Abigail was unsure whether to bow, curtsy, salute, wave or just faint away at being so close to the ruler of the British Empire and was relieved when he held his hand out to her, negating the necessity to choose.
She took his hand and shook it firmly. ‘Thank you, your Imperial Majesty.’
‘Please, just call me sir; all that Imperial Majesty stuff is a bit of a mouthful and once per day is enough, don’t you think?’
‘I, uh, I suppose so, Your, uh, sir.’
‘Excellent! By the way you sound a bit like me, there, would you like me to refer you to my doctor? He’ll sort you right out.’
The two women laughed, delighted that the Emperor could so easily joke with them about something that had caused him so much trouble and embarrassment in the past.
He smiled, pleased, and Abigail mused that he was probably surrounded with people who laughed at any joke he made, whether it was funny or not, and probably appreciated their honest amusement.
‘I hope you will forgive me if we get straight down to business, Miss Lennox; much as I would like to spend a pleasant afternoon in your company, I have too many duties to attend to.’
‘Of course, sir.’
‘Thank you.’ He nodded, making her feel as if it had mattered whether she had said yes or no. ‘I arranged to meet you here to show you how serious the situation really is. While we will do everything we can to prevent it, I, and my ministers, believe that war is most likely inevitable and we are rushing to prepare for it before it is too late.’ He turned and led them down the corridor, deeper into the complex. ‘This facility is only one of the many preparations we are making.’
As they went, the Emperor pointed out various rooms and their uses, from bathrooms, kitchens and dormitories, to the communications and map rooms. They finished the tour in a small meeting room where the Emperor showed Abigail to a chair before taking one himself.
‘While I will continue to make most of the decisions of running the country from the Palace and Downing Street, the war can be run from here if London is ever threatened. We are under several dozen yards of concrete, with dedicated telephone lines running to all the major installations around the country, both military and civilian and I am assured that there is, or at least there will be, enough supplies to last for a year or so locked down here. I shudder to think of the quality of the food if it keeps for that amount of time, but as long as there is enough tea, I think I can make do.
‘However, while a place like this is undoubtedly essential, it is not the most important of the preparations that we have to make. That would be the expansion and training of our armed forces and that it why I have brought you here today.’
He picked a newspaper up from the table in front of him and pushed it towards her. ‘Have you seen the reports from Spain?’
Abigail took the paper and looked at the story that had been highlighted in red marker. It was a report of the air battle over North-Eastern Spain and dealt with a Prussian Squadron that was fighting on the side of the Spanish Rebels in the Iberian Civil War. They were an elite squadron that called themselves die Karmesinroten Barone - the Crimson Barons - and had apparently knocked the Republican Air Force out of the sky without losing a single pilot or machine.
‘My ministers insist that I do not have to worry about the Crimson Barons, that the Imperial Aviator Corps with their new Harridans and Spitsteams will be perfectly capable of taking care of them, but I’m not so certain.’ He looked at Campbell. ‘That’s not to say I have any doubts about the RAC, Wing Commander; I am sure they will handle themselves very well when faced with Die Fliegertruppe, I am merely saying that they do not have the resources that that Prussian squadron in particular have behind them. Which brings me to you, Miss Lennox. I want you to form a squadron to counter them, to do the same to the Prussians as they are doing to the poor Republicans. I want you to find our best minds and pilots and make something out of them to defend this realm against that.’ He stabbed his finger at the article in punctuation.
‘Why me, sir? Surely one of those minds or pilots would serve you better?’
‘I looked at them all, believe me, but you are the one that stood out above all the rest; you’ve been holding together your father’s company, whilst simultaneously bringing up a son, designing and building new aircraft, keeping your sister’s impulsiveness in check and, to top it all off, I’m told that you are a brilliant pilot! As far as I can see, you’re the best person for the job.’
Abigail shook her head. ‘But I’m not really a military kind of person, sir.’
The Emperor laughed. ‘Good! Because I don’t want a military kind of squadron! I want you to find the men and women that wouldn’t necessarily flourish in the military, but who have lived and breathed our proud British aviation tradition their whole lives, who wouldn’t necessarily fit in with RAC discipline and would work best if they didn’t have to fit in. A squadron of misfits, if you will. Do you think you can do that, Miss Lennox? Are there people out there like you - brilliant pilots and designers - who would fight for their country in the difficult times to come?’
Abigail thought about all the men and women she’d met at the various conferences or heard good things about. If she could gather them together, she knew that they would form something special, something that would easily counter anything the Prussians, with their functional but unimaginative aviation techniques, could put into the air. The only trouble would be persuading them.
She nodded. ‘I think there are, sir and I will do my utmost to get them for you.’
The Emperor beamed happily. ‘Excellent! Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome, sir.’ She grinned. ‘And thank you for giving us our name.’
Ten minutes later, Abigail was slumped in the chair in the meeting room in a daze.
Somehow, not only had she agreed to put together the squadron, but she had been commissioned in the RAC as a Wing Commander, had her sister commissioned as a Squadron Leader and also somehow sold the Lennox Aviation Company to Hawking Aircraft Manufacturers. The Emperor had pointed out, and she had reluctantly agreed, that neither she nor her sister would have the time to keep it going and that it was failing anyway. He had said something about it being a very good offer from some honourable people, that the Lennox name would live on in the squadron, but by that point Abigail had been too stunned to listen properly and had just signed the thick sheaf of papers that a colourfully-dressed aide from the Emperor’s court had placed in front of her one by one.
Once that had been done, the Emperor had stood, shaken her hand, then made his excuses and hurried off to Downing Street, leaving her staring into space and wondering what she had done.
She blinked and glanced to one side, meeting the eyes of the Wing Commander. ‘What just happened?’
The woman smiled, barely holding back a laugh. ‘The Emperor just got everything that he wanted, and the British Empire just got its best hope of survival. Come on, let’s get you back to Hyde, we have a lot to do.’
‘We?’
This time the woman did laugh. ‘Did you miss the part where I was assigned as your liaison with the government?’
Abigail grimaced. ‘I think I must have done, but I’m glad; I really don’t want to have another meeting with that man any time soon - I might end up signing away my firstborn. Or a lung.’
The two women made their way back through the underground complex towards the exit, but before they got there, a grey-haired man in a dark-grey suit stepped out of one of the dormitories and stopped them.
‘Miss Lennox, if you wouldn’t mind?’ He gestured for Abigail to go into the room.
The Wing Commander frowned at him. ‘Minister Peterson? What’s going on?’
‘Nothing for you to worry about. We just want to have a quick word with Miss Lennox. It’ll just be a couple of minutes and then you can whisk her away, back where she came from.’
‘Please?’ The man gestured again, insisting, and Abigail nodded and moved past him.
The Wing Commander made to follow her, but the minister blocked her way. ‘Not you, Campbell, just her.’
He herded Abigail into the room and closed the door firmly behind her, then walked past her to sit with his fellows.
Abigail had to cover her mouth and fake a cough to stop herself from laughing when she was confronted by the strange sight of four dark-suited men, who she recognised as forming part of the Emperor’s inner circle of ministers, the most powerful people in the country, squeezed together facing her on a low metal military-type bed like sparrows on a fence.
‘Gentlemen. What can I do for you?’
‘We wanted to get a look at you personally.’
‘And warn you.’
‘War is coming, and we can’t afford to waste this country's resources, not even on one of the Emperor’s pet projects.’
‘At the first sign that your efforts are not worth the cost to the country, we will shut you down.’
‘Is that understood?’
The men took it in turns to speak, bombarding her, almost as if they’d rehearsed it, which she supposed they might have.
She nodded. ‘Perfectly.’
‘Good.’
‘Very good.’
‘Then we are done here, but remember you are now a member of the Imperial armed forces and therefore under the orders of the Government and not just the Emperor, Wing Commander.’
‘Dismissed.’
They looked at her expectantly and she gave them a small, extremely ironic bow, then turned on her heels smartly, pulled open the door and marched out.
Campbell was waiting for her a little way down the corridor so that she couldn’t be accused of eavesdropping and she raised an eyebrow at Abigail’s stormy expression.
‘I have just been warned to make sure that our efforts are worthwhile, Wing Commander Campbell.’
The woman rolled her eyes. ‘Take no notice; they’re just jealous old men who don’t want women having any power whatsoever and have never liked us being in the military. The Emperor will take care of you and stop them from interfering.’ She began to lead the way towards the exit. ‘By the way, if we’re going to be working together, you should call me Dot. Unless you want me to call you Wing Commander Lennox all the bloody time?’
‘God no!’ Abigail laughed then considered for a second. ‘And call me Abby.’
For a long time after Abby finished, the only sound was the furious scribbling of the journalist as the pilots absorbed the piece of their history that their commander had hinted at, but never fully shared with any of them.
Gwen eventually broke the silence. ‘How did your sister take my parents buying your company? And you signing her up for the RAC? Was she upset?’
Abby shook her head. ‘She was pretty happy, actually; she’d been trying to get me to sell for a while and it turned out that she’d actually been thinking about joining the RAC anyway.’
‘That’s pretty lucky.’
Abby shrugged. ‘I always got the sneaky suspicion that I was the King’s second choice, that he’d already sounded Cece out for the job, and that she turned it down and pointed him in my direction. If so, then he would have known how she would react.’
‘Don’t sell yourself short, Abby, darling,’ said Lady Penelope. ‘I can’t imagine anyone accomplishing what you have over the last three years. None of us could have.’
Abby began to protest, but she was immediately drowned out when the Misfits started showing their agreement with Penelope’s statement, variously stomping their feet or banging teacups and cutlery on the table as they called out their support. She blushed, meeting the eyes of her pilots one by one and settled for nodding her thanks.
The noise eventually died down and was replaced by the sound of silver spoons against fine china as the pilots polished off their desserts and resumed their conversations.
‘Was the Minister for War one of the men in the war rooms?’
Owen’s softly-voiced question plunged the room back into silence and all eyes turned to Abby.
She tried to picture the four men on the beds in her mind. She had still been in a bit of a daze after her meeting with the Emperor and hadn’t paid them much attention as individuals, only really remembering them as a group of unsmiling and unfriendly old men. Cummerbund was only a junior member of the Council of Ministers at the time and had been virtually unknown until his appointment as Minister for War, so she hadn’t taken particular notice of him at the time, but she seemed to remember him being one of them. ‘I think so, yes.’
There was a sharp sound as the journalist snapped his notebook closed, causing a few of the people around the table to jump, startled, and all eyes shot to him. He looked up and saw everybody staring at him and gave them an apologetic grin. ‘Pardon me.’ He looked at Abby. ‘That was wonderful, thank you.’
Abby was only able to give him a slight smile in return; the realisation that their problems with the War Minister may have been going on for far longer than they had realised had put something of a dampener on the mood. ‘You’re welcome. What are your plans for us, Freddy? Who will you want to question next?’
‘Actually, I’d like to hear how you recruited your pilots first before delving into their pasts and such.’
Abby nodded. ‘Very well, whenever I have time. Perhaps in the evenings when we are all done, over a pint or two.’
‘That would be delightful, thank you.’
‘Mr Featherstonehaugh!’ Lord Bagshot called from his place at the head of the table. ‘You haven’t had a chance to eat.’
‘Indeed I have not, my Lord, but no matter; I have been nourished in another manner. However, if you’ll permit me, I will dig in now.’
He began to eat but stopped again almost immediately when Abby stood up.
She nodded to him. ‘Unfortunately, we can’t keep you company, Freddy.’ She glanced around the table. ‘Fun’s over. Time to get back to work, Misfits.’
Chapter 6
Despite Abby’s absence, construction had begun that morning on the two new A flight aircraft. There was a slight delay, though, because when Gwen arrived at the hangar to go over the designs with the fitters, she found that there were different names on the plans. The ones she had angrily scribbled, “Rapier” and “Sabre”, had been rubbed out and in their place had been written “Raptor” and “Sable” in an elegant script. When she confronted Bruce and Monty about it, the stunt pilot just grinned, while the Australian shrugged, smiling just as cheekily as his wingman, and answered ‘couldn’t bloody read your writing, sorry Gwen, isn’t that what it says?’
Gwen had stared at them for a few seconds, speechless; the two men had seen the anger in her scrawled writing, had known her well enough to suspect what she had been thinking at the time, and done what they could to defuse her frustration by immediately giving the machines a personal touch.
In the end all she could do was smile. ‘Yes, Bruce. Now come on, let’s get these aircraft built.’
With the added incentive of new aircraft to work on and the flush of Gwen’s recent success in the air, there was an air of true excitement around the base that had been somewhat lacking before, and the fitters and pilots redoubled their efforts with new energy.
Since the two new A flight machines were identical, it meant that the pieces for them could just be duplicated, saving a lot of time, and they were completed after only four days, well ahead of schedule. The fitters then immediately moved on to the two B flight aircraft, plans for which had been completed shortly after those of Sable and Raptor. With every able-bodied man and woman in Misfit Squadron working on them, they took just four days to build.
When the aircraft were presented to the squadron, there was a surprise for Gwen which quite literally brought her to tears - each of the aircraft had some part of them painted pink.
Mac’s machine, which he named Jaguar in honour of Lady Penelope’s lost Cheetah, was twin-springed and had long, sharp, triangular wings. It was painted gold with black spo
ts and had pink nose cones on the airscrews.
Monty had chosen to make his machine bright orange in tribute to Ballerina, but with a pink vertical stabiliser.
Bruce’s Sable was a lush deep brown except for pink gun ports along the leading edge of the wings.
The unnamed aircraft, an elegant, twin-springed machine with wings that had gently-curving trailing edges, had been left unpainted, though. That way the new pilot could not only name their own aircraft, but also chose its colourings and feel that it was really theirs.
Finally, in early October, about three weeks after the fight with the Barons, the Misfits once more had a full complement of fighters.
They were still a pilot down, though, and there was less than a week before they were due to leave for Muscovy.
Abby had still been unable to find a replacement who satisfied all her criteria. In the end, she had had to bow to pressure from the King and the War Minister and had made her choice of the best of who was available. A couple of days after the last aircraft was completed, an Aviator Sergeant from a Spitsteam squadron arrived at the local train station and Abby went to bring her to the airfield in one of the squadron’s autocars.
The pilots had been to and told to be on the airfield to greet their new colleague and were standing in a loose line in front of the ready room, watching the autocar being admitted through the base gates before making its way around the perimeter road towards them.
Owen gave a theatrical sigh. ‘I really hope she hasn't found us another Gwen Stone; one’s enough.
Gwen grinned and glanced along the line at him. ‘Would you prefer another Scarlet?’
The diminutive Irishwoman put her hands on her hips and turned to peer up at the tall Welshman.
He laughed and shook his head. ‘Nope! Not that either. I just want someone who’s not going to show me up and steal all my credit on a night mission...’
Gwen tutted and rolled her eyes exaggeratedly ‘You’re never going to forgive me for that, are you? It’s not my fault the papers don’t find you interesting enough to write about, or even mention. Be thankful; even if they did, they probably wouldn’t spell your name right, Squadron Leader Fle... Fffew... Phlegm.’
The Russian Resistance Page 10