Ghosts of War: A Tale of the Ghost

by George Mann

  Then, unsure what else to do but unable to hang around in his compromised bolt-hole any longer, he gathered a change of clothes, some more cash, a gun and some ammunition, and got away from there as quickly as he could, leaving the dead man where he had fallen, bleeding out all over the carpet.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Ghost stood on the roof of the precinct building, gazing out over the thronging streets of the city.

  This was his city. The city he had sworn to protect. The city that permeated the very fabric of his being, that coursed through his veins, an immutable part of his psyche. The Ghost was the city rendered flesh. He was its avatar, its judge, jury, and executioner. It was as if the city imbued him with energy, woke him from the slumber of his daily routines, gave him purpose, meaning. Gave him a reason to exist.

  In return, the Ghost watched, and waited; a silent sentinel, ready to stir into action when the city needed him.

  Now, he was poised like a statue on the corner of the police building, his trench coat billowing around him in the gusting winds. A cigarette dripped from his lower lip, and his goggles glowed like red pinpricks in the darkness as he turned his head, surveying the passing cars on the street below. Searching for signs of the raptors, striking out from their nest to wreak havoc once more upon the citizens below. Searching for danger, for mobsters or burglars, muggers or rapists. Searching for valediction and redemption.

  If the brass monsters showed themselves that night, he would stop them. He would down one, shredding its wings, and he would pull it apart to find out what diabolical mischief had given it life. Perhaps then he would find a clue as to their purpose, or their origin, or both.

  Above, the searchlight of a dirigible shone down in a brilliant column, washing everything it touched in a brilliant white light. And farther out, all across the city, electric lights twinkled and shone in the windows of tower blocks, causing the whole island to glow, underlighting the brooding night sky. The moon was shrouded in wispy clouds, hanging full and low in the distance.

  He heard the scuff of a booted foot from somewhere behind him, and smiled.

  “Get down from there, Gabriel. You're making the place look untidy.”

  The Ghost turned to see Donovan standing on the rooftop a few feet away, his hair whipping around his face in the cross winds, a wide grin on his face. Behind him, the door to the fire escape was wedged open, allowing yellow light to spill out across the graveled courtyard.

  The Ghost dropped down from the lip of the building and walked over to greet his friend, clasping him firmly by the hand. “How are you, Felix? How's Flora?”

  “Tired and overworked.” Donovan said, with a shrug. “Nothing new there. I haven't seen Flora for weeks. Not properly.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “But we're good. We're surviving.” He flexed his shoulder. “And this is finally beginning to heal.”

  Donovan had taken a bullet in the shoulder back in November, during a run-in with Gideon Reece, the Roman's second in command. He'd nearly bled to death in the stairwell of his apartment building until the Ghost had come to his aid, dragging him across town to his own apartment and strapping the wound. That was how Donovan had first learned of the Ghost's alter ego, having spent the night sleeping fitfully in an armchair, waking to find the Ghost had once more become Gabriel Cross.

  Since then, there had been a growing bond of trust and mutual respect between the two men, even if their methods were often diametrically opposed.

  “What about you? You've been quiet.” The concern was evident in Donovan's voice. He knew about the canceled parties, the fact that Gabriel had retreated from public life since the death of Celeste.

  “I've been busy,” the Ghost replied, attempting to draw a line under the matter.

  “Haven't we all,” Donovan laughed, darkly. He sounded more exasperated than amused.

  “This raptor business…” the Ghost started.

  “Ah, yes,” Donovan sighed. “You look like you've been busy.” He indicated his face, referencing the Ghost's scarred and scratched appearance. “A woman called Patricia Reuben called the station this morning, asking for me by name. Said she'd been abducted by one of the flying things but a man in a black suit had saved her. Know anything about that?”

  The Ghost laughed. “Did she give you anything useful?”

  “Not really,” Donovan replied. “Nothing new. It's helpful to have a firsthand account, but she only told us what we already knew: that the things come swooping out of the sky to pluck people off the streets, seemingly at random. She was walking back from a jazz club when it happened. She was lucky you were there to help. Otherwise she'd have gone the way of all the others.”

  The Ghost nodded. “I only wish we knew what that was. And that I'd been quicker. There was another one, too. That one got away with a young man.”

  Donovan shook his head. He looked pained. “That one hasn't been reported yet.” He kicked at the gravel underfoot. “I take it you've had no luck tracking the things, then?”

  “No. They're too fast, even carrying a body. I damaged one of them yesterday, but I had to let it go to save the girl.”

  “Too bad,” Donovan said morosely.

  The two men lapsed into a brief, knowing silence.

  The Ghost studied the policeman, who seemed distracted. He watched as Donovan glanced up at the sound of the police dirigible whirring overhead, as if worried they might find themselves caught beneath its swinging searchlight.

  Then Donovan said suddenly, urgently, “Look, there's something else. Something that's come up.”

  “This thing with the commissioner?” the Ghost queried.

  “Yeah. The thing with the commissioner.” Donovan searched around in his jacket, realized he'd left his cigarettes on his desk again, and held his hand out to the Ghost, who chuckled and tossed him his own packet. Donovan slipped one of the thin white sticks out of the paper wrapper and pulled the ignition tab. He sighed gratefully as he dragged the nicotine into his lungs. “Seems there's a British spy running amok down there”—he nodded toward the bristling lights of the city below—”and the commissioner wants me to find him.”

  The Ghost frowned. “A spy? Aren't there government agencies to take care of that sort of thing? What about the raptors?”

  Donovan blew smoke from his nostrils in long riffles. “That's just it. That's what's got me feeling jumpy about the whole thing. I think the commissioner's been leaned on. The whole thing seems to have been orchestrated by a senator called Isambard Banks.” He paused. “Do you remember that name?”

  The Ghost frowned. “Wasn't he mixed up in all that mess with the Roman?”

  “That's him.” Donovan nodded. “Walked away from the whole thing because we couldn't tie him back to anything specific. But his name was linked to the others, more than once. Anyway, he was there when I went to speak to the commissioner this afternoon. Pretty much gave me an order to get on with it, and the commissioner just sat by and encouraged it to happen. Thing is, I don't trust him, Gabriel.”

  “Who? The senator? Or the commissioner?”

  Donovan shrugged. “Perhaps both…I don't know. There's something not right. I can't put my finger on it.”

  “Did he tell you what this spy was up to?”

  “Counterintelligence. Apparently he knows secrets that could ignite a war with the British,” Donovan replied, his voice low.

  “You mean he's uncovered what Banks and the rest of those corrupt bastards are up to, and Banks is trying to stop him going public,” the Ghost laughed, skeptically.

  “Something like that,” Donovan said, his tone serious. He reached out, catching the Ghost by the arm. “I need your help, Gabriel. If this is real, if there really is a war brewing…well, we have to stop it.”

  The Ghost nodded. He knew the horrors of war. Knew what it could do to a man. Donovan was right. If this spy really was in a position to escalate things with the British, to exploit the intelligence he'd uncovered, then he had to be stopped. “O
f course,” he said. “I'll start by checking out Banks, find out what he's really up to. But first I want to bring down one of those raptors.”

  Donovan nodded. “Thank you,” he said. He flicked the butt of his cigarette over the edge of the building, and the Ghost watched it tumble through the air and disappear into the haze of the city. When he looked back, Donovan was brandishing a manila envelope. “Photographs, names, places—everything I've got on the spy.”

  The Ghost accepted the packet and slid it inside his coat. “Keep in touch, Felix,” he said, and then turned and ran toward the edge of the building, leaping up onto the stone lip and propelling himself into the air.

  For a moment he was falling again, hurtling toward the street below. Then, seconds later, he was soaring away on twin spikes of flame, up and over the top of the nearby tower blocks, the rush of the wind in his face, adrenaline coursing through his veins.

  CHAPTER SIX

  He was in hell. He was sure it was hell.

  Up there, hanging out of the cockpit of his plane, Gabriel had a view that stretched for miles and miles, right across the undulating landscape, from the rolling hills in the east to the lush farmland in the west. If he craned his neck, ignored the spiraling pillars of black smoke, the remorseless chatter and bark of gunfire from below, he could almost believe he was flying away toward those far-off hills, where the war was a distant concern and the landscape hadn't yet been marred by blood and bullets.

  It should have been idyllic, peaceful. But instead, the ground far beneath him roiled with horror.

  Muddy trenches had been carved methodically across fields that had once been green, but were now reduced to nothing but brown slurry, churned over and over by mortar fire and peppered with the remains of the dead. People buzzed around in these tunnels like ants navigating their way through a confusing maze, or neurons darting to and fro inside the workings of some ancient, arcane mind.

  He wondered if they were, in fact, part of some enormous hive, if there wasn't some greater purpose at play. If that were true, none of those men were fully aware of it or knew exactly what part in it they were serving. All they did was follow orders, rushing headlong toward their deaths, because that was all they could do. That was all they knew, the only thing that gave them any purpose. The war had eclipsed everything, like an ink stain on a sheet of blotting paper. It had absorbed these men, turned them into drones for the hive, swallowed their identities and memories and reasons for being, and replaced them with orders and a desire to kill.

  Gabriel knew that wasn't entirely true. Nor was it fair. Those men—his friends and comrades—had given their lives for a cause they believed in, to protect their loved ones, their freedom, and their country. That was entirely admirable, and it was brave.

  Yet Gabriel had learned to hate the war, to hate everything it represented. The war had turned him into a murderer, and while he knew that if he survived this horror, he would return to his country to be heralded a hero, he would never feel like a hero. He would only ever feel like a killer, a man who had lost his way. He wondered if he would ever wake up from the numbness that had settled over him. He doubted it.

  He'd never intended to be here, in an aircraft high above a killing field. He'd never wanted to see the things he'd seen. Those sights had changed him irreversibly, altered his fundamental view of the world. There was no going back. Even when it was over, for him, the war would last forever.

  He looked down upon the battlefield.

  Black smoke curled from the blazing wreckage of buildings and vehicles, and lights flashed orange and white as hulking weapons punched explosive round after explosive round toward the enemy encampments. Mud sprayed in massive plumes where the mortar rounds struck the earth, some of them sucking up and spitting out people, too, like miniature tornadoes, striking in a flash, wreaking devastation, and then disappearing again, only to be replaced moments later by another, and then another, and then another.

  It was constant, relentless. It was a vast, mindless engine of death, with people as its fuel supply.

  From up there, high above the battlefield, Gabriel couldn't tell the difference between the two sides in this terrible game of death, couldn't discern which side was which, so similar were the encampments, the weapons, the uniforms, the tactics.

  That was the great irony of all this, he thought. If only they could see themselves from up here, they'd realize how ridiculous it all was, that in truth they were all the same, on the same side. But he knew they were blinded by rage and patriotism, and the killing would simply continue until there was no one left to die.

  Gabriel snapped suddenly alert at the rat-a-tat of a machine gun and banked sharply to the left, narrowly missing a hail of bullets that had been intended to shred his right wing. He dipped and arced in a loop, spiraling around to face his attacker.

  The other plane had come out of nowhere, zipping out from behind the cloud cover as Gabriel had approached. It was a German biplane, armed to the teeth with machine gun emplacements and hungry to bring him down.

  Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat.

  Gabriel realized there were two people in the enemy aircraft: a gunman in the rear seat was taking potshots at him while the pilot tried to maneuver them closer for the kill. He was massively outgunned.

  Gabriel went into a sharp dive, pushing the flight controls forward as far as they would go, sending the plane hurtling toward the muddy ground below. The propellers groaned and whined as he held his course until, at the last minute, he wrenched back on the controls, pulling the nose up sharply and bringing the plane back into a steady climb.

  He could see the enemy aircraft above him now, like a silvery boat hanging in the sky, its belly exposed beneath the water. He raced toward it, his thumbs depressing the buttons that set loose a hail of bullets from the nose-mounted weapons on his own plane.

  There was a din of rending metal as the spray of bullets hit home, peppering the fuselage of the German plane with a series of ragged pockmarks. The pilot bucked wildly in his seat but managed to maintain his course.

  Seconds later, Gabriel was forced to slew to the left to avoid colliding with the biplane, and he banked around trying desperately to gain height. The German gunman let loose with another shower of bullets, his machine gun roaring, its hot mouth spitting death. This time the gunner's aim was true and the shots caught Gabriel's plane along its left flank, opening a large rent in the thin metal fuselage.

  Gabriel breathed a heavy sigh of relief when he realized his fuel tank was still intact and the bullets had narrowly missed his legs, puncturing the area around the cockpit. He could barely hear himself think over the sound of the rushing air and the whine of the rending metal where the side of the plane had been compromised.

  He turned the plane in a wide circle, coming about above and behind the German aircraft. He depressed the triggers again, squeezing out another storm of bullets. The enemy biplane swung wildly from side to side, trying to avoid being hit.

  For a few moments the two planes danced above the battlefield, ducking and weaving, slewing and banking, diving and looping. All the while, Gabriel maintained his target, mirroring the other pilot's maneuvers, keeping the biplane locked in his sights.

  He fired again, roaring in rage and success as he saw the gunner jerk and go suddenly limp. Blood sprayed in a wide arc as the bullets ripped through the man's chest and throat.

  Gabriel pressed on with the attack, trying to capitalize on the pilot's fear and disorientation. He swooped down, hovering just above the other plane. He could see the lolling head of the dead gunner as the biplane shook and darted from side to side, trying desperately to shake Gabriel's tail.

  Gabriel, however, was too quick. He saw his chance. He took his aim, and fired.

  The pilot bucked in his seat, his hands abandoning the controls as he clutched pointlessly at his chest, as if trying to plug the holes where the bullets had punched through his body. He coughed blood, spasmed, and was still.

  Gabriel banked s
harply and climbed away from the biplane, which, with no pilot at the controls, went into a long spiral as it nose-dived toward the muddy battlefield below.

  Seconds later, leaning out of his cockpit to watch, he saw the German aircraft plummet into the ground, crumpling with an earth-shattering bang, sending dirt slewing in a tidal wave toward the enemy trenches. There was silence for a moment. Then it exploded with a whoosh of heat and light as the fuel tank went up, causing Gabriel to shield his eyes and look away.

  For a moment he allowed himself to feel jubilant. He'd survived. He'd bettered an enemy pilot in a dogfight. Then he remembered the look on the gunner's face as Gabriel's bullets had shredded his torso, the sight of the blood spewing out of the pilot's mouth, the desperate way he had clutched at his chest as if trying to hold himself together.

  This was nothing to feel jubilant about. There was no celebration here. He had killed two men.

  Gabriel buried those images, suppressing them, locking them in that dark, private place in his mind, that place where all of those horrors resided. He wondered if that was how they all coped, all of the soldiers, locking those thoughts away deep inside their psyches. He wondered if that was why they were all so happy to blithely follow orders like they did. Because it gave them something to focus on, rather than the horrors they would have to face if they ever turned away.

  Gabriel pulled back on the controls and the plane soared, rising up through the white, fluffy clouds, until all he could see was a blanket of white and the bright, formless blue of the horizon.

  And there, watching him, were the eyes.

  Gabriel woke with a start. He sat bolt upright in bed, his chest glistening with sweat. He ran a hand through his hair, feeling disorientated, out of sorts. Where was he? The place seemed unfamiliar.

  The walls seemed to resolve around him. A stranger's room? No, the spare room. That was it. He was back in Long Island, back at the house, and he'd spent the night in the guest room because when he'd returned home late from the city, he'd found Ginny curled up asleep on his bed.