by James Philip
“So, we’re high-class girls from Paris?” Melody inquired, rhetorically.
“Yes, just so, My Lady.”
“What sort of penance, Don Rafael?” Henrietta inquired.
Melody smiled philosophically: “We shall find out soon enough, Hen.”
They walked, stumbled, groped up the canyon and then hiked across a grassy, otherwise barren rocky plain for some miles before with nightfall the men erected a low canvas awning and laid blankets on the ground for the two women before the group settled to sip from their half-drained canteens and munch more biscuits and dried fruit.
Returning from relieving herself behind some rocks Melody discovered Don Rafael’s sons were nowhere to be seen.
“There are only two paths by which our enemies can approach this place unseen,” the old man explained phlegmatically. “My boys watch each.” Involuntarily, he glanced to the sky which was dark and cold all the way to the stars filling the heavens. “I was afraid we might be hiding all day long from eyes in the sky. Perhaps, the Air Force is not involved in the coup.”
Melody had a hundred questions.
The old man shook his head.
“I know very little other than that my Duke’s sword stands at the service of his Queen in Aranjuez. I know that there is fighting in Madrid, that probably the Army is behind the conspirators, and that the Inquisition must be involved. It is involved in all things in Spain, therefore it must be at the heart of this thing, whatever it is. Because this is Spain, to be a foreigner caught outside ‘protected’, or diplomatic grounds, will be a dangerous thing particularly for those associated with whoever loses this contest for the soul of my country. That is all I know. All that I would swear to, My Lady.”
“I am no lady, Don Rafael,” Melody smiled. “I am a lawyer turned detective turned spy, none of those things make me ‘a lady’.”
Amusement glinted in the old man’s eyes by moonlight.
There was no question of lighting a fire despite the ever-more biting fingers of the cold up here over four thousand feet above sea level.
Henrietta and Melody had collected up all the blankets they could find, tempted to huddle together but inhibited by the presence of their protector.
“Forgive me,” Don Rafael chuckled. “I make no judgement, you understand. My Lady De L’Isle is of an ancient and honourable family. While you,” he met Melody’s curious gaze, “are in My Lord’s regard, every inch as much ‘a lady’ as any of those fine ‘ladies’ who are the bane of his life in Madrid.” He grinned, shook his head and added: “My Lady.”
The old man sighed and looked to the nearby awning.
“You should try to sleep. We have a long way to walk tomorrow. You will be safe, I shall be nearby.”
The women clung together for warmth as the unyielding lumps and bumps in the ground beneath them dug into them. Unfortunately, not being able to ever be entirely comfortable was only a minor distraction from the cold which quickly got into their feet and began to attack their every extremity.
“I hate being dirty,” Henrietta confessed. “And being cold.”
Melody shivered, kissed the younger woman’s nose.
This, she knew, was going to get a lot worse before it got better but tonight, she would spare her lover that ‘little insight’ into the depth of the big black bottomless pit into which they had unknowingly plunged.
Chapter 12
Sunday 19th March
Idlewild Beach Field, Long Island
Major Alexander Lincoln Fielding walked cursorily around his Gloucester Goshawk Mark II radial-engined low-wing monoplane scout with the relaxed air of a man without a worry in the world. He kicked at the big undercarriage tyres, patted the lowest of the three wicked blades of the machine’s huge propeller and unhurriedly chatted with the veteran Sergeant fitter in command of the crew that kept his personal warhorse in tip top fighting trim.
The Goshawk had been cutting edge technology when it first took to the skies over a decade ago; it was still a formidable beast even though the coming generation of jet scouts would soon render it, and every other prop-powered ‘puller’ or ‘pusher’ obsolete. Notwithstanding, capable of around three hundred and fifty miles an hour in level flight with a 0.8-inch cannon and a brace of 0.5-inch machine guns in each wing, all the way up to twenty thousand feet it was the equal of anything the Spanish had down on the Border. True, it was a real beast to fly and when it first came into service it had acquired an evil reputation as a ‘sprog killer’ but modifications to the Mark II had since taken the sting out of the Goshawk’s unforgiving low-speed – that is, take-off and particularly, landing – characteristics and consequently, accidents were a lot less frequent these days.
On the down side it took two or three times as long to train a man to safely fly, let alone fight, a Goshawk in comparison to the old Bristol biplanes Alex had flown the first time he served down in the South West.
This morning the commander of No 7 (New York) Squadron of the Colonial Air Force was still chewing over the news that he and his boys were likely to be posted down to St Augustine in Florida, not West Texas or Alta California. Moreover, he had no idea what to make of the additional news that ‘the Squadron might be required to conduct affiliation drills with the Navy down there!’
It seemed that Headquarters had no real feel for how ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ the situation actually was down south or in the South West. In fact, there was a suggestion that the current ‘tension’ was simply more of the ‘usual nonsense’ that flares up when the Spanish screw up on Santo Domingo, Cuba or in Mexico City!
Alex was no historian, and ‘geopolitics’ was just a word to him but from what he was reading in the papers and what he had seen of the preparations being made on Long Island – parts of which resembled a military camp – by the Army, the sudden urgency with which the Air Force was looking to get things done, and the number of big grey warships he saw exercising in Nantucket Sound and the approaches to the Lower Bay, he was starting to get the distinct impression that ‘something’ had to give, sooner or later.
That said, nobody would tell him when his Squadron was likely to get its movement orders. It was as if the big wigs had not made up their minds what to worry about first!
Not that he was complaining.
He got to spend lots of time with his very pregnant, somewhat cranky, utterly bewitching and forever delicious wife, and in the last month or so he was beginning to feel as if he was knocking his old timers’ heads together and bringing his ‘newbies’ up to speed. That his experienced men were starting to do things his way and that his ‘sprogs’ had now graduated to being combat-green ‘newbies’ was real progress. If he got a few more weeks grace he was going to have a top line squadron behind him if and or when he led his merry men into battle.
The other thing all the delays and changes of plan had achieved was to bring 7(NY) up to full strength. A CAF Scout – Interceptor seemed to be the latest terminology but Alex was old school – Squadron had a ‘book roster’ of eighteen aircraft and twenty-six pilots, enabling damned nearly continuous operations over short periods by two flights of six aircraft each, or squadron sorties by at least a dozen machines. Not that it had ever actually worked out that way in any of his tours down on the Border; nevertheless, it transpired that since he had been away, five or six years without a major flare-up with New Spain had allowed the CAF to build up its fighting strength, phase out all the older types – like the Bristol VIs, VIIIs and IXs – and replace them with aircraft like the Goshawk and other more modern high-performance attack and bomber aircraft.
Alex elected not to contemplate the logical corollary to this: namely, that the Spanish, presumably surreptitiously aided and abetted by agents of the German Empire would also have used the intervening years to ‘make and mend’ on their side of the Border.
As any pilot will tell you ‘things can always get worse’ so there was not really much point worrying about it in the meantime!
One thing whi
ch had not changed from his earlier sojourns in the military was the rent-a-mob gang of scruffy ‘peaceniks’ who sometimes gathered outside the gates of the bigger military bases. From what Abe had told him the problem down in Virginia was with the Getrennte Entwicklung crowd. Those people did not mind about warmongering they just did not like ‘others’, particularly native Americans or the coloured descendants of the slaves brought to New England by their forefathers!
Up here in the ‘middle colonies’ the protestors, demonstrators, whatever, were often student dropouts, draft dodgers and poor rich kids. His late father used to crow about the minor acts of vandalism he and his cronies had carried out in ‘the good old days’, like that was something to be proud of! Since the Empire Day atrocities there had been a rash of attacks against men and women in uniform, usually when they had been out drinking on the town, less frequently bricks and stones had been thrown at servicemen’s houses or cars, and their families abused on the street by foul-mouthed youths. Back in the day nobody in uniform would have even thought about carrying a firearm while off base, nowadays, it was becoming de rigor, which Alex thought was a really sad comment on civil society in the First Thirteen.
Satisfied that there was no vital component of his Goshawk unscrewed, damaged or otherwise lying on the ground underneath the aircraft, Alex stepped up onto the port wing root and held his arm aloft signalling to the other five pilots of the training flight to mount up.
He scrawled his initials on Flight Form 100, officially transferring the aircraft – Serial 7114S – from the hands of his ground crew into his charge, and waited patiently while his straps were adjusted. He tried to get comfortable in his seat; not an easy thing when a man was sitting on his parachute pack.
In the big picture his passing discomfort was a blessing in disguise. Goshawks had been built to be flown by six-feet-six-inch tall muscular athletes – by men with the physique of a mature male gorilla - not fellows of average height with a musculature to match so the couple of inches of ‘seated height’ he got from perching on his chute gave him a much taller man’s visibility out of the cockpit, if not the longer legs ideally required to fly a Mark I. Fortunately, the Mark II had moved all the levers, pedals, buttons and switches that little bit closer to the pilot, as if in silent acknowledgement of the fact so many low-speed accidents were probably caused by a man’s foot slipping off a pedal or his not quite being able to reach a vital toggle in time.
The brainier types on the CAF Staff was speculating about something called ‘fly by wire’ whereby servos and hydraulics controlled by something called a ‘central processing unit’ which was completely separated physically from the actual flying controls, moved the flaps, ailerons and rudder and kept the aircraft in perfect trim all the time, thereby allowing the pilot to throw a bird all over the sky with a minimum of muscle-power and a much-reduced risk of inadvertently getting himself killed. That sounded literally like ‘pie in the sky’ to Alex.
Everything on a Goshawk was directly connected to something in the cockpit, every control surface and throttle adjustment was controlled one hundred percent directly by the pilot’s hand and feet. That could be challenging sometimes, like for example trying to persuade the aircraft to pull out of a steep dive…
He waved away the battery cart as soon as the big Derby-Royce 1,350 horse-power radial ran smoothly. The Goshawk was a tail-dragger like earlier biplanes which meant one had to look out of the side of the cockpit to see where one was going until the bird was up to speed. Alex had no idea what was fifty to a hundred yards in front of him as the chocks were pulled away.
One last look at the wind cock in the near distance.
Brakes off.
A blast of throttle and the scout lurched forward.
Over to his left construction teams were building a three-mile long runway. Whatever needed a runway that long was going to be worth seeing!
The Goshawk picked up speed.
With little more than a threat to touch the brakes the tail came up and suddenly he could see where he was going, albeit through the great blur of the auto-speed propeller.
More bumps, the machine wanted to leap into the air.
More throttle.
Then the fighter was free of the ground climbing like she was hitching a lift on an express elevator to the clouds ten thousand feet above New York’s Lower Bay.
A check in his mirrors, stupidly tiny little things that it took a man forever to get used to; followed by a veteran scout pilot’s neck roll to see as much as possible of what was around him and over behind his shoulders.
Where the fuck are the other kites?
He touched the speak button on his throat mike.
“BLUE LEADER TO CHILDREN!” He drawled laconically. “DOES EVERYBODY STILL HAVE ME IN SIGHT, OVER!”
The others obediently checked in.
Apparently, the ground controller had held back the last two Goshawks because the control tower had warned him a big transport was incoming. As per protocol he had acquired a visual – ‘a sighting’ in layman’s terms – on the distant transatlantic shuttle, before clearing the last two scouts to take-off.
Circling over Hell’s Gate Alex had awaited his missing ‘children’ before leading the flight east along the coast of Long Island. Today, ABLE Section would dogfight with BAKER Section over Long Island Sound mid-way between Bridgeport on the Connecticut northern shore and Smithtown Bay on the opposite, southern coast, and later over the Shinnecock Hills, because Leonora deserved only the best entertainment her colony could serve up.
First, he planned to slew off three aircraft as ‘singletons’, just to see if his newbies were up to navigating to the dogfight on their own. How a fellow performed in a fight was a moot point until he learned how to find his way to it!
Chapter 13
Sunday 19th March
Royal Navy Norfolk, Virginia
The Governor of New England had been able to report to the Prime Minister that morning by transatlantic telephone on a link scrambled at both ends – a thing he could easily believe given the appalling quality of the line – that there had been no new significant developments in the Gulf of Spain, Florida or in the Border lands of the South West in the previous twenty-four hours. However, that had been the beginning and the end of the good news communicated between the two men that morning.
It seemed that the Foreign Secretary had travelled to Paris to speak to the German Minister and his Portuguese counterparts. The Kaiser’s Chancellor, a wily Rhinelander who as his Emperor’s surrogate had largely been responsible for the renewed squabble over Germany’s legitimate unresolved colonial prerogatives - the settlement of which had been piggy-backed onto the subsequent seemingly unrelated Submarine Treaty over ten years ago, probably narrowly averting the risk of a general war - had vetoed any censure or intervention in Old Spain by the Great Powers under the remit of the Treaty of Paris protocols.
This suited Berlin but nobody else: Spain might be the sick man of Europe but its ongoing existence – sick or not – as an independent, unaligned polity with an avowed policy of neutrality between the British and the German Empires had, in hindsight, been the one thing which had kept Anglo-German rivalries in check for decades.
It was also the determining factor in successive British Governments turning a blind eye to German interference in the affairs of New Granada, which Berlin had always regarded as a counterweight to British power in North America. Diplomacy was all about checks and balances, uncertainty by design, so that nobody could ever be wholly confident that they would win a future war.
To the Germans the presence of significant British forces in France – at any one time between 120,000 and 150,000 personnel - had become an itch they could not scratch, and year on year the economic and cultural renaissance of the French – the vanquished enemy of 1866 – simply added insult to injury. A few colonial scraps from the British table; surrendered or passed over on ‘protectorate’ terms in Africa, the West Indies and the Chinese Far Ea
st in 1966 had failed to sate the Kaiser’s appetite for the Reich, and singularly failed to acknowledge the German Empire’s status as a global titan.
Now Spain appeared to be dissolving into civil war and even if one discounted the most gratuitous tales of the blood-letting going on in some of the big cities, of Army and Navy units in open rebellion fighting for different sides and the blood-curdling prognostications of the Catholic Church and its Inquisition, it was plain that the situation was completely out of hand.
Still, in extremis, the least an imperial pro-consul could do was to exhibit the stiffest of stiff upper lips which was exactly what Philip De L’Isle the Governor of the Commonwealth of New England planned to do that morning.
There had been no news overnight from Spain about his daughter, and he was not the sort of man who treated no news as good news when the principal object of his concern was pretty much the light of his and his dear wife’s life these days. He liked to think he loved, and had treated all his offspring fairly, equally with the devotion and care that they were due but Henrietta had always been different. Perhaps, it was because she was the youngest, born around the time that his wife, Diana, had first been diagnosed with the early symptoms of the rheumatoid arthritis which had so cruelly blighted her days these last few years.
Henrietta had been their last, not accidental although certainly unplanned child and they had forever cherished and protected her in ways her elder brothers and sisters had probably occasionally resented, possibly misunderstood because in retrospect they had never been quite as close to the others as they had been, briefly with Hen, especially since she returned from University in England three years ago.
It sounded so sentimental, so gushing when put that way; it was no less the truth for that. There was something special about their daughter that he and his wife had nurtured, wondering how that vital spark might express itself in later life. Now their precious treasure might already be dead, or in the murderous hands of some madman inquisitor…