“I am no lady, Don Rafael,” Melody smiled. “I am a lawyer turned detective turned spy, none of those things make me ‘a lady’.”
Amusement glinted in the old man’s eyes by moonlight.
There was no question of lighting a fire despite the ever-more biting fingers of the cold up here over four thousand feet above sea level.
Henrietta and Melody had collected up all the blankets they could find, tempted to huddle together but inhibited by the presence of their protector.
“Forgive me,” Don Rafael chuckled. “I make no judgement, you understand. My Lady De L’Isle is of an ancient and honourable family. While you,” he met Melody’s curious gaze, “are in My Lord’s regard, every inch as much ‘a lady’ as any of those fine ‘ladies’ who are the bane of his life in Madrid.” He grinned, shook his head and added: “My Lady.”
The old man sighed and looked to the nearby awning.
“You should try to sleep. We have a long way to walk tomorrow. You will be safe, I shall be nearby.”
The women clung together for warmth as the unyielding lumps and bumps in the ground beneath them dug into them. Unfortunately, not being able to ever be entirely comfortable was only a minor distraction from the cold which quickly got into their feet and began to attack their every extremity.
“I hate being dirty,” Henrietta confessed. “And being cold.”
Melody shivered, kissed the younger woman’s nose.
This, she knew, was going to get a lot worse before it got better but tonight, she would spare her lover that ‘little insight’ into the depth of the big black bottomless pit into which they had unknowingly plunged.
Chapter 12
Sunday 19th March
Idlewild Beach Field, Long Island
Major Alexander Lincoln Fielding walked cursorily around his Gloucester Goshawk Mark II radial-engined low-wing monoplane scout with the relaxed air of a man without a worry in the world. He kicked at the big undercarriage tyres, patted the lowest of the three wicked blades of the machine’s huge propeller and unhurriedly chatted with the veteran Sergeant fitter in command of the crew that kept his personal warhorse in tip top fighting trim.
The Goshawk had been cutting edge technology when it first took to the skies over a decade ago; it was still a formidable beast even though the coming generation of jet scouts would soon render it, and every other prop-powered ‘puller’ or ‘pusher’ obsolete. Notwithstanding, capable of around three hundred and fifty miles an hour in level flight with a 0.8-inch cannon and a brace of 0.5-inch machine guns in each wing, all the way up to twenty thousand feet it was the equal of anything the Spanish had down on the Border. True, it was a real beast to fly and when it first came into service it had acquired an evil reputation as a ‘sprog killer’ but modifications to the Mark II had since taken the sting out of the Goshawk’s unforgiving low-speed◦– that is, take-off and particularly, landing◦– characteristics and consequently, accidents were a lot less frequent these days.
On the down side it took two or three times as long to train a man to safely fly, let alone fight, a Goshawk in comparison to the old Bristol biplanes Alex had flown the first time he served down in the South West.
This morning the commander of No 7 (New York) Squadron of the Colonial Air Force was still chewing over the news that he and his boys were likely to be posted down to St Augustine in Florida, not West Texas or Alta California. Moreover, he had no idea what to make of the additional news that ‘the Squadron might be required to conduct affiliation drills with the Navy down there!’
It seemed that Headquarters had no real feel for how ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ the situation actually was down south or in the South West. In fact, there was a suggestion that the current ‘tension’ was simply more of the ‘usual nonsense’ that flares up when the Spanish screw up on Santo Domingo, Cuba or in Mexico City!
Alex was no historian, and ‘geopolitics’ was just a word to him but from what he was reading in the papers and what he had seen of the preparations being made on Long Island◦– parts of which resembled a military camp◦– by the Army, the sudden urgency with which the Air Force was looking to get things done, and the number of big grey warships he saw exercising in Nantucket Sound and the approaches to the Lower Bay, he was starting to get the distinct impression that ‘something’ had to give, sooner or later.
That said, nobody would tell him when his Squadron was likely to get its movement orders. It was as if the big wigs had not made up their minds what to worry about first!
Not that he was complaining.
He got to spend lots of time with his very pregnant, somewhat cranky, utterly bewitching and forever delicious wife, and in the last month or so he was beginning to feel as if he was knocking his old timers’ heads together and bringing his ‘newbies’ up to speed. That his experienced men were starting to do things his way and that his ‘sprogs’ had now graduated to being combat-green ‘newbies’ was real progress. If he got a few more weeks grace he was going to have a top line squadron behind him if and or when he led his merry men into battle.
The other thing all the delays and changes of plan had achieved was to bring 7(NY) up to full strength. A CAF Scout◦– Interceptor seemed to be the latest terminology but Alex was old school◦– Squadron had a ‘book roster’ of eighteen aircraft and twenty-six pilots, enabling damned nearly continuous operations over short periods by two flights of six aircraft each, or squadron sorties by at least a dozen machines. Not that it had ever actually worked out that way in any of his tours down on the Border; nevertheless, it transpired that since he had been away, five or six years without a major flare-up with New Spain had allowed the CAF to build up its fighting strength, phase out all the older types◦– like the Bristol VIs, VIIIs and IXs◦– and replace them with aircraft like the Goshawk and other more modern high-performance attack and bomber aircraft.
Alex elected not to contemplate the logical corollary to this: namely, that the Spanish, presumably surreptitiously aided and abetted by agents of the German Empire would also have used the intervening years to ‘make and mend’ on their side of the Border.
As any pilot will tell you ‘things can always get worse’ so there was not really much point worrying about it in the meantime!
One thing which had not changed from his earlier sojourns in the military was the rent-a-mob gang of scruffy ‘peaceniks’ who sometimes gathered outside the gates of the bigger military bases. From what Abe had told him the problem down in Virginia was with the Getrennte Entwicklung crowd. Those people did not mind about warmongering they just did not like ‘others’, particularly native Americans or the coloured descendants of the slaves brought to New England by their forefathers!
Up here in the ‘middle colonies’ the protestors, demonstrators, whatever, were often student dropouts, draft dodgers and poor rich kids. His late father used to crow about the minor acts of vandalism he and his cronies had carried out in ‘the good old days’, like that was something to be proud of! Since the Empire Day atrocities there had been a rash of attacks against men and women in uniform, usually when they had been out drinking on the town, less frequently bricks and stones had been thrown at servicemen’s houses or cars, and their families abused on the street by foul-mouthed youths. Back in the day nobody in uniform would have even thought about carrying a firearm while off base, nowadays, it was becoming de rigor, which Alex thought was a really sad comment on civil society in the First Thirteen.