James Philip - Empire Day

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.

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 have 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!

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.