Melody had no answer to that.
“Perhaps,” the man said wistfully, “now at last the rest of the World will pay attention to our troubles?”
Melody suspected that was wanderlust.
“You need to put down your gun, friend!”
The Spaniard had turned away from Melody as Paul Nash issued the order.
“My son is behind you, Englishman.”
“You still need to put down your gun!”
“Give it to me or he’ll kill you,” Melody pleaded.
“What is my life to you?”
“He will kill you and your son,” she retorted lowly. “Without batting an eyelid. How do you think Henrietta and I got from the other side of the Mountains of Madrid to here?” She stepped close to the man. “Tell your son to put down his gun and to step out into full view.”
She reached out for the shotgun.
The man allowed her to slip it off his shoulder, his expression a little bewildered.
“No more killing, Paul!” She shouted. “These men are not our enemies.”
“I’ve got the kid’s gun!” Albert Stanton called, his voice less than steady.
Paul Nash brought the youngster with him, indicating for the father and son to sit on the ground. He took the gun from Melody.
“I spotted these two fellows following us.”
“So, what?” Henrietta complained. “You used us as bait?”
“Needs must, what!”
“They don’t mean us any harm,” Melody snapped, irritably.
The vehemence of it caused Paul Nash’s left eyebrow to arch. He looked down at the two captives.
“Is that so?” He inquired.
The older man shrugged.
“The border is still twenty miles distant. Despite the rains, you may still be able to cross the river into Portugal. I know one, maybe two places that might be possible but there are patrols all along the Spanish side of the Douro. Without our help you will all die. Or worse,” he added sadly, looking to the two women and the boy in Henrietta’s arms.
Unaccountably, he smiled.
“It is good to meet at last, el Escorpion!”
Chapter 37
Thursday 14th April
HMS Perseus, 17 miles NE of Elbow Cay, Bahamas
The launch controller crossed his paddles across his chest. Commander Alexander Fielding opened the throttles of his Goshawk IV, felt the aircraft lurch forward against the brakes. Then he let the beast free. The four-ton scout rocketed forward, the end of the flight deck rushed at Alex and the aircraft was – after threatening to swoop straight into the sea – airborne.
The aircraft behind him would have a longer run and his boys were going to need every drop of fuel in their Goshawks’ under-wing tanks if they were going to get back to the ship.
That was what a real war was like; one trade off against another, day in and day out with no guarantees. Bad things happened and all one could do was to do what one could to mitigate the most likely painful outcomes. So, notwithstanding that the objective was easily within the theoretical operational range of his kites on normal, internal fuel tanks, every scout was having to drag itself off the deck of the carrier over-loaded with one hundred-octane. There would be no monkeying about saving fuel, running lean mixtures; today, everything was going to happen at top speed and that meant burning the proverbial wick at both ends.
Alex was struck by how surprised many of his new naval comrades were by how fast things seemed to be going wrong. Privately, he had tacitly assumed things would go to Hell in a handbag before they got better. The Empire had allowed the Spanish to call the tune, unsurprisingly, now they were having to dance to that tune. War might be a marvellous, exhillerating adventure, it was also a brutal leveller. Having surrendered the initiative it was hardly to be wondered that things were going so badly.
The mainly Dominican fleet which had attacked the Inagua archipelago was steaming to join up with another squadron from Havana, presumably steaming as hard as possible to block the wounded Indomitable’s escape.
Jamaica had fallen; the triple Alliance and their German friends were the masters of the Caribbean. Elsewhere, Empire-registered merchantmen trapped in the Gulf of Spain and at sea plying the trade with Panama had been interned, seized or were being systematically hunted down.
Several times on the race to the south lookouts had reported seeing periscopes and the whole Task Force had veered off course, losing time; and now there was a reported invasion force gathering off Nuevo Asentamiento Fluvial – the New River Settlement on the Floridian coast – a little over two hundred miles to the west-south-west.
The Spanish – increasingly the enemy was neither Cuban, nor Dominican, Hispanic or Mexican, just ‘Spanish’ – were landing troops from barges and sailing boats under the guns of a motley collection of ancient ironclads and new torpedo boats and frigates. The beggars even had air support!
This latter supposedly comprised float planes and string bags but given the bad things Alex was hearing about the swarms of state of the art, low mono wing German-type scouts the Mexicans had magicked out of the hat down in the South West, he was taking nothing for granted.
With the Ulysses still too far to the east to send her aircraft to the party; Perseus was picking up the slack. Alex had argued for waiting another couple of hours, closing the range to the Floridian coast. As it was, he was leading off half his Goshawks on a reconnaissance in force – to shoot up targets of opportunity and engage any aircraft over the landing beaches – while the carrier’s Sea Eagles were bombed up with fragmentation and incendiary (good old-fashioned Greek Fire ‘eggs’).
The idea was that the rest of the Perseus’s scouts would escort the Sea Eagles on their mission while Alex put back down on the carrier, re-fuelled and re-armed and rushed back to re-join the fray. Having had his appeal for a single all-out strike rejected, he had got on with making the best of a bad deal.
One by one the seven other pilots reported in and began to form up on their leader.
The Task Force had battered through the storm off the Carolinas and emerged on the other side into balmy, turquoise waters beneath azure skies. The Flight Room had greedily devoured every snippet of intelligence about the Ulysses’s strike on the enemy squadron off the Inagua Archipelago, listened grimly to the dire reports from Jamaica and to what sounded like, regardless of how the reality of it was hedged, the near rout of New England and Imperial land forces in the South West. It took little imagination to picture the streets of New Orleans witnessing an exodus up the Mississippi by every available boat, or the icy tendrils of panic which must, even now be beginning to impinge upon the thoughts of the people at Mobile and Pensacola, still hundreds of miles from any existential threat.
Right now, Floridians who had imagined that they had thrown off the Spanish yoke decades ago must be asking themselves what revenge their former masters planned to inflict upon them. They were probably also asking themselves: “Where are the British when we need them the most?”
Alex led his flight up to ten thousand feet and charged west at over three hundred knots of indicated air speed. There was a headwind of about thirty miles an hour; that would save fuel on the way back to the Perseus.