by Lou Cameron
‘Don’t you ever get off that subject, ma petite?’
‘Not often. But you’re right. Let’s just kill those ants down there before we discuss pussy anymore. Why are we going so slow?’
‘We’re not. Our air speed is almost twenty kilometers an hour. But the wind’s against us. So our ground speed is perhaps six or eight. Are you prepared to lob the bombs over the side when I tell you? I do not wish to make too many passes with that big Yank down there somewhere with a machine gun!’
‘Poof, you told me we are out of range at this altitude.’
The French pilot pursed his lips and said, ‘Yes and no. Bullets can reach this high, although spent and tumbling. But it would not take many rips in that bag above us to make life difficult. I wish we did not have to worry about ground fire. The higher we attack from, the harder it will be to hit anything!’
‘We’ve brought plenty of bombs, and there are more back home if need be. Just get me above those silly Scotchmen, damnit!’
Marcel tried, steering over the last of the swamp to line up on the tiny settlement below. Then he gave a startled gasp as, dead ahead, what looked like a great gray jellyfish soared skyward from a clearing in the jungle beyond the settlement!
He said, ‘Sacre bleu! Where on earth did they get a free balloon!’
Inez picked up a rifle as she asked, ‘Is that what that is? How crude! It looks like a patchwork of hastily sewn sailcloth.’
‘It probably is. Getting its lift from that stovepipe running up into it from the basket below. But I must say that Yank is good at thinking on his feet! Building a hot air balloon is not too difficult, given a sail loft and plenty of willing hands. But how could he have whipped one up so fast?’
‘Who cares? Just get me in range with this rifle and I’ll send it right back down where it came from!’
But as Captain Gringo and Gaston reached their altitude in their own crude version of air power, Marcel yanked the tiller ropes to veer away, saying, ‘Eh bien, I have no intention of getting in range of that other balloon, madame! We have power, but they have a machine gun!’
Inez wasn’t used to being disobeyed. She swung the muzzle of her rifle to cover her pilot as she insisted, ‘Fly over the lost colony so I can bomb it flat, you weak-kneed pussy licker!’
, ‘Madame, we are already closing with them! We are almost within range and, regardez! That is a machine gun they are training on us now!’
Inez was imperious and perhaps insane, but not that insane. She asked grudgingly, ‘Can’t we simply circle around them?
Marcel gasped with relief and said, ‘Mais of course. They, unlike us, have no choice but to drift with the wind. Let us simply avoid them until the trades carry them away and then—’
Then Captain Gringo, proving that great minds ran in the same channels; opened up at long range with his Maxim. He’d known from the beginning he’d only get one pass at the dirigible and had only hoped Marcel would take a while to figure this out.
Swaying wildly in his own basket, the soldier of fortune aimed higher than the other gas bag, hoping to hit it with plunging fire. He did – some. A few rounds punched down through the gas-filled envelope to make it leak both above and below. But as he and Gaston were carried helplessly across its stern, he feared he hadn’t punctured it enough to matter.
Then the stubborn Inez snapped, ‘What are you doing, you fool?’ as her pilot killed their engine.
He said, ‘We are leaking gas. Mais do not worry. We have enough lift to get home safely. The wind is carrying us back the way we came, hein?’
‘It’s carrying that other balloon the same way, damnit!’
‘I see that. Mais what of it? They are out of range and have two choices. They can simply sail on or kill their burner and land with us, on your well-guarded estate, see?’
‘I see we are drifting ever farther from those squatters I want evicted! Never mind about those fools in the other balloon. Let us make another bomb run across New Dunmore!’
‘We can’t this morning! I dare not risk restarting our engine amid all this gas, ma petite!’
Inez sniffed and said, ‘I smell no gas. The winds up here will surely blow it away from us in any case, no?’
‘Mais non. We, and the odorless hydrogen, are drifting with the wind at the same speed! Trust me. I told you when you recruited me in Paris I knew more about this business than that greasy little Brazilian who was taking all the credit for my work. I can free-balloon us safely back to your hacienda. I can have the envelope above us repaired in no time. Then we simply refill it and come back to do the job safely. The ingenious Captain Gringo has, as they say, shot his wad, non?’
‘Hmm, I wonder if he’s really as tall as he looks. But let’s not worry about that right now. What is to prevent him and that other Frenchman from trying the same disgusting trick every time we fly over?’
Marcel laughed and asked, ‘How? You can see for yourself he is already over your land, Mais unfortunately, too smart to land there. When they do come down, it will be far off in the jungle somewhere. I assure you we can have our own machine back in the sky long before those soldiers of fortune could hope to raft back down the river, even if they manage to land near it!’
Marcel was right, of course. In the hot air balloon Captain Gringo had had the lassies of New Dunmore stitch together overnight without mentioning it to too many others, they were coming to the same dismal conclusion.
They were floating over the Gomez hacienda in an eerie silence, since the wind carrying them didn’t have to whistle through their rigging. Down below, a dog was barking up at them.
Gaston asked dryly, ‘Would you mind dropping me off at the next corner? I am getting seasick.’
Captain Gringo growled, ‘I think you mean airsick. We can’t go down just yet, and damn, I wish that other balloon would blow closer.’
‘How can it, since we both seem to be enjoying the same sea breezes?’
‘That’s what I just said. Maybe I can taunt them into firing at us. I’m pretty sure they’re leaking gas.’
He braced the Maxim and fired another burst. The range was impossible, and none of his rounds went anywhere near the other air craft. He saw he was right about them leaking gas when they tossed ballast over the side to stay aloft. But nobody way over yonder seemed dumb enough to fire back.
There had to be a better way. Captain Gringo dropped below the rim of their basket, braced the Maxim in a corner, and took out a cigar to light. Then he removed a bundle of dynamite sticks from a burlap sack Gaston had assumed was ballast, stood back up, and, using the cigar clenched between his teeth to light the fuses, proceeded to lob dynamite over the side.
Down below, livestock, plantation workers, and a big flock of egrets took off in every direction, although he could see that in truth he wasn’t doing nearly much damage as he wanted to. The silent dirigible balloon was drifting closer to the main house and outbuildings down there. But he and Gaston were at least about to pass over a huge barnlike structure of unfinished lumber. So he said, ‘That must be the dirigible hanger Rosa told us about!’ and heaved two sticks at once just for luck.
One exploded harmlessly a few yards from the gaping end of the hanger. The other bounced and went on in. The whole place evaporated in a huge ball of flame and flying toothpicks, rocking their free balloon sickeningly as the shock wave reached them.
Gaston sobbed, ‘Must you be so boisterous?’ as he clung to the rigging for dear life.
It upset the willful Inez in the other air craft, too. She hissed, ‘Oh no! I won’t have it! It’s not fair! We were supposed to bomb them from the air! They were not supposed to bomb us from the air! After them, Marcel! We must shoot them down!’
The Frenchman shook his head and told her she was crazy. She proved it by shoving him aside and yanking the starter rope.
Inez shouldn’t have done that.
From their own basket a mile or more away, the soldiers of fortune were amazed but not at all upset to
see the enemy flying machine turn into an even bigger ball of lemon-yellow flame and burning shreds of fabric!
Mixed well with air, the hydrogen in Marcel’s gas bag exploded with more force than the tanks in the hanger had. The basketwork gondola below was torn in two by the downward blast and spilled its contents almost directly over the Gomez house. Captain Gringo noted how both falling and flailing human figures were wrapped in burning clothing. From the way the one in skirts was screaming, she was no doubt in a hurry to hit the ground.
However Inez felt about falling a quarter mile with her ass aflame, she hit hard, in her own backyard, without doing any damage to anyone or anything else. Marcel went through the tile roof to splatter on the tile floor inside. The heavy engine just made a big puff of dust as it landed in a corral. Most of the bombs they’d been carrying landed more or less harmlessly as well. But two followed Marcel through the big red roof, and judging from the way said roof flew skyward like terra cotta confetti, little Rosa was now an heiress who wouldn’t have to worry about handling her Papacito anymore.
Captain Gringo wasn’t about to land anywhere near the stomped-on ant’s nest he’d just created below. So he turned up the oil burner to give them more lift.
As he grinned at Gaston, the Frenchman sighed and said, ‘One assumes you smoked corn silk when your elders were not looking, you naughty child. Where did you get that dynamite, and how dare you invite me to go up in your balloon without telling me I was sitting on it!’
Captain Gringo said, ‘Oh, that’s right. You were so busy playing house with Yoyo last night that I had to do all the work. I got the dynamite from under the house before I went on down to the sail loft to make sure the lassies finished our gas bag in time.’
‘I know where we got this très shabby laundry bag full of smoke. Get back to the dynamite. You say it was under the house I was playing house in? How did it get there, and how did you know it was there?’
‘Rusty Lemmon put it there, of course. Old Marcel wasn’t all that accurate with his homemade bombs. Sandy Campbell and his family were blown up from the ground under the cover of an air raid. Lucky for us, Rusty hadn’t had time to wire the house we were quartered in yet. We were wired to blow up today!’
‘Sacre goddamn, feeding the treacherous cochon to crocodiles was too good for him! Mais what made you suspect all this, you clever species of rascal?’
‘Yoyo told me.’
‘She did? Mon Dieu, I know you had her first, but she might have mentioned it to me as we were making love right above Rusty’s intended and très nasty surprise, non?’
‘Oh, she didn’t know about it. It was that copper detonating wire she salvaged from the ruins of the Campbell house that tipped me off. I didn’t make the connection until I began to suspect we had a spy among us. The other side knew too much to be just guessing, see?’
‘Oui, but I must say you guess well too, Dick. Obviously, your guesses about that bagpipe and Rusty being the only serious Indian trader made sense, mais fess up. Was not your accusation at least partly a bluff?’
Captain Gringo shook his head and said, ‘Not after Wee Angus told me his people didn’t grow their own chocolate. The only way a general store can sell chocolate cheaper than coffee, in Central America for God’s sake, is to have a source even closer to home, so—’
‘Never mind about the rest, Dick. Have you noticed how high we seem to be at the moment? We are over the jungle well west of the Gomez grant, and I wish to go home to play with my Yoyo now.’
‘Take it easy, you horny little basser. I didn’t get any at all last night, and do you hear me bitching? As long as we’re up here, we may as well have a look around. Don’t you have any curiosity?’
‘Oui, I wish to discover if Yoyo takes it Greek style, and the little Spanish girl you just rid of a wicked stepmother may be grateful too. I know what is down there below us, you poor imitation of a soaring buzzard. Regard, I see nothing but tree tops, no doubt avec snakes, wild Indians, and other annoyances. No shit of the bull, Dick, I want to go down, not even higher!’
Captain Gringo ignored him for the moment as he gazed all around. A volcanic cone nobody had named or put on the map yet rose impressively to their north. But there were no other really imposing hills around. He saw a broken range of unimportant humps between them and a silvery horizon that had to be the Pacific. A whitewater stream below was running northwest rather than northeast, now.
He said, ‘Son of a bitch! There’s hardly any watershed at all down there, This stretch of the isthmus is a lot flatter than it is up where they’ve already started the canal! I wonder why they started up near Panama City when it looks so much easier down here!’
Gaston spat over the side and opined, ‘Perhaps they preferred to survey through friendlier jungle. How were they to know the lay of the land down here? They did not think to fly above it like idiots, and from ground level, the buggy swamps and très wild Indians discourage travel, hein?’
‘Yeah, I’m beginning to see why both the French and Germans have been working so hard to get into the air lately. That next big war everyone thinks Kaiser Billy is planning figures to be interesting as hell. Maybe it’s just as well my cavalry career was cut short. This sure beats scouting unknown territory from the top of a horse!’
‘Can we go home now? Our own more modest war would seem to be over and my poor derriere is beginning to suffer bumps of the goose, damnit!’
Captain Gringo turned off the oil burner, and explained, ‘We can go down, but not back against the trade wind. We’ll have to find an eastbound stream and do some serious rafting before you go poking in poor Yoyo’s ass. Do you think she’ll be true to you at least a couple of nights?’
‘Why should she be? She was hardly true to you when you wandered off to blow up balloons. Mais just get us down, goddamnit, and allow me to at least play with myself in less frightening surroundings!’
Captain Gringo pulled the lanyard leading up to the vent flap atop the envelope. But nothing happened. He tugged harder, then harder, until something popped and the long line dropped into the basket with them.
He said, ‘Shit, the fish-glue I had them size the sailcloth with seems to have glued our relief value shut. But don’t sweat it. We’re losing altitude anyway as the hot air cools.’
‘Not fast enough!’ gasped Gaston, adding, ‘Do you really wish to blow all the way across the isthmus and out over the Pacific?’
‘Not really,’ sighed Captain Gringo, drawing his .38.
‘Merde alors, I know we are in trouble, Dick. Mais is it not a bit early to consider suicide?’
Captain Gringo aimed his pistol up and explained, ‘I’m not going to shoot me, or even thee. A few bullet holes ought to spill that hot air above us pretty good.’
It did. Captain Gringo suspected he might have overdone it with the last few rounds as they began to go down faster than intended. He picked up the oil burner and tossed it over the side. It helped a little, but the tree tops coming up at them were coming awfully fast, and tossing out the machine gun didn’t slow them down all that much as the bottom of the basket punched through the forest canopy. So once they were plunging down through broken branches, screaming parrots, and sudden darkness, things got confusing as hell for a while.
But they seemed to be still alive and unhurt when at last the basket stopped falling – sort of.
Captain Gringo muttered, ‘What the hell?’ as he rose to look over the side of the still swaying basket. He gulped as he saw why their ‘Landing’ had been so soft after all. The forest floor was a good four stories down. Their gas bag and rigging had hung up in the tree branches above.
Gaston looked over too, and muttered, ‘Don’t you ever obey your elders, you naughty boy? Now what do we do?’
‘I’m still working on it. If we had a nice long rope, but who brings along a fifty-foot riata when he’s not punching cows?’
‘We can’t climb down the trunk of this accursed ocotea. There is not even a friend
ly strangler fig wrapped around the smooth mossy bole. Perhaps if we cut some of the lines above us?’
‘Shit, it would make as much sense to just jump! This sure is a dumb situation.’
Gaston didn’t argue. He pissed over the side, lit his own cigar and, when that didn’t make him feel any better, proceeded to curse monotonously in at least five languages.
He was still cursing a good forty-five minutes later, when Captain Gringo shushed him and murmured, ‘Company coming. Is your .38 fully loaded?’
Gaston drew his revolver, thumbed a sixth round into the usually empty last chamber, and said, ‘It is now. Did you really have to throw that machine gun away?’
Captain Gringo didn’t answer. He rechecked his own reloaded .38 and held it politely below the rim of the dangling basket as a dozen bare-assed Indians entered the clearing below to stare blanky up at them. The six-foot hardwood bows they carried looked even less friendly than their blank moon faces, which were painted all sorts of interesting colors. He knew Indians expected visitors to speak only when they were spoken to. They didn’t look like any tribesmen he could talk to in any case. An older man in the crowd below muttered to a younger one at his side. The younger one called up in Spanish, ‘El Jefe wishes for to know if you are gods or enemies.’
Captain Gringo called down, ‘Neither. Tell him we are friends from the sky.’
‘I do not think he would believe me, señor. One can see you came from the sky, but you appear to be white men, and our friend, the trader Lemmon, told us he is the only white man we can trust.’
‘We are friends of Lemmon, or we were until just before he died. We came to tell you your regular trader was dead and that now you must make new friends among the white people down the Rio Atrato, see?’
The young Indian translated and the old man seemed to get upset as hell. He shook his fist up at them as if they’d had something to do with the disaster, which was only fair when one thought about it.
The translator finally called up, ‘If you are traders who fly in the sky, what have you brought for us? El Jefe says if you try to give us beads and red ribbons as the crazy redheaded woman on the iron canoe did, we will kill you too! We are men, not silly children!’
