On Her Majesty's Behalf

by Joseph Nassise

  Without thought to her own safety, she slipped free of her shoulder straps and spun around in her seat, yanking her Webley out of the belt around her waist as she did so.

  The nearest shredder was less than two feet from the tail of the plane when she swung her arms up, the pistol gripped securely between both hands. Centering the barrel on the rotting bridge of the creature’s nose, she pulled the trigger. At that distance, it would have been hard to miss. Blood, brains, and flesh exploded in every direction as the Webley’s bullet tore the shredder’s head apart.

  She barely had time to smile in satisfaction, however, before another shredder loomed up beside her. She spun, a movement made difficult in the tight confines of the cockpit, and was still trying to bring her weapon to bear when the creature’s legs were cut out from under it by a burst of gunfire from one of Burke’s men.

  A glance showed more of the shredders closing in, but Veronica had bought Freeman the time needed. The plane hit a rut in the grass and bounced, throwing her against the side of the cockpit and bruising her ribs in the process, but the impact she expected as the wheels hit the ground again never came. The plane lifted off the ground instead, transforming in an instant from a bouncing, shuddering contraption of wood and canvas into a graceful flying machine that rose into the sky with silken smoothness.

  For a moment she was overwhelmed with wonder as she glanced about and saw the city of London slowly coming into view below her and then the realization that she was a hundred feet off the ground and getting higher by the second suddenly registered. Her heart jumped into her throat and she literally threw herself back into her seat, frantically tugging the straps over her shoulders and securing them as tightly as she could to the underside of the seat, terrified that a sudden turn on Freeman’s part would throw her right out of the aircraft.

  Closing her eyes, Veronica prayed that the flight would be over soon.

  VIZEFELDWEBEL JAEGER AND his men had been standing inside the bank the Americans had used as shelter the night before when the American aircraft passed overhead the first time. Their attention had been focused on determining which direction the American commando squad had taken earlier that morning and as a result they were caught unprepared by the plane’s sudden arrival, managing only to dash outside and get off a few meager shots in the plane’s general direction before it flew out of sight.

  Jaeger knew the plane had been sent to carry the Queen to safety and he wasted no time in sending his team after it. If he didn’t find it quickly, he knew there was a good chance that their quarry would slip the net before they got close enough to do anything about it. He had no intention of letting that happen.

  “Hound master!”

  The other man stepped forward quickly. The men hadn’t been with Jaeger for long, but they were already wary of his temper.

  “Are the hounds ready to be loosed?” Jaeger asked, still staring off in the direction the plane had taken, comparing the plane’s path with the map of London he kept in his head as he tried to work out just where it was headed. It couldn’t be far; the sound of its engine had already faded.

  “No, sir,” the hound master said in a trembling voice.

  Jaeger glanced over at the handlers and noted that the hounds appeared to be in some sort of distress, bucking and pulling at their leashes.

  “What’s the problem?”

  The hound master pointed at the roadway beneath their feet. “The Americans covered their tracks by pouring something, a chemical of some kind, all over the street in front of the bank. It’s playing havoc with the hounds’ sense of smell.”

  Jaeger frowned.

  Beside him, the hound master flinched.

  Jaeger barely noticed. He didn’t care if his subordinates loved him or feared him, as long as they got the job done properly. And right now the hound master was not doing so.

  To be honest, Jaeger hadn’t realized the Americans had dumped anything in their wake, for the simple reason that he couldn’t smell anything. Hadn’t been able to, in fact, since his transformation. He doubted any of the other men in the squad could either. To some degree that absolved the hound master from the way his hounds were now acting. It did not, however, absolve him from the fact that he hadn’t had the foresight to prevent this mess from happening.

  “Tell me, Sergeant, who is your second in command?”

  “Unteroffizer Fitz, Vizefeldwebel.”

  “And how would you rate Unteroffizer Fitz’s competence?”

  The hound master hesitated. “He is . . . competent,” he said at last.

  Competent was good enough for Jaeger, for it was a description he would not apply to the hound master himself. Without another word he drew his Luger and shot the hound master through the forehead. The body was still twitching when Jaeger called out.

  “Unteroffizer Fitz!”

  A burly young man handed the reins of a struggling hound to another and hurried over to stand before Jaeger.

  “Sir!”

  Jaeger looked him over; decided he would do. “You are hound master now, Fitz. I want the Americans’ trail found and I want it found quickly. Do you understand?”

  Jaeger noted that Fitz did not even glance at the body by his feet as he replied, “I do, sir.”

  “Then get to it.”

  Hound Master Fitz wasted no time. He began barking orders immediately, telling the handlers to spread out until they found the edges of the spill and to start looking for the trail at the point. Like Fitz himself, his men needed no further encouragement to do as they’d been instructed. The handlers spread out in a wide circle, waiting until their hounds stopped reacting to whatever it was that the Americans had poured over the pavement before beginning the search in earnest. Jaeger watched for a moment and then turned away. He was about to order the rest of his men into formation when the sound of an engine caught his attention.

  It was the airplane. Coming back.

  As the sound grew closer and the men around him began looking to the sky above, Jaeger shouted, “A week’s leave to the man who shoots that plane down!”

  He didn’t wait to see if the others were responding but turned instead toward where the machine-­gun crew stood around the weapons sled. The Maschinengewehr 08, or MG 08 for short, was a water-­cooled heavy machine gun mounted on a sled that was capable of firing four hundred rounds per minute. The weight and bulk of the weapon required that it be mounted on a tripod and made firing it at more than a forty-­five-­degree angle difficult, which was why the gun crew was currently readying their rifles instead of the MG 08.

  Jaeger’s transformation had made him stronger than most men and he didn’t hesitate to snatch the machine gun off its mount and hold it in his arms. The crew was under standing orders to keep the gun loaded at all times. All Jaeger had to do was cock the weapon and he was ready to go. He held the gun by his waist and pointed the muzzle toward the sky, waiting.

  It didn’t take long.

  The American aircraft arced into view overhead as it gently banked to the right, and for a moment the red, white, and blue rondel on each wing was clearly visible to those on the ground, resembling nothing so much as a colorful bull’s-­eye that gave them an easy target at which to aim.

  Jaeger’s men began firing at the plane as soon as it came into view, the sound of their rifles like music to their commander’s ears, but the machine gun in Jaeger’s hands remained silent. He waited, watching to see what the plane would do in response to the ground fire. As the pilot began to react, Jaeger anticipated his next move and opened fire.

  The roar of the machine gun filled the air and, high above, the pilot of the aircraft began to have a bad day.

  A very bad day indeed.

  IT WAS THE pop, pop, pop pop of small arms fire that caught Veronica’s attention. She’d heard the sound too many times in the last few days not to recognize it for what it was, even
at this height. Wondering what was going on, she summoned the willpower to open her eyes and look over the edge of the cockpit toward the ground below.

  She could tell right away that they were retracing the route she had taken with Burke and the others not so long ago. Ahead of them she could see Cleopatra’s Needle, still pointing fingerlike into the sky, and the spires of the Royal Courts. Off to her right was the bombed-­out remains of Parliament and beyond that, the dark expanse of the Thames. Directly below them was Grosvenor Square, and it was from there that the firing originated.

  Veronica could see at least a dozen soldiers gathered in the street and firing up at them as they passed overhead. Details were hard to make out from this height, but from the dark colors of their uniforms she guessed they were Germans. Perhaps even the unit that had attacked them the day before in the museum.

  She reached forward and tapped Freeman on the shoulder. When he glanced back, she pointed at the Germans below them.

  Freeman looked in that direction, nodded back at her to show he understood, and then put the plane into a steep, banking climb to get them out of range of the riflemen as quickly as possible.

  He’d barely begun the turn, however, when bullets began to tear through the right wing, sending wood, wire, and cloth exploding upward. Almost as an afterthought, the roar of the machine gun reached them a half moment later.

  Veronica sat there, too stunned by the ferocity of the machine-­gun attack to do anything, but Freeman reacted instantly to the damage to his aircraft, yanking back and pulling sideways on the stick at the same time, throwing the plane into a looping turn in the opposite direction he’d been traveling in an attempt to get out of the line of fire.

  Whoever was manning the machine gun on the ground had other plans, however. He readjusted his own stream of fire, correctly anticipating Freeman’s move in the bargain, and riddled the fuselage with another barrage. This time Veronica screamed, instinctively drawing her limbs in as tight to her body as she could get them, as bullets crashed through the floor and whipped past her like a swarm of angry hornets.

  Freeman threw the plane across the sky in a series of twisting maneuvers designed no doubt to get them out of the mess they were in and it was all Veronica could do to hang on for dear life as the plane tipped and twisted and twirled. When he finally brought the aircraft level again, they had lost nearly half their height but had passed out of range of the gunmen on the ground.

  Veronica felt moisture on her face. When she touched it with her hand, her fingers came back wet with blood. She knew she hadn’t been hit, which left only one other possibility.

  She craned forward, trying to get a good look at her pilot.

  Freeman was still strapped into his seat, preventing her from seeing how badly he was injured, but the thin line of blood that was leaking across the narrow piece of fuselage that separated the two cockpits told her it couldn’t be good.

  She shouted over the wind.

  “Are you all right?”

  He nodded, but that was all.

  Was it her imagination or was he listing a bit to one side?

  Before she could say anything more, the engine gave a loud bang and began spewing a thick stream of black smoke.

  That’s not good, Veronica thought.

  She didn’t know what scared her more, the fact that her pilot was bleeding from an unseen injury that could incapacitate him at any moment or the flames that crept up over the engine cowling seconds after the smoke.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Imperial Palace

  Berlin

  THE LAST FEW members of the Chinese delegation were just leaving the Throne Room when Eisenberg came hustling down the corridor for his afternoon meeting with Kaiser Richthofen. He looked into their faces, one by one, trying to get a sense of how the meeting had gone, and therefore what mood the kaiser might be in, but the men sent by former general and now self-­proclaimed emperor Yuan Shikai were professional politicians and gave nothing away with their carefully blank expressions.

  Inscrutable, he would have called them.

  Eisenberg watched the delegates move down the hallway until they turned a corner and disappeared from view, then he turned back toward the Throne Room. He cautiously stuck his head in the doorway and, after a quick glance about the room, discovered the kaiser standing over the map table in the far corner, his back to the entrance, seemingly lost in thought.

  The doctor had been around Richthofen long enough to know the man was never caught unaware—­he had the senses of a large hunting cat it seemed—­and so Eisenberg wasn’t surprised when the other man spoke before he could announce himself.

  “How stable is Shikai’s hold on the Chinese imperial throne?”

  Eisenberg considered the question as he crossed the room. “I would think that would depend on the next six months, Your Imperial Majesty,” he said at last.

  “Oh?”

  Richthofen’s tone gave nothing away as to his state of mind, so Eisenberg had no choice but to blindly plow ahead and hope he didn’t say the wrong thing.

  “Our agents within the Forbidden City suggest that high-­ranking officers in the National Protection Army might be able to gain enough support to challenge his rule and bring back the republic.”

  “Might?”

  Eisenberg shrugged. “Shikai needs to keep the nationalists from undercutting his power base within the army while at the same time preventing the Japanese, and by extension the rest of the Allies, from seizing any more territory on the Shandong Peninsula. That’s a hefty task.”

  “But can he do it?”

  The head of Germany’s Tottensoldat program frowned; he hadn’t missed the faint hint of urgency in the kaiser’s voice. Why was this so important? he wondered. Exactly what had that meeting been about?

  He glanced down at the map table in front of him, hoping it might give him a clue. The large-­scale map was well over six feet in length and easily four feet wide. It normally showed the conflict currently engulfing western Europe, with carved wooden markers representing the various force elements involved in bringing the rest of the continent under German subjugation. Today, however, the map had been moved to the left, revealing the vast expanse of Mother Russia and its surrounding environs, including China, Japan, and the German-­held Marshall Islands. Aside from a few German forces—­mainly elements of the Ninth Army—­poised along the Russian border to keep Czar Nicholas from attempting to take revenge for the execution of his cousin, former kaiser Wilhelm II, there was very little information about their eastern forces to be seen and next to nothing about the forces available to either the Chinese or Japanese emperors.

  Eisenberg didn’t know the answer to Richthofen’s question. Normally he would have simply said so, but something about the kaiser’s tone put him on edge; Richthofen wanted an answer and Eisenberg had the sense that a noncommittal one would be far more trouble than it was worth.

  Taking a deep breath, he said, “I think so, yes. Especially if he gives the army something to keep it occupied enough that it doesn’t try to oust him, with or without the nationalists’ help.”

  Some of the tension seeped out of the room as Richthofen nodded, either having reached the same conclusion on his own or simply agreeing with Eisenberg’s assessment. Given Richthofen’s intelligence, Eisenberg had little doubt that it was the former.

  “I’ve just received the most intriguing offer,” Richthofen told him.

  “Oh?”

  “It seems that Emperor Shikai has far grander ambitions than I was aware of. Grand enough, in fact, that he just offered me an alliance.”

  “An alliance?”

  “With the Japanese pressuring him from the south, Shikai is worried that Czar Nicholas will take advantage of the situation and move on him from the north, effectively trapping him in a pincer movement between two forces.”

 
Eisenberg couldn’t imagine a country as large as China being trapped by anything, but then again, military science was not his forte. He said nothing as Richthofen continued.

  “Shikai has offered to attack Russia from the south, distracting the czar’s forces long enough for me to march east while he is otherwise occupied and take Moscow.”

  Eisenberg frowned. That didn’t seem like the brightest move on Shikai’s part, given that it left him vulnerable to attack by the Japanese while he was otherwise engaged with the Russians.

  “What about . . .”

  He didn’t get any further.

  “ . . . the Japanese?” Richthofen finished for him. “That, my good Doktor, is part two of Shikai’s grand plan. He has requested that I loan him a few battalions of Tottensoldat shock troops, along with advisers to show him how to control them. In return, he will use those troops to spearhead an attack south, eliminating the threat posed by the Japanese and leaving their British allies farther south in Australia and New Zealand cut off from help.”

  Now it was Eisenberg’s turn to echo the kaiser’s question from just moments before. “Can he do it?”

  Richthofen grinned like the devil. “There’s only one way to find out. Now, what did you want to see me about?”

  Eisenberg shook off thoughts of the Chinese situation and focused on what he’d come here to report.

  “I received word from Vizefeldwebel Jaeger this morning. He has confirmed that Princess Veronica is alive and in the care of Major Burke’s unit. He has them on the run and expects to have the princess in custody before sundown.”

  Richthofen clapped his hands in satisfaction. “It is settled then, Herr Doktor! With Veronica’s death we will have eliminated any legitimate claim to the throne to our east and can turn our attention to her upstart cousin on the throne to the west.”

  “And after that?”

  Richthofen’s eyes gleamed as he looked out the window into the distance.

  “Why, America, of course, Doktor. Where else would we go?”