Word Hunters

by Nick Earls

In the fuselage Al’s face started to feel numb in the cold air and the plane’s vibrations hummed right through him. The plane tilted and swayed. Al’s stomach lurched. He focused on his breathing, imagined a horizon and tried not to think about vomiting.

  About half an hour had passed when Will looked down between his feet and shouted, ‘Nearly there!’ He turned around and called something out to Didier.

  Al and Lexi couldn’t hear it properly, but they could make out enough to know it was the next part of the plan. He wanted Didier to land when they were near the gun. He would only tell him where it was if Didier would land nearby and let them out.

  ‘It’s madness!’ Didier shouted over his shoulder.

  Will half-turned to the front. ‘Do you mean you can’t do it?’

  ‘Of course I can do it. I could do it in my sleep. The madness is being dropped behind enemy lines for no good reason.’ There was a pause as he checked the sky ahead. ‘But it’s your madness, and if you want to be so mad—’ He shrugged. ‘I just want to find the gun. For Paris.’

  ‘Try 30 degrees to the right.’ The edges of the map flapped as Will held a protractor up to it. ‘Look for a forested hill with a chateau just beyond it.’

  Suddenly there was a crash in the air near them, then another. Smoke blew by. It was anti-aircraft fire coming from the ground.

  ‘I see it,’ Didier shouted. ‘The hill’s just ahead. Three hundred metres. The gun’s firing over it. Mark it.’

  Will put a cross on the map. Didier dipped the plane to get out of the line of fire. There was another crash, much closer, and something punched through the canvas in front of Al’s face and passed straight through the other side of the plane. Sunlight and air rushed through the two holes, neither of them bigger than his thumb.

  Will stuck his head down into the fuselage. ‘Landing!’

  Lexi and Al braced themselves. The plane hit the road and bounced, then bounced again and rolled to a stop. Al’s stomach heaved around and he put one hand over his mouth.

  ‘Quickly!’ Didier shouted. He kept the engine running. The plane was straining to pull forward.

  Will jumped out and Al followed.

  As Lexi handed him her basket, he said, ‘See, I didn’t even—’ and vomited on the side of the plane.

  Inside his bag Doug vomited, too.

  Lexi clambered down past them with her skirts hitched up to her knees. Her hat was back in the plane.

  There was a field on one side of the road and a forest on the other. They ran for the trees. Didier revved the engine and the plane shot off down the road and up into the sky.

  From the forest the word hunters could hear more explosions, but they could hear the plane’s engine, too. It didn’t miss a beat. The explosions stopped. The noise of the engine grew fainter and fainter as Didier headed south. Al crouched down and took a few deep breaths of the fresh forest air.

  ‘Nice one.’ Lexi patted him on the shoulder. ‘I think Didier can charge you a 60-dollar cleaning fee for that.’

  They moved further into the forest and up a low hill. The trees thinned out near the top, enough to give them a clear view of the road they had landed on. It was empty.

  Al took a step to the right so that he could see further. ‘I thought they might be searching for us.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Will was listening for trucks, but he couldn’t hear any. ‘I don’t know if they realise we landed. They might think Didier ducked behind the hill to avoid the firing.’

  A loud boom rang out and the ground shook. The noise seemed to echo, or there were smaller versions of it almost immediately from other parts of the forest. The word hunters dropped to their knees.

  ‘That’ll be it,’ Will said. ‘That’s Kaiser Bill.’

  They stood up and moved forward. From the top of the hill they could see the barrel of a gun rising like the mast of a ship over the next hill and above the trees. It was thinner than Al had expected. It didn’t look like something that would terrorise a city.

  ‘So, how do we get there?’ He looked for soldiers, but didn’t see any. ‘I’m guessing they won’t make this next bit easy for us.’

  ‘Or maybe they will.’ Lexi had seen something. She pointed through the trees. There was a door set into the hillside and it looked new.

  It opened as they watched and two German sailors came out. One of them was putting on a coat.

  ‘It’s been developed from a naval gun,’ Will said. ‘Those sailors have got to be something to do with it. There’s no other reason for German sailors to come out of that door. It’ll be their barracks. They’ve dug it into the hillside so they can’t be seen from the air.’

  ‘Oh, I thought it might be a smart way to the gun.’ Just as that idea went nowhere, Lexi had another. ‘They’ll have uniforms in there. We can be German sailors.’

  ‘Great,’ Will said. ‘Great idea. Though maybe you should try to keep the talking to a minimum, since you’ll probably sound like a German girl rather than a German sailor.’

  ‘Don’t they have—’ She stopped herself. ‘No, I guess they don’t. In the future they have women in the navy, just so you know. But I’ll keep quiet.’

  ‘You’re also 12. I don’t want to make a big deal of that but – Yeah, don’t talk. And try to look like a teenager. You need to look like a 15-year-old guy at least.’ With Lexi dressed like a French girl, it wasn’t easy for Will to picture. ‘It’s lucky you’re tall. Try to look big. And make sure you’re at the back.’

  They made their way through the trees towards the door, ready to duck down into the bushes if it opened again. It didn’t. Al wanted a better plan, a less risky way to the gun. He knew how both sides treated spies in World War I and it wasn’t good.

  Al stopped Will as he was about to move to the door. ‘If there’s anyone there, tell them you’ve just been transferred here. You got the call when you were on leave and your kit’s coming from Kiel. You need to borrow someone’s to go on duty today.’

  ‘Good.’ Will nodded. ‘Nice detail.’

  ‘And keep it simple. You’re just a seaman. One of the crew. No special skills.’

  ‘I could—’ Will stopped himself. ‘Yeah. And no war stories either. I was going to say I fought at the Battle of Jutland, but – No, simple’s the way to go.’

  He stood up, straightened his coat, walked confidently to the door and pushed it open. Behind it was a long room with bare rock walls and bunk beds. Each one had a trunk at the end of it and several of the sailors’ black jackets were hanging on a rope that someone had tied between two of the beds.

  He waved to Lexi and Al.

  ‘Uniforms’ll be in those trunks,’ he said as they came in. He pointed across the room. ‘Let’s take knapsacks, too.’

  They grabbed the clothes as quickly as they could and ran back outside into the trees.

  Even though the uniform didn’t fit, Lexi was glad to get rid of the bulky dress and the basket. All she kept on of her Paris clothes were the shoes, since they fitted her well and looked enough like boots. She rolled her sailor’s pants up at the ankles and pulled the belt in as far as it would go.

  Doug jumped from Al’s hand and into his new pack as soon as he caught a hint of sausage. It was empty. He pressed his face against an oily stinky sausage stain and dreamt of the real thing.

  Will rolled up his Paris pants and folded the jacket. ‘Might as well take these,’ he said, pushing them to the bottom of his pack. ‘We might need them again, and they’ll make the knapsacks look full.’

  In his German uniform, Will could disappear easily into this war. Lexi watched him load his pack and wondered how much longer he would be with them. He could leave at any moment, change into his French clothes when he wanted to and somehow make his way back to London. Since they’d arrived in 1918 she’d been dreading the moment when Will
would turn to her and awkwardly begin some goodbye that would leave her with Al in a foreign time and place, with a portal to find in a war.

  Will noticed her watching him. ‘Pretty convincing, don’t you think?’ He saluted her, in the style he knew the Germans used. He took his key badge from his pack and pinned it to his lapel. ‘Better put yours on. Your grandad could be anywhere, maybe even in a tunnel near here.’

  They found the path the two Germans had taken and followed it around the hill to a rough road running next to a train track. At the far end of the track was the Kaiser Wilhelm. It looked like a huge train carriage with a long pipe swung way up into the air from one end.

  A sailor stepped out from behind it and waved a flag. There was a boom as the gun went off again and bangs as other guns went off as well. From the train track the word hunters could see them dug into the hillside.

  ‘That’s the noise we heard when it fired before,’ Will said as he worked it out. ‘Other guns. They’re trying to mask the firing of the big gun. If they fire the others at the same time it’ll all sound pretty normal at our frontlines. Then the shells from the others’ll land there, so no one’ll know another gun’s gone off and there’s a shell on its way to Paris.’

  There were two armed sailors next to the track as the word hunters approached the Kaiser Wilhelm. They were deep in a conversation about where they would go on their next leave. One of them half looked over and nodded and the other didn’t look at all. Al wondered if there had been guns back at the barracks. They’d be no help, though. The moment they needed guns, they would already have lost. There were more sailors around the carriage, most of them with weapons. And they knew how to use them. Al didn’t. He could count ten sailors and there would surely be others out of sight.

  The only thing for the word hunters to do was walk as if they belonged there and had no doubts at all.

  As they reached the mouth of the tunnel an officer shouted, ‘Ordnance!’ It seemed to be to them.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Will saluted as he said it and Lexi and Al followed.

  The officer pointed off into the dark. There were lamps in the tunnel, but not many. Grandad Al would never see their key badges in there. The tunnel had been cut roughly into the rock and threw up shadows. It was easy to imagine a man hiding there, waiting. Grandad Al, waiting for the next word hunter to come to the portal. Not waiting for a detachment of three German seamen.

  ‘What’s ordnance?’ Lexi said to Will, once they were away from the officer.

  ‘That’s the shells. He’s sending us to the shells.’ Will could see them on a rack against the wall.

  Three men were standing there with a trolley. Two of them turned to the rack to lift the next shell.

  ‘Hold on,’ the other said. ‘Here’s our relief.’ The two men immediately stepped away from the rack. ‘Nice of you to turn up early.’ He looked at the word hunters more closely as they approached. He couldn’t see them well, with the tunnel mouth and daylight directly behind them. ‘You’re new, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Will said. ‘First time. Just posted here. What do we need to know?’

  ‘It’s just like gunnery school, but with a few extra steps. The shells are numbered.’ He pointed to the rack. Each shell had a number written on it in chalk. Twelve was next. ‘They have to go in their exact order. It’s not a normal gun. The shells go faster than any shells before. They wear the barrel away, but each one needs to be a perfect fit, so each shell is very slightly bigger than the one before it. Put a shell in too early and it might burst the barrel. The engineers’ll decide when the barrel’s had its time.’

  He led them to some weighing scales that were near the trolley, and he handed Will a book and pen.

  ‘Here’s the other difference.’ He opened the book to show the numbers 1 to 20, running down the page, with two columns of figures filled in next to them as far as 11. ‘You need to weigh and measure the length of each shell, record it here and report it to the gunnery officer. He needs that to get the barrel height right. It changes with every shot.’ He looked past Will at Lexi and Al, trying to see them properly in the dark. ‘We’re taking them young now.’ He shook his head. ‘I suppose if I ask how old you are, you’ll say 18. Well, you’ll grow up fast here. This’ll put muscles on you. These things are mostly steel. They take some lifting.’

  ‘Enough lecturing, Heinz,’ one of the other men called out. ‘They’re our relief. Let them relieve us. Then you can get back to the real work of telling us all about your girl in Metz.’

  ‘I know I only met her once, but—’ He shrugged. ‘It was a great letter. You just wish you’d got a letter like that. You just wish you were going back to barracks to write to a girl like her.’

  All the way out of the tunnel, Heinz was insisting it was the real thing and the others were saying that she’d have forgotten him already.

  Al remembered the Anzac letters home that he and Lexi had studied at school. The Germans wrote letters, too. Of course they did.

  Will went over to the shells and put his hand on number 12. He rubbed the chalk 2 and it blurred.

  ‘Let’s swap them.’ He wiped his hand on the rack. ‘Let’s take them a bigger one next and see if we can blow the barrel.’

  ‘But that’s changing history,’ Lexi said. ‘We’re here for the portal.’

  ‘And we’ll find the portal, but if we take this gun out we’ll save some lives in Paris and our armies can focus on the spring offensive. The war will still be over in 1918, and probably no earlier, unfortunately. I know we’re not supposed to, but I’d like to change this bit of history more, if I could. I’ve got a brother not far from here, and two cousins. Anyway, we have to go to the gun. It’s the portal. That’s how this one works.’ Will could remember it from the other three steps. ‘Let’s give them 17.’

  As he smudged the crossed German 7 with his hand, Lexi was sure he was about to leave. He’d take them right to the portal and she knew she should be grateful for that. He could have left them in Paris. They had got through battles without him before, but she wished 1918 hadn’t come so quickly.

  It took all three of them to lift the shell and they could only hold it for a few seconds before putting it down. It took them four goes to get it to the scales. Will didn’t even look at the weight. He looked at the figures in the book for numbers 9, 10 and 11 and estimated what 12 would be. He did the same with the length, as Al measured the shell with a tape.

  With one more lift the shell was in the trolley, and they pulled it forward across the uneven ground and out of the tunnel to the rear of the gun.

  ‘Come on, come on!’ one of the gunnery crew shouted, as he saw them coming. ‘We should be loading already.’

  He swung a small crane around and they lifted the shell into its steel basket. He winched it up to the height of the deck and the word hunters climbed the metal steps to help him unload.

  There was a picture stencilled onto the base of the gun barrel. It was all white – the face of a man with a neat beard and moustache and a pointed helmet. Will noticed it and touched Lexi’s arm. It was Kaiser Wilhelm.

  They lugged the shell forward and loaded it. The gunnery crewman closed the barrel and locked it. Will presented the figures to the officer in charge, who recorded them in a book of his own and calculated the adjustments he would need to make.

  ‘Number 12,’ he said as he turned a wheel to make a small change to the barrel height. Cables reached up from the gun base to a structure rising from the barrel like the pylon of a suspension bridge. He stepped behind a steel barrier and turned a key in a control panel. ‘Another gift for Paris from Kaiser Wilhelm.’

  As soon as he said it, one of the Kaiser’s eyes in the picture started to blink and then to glow.

  Al slipped his pack off and found the activated peg. Together the word hunters moved forward.

 
‘Will,’ Lexi said. ‘Step back. It’s your chance. It’s your year. Go now, while you can.’

  The Kaiser’s eye was within reach.

  Will didn’t move. ‘I’m coming with you. Caractacus’ll get me home. There’s something going on with those men in grey robes. Something bad. It’s up to us to deal with it. And I think you’re about to bump into a few more of them.’

  ‘Stop! Stop there!’ the gunnery officer shouted. ‘Get behind the shield. We’re firing in ten seconds.’

  Will stuck his thumb in the Kaiser’s eye and it opened up. Al pushed the peg in, locked it and turned the key.

  ‘Jump!’ The gunnery officer shouted. ‘Cover your ears and jump!’

  Mist rolled along the train tracks and poured into the tunnel. The gun carriage shook and swayed. The signalman with the flag took a step away and vanished in the haze.

  As the word hunters passed into the portal there was an ear-splitting wrenching explosion.

  They fell and the explosion was gone, like a sound effect turned off before it had finished.

  They hit bumps and then clear cool air, first dropping quickly and then gliding down. As they broke cloud they saw a walled city below, with houses and farms around it. On one side it was under attack by an army of thousands of soldiers. There was a puff of smoke from the city wall as a cannon fired.

  The army was retreating. Men were stumbling across fields and through hedges as the soldiers on the walls fired down on them.

  The word hunters were falling towards a farm.

  ‘Swerve!’ Lexi called out, when she worked out the details of the farm below. ‘Pig sty!’

  She had landed in enough pig sties already. They steered clear and came down on dry ground beside the pigs, just as a chunk of smouldering twisted metal hit the mud in the sty with a splash and a hiss of steam.

  ‘What?’ Will jumped further away. ‘That—’ Then he worked it out. ‘Kaiser Bill. That’s why that didn’t happen last time. It’s a bit of the barrel. Looks like we stopped the shelling for a while, at least.’