The Demi-Monde: Summer (51 page)

‘It is remarkable, is it not? A real gift of ABBA. See how it shimmers green in the half-light. Wonderful.’

‘Wonderful,’ agreed Kondratieff as his body clock began to tick faster. He just hoped that none of the phosphorescent paint he’d concocted from the heads of the matches and that coated the Column stuck to the man’s hand.

‘But I must admit to being curious as to the purpose of the platform the Column is resting on,’ admitted Selim.

‘I am informed that the occult power of the Temple is stored in the Mantle-ite used to construct it, but the Mantle-ite must be activated before this power can be utilised. That is the purpose of the Column: it acts as a triggering mechanism. Once it is lowered into position, as will be done on Lammas Eve, all the latent power of the Temple will be released.’

And detonate the explosive stored inside the Column
, but Kondratieff left this unsaid.

‘Amazing,’ mused Selim and then he stopped suddenly and stooped down to examine the Column more closely. ‘I hadn’t realised the Column was scarred,’ he said, pointing to a twenty-centimetre-long gash on its final, sixth side. ‘How can it be scarred if it is constructed of Mantle-ite?’

It took an act of will for Kondratieff to still the tremor he was sure would infect his voice. ‘Academics have speculated
that the flaw was caused by the Pre-Folk when they were constructing the Column. There is no other possible explanation; Mantle-ite is, after all, invulnerable.’

A nod from Selim. ‘I find it quite comforting to know that our illustrious predecessors could be prone to error … to the making of mistakes. It gives hope to us all, does it not, Kondratieff?’

‘Indeed, Your Excellency, the Column gives us all hope.’

As he watched Selim wander away, Kondratieff, despite his atheism, found himself breathing a prayer to ABBA, requesting that He smile on the efforts of Trixiebell Dashwood with regards to the
real
Column, because if she was to fail then all his efforts – all his sacrifice – would be dust.

A thunderclap crashed and rain lashed down on the three hundred fighters who comprised Attack Group One as they bustled through the backstreets of Rangoon. But despite the rain Trixie felt she had been twice lucky in picking tonight of all nights to take – to
try
to take – the WarJunk CSS
Wu
that was anchored in the Kaliningrad docks on the St Petersburg side of the Volga. Lucky that the rain seemed to be even heavier than usual, which dissuaded even the most fervent of StormTroopers from venturing out, and lucky again in that the surrender of the Coven meant that the ForthRight army had suspended its artillery bombardment of Rangoon.

And with the ceasefire announced the ForthRight army had relaxed and its soldiers had turned their attention to converting the local Femmes into dutiful – and heterosexual – UnFun-DaMentalists and liberating any supplies of Sake Solution they
found, neither activity doing much to improve their vigilance.

But never one to push her luck further than was absolutely necessary, Trixie was anxious to cross the Volga before either the monsoon eased or Heydrich changed his mind and recommenced pounding the shit out of the city. Yet despite these somewhat morbid imaginings, she felt full of bounce and was actually looking forward to tonight’s adventure. For the first time in months she was taking the fight to Heydrich. Now she had the chance to hurt Heydrich and his foul creed of UnFunDaMentalism … to avenge all the poor people he’d slaughtered in Warsaw and Rangoon.

The first stage of the operation was quickly accomplished. To have her little army cross the Volga, she simply commandeered three Whitehall gigs moored near the Anichkov Bridge. The SS StormTrooper who was guarding the gigs would presumably have objected, but the first warning he had about what was happening was when Wysochi slit his throat. His interest in proceedings nosedived after that.

It took only twenty tense minutes to cross the river and to creep along the docks to where the
Wu
was berthed. As Trixie had been advised by LieutenantFemme Lai Choi San – the Femme in charge of all things nautical – four things needed to be done to successfully steal a WarJunk: take control of it from the UnFunnies, fill its coal bunkers, get its boilers up to a working pressure, and run the Volga without being blown to bits by the ForthRight artillery lining the river. Above all, they had to be lucky.

Lucky: that word again.

In fact, taking control of the
Wu
was accomplished relatively painlessly … painlessly for Trixie’s fighters, that is. The sentries guarding the WarJunk were dead before they even realised they were being stalked, and once they were disposed of, Wysochi and five fighters oozed down into the bowels of the
Wu
. Despite
herself, Trixie felt a moment’s sympathy for the poor unsuspecting sailors who were on watch. Her moment of tenderness lasted around two minutes, which was how long it was before a grinning Wysochi re-emerged and gave her the thumbs-up.

Without waiting for an order, LieutenantFemme Lai Choi San was across the boarding ramp and down the hatch to inspect the engine room, Trixie following hard on her heels.

‘Okay, first the good news, ColonelFemme,’ the Lieutenant began after a cursory inspection. ‘The boilers are hot. They must have been running a pressure check not more than an hour ago. It’ll only take us thirty minutes to get steam up.’

‘And the bad news?’

‘We’re low on coal. We’ve enough to get to the Wheel River, but no further. But it seems ABBA has smiled on us: according to Su Xiaoxiao’s agents, there’s a fully laden coal barge berthed just along the docks from where the Wu’s moored.’

‘Then we better start shovelling.’

It had been Trixie’s intention to load coal for three hours, then, bunkers full or not, to sail before dawn and run the Volga in darkness. But Fate decided not to cooperate. It was inevitable, really: it was one thing to put two of her fighters – dressed in SS uniforms – on point duty to deter nosy parkers, but when her entire army began shovelling coal from the nearby coal barge, the noise was too much for even the most dilatory of watch commanders to ignore. Less than thirty minutes after the coaling of the
Wu
had begun, a bleary-eyed, wet and evil-tempered SS captain, trailed by six burly StormTroopers, arrived at the dock and, brushing aside the objections of the faux-sentries, stormed towards the WarJunk.

‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ he demanded loudly. ‘This ship isn’t due to sail for two days. Who’s in command?’

For a moment Trixie considered trying to bluff her way out
of the situation, but as the captain and his men seemed to know their business – their locked and loaded M4s attested to that – she decided on more direct action.

‘I am, Comrade Major,’ she said as she stepped out from behind the WarJunk’s casement.

‘And just who the fuck are you?’

‘Colonel Trixie Dashwood,’ she answered and then shot the captain through the head.

There was a brief flurry of shooting, during which the StormTroopers were dispatched with commendable efficiency, and then Trixie started to bark her orders. ‘Prepare to sail. Cast off all mooring ropes. Close all hatches.’

Wysochi, black from head to toe in coal dust, materialised from the direction of the coal barge. ‘We’ve only got about half the coal we need, Colonel.’

‘Send two men and attach a hawser to that coal barge. We’ll take the coal with us.’

And that was how, ten minutes later, the CSS
Empress Wu
, with the coal barge
London
in tow, edged her way out of St Petersburg dock en route to Venice.

‘Comrade Lieutenant, there’s a message coming through over the wire.’

SS Gunnery Lieutenant Burns, twenty-three years old and a ninety-day veteran commanding Gun Emplacement Fourteen, drained his mug of café au gore, eased his gangly body up out of his chair and sauntered – carefully – over to where the signal sergeant had set up that miracle of ForthRight ingenuity, the galvanicEnergy-powered telegraph station. Burns had to be careful how he went and not for the first time he cursed being too tall for the artillery. The ceiling of the concrete bunker where his Krupp mortar was housed had a clearance of six feet, which was exactly three inches too low to accommodate a
vertical Lieutenant Burns. After a Season commanding the gun emplacement he suspected his back would never be straight again.

‘What’s the message say, Signal Sergeant?’

The sergeant finished deciphering the message and handed the Lieutenant the piece of paper. ‘Says, “CODE X472: ALL UNITS TO REFER TO SEALED ORDERS”.’

Lieutenant Burns studied the message with some curiosity. ‘You’re sure it was prefaced by “CODE X472”?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Burns pulled the envelope containing his secret orders from his jacket pocket, ran a nail under the seal and quickly read the contents. Then he read them again … and again. They didn’t make sense, but then, he supposed, any orders bearing the signature of His Holiness Aleister Crowley – as these did – didn’t have to make sense, they just had to be obeyed.

Still …

As he had been instructed, he burnt the orders and then turned to look at the huge thirty-six-inch Krupp mortar he’d been using to reduce Rangoon to brick dust. His brow furrowed as he wondered how in the world he was to use a
siege mortar
against a fast-moving steamship. But it wouldn’t do his ambitions of enjoying a long and comfortable old age running his family’s haberdashery empire much good if he was to refuse – on the ridiculous and indefensible grounds that what he was being asked to do was fucking stupid – to obey an order.

‘Get the men up, Bombardier. I want the mortar loaded and set at maximum elevation in five minutes.’

In the end it took them seven minutes. After fighting nonstop for most of the Summer, the four men who made up Burns’s gunnery crew were tired, disheartened and just a little hungover from celebrating the armistice. Ninety days of hauling the shells – which weighed just over a ton – into the bunker,
of using the hoist to load them into the stubby barrel of the mortar, of dragging back the bunker’s steel roof and then having to endure the shock of firing the bastard thing in such a confined space had taken its toll. Everyone in Gun Emplacement Fourteen was exhausted, deaf and heartily sick of the war … just as the rest of the army was.

Of course, Burns would keep his observations regarding the parlous state of the army’s morale to himself. Senior officers in the SS did not appreciate being told that their men were fed up fighting and that the grumbles of discontent in the army were growing louder by the day. The Great Leader, in Burns’s humble opinion, was pushing his people too hard and one day – one day soon – they would snap. There was a strong whiff of rebellion in the air: the people wanted rid of Heydrich and his cronies.

‘Gun ready for firing, sir.’

‘Is it set at its maximum elevation, Bombardier?’

‘Yus, sir. Any higher and the bloody thing will go straight up and straight back down. We’ll blow ourselves to kingdom-fucking-come.’

Burns eyed the elevation indicator, which read eighty-seven degrees: the Bombardier was right, it was nigh on vertical. He did a swift calculation and estimated that the shell would fall only three hundred yards from the emplacement. He just hoped his target would have the courtesy to steer that close into the shore.

‘Very good. Pull back the roof and prepare to fire.’

Lieutenant Stepan Makarov, officer commanding the FSS
Molnya
, the GunBoat charged with patrolling the Volga that night, spotted the
Wu
just as she was approaching the Anichkov Bridge. But spotting the WarJunk was one thing, sinking the bastard was quite another. Obeying the order to ‘ENGAGE AND
DESTROY ENEMY WARJUNK’ would require the use of the brand-new and ultra-secret, galvanicEnergy-powered Whitehead torpedoes – the V4s – with which the
Molnya
was equipped.

‘Signal Command: “REQUEST PERMISSION TO ENGAGE USING V4 WEAPONS”.’

Makarov had to ask permission: SS Colonel Clement was anxious that none of the ForthRight’s enemies be given the merest inkling that he had such a powerful weapon at his command. And it was an indication of how seriously Naval High Command took the destruction of this WarJunk that the response was almost immediate: ‘PERMISSION GRANTED’.

Grinning from ear to ear, Makarov issued his orders that the torpedoes be prepared for launch. He could barely contain himself: he was going to make history, he was going to be the first naval commander to destroy an enemy vessel using a torpedo.

‘Enemy vessel to port, Colonel.’

Trixie swung her telescope to where the seaFemme was pointing. She had known their luck couldn’t hold for ever, and luck – and the time it took for the enemy to get themselves organised – meant they’d reached the Anichkov Bridge without facing serious opposition. They’d been shot at, of course, but most of it had been small-calibre stuff that had bounced harmlessly off the Wu’s thick steel hide and anything big enough to do damage had been fired in such a wayward manner that the shells had screamed harmlessly overhead. It had been as though the UnFunnies weren’t even
trying
to sink the
Wu
, but now, she suspected, things were going to get a whole lot more dangerous.

In the darkness it was difficult to make out the type of ship that was closing on them but what she could see confirmed it to be small, fast and, if the way it carved so easily through the
water was any indication, very agile. Trixie frowned; it looked much too small to be seriously intent on taking on the
Wu
. Certainly the WarJunk – especially with the coal barge in tow – was ponderous and making heavy going against the monsoon-fuelled ebb tide, but it was a powerful warship and packed a massive punch.