Dogfighters: Under the Hill

by Alex Beecroft

  “Geoff? It’s great to hear your voice again.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I could say the same, Skip. I really could.”

  Chris pulled out of his ascent and levelled off, tried to rub off his grin. What he saw managed it far more successfully than he desired. The Typhoon was peeling away, returning to base with all its ammunition spent. Deprived of that target, Liadain’s dragons had seen Oonagh’s weakness and were mustering to attack. There were five of them left, and they had joined one another in a loose formation directly above the single stone on top of the hill. They parted like a flower opening, one attacking Oonagh from the front, one from the back and one each side.

  The final, largest one dived directly for Geoff, claws outstretched to pluck him from his dragon’s back. At the same time something hit Chris’s kite amidships, sailing straight through the Lanc and smashing into the Mosquito beneath, splintering the wood, leaving a hole the size of his head. The missile rolled about the fuselage behind him, a block of stone, roughly shaped into a circle. Someone down below had had time to fit together a trebuchet and had shattered one of the standing stones to turn into shot.

  Chris ignored the howling wind that was now whipping around the compartment, pulled down his goggles to protect his eyes and moved to intercept Geoff’s attacker. It was another white dragon. A beautiful thing, the way its scales were patterned with what looked like lotus flowers in yellow. It shone in the moonlight as if it were hammered out of silver and gold, but Chris was much more concerned about the way it had managed to get one long claw embedded in the black dragon’s wing joint, was reaching its swan neck down to let loose a bolt of flame straight in Geoff’s face. Geoff, God bless him, was trying to hold the jaws away from himself and buckling flat under the strain.

  “Skipper to gunners, give it every damn thing you’ve got.”

  He’d never flown the Lanc as a gun platform, always used his gunners as lookouts only unless something was directly attacking them. This was his first experience with what the Fighter Boys called “the kill”. It was fucking awesome to dive on an enemy with the gun turrets blazing, to see the shots go home, and put out the dragon’s fire with a burst to the throat. Red’s work, that. It left Geoff nothing to do but stand up, kick the great claw unclenched and lever the body over the side. He let it fall like a stone on one of the groves of moving trees, shattering them.

  “Thanks, Skipper!”

  “Don’t mention it, Navigator, but you can do me a favour and take out that bloody trebuchet, would you?”

  “I’m on it.”

  Chris wanted to laugh for the glory of it, right until he had circled round again and could see how hopelessly outnumbered Oonagh was. Her forces were now limited to her bodyguard, drawn up tight around her, an elf like a walking flame trying to take down the enemy dragons with a bow.

  Elsewhere on the field, Liadain’s scattered army were reforming into companies. Some, closest to the road, had begun to send out scouts, scoping out how to get to the nearest town. He didn’t want to think about what would happen when peaceful, sleeping Bakewell was invaded by vampires and monstrous trees, and axe-wielding eldritch warriors who regarded humanity as their ancient usurpers.

  There was a grey cast to the sky in the east, and still no reinforcements.

  Chapter Nine

  Chris made another roaring pass of the battlefield and lined up on the knot of dragons that was all he could see of Oonagh. The occasional flash of bronze said she was still fighting in there, her own dragon clawing at the foremost of its attackers, a ball of fire hanging between them as both exhaled at once. The blue dragon’s throat had expanded and throbbed as it drew in breath and flamed at the same time.

  Ben was in that knot too, balancing on the blue dragon’s flailing tail, defending himself unexpectedly well with a bow and arrows. Two of Liadain’s wyrms were flapping about him, angling for a clear shot. Every time one opened its mouth, he would loose an arrow into its throat, and it would have to pause, scrub at its nose with its claws, cough up soot and melted arrowhead before it could try again.

  Liadain had remounted herself on a smaller green dragon and now fought Oonagh face to face, Oonagh with her spear and Liadain with a trident, whose hollowed glass tips oozed with white liquid, that looked very much like the venom that dripped from her mount’s teeth.

  The fourth enemy dragon had been sent tumbling by a claw strike from Oonagh’s mount, now it gathered itself together and stormed back in with a side attack. Its neck ruff and spine ridges stood out as it breathed in, and Chris could picture the explosion of fire that would hit both Ben and the queen in the side, nothing they could do about it without taking their attention disastrously away from the enemies they were already fighting.

  “Okay, that one, and right now,” he said, banking into another low rake across the battlefield, below the knot of skirmishing dragons, so that Occe in the mid-upper turret could get in on the action too. They flew directly under the belly of the yellow beast, emptied their magazines into the hollows beneath its legs, and the long, smooth scales shattered at the impact of the ghostly iron.

  Chris didn’t ask how it worked. He was too busy evading a dozen tonnes of unexpectedly plummeting dragon. It clipped him as it fell, sending the plane into a spin he really didn’t have the height to risk. Body working on instinct, he fought the kite level again, found himself ten metres above the ground, his wingtip almost touching it as he turned onto one side to fly between two of the moving trees.

  They gouged one of the standing stones from its socket, split it between them and hurled the pieces at him as he all but shook the crate apart trying to claw back altitude.

  By the time Chris had the plane under control, turned for another sweep, Ben had run out of arrows. His last shot blinded one of the dragons he was fighting. He had taken out its other eye earlier, and now thin, orange blood trickled from both sockets out of which the arrows’ fletching still poked. The dragon broke off the fight and dropped to lie writhing and hissing on the ground.

  The other, Ben was only just managing to keep away by jabbing it in the nostrils and mouth with the spike on the end of his bow. Obviously not a particularly intelligent creature, it had not yet realised that it could back away and incinerate him from a safer distance.

  Oonagh’s mount was moving sluggishly, beginning to spiral downwards. In the back of its neck, two wounds bled slowly, and there was something of the drugged sleep in the way its head hung and its claws twitched. On its neck, Oonagh also bled, her bare right arm marked with a long white scar. She had caught the trident on the crossbar of her spear—designed in ancient days to stop the charge of an angry boar—and she was trying to unseat Liadain, twisting and pushing hard.

  But it was clear that the venom was at work in her too. As he watched, Chris saw her knees buckle, watched her land heavily in the saddle and take a hand away from the spear to steady herself. At once, Liadain pressed her attack, twisted the trident and wrenched the weapon out of Oonagh’s hand. Oonagh flailed after it as it dropped, slid against the dragon’s smooth scales. Liadain drew back the trident, thrust forward, but Oonagh was still sliding sideways, the prongs of the trident passed over her head as she reached out her hands, and Geoff, standing up on the black dragon’s back, passed beneath and caught her before she fell and smashed herself on the rocks below.

  That dilemma solved, Chris swooped beneath the blue dragon’s drooping tail, took out the beast that was attacking Ben.

  Ben looked up as he passed, his face sweaty and alight with exhilaration and laughter. He gave a little salute, and Chris returned it, the life-and-death split-second quality of the exchange giving it a blaze of intensity, like a flashgun going off. He had afterimages of Ben’s smile on the back of his eyes for long moments while Ben leapt down to the ground searching for spare arrows, and Chris banked again and came back for another pass.

  He’d thought that had all gone quite well until he turned and saw that Oonagh’s army had retreated all the way t
o the portal. There were scarcely a hundred of them left, holding open the way home for themselves and their queen should she decide on a retreat. If anything, Liadain’s forces seemed to have grown.

  Chris thought he had imagined that part, until he recognised amongst them some of Oonagh’s troops who had been killed by the vampires. They now marched on the other side, their backbones showing through their ripped open throats. Revenants, with swords.

  Liadain herself had also broken off for a moment to survey the scene. Now she floated alone over the battlefield, white and silver on her verdant steed, and laughed. “This is our day. The day when the throne passes back to the ancient blood from which you stole it. Go back to your ice-clad fjords, Ylfe, tell them of your deeds while I am reminding these creatures of meat that they once lived in terror of the Sidhe.”

  Okay, thought Chris, taking out the leader was a good plan at the start, and right now it’s all there is left that might work. “Skipper to gunners, have we got ammo to spare for this one?”

  Red gave a sucking sound between his teeth. “It’s getting low, Skip. But let’s give it a shot regardless. Is she the one that did this to us? The fireball? The burning? If so, shooting her down is what we’re here to do.”

  He did, God help him, think of lying. It would have been so easy to say yes. A queen of Faerie had killed them, and this was a queen of Faerie. But he wasn’t going to spend what might be his last moments on earth lying to his crew. Some loyalties, you simply couldn’t betray, no matter what.

  “Boys, I won’t lie to you. The one that shot us down—killed you and messed up my life and Flynn’s? That’s the one we’re fighting for. The one Flynn just saved.”

  Silence, and the noise of the engines muted. He wondered why for a moment, until a glance outside the cockpit showed only the two props of the Mosquito band-sawing the air by his head. The static in his ears was the mundane hiss of an untuned channel. He didn’t close his eyes or put his head in his hands, but if he had not been flying, he would have. The crumpled sensation in the belly was the same.

  He thought of Grace, suddenly, sitting in her church and rethinking her principles on the side of loving-kindness. He’d thought it should have been an easy choice for her, realised now it was more of a request to turn the world inside out and reshape everything she had ever known to take in a God more terribly, more super-humanly good than human nature found easy to support. Same thing here—he knew the right thing to do. He was damn sure the boys knew it too, but God it was hard! Too bloody much to ask.

  But it was being asked nevertheless, and that being so, it was his job as skipper to get them safely through it.

  “Listen, boys,” he urged, not knowing if they were even there to hear, “maybe vengeance isn’t what you’re here for at all. ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord’ am I right? That’s His job. Maybe your job is to be the better man? To do the decent thing? Maybe you’ve been kept back so you get the chance to forgive her. What d’you think?”

  He wished hard for Grace, right now. What would she say? She always knew the right thing to say. Picturing her, the way she dealt with things, he remembered that she didn’t bring theology into it much, always brought it down to the here and now, to the personal. And that was the part he hated doing himself—exposing the inner man with all his vulnerabilities to the light.

  He swallowed, followed her example—for the boys, and the words came by themselves, unexpected, even shameful in their intensity.

  “From what I guess, you’re in the anteroom of Heaven or Hell, where you are now. I don’t want to see you make the wrong choice, Tolly, Archie, Red. If you’re going to damn yourselves, out of fucking spite, count me out of it, okay? That’s not the boys I knew. That’s not my brothers in arms. Don’t make me remember you badly. Don’t disappoint me, okay? You’ll break my bloody heart.”

  “You’re a goddammned sap, Skipper.” It was the hand that came back first, the cold fingers linked through his on the throttles, and then the faint glimmer of a shape in the flight engineer’s seat. The accent was Hank’s drawl, slow and steady and amused. “But I guess you’re right. If we’d done what we felt like come wartime, I wouldn’t never have left home. We’re here to do what’s the right thing, not the easy one.”

  “You agree?” Chris asked, surprised at how hard it was to get the words out. His diaphragm seemed to be trembling, and someone had interrupted the power to his legs.

  “We’re all in this together, Skip, you should know that.” The chorus of affirmative noises sounded buzzing and distant in his ear. He hadn’t realised quite how much he was fighting for until the prize had been won, thank God. If he’d known—if he’d truly known what was at stake, the responsibility would have paralysed him.

  Dawn was hurrying. There was a golden haze in the east, like dust motes caught in sunshine, and the whole sky over there twinkled. Chris breathed in and out, and felt glad to be alive, and willing to die—a gorgeous, buoyed-up, light-as-air feeling, filling all the spaces his earlier terror had scoured clean.

  He turned the plane for another pass, found Liadain’s new mount at the throat of Flynn’s beast. The girl on its back was half-supporting Oonagh, whispering something to her. She seemed less boneless now, but she was clearly not recovered enough to hold her own spear. Flynn was doing that for her, standing upright with his feet braced in the stirrups and fighting Liadain off with wide, dangerous swipes of the spear.

  In single combat, he was getting the worst of it, she was so much faster than he was. Doubtless if a single blow of his had connected, she would have been knocked flat, tumbled off her dragon, and that would have been the end of it. But his blows couldn’t connect, she was always in a different place. Always just dodging away, flicking in her trident in little taps that scarcely connected, but it would only take one of them to rip through the flying jacket and graze his skin with its venom, and the battle would be over.

  It offended Chris to see Geoff fighting. For a man of war, he was the gentlest soul Chris had ever met. He gritted his teeth and pulled his now-usual trick of flying low, directly underneath the more tender scales of the green dragon’s belly.

  The front and upper gunners got off a rattling volley, and then everything went horribly wrong. Liadain’s dragon let go of Oonagh’s and simply fell, straight down on top of Chris’s plane. The claws at the knee joint dug in to the wood and fabric wings of the Mosquito. Its long tail lashed around, curved, and the pointed tip of it thrust like a scorpion’s sting through the rear-gun turret of the ghost Lanc. Perspex shattered in an eerie silence. When he heard the grunt, the coughing gurgle of Red with the stinger through his chest, Chris tried to get up, to run to him, and Hank’s chill hands held him down.

  “Dead already,” he said soberly. “Nothing you can do but fly, Skipper.”

  Chris wasn’t sure how the kite was staying in the air with the weight of the dragon pressing it down. The lift of the mighty Lancaster engines must have somehow been holding the Mosquito up too, but he could feel the wings bending upwards, the slow, soggy, cumbersome response of the stick. Up above, the mid-upper turret rattled into silence. “Run out, Skip. Made a ruddy great hole in it, but it’s just taking it.”

  “Okay, Mid-upper. Get down to the rear and see what you can do for Red.”

  The dragon’s fore-claws were closed about the join between wings and fuselage. It had been nosing at the propellers, trying to decide if it could bite there, lost a whisker and withdrawn. Now it braced its long, muscular neck, turned its head upside down and looked at him through the cockpit screen. Venom hit the Perspex like heavy rain. One good bite and the long fangs would sheer the front of the plane off, chomp him up. This was obviously no time for half measures.

  Chris flipped the kite onto her back, dropped the altitude and scraped the dragon through Liadain’s army, flinging armoured warriors and their weapons at the beast’s head at one hundred miles an hour. Debris hit the props and was flung back, shattering the windscreen. The plane yowle
d and shuddered, the smell of overheating engines and dope and oily, metallic dragon’s blood rang in his head like a single, high-pitched piercing note. And then many things happened at once.

  The dragon let go, tried to twist in the air and failed. It slammed into the ground upside down and ploughed onwards thirty feet, raising a crater in the gorsy field. Free of the weight, the Mosquito kicked upwards five hundred feet in a single bound, making Chris’s head feel like an overripe tomato ready to burst. He had not brought a flying suit, and the blood was pooling in his head, covering his vision with a film of red, making his pulse hammer, hammer, hammer at his skull with a pile driver.

  He flipped the plane upright again, tried to master the dizziness, the protest of his neck and spine, the red, whining tremble of all his muscles. Saved him though it had, the ghost Lanc was not a light plane by any means, had to be wrestled through acrobatics by sheer brute force, and he was not as young as he used to be. He could feel exhaustion welling out of his bones like the onset of depression, grey and numb and hopeless, and he still hurt all over from the memory of that strange duel for Ben’s soul that he wasn’t completely sure he’d won.

  Blue flames trickled from the outer port engine of the Lanc, and he wondered idly how that could be, what dimension the dead existed in, which could simultaneously be in this world and not. “Did we get her?”

  “Bomb aimer here, Skip. I think we did. The dragon’s crumpled up, looking pretty dead to me. I see her arm and shoulder. They’re trying to get her out, but she’s right underneath. Squashed flat.”

  “Well, that’s…” He made for the road. With the port outer engine feathered and the starboard inner crushed, the power of the Lanc was no longer adequate to keep the mangled Mosquito in the air. Chris held on to her with sweating hands, fighting the juddering stick and the sloppy rudder, trying to figure out how to land two different planes at the same time. Heat blew in along with the wind and pieces of the windscreen peppered his face. He didn’t think he could keep her in the air any longer. And where, but where, was the RAF?