Empire Day Read online

  “Yes, sir.” The two men gazed at the other ‘Lions’ moored astern of the flagship like immovable castles of steel rising out of the cold waters of the bay.

  The battleships and their escorts were streaming huge Union Jacks at their bow and stern jack staffs, and White Ensigns and battle flags carrying the names of the actions in which they, and their namesakes had fought in since the birth of the Royal Navy from their towering steel fore and aft masts. For all that there had been no great war since the 1860s there had hardly been a year during the last century when the Royal Navy had not seen battle.

  In a funny way the shock of the atomic age had initially pacified many previously dangerous hot spots around the globe; temporarily quashing the persistent local, often very nasty, colonial spats and uprisings which were the bane of the all mature Empires. Lately, trouble seemed to spark where one least expected it; one year prompted by the threat of famine in Bengal, the separatist movements in South East Asia, tribal conflict in Arabia, this or that clan feuding with its neighbours in sub-Saharan Africa, piracy in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean, or the latest unrest along the desert and mountain wilderness border between New England-Nuevo Spain. People too easily forgot that it was less than twenty years since a rebellion against the Spanish authorities in Florida had drawn in sympathetic militias from the neighbouring colonies of Carolinas and Georgia, during which the Mississippi Counties of Louisiana had sent raiders into Texas – Tejas, the eastern department of the State of Coahuila – in a clumsy land-grab that had almost embroiled the rump of European Spain in a Mediterranean war and caused a North Atlantic stand-off between the antiquated Spanish Fleet and the Royal Navy off Cape Trafalgar. Things had escalated so far out of hand that at one juncture Spanish troops threatened to assault Gibraltar!

  The idea that the Spanish would contemplate pitting a rag-tag collection of obsolete ironclads against the might of the battle line of the Mediterranean Fleet was frankly absurd; nevertheless, the Government of the day in England had fallen over that particular debacle.

  These days, the trouble was that one never knew where the next problem was coming from! As the first of the King’s Prime Ministers had remarked when asked what worried him the most: ‘Events. Events, sir!’

  “My father always used to say that it made him nervous when the sun shone on Empire Day,” the King guffawed softly. “That was why he hated to go abroad in July.”

  His old friend echoed his mood.

  “What is it they say? The two things you can rely on in England are that it will rain but never enough to stop Australia or the Philadelphians beating England at cricket!”

  The two men had switched their gaze to the old-fashioned ironclad moored in the grey waters between Governor’s Island and Red Hook. The twenty thousand ton white-hulled battleship belonged to a generation twice removed from that of the Lion and her mighty sisters.

  The Nuestra Señora de la Santísima Trinidad had been the pride of the Armada de Nuevo Española when she was launched in 1927; that she was nominally still the flagship of the Gulf of Spain Fleet was in part a testament to the decline of the once formidable Spanish Navy, and also a minor but presumably calculated slight to her English hosts. The Spanish had sent the old ship – she had been dry docked in Havana for over ten years acting as the non-operational flagship, essentially the shore-based headquarters of the small but otherwise relatively modern Cuban Squadron - up to New York simply to make a statement about how little importance the administration in Madrid attached to the day.

  “They say they removed the breech blocks of her big guns and de-activated the hydraulic trains for both turrets,” the King said, thinking out aloud.

  The calibre of the guns of the old battleship’s main armament was the same as that of the four Lions’ and all thirty-one of the big-gun capital ships on the current Navy list; but HMS Lion’s guns were 15-inch 42-calibre Mark V versions of a naval rifle found to be so reliable and accurate that it had been the standard heavy gun of the Royal Navy for over five decades. Its characteristics – including how to adjust gunnery tables to compensate for barrel lining degradation during its 150 to 180-round service life – were intimately understood, and over the years it had been established that its design maximum range of approximately 33,500 yards could be safely extended, by supercharging with additional propellant well within the bursting tolerance of the barrel, to 37,800 yards. Moreover, although the Royal Navy had always prided itself on its ability to put the greatest possible weight of metal in the air at any one time in a battle, by tradition and pragmatic trial and error it had been proven beyond reasonable doubt that the optimum ‘accurate’ rate of controlled fire of the Mark V was approximately – give or take three or four seconds - two rounds per minute. Theoretically, five rounds every two minutes could be fired, but this always tended to reduce the effectiveness of the ‘shooting’.

  The Santísima Trinidad’s four big guns were 38-calibre like her secondary armament of eight single casemate-mounted 9.5-inch weapons. Unlike the naval rifles carried by Royal Navy ships the Spanish ironclad’s guns were the originals, ‘shot out’ as long ago as the 1940s, and even in their prime had had only two-thirds of the range of the British Mark Vs. In her long ago prime the old Spanish ironclad had only been able to make sixteen or seventeen knots. Back during Lion’s second commission she had clocked thirty-two and a half knots – nearly thirty-seven miles an hour – running machinery trials off the west coast of Scotland and sustained a speed of thirty point two knots during a two-hour maximum power run.

  “The Spaniard’s escorts look well turned out,” the King observed, enjoying this last moment of the day when he could get away with just being an old sea dog.

  The latest class of Spanish destroyers – less gunships and more general-purpose frigates with a couple of guns forward and twin anti-aircraft missile rails aft – were German-built and looked a little top-heavy with their radar masts and boxy, aluminium-skinned superstructures.

  “One good hit and they’re done for,” retorted the Commander of the 5th Battle Squadron.

  “Maybe,” the King replied. For the moment the forest of smaller calibre automatic-firing anti-aircraft barrels carried by most large Royal Navy ships probably remained the best option for fending off air attack. But in five years’ time when the first of the new jet fighters and bombers came on the scene, perhaps precision guided missilery would be the only thing that could be relied upon to do the job.

  The Navy certainly thought that was the way the wind was blowing. The next time Lion or her sisters went into dock for a major overhaul all their quadruple 1.7-inch mounts were going to be removed, new radars hoisted and short-range – two to four miles – surface-to-air – missile launchers installed amidships on either side of the aft funnel.

  The King was aware that, as was their wont, the men of his protection detail had moved closer as he had been taking the air on the ‘exposed’ quarterdeck of the battleship. The nearby islands were swarming with colonial policemen and soldiers from the New York Garrison. The next nearest shore was well over a mile away; if some misguided fool wanted to take a pot shot at him from that sort of range through the morning haze good luck to him!

  Oddly, it was at the very moment that this thought flitted across his mind that he heard a dull ‘clunk’ somewhere to his left. He might have heard another ‘pinging’ sound a second or so later but by then he was buried beneath a wall of muscular bodies, everybody was shouting and the thunder of booted feet on the planking of the quarter deck was deafening.

  Strong hands picked him up and transported him as if he was weightless towards, around and behind the barbette of ‘Y’ main battery turret. Then, after the briefest of hesitation he was bundled unceremoniously down an ammunition loading hatchway into the heavily armoured innards of the giant floating citadel.

  Chapter 3

  East Hempstead Police Station, Paumanok County, Long Island

  I had been arrested under a warrant that permitted th
e Long Island Police to hold me in custody for seventy-two hours subsequent to the moment of my detention. Basically, I was going nowhere for the next few days.

  The ordinary uniformed ‘bobbies’ at East Hempstead were unnervingly like their fathers, two or three decades ago when I had been a frequent caller and guest at establishments such as the brand new whitewashed, spic and span station on the Jamaica Bay Road just out of town, in former times and were, in the main, regular guys. Of course, years ago, there were no women in the police force, that was an eye-opener, being processed into custody by a female sergeant. She was hardly Sarah’s age, brunette, pregnant and not in the mood to be messed about by a shaggy-haired disgraced professor feebly trying to make light of his situation.

  I tried to sleep but my neck was sore from being rousted out of bed and manhandled to the floor in the middle of the night. Oh, and I was worried about Abe. I had been worried about my youngest son since he was knee high, truth be known. Rachel had been too protective, too…nurturing; although that might just have been me being pig-headed.

  When Inspector Danson had asked me about why Abe had chosen to study at Albany I had skated around the truth in more than one respect. Much though Abe and the other kids had loved those weeks we spent camping in the woods along the Mohawk River every year; I was a little afraid the sins of the father were about to be revisited on my family and suddenly I was thinking again of my old friend Tsiokwaris – in Kanien'keháka, the language of the Mohawk nation, ‘Black Raven’, and his daughter Tekonwenaharake, ‘her voice travels through the wind’.

  Rachel had wanted the kids to be exposed to the ways and the traditions of the indigenous native peoples of the colony; I had wanted to plumb the natural well of dissent and possibly, revolution in the ranks of the People of the Flint – the Mohawks - and their brother nations for once upon a time, long ago, I had not been the pacifistic, armchair rebel of my later years.

  Rachel and the kids had burned a lot of that revolutionary zeal out of me early on. After that I was a dabbler, a dilettante dissident and little more. At first, I saw the peoples of the Iroquois ‘league’, as the French called them, as the separatist movement’s natural allies. The Iroquois or Haudenosaunee – made up of the six tribes of the Cayuga, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, and Tuscarora peoples had survived the rapacity of the first waves of nineteenth century Anglo-European colonization and retained their identity, their sense of being a people.

  I think my old friend Tsiokwaris thought I was a harmless, amusing fool. He was wise and patient, I was anything but; the fact of the matter was that to the tribes of the Iroquois Nation the colonies’ ongoing respect for the sanctity of the tribal lands – south of Lake Eerie and Ontario and the St Lawrence, mirrored by the Dominion of Canada to the north – which had finally ended the Indian Wars in the late eighteenth century, meant that there had never been any real appetite in the Mohawk, or any of the other Iroquois peoples to wage war again on the white men. Other that is than when periodically, one or other of the cronies of colonial administration bigwigs in Albany attempted to grant logging or mining concessions adjacent to or infringing upon their ‘countries’.

  As far back as the late eighteenth century the English had figured out that it was easier to live in peace with the Iroquois and the Algonquin and most of the other Indian nations than it was to get embroiled in a continental-scale never-ending guerrilla war which would sooner or later, bankrupt the colonies and the old country.

  Tsiokwaris and his people understood that calculus and counter-intuitively, the drive to pen the native peoples back into their ancestral lands which had slowly gathered pace over the last thirty or forty years had suited the Mohawk just fine.

  In retrospect Rachel and I brought our little family into contact with that other, indigenous New England of the native tribes at the very cusp of a sea change in the affairs of the First Thirteen colonies; that moment when co-existence, the byword – something of an article of faith - of generations of settlers for over a hundred years which had kept the continental peace was falling out of fashion.

  In any event, I had come to understand that the Iroquois had a different, more elastic, spiritual connection to the land than was fathomable to most white men and women; and had no need to be lectured by a ‘settler’ – for that was what all white and black men in New England were to most native Americans of the North East – about the legacy of invasion and oppression.

  I was an idiot back in those days!

  In my defence I was an idealistic idiot; not that that is any real defence as anybody who has tried to rely on it in a court of law will attest.

  The real reason Abe had applied to Churchill College, Albany, was Tekonwenaharake, ‘Kate’. She and Abe were of an age and the two of them had been peas out of the same pod from the day they first rubbed noses when they were three years old.

  Tekonwenaharake translated as her voice travels through the wind in English but her father stoically maintained that it sounded even more poetic in the native Kanien'keháka.

  Kate had grown up a full head short of Abe, the tallest of the three brothers at six feet and a fraction of an inch, and her slim litheness was like poetry in motion compared to Abe’s gangling clumsiness as a teenager. Abe had thickened out a bit, turned into the family’s one, real sportsman in his last couple of years at Grammar School. He had been too whole-hearted playing football, a little prone to get himself injured chasing lost causes; at cricket he had been a star with bat or ball, and his big hands never dropped a catch. All things considered, Abe had been exactly the ‘late developer’ his mother had said he always would be.

  And as soon as he could he had run away to Albany to be with Kate. Sarah and I had fretted about that. He had a brilliant career ahead of him; Kate might be a girl in a million but…

  She was pure bred Mohawk and in the professions; in any profession, everybody knew that if he married her Abe could kiss his career goodbye.

  Rachel had said ‘Abe’s happiness is the only thing that matters’.

  After she died I lost my bearings; my moral compass went awry and like a fool I had had ‘that conversation’ with Abe. It had not gone very well.

  ‘It’s none of my business,’ I had confessed.

  He had confirmed that he was of the same mind.

  I had rowed back.

  ‘You know I’ll support you whatever you decide…’

  Abe had come home a lot less after that.

  Kate was the one non-negotiable thing in my youngest son’s life and now I was asking myself if that was what all this was about.

  For all I knew Abe had married the girl by now; that was a thing easily achieved in the Mohawk country, a simple matter of words exchanged between the prospective husband of a young woman and her father or guardian elder. In theory Kate’s views would not actually have been canvassed but in practice, having known the kid since she was knee high, it would have been the only thing my old friend Tsiokwaris would have taken into account.

  Heck, why did life have to be so goddamned complicated?

  At around ten o’clock I was escorted into a small, well-ventilated windowless interview room on the first floor of the police station.

  A blond woman in her twenties brought in mugs of tea and joined Detective Inspector Danson on the opposite side of the room’s single table. She had entered the room juggling the mugs on a tin tray with a slim brown attaché case under her left arm.

  Danson had relieved her of the tray so she could divest herself of her case, which she dropped on one of the chairs, and wordlessly delved inside. I registered the small black notebook and the silvery propelling pencil, or pen, which she withdrew from it before putting it on the floor by the nearest table leg.

  I tried to wake up.

  I had been brought a cooked breakfast from the station canteen, allowed to wash and perform my personal ablutions in private in a washroom at the end of the corridor nearest my holding cell, and nobody had bothered to re-cuff me after I had
been processed into custody in the small hours.

  I sipped my tea.

  There was a waist high-to-ceiling mirror across the end wall of the interview room; presumably a two-way mirror to permit the full observation of proceedings. From past experience I automatically assumed that there would be microphones buried in the walls, too.

  Interview rooms had been dirty, smelly places in the old days. It appeared that things had moved on more than somewhat since the last time I had been in police custody.

  Another pleasant surprise was that the tea was only middlingly vile.

  “Sorry,” the young woman apologised. She sounded very English. Her blond hair was cut short, almost like a man’s and her freckles took years off her age.

  Danson stirred.

  “This is Lieutenant Judith Adams of the Royal Military Police,” he announced. “She is a member of His Majesty’s Personal Security Detail and for the duration of the Royal Visit to New York, New Jersey and Long Island she is acting as the Redcaps’ Liaison Officer with the Special Branch of the Colonial Police Service.”

  “Delighted to meet you, Lieutenant,” I muttered.

  What the fuck was going on?

  Danson sat back, clearly leaving the floor to the woman.

  “Inspector Danson tells me that you haven’t seen or spoken to your son for several days, Professor Fielding?”

  “Weeks, actually. Last time we spoke was about a month ago, I suppose…”

  “Yes,” the young woman said, checking something in the notebook she had opened. “That would have been on 8th June. You spoke for about five minutes.” She hesitated, frowned. “About little of any substance. Our analysts could not rule out the possibility that you were communicating using a code employing keywords. Prior to that you spoke on 23rd May. This conversation was a little less stilted, likewise not obviously suspicious.”