Empire Day

by James Philip

  Three hours after the event he had discovered that his wife had collapsed around the time of the afternoon’s disaster and been rushed to hospital with the first badly injured survivors. Something had happened with the baby and by the time she was wheeled into the overwhelmed operating theatres it was too late. An emergency caesarean section had been carried out but the baby – a boy – was already dead and when Watson had finally got to her side Vicky was unconscious, comatose and fighting for her life.

  The death toll from the Polyphemus disaster had topped a hundred, with at least as many seriously injured. Some twenty persons still missing or variously unaccounted for. Among the dead were over forty women and children. Now John Watson’s wife was likely dying and he well understood that the only reason ‘the Colonel’ was sitting in his office was because the CSS was looking for a convenient scapegoat.

  “I’m busy, what do you want, Harrison?” He demanded, slumping behind his desk and rifling through the notes which had accumulated on his blotter while he had been at Queen Mary’s Hospital. Belatedly, he remembered his manners. A guest was a guest, notwithstanding he was Matthew Harrison. “Forgive me. These are trying hours.”

  Sixty-two-year old Matthew Jefferson Harrison shrugged.

  “No offence taken, friend.”

  The CSS man had used the time waiting for John Watson’s return to study the man’s office. His surroundings were less opulent, less to do with a visible expression of his status at the yard, suggesting a confident, pragmatic man who knew he was very good at his job and had no need of the psychological props with which many of his fellows surrounded themselves. The furniture was old, solid and sparse. A big desk, chairs for visitors, a drinks cabinet by the window overlooking the four slipways.

  “It has been a long day,” Watson breathed wearily. “Will you join me in a drink?”

  Presently, Harrison was contemplating the generous measure of Scotch Whiskey in the tumbler in his large, pale hands as the two men took fresh stock of each other, circling like heavyweights nervous about the other man’s left hook.

  Through the windows arc lights threw their harsh, unrelenting dazzling illumination across a surreal scene as rescuers still sifted through the wreckage at the bottom of the slipway. The hulk of the Polyphemus lay half submerged like a giant steel whale as oxy-acetylene torches cut through the ship’s plates in a desperate race to free men still trapped within the hull.

  From a distance it might have seemed like an outer ring of Dante’s inferno.

  “A lot of questions are going to get asked about what happened here today,” Harrison observed. “I reckoned I’d start with the man most likely to have figured it out first.”

  John Watson did not take this as any kind of complement.

  “What happened isn’t any kind of mystery,” he retorted.

  Whisky scorched his throat.

  Several hundred pounds of most likely blasting powder or gun cotton, cordite – judging by the stench of the remains of the crater half-way down Slipway Number 3 – had detonated during the launch. Thereafter, the forward hull of the Polyphemus had dragged over the wreckage opening a hundred feet long gash in her bottom plating before she toppled over onto her starboard beam and sank into the relatively shallow waters of Wallabout Bay at the bottom of the slip. The explosion had been so violent it had sent debris as large as slipway rails scything through the packed crowd up to fifty yards away and left a crater over thirty feet wide by ten in depth.

  “At some time in the last month saboteurs must have emplaced a large blasting charge in the storm drains beneath the slips…”

  “Why the last month?”

  Watson emptied his tumbler.

  He was an engineer by training so he knew all about the properties of blasting powder and other demolition explosives. Cordite was a low explosive which burned rather than exploded, like TNT, a high explosive. ‘Burned’ was the operative word. Low explosives only ‘exploded’ when confined, either in a gun barrel or otherwise. The saboteurs would have had to wall up the storm drain beneath the slipway and that would have blocked it, leading to back flooding if there was a big storm. Without blocking off the tunnel the charge would have burned itself out underground, perhaps venting through weak spots in the drain-lining; and it would not have caused a single violent explosion.

  The properties of cordite were so well understood that capital ships like the Lions anchored out in the Upper Bay were designed with ‘venting paths’ so that flash fires caused by enemy action or by an accident in the shell handling rooms of the main and secondary magazines could never, hopefully, result in a catastrophic ship-wrecking detonation.

  “Blocking the storm drains so close to their seaward outfalls would have caused back flooding in Brooklyn and the yards. The last heavy rains were in the first week of June. So, it had to have been done in the last two to three weeks.”

  “Oh. Right. How big are these drains we’re talking about?”

  “Four to six feet in diameter. They were installed when the yards were modernised back in the 1950s. The authorities decided it was easier to route them through the yards rather than digging up the neighbourhoods around Brooklyn Heights.” He had a stray thought. “Once we dig out the crater and follow the tunnels back we might find traces of the blasting powder or cordite the bastards used. That could be analysed…”

  “How do you mean?”

  “In peacetime cordite is only made in half-a-dozen factories in the United Kingdom and here in New England. The production process is standardised but there will be minor trace pollutants and imperfections particular to each plant. That would tell us where it came from.”

  John Watson thought better of it.

  “No, that wouldn’t help, I suppose.”

  Under the right conditions gun cotton could be stored for many years, during that time it might be sold on, transferred, or passed through endless hands.

  “But,” he sighed, “you don’t really care about any of that, do you Colonel?”

  “Don’t I?”

  Watson shook his head.

  “The CSS didn’t see this coming therefore you’re doing what everybody else is doing, you’re covering your arse!”

  “You’ve got to admit it’s mighty suspicious nobody noticed anything was wrong until that bomb went off, friend?”

  Watson had walked every inch of Slipway Number 3 in the weeks before the launch, every day checking every little detail, inspecting every block, every chain, every rail. Of course, he had not personally walked and crawled through every drain and utility conduit beneath the slips…

  Why would he?

  He was damned sure nobody from the Colonial Security Service had either!

  John Watson said nothing.

  “It doesn’t look good,” Harrison intoned, clunking down his tumbler half-drunk on the desk.

  Chapter 18

  East Islip, Suffolk County, Long Island

  I honestly did not think this could get more surreal. But then what did I know? The cuffs had come off. I was ordered to take off my wet clothes. A medic had come in and cleaned up my face; and stuffed wads of cotton wool up my nostrils to staunch the flow of blood. Needless to say, nobody brought me dry clothes. Or offered me food or water as I shivered uncontrollably. The thirst was the worst thing, then the cold…

  I was beginning to get a feel for ‘the method’ I was being subjected to. Normally, these things would play out over days; this thing, whatever it was, was operating on a much shorter, possibly abbreviated timescale.

  “Drink this.”

  The water in the beaker tasted brackish but I was so thirsty I’d have drunk the man’s piss – anybody’s in fact - without a second’s hesitation.

  Then I got handed a big blanket and led out of my abandoned, coldly tiled abandoned changing room into a cell with a mattress on the floor. This room still retained a little of the sultry heat of the day.

  Next, a bowl of some kind of gruel which was vaguely like porridge was put in
front of me.

  Presently, I began to feel half-human again.

  I had just curled up on the mattress and started to nod off to sleep when Sarah marched into the room. One of her acolytes placed a chair for her and she sat, peering down her nose at me.

  “When did you discover I was with the CSS?” She asked without preamble.

  “When you walked through the door at Long Island University,” I confessed. “You were too good to be true.”

  Sarah raised an eyebrow.

  I struggled onto an elbow and eventually sat up, propping my aching frame against the wall at my back.

  “I thought you’d play harder to get for longer,” I went on. “Don’t get me wrong, the sex was good.”

  This prompted a contemptuous curl of Sarah’s lips.

  “Well, I enjoyed it, anyway,” I assured her in all sincerity.

  “Everything’s a joke to you, isn’t it?”

  “We all get by the best we can.”

  “Tell me about the Sons of Liberty?” This Sarah said crossing her left leg over her right knee in front of my now puffy, possibly blackening eyes. The glimpse of stockinged knee and thigh before her skirt fell back into place allied to my hangover-like headache distracted me so badly I forgot what she had asked me. “The Sons of Liberty?”

  “Oh, those old rascals…”

  “No, I’m talking about their modern-day co-conspirators?”

  I tried to look blank.

  “The traitors who use your writings as their guiding text!”

  “Oh, we’re talking about Two hundred lost years, again” I muttered. Denying that I was the author of the piece was obviously a waste of time. “You know that was all a joke, don’t you? I mean, the sub-title gives the game away. I ask you: What the World might have looked like if George Washington had ducked at the right time! Surely, even the CSS ought to get the joke by now?”

  Sarah was unblinking.

  “The second half of the book,” she reminded me tersely, “was an essay about how the World might have looked on the two hundredth anniversary of the treasonous Declaration of Independence on the 4th July 1776 had the rebels wrested the New World out of the hands of Mad King George. You describe England as being a ‘tiny little insignificant island off the north-west coast of Europe hankering for its lost world-wide empire…”

  I chuckled; I could not help myself.

  Sarah glowered at me.

  She tried again to refresh my memory: “A tiny little insignificant island off the north-west coast of Europe hankering for its lost world-wide empire forced to beg for scraps off the table of the New Romans governing the globe from their ivory towers in the Americas!”

  I did actually recall writing pretty much that.

  “You said that George Washington would be remembered as the patriarch of the World’s greatest empire and King George III as that ‘mad old German loser’!”

  “I was writing a satirical polemic. I was a young man and attitudes to these things were, well, different back in the thirties and forties…”

  “How do you think King George and Queen Eleanor feel about having their ancestors ridiculed and insulted by people like you?”

  “I don’t know. Have they actually read any of my books?”

  Sarah stood up, rustling in that way that invariably brings warmth to the cockles of an old man’s private parts. She moved away, still rustling and stood by the door. The cell was possibly six feet by eight and clearly, she wanted to be a lot farther away from me than that!

  I took this as a good omen; I was not about to get slapped again any time soon. Leastways, not by her.

  “Look,” I said, reasonableness personified or so I thought, “a lot of contemporary historians, here and in England, see the crushing of the rebellion in 1776 as a pivotal point in imperial history. Without the resources of New England at its disposal the British might have had to fight a world war on two fronts – with the rebel colonies at their backs - when the French wars of the 1790s flared up. And later, when the German Empire was at its most aggressively expansionary how could Britain have matched it industrially, or militarily without the factories and manpower of New England. Goodness, had the colonies gained their freedom in the 1770s they might have allied with France and Spain against England at any time in the late eighteenth and throughout most of the nineteenth century. So, absolutely, if the Continental Army had not been destroyed in August 1776 and the one man capable of leading its surviving remnants had not been killed at the battle of Long Island, the World in which we are living today might indeed be a radically different, and perhaps, a better place to live. It is all academic, anyway, just an intriguing thought exercise.”

  “Don’t you teach your students that ‘the tongue is mightier than the blade’?”

  Actually, I usually misquoted dear old Euripides – who died around 400 BC, so far as I recollected, so, he would not mind – by opining that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’.

  “Yes, but that was in the context of the Bible, the Koran or the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, or Confucius, not my own humble scribblings, my dear.”

  “Nonetheless your followers call you the Father of Liberty?”

  “My followers?”

  “You started by poisoning your sons’ minds against the Crown then you sowed sedition…”

  I thought I was the one who had been drugged!

  “I’ve done no such thing!”

  That was when a very strange thing happened; possibly the strangest thing yet. Sarah started crying.

  I struggled to my feet, would have crumpled to the floor had I not braced myself against the wall for a moment.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  I had not planned on touching her. I was a sucker for tears, that’s all. I held up my hands.

  “How could you do it?” Sarah spat at me.

  “Do what?” I asked like an idiot, completely blindsided.

  “Blow up that ship and kill all those people?”

  I opened my mouth to ask the obvious question.

  “What,” I stuttered. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you dare pretend you don’t know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re a monster!” Sarah shuddered with sudden, unmistakable revulsion. “I can’t believe I let you touch me!”

  It was a bit late to be crying foul.

  However, I refrained from voicing this sentiment.

  “You have to give me the names of the people responsible. Now! Or I won’t answer for what will happen to Alex and Abe,” she took a snarling gulp of air, and added, posthumously: “and Bill!”

  “They’ve done nothing,” I protested, hoarsely. “None of us have and you know it!”

  We were shouting at each other like an old married couple who had hated each other all along.

  “I know that you are the leader of the Sons of Liberty…”

  “That’s horse manure!”

  “Names! I want names, Isaac!”

  Sarah and I were toe to toe, breathless with anger.

  “For once in your miserable life do the decent thing, man!”

  Chapter 19

  Jamaica Bay Field, King’s County, Long Island

  Alex Fielding had invited his two ‘wingmen’ to join him sampling the delights of nearby St Albans. He had considered – albeit in passing – looking up his father in Gravesend; but decided against it. Dad got preachy every year around the time of the Empire Day holidays and they would almost certainly get into a fight about his shameless ‘profiteering’ flying press men and photographers over the Fleet Review.

  So, St Albans it had been!

  Neither Paul Hopkins or Rufus McIntyre had wanted to join him on his expedition back to the less than exotic fleshpots of his misspent youth. This was a thing he breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief over as soon as he was a safe distance away from the pair of them.

  Neither of the idiots was half the pilot Abe was and Abe was just starting out; it had been all the losers could do
to keep formation with him in straight and level flight. He had lost them in an instant the moment he started ‘beating up’ Leppe Island; later Hopkins had got lost following him down to Long Island and he had had to turn around and reel him back in!

  Never mind, they had both touched down – more or less – safely on the grassy strip overlooking the marshy wetlands the first settlers had called Jamaica Bay, so called probably, as Dad would say ‘because they were so badly lost they had no idea if they were in Jamaica or Boston!’

  Anyway, Alex had met a girl called Daisy who had cleaned him out every which way, had a good time and hitched a ride back to the field in the early hours of the morning and slept the sleep of the just.

  “Are you Alexander Fielding?” The bespectacled man in the plus fours asked hesitantly.

  Alex groaned and blinked up at the stranger.

  “Yeah, who would you be, sir?”

  “Albert Stanton of the Manhattan Globe,” the other man confessed. “Are you drunk?”

  “Nope,” Alex declared, shaking his head and rising unsteadily to his feet. “But I will be again later. We agreed thirty-five pounds, Mr Stanton?”

  “Er, yes…”

  “I’ll take you as low and as close to the big ships as I’m allowed but if we get too close they might open fire on us.” Alex had been trying to be funny; the other man gave him a cold fish look. “What?” He asked.

  “After what happened at the Brooklyn Navy Yard yesterday I should imagine the Navy is as trigger happy as Hell!”

  Alex ran a hand through his tousled hair.

  His bladder was fit to burst.

  “Excuse me,” he turned away and after fumbling with his flies relieved himself on the ground beneath his Bristol V.

  He saw the line of Jerry cans nearby. Excellent! The gasoline he had paid for last night prior to his sortie to St Albans – while he still had money in his pockets - had materialised overnight. He buttoned his trousers. “That’s better! Give me a hand with those cans and we’ll be on our way!”

  For some minutes the strenuous work of pouring 87-octane fuel into the old trainer’s tank passed wordlessly.