Empire Day

by James Philip

  Inevitably, when you designed an operation with as many moving parts as Empire Day it was to be expected that not everything would work out the way it was supposed to and that somewhere along the line somebody was going to have to be thrown under the train.

  Nonetheless, he was still a little disappointed that Sarah had not been able to tie down the Sons of Liberty angle; even though that had always been a speculative exercise, just another level of insurance in case something went badly wrong elsewhere. A lot of people were going to want somebody to take the rap – and probably swing from a gibbet – in the coming months and it was going to be as hard as Hell to pin it on the real bad guys.

  The real bad guys!

  What was going on out there in the Upper Bay was effect not cause. The men in those speedboats and aircraft crashing into the symbols of Imperial dominion honestly believed that they were martyrs doing God’s sacred work.

  Were they the bad guys?

  What about the men whose negligence and complacency had brought the First Thirteen to their knees?

  In any event, most of the men the papers and those smart-arsed college boys on TV would call the evildoers would soon be – if they were not already – dead out there in the fires and smoke blanketing much of the Upper Bay. They had fulfilled their role in the tragedy of the age; now it was for others to pick up the flag.

  It was frustrating being able to see so little. The folks up on the top, road deck, of the Brooklyn-Manhattan bridge would have had the best view looking down to the south from two hundred feet above the East River. The head of the CSS had contemplated joining them up there, decided against it. He instinctively mistrusted hubris even when a plan had come together so perfectly.

  Perfection, of course, was a relative thing.

  He would have a better feel for the post-outrage situation when he learned who had lived and who had died. In the confusion fall guys as well as actors would have died or been taken prisoner and as with any conspiracy the key thing was for everybody to get their story straight at the outset.

  That, and to make damned sure one had a cast of scapegoats and hapless victims who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Harrison hated loose ends; like for example, where in the name of Hades was the youngest Fielding boy? He had been promised he would be in the air over the bay today but the latest he had heard was that the kid had gone off up country with his little squaw!

  That just was not natural!

  There were good reasons why that sort of thing was illegal in the northern colonies!

  It was bad enough the whole population along the South West border gradually turning a dusky shade of white. In a way that was understandable; the Border War had turned that whole region into a racial melting pot but nobody gave a damn about that because West Texas, the disputed Coahuila, Nuevo Mexico and Alta California borderlands were so far from anywhere remotely civilised that decent folk back in the First Thirteen colonies were not about to get offended. Up here in the North East people had standards. People had a right to expect dedicated public servants like him to defend their God-given beliefs and prerogatives, and when necessary to try his Christian conscience to its limit to ensure that God’s work continued to be done on the Commonwealth of New England. The rest of the Empire could go to Hell in a handcart if it wanted to depart from the path of the Lord; here in the heartland of the First Thirteen there would be no compromise, no surrender to the godless, libertarian excesses so common elsewhere in what ought to be for all time the White Empire.

  Nonetheless, it saddened him that so many undoubtedly good, innocent people had suffered on this auspicious bicentenary of that original act of shameless, unmitigated treachery in Philadelphia in 1776.

  His country had needed to be shocked out of its complacency before it sleep-walked too far down the road to perdition. And, if in the process he had evened up a few old scores well, that was just the way things were.

  If the English had taught the peoples of the Empire anything it was that the victors always got to write the first draft of history.

  The people around Harrison had fallen silent.

  Now they began to stir anew.

  The crackle of heavy automatic gunfire rumbled anew across the Upper Bay.

  Chapter 29

  East Islip, Suffolk County, Long Island

  To be frank I had no idea what I was actually watching until I saw the cameras zeroing in on HMS Princess Royal to catch the moment when one of her ready use ammunition lockers blew up and Sarah finally turned up the sound.

  “This is going on right now,” she informed me just when I thought nothing could possibly ever surprise me ever again.

  I am not sure what she expected me to say; not unnaturally I was speechless. I had been frog-marched down a corridor and up a flight of stairs by two brawny military types – although they were not actually in uniform, they just had that look about them – whose general demeanour was that of men who would much rather be beating me to a pulp than hanging onto my arms to stop me falling over.

  The TV had already been on in the lounge – it had a settee, a couple of comfortable chairs, a low table for tea things, so I reckoned it was a lounge no matter that it was in a CSS interrogation centre – and I had been bundled into one of the chairs. I stared, mostly in horror at what I was watching.

  “This started happening a few minutes ago,” Sarah added with a nasty ‘I told you so’ inflexion. “But you already know that!”

  There was a clock on the wall.

  It indicated that it was 11:13, presumably in the morning.

  “What do you mean? I know about precisely nothing to do with that!”

  I gesticulated angrily at the screen.

  By then I would have been hard-pressed to confidently say what day it actually was…

  I was a little disappointed that the CSS did not have a colour television; sure, they were very expensive but the CSS was always the last colonial department to feel the pinch when it came to saving the pennies.

  The picture was a little grainy and juddered periodically as if the cameraman was as shaken as everybody else watching the transmission. Suddenly, pictures from a new angle were on screen. The lens swung about the sky, steadied and zoomed in on two aircraft, still distant but in a shallow dive. This camera was not on a small launch bobbing around in the Bay but on the rock-steady deck of a big warship.

  “I don’t think any of the Lion’s guns will bear on these two!” This from a breathless commentator more used to covering football or rugby matches. “No, no… That’s the flagship’s forward 1.7-inch guns starting up…”

  At that moment the man’s voice was entirely drowned out by the air-ripping hammering of a nearby quadruple anti-aircraft mount. The cameraman must have jumped out of his skin because the lens was suddenly jerked to the right looking down the port superstructure of one of the Navy’s heavy cruisers.

  Cordite smoke drifted, briefly obscuring the view and when it cleared the cacophony was crackling, overwhelming the TV microphones as spent cartridge cases spewed onto the nearby deck.

  The camera swung away again.

  The commentator was shouting; his voice hoarse and breaking with his impossible excitement, and presumably, no little fear.

  “There they are! There they are! My God, they almost collided! Goodness knows how they haven’t been shot down yet…”

  Even from the shaky TV pictures on the twenty-four-inch screen in the CSS lounge I could see that the Lion and by now several other ships were filling the air ahead of the two old-fashioned, relatively slow biplanes with hot metal and exploding shells but that hardly any of the growing volume of fire was actually passing anywhere near them.

  “THEY ALMOST COLLIDED AGAIN!”

  I blinked, unable to make sense of it.

  Any of it.

  The leading aircraft – it looked like a Bristol VI, one of the sportster versions that was so popular ten years ago when air racing first became so fashionable – ought to hav
e been showing its companion a clean pair of heels.

  The second plane, a much older Bristol V, doped canvas all over without the VI’s partially stressed-aluminium fuselage streamlining had swooped so close that the leading aircraft had had to veer away to the left.

  Now the two aircraft were coming together again.

  “It is almost as if the second plane is trying to knock the leading one out of the sky!”

  Sarah stepped in front of the screen and instinctively I shifted in my chair to look around her.

  “I hope you’re pleased with yourself, Isaac?”

  Although my captors had given me water I had not eaten since I could not remember when, I was light-headed from hunger, and more than somewhat knocked about and bruised.

  I was NOT particularly pleased about anything at that moment!

  I lost my temper.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” I inquired, more testily than I meant.

  Sarah gestured at the mostly concealed screen.

  “All this!” She hissed venomously. “This is all your work. Your work and the work of the Sons of Liberty!”

  I would have snapped back something witty, pithy in fact had I not been so stunned. Stunned very much, in fact, in the manner I might have been had I just been brained with a cricket bat.

  Consequently, I did not begin to start fully processing what my – clearly ex-common law wife – had accused me of until I was being bundled, al la sack of potatoes into my cell with the metallic clunking of the door being slammed shut behind me ringing in my ears.

  I hardly had the energy or the will to get off my knees. It seemed simpler to roll over on my back and to stare up at the ceiling so that was what I did.

  Despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary I think I had still believed, right up until then, that I would be able to talk my way out of this. I always had before; but now I was reluctantly coming to the ineluctable conclusion that this was one of those scrapes where being the smartest guy in the room was not going to cut it.

  This was different.

  This time that bastard Matthew Harrison had got all the angles covered!

  Chapter 30

  Upper Bay, New York

  Leonora Coolidge had never, ever been so exhilarated. Utterly terrified also but as she clung to the leather rim of the forward cockpit of the old Bristol V as it swooped and juddered, threatening to shake itself to pieces towards the wall of exploding shells and the impenetrable wall of tracers, it was as if she was outside of her body looking down on the unfolding drama.

  When her pilot had swung the aircraft back towards the ships in the Upper Bay she had, for a fraction of a second wondered if she had hitched a ride with a member of the gang of lunatics who had already crashed several machines into one or other of the battleships far below; but then she had realised her mistake.

  Her pilot might be a madman but he was not one of the bad guys. First, he had attempted to fly alongside the other aircraft, one of the shiny, more modern models of the string-bag in which she was riding, and insanely, he had attempted to flip it over using his left-hand top wing-tip. Secondly, when that failed he had veered straight towards the other aircraft and come within a whisker of sawing off his tail with his propeller.

  As if that was not surreal what was going on now was too incredible for belief!

  The man in the Bristol VI doggedly heading for the northernmost battleship in the Upper Bay was periodically looking over his shoulder and firing a pistol at them!

  Should I duck?

  No, I might miss something!

  It was probably the benefit of the two Martinis she had downed before she set off for Jamaica Field that morning but bizarrely, the faster this crazy roller coaster went the less she got distracted by minor considerations such as: am I about to die?

  She had never been so alive, her senses were so electrically, ecstatically heightened that she was aware of everything going on around her in pinpoint detail.

  The aircraft juddered to the right, recovered.

  Leonora craned her neck to look around.

  The pilot had blood on his face and grim determination in his eyes as if he was looking through her.

  When next she focused on the other aircraft it was almost close enough to touch.

  They were going to ram it!

  In a second it would all be over.

  Should I shut my eyes?

  No, it will hurt as much either way!

  The Bristol V wobbled and bucked in the slipstream of the leading aircraft and suddenly Leonora was looking beyond it; she gasped when she saw how close they were to the leading battleship.

  It seemed so huge it filled the world…

  Momentarily, the vortex of bursting shells and criss-crossing machine-gun fire which had stubbornly remained fifty or a hundred yards ahead of the two planes rushed towards and enveloped them both.

  For a split second both aircraft were within the firestorm.

  Leonora felt the Bristol V staggering, lurching sidelong, bouncing with impossible violence. She heard metal and wooden spars splintering. The machine lurched sidelong and then she was in clear air.

  The aircraft’s motor spat gouts of smoke from its exhausts and seized and the sea rushed up towards her impossibly fast

  Chapter 31

  HMS Lion, Upper Bay, New York

  Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Packenham watched the approaching aircraft with cool professional detachment. Every forward facing anti-aircraft gun was shooting at the two fragile Bristol scouts, and to the left and the right both the Ajax and the Naiad were filling the sky with metal, too. And yet the two old machines still came on, wobbling through the turbulence of the exploding ordnance seemingly invulnerable.

  “Our bloody guns are shooting short!” He complained.

  The problem would lie with the variables programmed into his ships’ gun control tables. Neither of the oncoming aircraft could achieve anywhere near the default one hundred and fifty mile an hour minimum speed set up on the high angle air defence directors. None of these blighters would have laid a finger on his ships if somebody had had the wit to alter the parameters. It was too late now; thank God these string bags were so flimsy they crumpled up the moment they hit one of his leviathans.

  Problematically, there was going to be the mother and father of all inquests – or rather, inquisitions – when this was over. Thus far three of the Royal Navy’s most modern battleships had been damaged, granted not seriously, by a bunch of maniacs in speed boats and fifteen to twenty-year old obsolete biplanes and the one thing the Admiralty never, ever tolerated was being made to look stupid.

  Dammit, what would have happened if the King or the Queen had been injured? The Commander of the 5th Battle Squadron shook his head, wincing at the very thought. Literally, he would have fallen on his sword. Or, more likely borrowed somebody’s service pistol rather than attempted that barbaric Japanese Seppuku, hari-kari ritual, he was British after all.

  As it was his fate was probably going to be significantly messier.

  The King would do his best to lessen the blow but he knew his old friend too well to know that he would not overtly intervene in the Court of Inquiry which would inevitably recommend that he, the Squadron Commander, the man in charge of this fiasco, be court-martialled.

  As Tom Packenham gazed around the Upper Bay and the sporadic detonations of more of the Princess Royal’s ready use anti-aircraft shells crackled across the smoky waters he wondered if the word ‘fiasco’ even began to do justice to the humiliation and the outrage that today’s events would invoke across the whole Empire.

  “We’ve got one of them!” Somebody nearby on the open flying bridge atop Lion’s armoured bridge cried more in relief than triumph.

  Packenham saw one aircraft slewing to port with what looked like pieces of wing and fuselage falling off it trailing grey smoke shot through with streaks of crimson fire gliding towards the stone-coloured waters of the Bay.

  The other aircraft w
as on fire.

  It was heading straight at him.

  Men around him began to scurry for cover as the Bristol VI wobbled over the Lion’s bow. The big quadruple 1.7-inch automatic cannons no longer bore on the aircraft but heavy machine guns and rifles in the hands of Royal Marines still dressed in their ceremonial redcoats dressing

  standing on the two forward 15-inch main battery turrets were knocking lumps out of the scout which it seemed must disintegrate at any moment.

  But Tom Packenham knew that was not going to happen.

  He stood rigidly to attention.

  The last thing he saw in this life was the blur of the spinning propeller a microsecond before it, the wreck of the Bristol VI, thirty gallons of 87-octane gasoline and the one hundred and sixty-seven pounds of dynamite inside the bullet-riddled fuselage of the biplane crashed into and detonated squarely against the binnacle platform in the middle of the flying bridge.

  Chapter 32

  Mohawk Valley, New York

  The small group paddled two miles up-river, keeping out of the main stream, hugging the banks where the slow-moving water eddied and swirled before hauling the boats onto land and loading them onto the ancient flatbed, much-modified rusting Leyland lorry Tsiokwaris had used to transport first Kate, and then himself and his nephews to this southerly part of the tribal grounds in the previous days. Abe and Kate squeezed into the cab with the old man, the teenage boys rode with the canoes as the charabanc wheezed and coughed down over-grown and unmaintained roads through the narrow breaks in the wilderness that barely qualified as tracks.

  The Albany to Buffalo trunk road, likewise the railway still ran through Mohawk land north of the river but all the latter’s branch lines had been abandoned, like the tarmac roads which used to quarter the forests a quarter of a century ago and were slowly being reclaimed by nature.

  Here and there the Leyland bumped and jolted past derelict farmsteads; the cabins that hunters and fishermen from the towns and cities once used to frequent in summer had mostly been vandalised, their roofs pulled down or simply torched by their owners when the colony’s bailiffs came calling. That had been one of the many unforeseen consequences of the rigid application – county by county – of the Getrennte Entwicklung policies of the forties and fifties. A lot of colonists, including most of the small farmers had tried to hang on as long as possible and even as recently as ten or fifteen years ago illegal hunting and trapping had been a big problem in these lands. Nothing happened all at once, and the ideologues of separate development had remorselessly tightened the law until the penalties for breaking its legal straightjacket were as severe, possibly more so, for white colonists than for the ‘natives’. So, these days nobody maintained the roads and land cleared for arable rotation had gone back to nature as the forest began swallow up the fields.