Ack-Ack Macaque Page 3

  He used to find it easier. In the early days, he’d capered around like one of those cartoon characters from those shorts they sometimes screened in the ready room. A smile and a cheeky quip, and somehow the war hadn’t seemed so bad. But then his quips had dried as the death toll rose. The shrinks called it ‘battle fatigue’. He’d seen it happen before, to other pilots. They lived too long, lost too many comrades, and withdrew into themselves. They stopped taking care of themselves and then, one day, they stopped caring altogether. They took crazy chances; pushed their luck out beyond the ragged limit; and died.

  Was that what he was doing? He’d gone up against that pair of ’schmitts this morning, even though they’d had the height advantage. He should have turned and fled. If one of his squad had been so reckless, he’d have boxed their ears. He’d been fortunate to make it home in one piece, and he knew it. Was he pushing his luck? With a sigh, he dropped the soggy butt of his cigar and ground it with his boot.

  “What’s up, skipper?” The Scottish accent belonged to Mindy Morris, a new recruit to the squadron. “I heard you took a bit of a battering out there.”

  He opened his baleful eye. They were always new recruits, all these kids. Yet Mindy was one of the youngest he’d seen. She couldn’t have been much over fourteen years old.

  “Stop smiling,” he said. “If you bare your teeth at me like that, I’m liable to rip your face off.”

  The girl’s eyes whitened.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t take it personally.” He kicked a chair out for her. “It’s a primate thing. Now, sit down.”

  The Mess Officer brought over a daiquiri in a cocktail glass, which he placed on the table.

  “Will that be all, squire?”

  Ack-Ack Macaque scowled at him. “What, no bananas?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir. There’s a war on, you know. Can I get you something else instead?”

  Ack-Ack Macaque picked up the cocktail glass in his hairy hand and tipped the contents into his mouth. He smacked his lips.

  “Bring me rum.” He turned back to Mindy Morris, where she sat perched on the edge of her chair.

  “You might want to watch it with the eye contact, too,” he warned her. “If I get drunk, I might take a stare as a challenge.”

  The girl dropped her gaze to her hands, which were knotted in her lap.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  The Mess Officer returned with a bottle of rum, which he set down without a word.

  Ack-Ack Macaque said, “Now, do you want a drink, kid?”

  Mindy gave a shake of her head. She had green eyes and very short ginger hair. No make-up. Ack-Ack Macaque picked up the bottle and pulled out the cork with his teeth. He spat it onto the floor.

  “Well,” he said, “if you don’t want a drink, what do you want?”

  The girl squirmed in her chair. Her cheeks were flushed.

  “I know you lost a wingman yesterday.” She hesitated, trying to gauge his reaction. “And I hoped...”

  Ack-Ack Macaque sloshed rum into his glass. The neck of the bottle clinked against the rim. He was aware that the pilots on the surrounding tables were eavesdropping on the conversation, even as they pretended not to.

  “You hoped I’d let you fly with me?”

  Mindy swallowed hard.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen, sir.”

  Ack-Ack Macaque gave her a sceptical look. She flushed a deeper shade of crimson. “All right, all right. I’m fifteen. But I know how to fly a kite, and I know when to follow orders, and when to keep my mouth shut.”

  Ack-Ack Macaque scratched at a sudden itch. He hoped he hadn’t picked up fleas again.

  “Where are you from, Morris?”

  “Glasgow, sir.”

  “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  The girl frowned.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Ack-Ack Macaque picked a crumb of bread from the hairs on his chest, and popped it into his mouth.

  “Have you ever been in a dogfight?”

  The girl leaned forward excitedly. “No, but I’ve racked up hundreds of hours of flight experience on simula—” She stopped herself. “On training aircraft. I’ve racked up hundreds of hours on training aircraft.”

  Ack-Ack Macaque sipped his drink. He looked at the freckles on Mindy’s nose. Something about her youth made him feel very old and very tired.

  “I don’t need someone who’s just going to get themselves, or me, killed.”

  “Oh, I won’t, sir. I promise you that.” She looked up at him with eyes the colour of a summer meadow. “Please sir. This means a lot to me.”

  Ack-Ack Macaque sighed. She wasn’t the first rookie pilot to want to fly with him. After all, he was the most famous pilot in the European theatre. The kids treated him like a grizzled old gunslinger: someone against whom to measure their own skills and nerve. Over the past few months, many had tried to keep up with him, and many had died as a result. He couldn’t remember all their names. They came, flew with him for a while, and then died. Some got sloppy, others over-confident, and some were just plain unlucky. But they all died eventually, leaving no more impression on the world than if they’d never existed in the first place. All trace of them vanished. Nobody grieved for them, and he seemed to be the only one able to remember that they’d ever been there at all.

  He looked around at the young, fresh faces sat at the other tables. They could be called to fight at a moment’s notice. Many of them would die in the hours and days ahead; yet few seemed the slightest bit perturbed. They behaved as if they were on holiday: laughing, joking and flirting. Over drinks, they casually compared the number of kills they’d made as if discussing the scores of an elaborate cricket match. How could they be so blasé in the face of almost certain death? How could life mean so little to them? For all the impression they made on the world, they may as well have been shadows.

  He put down his glass and reached again for the bottle. As he poured, he looked at Mindy.

  “Do you ever feel like you’re the only real person here, and everyone else is just pretending?”

  The room fell silent. The music stopped. Mindy sat back in her chair. Her eyes leapt left and right, as if unsure what to do. Nobody else moved. Nobody breathed.

  Ack-Ack Macaque looked around at their frozen faces.

  “What’s the matter?” He lowered the bottle to the table. “What did I say?”

  Then, growing closer, he heard the bass thrum of enemy aircraft engines. An airman burst into the tent, half into his flight jacket.

  “Ninjas! A whole squadron of them!”

  Chairs scraped on the wooden floor. Their faces expressing both relief and excitement, the crowd rushed for the door, pulling on gloves and flight helmets as they went.

  Left at his table, Ack-Ack Macaque took a final swill from the bottle. The rum was as sweet and dark as coffee. Rivulets ran into the fur beneath his chin. He clamped a fresh cigar in place and gathered his holsters from the table. Through the open door, he could see the boomerang silhouettes of German flying wings lumbering across the airfield, spilling black-clad paratroopers. Chutes blossomed at the far end of the aerodrome, as a squad of ninjas tried to attack the tower, brandishing swords and submachine guns. A second wave fell towards the aeroplane hangars, armed with flame throwers and throwing stars.

  Mindy was waiting for him at the door.

  “Come on, Morris,” he said around the cigar. “It’s that time again.”

  “And what time would that be, skipper?”

  Ack-Ack Macaque drew his guns: two silver Colts big enough to shoot holes in the moon. Holding them, he felt his energy returning. A grin peeled his lips from his clenched yellow teeth.

  “Time to blow shit up.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  BATSHIT CHATROOMS OF DOGGERLAND

  11.30PM IN PARIS. On the steps of the Turkish Embassy, His Royal Highness Prince Merovech, th
e Prince of Wales, shook hands with the Turkish Ambassador and thanked him for a wonderful evening. Then, after dutifully waving for the paparazzi, he slid into the comfort of a waiting limousine.

  As the car pulled away from the kerb, he let his shoulders sag, and his smile sank back beneath the aching muscles of his face. With one hand, he undid his bow tie, and the top two buttons of his crisp white shirt. With the other, he took a bottle of cold imported lager from the mini fridge behind the driver’s seat and popped the cap. Then, cradling the bottle in his lap, he let his head rest against the cool black of the tinted window. Beyond the bulletproof, rain-streaked glass, trees lined the side of the road, and reflected streetlamps glimmered off the waters of the Seine. On the opposite bank, the Eiffel Tower reared above the trees, lit by spotlights, with both the Union Flag and the French Tricolour hanging sodden from its mast.

  The flags reminded Merovech of a line from his great-grandmother’s famous Unification speech, where she’d spoken about the way Dover and Calais had once been joined by a chalk ridge called Doggerland; and how the Seine, the Thames and the Rhine had all been tributaries flowing into a mighty river delta, the remains of which now lay submerged beneath the English Channel.

  “Our two great countries have always been linked beneath the surface,” she’d said, before going on to announce plans for the construction of a tunnel to reunite the two countries — a project which wouldn’t be completed until nearly fifteen years later, in 1971.

  She had made that speech almost one hundred years ago, and yet every school child knew it by heart. The political merger of Britain and France had been a key turning point in European history: a cause for optimism and hope on a continent still nursing the hangover from two devastating World Wars.

  Merovech took a sip from the beer bottle. Good news for Europe, yes; but not so good for him. With the hundredth anniversary of Anglo-French unification only days away, his life had become a stultifying round of yawn-worthy cocktail parties, receptions and ceremonies. He ate, slept and moved to a strict itinerary, with hardly a moment for himself. At heart, he’d always been grateful for the privileges which came with his royal title, but recently, he’d found it hard not to resent the accompanying responsibilities: the boredom and wasted time.

  Some people said he hadn’t been the same since that helicopter crash in the Falklands. Perhaps they were right?

  His trousers squeaked as he shifted position on the soft leather seat.

  His SincPhone rang. He pulled it from the inside pocket of his tux and groaned.

  “Hello, mother.”

  From the phone’s tiny screen, Duchess Alyssa’s face glared out at him. She wore a plain navy-blue business suit with a string of pearls, and a slash of red lipstick.

  “Don’t you ‘mother’ me. What’s this I hear about you missing the press conference this afternoon?”

  In the darkness, Merovech shrugged.

  “The Prime Minister was the one giving the speech. I didn’t have anything to say. They just wanted me there to make up the numbers.”

  “Nevertheless, you were supposed to be there. A prince has certain obligations, Merovech. Like it or not, while your father remains in a coma, you are his representative and heir, and it’s time you started to act like it.”

  “I had studying to do.”

  “Nonsense. I expect you were out chasing that little purple-haired floozy again, weren’t you?”

  Merovech bridled, but held his tongue. The truth was, he had been studying but, from long experience, knew he wouldn’t get anywhere by arguing. Once his mother had her mind made up about something, there was little he could do to change it.

  “Look, I really don’t have time for youthful rebellion right now. There’s too much to do. Honestly, Merovech, you’re going to be twenty years old in a few months. When are you going to start facing up to your responsibilities?”

  Merovech lowered his eyes, trying to look contrite.

  “Sorry mother,” he mumbled.

  The Duchess glared at him.

  “Whatever. I’m not prepared to discuss this any further over an unsecured line. I trust you were polite to the Turkish ambassador?”

  “He’s invited me to play golf with him next week.”

  “Very well.” She brought the phone close to her face, so that she seemed to loom out at him in the darkness of the limo. “Now get home, and get to bed. We’ll finish this talk in the morning.”

  She hung up. Merovech held the phone for a few moments and sighed. Then he folded it up, dropped it onto the seat beside him, and went back to watching the streetlights of Paris drift past the smoky window.

  Paris and London were very similar cities. They had the same stores, the same billboards. The same weather. The kids even used the same bilingual slang, or “Franglais” as they called it. Yet despite these superficial similarities, and despite having been born and raised in London, something about the neoclassical streets of the French capital—something he couldn’t quite put his finger on—made him regard the city as his home.

  When the phone beeped again, he winced, expecting another reprimand, but found instead a text message from Julie. For the past three weeks, they’d been seeing each other in secret. The message invited him to meet her in a café on the South Bank, at midnight. He read it twice, and smiled to himself as he slipped the phone back into his pocket.

  Perhaps tonight wouldn’t be a complete waste, after all.

  HE REACHED THE café half an hour later, wearing an old red hoodie and a pair of battered blue jeans. He had the brim of a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, shading his eyes. He’d read somewhere that ninety per cent of facial recognition depended on the hair and eyes, and he hoped that by keeping the brim of his cap low, he’d remain anonymous. So far, no-one on the rain-soaked streets had paid him the slightest attention, and he wanted it to stay that way.

  The café stood, shouldered between two taller buildings, on a narrow street south of the river, across the water from the flying buttresses and gothic exuberance of Notre Dame, and a few doors down from the famous ‘Singe-Vert’ nightclub, where the Beatles had cut their teeth in the early 1960s, playing a formative two year residency before returning to England to record their first single.

  Inside, the place was quiet, even for a rainy November Sunday in Paris. He shook out his umbrella. The dinner crowd had gone and only the solitary drinkers remained. A radio behind the counter played spacey Parisian electronica: low, dirty beats and breathy female vocals. The whole place smelled of coffee and red wine. Steam from the silver espresso machine fogged the mirror behind the counter. A sign on the café’s glass door advertised free WiFi. A small TV at the end of the counter showed a news channel. The sound was off and the screen too far away for him to read the headline ticker. All he could see were the pictures: troops from China, India and Pakistan facing each other across the windswept borders of Kashmir. Another murder victim in London. UN helicopters plucking survivors from the floods in Thailand.

  The café’s proprietor was a bored-looking woman in her late fifties, with thick, dark eyebrows and a mole on her cheek. If she recognised him as he came in, she gave no sign.

  The walls of the café were covered in framed photographs of old-fashioned Zeppelins from the 1930s, and the newer, much larger, modern skyliners.

  Working together in the decades following their unification, and partly in response to pressure from the Americans, who were less than thrilled by the alliance, Anglo-French engineers built a new generation of lighter-than-air behemoths. Merovech glanced at the pictures as he crossed the floor. In the last decades of the twentieth century, skyliner production had kept alive the British and French shipyards, rescuing them from a post-war drop in demand. And during the economic turbulence of the seventies and eighties, when the tantrums of the OPEC nations forced the Western world to take a long, hard look at its dependence on oil, the skyliners had really come into their own, offering cheap and relatively carbon-neutral transportatio
n. Now, with their impellers driven by nuclear-electric engines originally designed for use in orbital satellites, the big old ships still plied the world’s trade routes, unfettered by the market peaks and troughs that had so bedevilled the traditional airlines.

  Julie was sat at the table farthest from the door, against the back wall. She looked up from her coffee as he approached.

  “Did you get away okay?”

  Julie Girard was a native Parisian and a fellow politics and philosophy student at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University. She had purple hair. She wore jeans and a sweater under her anorak. He wanted to kiss her. Instead, he slipped into the opposite chair and said, “I went out through a service entrance.”

  “They will be angry.”

  He gave a shrug. “What can they do? They can’t keep me locked away forever.”

  Julie glanced around the café. Her shoulder bag hung from the back of her chair. As she moved her head, he caught the glint of silver music beads in her ears.

  “But is it safe for you to be out like this, on your own?” She looked worried. “I did not think. I should not have asked you—”

  A candle burned on the table, little more than a stub jammed into the neck of a wax-streaked wine bottle. He reached around it and took her hand.

  “I’m not on my own. I have you.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “And what good am I going to be if someone comes at you with a gun?”

  He squeezed her fingers. They were cool and dry. His were wet and cold from the rain.

  “No-one’s going to come at me with a gun.”

  “You don’t know that. Look at what happened to your father.”

  His jaw tensed. He let go of her hand, and sat back in his chair.

  “I can’t live in fear of terrorists, Julie. If I do, they’ve already won.”

  She ran her index fingernail around her coffee cup’s rim.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just had to see you. It’s been nearly a week.”