Anno Dracula 1918 - The Bloody Red Baron (2 page)

'Don't mind Ball,' Ginger told Winthrop. 'He was shot down by the Bloody Red Baron's fiendish brother, Lethal Lothar, and has a feud on. Family honour and all that.'

'Our intelligence is that the château is more than a billet for Boche fliers,' Winthrop said. 'There's odd nocturnal activity. Comings and goings of, um,
unusual
personages.'

'And Diogenes want photos? We did a batch on this site last week.'

'By day, sir.'

Winthrop took his hands off the map, which curled into a tube. He laid out photographs of the Château du Malinbois. Black bursts of anti-aircraft fire, known to one and all as Archie, were frozen between castle and camera.

Winthrop tapped areas of the picture. 'These towers have netting draped around them. As if the Boche doesn't want us to know what he's up to.
Camouflage,
as our French allies would say.'

The sort of thing that makes a fellow inquisitive,' Ginger commented.

Cundall was doubtful. 'Be a bit bloody dark for photography tonight. I doubt if any of 'em would come out well.'

'You'd be surprised what we can read from a dark picture, sir.'

'I'm sure I would.'

Cundall looked closely at the photographs. He laid his hand on the table and drummed thick, pointed nails.

'The pilot will have a Verey gun. He can pop off a flare to throw some light on the subject.'

'"Pop off a flare?" Very likely,' Cundall said. 'Verey likely. That's almost a joke, isn't it?'

'I'll wager JG1 will be delighted at our company,' Courtney said. 'Probably lay out a red carpet.'

In the pictures, the Archie was uncomfortably close to the visible struts of the photographer's aeroplane.

'The Circus will be busy toasting each other in Rhine wine and virgin blood,' said Cundall, 'lying about the number of Britishers they've downed. Only we are dolts enough to send people aloft in this mucky weather.'

'Very unsporting of the Hun,' Ginger commented. 'Not coming out to play.'

'The flare'll prod him,' Albright said. 'There'll be Archie. Maybe an Albatros will make it into the air."*

'Inferior bird, the Albatros,' Courtney said.

Cundall seemed hypnotised by the photographs. The castle was bashed a bit about the battlements but still far more imposing (and, presumably, comfortable) than the farmhouse. Like every other breed of fighting man, the Royal Flying Corps were convinced the enemy had it cushier.

'Very well, Winthrop,' Cundall said. 'Pick your man.'

This was not what he expected. He looked at the pilots. One or two turned away. Cundall smiled nastily, showing sharp tips of teeth.

Winthrop felt like a live mouse in a cattery. He remembered the bloody nailheads in Spenser's scalp.

'The best qualified would be the man who took these.'

Cundall examined a serial number scrawled on the edge of a photograph.

'Rhys-Davids. Not a good choice. Went west two nights gone.'

'He isn't confirmed,' Bigglesworth said. 'He may be a prisoner.'

'He's lost to us.'

Winthrop looked around again. No one stepped forward. Though well aware of the crucial differences between war as waged in the jingo press and war waged in France, he somehow expected a dignified competition of volunteers.

'Here's a list. Pick a name.'

Cundall handed over a clipboard. Winthrop looked at Condor Squadron's roster. He couldn't help but notice names with lines drawn through them, including 'Rhys-Davids, A.'.

'Albright, J.,' he said, taking the first name.

'Fair enough,' said the red-headed captain. Though in RFC uniform, he was another American. Cundall's catch-all squadron had more than its share of foreigners.

'How's your crate, Red?' Cundall asked.

Albright shrugged. 'Better than she was. The camera's still slung.'

'Highly convenient.'

Albright seemed a steady man. Though a vampire, he was sturdily built, square-faced, firm-jawed. He seemed made entirely of solid blocks. The wind would not blow him away.

'Ball, you'll have to make a fourth,' Courtney said. 'Red promised to partner Brown in bridge against me and Williamson.'

Albright shrugged a can't-be-helped as Ball shifted himself to the cards group.

'I'll be back by midnight,' Albright said.

Everyone groaned, in on a private joke.

Winthrop felt obliged to shine a lantern under the lower wings of the Royal Aircraft Factory SE5a to inspect the cameras rigged up in place of Cooper bomb racks. They were operated like bombs, by pulling a lanyard in the cockpit. The plates were fitted properly. One of Dravot's responsibilities.

Uneasily aware he was the only man on the field who could not see in the dark, Winthrop shut off the light.

Albright hauled himself into the cockpit and checked his guns, a fixed Vickers which fired through the propeller and a swivel-mounted Lewis attached to the upper wing. On a jaunt like this, he should get back without firing a shot. The idea was to creep in and get photographs before the enemy could muster. That was why this was a one-man job: too many aeroplanes would alert Malinbois that they were coming. As a rule, the Boche didn't take to the air unless they had to. Allied policy was to mount offensive patrols constantly, to remind the Central Powers who owned the skies.

Cundall and his cronies had ventured out to watch Albright depart. The pilots took a professional look at the SE5a, examining the fuselage where bullet-holes had been darned. They agreed the aeroplane, a relative newcomer, was acceptable. Through Diogenes, Condor could get whatever machines it wanted, but each pilot had preferences.

Stamping to get feeling into dead toes, Winthrop was completely in the dark. The aeroplane was a large shadow skeleton. Vampires were as comfortable in the night as he was on Brighton pier at midday. With their adapted eyes, the undead were suited to night-flying, to night-fighting. Thanks to them, this was the first round-the-clock war in history.

Ginger spun the SE5a's propeller. The Hispano-Suiza engine did not catch first time.

'A bit more elbow-grease,' said one of the cronies, Bertie.

Of course, without vampires (specifically without the brute now calling himself the Graf von Dracula) the war would not have been fought at all. The Graf's latest attempt at European power had led to a conflict that seemed to involve every nation on the globe. Even the Americans were in now. The Kaiser said modern Germans must embody the spirit of the ancient Hun, but it was Dracula, proud of blood kinship with Attila, who most epitomised twentieth-century barbarism-

Ginger spun the prop again. The engine growled, prompting a ragged cheer. Albright gave a salute and said, 'See you at midnight.' The machine taxied along bumpy sod, plunged into the shadow of the trees and soared upwards, wobbling a little as wind caught under its wings.

'What's the business about midnight?' Winthrop asked.

'Red always gets back by then,' Bertie said. 'Does the job quickly and comes home. That's why we call him Captain Midnight.'

'Captain Midnight?'

'Silly, isn't it?' the pilot grinned. 'So far, it's brought him luck. Red's a good man. Flew with the
Escadrille Lafayette
until they disbanded. We got him because the Yanks rejected him for their show as medically unfit. The American Air Corps is exclusive to warm men.'

Albright's crate rushed up into the underside of a low-lying cloudbank and passed quickly from sight. The engine drone faded into the wind and drifting music from the farmhouse gramophone. 'Poor Butterfly' was waiting again. Sergeant Dravot's eyes were fixed on the night sky.

Major Cundall consulted his watch (one of the new wrist affairs they wore in the trenches) and noted time of departure in a log book. Winthrop checked his own pocket watch. Half-past ten on the evening of February the 14th, 1918. St Valentine's Day. At home, Catriona would be thinking of him, intelligently worried.

'Nothing for it now but to wait,' Cundall said. 'Come in and stay warm.'

Winthrop had not realised how chilled he was. Slipping his watch into its pocket, he followed the pilots back to the farmhouse.

Throughout the crossing, Beauregard was uncomfortably aware of the wounded man lying in a corner of the cabin. Given his condition, Captain Spenser was unnaturally quiet.

When an orderly had found him, Spenser was on the point of driving in a fifth nail. It seemed he intended to porcupine his entire skull. The inevitable diagnosis was a failure of nerve, but Beauregard thought it must take a steady hand to perform such an operation upon oneself.

Beauregard reproached himself for his failure to appreciate the strain put on Spenser by the demands of Diogenes. A man may know too many things. Sometimes, Beauregard wished his own skull would open and let his secrets escape. It would be pleasant to be innocent and ignorant.

After years of service to the Diogenes Club, Charles Beauregard sat with the venerable Mycroft and the eccentric Smith-Cumming on the Ruling Cabal, highest echelon of the Secret Service. His whole life had been lived in the dark.

The Channel was gentle. He chatted with the Quaker stretcher-bearer, Godfrey. He had chosen ambulance duty over prison and been decorated for bravery under fire at Vimy Ridge. Beauregard recognised as a better man one who would die for his country but not kill. He regretted each time he had killed; but he also regretted, in a single instance, not killing. At the sacrifice of his own life, he might have put an end to Count Dracula. Often, as he got older, he thought of those seconds.

At Newhaven quay, nurses awaited a small group of maddened officers. As a group, the men were quiet and pliable.

They were shepherded with kindly firmness by the nurses. Four years ago, the army had considered shell-shock deplorable cowardice. After seasons of gruelling war, breakdowns were almost
de rigueur
for the better sort of officer. The second son of the Duke of Denver was among the current crop of Dottyville cases.

No light showed on the dock. German submarines were rumoured to be in the Channel. Beauregard wished the uninterested Spenser good luck and gave Godfrey his card, then crossed the shadowed platform to board the fast train for London.

He was met at Victoria by Ashenden, a youth who had proved himself a cool hand in Switzerland, and driven through the dark city. Despite rain and unlit streets, purposeful night crowds were everywhere. Even in the heart of Empire, touched only by an odd air raid, it was impossible to forget the war. Theatres, restaurants and pubs (and, doubtless, vice dens and brothels) teemed with soldiers desperate for forgetfulness. Around every group of men in uniform swarmed crowds of hearty fellows eager to stand 'our boys' rounds of drinks and hero-worshipping young women intent on bestowing hot favours. Posters blazoned severe penalties for evading the call- up. Fire-eyed vampire girls scoured Piccadilly and Shaftesbury Avenue with white feathers for presentation to any of their undead brothers not in the King's service. A model trench in Hyde Park impressed an idea of conditions in France upon non- combatants; its cleanliness and home comforts provoked bitter mirth among those on leave from the real thing. At the Queen's Hall, Thomas Beecham conducted a No German Concert: the selection of pieces from English, French and Belgian composers excluded any note of the diabolical
kultur
of Beethoven, Bach and Wagner. The Scala Cinema offered reels taken at the front (mostly staged in the shire counties) and Mary Pickford in
The Little Bat Girl.

If motion pictures were taken in the streets, a million details would confirm this as a city at war, from women traffic police officers to armed guards in butcher shops. To a man of his advanced years, many specifics reminded him of the Terror, the period thirty years gone when Britain had struggled under the yoke of the then Prince Consort. Commentators like H. G. Wells and Edmund Gosse argued the world war was the consequence of a job left undone. The Revolutionists of the '90s merely drove Dracula from the country when they should have hoisted the demon prince on one of his own stakes. By the second coronation of King Victor in 1897, there had been enough blood. Another civil war was narrowly averted when Lord Ruthven, the Prime Minister, persuaded Parliament to confirm the succession, cutting off his former patron, Dracula, from any right to rule.

Young Ashenden was patient with the crowds obstructing the car's way. As they idled, waiting for a Salvation Army band to pass, a rap came at the window. The driver looked out, quietly tense in what Beauregard recognised was a habit of their profession. A white feather puffed through the open crack of window and fluttered down.

'A penalty of serving in secret,' Beauregard said.

Ashenden put the feather in a tin box by the gears. Inside were a revolver and three or four more tokens of shame.

'You're accumulating plumage.'

'Not many chaps my age in mufti this year. Sometimes ladies converge on me like a pincer movement, competing to pass on the feathers.'

'We'll see what we can do about getting you a medal ribbon.'

'No need, sir.'

The Terror was the most vivid period of Beauregard's life. Nights of danger stayed fresh in the memory. His long-healed neck-bites troubled him. He remembered his companion of those nights, the elder Genevieve. These days, he thought more often of his wife Pamela, who had died before Dracula stirred from his Transylvanian fastness. Pamela was of the world of his youth, which now seemed sunlit and charmed. The world without vampires. Genevieve was the fall of twilight, exciting but dangerous. She had left her mark on him. He would have sudden intuitions and
know
what she was doing, what she was feeling.

Soldiers lifted the barrier to allow the car into Downing Street. The Prime Minister's guards were elders, Carpathians who had turned against the Impaler during Ruthven's revolt. They wore quasi-mediaeval cuirasses and helmets but carried carbines as well as swords. If Dracula came for Ruthven, these vampires would stand up to their former commander. They had no choice, for Dracula would try to kill them on sight. He was not a forgiving soul, as this war bore out.