The Warlord of the Air (21 page)

Men in brown uniforms with wide-brimmed hats appeared from behind the wall and moved amongst the corpses, checking that none lived.

“Americans!”

“To be fair,” General Shaw said tonelessly, “they were acting at the request of the Siam government. That scene took place a few miles from Bangkok. American troops are helping the government to keep order. There have been a number of minor rebellions in some parts of Siam recently.”

The next scene was an Indian township. Concrete huts were arranged in neat rows for as far as the eye could see.

“It’s deserted,” I said.

“Wait.”

The camera took us along the desolate streets until we were outside the township. Here were soldiers in British red. They were wielding spades, heaping bodies into trenches filled with lime.

“Cholera?”

“There was cholera—typhoid—malaria—smallpox—but that was not why the whole village died. Look.”

The camera moved in closer and I saw that there were many bullet wounds in the bodies.

“They marched on Delhi without passes to enter the city limits,” said Shaw. “They refused to halt when ordered to do so. They were all shot down.”

“But it could not have been an official decision,” I said. “An officer panicked. It sometimes happens.”

“Were the Russians, the Japanese, the Americans panicking?”

“No.”

“This is how your kind of power is used when others threaten it,” said Shaw. I looked at his eyes. There were tears in them.

I knew something of what he was feeling. There were tears in my eyes, too.

I tried to tell myself that the films were counterfeit—played by actors to impress people like me. But I knew that they were not counterfeit.

I left the kinema. I was shaking. I felt sick. And I was still weeping.

W
e walked in silence through the tranquil City of the Dawn, none of us able to speak after what we had witnessed. We came to the edge of the settlement and looked out over the makeshift airpark. There were men there now, working on the girders for what was evidently to be a good-sized mooring mast. We saw
The Rover
still pegged to the ground in her spider-web of cables, but the bigger ship had gone.

“Where is the
Loch Etive
?” It was Korzeniowski who spoke.

Shaw looked up absently and then, as if remembering a duty, smiled. “Oh, she is on her way back. I hope her second mission will be as successful as her first.”

“Missions?” said von Bek. “What missions?”

“Her first was to shoot down the Imperial Japanese Airship
Kanazawa.
We have armed her with some experimental guns. They are excellent. No recoil at all. Always the problem with big guns aboard an airship, eh?”

“True,” said Korzeniowski. He took out his pipe and began to light it. “True.”

“And her second mission was to bomb a section of the Trans-Siberian railroad and steal the cargo of a certain Moscow-bound train. I recently heard that the cargo was stolen. If it is what I hope, we shall be able to speed up Project NFB.”

“Just was
is
this mysterious project?” Una Persson asked.

General O.T. Shaw gestured towards a large building like a factory which stood on the far side of the airpark. “Over there. A very expensive project, I don’t mind saying. But I can’t tell you any more, I’m afraid. I hardly understand it myself. Most of our German and Hungarian exiles are working on it. There are one or two Americans, too, and an Englishman—all political refugees. But brilliant and original scientists. Dawn City benefits by the tyranny imposed on curiosity in the West.”

I could not believe that he had not considered the consequences of these actions. “You have now earned the wrath of three great Powers,” I said. “You stole a British airship to destroy a Japanese man-o’-war and a Russian railway. They are bound to get together. Dawn City will be lucky if it lasts a day!”

“We still have the hostages from the
Loch Etive
,” Shaw murmured serenely.

“Will that knowledge stop the Japanese or the Russians from bombing you to bits?”

“It offers a serious diplomatic problem. The three nations must argue it over for a while. In the meantime we are finishing off our defenses.”

“Even you can’t defend yourself against the combined aerial fleets of Britain, Japan and Russia!” I said.

“We shall have to see,” said Shaw. “Now, Mr. Bastable, what did you think of my magic lantern show?”

“You convinced me that a closer watch should be kept on how the natives are treated,” I said.

“And that is all?”

“There
are
other ways of stopping injustice,” I said, “than revolution and bloody war.”

“Not if the cancer is to be burned out completely,” said Korzeniowski. “I realize that now.”

“Aha,” said Shaw, looking towards the hills. “Here comes the
Fei-chi...”

“The what?”

“The flying machine.”

“I can’t see it,” said Korzeniowski.

I, too, could see no sign of the
Loch Etive,
though I heard a drone like that of a mosquito.

“Look,” said Shaw, grinning, “there!”

A speck appeared on the horizon and the droning became a shrill whine.

“There!” He giggled in excitement. “I don’t mean an airship—I mean the
Fei-chi
—the little hornet—here she comes!” Instinctively I ducked as something whizzed over my head. I looked up. I had an impression of several windmill sails spinning at fantastic speed, of long, bird-like wings, and then it was disappearing in the distance, still voicing the same angry whine.

“My God!” said Korzeniowski, removing the pipe from his mouth and registering his amazement for the first time since I had met him. “It’s a heavier-than-air flying machine. I was sure—I was always told—such a thing was impossible.”

Shaw grinned, almost breaking into a dance in his delight. “And I have fifty of them, captain! Fifty little hornets with very bad stings. Now you see why I feel up to defending Dawn City against anything the Great Powers send!”

“They seem a bit fragile to me,” I said.

“They are a bit,” Shaw admitted, “but they can travel at speeds of nearly five hundred miles an hour. And that is their strength. Who would have time to train a gun on one of those before a
Fei-chi
was able to burst the hull of a flying ironclad with its special explosive bullets?”

“Who—how did you come by this invention?” von Bek wanted to know.

“Oh, one of my American outlaws had the idea,” Shaw returned airily. “And some of my French engineers made it practicable. We built and flew the first machine in less than a week. Within a month we had developed it into what you have just seen.”

“I admire the man who would go up in one of those,” said von Bek. “Aren’t they crushed by such speeds?”

“They have to wear special padded clothing, certainly. And, of course, their reactions must be as fast as their machines if they are to control them properly.”

Korzeniowski shook his head. “Well,” he said, “I think I’ll stick to airships. They’re altogether more credible than those contraptions. I’ve seen it—but I still can’t believe in heavier-than-air machines.”

Shaw looked almost cunningly at me. “Well, Mr. Bastable? Are you still convinced I am mad?”

I continued to stare into the sky where the
Fei-chi
had disappeared. “You are not mad in the way I first thought,” I admitted. A sense of terrible foreboding seized me. I wished with all my heart that I was back in my own time where heavier-than-air flying machines and wireless telephones and coloured, talking kinemas which came to life in one’s room were the fantasies of children and lunatics. I thought of Mr. H.G. Wells and I turned, looking towards the buildings which housed Project NFB. “I suppose you haven’t invented a Time Machine, by any chance?”

The warlord grinned. “Not yet, Mr. Bastable. But we are thinking about it. Why do you ask?”

I shook my head and did not reply.

Von Bek clapped me on the back. “You want to know where all this leads, don’t you? You want to travel into the future and see General Shaw’s Utopia!” He had been quite won over to Shaw’s side now.

I shrugged. “I think I’ve had my fill of Utopias,” I murmured.

T
hroughout the days which followed I made no attempt to escape Dawn City. The whole idea would have been pointless anyway. General O.T. Shaw’s men controlled all roads and guarded both the airships and the sheds where the new
Fei-chi
“hornets” were stored. Sometimes I would watch as the
Fei-chi
were tested by their tall, Chinese pilots—healthy, confident young men completely dedicated to Shaw’s cause, able to accept the heavier-than-air machines as I could not.

Early on I assured myself that the
Loch Etive
hostages were safe and well and I chatted with one or two fellows I had known on board her, learning that Captain Quelch had indeed died not long after being sent home to that little house in Balham where he had lodged during his leaves. Another acquaintance had died, too. In an out-of-date newspaper I read that Cornelius Dempsey had been shot in a street battle with armed policemen. Dempsey had been part of a gang of anarchists trapped in a house in East London. So far his body had not been found, but several witnesses confirmed that he had been dead when his friends carried him away. I felt sadness overwhelming me and adding to that mood of bitterness and depression which had come while I watched those terrible kinema films.

More recent newspapers brought in by Shaw’s men were full of reports of Shuo Ho Ti’s daring raids, his acts of piracy and murder. One or two of the papers saw him as “the first modern bandit” and it was they, I think, who had dubbed him “Warlord of the Air”. Certainly, while England strove to halt Russian and Japanese military airships from taking instant vengeance and the Chinese Central Government vainly attempted to stop any aerial warships entering their territory, Shaw pulled off a series of amazing raids, descending from the sky on trains, motor convoys, ships and military and scientific establishments to get what he needed. What he did not need he distributed to the Chinese population—his repainted “flagship”, now no longer the
Loch Etive
but the
Shan-tien
(Lightning) and flying his familiar crimson flags, appearing in the skies over an impoverished village or town and showering money, goods and food—as well as pamphlets telling the people to join Shuo Ho Ti, the Peacemaker, in the freeing of China from foreign oppression. Thousands came to swell the ranks of his army at the far end of the Valley of the Morning. And Shaw added more ships to his fleet, bringing merchant vessels to land at gunpoint, releasing crews and passengers, flying the captured craft back to Dawn City and there refitting them with his new cannon. The only problem was a shortage among his own followers of men trained to fly the craft. Inexperienced commanders had put their ships into danger more than once and two had been lost through incompetence. A couple of times Shaw proposed that I should become his ally and help fly a ship of my choice, but I refused, for the only reason I would board an airship would be to escape and I did not wish to indulge in piracy just so that I might find a chance of gaining my freedom.

Nonetheless there were conversations with the warlord in which he described his past to me as he continued to try to win me over.

His was an interesting story. He had been the son of an English missionary and his Chinese wife who had worked in a remote Shantung village for years until they came to the attention of the old warlord—“a
traditional
bandit” Shaw called him—of their part of the world. The warlord, Lao-Shu, had killed Shaw’s father and taken his mother as a concubine. He had been brought up as one of Lao-Shu’s many children and eventually ran away to Peking, where his father’s brother taught. He had been sent to school in England where he had been very unhappy and learned to hate what he considered the English superiority towards other races, classes and creeds. Later he went to Oxford, where he did well and began to “realize”, as he put it, that imperialism was a disease which robbed the majority of the world’s population of its dignity and the right to order its own affairs. These were English conceptions, he was the first to admit, but what he resented was that they were reserved for the English alone. “The conqueror always assumes that his moral superiority—rather than his ferocious greed—is what has allowed him to triumph.” Leaving Oxford, he had entered the army and done well, learning all he could of English military matters, then getting transferred to the Crown Colony of Hong Kong to serve in the police— for, of course, he spoke fluent Mandarin and Cantonese. He had soon deserted the police, taking with him his whole detachment of native soldiers, two steamcarts and a considerable amount of artillery. Then he had gone back to Shantung, where the warlord still ruled, and—

“There I killed my father’s murderer and took his place,” he said baldly.

His mother had died in the meantime. With his connections with revolutionists throughout the world he had conceived the idea of Dawn City. He would take from Europe what, in its pride, it rejected—its brilliant scientists, engineers, politicians and writers who were too clever to be tolerated by their own governments— and he would use it to the benefit of his China.