The flight crew hastened through their preparations. Mechanics climbed up to the engines and started them with crank handles. A rev of the propellers and they were under way, through the channel and out onto the river. They were now on the sewer of London, a fact obvious from the breath of it that filtered into the cabin. A cadaver ballooned up with decomposition flowed past, then another, both so far gone it was impossible to determine either age or sex. Then a dead cow... The flying boat’s nose lifted, waves and foam swept past the port hole, Donald ducked to look up at the underside of Tower Bridge as the flying boat passed under it. The roar of the engines hardened, the propellers droned with strain, a storm of spray flew behind—and then all was smooth as the brown river and its stench fell away and the land to either side flattened and slowed. He looked behind at the spectacular red barrier of the Grande Enceinte extending away from both sides of Tower Bridge like an escarpment. This red-brick wall was the frontier of the Central Enclave of London. It had a circumference of nineteen miles and supposedly contained two billion red bricks. As ‘enceinte’ was a French word, it was correctly pronounced ‘on-saint’, not ‘hen-sent’ as the ill-educated claimed. So echoed the words of a primary school teacher of long ago.
The frantic bellow of the engines eased back to a mellower pulsing. The flying boat cruised down the River Thames, past the industrial asylums with their factory sheds, chimneys belching smoke, masses of workers’ houses clustered around them like gravel. Donald was always amazed by how small the asylums looked from the air given the torrents of slummies that poured into the Central Enclave to work as labourers and household servants. The asylums quickly gave way to woodland, strip fields and pastures in which horses grazed. He assumed these were the petty domains of gangsters.
He knew from previous flights that flying boats were swift conveyances, being able to cruise at about twice the speed of a galloping horse. That was how the machine would be able to land in Portsmouth on the south coast of England just three hours after leaving the Central Enclave of London. Or at least, that would be so if the weather permitted. A little under an hour after take-off, Donald noticed the machine lean to one side and the world begin to rotate slowly under them. He heard Cecil Tarran-Krossington shouting on the deck above. By moving to the front of the servants’ deck, Donald could see up towards the cockpit. The pilot was red in the face and fretting over some papers. Donald looked down through the nearest port hole and immediately understood the problem. To one side fog lay on the sea, spreading away into the distance like a snow-covered plain. However, the air above the fog was clear.
The flying boat levelled out and continued over the white, rolling layer. Donald supposed the caution of the pilot arose from the risk of drifting over private sovereign land hidden by fog. If this happened, the glory trust responsible for defending the privacy of that land would open fire with its standard 155mm anti-aircraft guns, shooting through the fog using tracking radar. That was how the law was enforced. Having said that, Donald had a minor appreciation of navigation and knew that aircrew were trained to take fixes from the sun to determine position. He returned to his seat, growing bored with the monotonous white view. The sky paled from blue to hazy. They should be turning south to fly through the Strait of Dover about now… And there it happened, the starboard wing dipped to point at the fog layer below and the world beneath rotated.
Only a minute or so later Donald twitched with shock, as if he had nodded off and then snapped alert. There had been a flash somewhere nearby. He noticed a cluster of dark puffs falling behind the flying boat, then another cluster appeared and he heard a bang behind him, like someone whacking the planking of the hull with a hammer. When he swivelled around in his seat, he was amazed to see a jagged hole in the side of the hull and a corresponding hole about an inch across on the opposite side.
As he turned to face forwards again, a brilliant flash burst outside his window with a report like a shotgun, followed by wild screams from the sovereign deck overhead and a stinging pain in his right thigh. Shattered glass whirled about the cabin and a spray of wood splinters covered the front of his jacket. Blood bulged up through a rip across the top of his trouser leg. Although dazed by the blast of the anti-aircraft shell, he now understood they were in breach of the so-called Naclaski law of privacy and were being quite legitimately fired upon. That damned fool of a pilot had taken them over a sovereign’s land!
The deck turned almost vertical, turfing Donald across the cabin. He bounced off the ceiling and then hit the deck on which he was crammed down by an extraordinary force seeking to drive his skull through the planks. The roar of engines cut dead. Now all he could hear was howling from overhead caused by the tornado of their speed in the bracing wires between the wings. By kneeling behind a seat and hugging it, he managed to hold himself in place long enough to see the that world and the sky were reeling around and around and the snowy layer of fog was getting closer and closer.
For all its great size and power, the flying
