by James Philip
If Philip De L’Isle ordered a general mobilisation before the war actually began, he would be pilloried for scaremongering; whereas, if he waited until Spanish boots were on New England soil before hitting the button, he would be pilloried for vacillation.
Heads he lost, tails the other fellow won…
Sooner or later most Governors of the Commonwealth of New England came to understand that nothing was black and white and there were often, especially in great matters of state, no ‘good options.’
You have only got yourself to blame, old man…
Nobody had held a gun to his temple and ordered him to pick up the poisoned chalice. Thus far, his time in Government House had coincided with one of the longest periods of peace for several decades, the people had got used to the absence of war and welcomed the gradual run-down of both the colonial militias and the CAF. The complacent mantra that whatever the Spanish do we have the Royal Navy had taken root. Under his administration everybody’s number one priority had been to do nothing to slow down or to impede the runaway economic boom which was making New Englander’s more prosperous and supposedly, happier with every passing year. Even the Empire Day outrages of July 1976 had just been a blip on the horizon; nobody could have predicted that the ‘blow back’, or knock on effect of last year’s revelations about the disaster would have their most malign, world-shaking consequences not in New England but hundreds and thousands of miles away in the Gulf of Mexico and back in old Spain.
There was still no news of Henrietta...
The latest cables from London reported that communications with the British Embassy in Madrid were ‘up and down’ and that fighting in the city had intensified in the last twenty-four hours with the Army shelling several neighbourhoods and possibly the grounds of one, or all of the Royal Palaces.
Troublingly, the provinces of New Granada, Cuba and Santo Domingo had yet to publicly, formally pledge their allegiance to the King-Emperor. In fact, hardly anybody had said anything about events in Spain other than the Pope in Rome, who had demanded the warring parties lay down their weapons and accept the intercession of the Papal Legate to the Spanish Church, Cardinal Vincente Coretta, formerly Bishop of Milan and latterly hardly ever absent from the side of Pius IX, the doddery, eighty-seven-year-old near blind incumbent sitting – stupefied most of the time, some claimed - on the throne of the Vatican.
Unlike the Pope – premature rumours of whose death had leaked out of Rome twice in the last six months – Coretta was an arch conservative who preached ‘God’s will that we roll back the territorial and theological adjustments of recent times.’ Specifically, this was usually interpreted as advocating a stronger hand on the helm in Madrid, a resumption of the Church’s historic missionary role in Spain’s overseas provinces and a global renewal of the battle against the march of heresy and apostasy.
De L’Isle had snatched three hours sleep, risen, completed his toilet, breakfasted and was at his desk at nine o’clock, diligently working through his papers and dictating letters to his secretary.
He broke for a cup of tea at eleven o’clock, chatting briefly with his Chief of Staff, Sir Henry Rawlinson about the meetings he had scheduled for that afternoon with the Governors of the Carolinas, Georgia and the Governor-designate of Florida, which was about to be incorporated into the Commonwealth of New England as its newest Crown Colony.
The race was now on to incorporate all possible viable protectorates, concessions and as much as possible of the ‘wild west’ beyond the Mississippi as full colonies. This was always a thing the First Thirteen and their two ‘Johnny-come-lately’ allies – Maine and Vermont – had resisted for over, in several cases, a hundred years before, more recently, grudgingly caving in to the reality of the global marketplace. That none of the ‘unincorporated’ or so-called ‘un-organised’ territories had yet gained full Crown Colony status simply reflected the determination of the First Thirteen’s rear-guard action. Ironically, as the crisis worsened in the south, practically every delaying tactic had run its natural course and in the coming years De L’Isle confidently expected the map of his immense bailiwick to start changing in a big way.
Politics was one thing but business was business.
Florida was about to become the sixteenth Crown Colony, joining, in order of their Royal Grants of full Colonial status: Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont and Maine.
De L’Isle had been disconcerted by how little real push back there had been when, early in his administration he had spoken to New Englanders of his mandate to complete the ‘process of colonisation’ from ‘shore to shore’ of this mighty land. In many instances granting full crown colonial status and rights was long overdue. In the cases of the Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Louisiana and Illinois territories it was going to be a matter of simply rubber-stamping long-established realities on the ground. Over forty million of the King’s subjects lived in those lands and had enjoyed what amounted in reality to a semi-colonial settlement dating back to the early days of the century.
The prima facie case for full colonisation was less clear cut for the other eight parcels of ‘real estate’ and their growing mining, industrial, farming and settler populations. In many of them there were unresolved questions as to what to do with the minority but still large indigenous populations, although it was recognised – with no little discomfort in Government House – that as time went by European diseases, the diminishment of their traditional hunting grounds and emigration to the industrial cities of the interior was gradually winnowing the extant populations of the native nations.
That said, around half of all native Americans – some six or seven million souls – lived east of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi on the great plains of the interior and it remained unclear how exactly, they might be humanely accommodated in the final regularisation of the disparate polities living in the areas designated on maps of New England bearing labels such as: the Minnesota Farmland, the Dakotas, the Missouri Valley and Basin, the Mississippi Plain, and the Oregon Country.
The railways had rolled across the hunting grounds of the Lakota Sioux and the other clans of the Great Plains a hundred years ago, punching through the towering continental divide of the Rocky Mountains and driven north and north west to link into the railroad system of the Canadian colonies by the turn of the present century, connecting the Eastern economic power house of New England to the great Pacific port cities of Vancouver and Sammanish and opening up the Oregon country.
Last but by no means least, was the fate of West Texas, Texas, Sequoyah and the highlands of the Colorado Valley, contested lands located along the vulnerable South Western borderlands running from the Gulf of Spain in a ragged line all the way across Alta California to the Pacific at a place called Port Orford, notwithstanding that to this day nobody had ever comprehensively mapped that border.
Throughout these territories the gathering ‘land rush’ of the last decade was constantly changing the facts on the ground, populating former Indian land. Change was happening so fast that the maps drawn by the mandarins in Whitehall were out of date before they ever saw the light of day in Philadelphia.
Watching those ‘facts on the ground’ changing virtually before their eyes it was, in one way, hardly surprising that the rulers of New Granada, seething angrily in the corridors of power in Mexico City, should be chomping at the bit and beginning to plan for one new, possibly last war to turn back what to them must seem to be an unstoppable tide of ‘English’, protestant invaders into provinces that in living memory, had actually been ‘Spanish’ buffer zones between the further expansion of the British Empire and their sovereign realm…
That was the trouble with the bloody Spanish.
One could not have a straightforward war with them; everything was stained, usually, blood-stained with them…
The telephone by his right hand rang.
/> More bad news?
“The Lieutenant-Governor of New York is requesting to speak to you urgently, My Lord,” a prim female secretary informed him.
“Put him through, please.” De L’Isle waited. “Hello, John,” he welcomed his caller the moment the line connection crackled in the earpiece of the handset. He knew Sir John Waverley from his time in the Cape and had been happy to recommend him for the sinecure he now held, with immense charm and dignity on Long Island. “Always good to hear your voice, what can I do for you, old chap?”
There was a crackle of static down the line.
“I’m afraid I am the bearer of bad tidings, Philip,” the other man apologised.
De L’Isle waited patiently, bracing himself.
“There was an incident outside the Governor’s mansion this morning,” Sir John Waverley explained, his tone very grim. “The Governor’s official car was rammed by another vehicle and there was a large explosion. The Governor and his wife were both declared dead at the scene. I fear there will be news of many other fatalities and serious injuries as the day progresses.”
De L’Isle and Lord Cumberbatch, the Governor of New York, had been at daggers drawn – very politely, of course – ever since he had appointed Melody Danson to look into the apparent discrepancies in the prosecution files of Isaac Fielding and his sons in respect of the Empire Day atrocities. Subsequently, Cumberbatch’s regime had come in for something of a roasting in the New England press and he had been a somewhat reclusive figure in recent months.
“Damn,” the Governor of New England muttered. “Thank you for giving me a warning that the story was about to break, John. It goes without saying that my office will render all assistance to you up there in New York.”
“Thank you…”
“I’ll let you get about your business,” De L’Isle concluded.
No sooner had he put the phone down Sir Henry Rawlinson knocked on the door and entered his room. He had been listening in on the call in his own office.
“We’re also getting reports of an incident outside the law courts in Albany,” De L’Isle’s Chief of Staff announced grimly. “At least one, perhaps two suicide car bombers. There are many casualties in Temple Gardens.”
Two attacks…
How many more were to come?
Chapter 18
Maundy Thursday 23rd March
North Atlantic, 25 Miles east of Sandy Hook
Major Alexander Lincoln had done a lot of crazy things in his barnstorming days but flying through a prematurely initiated firework display – set off by an imbecile he had punched out the night before who had accused him of ‘hitting on’ his girl in a bar - while looping the loop in a souped-up Bristol VI with two buxom wing walkers strutting their stuff on the old kite’s top wing had pretty much taken the biscuit…until now.
That said, veterans like Alex who had survived four tours down on the Border in those years when peace had been – more or less – unofficially declared everywhere except in the skies above the disputed territories, got inured to being handed the shit end of the stick. So, when he had finally discovered why 7NY’s transfer out of Colony had been delayed not once but three times in the last month he had been uncharacteristically phlegmatic. Of course, breaking the news to his pilots had been…challenging.
‘Look, I’d sugar-coat this, chaps,’ he had apologised, trying to be as pugnacious as a British bulldog, ‘but the sooner you know what’s going down the sooner we can start getting our heads around it.’
That had got the boys’ attention!
‘We’re swapping our Mark II Goshawk’s for Mark IVs.’ His pilots’ eyes had been as wide as his had been when he had first choked down the implications of this. ‘Then we’re going to learn, very quickly, how to operate them off the Navy’s biggest flight deck!’
The Gloucester Aircraft Corporation had re-designed and extensively modified the Mark II Goshawk for a longer-range ground-based fleet protection role some years ago. More recently, as an expedient to cover the period – as little as three and as many as six years – before the first generation of jet interceptors was likely to come into general squadron service, the Mark III, a heavier, slightly slower and less nimble version of the Mark II but with approximately twice the operational range, had been given a significantly more robust undercarriage and structurally strengthened to enable it to fly off, and the hard bit, land on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier at sea.
On the plus side, the Mark IV’s 1,475 horse-power power plant made it the Mark II’s match for speed, if not manoeuvrability and because of its bull-like construction on land at least, serious take-off and landing ‘incidents’ were statistically speaking, occasionally ‘survivable’. The problem was that the Goshawk Mark IV was the Royal Navy’s principal sea-borne scout-interceptor and each of the new Ulysses class ships were listed to carry at least two squadrons of them and there were not enough naval pilots to fly the aircraft now rolling off the production lines.
Old hands like Alex had been asking themselves how on earth the Navy was going to find the pilots to fly so many Mark IVs. Now he knew and putting a good spin on it was not going to be straightforward. It was this which had impelled him to commandeer the first three Goshawk IVs delivered to Idlewild Field and to lead his best two jockeys on this little ‘proving flight’.
The base’s Royal Navy Liaison Officer (RNLO) had tried to give them a pep talk last night, and – give him credit, he was a persistent cove – that morning before the off.
‘There’s nothing to it,’ he had explained. ‘You crank down the hook and let the birds glide onto the after part of the flight deck. The ‘sweet spot’ is marked by a big cross and smaller markings indicate less ideal but still safe touch-down points where you are still likely to catch a wire…’
Obviously, it was not that simple.
A Mark IV’s stalling speed was around seventy-eight or nine knots – about ninety miles per hour - at sea level which normally meant a minimum safe landing speed was going to be in excess of a hundred miles an hour, maybe as high as one hundred and twenty. Any faster and the kite would squash down on its under-cart, breaking something, or ‘bounce’ back into the air, either way a pilot was liable to lose control and it was going to hurt. In a nutshell, landing on a carrier’s flight deck entailed putting down on a moving runway - one-fiftieth the size of the target on land - steaming into the wind at around twenty-five knots. Moreover, to avoid bouncing over the four evenly spaced ‘traps’ – tensioned steel hawsers raised off the deck just high enough to catch a plane’s tail hook – a Goshawk Mark IV had to hit the deck at a closing speed of around a hundred knots.
Four ‘traps’ sounded reassuring…sort of.
However, there was a reason the Navy called the fourth ‘trap’ the ‘FOR CHRIST-SAKE’S WIRE’: because even if your hook caught it the odds were that the best one could hope for was a crash with – or without - the aircraft nosing forward onto its propeller or worse, slewing over the side of the ship…
The RNLO had briefed Alex about the advanced ‘mirror landing system’ installed on all the big carriers; the CO of 7NY had been more interested in the Landing Officer’s ‘light board’, visible for two to three miles distant.
Two reds – too high, abort.
One red – too high, adjust.
Green – on glide path.
Green and red – left of the glide path.
Green and yellow – right of the glide path.
‘Watch for the WAVE OFF officers standing in the small sponsons either side of the fantail of the ship. Watch their bats very hard during the final approach…”
In extremis these latter ‘bat men’ had been known to fire flares directly in front of, or directly at aircraft that looked as if they were going to crash into the stern or the wake of a carrier.
‘Look, don’t be upset if only one of you gets down successfully and the others have to return to Idlewild,’ the RNLO, a Naval Air Service pilot of Alex’s vintage who
comported himself with the exaggerated care of a man who had taken one knock too many. “That’s par for the course. Give your chaps a couple of goes at this. The third attempt is usually the stickiest if a fellow has had to abort a couple of times.’
HMS Perseus looked like a floating wall of steel from the quayside but right now as Alex began his approach from the north-east, she looked like a tiny grey speck in the distance.
He was still too far out to be worrying about mirrors and light boards. To either side of him his wingmen, both old-timers – real old lags - like him, had taken up formation three or four wingspans away, attempting to conform to his every move. They would peel off at about eight hundred yards from the carrier, hopefully, if he got down in one piece, they would have got a feel for the right glide path and throttle settings by then, giving them a better chance at lining up for their own landings on the postage stamp size crosses on the deck of the Perseus when their turn came.
TWO REDS!
Jesus, those lights were bright!
No, not going to abort this far out…
He chopped back on the power and the Goshawk sank towards the grey, white horse-flecked North Atlantic.
ONE RED!
Still over three miles out but suddenly closing horribly fast.
Maximum flaps!