“Carry on reading from page one hundred and seven, Professor,’ Lieutenant Adams demanded, pointing at the book on the desk before him.
Two Hundred Lost Years. And on the frontispiece sub-titled, I had thought at the time, cleverly, ‘What the World might have looked like if George Washington had ducked at the right time!’
It was never meant to be a polemic.
The whole thing was just an amusing satirical project; if the Lieutenant Governor of New York had refrained from using his powers of censorship to ban the bloody book it would never have attracted such a cult readership on the East Coast back in the day.
Written by: Anonymous.
Anonymous had become a Son of Liberty a couple of years later but I had had nothing to do with that.
I had destroyed all the drafts, my notes.
I had never even told Rachel about the book.
Over the years I had come across dusty copies of the damned thing in antiquarian bookshops, and nearly fainted with horror and pride when I found a copy of it in Abe’s bedroom bookcase five or six years back. Since the 1940s the book had morphed from the dangerously seditious to the whimsically irrelevant; and yet now it was being brandished, albeit metaphorically, in my face like an accusation of high treason!
I turned the book around and pushed it towards my interrogators.
“Read it yourself,” I suggested.
The way the man and the woman exchanged glances told me they were suddenly off script.
I sat back and folded my arms across my chest.
I confess I was beginning to feel a little bit silly.
“Do you deny that you are the author of ‘Two Hundred Lost Years, Professor?’ The man who called himself Danson asked before he remembered he was not supposed to ask that question.
I thought his sidekick was going to kick him under the table for a moment. She tried to recover the situation.
“Your son is in a lot of trouble, Professor…”
“Why?” I asked. “What’s he supposed to have done?”
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
They had played me for a sucker and I had not disappointed!
No fool like an old fool, and all that.
I looked over my shoulder at the mirror on the wall behind me, rose to my feet and went over to it.
“Sit down, Professor,” Lieutenant Adams pleaded but she was out of character now and clearly a little afraid that she really was in a room with a dangerous enemy of the colonies.
I ignored her.
I knocked on the glass.
Rap-a-tap-tap!
It was weird how I had travelled from terrified hare in the headlights of an approaching car, stunned and meekly quiescent to irritated, straight to just plain pissed off in less than ten seconds flat once I had finally got my brain in gear.
Rap-a-tap-tap!
“Interview suspended!”
I recognised the voice which broke from speakers hidden behind the panels of the room’s suspended ceiling. I recognised it even though it had lost the edge of youth, mellowed a degree. That Virginian drawl had lived with me over the years and deep down I had always known it would haunt me forever.
“The prisoner will be taken back to his cell.”
I was not taken back to my cell.
Presumably, my old nemesis Matthew Harrison – in 1940 he was only just setting out on what had no doubt subsequently been a successful career in the Colonial Security Service of New England, judging by the fact he was the one calling the shots – had decided that the two stooges who had conducted my interrogation to date had served their purpose. They made themselves scarce as I was cuffed, bundled into the back of a Bedford lorry, hooded and dumped onto a hard bench for the duration of the journey to an inevitably less public place. There were far too many people to hear one’s screams in a normal police station.
This time when my hood was removed I was in a windowless room possibly six feet square and the only bed was a concrete ledge along one wall. There was a slop bucket, otherwise the amenities were, limited. The air in the cell was on the cool side of not very warm even though it had to be around mid-day.
The cell reeked of stale urine.
My hosts had left my cuffs on and my hands were numb.
I was definitely getting too old for this shit!
I was having trouble focusing, too.
Great!
The bastards had put something in my tea back in Hempstead; nonetheless, I was convinced I was going to get to the slop bucket in time right up to the moment I didn’t. I would have worried about the mess I had made a lot more if I had not blacked out soon afterwards.
Chapter 9
Shaker Field, Albany County, New York
“Tell me again why we’re heading up to the north-west before we fly down to Jamaica Bay?” Demanded the shorter of the two men standing before Alexander Fielding outside the hangar which accommodated the offices of the Albany Flying Club. Alex was the shortest of the Fielding brothers, by a couple of inches to Bill and three or four to Abe – Ma must have fed his ‘little brother’ better as a baby or something – but his dapper, trim frame belied a natural whipcord strength which had made him lightweight boxing champion both years during his time at the Colonial Air Force Academy at the Patuxent River Air Station in Maryland.
Those had been among the happiest days of his life.
In fact, he had not known how much fun he was having until his eight-year short service commission had run its course. He had tried to re-enlist, that was four years ago but the New Spain border was quiet at the time so the CAF was mostly going into mothballs and his personnel file was not exactly spotless. In another couple of years’, he would reach the top of the ‘active’ Reserve List, or if things got any hotter down south he could be back in the service any time now.
In the meantime, it paid to keep busy.
Barnstorming was okay; you ended up flying with a great bunch of guys. The down side was that you could get a reputation for being a wild man and the days when the CAF let ‘crazy men’ anywhere near its aircraft were long gone. So, three years on that circuit was enough. He had needed to look like he was ‘settled’, reliable when eventually the call back to the colours came.
The job at Shaker Field was a godsend.
Later Alex had discovered he had only got the job at the Albany Flying Club because the uncle of one of his class mates in Maryland – Pilot Officer Frank Sinclair, who had been killed in a crash down on the border six years ago – had recommended his name to the Committee.
His predecessor had got a landing wrong in a Bulldog racer – the civilian version of the CAF’s main front line scout-fighter at the height of the Border War – and before they could cut him out of the wreckage the fuel tank had lit off.
Bad way to go!
Alex’s Bristol Mark V had been a CAF trainer throughout its fifteen-year service which meant it had probably had more than one bad crash in its time. The flip side was that because it had been in the service ever since it was rolled out of the factory back in England, the Air Force had lovingly repaired and cared for it. So, while it was not exactly ‘new’, it was, for an aircraft of its age, technology and vintage, a relatively well-maintained, reliable machine. Twenty to thirty miles an hour slower than a Bulldog, about as manoeuvrable, but much more forgiving with perhaps thirty or forty miles more range, it was an excellent basic trainer.