"Lieutenant Caulfield. Come in."
Max straightened her uniform and stepped into the office, stood at rigid attention before the old man's desk, trying to look as tall as possible. "Sir," she said, a practiced hoarseness in her voice.
"Sit down, Maxwell."
"Yes sir." She sat, erect in the chair, looking at him expectantly.
"You know we haven't seen von Preiss in the air for a while now."
"Yes sir."
"Well, now we know why. Report came in this morning that he's been seen operating at the south end of the front, near Switzerland. He's leading a small squadron, really creating a great deal of havoc. We don't honestly know if this is the prelude to something bigger or just a distraction."
"That's tough country. The mountains, the wind…"
"It is, and he's using that to his advantage. He appears out of the mountains, disappears back into them. We don't know where he's based. We don't know his routes. We don't have adequate air defenses. He's shooting down our planes, strafing our men, bombing our supplies. I need this to stop, lieutenant." The old man leaned forward in his chair. "You now have one mission and one mission only. You are to intercept and bring down the blue baron."
Max blinked. Conrad von Preiss had shot down more of her fellow pilots than entire wings of elite German aircraft. The last time she'd seen his signature blue plane, she'd barely made it back to base alive, limping home with a tattered wing and a jammed rudder. "…Sir. I'm not sure…"
"You think I should send someone else? If we have a better pilot in the service I'd like to know it."
Max swallowed. "No, sir."
"Alright." He handed her a sheaf of papers. "Fly down alone, nobody's to know where you're going. Do your best to blend in with the air detachment down there and hopefully you can take the baron by surprise. Dismissed."
Max stood, saluted, turned on her heel, and strode out.
She hadn't planned on this when she'd joined up, cutting her hair, strapping her chest, deepening her voice. She'd wanted to fly and they'd put her in a plane. Had they really been fooled, or had the British Army, desperate for capable pilots, joined her in the convenient fiction of Maxwell Caulfield? It didn't matter now. Her success had sealed her fate. She was going to confront the baron directly in challenging, unfamiliar terrain.
She was going to die over the mountains of eastern France.
Max was flying blind. She could barely even see her two wingmen in the dense cloud that surrounded her biplane, cold and damp biting at the exposed parts of her face between her goggles and her helmet. She checked her watch. Two minutes. She angled downwards, descending gently until, all at once, she was in open air, with a clear view of the land below.
The mountains were not particularly high, nothing like the fearsome Alps farther south, but they were steep, an endless roll of long, forested ridges and narrow valleys with scattered pastures and farms. It was arduous going on land, and a plane could easily dip behind a hill and disappear from sight. Flying below the peaks was dangerous; a miscalculation, a sudden gust of wind, and you could run out of open air very fast.
Von Preiss's pattern so far had been to embrace the danger, sneaking through the hills to emerge without warning above the heads of Allied troops, dispense all of his ordinance, and disappear via a different route. Allied air patrols had kept to middle altitudes, with good visibility but also, highly visible themselves. When they'd encountered the baron, he'd always seemed to see them first, climbing to meet them and either driving them off or shooting them down.
Max had taken to higher altitudes, and followed the weather, grateful for a spell of overcast days. She concealed herself in the clouds, dropping out periodically to scan the ground, then climbing back into hiding. If she could avoid being seen by the baron until she was right on top of him, he'd have no way to run or hide and he'd be at a massive tactical disadvantage. All she had to do was find him.
Looking down, she quickly scanned the horizon, then the valleys all around her, counting down as she did so. She would stay visible for no more than ten seconds. Nothing. She glanced back at her wingmen, also looking. No signals from them. She pulled back on the stick, rose easily into the cloud, checked her watch.
It had gone on like this for days, a tiresome monotony of steady engine drone in gray fog. The baron had attacked to the north. To the south, directly along the Swiss border. He was everywhere and nowhere. Max checked her watch. Two minutes. Descend again, look around.
There! Low against the hills, coming through a pass to the northeast. A wing of German biplanes, the leader painted signature blue. Max felt a tingle of adrenaline as her heart began thumping hard in her chest. She had worked for this, had wanted it, and was absolutely terrified of what would happen next. But she had no choice; if not her, then who? She signaled her wingmen by wobbling her plane slightly, quickly changed her heading, and rose again into the cloud. She checked her watch.
She estimated three minutes flying time before she was directly above the baron. They had even numbers, and her wingmen knew what to do. Distract the baron's own wing, leave the blue plane to her. Their own upgraded S.E.5's were faster than the German Fokkers, and her wing was ordered to retreat immediately if either Max or the baron went down. The other German planes were targets were of no importance, at least today.
She stared at her watch, counted down. Time. She descended, looking again for her target. There, below, still cruising, hugging the land. She pitched into a steep dive, and her wingmen followed, coming down high and fast to the rear flank of the Germans. Max smiled to herself. This might even work, if she was lucky. She tended to be lucky.
And then they saw her. Instantly the baron's wingmen left formation, breaking left and right, as all three planes throttled up and began to climb. The move was designed to draw Max's wing apart, reducing their tactical advantage, and it worked. Max's wingmen spread out, each picking and aiming for their own target. Max stayed focussed on her quarry.
She closed fast, speeding downward, and just as she closed to firing range and reached for the trigger, the baron banked with sudden ferocity and dove away, toward a looming mountaintop. He gave her no choice but to follow, flying directly at solid ground, suddenly regretting her high airspeed. She grimaced, pulled the throttle back sharply. It would be a dogfight.
As they began to dance, the baron's tactic become clear; he would use the mountain, diving and skimming past peaks and boulders, missing by what seemed like inches, before bounding upward again, rolling to make an attack on his pursuer. A less confident pilot would not dare follow, and would soon find himself in the blue plane's sights.
Max was not a less confident pilot. Against her instincts, she followed the baron in his insanity, finessing flight stick and throttle, engine alternately docile and roaring, swinging from near stall to gut-twisting dive and back again. Their wingmen disappeared in the distance, Max's own men successfully drawing off the Germans. It seemed protecting the baron was not a priority; they must have believed him invincible against a single adversary. As, so far, he had always been.
Max hoped to beat the odds. She stuck to the Baron like glue, trusting that there was nothing his latest-model Fokker could do which her plane could not. As far as anybody knew it was still true, but the equation had changed more than once over the course of the war. Max remembered the first reversal bitterly, overconfident British and French pilots cut down by new German Eindecker monoplanes. Before long they had sensibly returned to biplanes, but they were good ones, and gave the Allies quite a fight.
As her pursuit continued, the baron grew ever wilder, taking risks. Leveling off, he suddenly banked, seeming to hurl himself directly into the mountain. Max sensed a feint and slowed, keeping an even course, and she was right. The baron reversed his bank, pulling hard away from the mountain, hoping to throw his pursuer off balance. Instead, he crossed the sights of her gun. Max squeezed the trigger, the forward Vickers hammering away in front of her, and she smirked as she saw a small spray of debris from her target, followed immediately by the scent of raw petrol.
Now it was only a matter of time. The legendary blue baron, scourge of the Allied air forces, hadn't expected to meet a British ace in an anonymous plane out here on the edge of the war, and now, his fuel pouring away, he would go down on the French side of the front. Max eased off the throttle, still following, expecting the baron to break eastward, toward the border.
Instead, he pulled up hard, rising into a vertical stall at maximum throttle, then tipping over and backward, falling, upside-down. A suicide move that would kill his engine and set his nose, suddenly, pointing toward Max.
Too late, she swore, yanked hard on the stick, her plane lurching as the baron's twin machine guns rattled, perforating Max's wings, and then, with a bang, her engine locked, her propeller slamming to a halt. The engine's roar, ever-present in years of flying, fell silent, and Max heard something she'd never heard before. The sound of the wind, whistling over the fuselage.
There was a rumor among her fellow pilots that some German aircraft had begun to be fitted with ejector seats and parachutes. As she lost speed and approached a stall which would drop her from the sky like a stone, Max sorely wished the Brits were a little further along with this new technology. She fought the controls, forcing the nose down, trying to maintain enough speed to keep the plane aloft. As she did so, she looked around, desperate for flat ground where she could attempt a landing.
Off to one side, the baron's plane tumbled, spinning wildly, his engine also dead. He was dropping fast, essentially in free fall, but as Max watched the plane straightened out and headed for a wide stream bed, not far away.
It looked like the only place within reach which wasn't covered in trees. Max cursed again. She was going down in the middle of nowhere and, if she survived the landing, the blue baron would be waiting for her. She turned her plane, reluctantly gliding after him. She had greater altitude; she realized she could probably strafe him on the way down and kill him in the cockpit.
But that wasn't how she operated. She'd succeeded at her mission, they were still in France, far from the front. One way or another, he was not going to fly for the Germans again. That ought to be enough.
She watched as the blue plane, silent, glided into the stream bed, bouncing on a stretch of flat rock, rocking wildly. As it slowed, the lower right wing clipped a stray tree limb, and the plane spun right, slamming to a halt against the trees. Almost immediately, a figure lithely hopped down from the cockpit and disappeared into the forest.
Unfortunately for Max, the tail of the baron's plane was now in her way, projecting into the limited open space. She'd have to come down earlier, where there was less room, and hope could stop before smashing into his plane. Which was, by now, surrounded by spilled fuel.
She concentrated, imagining her precise path through the space in front of her. As soon as she cleared the last tall tree, she dropped hard, risked planting the nose, bounced her landing gear against the ground. She forced the plane down, braking hard.
It wasn't enough. She flinched as the two planes collided, delicate wood and fabric structures shredding into a tangled mess around her. Her landing gear collapsed, pitching her propeller and heavy engine down onto the rocky surface below, and Max saw the the thing she least wanted to see. Something must have sparked on the stone, because all at once she was surrounded by flames.
It was not, in fact, Max's first time in the cockpit of a burning aircraft. Highly flammable under normal circumstances, one entire side of her plane was now entwined with the baron's own fuel-soaked wreck. She didn't have much time, but she knew her flight suit — dense, weatherproof fabric lined with fur — would protect her. Briefly. She grabbed her satchel of emergency supplies and hurled them away, clear of the flames. Then she awkwardly levered herself up and out, falling the distance to the ground and landing painfully on her back, in a pool of burning petrol.
She scrambled up, the arms, legs, and gloves of her suit now on fire, and dashed a short distance away before dropping again, rolling, and stripping off the burning garments and fuel-soaked helmet. Fortunately the shirt and trousers she had on underneath had not ignited. She crawled away from the conflagration, panting. "Ah," she gasped, rolling from her knees onto her back. "Ah, bugger."
A shadow fell across her. Her eyes flicked up to the barrel of an automatic pistol, aimed steadily at her head. And behind it, Conrad von Preiss, the blue baron himself.