Anno Dracula 1918 - The Bloody Red Baron (37 page)

He gripped the stick and kept level. The pain-burst faded. The night sky was alive. Without turning in his cockpit, he knew where the other Camels were. A picture of the arrowhead stayed in his mind.

Down below, a column of vehicles advanced along a road, feeding men and materiel to the Boche lines. He ignored it. This was not an observation flight. This was an offensive patrol, a hunting party.

A tiny noise. A lone Hun on the ground fired a futile shot upwards, at the Camels. Winthrop's thumbs almost depressed firing buttons. Albert Ball told him to be a cool hand. Ball sat on one shoulder, Kate on the other. Not a comfortable arrangement.

The patrol flew the course Winthrop had flown with Courtney. Up ahead was the newly named Schloss Adler. This was where the Bloody Red Baron lived.

Reports were in from the lines. JG1 were out of their nest tonight, towards Amiens, attacking a row of patched-up balloons suitable only for hauling aloft Guy Fawkes dummies. They'd return frustrated to find a fight waiting for them. No one had ever
attacked
the shape-shifters before. That was a tiny advantage, a surprise.

Before he saw them, he
sensed
them. His ears thrilled. A silent formation returning to the castle. They flew like bats, gliding between wing-flaps, riding unmapped currents.

Allard saw the Boche too. He raised his hand. The arrowhead expanded. The Camels let distance grow between them, but kept in formation.

Remember,
short
bursts. Accurate fire, not hosepipe spray.

His mind stripped down, surplus thought and feeling done away with. He was a new person, unencumbered. A purpose behind Vickers guns.

They
saw the Camels.

Allard was close to the flank of the enemy formation. He fired first. Silver flashes appeared in the wings of one of the creatures. The horribly human scream was louder than an elephant's bellowing. The injured monster fell out of formation. His wings were torn but bullets passed through. He'd have to be hit in the torso or head to be seriously damaged.

Winthrop watched the flier tumble, wings like an umbrella reversed by a sudden wind. He recovered and cruised downwards. Severin was on the wounded vampire's tail, whooping and firing like Broncho Billy. The elder had a killing thirst and was ignoring tactics. When his guns were empty, his enemy would recover and come for him.

The formations passed through each other. Winthrop smelled the shape-shifters' musk and felt the cold rush of their wings. Wheeling in the air, he tried to draw a bead on a black shape darting past. He nearly fired, but managed not to waste precious bullets.

The Boche weren't firing either. They would have used up most of their firepower on the dummy balloons. It was often the habit of fliers to get rid of the extra weight of ammunition by emptying guns into enemy trenches on the way home.

A wing filled his whole field of vision and he squeezed the firing-buttons. White flashes seared his eyes as his guns discharged. The wing was gone and he let up the pressure on the buttons.

The burst, only a few seconds' worth, jarred his ears. On instinct, he fired again, moments
before
another wing passed in front of his prop. This time, the shape-shifter flapped into his burst, and was twisted, screeching, in the air. A row of holes appeared in a curtain of wings. He was sure he had sunk a few into the furry barrel of the flier's body.

He tasted blood in his mouth. His own, mingled with Ball's and Kate's. His teeth were coral razors. This was as near to the vampire condition as he wished to come.

Another burst. Another miss. The bat-creature executed a perfect Immelmann and swooped towards the slice of moon. Dandridge was on his tail, firing scientific bursts. The Boche came out of his turn and spread wings wide. Dandridge had hit him. Red gobbets dripped in black fur.

With a sinking motion, the shape-shifter got beneath Dandridge's climb and latched like a lamprey on to the underside of the Camel, wings wrapping upwards, tail lashing. The Camel's frame buckled and its engine stalled. The prop sliced into the Boche's face but jammed.

Winthrop was appalled.

The Camel came apart. Dandridge's upper plane ripped off and disappeared like a kite in a storm. The shape-shifter detached from the aircraft. Dandridge's crushed wreck plunged, wind shrieking in the wires. As he went down, Dandridge emptied his guns.

The creature that had killed Dandridge struggled to stay aloft. He had taken many hits and the propeller slice was severe. His wings were ragged and torn. Ribbons of dark blood flew from wounds.

Was this the Red Baron?

Winthrop had the mutilated monster in his sights. He fired, pouring out silver and lead. He swooped down and over the creature, briefly worried that he might latch on to his Camel, repeating the manoeuvre that had defeated Dandridge.

His blood thrilled. There would be a reckoning. Turning for another pass, he saw Allard diving on the same prey. The monster struggled upwards to meet Allard. With what seemed a single shot, Allard put a lump of silver into the monster's skull. Instantly dead, the flier dwindled to human size, weighted by heavy guns, and fell towards black ground.

The creatures could be beaten.

His victory stolen, Winthrop wheeled, searching. He was at the heart of the dog-fight. Shape-shifters and Camels whirled around, firing guns, tearing wings. There was an explosion as a Camel (Rutledge's, Winthrop thought) burst into a fireball. An expanding ball of hot air hit his wings and forced him back.

Down below was the castle. And above was an immense dark shape that laid a shadow on the land.

Rutledge had not been killed by one of JG1. There was Archie all around. The Schloss Adler was defended by gun emplacements. Archie exploded below Winthrop, a carpet of fire in the night. Smoke smeared the lenses of his goggles and stung his eyes.

A bat came at him, and he turned the Camel's nose away. Detaching one hand from the stick, he wrenched off his blinded goggles, unmasking his face to the icy dash of open air.

Looking up, he realised a Zeppelin hung over the castle like a mammoth balloon, floating in thin atmosphere above the operational ceiling of any heavier-than-air machine. Only real monsters lived in those altitudes, where the cold froze blood in veins and made woolly flight suits into crackling ice chain-mail.

Allard signalled withdrawal. The shape-shifters were landing on their tower, retreating within stone walls.

Winthrop had been cheated of his kill. Perhaps the Red Baron was truly dead. Allard's kill. Angered beyond thought, Winthrop approached the Schloss Adler. A shape-shifter on the landing platform was shrugging his flying shape, bending to wriggle into the castle.

Winthrop fired a burst to get range. He heard his shots whine off stone. Half-way between human shape and bat form, the flier turned, attention caught by the fire, pointed ears swivelling. Winthrop's next burst caught him in the chest, bearing him backwards against the castle wall. Scarlet gouts blurted through thinning fur. A perfect heart-shot.

A seventh score. One that counted. One of the monsters.

No, it would not count officially. Winthrop, the killing urge briefly satisfied, realised he had gone against Allard's orders to withdraw. His victory would never be confirmed. Besides, what he had done was strafe a foe on the ground, not meet him in the air. The pitch was not level.

Still, the kill counted in his system. One of the monsters was gone.

It had been only seconds. He slid easily back into formation, behind and above Allard.

There were others. Brandberg, Lockwood, Knight, Lacey.

They sped away. There was still archie but it was ineffectually distant. The shape-shifters were out of the air. The airship was too high to bring guns to bear.

Fourteen had approached the castle. Five were returning.

Winthrop had seen Dandridge and Rutledge killed and known Severin would lose his match. Now, he realised he had for a half- instant glimpsed one of the shape-shifters with a human rag in his mouth, shaking his head as blood-trails whipped. That had been another of the pilots.

The rest had been killed without his even noticing. Nine men exchanged for two monsters. The dog-fight couldn't have lasted more than two or three minutes.

The five Camels flew away from the rising sun. Spreading dawn fell heavily on Winthrop, like a blanket, sapping his energy, cooling his blood. They crossed the lines.

"Your bus is wheezing a bit, miss,' said Colonel Wynne-Candy, 'I'll have my driver look it over.'

Kate, not attuned to the eccentricities of internal combustion, thanked the officer, whose staff car was mired at the side of the road. He had pulled over to let her ambulance past and suffered the consequences of gallantry.

There had been near-continuous bombardment all day. The enemy had brought up big guns and were hammering the Allied trenches. It would be heads down in the lines.

She looked up at a slate sky empty of all but cloud. To the east, the gloom was reddened by fire.

'A boy in the air?'

The round-faced colonel, cheerfully retained from the Boer war, was not the jolly fool he seemed. Kate shivered as she tried to shrug. She could usually put ideas into words, but was too involved in the business with Edwin to explain it easily.

The lad'll be a lot safer with Richthofen down.'

The Red Baron?'

'Word over the blower this morning. Not official yet. Boche won't admit a thing but our ears in Hunland have picked up a whisper. It seems Allied mastery of the air has been reasserted.'

Kate wondered if Edwin was disappointed. He had shaped himself into a weapon so he could go after the creature who had nearly killed him. Or maybe he had succeeded? No, he had not bested the Red Baron. In her blood, she would have
known.

'Almost a pity, ain't it?' Wynne-Candy mused. 'The war will seem a spot less colourful. Richthofen gave our fellows something to shoot for.'

Something to shout
at,
she thought.

A projectile whizzed into the mud a couple of hundred yards away and burst. Kate and Wynne-Candy cringed in a light patter of wet dirt.

'That's an overshot', the Colonel said. 'No harm to anyone.'

A smoking crater marked the site of the shell-burst. There were more of them dotted about behind the lines than usual.

'Enough misses like that and our supply lines will be jiggered.'

'You have a point, miss.'

Wynne-Candy's driver, a muddy Cockney, reported on the ambulance, grumbling in the colonel's ear.

'I say, that's not on.'

Wynne-Candy was shocked.

'I'm sorry to have to tell you, miss, but some unsportin' type seems to have taken a pot shot at you.'

The driver put his finger into a hole in the bonnet.

'Probably an accident. Any proper German officer who found one of his men sniping at an ambulance would have the bounder shot.'

The driver told her the engine was unharmed. With a good clean, the ambulance would run smooth as silk.

'Not easy, keeping things clean in this country,' Wynne-Candy said, looking about the plain of mud. 'Now, miss, be on your way. Boys are waiting at the front for a sight of you.'

With a khaki coat three sizes too big, a nest of hair plastered with mud spatters and a bad case of the distractions, she suspected she would not pass for an angel.

She bade the colonel farewell and got back into the ambulance. When the army bought these vehicles, the assumption was that drivers would be six-foot-tall men. It had then been inconceivable that all those who fit the description would be required for the front and the position would have to be filled by a tiny vampire woman. She sat on three pillows and leaned forward to reach the steering wheel, which seemed a yard across. Wooden blocks tied to the foot-pedals brought them within range of her short legs.

Every part of the ambulance rattled. Through the smeared windscreen, she looked at the sky. Even with the Red Baron gone, there were monsters up there. She sensed the tug of Edwin like a toothache. What he had taken from her would take months to recover. She felt she was half a person, fading into ghostliness.

Like a proper Victorian, she was throwing herself into duty. If it had been possible, she'd have picked up a rifle and fought the war. Genevieve, in her long life, had sometimes passed for a boy and served as a soldier: with Joan against the English, with Drake against the Spanish, with Buonaparte in Russia. Genevieve, of course, had done
everything.
Without meaning it, she went through life making other women feel inadequate. By 'other women', Kate meant herself.

In 1918, though she was stronger than most living men, the best Kate could do was drive an ambulance. The next war would be fought by men and women, vampire and warm. If she survived, Kate might be in that one. And the next. And the next.

Richthofen dead. She should follow the story. It would be news.

The road sank into the ground, banks rising to either side. She entered the maze of trenches. Corrugated iron grumbled under the weight of the ambulance. The main road was only just wide enough. Every time she made this trip, the route was different, as old avenues were blocked and new ones blasted.

Another shell exploded, out of her sight, but quite near. Clods pattered on the tin roof of the cabin. It was just earth, not shrapnel.

She was still a reporter, despite setbacks. She would try to learn more about the Bloody Red Baron. There were always the Musketeers of Maranique: Bertie, Algy and Ginger. They would talk to her. They were so good-natured they'd probably sent Christmas cards to the Kaiser during the truce of'14.

She could not go much further in the ambulance. There was a station where the wounded were gathered, laid out on stretchers. Casualties had been light recently. The Germans were preparing their offensive. That would be a military hurricane. Rear positions were deserted as every man and gun the Allies had in France was put into the front. It occurred to her today's heavy bombardment was to soften up the Allies. The offensive -
Kaiserschlacht,
they called it - was very close.