Neither of the idiots was half the pilot Abe was and Abe was just starting out; it had been all the losers could do to keep formation with him in straight and level flight. He had lost them in an instant the moment he started ‘beating up’ Leppe Island; later Hopkins had got lost following him down to Long Island and he had had to turn around and reel him back in!
Never mind, they had both touched down – more or less – safely on the grassy strip overlooking the marshy wetlands the first settlers had called Jamaica Bay, so called probably, as Dad would say ‘because they were so badly lost they had no idea if they were in Jamaica or Boston!’
Anyway, Alex had met a girl called Daisy who had cleaned him out every which way, had a good time and hitched a ride back to the field in the early hours of the morning and slept the sleep of the just.
“Are you Alexander Fielding?” The bespectacled man in the plus fours asked hesitantly.
Alex groaned and blinked up at the stranger.
“Yeah, who would you be, sir?”
“Albert Stanton of the Manhattan Globe,” the other man confessed. “Are you drunk?”
“Nope,” Alex declared, shaking his head and rising unsteadily to his feet. “But I will be again later. We agreed thirty-five pounds, Mr Stanton?”
“Er, yes…”
“I’ll take you as low and as close to the big ships as I’m allowed but if we get too close they might open fire on us.” Alex had been trying to be funny; the other man gave him a cold fish look. “What?” He asked.
“After what happened at the Brooklyn Navy Yard yesterday I should imagine the Navy is as trigger happy as Hell!”
Alex ran a hand through his tousled hair.
His bladder was fit to burst.
“Excuse me,” he turned away and after fumbling with his flies relieved himself on the ground beneath his Bristol V.
He saw the line of Jerry cans nearby. Excellent! The gasoline he had paid for last night prior to his sortie to St Albans – while he still had money in his pockets – had materialised overnight. He buttoned his trousers. “That’s better! Give me a hand with those cans and we’ll be on our way!”
For some minutes the strenuous work of pouring 87-octane fuel into the old trainer’s tank passed wordlessly.
“What happened at Brooklyn yesterday?” Alex inquired belatedly. More to be civil than from any existential curiosity.
“There was a dreadful accident, some say sabotage, at the launch of HMS Polyphemus. Over a hundred people were killed and the CSS have been making large scale arrests.
“Oh, maybe I won’t fly as close as I usually do to Navy ships today!”
From the look on Albert Stanton’s face the photographer suspected he was about to be short-changed. The first aircraft were running up their engines.
Alex checked the field’s windsock and flags.
The wind was southerly to south westerly.
A little high cloud apart the sky was already azure blue all the way to the invisible stars above.
Stanton had one of the new heavyweight British cameras with a stubby telescopic lens. Seeing Alex’s interest in his equipment the man in spectacles became positively loquacious.
“I’m using the latest Ealing one-inch colour stock film today. So, especially as the sun is quite low at this time of day I need to be ‘down sun’ to avoid extraneous glare off the water…”
“Do you need to land to re-load a new magazine of film?”
“No, that’s the marvellous thing about these cameras.”
“Do you want to go in the front or the back seat? This is a dual control machine so it doesn’t matter to me.”
Passengers usually wanted to go in the front seat but Stanton was a professional and he knew he would get better shots, less obstructed by the wings from the back seat.
Out of the corner of his eye Alex saw Rufus McIntyre and Paul Hopkins trudging towards their Bristol VIs like men off to the funeral of somebody they despised. They had had their aircraft fuelled up last night. Alex had been unwilling to pay a premium for the privilege, not everybody was made of money.
Alex gave Albert Stanton the normal ‘talk’ as the two of them went to the tail of the Bristol, picked it up and walked it around until the nose of the trainer was pointing into the wind.
“Make sure you are strapped in at all times”
“Hang onto your camera like grim death.”
“Don’t touch any of the controls.”
And: “Don’t be sick until we’re back on the ground again!”
Then Alex was running up the engine.
Chapter 20
Leppe Island, Montgomery County, New York
Abe Fielding had been aware from a relatively young age that in its tribal grounds the Iroquois Nation operated so separately from the normal colonial administration that it, in effect, constituted a kind of shadow, or ghost society. It was more than just separate development, it was a nation within a nation in the northern counties of New York. However, it was only when in late adolescence that he realised that ‘the system’ might have been designed to stop Kate and he being together the way his own father and mother had been that he had really understood both its cruel iniquities and the remarkable possibilities it might offer a self-elected fugitive.
In the ‘white’ colonies of the East Coast a man needed identification papers to prove ownership, and as an adult a web of contracts determined his place in that society; among the tribes of the Iroquois peoples there were no records, no formal checks or balances other than personal recommendation, or a friend or an ally or a kinsman to vouch for one, no meaningful money economy, everything was personal, not commercial and every social transaction was by the free will of all the parties concerned.
Obviously, the system was imperfect and human foibles and follies made for what in Abe’s world might have been called a feudal society but that said, there were few native tricksters and shysters preying on the unwary and the vulnerable, violence was restricted in the main to consenting males, and more often than not expressed in ritualised non-lethal forms and unquestionably, the biggest difference from the ‘white’ colonial model, was that women were regarded as equal members of most communities.
In other words, the worst excesses of Getrennte Entwicklung in the First Thirteen colonies – directed against blacks in the south and mainly against the native nations of the north – had created not just ‘separate’ communities but an underground movement of which the Colonial authorities knew little and understood less. Since most whites did not consider full-blood Indians or African-Americans as citizens, and in some places did not regard or treat persons so classified even as human beings the borders of tribal lands and former slave reservations were porous, unregulated. The situation skewed trade and consequently the tax-raising competence of individual colonies creating huge unregulated, shadowy black-market sectors in ever local economy and meant that it was hard if not impossible to track people or realistically, to control cross-border movements.
The really odd thing was that most white colonists – certainly most of their leaders – either did not see the problem or simply did not understand the way clinging to, and latterly, actively pursuing Getrennte Entwicklung policies had hollowed out the eastern half of New England. Society and the economy had stagnated in the East while in the Mississippi valley and many of the western colonies and territories, despite the never-ending Border War in the South West, migration from the old ‘First Thirteen’ colonies had fuelled a twenty-year runaway boom. Out west there was still unclaimed land and new industries had sprung up along the whole length of the mighty Mississippi from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Spain twelve hundred miles to the south. Out in the ‘new colonies’ there was little of the bureaucracy that strangled daily life and business on the East Coast, no straightjacket of stupid ‘Separate Development’ legislation and the hand of imperial administration was ‘light’ to ‘non-existent’. The West was once what the East had been a hundred years ago, the great unstoppable economic and commercial engine of the North American continent allowed to run free by the masters of the colonies back in London.