James Philip - Empire Day

As if that was not surreal what was going on now was too incredible for belief!

The man in the Bristol VI doggedly heading for the northernmost battleship in the Upper Bay was periodically looking over his shoulder and firing a pistol at them!

Should I duck?

No, I might miss something!

It was probably the benefit of the two Martinis she had downed before she set off for Jamaica Field that morning but bizarrely, the faster this crazy roller coaster went the less she got distracted by minor considerations such as: am I about to die?

She had never been so alive, her senses were so electrically, ecstatically heightened that she was aware of everything going on around her in pinpoint detail.

The aircraft juddered to the right, recovered.

Leonora craned her neck to look around.

The pilot had blood on his face and grim determination in his eyes as if he was looking through her.

When next she focused on the other aircraft it was almost close enough to touch.

They were going to ram it!

In a second it would all be over.

Should I shut my eyes?

No, it will hurt as much either way!

The Bristol V wobbled and bucked in the slipstream of the leading aircraft and suddenly Leonora was looking beyond it; she gasped when she saw how close they were to the leading battleship.

It seemed so huge it filled the world…

Momentarily, the vortex of bursting shells and criss-crossing machine-gun fire which had stubbornly remained fifty or a hundred yards ahead of the two planes rushed towards and enveloped them both.

For a split second both aircraft were within the firestorm.

Leonora felt the Bristol V staggering, lurching sidelong, bouncing with impossible violence. She heard metal and wooden spars splintering. The machine lurched sidelong and then she was in clear air.

The aircraft’s motor spat gouts of smoke from its exhausts and seized and the sea rushed up towards her impossibly fast

HMS Lion, Upper Bay, New York

Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Packenham watched the approaching aircraft with cool professional detachment. Every forward facing anti-aircraft gun was shooting at the two fragile Bristol scouts, and to the left and the right both the Ajax and the Naiad were filling the sky with metal, too. And yet the two old machines still came on, wobbling through the turbulence of the exploding ordnance seemingly invulnerable.

“Our bloody guns are shooting short!” He complained.

The problem would lie with the variables programmed into his ships’ gun control tables. Neither of the oncoming aircraft could achieve anywhere near the default one hundred and fifty mile an hour minimum speed set up on the high angle air defence directors. None of these blighters would have laid a finger on his ships if somebody had had the wit to alter the parameters. It was too late now; thank God these string bags were so flimsy they crumpled up the moment they hit one of his leviathans.

Problematically, there was going to be the mother and father of all inquests – or rather, inquisitions – when this was over. Thus far three of the Royal Navy’s most modern battleships had been damaged, granted not seriously, by a bunch of maniacs in speed boats and fifteen to twenty-year old obsolete biplanes and the one thing the Admiralty never, ever tolerated was being made to look stupid.

Dammit, what would have happened if the King or the Queen had been injured? The Commander of the 5th Battle Squadron shook his head, wincing at the very thought. Literally, he would have fallen on his sword. Or, more likely borrowed somebody’s service pistol rather than attempted that barbaric Japanese Seppuku, hari-kari ritual, he was British after all.

As it was his fate was probably going to be significantly messier.

The King would do his best to lessen the blow but he knew his old friend too well to know that he would not overtly intervene in the Court of Inquiry which would inevitably recommend that he, the Squadron Commander, the man in charge of this fiasco, be court-martialled.

As Tom Packenham gazed around the Upper Bay and the sporadic detonations of more of the Princess Royal’s ready use anti-aircraft shells crackled across the smoky waters he wondered if the word ‘fiasco’ even began to do justice to the humiliation and the outrage that today’s events would invoke across the whole Empire.

“We’ve got one of them!” Somebody nearby on the open flying bridge atop Lion’s armoured bridge cried more in relief than triumph.

Packenham saw one aircraft slewing to port with what looked like pieces of wing and fuselage falling off it trailing grey smoke shot through with streaks of crimson fire gliding towards the stone-coloured waters of the Bay.

The other aircraft was on fire.

It was heading straight at him.

Men around him began to scurry for cover as the Bristol VI wobbled over the Lion’s bow. The big quadruple 1.7-inch automatic cannons no longer bore on the aircraft but heavy machine guns and rifles in the hands of Royal Marines still dressed in their ceremonial redcoats dressing

standing on the two forward 15-inch main battery turrets were knocking lumps out of the scout which it seemed must disintegrate at any moment.

But Tom Packenham knew that was not going to happen.

He stood rigidly to attention.

The last thing he saw in this life was the blur of the spinning propeller a microsecond before it, the wreck of the Bristol VI, thirty gallons of 87-octane gasoline and the one hundred and sixty-seven pounds of dynamite inside the bullet-riddled fuselage of the biplane crashed into and detonated squarely against the binnacle platform in the middle of the flying bridge.

Mohawk Valley, New York

The small group paddled two miles up-river, keeping out of the main stream, hugging the banks where the slow-moving water eddied and swirled before hauling the boats onto land and loading them onto the ancient flatbed, much-modified rusting Leyland lorry Tsiokwaris had used to transport first Kate, and then himself and his nephews to this southerly part of the tribal grounds in the previous days. Abe and Kate squeezed into the cab with the old man, the teenage boys rode with the canoes as the charabanc wheezed and coughed down over-grown and unmaintained roads through the narrow breaks in the wilderness that barely qualified as tracks.

The Albany to Buffalo trunk road, likewise the railway still ran through Mohawk land north of the river but all the latter’s branch lines had been abandoned, like the tarmac roads which used to quarter the forests a quarter of a century ago and were slowly being reclaimed by nature.

Here and there the Leyland bumped and jolted past derelict farmsteads; the cabins that hunters and fishermen from the towns and cities once used to frequent in summer had mostly been vandalised, their roofs pulled down or simply torched by their owners when the colony’s bailiffs came calling. That had been one of the many unforeseen consequences of the rigid application – county by county – of the Getrennte Entwicklung policies of the forties and fifties. A lot of colonists, including most of the small farmers had tried to hang on as long as possible and even as recently as ten or fifteen years ago illegal hunting and trapping had been a big problem in these lands. Nothing happened all at once, and the ideologues of separate development had remorselessly tightened the law until the penalties for breaking its legal straightjacket were as severe, possibly more so, for white colonists than for the ‘natives’. So, these days nobody maintained the roads and land cleared for arable rotation had gone back to nature as the forest began swallow up the fields.