the queen—thought again, because that would mean sending a barrage of missiles Geoff’s way.

  He peeled off, gave the engines all the power he had available and got enough of a head start so that he could loop behind the hill and charge in from the opposite direction, flying straight at the black dragon’s nose. Unless one of them lost their nerve soon, they would collide just above Oonagh’s head, with unimaginable damage to them both.

  “Skipper to wireless operator. Flynn’s wearing his helmet, can you patch him into the in
tercom?”

  “It’s an intercom, Skip. He’s not exactly ‘in’.”

  “Don’t give me that crap, Tolly. I’m flying a ghost kite above a portal between worlds I opened by the power of prayer. Don’t expect me to play by the laws of physics now. Just do it!”

  They were coming in fast, Chris’s biceps twinged with the need to pull up, pull up right now and avoid the collision. He could hear Tolly muttering about wires in his left ear, hear the deep whuum, whuum of four well-adjusted engines and the shriller tone of the two Mosquito props. Cold sweat gathered under his collar and made the headset chafe against his cheek where the old scar lay silver from one too many wartime blisters. He could see the faces of the dragon riders, the little golden ornament the woman wore in her hair, the look of utter bemusement on Geoff’s face, familiar to Chris as his own.

  “Five seconds. You’re cutting it fine!”

  “Ah! Got it! There you…”

  There was the sharp snap of a connection in his right earphone. “Flynn? Flynn, pull up!”

  “Skipper?”

  Chris almost stood in his seat, elbows through the yoke, pulling it back with all the strength in his back and his legs. At the same time, the black dragon folded its wings and dropped sixty feet. It levelled out, scarcely higher than a man’s upraised arm, turned on a wingtip, and with its head down like a man labouring to peddle a bicycle up a hill, it worked to regain the height it had lost. Even so, the ghost tailplane of the Lanc grazed the end of the dragon’s floating tail, slithering along the barb with a metallic screech.

  “Skipper? Skip, is that you? What the hell? I nearly had her.”

  “You’re going for the wrong one, sunshine. It’s the one on the white dragon you want to take out. Liadain, she’s the genius who cooked up the idea to invade earth.”

  “She…told me…” Flynn’s voice had none of the white noise to it, the scratchy hollow sound of the other boys. But it did sound painfully identical to how it had sounded back in the days of Chris’s vanished youth. That shouldn’t hurt so much.