Raise the Red Flag Read online

  Eventually he raised his head, smiling, showing by his clean chin that no globule of jissom had gone to waste. He even opened his mouth and waggled his spotless tongue, proud of his accomplishment.

  It might have ended with that lone act. He understood that. Kane was his professional superior. Though he might accept the avid oral attentions of someone in his employ, it didn’t necessarily follow that he was inclined to reciprocate. Jonny could well be left to tend to his own painful hard-on alone. Very well. Even so, he felt a keen satisfaction. There was nothing so fine as putting reality to a longstanding fantasy, and Kane had played for some while in his lustful thoughts.

  But Kane smiled languorously and said in his harsh-mellow voice, “Bring that stiff up here, lad. I need its taste.”

  So Jonny stood up next to the couch and dutifully presented his yearning cock to Kane’s mouth. Kane was no dilettante, though perhaps his cocksucking talents weren’t quite as perfected as Jonny’s own. Twice teeth grazed his sensitive crown, but it was a small cost to pay for the privilege of filling that beautiful man’s face with his swollen staff.

  When the final throes began to overtake him, his hips thrust as if with a mind of their own. He fairly fucked that mouth, quickly losing control, until instants later he was issuing a prodigious load of semen into Kane’s maw. He wasn’t nearly as neat with the stuff as Jonny, but it was a luscious sight as he staggered back from the couch on bare soles, seeing the sparkling dewdrops he’d left on the cheeks and chin and lips and throat of the dark-haired male.

  Once more Kane smiled, with real affection, it appeared. He said, “That was a glory, boy. We will do that again, I assure you. We will have many a night ahead of us. Meanwhile, don’t give any other man a taste of what is now mine. Do we have an understanding?”

  Jonny had started to smile before Kane had spoken these words. He left the smile frozen there, as frozen as when the watchman had come along during that burglary. A deep, quiet dread touched him. Kane should not have said what he had just said, though the man surely couldn’t know what he was setting in motion with that demanding, restricting statement. Don’t give any other man a taste of what is now mine.

  Kane wanted his exclusivity, his carnal loyalty. The thought fairly turned Jonny’s stomach. It wasn’t that he didn’t still find this man appealing. But such regulations bucked against Jonny’s nature. He had no wish to be any man’s private lover. A relationship like that was like jealousy put in motion, given full dominion. He wouldn’t be able to live up to any such oath.

  Standing there with his cock oily with seed and saliva, he offered up what felt like a grotesque grin and said, “We have an understanding, Mr. Kane.”

  “Just Kane.”

  “Just Kane it is.”

  IT TURNED out one couldn’t just lie forever bare-assed beneath a ceiling fan in the swelter of a New Orleans summer. Jonny had diddled himself to thoughts of Kane on the occasion of their first sexual encounter, as well as subsequent rendezvous. He had especially enjoyed the times when the criminal kingpin took him in his fancy electricar up to his house on St. Charles Avenue. There they had indulged themselves in every carnal pleasure amidst unimaginable luxury. Crime, quite evidently, paid—and paid well.

  But after blasting fresh juice across his belly and chest, Jonny had gotten up and found Malcolm absent from the apartment. The last of evening was fading from the sky. Malcolm often came and went erratically, as the needs of his business dealings dictated.

  Jonny felt restless and so dressed and set out on his own into the French Quarter. Malcolm provided him with a little pocket money. Also he’d taken to filching the occasional note from the man’s billfold, just to keep up his larcenous instincts. For, of course, this relationship too would eventually and inevitably come to some calamitous end. Either fate or Jonny himself would devise a means of sabotaging it. But he would enjoy his situation while it was still in force.

  He dressed casually, within the parameters permitted by the climate and the lax etiquette of the Quarter. He wore a loosely weaved shirt, colorful waistcoat, light trousers, and moccasins. The streets were crowded but not busy. It was too humid for busy. Rather, people moved at the torpid pace of the city. No one was ever on time for an appointment here. Natives took this as a fact of life, and visitors usually acclimated to the off-kilter schedule.

  The city, above all, was for pleasure. Good food, fine drink, the best opiates, pretty girls and boys for every appetite. It was also violent and decidedly dangerous, but the environment fit Jonny Callahan quite snugly for this current stage of his tempestuous life.

  He’d had absinthe earlier today, but the exotic effects of the Green Fairy had nearly worn off entirely. He would indulge once again, but first, a meal. Malcolm kept precious little foodstuffs at the apartment and didn’t even have a servant to clean and cook. Jonny suspected he was using that part of whatever budget he’d been allotted by his firm to pay for Jonny’s keep.

  It was Spanish architecture that festooned the French Quarter, adding to the city’s legend as an international port of call. Everything had an informal crumbling look, as if these structures might swoon in the heat at any moment. But the commerce and municipal services carried on nonetheless. Deliveries were made. Refrigeration repairmen were forever on the move in and out of the many restaurants. Garbage was shoveled up from the streets. The people were black, yellow, white, brown, and all the hues of the Caribbean and beyond.

  A horn sounded overhead. Jonny deliberately sorted the tonality of the particular mechanical wail before looking up. Malcolm had taught him the different calls of the various airship lines that served New Orleans. It was the only information he’d ever offered up that had remotely interested Jonny.

  The great dirigible hung above the Quarter in the dusk. It did indeed belong to the shipping line he had guessed. The craft was a ribbed tube, equipped with maneuvering fins and lit with running lights. Such vessels moved cargo all across the globe now.

  He paused at a corner. There were so many good places to eat in the French Quarter it sometimes overwhelmed a person. Other casually dressed denizens swirled past him. One of these was an olive-skinned, black-haired man, and Jonny’s thoughts once again ticked back to Kane.

  Kane’s decree of exclusivity had doomed their affair, though Jonny had played along as best he could for as long as he was able. But the temptations of other males were ever-present. He liked to frequent those taverns that catered to the propensities of Sodom. They were places Kane wouldn’t go. Inevitably Jonny gave into the enchantments of random men, anonymous encounters of brief, feral passion. And just as inevitably his escapades were discovered by Kane, who flew into a rage. Jonny had only barely escaped. Kane, in a fit of fury and sorrow, had fired shots at Jonny’s fleeing back.

  Since then he had lain low. Malcolm had come fortuitously along, and Jonny had kept to his apartment as much as possible. But one couldn’t stay indoors forever. Being outside, with the hot breath of the Quarter on his flesh and the wild parade of life ever on display through these narrow fairy-tale streets, only reminded Jonny that his was a spirit that required freedom. He could not be kept, not for any length of time.

  Another blast of noise came from the sky above. This time Jonny frowned, not recognizing the mechanized bellow. People around him had stopped, he realized. With a strange trepidation, he turned his gaze upward again.

  This airship was of a different order than the previous. It was no cargo hauler. The craft was larger, far sturdier in design, with reinforced struts. Turrets were set along its flanks. Weapons glinted in the twilight, artillery pieces that no doubt could lay waste to this entire Quarter inside an hour’s time. The ship was menacing, ominous, a predator of the sky, its body breathing steam like a dragon.

  It was, of course, a Brit vessel. The goddamned Brits. Ever the world’s great power. Ever the overlord of the Americas. From Britain had come the technological booms, vast cascades of scientific and engineering advancement. The breakthrou
ghs seemed endless, adding to the strength of that nation, allowing its political and cultural and militaristic influences to touch every part of the earth.

  Generations ago, Jonny knew, there had been an attempted revolution against the Crown. But it had failed, dying on some dock in Massachusetts. Still, fantasies of a new uprising persisted in the minds of some Colonists.

  But sights like that should stop any far-fetched rebellious impulses. Just look at that bloody airship! And the Royal Airborne Fleet had dozens and dozens of those.

  Yet as the huge craft blotted out the last of the daylight, Jonny sensed the mood of the crowd around him. He heard the familiar mutterings, curses for the English, vile slurs against Herself. Complaints like these always seemed ineffectual to Jonny, the murmurings of the impotent. The Brits taxed how they pleased, enforced sovereign law with whatever level of brutality seemed appropriate at the moment, and oversaw the Americas with all the sentimentality of… well, an overseer.

  If the Colonists wanted any of that to change, they would have to do more than gripe and grumble.

  He lowered his eyes, turned smartly on his moccasined heel, and started toward the eatery he had suddenly decided to patronize this evening. He took one step, two—

  A hand seemingly fitted with iron fingers caught his elbow, held it, and squeezed, enough to bring bright pain to his arm. Before he could begin to voice his distress, the hulking shape pressed in alongside him, and against his right ear he heard: “No theatrics, Señor Callahan. You are walking this way with me, si?”

  And abruptly he did find himself walking in lockstep with the looming Mexican. He didn’t recognize the individual, though odds were he had some connection to the underworld. Certainly he was no copper, definitely not a Brit. They turned at the corner of St. Philip and marched all the way down toward Rampart Street. The Quarter’s crowds thinned considerably as they reached the small district’s periphery.

  Jonny’s mind raced. Plainly he couldn’t physically overcome this man, but if he got loose, even for an instant, he could scamper. Run. Yes, run. He would vault fences, scramble across rooftops, find his way back to Malcolm’s rooms—which he would never leave again. He had thought with the several weeks that had passed since the final incident with Kane, things would have cooled down enough for him to show himself in the Quarter. Apparently not.

  For that was all that this could mean, after all. Kane. Jealous Kane, who didn’t understand that he wasn’t for safekeeping in a box. It was all so ridiculous.

  And it might well spell the end for him. What an absurd way to go.

  But it wasn’t Kane’s ornate powder blue electricar waiting at the curb of the thoroughfare, which saw much more traffic than within the Quarter itself. The big Mexican had brought him instead to a battered, plainly decommissioned military vehicle, its armor plating rusted but its lines still sturdy. It had wire mesh across the windscreen. The bed was enclosed, and a door opened on its side.

  Jonny waited for the iron hand on his arm to slacken, but it didn’t. He was very efficiently shoved up into the truck. The door whanged shut behind. The interior smelled of the rust and damp and the scent of a cheroot. The same as Kane smoked? Jonny, standing hunkered in the dimness, kneaded his elbow to return circulation to his arm.

  “Hello?” he said in the foreboding dimness, waiting for whoever had opened the door to speak. Was he to be driven away from here? But the electric motor stayed silent.

  A light winked into existence. One of Kane’s lieutenants was sitting on an upturned crate, an electric torch in hand. Jonny’s stomach fell, though this was just confirmation of what he’d already figured. Kane, his former lover, still wanted him dead. Apparently he couldn’t even be bothered to commit the deed himself. Jonny’s eradication was to be performed here, in the back of this beat-up truck. He grimly supposed it would make disposal of his body that much easier.

  “I’m not here as a representative of your former… employer,” said the lieutenant, a man named Brixton, who had piercing blue eyes and a rough but intelligent face.

  Jonny understood the meaning behind Brixton’s pause. He’d long suspected that everyone who mattered in the crime ring knew about Kane’s sexuality, though no one spoke of the open secret.

  Clinging to an ember of hope, Jonny said, “You represent who, then? Or what?”

  “You have the chance to aid your native land. I know that doesn’t mean a shit to you, but I wanted it said. Here’s the deal. There’s a spot of thievery that needs done by steady hands. You could be one pair of those hands. The pay will delight you. The danger might dismay you. What we want is to steal that big bitch of an airship what just wafted into town tonight. The Brit job. We want to steal that and take its captain as hostage. You in?”

  TWO.

  CAPTAINCY OF a bird of the Royal Airborne Fleet had, in Hamilton Arkwright’s younger imaginings, been an achievement of unparalleled magnitude, a state of grace. He would rather helm a GB-254 Crimson Talon dirigible than occupy a seat in the Admiralty—not that anyone was offering him that. The truth was that such high-flown advancements were surely out of the reach of any “jackyank,” no matter what his skills or proven record of service.

  He had longed for command of so majestic an air vessel, striving toward the post from the first day he’d donned the naval uniform. He had been awarded no privileges for his lineage. His father and grandfather had served the Crown proudly and effectively, but he, though physically and mentally qualified, carried with him an additional factor. He had been born on American soil. His birth had taken place in a military hospital in Boston. Naturally he was still a British citizen, accorded all the rights and privileges thereof, et cetera. At least, such was his status on paper.

  But reality was somewhat separate from that, especially for one pursuing a military career. No one had ever called him a jackyank to his face. He couldn’t point to any precise instance during his service when he had explicitly experienced any discrimination. Yet somehow, he was never permitted to entirely forget his peculiar station.

  Not that he was one to complain. He had faced every challenge the Fleet put before him, and if his hurdles occasionally seemed a tad—or more—higher than for others, it was all the more satisfying when he cleared them with soldierly aplomb.

  He had persisted and persevered, and his marks had been consistently excellent. Even so, though he had completed every necessary training, he was the last in his officers group to be given a command. It might even be said that men of lesser talent and ambition were awarded a bird before he, perhaps expressly to drive home one final time the truth of who and what he was.

  Still, he would voice no complaint. Not even now, when he had come to understand the far more bitter actuality of captaincy of a GB-254 in these Colonies.

  “Mr. Drake, do we have Algiers Point Airdock on the crystal?”

  “Raising them now, sir.”

  “Advise our intent to tether. Five minutes out.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  It was the familiar crisp badinage of command. None of his well-honed bridge crew needed these orders of his. It was ritualistic. He could be in his cabin with a book and a glass of port. It was when they were out in the field that his quick decisions made the difference. In action he gave this grand craft its character, its meaning. He could imbue the vessel with what he thought were his worthy traits. The Indomitable, in his hands, became an instrument of might and justice.

  At least, most of the time. Other times….

  The airship had come in over New Orleans, directly above the notorious French Quarter. He’d had the first mate give the city a healthy blast with the horn. It was standard procedure for the Crimson Talon class to announce itself to dense local populations. Let the people know Airborne was there, always present, diligent, and watchful.

  They had been on prolonged maneuvers. The Indomitable had plied the skies above Kentucky and Tennessee. Such raw terrain it was below. The Fleet had standing orders to seek out enclaves of un
assimilated red men, or—far worse a threat, in Hamilton’s view—persistent pockets of slaveholding whites. The practice of bondage had been outlawed long before his own birth. It was England that had led the way against this most brutal form of injustice.

  His grandfather, Rowland Arkwright, had lived while the slaveholding trade was still active in England and its nascent Colonies. He wouldn’t speak of those olden times, however, except in generally reproving terms. Toward the end of his life, he had secretly confided in the young Hamilton, a boy for whom he had a strong affection. “Lad,” he said, a parchment hand upon the nine- or ten-year-old Hamilton’s shoulder, “do not give ecumenical sanction to the established practices of any given nation. Nations can be foolhardy. They can be misguided. Laws are made by men, although we pretend they come of God.”

  It was a good deal of verbiage for Hamilton’s juvenile mind to absorb, but the words had stayed with him all these years. He’d often had occasion to meditate upon them and perceive the old man’s wisdom.

  His two years at the helm of the Indomitable had given him time aplenty to wonder about the integrity of England. And about the character of these Americas. It seemed to him right and proper that all nationalistic assumptions should be questioned now and then, lest a man find himself backing an unjust system.

  “Response from Algiers Point Airdock, sir. They are ready to receive.”

  “Very good.”

  More ceremonial nonsense. But this tour had been a long one, and they had seen no small amount of action. The men were eager to disembark. Shore leave had been authorized. Hamilton would report to the duty officer at the airship field, but it was merely another formality. The report of this mission had already been printed up on board. The equipment they were able to carry on this vessel amazed him sometimes. He’d put his signature to the official account. It, in turn, would be delivered by protected courier to American Operations Headquarters in Richmond, Virginia.