Anno Dracula 1918 - The Bloody Red Baron (42 page)

A tiny scrawl of flame clung to the Zeppelin's gondola. It was whipped to extinction by cold winds.

A Camel rose to join Winthrop. From the streamers, he knew it was Allard. A shape-shifter pursued the flight commander. Winthrop caught its chest with a burst of fire, and it sank, recovering balance. Wounded, the thing would be an easy target for another pilot. Only one victory counted. Confirmation didn't matter. Winthrop just had to know he had done it.

Allard flew away from the
Attila
and turned in a wide circle. Then he swooped back, closing upon the airship as if the length of its gasbag were a landing strip. He fired a Verey pistol over the side. The flare fell on to the skin of the gasbag, burning purple, lighting up Allard's path. Seeing what the flight commander intended, Winthrop pulled up on the stick, gaining height. Allard's Camel scraped the silk with its wheels, ran into the spreading flame of the flare, then flipped up and over, prop shredding through the silk skin, wings buckling. A rent appeared in the top of the gasbag and Allard tumbled in. Gas belched out of the ruptured compartment.

Winthrop heard Allard's engine stall and buzz. There was gunfire inside the gasbag. Flashes showed through the silk as Allard emptied his Lewis guns. Then a spark of purple, as the flight commander, swamped by an atmosphere of flammable gas, fired another flare.

The
Attila
shuddered as something slammed down on to it. Robur screamed at the violation of his beautiful ship, jamming his hands against the keys. Tortured wind roared through the organ pipes, accompanied by the creaking and cracking of metal struts.

Hardt stood over the observation port, where Reitberg still lay, and kicked down with a heavy heel. The port fell out in pieces, dropping Reitberg like a loose-limbed tumbling bomb.

Stalhein was confined by the broken walls of the gondola. He should fly free.

Dracula was still turned away from the panic.

Hardt saluted, smiled and stepped out of the hole. He fell like a weight. Others of Dracula's guard followed. Some prayed, most were stone silent.

Strasser, conscious and intent despite the pain, pulled useless levers. Too many connections were broken. The organ pipes groaned.

The first of the big explosions came, discharging a foul smell through the gondola. Then the second.

A ball of fire burst out of the side of the
Attila
, ripping through the gasbag as if it were a paper lantern.

Winthrop felt the hot air rising.

He should look away but could not. The airship kinked in the middle. One compartment turned inside out in a gust of fire. Crumpling tail-planes angled up. The firelight showed a dozen flying shapes desperately trying to burst free of the gravity of the huge, doomed ship.

Another compartment, near the nose, exploded. Winthrop saw Camels and shape-shifters outlined black in the flames that consumed them entirely. He was calm. Richthofen would not be destroyed so easily, so stupidly. The Red Baron would be saved for him. Another compartment blew.

Through the hole in the gondola floor, the forests were as brightly lit as by day. The
Attila
was a burning red sun. Fires spread around, running along walkways, climbing ropes, chasing airmen.

Some of the crew had followed Hardt. Stalhein saw them break against treetops five hundred feet below. Some, by a miracle, might survive. He waited for his own last duty.

Strasser, almost calm, stood away from the controls and smoothed his hair, then replaced his cap. He made no move to the hole. He would go down with his ship.

Robur turned away from his keyboard and looked at his disciple. He said 'we should have won. If it were not for the insects.' He did not mean the war between the Entente and Germany, but the war between airships and aeroplanes.

Dracula stood. Knowing it was time, Stalhein rose from the floor, struggling with hot air under his wings, and took the Graf from behind, wrapping his legs around the commander. He surged forwards, dragging his burden, and burst through the last of the nose-port.

Something was ejected from the burning airship. A winged figure, something wrapped in its legs.

Winthrop let the thing pass through his sights without firing. He had more important prey.

He stalked the skies.

Above, as Dracula's weight pulled Stalhein down, the black canopy of the gasbag dissolved into a sky of fire. The organ, attacked in a final frenzy by the engineer, produced insane music.

His wingspan grew and Dracula was less heavy. They flew straight, descending towards the trees.

The
Attila
was lost, a string of burning balloons falling from the skies. The gondola crunched into treetops a hundred yards behind them.

Stalhein put on speed, outracing fingers of flame.

The dog-fight, scattered by the fall of the
Attila
, regrouped. The last of both sides forgot the possibility of surviving this battle and mixed in for death. He looked for a place to set down. Once duty was discharged, he should join his comrades in the sky.

An aeroplane was above him, closing. Though unarmed, he'd have a chance in a skirmish. He could drop Dracula and rip off the pilot's head. But he would not give up his commander.

At a glance, he realised he was spared. The aircraft was German, a two-man Junkers J1 spotter. It would give him cover.

They were past the burning forest. A straight road extended ahead. Glassy lakes reflected the fire. Stalhein spread his wings, letting wind slow him rather than speed him on, and settled towards the ground. They hit hard and he lost his grip on the Graf, sprawling in a mess of wings and limbs as he rolled across a field.

Thinking he was broken, he turned, trying to get the horizon level. After the even air, the ground was unsteady, rising and falling like the deck of a ship in a storm.

The Junkers, still aloft, circled like a protective spirit.

Stalhein saw Dracula rise from the field and brush off his uniform. He still did not understand why the
Attila
had been wasted, why an airship had committed suicide. The Graf walked over to Stalhein and looked down at him. His flat face was inexpressive, but Stalhein recognised the daze. In a lesser man, it might be called shell-shock. In Dracula, such weakness was unthinkable.

The field was not empty. Men shouted, in English. Shots were fired. Stalhein cringed.

Looking up, he saw Dracula was wounded. Blood soaked his chest.

'To die,' he announced, theatrically, 'to be really dead ...'

Shadow-men gathered around in a circle. The Junkers uselessly strafed the field, hundreds of feet out of range. Silver caught light. Fixed bayonets neared.

The Graf still tried to speak.

'Poor Bela,' he said, incomprehensibly. 'The curtain falls.'

Blades moved, stabbed into the standing vampire, carving through his ribs and neck. Stalhein could not help his master. His wings were snapped. One of his legs was broken. Given minutes, he would heal and be well. He did not have minutes.

The enemy tore Dracula apart, spreading him across the field. Then they noticed the fallen flier. Gasping in revulsion at his changed shape, they closed in. Silver points pressed to his chest. Almost with pity, the British soldiers pierced his heart.

Croft personally picked the black oval of the Attila off the map. His lips were a line of triumph.

'Gentlemen,' he announced, 'Dracula is dead. His head will be sent here.'

Beauregard remembered this had happened before. When Vlad Tepes was killed, his head was supposedly cut off and sent to the Sultan. Yet he had survived.

Events moved too swiftly for Croft's news to have much impact. Haig and Pershing were in dispute, competing for the honour of jamming breaches with their own dead. The telephone connected to the Prime Minister hung abandoned, twittering like a pathetic bird.

With Mireau gone, the French were rallying sensibly. American troops arrayed themselves against the German advance: raw recruits against combat-hardened veterans, or fresh spirited men against battle-weary remainders. And the British were dug in.

A shell burst on the roof of HQ. A patch of plaster fell from the ceiling, dusting Croft and Churchill like pantomime ghosts. Only their livery lips and fiery eyes were red in white faces. Subalterns with buckets were sent off to douse the fire.

'It is evident the Diogenes Club should have ceded responsibility for the secret war earlier,' gloated the phantom Croft. 'Great losses might have been prevented.'

The German advance came like a wave, spreading and breaking as it came up against the bulwarks of well-prepared positions.

Churchill did mental calculations.

They cannot keep this up,' he said. 'With the Attila down, they will lose perspective. Confusion must set in.'

Comte Hubert de Sinestre, a sardonic general, reported a sighting of Dracula.

Croft paid attention. The
Attila
?'

'No,' said de Sinestre. 'Dracula leads his cavalry in full armour, mounted on a black horse, laying about him with a silver sword. Here, on the left flank. Where the gallant Mireau made his stand.'

The officer indicated a German charge.

Croft was perturbed. 'We have definite word the Graf was in his airship. He was killed by ground troops.'

The French vampire shrugged. 'English intelligence is notoriously suspect. I have the word of Colonel Dax, a most reliable officer.'

'He was in the air. It is his character.'

'The Graf proves remarkably mobile,' said Churchill. 'I've been handed a despatch from Captain George Sherston of the Royal Flintshire Fusiliers which tells me Dragulya has personally led a bayonet charge on the right flank and been peppered with silver bullets. Another cause for celebration, Mr Croft?'

Croft crushed the
Attila
oval in his hand.

'We have a plague of doppelgängers,' Beauregard offered. 'Next the Graf will be spotted strolling down Piccadilly with a straw hat on.'

'A mediaeval trick,' Churchill said, making a chubby fist. 'Impersonators to rally the troops, to draw fire.'

'The real Dracula was in his Zeppelin. I have affirmed it.'

Croft was green under his grey. His hands reached out involuntarily.

The cavalry Dracula is down,' said de Sinestre. 'Cut in two y a machine-gun. His charge is broken. Mireau is avenged.'

It will not do,' said Churchill. 'We must kill all of him.'

'He is dead. Truly dead,' insisted Croft.

'He'll be somewhere safe,' concluded Beauregard. 'In Berlin, probably. This has all been a distraction.'

'No,' said Croft, firmly. His fingers closed on Beauregard's throat. 'I am right and you are wrong.'

The face, rotten under the tight skin, came close, ghastly green powdered with plaster dust. Beauregard gripped the vampire's wrists, trying to break the choke-hold.

Officers tried to free him from Croft.

'I say,' snapped Haig, 'stop that, you two. I'll have no fighting in here. There's a war on, you know.'

Croft pushed him away, letting go. Beauregard coughed, breathing again, pulling his collar away from his bruised throat. The grey man calmed, deflated. Beauregard assumed the vampire's career was about to suffer a reversal.

Haig and Pershing came to an agreement and began piling American and British blocks on the road to Amiens. Black blocks, reinforced by cross-marked paper scraps, edged nearer.

Bombardment was constant and close. Blocks jumped on the table with each impact. Telephone lines were cut and re-established.

Everyone looked at the table. The blocks were hopelessly mixed up.

Conceiving of the losses, Beauregard's heart ached.

'Oh the humanity, the humanity ...'

The wreck of the
Attila
burned so brightly Winthrop might have been flying by day. Beyond the forest, the landscape was covered with the straggling shadows of Allied troops falling back to Amiens. Lorries clogged roads and men waded through fields.

His face stung from the immense heat of the dirigible's death. He scanned the sky, above and below the Camel, for the enemy. Howling frustration gnawed his gut. He might be the sole survivor of the dog-fight, the last of both Condor Squadron and JG1. And he would never know what exactly had happened to Baron von Richthofen.

That would be worse than going down in flames. No. Nothing was worse than going down in flames. Nothing was worse than Allard's sacrifice, Brandberg's crack-up or the deaths of the dozens of men in the
Attila
. It occurred to him that he was, or had been, quite mad.

The Albert Ball in him urged him on to hunt out and destroy his enemy. But there were doubts. It wasn't so much the Kate Reed in him. She was not his conscience. He missed his old self, the boy he'd been before war made a man of him. The man he'd been before war made a monster of him. He owed explanations to Catriona. To Beauregard.

In concentrating on evening things with the Baron, he'd made himself a freak. This strange Edwin Winthrop was as repulsive as Isolde, pulling out her veins on stage, or the bat-staffel of JG1, demon monsters for the Kaiser.

The rush of air on his face awakened him, purging him. He opened his mouth and let the wind blow in. Pulling back the stick, he made the Camel climb. The higher he went, the more distance he got from the brutish business. He could burst through the Earth's bubble of atmosphere and be free of the war and its eternities of killing and waste.

Then he saw the flying creature, hugging burned-out treetops, moving with purpose, as alone as a hunting shark. A flight commander's streamers flew from his ankle. It was Richthofen. In the firelight, the Baron was truly red.

Winthrop hoped this was the last of the shape-shifters. He'd seen enough of them destroyed. The charm was off. They were creatures who bled and died like any others.

His doubts drowned in a red tide. Icy calm, he took the Camel down, fast. The miracle was that he still had ammunition left. The shape-shifter couldn't fire backwards. From behind, the Baron was easy meat.