by James Philip
GREEN AND YELLOW!
How the fuck did I drift left?
Perhaps, the wind had shifted?
Once a carrier was landing aircraft it would not change course unless the wind backed or it was under attack.
Alex had no excess mental capacity to check to see if his wingmen were still clinging to his coat tails. This was one of those scout pilot’s classic every man for himself moments. He blinked, sweat stinging his eyes, a spasm of cramp shot up his right arm.
Try not to grip the stick so bloody hard, old man…
GREEN!
Shit I’m almost on top of the bloody ship!
He glimpsed the Landing Officer flattening his big paddles across his chest.
The Goshawk hit the deck with a jarring crunch.
Alex was brutally snapped forward in his straps.
The engine was roaring but the aircraft was stationary.
Without conscious thought he cut the throttle to idle.
There was a man already pulling back his cockpit hood.
“UNHOOKED!” The man in the greasy yellow dungarees of a flight deck crewman yelled in his ear. He reached in and thumped Alex’s right shoulder. “Gun the engine, sir!” He said into the pilot’s face as if cognisant that he was still in a state of shock. “Hit the WINGS FOLD switch and taxi STRAIGHT AHEAD! We’re parking you forward of the island.”
Presently, he was ordered to kill the engine.
Strong arms helped him out and manhandled him clear of his aircraft as a gang of men in yellow, black and red dungarees pushed his Goshawk so close to the edge of the deck he thought for a moment they were going to pitch her over the side. Then he was being escorted through a door into the quiet of the ‘Island’, HMS Perseus’s bridge superstructure located approximately half-way down the vessel’s starboard flank.
It was not until he stepped into Flight Control, the fiefdom of the Commander, Carrier Air Wing (CAW), that Alex truly started to get his faculties back into gear.
“That was a gutsy landing!” A large, bearded, piratical figure of a man some years Alex’s senior declaimed heartily as he crushed the newcomer’s right hand in a bear-like calloused paw. “Come and join me at the best seat in the house!”
Alex found himself leaning on the back of a chair high up in the Island with an unobstructed view of the entire massive – it looked very, very big down at this level – flight deck of the brand-new carrier. In addition to his Mark IV there were several Bristol torpedo bombers neatly parked near the bow and to his surprise two of the experimental small helicopters – machines clouded in real rather than perfunctory secrecy – he had been starting to hear so many good things about. One of them was slowly spooling up its small tail-mounted stabiliser and twenty-feet diameter main lift rotors.
“I’ve ordered your chaps to try a couple of trial approaches while we get our little friend,” the Perseus’s CAW intimated, “into the air. Just in case we have to pull anybody out of the sea in the next few minutes.”
Alex sobered, gave the man a very hard look.
The big man grinned.
“Those whirlybirds are still very much works in progress,” he confessed. “I’d hoped to have one in the air for your landing but we’re having to learn as we go along.”
The other man became more serious.
He gestured to the thickening overcast.
“You’ve made your point,” he said, breathing respect. “You’ve shown what can be done. Are those two chaps out there up to this work?”
Heck, that was honest!
“Up to it and up for it,” he retorted briskly.
“Good. We’ll give the whirlybird a couple of minutes to get onto station then we’ll call your chaps in again.”
Alex watched the fragile-looking helicopter lift effortlessly off the deck and swing away to port, its main rotor a blur in the greyness. Three or four miles away the indistinct silhouette of a sleek fleet destroyer kept pace with the Perseus.
“When we go to sea with Task Force 5.2 there will be a battlewagon, cruisers and a pack of destroyers like the Campbeltown – out there - all around us, not to mention oilers, ammunition and general stores auxiliaries in company,” the Perseus’s CAW remarked cheerfully. With our Goshawks, torpedo and dive bombers we will be able to make mincemeat of any battlefleet that ever sailed the seven seas at a range of two to two hundred-and-fifty miles.”
“That’s quite a thought, sir,” Alex grimaced. “You’ll forgive me if I worry more about the mechanics of taking-off and landing on this boat rather than grand strategy for the next few minutes.”
The older man laughed heartily.
“I can see that you and I are going to be a damned good team, Major!”
Chapter 19
Maundy Thursday 23rd March
Bridge Street, Manhattan, New York
Brigadier Matthew Harrison tried not to dwell on the news he had received two days ago, about the tumour discovered last year in the x-rays taken after his admittance to the Accident and Emergency Department of the Queen Eleanor Hospital in the wake of the Temple Gardens shooting. It seemed that the surgery he had undergone last August, had only delayed the inevitable and that his present, oddly rude health was simply the precursor to a sudden terminal decline which might set in any day without warning.
Rather than dwell upon his own troubles, he had begun to reflect on the many regrets he would be relieved to be leaving behind sometime later that year.
Last night he had visited the Brooklyn Admiralty Dockyards to walk down the now repaired slipway where so many people had died on Empire Day two years ago, and a great ship had been wrecked. The death of John Watson, an innocent man in the confusion some hours later was a thing that would be on his conscience forever; few days passed when he did not think of the man’s poor widow and his orphaned children.
In comparison, the news of his boyhood friend, Isaac Fielding’s death had left him cold. The man who had been his oldest friend had become his most implacable enemy and the shame of it would cling to him like a bad smell, an itch it was far, far too late to scratch. Isaac had won in the end: in the last few years everything he touched turned to dust, went bad on him.
Harrison still had no idea why the Spanish had had Sarah Arnold assassinated, or even if she, not Melody Danson had been the real target…
He should never have let that woman go to Spain on that fool’s errand. Now she, and almost as bad, Henrietta De L’Isle had disappeared into the chaos of what had every manifestation of a civil war, a war to the knife for the soul of Spain.
What made it ten times worse was that he could and should have called her back two or three months ago. Those idiots in Madrid hated having such an intelligent, perceptive – and strong – woman in their midst in a position of authority. That was why they had progressively cut her and the Governor’s daughter out of the main work of ‘the Commission’, and probably why so little had been achieved other than to delay the moment the men in London had to take action against the Spanish for turning a blind eye to the Empire Day plot.
Although, in that respect, that time had been coming soon anyway; and the current disorder, probably a botched coup attempt in Madrid and other major regional capitals in the Iberian Peninsula, had merely pre-empted matters.
At least Melody and Henrietta had contrived to make contact with one or two of the saner players on the undercast of the ongoing Spanish tragedy. Moreover, they had managed to travel around the country last year, collecting a wealth of ‘soft’ intelligence before the Mission’s senior men - dolts one and all - had succeeded in clipping their wings.
Melody Danson’s acutely observed, detailed reports of what the two women had seen, and heard being said, in several of the big cities and their conclusions on the actual, not the theoretical, workings of Old Spain had been remarkably illuminating. On their own initiative they had moved around – in the guise of Melody escorting Henrietta around the landscape of her childhood in Spain, gaining access to what was es
sentially, the last ‘closed’ society in Western Europe – and with nothing more potent in their armoury of subterfuges than their charm, quiet persistence and their nascent curiosity had set about overturning a raft of long-held misconceptions about the relative modernity and stability of Spanish society, and partially de-bunked a slew of brainless assumptions about the real nature and virulence of the Inquisition.
The two women had ruthlessly exploited their hosts’ notion – shared by the male hierarchy of the ‘Joint Commission’ - that they were just a pair of exotic adornments, window-dressing. Therefore, the Spanish had let them roam about at will just like two wide-eyed tourists on some kind of old-fashioned Grand Tour. The great families of the cities they had visited had been only to eager to welcome ‘Lady Henrietta’ and her quaint, New England ‘friend’ into their houses, and now and then, to talk with what seemed like reckless abandon about the issues confronting their fiefdoms, and their country.
There was no single Inquisition in Spain in exactly the same way there was no controlling Mafia family in the affairs of Italy or Sicily or anywhere else in the Mediterranean world. Everything was a lot more complicated than people imagined and Old Spain was simply an umbrella nomenclature under which Castile, Asturias, Galicia, Catalonia, Aragon, the Basque lands and all the other fiercely independent ‘nations’ of the Iberian Peninsula, without the borders of Portugal, co-existed in a constant state of flux. Seville and Cadiz, Granada, Toledo, Salamanca, Segovia, Barcelona and a score of other communes and communities were each in permanent low-level opposition to the writs of the Royal Palaces of Madrid. To many Spaniards the King-Emperor was an irrelevant lapdog of the Mother Church locked away in his bunker in the Mountains of Madrid…
Harrison glanced at his wristwatch.
Sighed, knowing he needed to be on the next ferry across to Elizabethtown if he was to catch the 14:11 train down to Philadelphia. After that the next express service did not leave until after four o’clock and he needed to confer with the Governor this evening.
His best guess about the ‘Spanish situation’ was that a cadre of officers within the military – possibly both the Army and the Navy, the Air Force tended to keep out of politics – had sided with one or other of the Court factions, there were several of those in both Ferdinand and Sophia’s palaces, and possibly with a coalition of the more ‘traditional’ Inquisitions but at the end of the day all that was pure guesswork.
He looked out of the window of the tea rooms where he had taken shelter from the morning’s showers. Out on the street everybody was going about their business as usual.
Ignorance was indeed, bliss!
The Empire Day outrages had somehow let a terrible genie out of his bottle and soon, he feared, they were all going to have to pay the price.
Matthew Harrison had come to New York the day after the murder of the Governor and his wife and the Temple Gardens bombings. There were twenty-seven dead, another one hundred-and-five people, men, women, children, two of them babes in arms still in hospital, many of them critically ill and yet here in Manhattan all was calm and few of the uniformed police on the streets carried fire arms.
He had immediately offered the full resources of the Colonial Security Service to assist ‘in any way required’ by the Colony’s constabulary, and as he had anticipated, had his offer politely, curtly rejected notwithstanding the locals were obviously desperately chasing shadows again with little or no idea how to begin to uncover the support networks which had to have existed, and had to have left significant evidential trails, given that the three suicide car bombers had contrived to wreak such havoc.
Of course, the idiots did not have the first idea what they were actually looking for, and he had little or no confidence that even if they stumbled over what they were looking for, they had the expertise or the native wit to recognise it for what it was!
It was Empire Day 1976 all over again…
I should have had Melody Danson recalled from Spain!
Honestly and truly, I was stupid to let her go in the first place!
Problematically, no amount of wishful thinking or retrospective existential angst was going to change a single damned thing; he was dying and the woman he had first floated as his long-term successor shortly after the smoke in the Upper Bay had cleared twenty months ago was, for all he knew, dead.
He paid his bill, collected his hat and coat and ventured out into the street. Threatening rain drops splashed heavily on the pavement even though the nearest bank of grey-black storm clouds was retreating to the east.
He had no idea if Melody Danson would have accepted the role that he still envisioned for her; for all he knew she might have laughed in his face. Nevertheless, that would have been the sort of conversation a man would pay good money to have a ring-side seat at!
He forced himself to focus on his contemporaneous mistakes and misapprehensions. Specifically, were there still terrorist attacks to come and if so, where and directed against whom?
He began to walk west down Bridge Street towards the ferry port on the Hudson bank.
Bridge Street…
The road had been carved through late nineteenth century Manhattan at much cost and against huge public opposition – on account of so many private buildings having to be demolished to make way for it - because the colonies of New York and New Jersey had briefly agreed that a bridge on the model of the King Edward VI, already spanning the East River linking Long Island to Manhattan should be built across the Hudson River. That concordat had only survived a couple of years and by then Bridge Street and the footings for two rail tracks had already been substantially constructed most of the way across Manhattan. Nowadays, the magnificent straight road across the city was regarded as a salutary epitaph to inter-colonial non-cooperation and misunderstanding, a folly worthy of comparison with any of those ridiculous aristocratic landscape jokes of yesteryear back in the Old Country.
A depressing aspect of the current crisis was that the complacency he witnessed everywhere in the First Thirteen had its roots in the misconception that somehow, if war came, the greater part of the burden would be borne not by the East Coast but by the Old Country and the peoples of the trackless western hinterlands. The general view on the East Coast was that not only would the war industries of the Ohio and the Monongahela Valleys and the vast sprawling cities around the Great Lakes take much of the economic strain, but that the sons of other parts of the Empire and of the anonymous factory workers of the interior would largely populate the regiments, man the ships and fly the aeroplanes which would enable life in the First Thirteen – and of course Maine and Vermont – to go on ‘as normal’ until such time as the unpleasantness was concluded.
As in all previous ‘conflicts’ with the rump of New Spain the exchequer back in England would take the strain while in New England it would be ‘business as usual’.
In any event, nobody in the middle or upper colonies took the notion of the supposedly ‘raggedy’ despotic Spanish colonies of the Caribbean, the Central Americas and the northern shores of the Latin Southern continent ever ‘getting their act together’ and uniting in common cause very seriously.
Heck that was as unthinkable as the First Thirteen ever agreeing about anything other than that they deserved preferential treatment within the Empire!
As for talk of a ‘Triple Alliance’, comprised, according to who one listened to, of New Granada, Cuba and Santo Domingo or any number of the other estranged Spanish provinces like Panama, or Colombia or one or other of the fractured colonies of Nuevo Valencia, Maracaibo, Caracas or Barquisimeto, that seemed almost too incredible to be true. Likewise, few people were aware that the German Empire’s so-called ‘1966 Concessions’, among them Aruba and Curacao, and the ports of Cumana and La Cruz in the South and San Juan, the original Spanish ‘rich port’ or Puerto Rica in the Americas, had been conduits through which the Germans had injected unknown treasure and technological assistance to their allies in the region.
In the
last half-a-dozen years the German Navy had been granted facilities in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay, at the city of Santa Domingo and at Port au Prince by the Dominicans and perhaps, most significantly, at Vera Cruz on the Caribbean shore of New Granada. Nor was it commonly recognised that trade between the Empire of Germany and the Spanish colonies they had ‘befriended’ in and around the Caribbean had expanded exponentially in those years from a nett worth of a few tens of millions of pounds sterling – the currency of all international transactions – thirty-fold or more just since the mid-1960s.
The World was changing but the mindset of New Englanders was not. Several Colonial Legislatures had already cavilled at the increased military expenditures suggested for the financial years 1979-80 and 1980-81 by the Governor’s Office in Philadelphia, increases designed to ensure that there was a realistic, working recruiting and supply administration, and that planning for a future expansion of military capabilities was carried out on a continual basis in every colony and protectorate in the Commonwealth of New England.
There would be Hell to pay when the Governor was forced to insist that for the first time in a generation the Colonial Exchequers re-introduce the direct taxation of personal rather than just commercial income. In peace time levies on raw materials and manufactured goods entering the Commonwealth from outside the Imperial Preference Zone, duties on household goods other than foodstuffs and taxes on petrol and heating oil when supplemented by local tariffs imposed by Colonial Legislatures were usually sufficient to fund basic public services, universal health provision free at the point of contact to all persons as per the original ‘British model’, the Constabulary, urban sanitation and waste disposal, the maintaining of the road system and so forth. The railroad combines were privately owned, as were the river and canal conservancies who kept the waterways in operation. Historically, the colonial militias – part-timers or as the English termed them ‘Territorials’ – were the responsibility of individual ‘home colonies’, whereas, regular troops were paid for directly by the British taxpayer, although many argued the profits, dues and taxes the Chancellor in Whitehall collected abroad were as much Empire as solely British taxes.