The Lion and the Baron

by Simon Brading

  ‘What about your teeth?’

  Tanya grinned, showing him the gap. ‘They have good medicines, but apparently they’re not very good dentists.’ She chuckled. ‘Actually, they are, but I do not warrant such special care as you.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I will get some new ones when I get back to Moscow.’

  ‘You’re from Moscow? I thought you said Nobo something?’

  She shook her head. ‘Novosibirsk, it’s in Siberia and that’s just where my family has a hunting lodge. And you? Are you from London?’

  ‘No, my family’s estate is near Oxford.’

  ‘Estate?’ Tanya frowned. ‘Does that mean you are rich?’

  Drake nodded solemnly. ‘Very.’

  Tanya smiled in satisfaction. ‘Then you can pay for some lovely gold teeth for me.’

  ‘On top of the reward from my parents?’

  ‘Of course! Deal?’

  She stuck her hand out and Drake laughed as he shook it. ‘Deal!’

  ‘Good! Now, I need to pee, so you need to look the other way.’ She gave his hand a hard squeeze, then let it go and got to her feet, but her legs gave out and she stumbled and fell onto him.

  They froze, staring into each other’s eyes, but then, as if realising exactly what position she was in, she blushed and pushed herself off him. She flopped back down on her bed and yawned, rubbing her face, acting as if nothing had happened. ‘On second thoughts, I think I’ll just stay here a while.’

  ‘Did you get much sleep?’

  She shook her head. ‘The doctors were working on you for a long time. They brought you here only a couple of hours ago.’

  Drake smiled. ‘You could have left me and come to bed.’

  ‘If you keep telling me to leave you, one of these days I will!’ She laughed, then waved away the suggestion with a sneer. ‘They may be good doctors, but they’re still Prussians and I don’t trust them - I was not going to leave you alone with them.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t thank me, just buy me something expensive to thank me when we get home.’

  Drake laughed incredulously. ‘Something else? You’ve only just asked me to pay for gold teeth! Is this the only reason you’re taking care of me?’

  ‘Why else?’ She grinned at him. ‘It’s not as if you’re much of a pilot or very pretty, after all, you only shot down one Baron and Gruber is much better looking than you.’

  Drake winced. ‘Ow. That hurt more than my arm.’

  She laughed, but then suddenly turned serious. She slid across the small gap between the beds to sit next to him and looked into his eyes earnestly. ‘Did you see the photographs in Gruber’s office? On the wall, next to his desk.’

  ‘The ones of aircraft? I didn’t get a good look at them, no.’

  ‘They were bad quality and it was hard to make them out, but they were of the Misfit aircraft in the hangars at Vaenga.’

  ‘Are you sure? I mean, you arrived the night before we were shot down, right? You can’t have seen them well enough...’

  Tanya shook her head, cutting him off. ‘There have been drawings of those aircraft in the newspapers every so often for the six months, with all the news of the battle you fought over Britain. And ever since you came here there have been daily articles of the fighting on this front, with representations by our best artists of the kills the Misfits and the Wolfpack have made together. I can assure you, every Muscovite knows exactly what they look like.’

  Drake found himself quite glad that he wasn’t a Misfit; he wouldn’t like to have his every move scrutinised like it had been by the British over the summer and now apparently by the Muscovite public as well. However, at the same time a lump rose in his throat. ‘So there’s a spy at Vaenga and Gruber knows where the Misfits are based.’

  Tanya nodded vigorously. ‘Exactly! He could attack them at any time!’

  Drake stared at the floor, deeply disturbed.

  Vaenga was deep into Muscovite territory and defended by dozens of anti-aircraft batteries in the surrounding woods, but that was no defence against the waves of bombers the Prussians could send. Britain was proof of that; it had taken the entirety of the RAC to stop London from being devastated and here it was only the Misfits and a few ragtag Muscovite squadrons standing in their way.

  Would that be a tactic Gruber would use, though? Would he prefer to beat the Misfits in the sky, or would he take any victory that he could get?

  Drake hoped that the man would be arrogant enough to want to fight the Misfits himself, but who knew what he would decide to do if the battle starting going against him as it had over the summer.

  If only there were some way to get a message out.

  Chapter 8

  There wasn’t much more to be said, so Tanya staggered back to her bed. She was snoring as soon as her head hit the hard, bare mattress, but Drake couldn’t sleep; his already feverish mind was going round and round in circles, trying to work out what he could possibly do to warn the Misfits. To warn Gwen. He ran through each and every scenario he could think of, but discarded them all as impossible or downright absurd and just ended up making himself feel more frustrated and trapped.

  He must have dozed off at some point because the next he knew a guard was standing over him, shouting at him in German to get out of bed.

  He jerked awake and rolled onto his feet, blinking away his sleepiness and trying to get his bearings, then gazed around.

  Tanya was already being frogmarched out of the room and he made to follow her, but the guard stopped him with a hand to the chest. Another guard stepped forward and threw something on the bed, then pointed at it and said “clothes” in heavily accented English.

  Drake eyed the pile of blue cloth - it looked like an RAC officer’s day uniform. He nodded at the guard and smiled. ‘They are indeed. Well done.’

  The guard snarled and stepped forward, raising his hand, but the other spoke before he could strike. ‘Don’t. Gruber wants him in one piece.’

  The guard hesitated at the words, but Drake flinched back from him and held up his hands protectively anyway, pretending not to have understood. ‘Alright, alright! I’ll put them on!’

  He turned away from them in order to hide his smile, filing away the information about Gruber for later, and began undoing his red jumpsuit.

  He could tell the uniform was just a copy by the feel of the material and the fact that the rank stripes were not quite in the right place, but it was good to be back in a proper uniform. It felt like he’d regained a measure of his dignity, after the ignominy of capture and imprisonment, and he held his head up just a little bit higher as he was escorted out.

  The cell turned out to be the last of a dozen or more, on either side of a long corridor in a low building, one of the new military ones. He couldn’t detect any signs of life in any of the others as he passed, though, and he wondered if he and Tanya were the only prisoners. Through a door at the end of the corridor was a small guard room with a desk. Another soldier was there and he exchanged a few words with Drake’s guards, making a note on a clipboard, before unlocking the outer door for them.

  Drake pulled his greatcoat tightly around him as the guards marched him down the concrete path between the cell block and the neighbouring building and out onto the perimeter track, not for the first time wishing that he had been able to enjoy the Muscovite parka for just a bit longer.

  In the light of day it was immediately apparent that the Prussians had taken over and expanded some kind of private air club for their aerodrome, much like what the Misfits had done with a holiday camp in Kent for their base. The brick buildings were what remained of that, but there were also a couple of beautiful, ornately decorated, wrought iron hangars on the other side of the field. They were dwarfed by the recent Prussian constructions and were now sitting abandoned and rusting, slowly losing their splendour, but they were a clear indication of how exclusive the club must have been.

  There were
signs of recent damage everywhere - unpainted silver patches among the green camouflage of the military buildings, of which the cell block was one, and multiple pockmarks and broken windows on the brick buildings, one of which was completely burnt out - and Drake realised that the air base was the one that the Misfits and Wolfpack had mounted a joint raid on.

  By all reports the base had been left in a shambles, with every single fighter a wreck, the buildings damaged, and the field pitted and holed, but the Prussians had shown their usual efficiency and rebuilt, replacing all of the aircraft and patching up the buildings and air field. In double-quick time the aerodrome was operating at peak efficiency once more and, as the guard ushered Drake along, a flight of MU9’s began taxiing in an orderly fashion out of the leftmost hangar and lined up for the morning’s mission. They were followed closely by MU10’s from two other hangars. There was no sign of the Barons, though - the fourth hangar was closed, with no movement evident - and he wondered whether they had gone up already or if Gruber liked to have a bit of a lie in.

  He would have liked to watch the Prussians take off, wondering how their drill differed from the British, but he was starting to feel the cold - it wasn’t just that his greatcoat was inadequate, but his thermal underwear had been taken away when they’d arrived - so he was glad when they turned off the path and climbed the steps up to the door of one of the smaller brick buildings. The sign on the wall by the door announced it as the pilot’s mess, so he wasn’t surprised to see Gruber within. The Prussian was reading a newspaper in an armchair in front of a roaring fire, midway down the room, and he looked up when Drake come in and waved with a smile, then motioned towards a table near him.

  As he made his way across the room, Drake glanced around curiously. It was about ten yards wide by twenty deep and luxuriously appointed, as if it were a country lodge. There was a bar at the far end with two large tables in front of it, which were occupied by half a dozen pilots in grey Fliegertruppe uniforms, who were eating while trying not to look like they were watching him. The rest of the space was taken up by a dozen armchairs, loosely grouped around the fire, and half a dozen small round tables, like the one that Gruber had pointed to, each seating two to four people.

  There was an air of impermanence about the mess, quite unlike any other he’d seen. The only decorations in evidence were paintings of Finnish landscapes and old photographs of smiling people in front of antiquated aircraft, inherited no doubt from the previous occupants. There were no trophies, no portraits of lost pilots, no awards. The squadron colours weren’t even on display, something which would be unthinkable in a British squadron.

  He idly wondered where the Crimson Barons, part of an invading force, would keep its trophies if they didn’t carry them with them. Did they have a home base in Prussia where they sent them for safe keeping?

  Gruber met Drake at the table and held his hand out, completely ignoring the guards, who saluted then backed away. ‘Thank you for joining me. I apologise for the early hour, but I have a sortie in an hour and I prefer not to fly on an empty stomach.’

  The Prussian’s black day uniform was severe and functional, the trousers sharply-pressed and the tunic plain, aside from the silver wings on his chest, the epaulettes with gold braid surrounding a single brass star denoting his rank of Generalleutnant (a pay grade higher than Dorothy Campbell) and a black cross hanging from a red ribbon around his throat.

  Drake flashed him his best lopsided grin, the one that he knew infuriated self-important people. ‘No need to apologise; the sun has been up for at least half an hour. This isn’t at all early for a pilot in this war.’

  Gruber blinked, momentarily lost for words as he tried to work out whether he was being insulted or not, but his smile didn’t falter as he released Drake’s hand and went to his seat.

  A steward in a white uniform took Drake’s greatcoat, then held his chair for him. Only when he was settled did another approach with a large silver tray balanced on his hand and begin to lay food and drink on the table.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of instructing the chef to prepare you an English breakfast. If you would prefer something else then just ask. Myself, I’m used to a very American diet.’

  While Gruber’s plate was filled with things that looked very sweet and not particularly nutritional, including a stack of pancakes, inches tall and dripping in syrup, Drake’s was piled with enough bacon, eggs, sausages and toast for several people. He also had a large pot of tea to himself, while Gruber had coffee.

  ‘This is fine, thank you.’ Drake nodded gratefully at the steward, who gave him a slight bow in return before retiring. ‘Is Praporshik Guseva not joining us?’

  Gruber paused with an immense forkful of pancakes half-way to his mouth and stared at him, almost in disbelief. ‘Of course not! I want to enjoy a civilised breakfast with you, like two gentlemen, without the inane warbling of a woman to distract from our conversation. Anyway, she is better off eating with her own kind.’

  Drake would have liked to protest, but Gruber evidently thought there was nothing more to be said on the subject and started shovelling his food into his mouth as if he were a starving man, barely taking the time to chew before swallowing. He smiled widely between mouthfuls, like a child, not bothering to wipe the syrup from his chin.

  Drake hurriedly looked away from the revolting sight and began eating in a far more dignified fashion, extremely relieved that he had the use of both arms, saving him the indignity of having someone cut his food up for him, or, horror of horrors, forgo manners and use the fork in his right hand. Like Gruber was. He cut a half-inch slice from one of the thin Prussian sausages and chewed fastidiously; just because he was among barbarians didn’t mean he couldn’t still be civilised.

  ‘So, how shall we address each other? Will you insist on your title?’

  Gruber spoke around a mouthful and once more Drake had to fight to contain his disgust at the man’s poor table manners.

  ‘Of course not; that was just for your underling. However, I don’t think we’re quite on a first name basis, especially given the circumstances. Perhaps, despite the advantage you have over me,’ Drake nodded at the gold on the man’s shoulder boards, ‘we should stick with ranks.’

  Gruber nodded reluctantly. ‘Very well, that is acceptable for now, although I hope you and I can become friends at some point.’

  Drake shrugged. ‘After Britain has won the war and things go back to how they should be, that might be possible, I suppose.’

  A brief flash of anger darkened Gruber’s face, but it was gone in an instant.

  Drake pretended not to see it while he concentrated on his food, but he stored the man’s short temper away with the other information he’d gleaned, like the fact that Gruber seemed to be keeping himself isolated from his pilots and, by the looks they were shooting his way, they didn’t particularly like him.

  Gruber showed his training as an actor by continuing on as if Drake hadn’t said something that had disagreed with him. ‘I assume you are in Russia to train pilots to fly your Harridans.’

  Drake considered what to do. Under the terms of war he was under no obligation to tell Gruber anything and if he did he could get in serious trouble from his own government, but, considering the man had a spy in Vaenga, he probably wasn’t asking anything that he didn’t already know. And besides, by talking to the man he might be able to worm his way into his confidence, which might come in handy at a later date.

  He nodded. ‘I was brought over to give the Muscovites a bit of a hand, yes.’

  ‘Muscovites.’ Gruber chuckled, spraying flecks of food on the table, and shook his head. ‘As if a change of name will make a difference to who they really are - Imperialists with a thirst for territory. It’s merely a political stunt to curry favour with you British. Once they no longer need you, or if they make other... arrangements, the name will revert and so will they.’ He gave Drake a sly grin.

  Drake raised an eyebrow. ‘I thin
k you will be surprised at how determined they are not to make any arrangements with you. If you’ve read any history books, you’ll know they don’t take very kindly to invaders and they don’t bow to them, no matter how much it costs.’

  ‘We shall see, but anyway, we were talking about you before we got sidetracked.’ With a squeal of his fork, Gruber scraped his plate clean of the last traces of pancake, then stuck them in his mouth. To Drake’s relief, he swallowed before speaking again, though. ‘So, tell me, who did you annoy to get sent to this godforsaken place?’

  ‘Nobody, I volunteered. I was starting to get a bit bored, just twiddling my thumbs in England after we beat you, and was looking for something to do.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid you got a little bit more excitement than you bargained for!’

  The Prussian chuckled as he began tucking into a pastry and Drake took the opportunity to eat more himself. He was extremely hungry, not having eaten anything since before being lured into the Muscovite bunker, and it was all he could do to restrain himself from joining Gruber in wolfing down the food.

  ‘Tell me about Gwen Stone.’

  Gruber’s voice was low and casual, his face innocent, and he kept his eyes on his food as if the question were of no importance to him, but Drake could still tell this was where Gruber had wanted to take the conversation all along. He chewed carefully, using it as an excuse for not speaking straight away, giving himself time to wonder why the man would ask such a thing. Had his spy seen him with Gwen? Did he know about their past?

  He swallowed, then very deliberately wiped his mouth clean with his napkin before answering. ‘She’s one of the Misfit pilots.’

  ‘Any fool who has read an English newspaper knows that.’ Gruber scoffed and waved at a rack of newspapers at the side of the room next to the entrance. From where Drake was sitting he could see there were a few British newspapers among the Prussian ones. ‘I even received a letter from her personally.’ Gruber smirked when Drake’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘You did not know? I thought your childhood friend would tell you something like that. Or have the two of you drifted apart? Mr F Featherstonehaugh’s articles make no mention of that, in fact he said that you two were very close, especially on board the Arturo.’