Satisfied that there was no vital component of his Goshawk unscrewed, damaged or otherwise lying on the ground underneath the aircraft, Alex stepped up onto the port wing root and held his arm aloft signalling to the other five pilots of the training flight to mount up.
He scrawled his initials on Flight Form 100, officially transferring the aircraft◦– Serial 7114S◦– from the hands of his ground crew into his charge, and waited patiently while his straps were adjusted. He tried to get comfortable in his seat; not an easy thing when a man was sitting on his parachute pack.
In the big picture his passing discomfort was a blessing in disguise. Goshawks had been built to be flown by six-feet-six-inch tall muscular athletes◦– by men with the physique of a mature male gorilla◦– not fellows of average height with a musculature to match so the couple of inches of ‘seated height’ he got from perching on his chute gave him a much taller man’s visibility out of the cockpit, if not the longer legs ideally required to fly a Mark I. Fortunately, the Mark II had moved all the levers, pedals, buttons and switches that little bit closer to the pilot, as if in silent acknowledgement of the fact so many low-speed accidents were probably caused by a man’s foot slipping off a pedal or his not quite being able to reach a vital toggle in time.
The brainier types on the CAF Staff was speculating about something called ‘fly by wire’ whereby servos and hydraulics controlled by something called a ‘central processing unit’ which was completely separated physically from the actual flying controls, moved the flaps, ailerons and rudder and kept the aircraft in perfect trim all the time, thereby allowing the pilot to throw a bird all over the sky with a minimum of muscle-power and a much-reduced risk of inadvertently getting himself killed. That sounded literally like ‘pie in the sky’ to Alex.
Everything on a Goshawk was directly connected to something in the cockpit, every control surface and throttle adjustment was controlled one hundred percent directly by the pilot’s hand and feet. That could be challenging sometimes, like for example trying to persuade the aircraft to pull out of a steep dive…
He waved away the battery cart as soon as the big Derby-Royce 1,350 horse-power radial ran smoothly. The Goshawk was a tail-dragger like earlier biplanes which meant one had to look out of the side of the cockpit to see where one was going until the bird was up to speed. Alex had no idea what was fifty to a hundred yards in front of him as the chocks were pulled away.
One last look at the wind cock in the near distance.
Brakes off.
A blast of throttle and the scout lurched forward.
Over to his left construction teams were building a three-mile long runway. Whatever needed a runway that long was going to be worth seeing!
The Goshawk picked up speed.
With little more than a threat to touch the brakes the tail came up and suddenly he could see where he was going, albeit through the great blur of the auto-speed propeller.
More bumps, the machine wanted to leap into the air.
More throttle.
Then the fighter was free of the ground climbing like she was hitching a lift on an express elevator to the clouds ten thousand feet above New York’s Lower Bay.
A check in his mirrors, stupidly tiny little things that it took a man forever to get used to; followed by a veteran scout pilot’s neck roll to see as much as possible of what was around him and over behind his shoulders.
Where the fuck are the other kites?
He touched the speak button on his throat mike.
“BLUE LEADER TO CHILDREN!” He drawled laconically. “DOES EVERYBODY STILL HAVE ME IN SIGHT, OVER!”
The others obediently checked in.
Apparently, the ground controller had held back the last two Goshawks because the control tower had warned him a big transport was incoming. As per protocol he had acquired a visual◦– ‘a sighting’ in layman’s terms◦– on the distant transatlantic shuttle, before clearing the last two scouts to take-off.
Circling over Hell’s Gate Alex had awaited his missing ‘children’ before leading the flight east along the coast of Long Island. Today, ABLE Section would dogfight with BAKER Section over Long Island Sound mid-way between Bridgeport on the Connecticut northern shore and Smithtown Bay on the opposite, southern coast, and later over the Shinnecock Hills, because Leonora deserved only the best entertainment her colony could serve up.
First, he planned to slew off three aircraft as ‘singletons’, just to see if his newbies were up to navigating to the dogfight on their own. How a fellow performed in a fight was a moot point until he learned how to find his way to it!
Chapter 13
Sunday 19th March
Royal Navy Norfolk, Virginia
The Governor of New England had been able to report to the Prime Minister that morning by transatlantic telephone on a link scrambled at both ends◦– a thing he could easily believe given the appalling quality of the line◦– that there had been no new significant developments in the Gulf of Spain, Florida or in the Border lands of the South West in the previous twenty-four hours. However, that had been the beginning and the end of the good news communicated between the two men that morning.
It seemed that the Foreign Secretary had travelled to Paris to speak to the German Minister and his Portuguese counterparts. The Kaiser’s Chancellor, a wily Rhinelander who as his Emperor’s surrogate had largely been responsible for the renewed squabble over Germany’s legitimate unresolved colonial prerogatives◦– the settlement of which had been piggy-backed onto the subsequent seemingly unrelated Submarine Treaty over ten years ago, probably narrowly averting the risk of a general war◦– had vetoed any censure or intervention in Old Spain by the Great Powers under the remit of the Treaty of Paris protocols.
This suited Berlin but nobody else: Spain might be the sick man of Europe but its ongoing existence◦– sick or not◦– as an independent, unaligned polity with an avowed policy of neutrality between the British and the German Empires had, in hindsight, been the one thing which had kept Anglo-German rivalries in check for decades.
It was also the determining factor in successive British Governments turning a blind eye to German interference in the affairs of New Granada, which Berlin had always regarded as a counterweight to British power in North America. Diplomacy was all about checks and balances, uncertainty by design, so that nobody could ever be wholly confident that they would win a future war.
To the Germans the presence of significant British forces in France◦– at any one time between 120,000 and 150,000 personnel◦– had become an itch they could not scratch, and year on year the economic and cultural renaissance of the French◦– the vanquished enemy of 1866◦– simply added insult to injury. A few colonial scraps from the British table; surrendered or passed over on ‘protectorate’ terms in Africa, the West Indies and the Chinese Far East in 1966 had failed to sate the Kaiser’s appetite for the Reich, and singularly failed to acknowledge the German Empire’s status as a global titan.
Now Spain appeared to be dissolving into civil war and even if one discounted the most gratuitous tales of the blood-letting going on in some of the big cities, of Army and Navy units in open rebellion fighting for different sides and the blood-curdling prognostications of the Catholic Church and its Inquisition, it was plain that the situation was completely out of hand.
Still, in extremis, the least an imperial pro-consul could do was to exhibit the stiffest of stiff upper lips which was exactly what Philip De L’Isle the Governor of the Commonwealth of New England planned to do that morning.