Dogfighters: Under the Hill Read online

  So he gave the memory of those Spitfire boys with their arrogance a thorough thrashing, turning side on to scrape through below Cottingly aqueduct and giving the poachers in the fields the fright of their lives.

  Perhaps it was one of them who phoned up to report him or perhaps he had simply crossed into the range of Manchester Airport’s more powerful radar, but he had just begun to recognise the shapes of the Peaks below when the radio burst into life, cutting through the band-saw throb of the engines.

  “Unidentified aircraft, you have no clearance to be in this airspace. Identify yourself.”

  Chris opened his mouth and shut it again, knowing that there was nothing he could say. The line of the Bakewell road peeled off from the motorway below him, and he altered course to follow it.

  “Unidentified aircraft, respond.” Even through the sound of his own engines, he could hear the higher, more machinelike drone of something on his tail. In seconds they had idled up on either side of him, two Eurofighter Typhoons, having some trouble in going as slowly as he.

  “Let me shoot them down.” That was Occe, who hadn’t seemed to have registered that he was flying in a famously unarmed bomber.

  “What with?” he asked, just as Tolly—wireless operator—spoke directly to the pursuing pilots, giving the call sign for good old V for Victor.

  “Boys, we’re not…” Ah! And now he could see the field in the distance, the standing stones looking almost yellow in the light of the big bone moon.

  The pilot in the lead Typhoon had swung his plane close enough so he could have stepped from his wing onto Chris’s. His face was clear as day, shadowed eyes grim beneath his helmet shield. “You’ll accompany us back to base and surrender your vehicle. If you fail to comply, we are authorised to shoot you down.”

  “I can get him from here.” Red joined the call to be allowed to use his beloved guns. Chris wriggled in his seat, looked over his shoulder, and just for moment in the dark thought that he saw the main spar of a Lanc behind him and the body behind it receding into the distance like a corridor. Swallowing, he looked out of the cockpit and saw wider wings, four engines outlined in cobweb light. For that same moment, the weight on the stick was punishing, the feeling of the plane beneath him magnificent, the heavy, brutal, beautiful beast he had flown in his youth.

  He got a fix on the stone beneath which he had found Ben’s phone. The scored ground under it was invisible in the night, but he remembered—a little hole about the size of a badger’s set, ringed with grass and filled with crumbling soil and worms.

  Turning to put it dead ahead of him, he saw moonlight on Victor’s four engines, and beneath his feet, the back of Archie’s head where he sat in a bomb nacelle that hadn’t existed for seventy years.

  Chris would have thought it was just that he was going mad, if both Typhoon pilots had not reared back in their cockpits and peeled off to twice the distance, making room in the sky for a far bigger plane. A crackle of shocked expletives burst from his earpiece and then even the background noise of radio contact cut off for a moment.

  He felt sorry for them, truly. The pair of them were looking at each other. He could imagine them confirming that the other guy really was seeing what he was seeing. Even now they would be working their way past the sinking realisation that there was a form to fill in back at base that had no space on it for ghostly kites from the war, still thundering across the countryside to rain their nightly terror on Germany.

  “Unidentified aircraft, you will accompany us to base or we will shoot you down. Acknowledge.”

  Chris shut off the radio, cut off their voices and as easily dismissed them from his mind. “Good work, chaps,” he told his crew. “And thank you. I don’t know if you still obey my orders, being dead, but time to bail out. I’ll see you on the other side.”

  “Always were a joker, Skip.” The voice made him jump. Right beside him, elbow to elbow. Hank’s voice, with a little crackle to it as if recorded on vinyl that had not been handled gently over the years. “This is our fight too, remember? We’ve had to wait a very long time to get our own back against these bastards. We’re not scrubbing out now.”

  “Brace yourselves, then.”

  He moved the throttle forwards, the touch of cold, clammy fingers over his own, lending their strength. Putting the plane into a long, shallow dive, he aimed the nose at the base of the hill, where the tiny scrape in the soil was a closed door into another world. Speed picked up, the dial of the altimeter spinning down to zero. The two grey fighters, unprepared for the move, zipped past, then turned in tight curves, vapour streaming from their wingtips as they doubled back. There’d be more swearing going on in those cockpits, Chris thought with a flash of manic laughter as the blur of the earth rushed at him. The undercarriage touched one of the standing stones and yellow sparks flew as he was thrown against his straps, but he lifted her off and rammed her into the ground. Open wide, I’m coming through.

  Everything blurred, black and grey. There was an immense rushing noise. He thought he heard the crash, aluminium buckling under impact, the tinny shriek of fuselage being torn apart, the trickle of fuel and then the whoomph as it caught the sparks and exploded. He closed his eyes, just for a second, and there was—God, there was burning, eviscerating light behind them, making his eyelids shine crimson.

  But his breath went on, ragged and fast over a thundering heartbeat. He snapped his eyes open, pulled back on the stick just in time to bring the nose up. The tail dragged a thin furrow in water edged with reeds, and by the time he’d levelled off it was over a riverbank, bordered in grass as green as in a child’s painting and backed by a forest of elm and elder under strong, bluish sunlight. Against all probability he had made it through. He had arrived.

  Chapter Six

  Chris circled above the grassy field, looking frantically for the way back. Was there a slightly more steel tint to the water just beside that thin wooden causeway where it was ringed in bullrushes? Perhaps. And there were bullrushes decorating the damp wings, splattered like insects across the Perspex of the cockpit. “You still with me, lads?”

  “Still here, Skipper.” Their voices sounded fainter. There was an echo to them, as though they came distantly down a long corridor where a stormy wind blew.

  “But where are our rescuees?” Chris lined up for a landing, lost speed, came down, floating, floating and then the ah, the breathless turbulent bone-shaking rush of the wheels kissing ground: potholes and rabbit holes, mole hills and stones, and the edge of the forest rushing up towards him like a green and grey wall. The flaps caught, the brakes caught, he swung the nose of the plane around to position for an immediate takeoff, and then taxied slowly to a halt. He’d caught something moving out of the corner of his eye. In the forest, wasn’t it?

  Unbuckling his straps, he shifted round in the seat to look behind him. There the trees grew so thick he saw no undergrowth at all. Two paces in and the bright day had been so thoroughly snuffed he saw only floating stars where a stray beam had found a tiny crack in the leaf cover. Floating stars and other, darker things, moving. The skin along his spine itched as a ruff he didn’t have tried to stand on end.

  There were eyes in there. The bluish gleams were not leaf-dappled light at all, but a phosphorescence at the back of night hunter’s eyes. There was a pulling in and shifting, as if the trees had turned into liquid, hit the ground and splashed back up as something else. Light began to penetrate as the tree cover thinned, and with every second he could see the process more clearly—falling branches becoming figures in armour, shield and sword in hand. He had flown not onto a deserted plain but right into the middle of a waiting army.

  He pressed contact for the engines again, throttled them up, was beginning to ease away when a small boat rounded the corner of the river ahead of him, brushing past purple and yellow irises, scattering the waterfowl from beneath its curved prow. Despite the cockroach-like crawling of the woods behind him, there was a moment of triumph, of relief as sharp as a s
tab wound. He turned off the engines and scrambled out.

  Bright as a ruby in crimson silk, crowned with a silver circlet, Ben guided the boat to the shore, leapt out, his movements sure and flowing. Chris stopped, hunkered down on the wing of the plane, arrested by the expression on the young man’s face, the way he moved—the certainty, poetry and arrogance of it.

  He tried to cough out the dread that had settled like cold water in his lungs and shouted, “Ben! Quick! Get in!”

  But it was like that moment in nightmares—he knew what was coming, and that made it more horrifying rather than less. Ben strolled over to the plane, put a hand on the wing next to Chris’s foot and looked him in the face, and Chris felt he was looking at a man he’d never met before. “Ben?”

  “You wondered what I was. Didn’t you? The others never quite let go their feeling that I might not be trustworthy. That I might not be fully human.”

  “But you are!” Chris leaned down, took hold of Ben’s arm and tugged. It certainly felt as human as ever, but for the slippery sleeve, dotted with seed pearls and silver. “At any rate, come on. This is not a good time for discussion.”

  Ben’s brow creased. The too-wide, too-certain eyes clouded over. He looked away from Chris to what seethed behind the plane. Following his gaze, Chris saw that the first armoured phalanxes of an army were spilling out of the trees onto the riverbank. They were drawing up in ranks, all clad in green and grey, their banners rolled around their spear shafts and tied tight.

  It was a very different look Ben gave him next—clever, doubtful, wary—a very Ben kind of look. It made Chris lean down, take a hold of Ben’s filigreed platinum belt and try to lift him bodily into the plane. “They’re with you?” Ben asked.

  “Not me. I thought they were with you. You’ve landed on your feet here, I see.” Ben hung from his aching hands. The muscles in his back stretched and burned and would not answer his demand to contract, to pull the dangling man bodily off the floor. “Come on, damn it! Give me some help here.”

  A moment’s more uncertainty. Ben’s face creased as though he was in pain. He reached up his other hand, but it had scarcely brushed Chris’s sleeve before he dropped it again, the tiny muscles around his eyes changed, second by second, as though he fought a war in there. “I…don’t…”

  The sound of the afternoon shifted as a great sibilant sssh Chris had taken for the brush of the wind over the treetops detached itself from the background noise, grew heavier, louder, more regular. At the same time, there came a noise like cymbals and a distant, bell-like voice over the wind. Ben’s face transfigured with joy. It all but glowed as he reached up a second time and began to bend back Chris’s fingers, prizing them away from his arm.

  Looking for the source of the voice, for the thing that had made Ben’s face shine, Chris saw it, coming in from the east. He’d never hoped to see one, never believed in them, but what went through him on seeing the spread, black, batlike wings, the long, lean body, trailing away in loops of tail, and the crocodile-like head, teeth aglitter, was instant recognition, fear and awe, and not a little glee. Bloody hell, now I’ve seen everything!

  “I don’t belong in your world, human. I belong here.” Ben’s fist struck Chris in the jaw, taking him by surprise, jamming his teeth into his tongue, filling his head with grey sparkles and his mouth with the taste of blood.

  “Oh no you don’t, you little…!” Both Chris’s hands were occupied. He tried again to lift Ben off the ground. If he smacked Ben’s head into the underside of the wing he might be able to stun him for long enough to get him aboard. But with Ben struggling, he managed only to haul him up a couple of feet and jam his shoulder at an awkward angle between two of the propeller blades.

  “I am a prince of the Gandharva people. Unhand me or you will know my wrath!”

  “It’s a fucking rescue, you arse. Now get in the plane.” But he knew by then that persuasion wouldn’t do it. The Ben Chaudhry he knew—change of convictions or not—could never have uttered such a line with a straight face. Possession? Or was this some kind of clone? An evil twin?

  Ben was twisting in his grip. Chris’s shoulders were about to separate themselves from his body, he could feel the muscles pulling, ripping. That hissing grind grew louder with every panting breath. A moment’s glimpse behind him showed a great white shape bulking out of the forest like the grinding of a glacier. Ice shone on its scales. The iron-fanged muzzle gaped as high as a house. It had made its way through the ranks of the army, was dragging itself into a catlike crouch. The membranes of its wings, blue-white as skimmed milk, stretched taut as it unfolded its wings.

  On its back sat a woman in a robe of chain mail, so fine and flexible it might have been linen. The mask of her helmet gleamed like bright gold, her living eyes looking out eerily from the smooth metal. A chill went down Chris’s back as she raised her spear and pointed at him.

  His voice failed him. He had to whisper. “Ben. This is going straight to hell. If you’re coming with me, do it now. Please.”

  The white dragon beat its wings once, testing them out. The blast of wind almost knocked Chris off his perch. He had to let go of Ben’s arm to scrabble for purchase on the engine mounting, and as he did so, Ben drew a small, sharp knife from the top of his boot and stabbed it through the centre of Chris’s other hand.

  “Aaah!” he yelled, letting go involuntarily, the recoil throwing him back against the cockpit, hand cradled against his chest. “Ah. Ah. Oh fuck.” It hurt. It hurt so much he could barely force his watering eyes to stay open, but he managed it, fumbling with edge of the entry dock behind him, getting it unlatched and open. It was enough to see Ben land lightly on both feet, run fast along the edge of the riverbank, his arms held out.

  Above them, the black dragon folded its wings and plummeted like a stooping hawk. Its claws came down. It picked Ben up with careful delicacy, turned and began to beat back the way it came. Chris breathed through his clenched teeth, wiped his palm over his face to shake off tears and sweat, took one look at the way the white dragon was now clawing at the ground, beating steadily—for all the world like a fighter getting its engines to full power before releasing the breaks—and vaulted back into his seat.

  Blood continued to pour from his hand, trickling between his fingers. He started up the engines, revved hard. The Mosquito began to trundle gently forwards. “Shit! Shit!” and he could have hated it for its elderly, arthritic slowness, but he didn’t have the time, just poured all the power he could on, struggled to hold her steady and straight until he could feel the lift under the wings. The wheels bumped off the ground, and again, and then they were away in a shallow upward scrape, into an alien sky, and he had no idea which way to go, or where in the whole of this world he might be able to find Ben again, or Geoff.

  He clipped the stiff leather of his oxygen mask to the side of his helmet, his good hand shaking, and the other still bleeding steadily, showing no sign of slowing or clotting. Clenched around the stick, it pulsed with a brilliant lemon-yellow pain. Once he had the oxygen flowing and could replace it with his other hand, it subsided to a dull, deep throb. The air mix helped him to get his breathing back under control, slow it from the rasping, back-of-the-throat pant, and it was a good thing it did, as he’d barely stopped hyperventilating before all the air in the cockpit seemed to disappear. The engines gave a shrill whine as the plane juddered, pulled backwards into a sudden vacuum.

  The white dragon was in the air, the upstroke of its takeoff sucking the sky right out from beneath Chris’s wings. The downstroke sent him bucking away on a whirlwind of turbulence, fighting the column with arms and legs, while the airframe of the plane shrieked in protest and the engines coughed and smoked. The rudder bar grew sticky beneath his feet as a wave of hot air pulsed through the plane from the tail. When he looked up, he could see green-gold fire lick along the Perspex, smoulder on the wooden blades of the propellers. He really didn’t want to imagine what it was doing to the dope-painted dry wooden airfr
ame of the plane.

  Okay, scrub this as a rescue mission. It couldn’t have gone any worse. All he could do now was get out of here, get some better intel and come back when there wasn’t an entire army waiting for him. With a flash of panic, he saw the white dragon’s pillar-like teeth at the window just in time. Sideslipping the gnash of its jaw, he banked around, scarcely more than head height. A burst of speed, a burst of height, and he dived straight for the smooth, mirrorlike water of the mere that was the portal on this side of the worlds. He felt it close over him; grey, black, and that moment that was like drowning and then he was out, climbing impossibly out of the side of the hill.

  Elation hit him, just briefly—the joy of still being alive, of having escaped. He clenched his flying jacket tight, the leather softening beneath the still bleeding wound.

  It was twilight, the silver-blue stillness of a world under a strong full moon, and he thought the tricky light was deceiving him for a moment, that the stir in the scrubby grass below was his own imagination. Then the snout of the dragon broke through, scattering earth. The long white wormlike body squirmed out onto a hillside near Bakewell, as early-morning lorries trundled with their lights on through the sleeping streets. The first rank of the army came after as he watched, as though a warriors’ cemetery was emptying itself, mound by mound, disgorging shapes in silver armour, with helms and swords unsheathed in silver hands.