P.C.122, Mick Horne, coasted to a stop and leaned his bicycle against the wall of the station booking office. He lifted his tall police helmet and mopped his brow with a blue spotted handkerchief. The effort as he pedalled up the gentle hill from the centre of Chipping Ongar, to the railroad station entrance had raised beads of sweat on his broad forehead despite the chill night air. A big man with a round friendly face, framed by a red beard now flecked with gray, he projected an easy confidence. Mick was a policeman old ladies waylaid for a chat, and thieves avoided if they could: the very model of an English constable.

He turned toward a wooden hut that sagged against the wall separating the passenger platform from the loading dock, where milk churns stood lined up for the early morning train to London; as he walked the few paces he looked up. He was still staring at the sky when a thick china mug was thrust into his hand.

"Prithee, good constable, what evil sprite yonder comes?" The frown on the policeman's face dissolved into a broad grin as he turned to the night watchman who had stepped from inside the hut holding two mugs of steaming tea.

"Bloody Kaiser's men and their gasbags. Can't you hear them, Tom?" Mick asked.

The old man cupped his ear with his free hand. "Oh aye, I might be blind as a bat but there's nowt wrong with me ears." A deep, throbbing drone faded and swelled, audible above the cold breeze that snapped through new leaves and stung their faces. Tom peered into the sky through thick spectacles. A library of classics read by the poor light in his hut had left him with bad eyesight and a pretentious vocabulary.

Above them a waxing half moon slipped through thin drifts of cloud. Two nights before, high over the town of Epping, Mick Horne had seen his first Zeppelin, held in the searchlights massed in the north eastern suburbs of London. The hair on the back of his neck had stood up as he watched it, eerily beautiful, a silver cigar shape hovering far overhead. Tonight, he saw nothing.

Over two miles above, and ten miles down the railroad line toward London, Captain William Turner, MC, had resigned himself to the fact that he would also see nothing. He shone a weak, red-shaded flashlight at the oil pressure gauge on the instrument board of his B.E.2 biplane. It only needed a glance to see that his engine had steady lubrication; he had no need to burn his night vision away gazing at flight instruments telling him what he already knew. His sensitive hands and feet on the stick and rudder bar told him the big biplane wallowed along holding the altitude gained in the last hour of his patrol. Height and speed had whipped the same cold wind that chilled the constable and night watchman on the ground below into a slashing slipstream that swirled around the windscreen of the open cockpit, plucking and tugging at his scarf and driving icy fingers into the exposed skin of his face.

Will eased the stick to the left, adding a touch to the rudder bar to balance the turn as he felt the machine slide under him like a car on ice. He moved automatically, unthinking, the airplane as much part of him as if the wings grew from his shoulders. He peered over the side of his cockpit and then forward between the double, biplane wings. The moon spilled cold mercury on the cloud below, light enough to outline a ghostly horizon. It felt unreal, as if he were flying through one of his own dreams. Will shook his head, took his feet off the rudder bar and stamped them against the floor of the cockpit until he felt pins and needles.

"Pull yourself together, William," he spoke out loud but only heard his voice inside his head. Looking down he could see the lights of London through gaps in the cloud. "Blackout my ass." Will wondered what people were doing far below that needed that much light at two in the morning.

At eighty miles an hour he held his course for one last sweep toward the city. He crouched behind the windscreen. Shielded from the worst of the slipstream he had no sense of speed. The engine roared but he felt rather than heard it, the vibration buzzing through the controls and the framework that supported him. The stink of hot oil and exhaust fumes sometimes caught in his nose and mouth, but it seemed to him that he floated, suspended over the city. At last the familiar horseshoe shape of the River Thames, as it curled around the Isle of Dogs, appeared from under his right wing: an ink black swirl in the surrounding pattern of scattered light. He wheeled into a turn, then straightened on course for his home field at Abbots Roding: just twenty five miles from London, but a different world in the heart of the Essex countryside.

Will tugged the collar of his leather coat higher and squirmed down in his seat, searching for a more comfortable position as he coasted out over the fields and woods of Essex leaving the suburbs of the city behind. Two hours on patrol had numbed his backside. The wicker seat gave slightly and he groped with clumsy, gloved fingers to rearrange the cushion. Another false alarm, he thought. Two hours spent chasing shadows with an obsolete biplane masquerading as a night fighting machine. Two hours peering at the pale fingers of searchlights groping for the elusive German airships that had plagued England from the beginning of the war twenty months before. The "Zepps", as people called them, roamed almost with impunity above towns and cities, scattering bombs that killed and wounded, wrecked homes and spread fear and alarm.

He took deep breaths, trying to make up for the lack of oxygen. "Where are you, you miserable bastards?" he bellowed into the slipstream. He felt foolish but more alert; enough to realize that the moisture splattering against the windscreen did not come from his engine. A strong, evocative smell flooded the thin air around him. Will glanced up, uncomprehending for a moment as he watched the stars that pricked the black night wink out as if a cloud had slipped above him, cutting off his view of the sky. "Oh, bugger!" he swore. Even as he reached for the trigger on the Lewis machine gun fixed to fire over his top wing, a light exploded in his eyes.

 Far below, the policeman pointed into the sky. "Did you see that? Over there toward London?" Mick asked.

Tom wiped the lens on his spectacles and stared up again, hoping to catch the spark they had seen. "Even with these old peepers, that looked like a light."

Mick pulled out his notebook, licked the end of his pencil and carefully wrote down the time. "Probably a signal from one of our boys in his airyplane, but no harm in noting it down. Now is there any more tea in that pot?"

* * *

The icy wind pouring into his slack-jawed mouth, freezing his teeth and jabbing an exposed nerve that jerked him back to jumbled consciousness. He opened his eyes but what he saw made no sense. Lights spun around his head. The wind swished through the wires and he could hear the airframe creaking, but the reassuring roar of the engine no longer pressed on his ears.

"Where am I?" He heard his own voice but no reply. Somebody seemed to be shaking him, his body flopping from side to side and back and forth. The movement roused him further. There was nobody in the airplane with him: no observer to answer him. So who had hold of him? The seat belt hurt where it cut into his thigh. He grabbed the stick and scrabbled with his feet for the rudder bar. The controls flopped and jerked. He could make no sense of his situation, but experience and instinct saved him.

"Christ Almighty, a spin!" He reacted without thinking. He thrust the stick forward and peered ahead. He could barely see. Something covered his goggles. He tore them off. He tensed. The impact with the ground could come at any instant. He could be at ten thousand feet. He might be at ten. Hard opposite rudder would yank him straight, but trying to judge the direction of the spin in the dark: confused, concussed… impossible.

He pushed the rudder to the neutral position and prayed the elevators had forced the nose down enough to gain airspeed. He felt the controls come alive. Heard the pitch of the wind in the wires rise to a howl. At last he saw something to give him his bearings. Railroad tracks lined up exactly on the nose, reflecting the thin light, framed between the wings, directly below. Not far enough below.

"Come on, sweetheart!" He shut his eyes and hauled the stick back. The force of gravity smashed down on him like a giant's fist as the biplane screamed out of the dive, pushing his head into his chest, dragging his cheeks down, making his arms feel like lead. From the corner of his eye he saw treetops flashing past on his own level. The clamour of the engine bursting back into life made his heart leap.

 The pressure on his body eased. He peered over the side of the cockpit and moved the stick forward. "Oh good God!" He slumped back in his seat. He had clawed his way to a safe height but realized that the only thing that had saved him from becoming a crumpled and charred lump of grisly wreckage, amongst the charred wreckage of the B.E.2., was a railroad cutting into which the big biplane had dipped at the bottom of the dive, giving him an extra fifty feet of space.

Will forced himself upright in his seat. He had to find the field. He had no idea why the engine had stopped or why it had started again. His machine might be fatally damaged, and he could not see out of his right eye again. His compass spun, upset by the gyrations of the spin, but the railroad track that had saved him once might save him again. He banked to follow the metallic thread; twisting in his seat he could see the scattered lights of London fading behind. The track had to be the branch of the Great Eastern Railway Company that served the people of Chipping Ongar and North Weald as their link to London, and the airmen of Abbots Roding as a solid, immovable signpost.

The confusion he felt a minute before gave way to a dull pain that now throbbed above his eye. He raised his hand to his face and probed gingerly. His vision cleared. He touched his tongue to his gloved finger and tasted blood. The railroad terminated at Chipping Ongar station. He banked again to line up precisely on the track. When the silver thread disappeared, he eased the stick over and rolled into a left turn.

"One el - e- phant, two el -e - phant..." he counted off five seconds, thirty degrees around the compass at that rate of turn. He straightened the machine with a firm push on the controls and chopped the throttle, feeling a dropping elevator sensation in the pit of his stomach as the airplane sank toward the ground. Gliding at exactly sixty miles per hour for a minute would bring him over a river, a broad ribbon reflecting the moonlight. The landmark appeared and he sighed with relief. Altitude? Too high. Will booted the rudder hard to the right and thrust the stick forward and to the left. He braced himself against the cockpit edge feeling a blast of air against his cheek as the airplane tipped up on one wing in a fierce slip. It dropped, with one wing pointing at the ground and the nose slewed sideways, giving him an unobstructed view of his landing point. He frowned as a line of flickering lights sprang from the surrounding darkness. Arranged in an "L" with the short arm across the direction of the wind all he had to do was touch down following the long arm, but the lights marched across his line of flight at an angle. "Damnation!" He heaved his airplane out of the slip even as the lights flickered.

A mile away at the station Mick and Tom turned and looked at each other. The sudden roar of the biplane overhead had brought them from the hut to peer into the sky. They had seen the dim shape swoop past like a giant deformed bat against the luminous night sky, and they had listened to the diminishing roar of the engine until it stopped; a few seconds later they heard a low rumble. "That didn't sound too healthy, Tom"
The night watchman glanced up at the sky, "I'd like to say that was thunder, but 't wasn't."

The policeman frowned, "You're right. I think I'll take a ride by the flying field on my way home." He pitched the dregs in his mug into the bush. "Thanks for the tea." He mounted his bike and pedalled away with a wave of his hand.

"God speed, good steed," Tom called after him. "See you tomorrow."
 

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Copyright © 2000-2006 by Chris Davey