A Solitary Cyclist

She had to pedal at speed so her greatcoat's tails would not flap into the spokes. Given the state of the roads near the lines, she came off her bicycle at least once an hour. With vampire resilience, she felt hardly anything from her tumbles. Most bruises faded inside a minute. Kate would have enjoyed the rush if the air here had not tasted of ash and death. When life passes, blood spoils instantly like milk left in the sun. The stench of rancid blood hung miasma-like.

The lanes were narrow and shell-holed. She wove from side to side, skirting cavities. The old signposts were mainly blasted to splinters and replaced by sheets of painted tin wired to bushes. If further bombardment disturbed the bushes, the makeshift signs wound up pointing in wrong directions. Pre-war maps no longer resembled reality. Old routes were buried under rubble, new ones driven through fields. The courses of rivers were altered by the random landscaping of a million tons of shelling.

Still dogging Edwin, she looked for Maranique. Her reporter's sense, sometimes finer even than her vampire senses, twitched.

As the sun went down, a flight of aeroplanes passed over. She was on the right road: the machines came from the direction where she had guessed the airfield was.

The war in the air was changing. That was the story she had scented. Mata Hari had inclined her to look to the skies. Edwin had confirmed the insight.

She braked and touched one boot to the ground, then looked up through her thick glasses, afraid she would see black crosses -n the undersides of wings. The blue, white and red roundels of the Royal Flying Corps (soon to be reconstituted as the Royal Air Force) told her she was at least not completely lost.

Pilots called their aeroplanes 'kites' or 'birds'. The wire and canvas contraptions were pitifully frail, ready to fly apart in a stiff crosswind let alone heavy fire. She was not convinced the things were safe even for peacetime use. At RFC flying schools, pupils were called 'Huns' because they wrecked more aeroplanes than the enemy. Half as many pilots were killed in training accidents as in combat. Wilbur and Orville Wright had much to answer for. Then again, her father had been certain bicycling would be the death of her.

She waved up but could not see any of the pilots return the greeting. It was possible this patrol was to do with the story. Once she lit on something, everything suddenly seemed connected, a dozen chance remarks and incidents forming a pattern.

The popular press in which Kate Reed was not published, typified by that fathead ass Horatio Bottomley's bloodthirstily patriotic witterings in John Bull, invariably called Allied pilots 'gallant' and 'dauntless'. Watching them soar away to probable death, it was hard to disagree. There was such a spirit in the fighting men. It was a crime the planners and the propagandists were so intent on wasting it with sheer carnage.

The patrol flew towards the lines in a neat arrow like a flight of ducks heading south for the winter.

Her position was not without risk. A reporter who seeks the truth is easily mistaken for a spy. GHQ concealed its blunders from press and public as keenly as it concealed its stratagems from the enemy. Like Mata Hari, Kate was forced to use her wiles, to cultivate friendly officers, to snoop where she was not wanted, to winnow out the germane from the gossip. General Mireau, for one, would be happy to see her go to the stake. She wondered if he still had his Jesuit after her. She would have to be wary: holy water and rattling rosaries were a joke, but silver bullets would be impossible to laugh off.

She wore the arm-band of an ambulance driver, which won her admittance to most military facilities. This close to the front, men were so pleased to see a female, even one whose attractions were as meagre as hers, that she could pass unquestioned in a mess-hall or a field hospital.

To the east, star-shells exploded, casting jagged shadows. Night-fighting had been fierce the last few weeks. The Germans did not want to give the Allies time to think. The patrol was over No Man's Land. She wished them well and pedalled on.

Maranique was home to Condor Squadron, which was an instrument of the Diogenes Club. Kate had gleaned that much from a canny interpretation of official releases before she even sneaked a look at Edwin's orders. She had spent an evening in the Paris HQ of the General Quartermasters' Staff, tracing requisitions and transfers, inferring a history of the squadron through the assembly of men and materiel. Charles Beauregard was often found in the paper trail. She was not surprised to learn how often he got what he wanted, even against the wishes of distinguished officers.

The road ahead was utterly devastated, hedgerows blasted, fields madly ploughed. Duckboards had been put down but most of them were smashed too. She got off her bicycle and hefted it easily on her shoulders. She hardly remembered being warm and weak, though she usually avoided ostentatious public displays of vampire strength. She stepped on to the impossible ground and waded on. Within a few steps, she was up to her puttees in grainy mud, extricating her feet with obscene sucking sounds.

All the aces joined Condor Squadron, but it was a sidestep in many a glamorous career. Considering their combined tallies before this assignment, Cundall's Condors logged comparatively few individual victories. For glory-hounds - it was naive to think no Allied pilot was as intent on racking up a score as Baron von Richthofen - it must be frustrating. The squadron must be engaged on work of such paramount military importance that the propaganda value of medal-laden valour had to be set aside.

She again found something resembling a road and got back on her old Hoopdriver. It was a man's bicycle, supposedly too big for her, but she was comfortable with it. Her first journalism had been published in the cycling press, back in the '80s. She was sometimes nostalgic for her warm days, when the right of women to wear bloomers on bicycle excursions was a fiercely contested issue. It was ridiculous to think of the period before the Terror as a sunlit idyll, but there had been something of comfort in trivialities now lost.

She came upon a sign ordering those without the relevant papers to turn back. The only paper in her voluminous pocket was wrapped around a package of blood sherbet. She kept notes in her head, where no one could get at them.

The road was marked with poles that reminded her of the stakes of which Count Dracula was so fond. They were mostly surmounted not with fleshless skulls but with battered German helmets. Another sign, in French and English (but not German), said, 'Unauthorised persons will be taken as spies and shot'. Kate was sure they meant it. Bottomley said journalists who criticised the conduct of the war should be executed as traitors.

One of Kate's sources, Colonel Nicholson, had been given the duty last September of escorting the great bloodsucking Bottomley on a tour of the front. He said the temptation to suggest the editor perch on the firing step and put his head in the way of a silver bullet was nigh irresistible. Having come as near as four thousand yards to the fight, Bottomley returned to the warmth of London and loudly trumpeted his own bravery at sharing the condition of 'our glorious lads' in the trenches. She remembered his article with a stomach-deep sickness: 'SOMEWHERE IN - HELL! What I have Seen - What I have Done -What I have Learned - The War is Won!' Most 'glorious lads' would cheerfully slip a bayonet into his belly rather than read another article full of sentiments like 'from Field Marshal Commander-in-Chief, right down to the rawest Tommy in the trenches, there is but one spirit - that of absolute optimism and confidence'. Nicholson told her, 'We put him into a gasmask for the purpose of a photograph and for a moment I had hopes that he would die of apoplexy.'

Laid over the war between the Allies and the Central Powers was a war between the old men and the young, between the politicians and tub-thumpers on both sides and the soldiers sent out to die. Kate had better cause than most to despise Dracula and recognised the need to check his ambitions, but many as bad held high office in Britain. That men like Charles Beauregard and Edwin Winthrop still served King Victor was fragile cause for hope.

She had thought a great deal of Edwin since their wager. They had made some contact she still did not quite understand. She wondered if he ever thought of her.

Coming upon a weary sentry, she meekly said 'Red Cross' to him as if it were the password of the day. He saluted and let her through without asking to see her fabled papers. Given the hell- raising disposition pilots were rumoured to have, women far more questionable than she must be coming on and off the field at all hours.

She found a shed and leaned her bicycle against it. Mud had spattered her entirely and was inches thick on the tops of her boots. Even her glasses were speckled with brown liquid. She was scarcely in a condition to beguile secrets from tight-lipped heroes.

The airfield still looked like a farm. Barns augmented by corrugated metal structures served as hangars. Just after nightfall, there were quite a few personnel milling about. In what had been a stableyard, two mechanics toiled on a Sopwith Pup which was leaking oil in a steady gush.

Kate walked past purposefully as if on important business, as indeed she was. One man whistled, testimony to the length of time he had spent away from home. She smiled back, hiding teeth.

She found the field itself. The patrol she had seen would have taken off from here. A knot of men stood near the farmhouse that must be their billet, watching the night skies.

It hit her that this must be dreadful, waiting and knowing the odds were bad. She had heard it was possible to become accustomed to the steady attrition as men you served with were killed off. It must take a fearful toll on anyone's sanity.

The group gradually broke up. First one man drifted off, then another, then all of them. They looked self-consciously at the ground, trying to fight the compulsion to gaze forever at the sky. Then they kicked a bit, muttered with mock cheer, and slipped back into the house. A gramophone croaked out 'Poor Butterfly'.

She felt, as she rarely did, that she was intruding, and wondered if she should get back to her ambulance unit. When she wasn't snooping, she helped with the wounded. The sobering duty reminded her why it was important to find and tell the truth.

'Miss,' said a deep voice. 'Should you be here?'

He had come up behind her without making a sound audible even to her bat-sharp ears. That marked him as a professional creeper. It was Sergeant Dravot, the hatchet man of the Diogenes Club.

She spread her hands in surrender and tried a mousy smile.

'I'm waiting for my soldier boy to come home,' she said, trying to sound like a tart.

Dravot looked up at the sky and, without a trace of expression, said, 'So am I.'