Harry Takes Off: Astounding Stories of Adventure (Iron Pegasus Book 1)

by Steve Turnbull

  Johannes sat down at his desk with his head in his hands. Harry considered that Khuwelsa’s explanation was probably not the most diplomatic, but Sellie had always been one for plain speaking.

  Harriet got defensive. “He was firing at an unarmed vessel.”

  “You did not follow his instructions.”

  There was the approaching sound of many booted feet thudding in perfect unison outside the door. At a sharp command they came to a halt. The sound of guns being cocked and readied penetrated the room. A shadow moved across the frosted glass of the window.

  Then someone knocked.

  iv

  Kommandant Schmidt had been very polite.

  He had very politely escorted the two of them from Johannes’s office to a room on an upper floor of the main building, a room that sported bars on the windows.

  So here they were, with Harry sitting on one side of a bare table, him on the other and Khuwelsa merely allowed to stand near the window.

  “Does your girl speak German?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Please do not pretend you only speak English.”

  “I speak French, if you like.”

  “Miss Edgbaston, you think this is a joke?” He took out a cigarette pack, tapped out one for himself and lit it with a match. “I assure you this is no joke.”

  “You can’t keep us here.”

  He drew in a lungful of smoke and blew it out. Harry hated the smell of cigarettes but she was not going to let him know that.

  “I can keep you here.”

  “My father knows I was coming here. If I’m not back by this evening someone will look for me.”

  “Why are you here, Miss Edgbaston?”

  “I came to see Jo— Lieutenant Schönfeldt.”

  “Why?”

  Because she often did? Because he was a good dancer? Because she enjoyed talking to him about flying and machines? There didn’t seem to be a very good answer.

  “Are you spying for your father?”

  “What?” She laughed. He, however, did not. It took her a moment to realise it would be better if she expressed anger rather than amusement. “You think that a seventeen-year-old girl would be a spy.”

  “We know who your father is, Miss Edgbaston. It is very likely he would use you as a spy, even if you did not realise it.”

  She jumped to her feet and leaned over the desk. “How dare you? I am no spy. My father never asks me about my trips. He has never expressed an interest in what you Germans are doing. Why? Are you doing something he ought to know about?”

  Schmidt had maintained his slightly aloof, superior attitude until those words slipped out. Now he frowned and stood up. His face drew close to hers.

  “You will remain here until noon tomorrow. Then you will be free to go. If anyone comes looking for you they will be dealt with the same way.”

  He went to the door and turned. “Miss Edgbaston. You made an unfortunate mistake coming here today. We are not at war with your country. If you behave intelligently you will not be harmed.”

  “And if I don’t, Herr Schmidt?” she said, omitting his title. His frown deepened into a scowl.

  “I will leave that to your no doubt vivid imagination.”

  He banged on the door, and it was unlocked from the other side and opened. The Kommandant clicked his heels, saluted and left without a further word.

  Harry sat down and sighed. Khuwelsa took the other chair.

  “It’s only a day,” Khuwelsa said. “No worse than when Mrs Hemingway manages to keep us in the schoolroom.”

  Harry stood up and went to the window. She looked out on the entrance to the military compound. Squads of soldiers marched along the main road and there were patrols around the perimeter.

  “What’s going on, Sellie?” she said, almost inaudibly. “What are they doing?”

  Khuwelsa came up beside her, placed her palms on the windowsill and peered out. “They are going to war.”

  “But who with?”

  It couldn’t be the Italians; they held so little land it hardly seemed worth it, even if it was along the coast. Most of the natives were on the German side anyway, only the Wahehe fought them. And that left the British. But how could they even dare? The Empire was far too strong.

  The Empire might be powerful around the world, but not here in East Africa.

  “They must be going against us,” she said.

  The door unlocked. She and Khuwelsa turned as Johannes entered.

  “I will speak with them alone,” he said to the guard outside.

  The door shut and locked.

  “What do you want?” said Harry.

  He switched to English. “Do not do anything, Harriet.”

  She laughed. “Do?” She gestured around the bare room. “Do, Lieutenant? I am imprisoned. I cannot do anything.”

  He frowned. “I am your friend. Just wait until tomorrow and they’ll let you go.”

  “If you were my friend, you would have them unlock the door and let me go now.”

  “I cannot do that, but I will have them move the Pegasus. It is in the way.”

  She turned to face him fully. “Don’t you dare break my baby bird.”

  “Oh no, Harry,” he said and enunciated every word. “I will ensure your baby bird is in perfect flying condition.”

  She paused, absorbing his words, then retorted, “You’d better. If there’s a single feather damaged I’ll replace it with your skin.”

  He nodded and knocked on the door. As it was unlocked he saluted with a click of his heels.

  “Johannes”—she burst out as he turned to go—“we can’t be stuck in here all day and night.”

  He glanced round and then nodded. The door closed behind him and locked with a solid clunk.

  Harry turned back to the window with a grin on her face. Khuwelsa frowned. “You worry me when you smile like that.”

  “Ha!” Harry threw her arms around her in a tight hug. “He’s going to help us get out.”

  “Are you feeling well?” Khuwelsa said, extricating herself from Harry’s arms and brushing the creases from her dress. “He didn’t say anything like that.”

  “You weren’t listening with the right ears,” said Harry.

  “You mean your ears. I remember the time you claimed your father said we could go down to the waterhole. And we got chased by that old hippo.”

  “We were seven.”

  “And ten years later you’re just the same.”

  “We didn’t get hurt.”

  “Only because hippos can’t climb trees.”

  Harry laughed. “You’re still angry because you tore your dress.”

  “It was a present from your father.” She turned away, pouting. “I could never wear it again.”

  “You wait,” said Harry. “You’ll see.”

  v

  They waited. At shortly after two in the afternoon the main compound gates opened and the Pegasus came through, mounted on a reduced-gravity trailer and pulled by a steam truck. The wings had been folded in. Khuwelsa worried over potential damage to the control mechanisms.

  “They don’t know what they’re doing with a ’thopter,” she said.

  The steam truck was unhooked, but the electrical cable remained attached. A dozen soldiers manoeuvred the trailer into a space out of the main stream of traffic. One of them disconnected the cable and the girls watched the trailer sink as it took the full weight of the Pegasus.

  A meal was brought to them mid-afternoon and Harry asked to see Johannes. They ate and drank slowly. The electric fan in the ceiling kept the hot air circulating but, as the sun crept round, the room was bathed with light and heat. Their only escape from it was to sit against one wall until the sun had moved on.

  It was an hour later that Johannes appeared. Khuwelsa was sitting near the door as he entered, while Harry stood near the window but in the shade.

  “What do you want, Harriet?”

  “Well, without wishing to be indelicate,
I would like to point out there are no facilities available.”

  He frowned. “Facilities?”

  Harry sighed. “No water closet.”

  Johannes nodded. “We do not have the facilities for ladies.”

  “Well, you should have thought about that before you locked us up.”

  “It was not my decision, Harriet,” he said. “I do not want you here.”

  “And to think I came all this way just to see you.”

  “You deliberately misunderstand.” Before she could come back with another retort he continued. “I will arrange a visit to the officers’ facilities in a short time.”

  He knocked on the door. It was unlocked and he pulled it open.

  “Johannes?”

  He paused, waiting for her to continue, but she said nothing.

  “Yes, Harriet?”

  She arranged what she hoped was an expression of concern on her face, and looked down at the floor. She had been to parties where the young women made the men chase them by behaving like prey.

  Like the good German gentleman that he was, he moved away from the door and stood before her.

  “What is it, Harriet?”

  “They will be letting us go tomorrow, won’t they?”

  “That is what I have been told.” The momentary pause before his reply told her everything she needed to know.

  She nodded, which he took as his dismissal. The door lock clicked firmly behind him.

  “Well?” Harry demanded when the footsteps of the guard had retreated. “Did you get a good look at the lock?”

  “I wish we were wearing corsets,” replied Khuwelsa. “What we really need is a strip of pliable bone or metal. But at least there’s no bolt on the outside.”

  “You’ve got your tools, though?”

  Khuwelsa patted her skirt and smiled. “I wouldn’t go anywhere without them. No chisel, though.”

  “What about the table?”

  “It’s designed to be taken apart but there’s nothing useful. Though we could use the legs as clubs.”

  Harry sighed. “Maybe there’ll be something in the W.C. that you can use.”

  Another thirty minutes crept past before Johannes reappeared with an escort of four soldiers with rifles in their hands and pistols at their hips.

  “You’re expecting us to make a break for it?”

  “Regulations.”

  “Of course.”

  They were guided through the building and out into the open. The Pegasus was only a dozen yards away but might as well have been on the other side of the moon for all the good it did.

  “The furnace wasn’t properly banked when we landed.”

  “Our engineers looked after the ship.”

  “What do they know about ’thopters?

  “You are not going aboard your vessel, Harriet.”

  They were guided to a building, probably constructed by Arab slavers years before. It had smooth tapered columns, and open windows with a ceiling that was high and distant. As they stepped through into the shade and coolness of the interior, Harry breathed a sigh of relief. The German-built structure was not designed for equatorial zones, but the Kaiser’s people had only started colonising in the last fifteen years. They were new to the game and did not understand the climate.

  The building bustled with officers in deep discussion and messengers moving in and out. Apart from the guards there didn’t seem to be a single man of rank below lieutenant in the place.

  They passed the open door of a room with a huge map hung on one wall, showing the German Protectorate from the inland lakes to the coast, and the island of Zanzibar from whom they’d wrested control of the land. She knew the Arabs weren’t too pleased about it, though in general she did not pay attention to her father’s business.

  He was on a diplomatic mission to Zanzibar. The old sultan was dead and there was some problem with the succession. Could this German invasion have anything to do with that?

  They reached a suite near the rear signposted in German as “refreshment rooms.” German was a long-winded language, but at least everything was labelled.

  Johannes went in and determined that the rooms were in fact empty. On his return, he held open the door, gesturing for them to enter.

  Harry put on her best haughty “maiden aunt” expression and jammed her fists into her hips, elbows out. “You do not expect to be in there with us?”

  “Regulations state…”

  “I don’t give a damn about your regulations.”

  Khuwelsa gasped and threw her hand over her face to hide her giggles.

  Johannes stood in the doorway, looking for a moment as if he was going to argue. Then he shrugged and came out.

  With Khuwelsa in tow, Harry stormed past him and slammed the door. She threw the bolt on the inside and took in the details of the room as fast as she could. There were the usual wide windows along one wall, blocked with elegant wooden grids of complex geometric patterns, one behind the other in such a way that air would flow through but no one could see in or out.

  The room was constructed primarily of marble with cubicles separated by alabaster panels, while the ceiling was decorated in patterns that echoed the window ornamentation.

  A room off led to a bathing area.

  “Those slavers liked the good life,” commented Khuwelsa, with a dangerous undertone in her voice.

  “See what you can find.”

  “Better not forget to use the facilities either,” said Khuwelsa, grinning as she pulled up her skirt and extracted a leather toolkit from an inside pocket. “They probably won’t let us out again until tomorrow.”

  vi

  The walk back through town was similar to the outward journey, except for the marching columns of soldiers heading east. Their thudding boots raised clouds of dust that dried the throat. The regular rhythm of their passing was punctuated by barked commands.

  Harry made a point of counting them as they passed and had reached a number over a thousand by the time they regained the main building. But there had already been soldiers before those, and more just kept on coming.

  Khuwelsa had extracted a strip of lead from one of the cisterns while perched on the toilet lid, and replaced the missing metal with a wad of folded cotton sliced from Harry’s petticoat using a small knife. She thought her makeshift replacement would hold for perhaps a few hours. They hoped to be away before they were discovered.

  The second part of the plan was trickier.

  When they approached the door to their prison, Harry allowed Khuwelsa to go ahead of her and through the open door. Harry turned on Johannes.

  “This is completely outrageous. My father will hear of this. There will be stern words to your government.”

  “Harriet, your father is precisely the reason why you are to be kept here until tomorrow,” he said. She kept her head down and sniffed. “Fraulein Edgbaston?”

  Harry knew she’d never win awards for acting, but she didn’t have to do this on the stage. She pulled out a kerchief and lifted it to her face. The handkerchief had been soaked before they left the facilities; she wiped it across her cheeks, dampening them rather than drying. She rubbed her eyes hard in an effort to redden them. Suffering as she did from the combination of a redhead’s complexion and a multitude of freckles, crying always made her blotchy and quite ugly (as Khuwelsa had pointed out on more than one occasion).

  She sniffed again and raised her eyes. Johannes shifted his feet and looked uncomfortable. “There is no need for tears, Harriet.” He glanced at the guards, all looking at him, and then patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. “You must go into the room now.”

  She sobbed and pretended to suppress it, which caused something of a problem in her throat and turned into a short fit of coughing. She felt Johannes patting her shoulder again. Men are so useless, she thought. Give them a gun with something to shoot and they’re all bravado and swagger. Faced with a crying girl, they crumble.

  Which was just what she had counted on
.

  Khuwelsa’s voice drifted from the room. “It’s all right, Harry, I’ll look after you.” That was her signal to indicate she had finished. Harry was grateful; if she had to escalate, the next stage involved collapsing to the floor in a dead faint. She hated smelling salts. And as she wasn’t wearing a corset, it might be unconvincing.

  She sniffed. “Thank you for being so kind, Johannes.” She closed on him and raising herself on tip-toes gave him a peck on the cheek. She turned and walked into the room. The door shut with a firm click.

  Khuwelsa could barely contain her laughter. She put her hand on Harry’s shoulder and mimicked Johannes’s concerned tones. “It’s all right, Harry, I’ll look after you.”

  “Oh stop it. He was trying to be nice.” Then she too had a fit of giggles that she desperately tried to suppress. “Did you do it?”

  Khuwelsa nodded. “Of course I did.”

  Harry went to the window and the humour went out of her. The army continued to march past and she counted a further thousand men as she peered through the window of their prison. And that didn’t include the five hundred she guessed must have gone past when she wasn’t looking.

  The military column changed composition from men to equipment: numerous steam- and diesel-powered automatic artillery units. She had no experience with which to judge how powerful they were but there was a group that had barrels that she thought she could stick her head into. Or Johannes’s head.

  Finally came a hundred steam trucks carrying supplies and support staff.

  Could the Germans really be going to war? How many soldiers did you need for a war? Let’s say they had five thousand men. How many had fought at Agincourt? She couldn’t remember but it was more than that, and that was hundreds of years ago.

  It all went quiet until an hour or so before dusk when the sky was filled with the sound of engines as a squadron of fighters went over followed by four Zeppelins that were so low they filled the sky.

  They needed to get out and warn her father.

  Below them in the courtyard sat the Pegasus–so near and, as yet, unattainable. They might be able to get out of the room, but how could they possibly reach it, get inside, and fire up the furnace, all without being shot?