The New Hero: Volume 1

by ed. Robin D. Laws

  ‘You said they were German?’ Louie handed Finnegan another beer.

  ‘I didn’t see any markings, but they sounded German,’ Finnegan said. ‘And the fighters had that little round Fokker tail and wedge tailplane. D VIIIs if I had to guess. How they stayed in German hands after the war, I don’t know. Did the Germans even have any colonies in the Pacific?’

  ‘Bloody right they did,’ said Gillibrand. ‘Before the war they had part of New Guinea. Kaiser Wilhelm’s Land, they called it. The Bismarck Archipelago was named after some other Hun bigwig, too. We had it all off the bastards in the first few months.’

  Finnegan ran a hand through his hair. ‘Well, how about that? So did they have any zeppelins out here back then?’

  Gillibrand shook his head. ‘Nah. They kept ’em all in the Mother Country so they could drop bombs on London and Paris. Too big, too expensive, and too hard to move all the way out here. No planes, either—or at least, nothing like a Fokker.’

  Louie stopped polishing the bar. ‘Here’s what I’d like to know,’ he said. ‘Is anyone doing anything about these jokers? Britain, Holland, anyone?’

  Gillibrand shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t rely on Britain,’ he said. ‘Even if we could drag some chinless Pommy wonder away from his pink gin long enough to tell him there’s a German zeppelin running about, he’d laugh in our faces. The RAF’s got next to nothing this side of Singapore. Holland has even less. The best either of ’em could do is send a cruiser or something, and that wouldn’t be any use for hunting zeppelins.’

  ‘Not much is,’ said Finnegan. ‘Nothing we had in France could get high enough to touch them once they were under way. All we could do was bomb their bases and try to catch them taking off or landing.’

  ‘And nobody knows where these bastards hang their spiked little helmets,’ said Gillibrand. ‘Bloody marvelous. What about your lot, though? There’s that U.S.S. Los Angeles. Set an airship to catch an airship?’

  Finnegan shook his head. ‘Unless she just happens to be on a fleet exercise in the Pacific, she’d take weeks to get here,’ he said. ‘Besides, I don’t have a lot of credit with the U.S. Navy. It’s a long story.’

  ‘So it’s just us, then?’ Gillibrand took a long pull of his beer. ‘Well, I don’t know about you, mate, but I’m off to see a man about a Lewis gun. Those Fokkers’ll have to watch out if they come near me.’

  ‘I’m going back to Tamaling,’ said Finnegan. ‘The zeppelin must have passed close by there. Maybe the Doc can tell me where it was headed.’

  Finnegan spotted the column of smoke from twenty miles away. When he brought the Lady Luck down on the lagoon, the mission looked like a war zone. Two buildings were still burning, and the compound was deserted.

  Everything was quiet when Finnegan stepped ashore. As he walked toward the compound, a small boy stepped out of the bush and waved urgently. Finnegan found a cluster of scared and wounded locals hiding at the edge of the compound, crouched around Lacroix. The old Frenchman lay in the shade with blood leaking out of three holes in his shirt. ‘They came from the air,’ he croaked. ‘Took everything.’ He coughed up a few flecks of blood.

  ‘Eve?’

  ‘Gone!’ Lacroix grabbed Finnegan’s arm. ‘I tried to stop them!’ Another fit of coughing racked his body. Blood dribbled onto his beard.

  Finnegan held a canteen to the Frenchman’s lips and he took a few swallows of water. Then his head sagged back and his eyes closed. The locals began a mournful wail.

  Leaving them to bury Lacroix, Finnegan searched the ruined buildings. All the mission’s medical supplies and equipment were gone, along with the kerosene for the generators.

  Using a mixture of French, pidgin English, and the little he knew of the local language, Finnegan managed to get some idea of what had happened. The zeppelin appeared a couple of hours ago. It lowered some kind of cage containing a landing party of white men, who went from building to building gathering everything they could find. Eve wounded a couple of the raiders before they overpowered her. Lacroix was shot and left to die. They set fire to the buildings before being winched up with the looted supplies, and the zeppelin headed off northward. The attack took less than thirty minutes.

  Finnegan set off to the north. With a map on his knee, he mentally plotted the zeppelin’s course and the sites of the other attacks. The pirates needed a base. It had to be far enough away from anywhere inhabited that no one would see them coming and going, but big enough to accommodate mooring gear and everything else needed to maintain—and preferably hide—an airship over five hundred feet long. Eventually he found it: a small volcanic island named Kunatik. The crater was almost a half mile wide, and high enough to swallow the zeppelin completely.

  The sun was low in the sky as Finnegan approached Kunatik from the west. ‘Beware the Hun in the sun’ was a hard-learned lesson from the Western Front, and he hoped the sunset would mask his approach from any lookouts. The raking light picked out every detail of the mountain. It looked almost pleated where wind and water had carved gullies down its flanks.

  The western side of the crater was marked by a wide notch. According to a geologist Finnegan had once ferried around the islands, at some point the volcano had blown out its flank and erupted sideways, like Mount Pelée did in 1902. Silver glinted inside the notch, and about two miles out Finnegan could see the curve of the zeppelin’s back nestled inside the volcano.

  Below the mountain, the fringes of the island were covered in dense forest. Finnegan set the Lady Luck down in a small bay, running her onto the beach under the cover of overhanging palm trees. He slung a canteen of water over his shoulder and grabbed a machete. After some deliberation, he left his Colt behind. That zeppelin held a lot of inflammable hydrogen, and if Eve was in there he couldn’t take the risk of setting it off with a spark from a ricochet. Besides, the pirates outnumbered him and gunshots would only give away his position.

  The tropical sunset was a brief but spectacular affair. Night falls quickly at these latitudes, and the light gave out before Finnegan had gone more than a mile into the jungle. The clamor of bird calls gave way to the steady drone of insects as he made a makeshift camp.

  At first light he set out again, climbing steadily upward and around the crater. By the time he arrived at the notch it was almost noon and his clothes were dark with sweat. Rock walls rose almost vertically on the other sides, enclosing a dormant crater and rubble floor.

  A line of palm-thatched wooden shacks stood with their backs to the crater wall. The ground around them had been cleared of debris and flattened. The zeppelin hung over everything like a vast awning. It was moored to a mast with a small hut at its base—probably a winch-house for lowering the airship into the crater once its mooring lines were secure. A broad ramp led down from the belly of the ship onto the makeshift dock, where uniformed men moved about carrying crates and pieces of equipment.

  Keeping low, Finnegan picked his way from boulder to boulder. There were no guards or lookouts that he could see, so the pirates must not have spotted the Lady Luck approaching the island. Soon he was within a few yards of the closest hut.

  Finnegan had never seen a zeppelin at such close quarters. A control cabin jutted from the underside of the nose, with a secondary cabin about halfway back. Both were equipped with ladders giving access to the interior. Three pairs of engines hung from the exterior on latticework pylons. The men working on them looked like ants.

  As huge as the zeppelin was, it was also fragile. Any flame—even a spark—could ignite the hydrogen gas that held it aloft, and if that happened it was doomed. Signs all around the base proclaimed Rauchen Verboten—Smoking Forbidden—in jagged German script. From what he could see there were at least twenty of the pirates, and there were probably more aboard the zeppelin repairing the damaged fighters.

  Eve was probably aboard the zeppelin as well. Between the downed pilots and the raiders she had wounded, the pirates needed someone with medical skills. That might be the only thing keeping
her alive. The base of the zeppelin’s ramp was around fifty yards from where he crouched, and twenty from the nearest shed. Given the constant movement on the dock, he had almost no chance of boarding the ship without being spotted. He needed some kind of diversion.

  No one seemed to be looking his way, so Finnegan risked a short run to the huts and worked his way cautiously behind them. He listened for footsteps, and when his ear told him no one was nearby he pulled out his lighter and set fire to the overhanging thatch on the hut furthest from the zeppelin. Then he moved to the opposite end of the row and waited as the fire took hold.

  ‘Feuer!’ The alarm was raised. The pirates on the dock grabbed buckets and ran toward the burning hut. More came running down the ramp from inside the zeppelin. When he was sure no one was left on board, Finnegan ran onto the huge craft.

  Even with the space taken up by its gas bags, the zeppelin’s interior was larger than Finnegan had expected. Near the top of the ramp, a winch held the zeppelin’s mooring line. Nearby, a kerosene-powered generator was connected to electric lights that hung from the metal latticework of the zeppelin’s skeleton.

  The floatplane and the two fighters hung from trapeze-like frames that could be lowered through the opening in the airship’s belly. Benches had been set up beside the damaged planes, and Finnegan allowed himself a tight smile as he saw the evidence of their encounter with the rock. At the rearward end, metal steps led up to a walkway that connected several doors.

  The zeppelin’s sick bay was behind the fourth door he tried. Eve was tending an injured man in one of the two bunks, and looked up with a scowl as he entered. Finnegan grinned as her expression turned to one of surprise.

  ‘How did you…?’ she asked. Finnegan cast a warning glance at her patient, but she responded with a low chuckle. As she turned, he saw a livid bruise on her left cheek.

  ‘Morphine makes for a cooperative patient,’ she said. ‘He won’t be raising any alarms.’

  ‘That’s fine by me,’ said Finnegan. ‘What happened to your face?’

  Eve grimaced. ‘I told them I don’t look after murderers,’ she said. ‘It didn’t go down too well. This guy’s their best pilot, apparently, but he had a disagreement with a rock while he was chasing down a plane that sounded a lot like yours. I’m glad you got away.’

  ‘Plenty of others weren’t so lucky,’ said Finnegan. ‘Are you ready to get out of here?’

  ‘Am I ever!’ She gave him a smile he could feel all the way to his boots. ‘Lead on, mein Kapitan.’

  They made their way back into the hangar, which was still empty. From the commotion outside, the pirates had not yet brought the fire under control. Finnegan led the way to the top of the ramp, using the docked aircraft and onboard machinery as cover.

  ‘I’m making this up as I go,’ said Finnegan, ‘but if we—’ He whirled around as Eve let out a sudden gasp. She was writhing in the grip of a tall man in an officer’s uniform. Finnegan’s machete was in his hand before he even thought about it.

  ‘Lack of proper planning is a serious oversight,’ he said in mock reproach. ‘It has been the cause of many military blunders.’

  The officer was as German as his accent. Beneath his cap his blond hair was cropped short. A monocle twinkled in one eye, and a red scar snaked down one side of his hawk-like nose. His left arm was wrapped tightly around Eve’s throat, and his right held a long saber. Slowly but meaningfully, he raised the point of his sword until it dug into Eve’s ribs. With an effort, Finnegan relaxed and took a step back.

  ‘His business sense isn’t much better, I’m afraid.’ A smaller man stepped out from behind the officer, pointing a gun at Finnegan. The American groaned.

  ‘Huysman,’ he said. ‘So I guess this is your buyer?’

  The Dutchman’s only reply was a greasy smile. The German pushed Eve toward Finnegan and clicked his heels sharply.

  ‘Kapitan Freiherr Eberhardt von Falkenburg,’ he said with an ironic bow. ‘Late of the Kaiserliche Marine. Welcome aboard the L66. You must be Michael Finnegan, the American Boy Scout. Huysman here warned me about your misplaced sense of chivalry.’

  Finnegan motioned Eve behind him and glared at the two Europeans. Huysman’s face was full of malicious glee, while the German’s showed nothing but arrogant humor.

  ‘I suppose I should thank you, Mister Finnegan,’ he continued. ‘Since you declined Huysman’s offer, I was able to obtain the morphine for free. Although I doubt that Huysman here shares my sentiment. He would have profited significantly from the transaction.’

  ‘But of course, you have also caused me a great deal of trouble. Two aircraft seriously damaged, one pilot badly injured, and of course the two men shot by your lady friend here. She is quite the Calamity Jane, I think.’

  ‘What do you plan to do about it, Fritz?’ Finnegan growled. ‘Talk us to death?’

  ‘He’s good at that,’ Eve put in over Finnegan’s shoulder. ‘Been entertaining me with brandy and fancy dinners since they brought me here.’

  ‘And I assure you,’ von Falkenburg added smoothly, ‘my intentions have been completely honorable. The fact is, Mister Finnegan, that we have—how do you put it?—time to kill. Once my men have dealt with that inconvenient fire—which you no doubt set as a distraction—I can kill you at my leisure, and in front of my crew. Since your little trick with the rock there has been too much talk about this American pilot with supernatural flying abilities, and it is very bad for morale. It will be good for the men to see that you are not also immortal.’

  Finnegan spread his hands and gave a small bow of acknowledgement, stepping out from in front of Eve as he did so. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but instead he moved with blinding speed, pushing Eve to the ground and using the momentum to roll the other way so Huysman’s bullet passed harmlessly between them. He struck at the winch with his machete, severing the mooring cable with a single blow. The zeppelin lurched slightly and began to rise.

  Huysman raised his gun to fire again, then stopped. His eyes widened as he stared at the stump of his wrist where von Falkenburg’s sword had passed through.

  ‘Dummkopf!’ screamed the German. ‘You will kill us all!’ The Dutchman crumpled to his knees in a widening pool of blood, whimpering as he clutched his maimed arm to his chest. Outside, a few of the pirates had heard the shot and seen the zeppelin start to ascend. They were running toward the ramp, but a glance told Finnegan they would not reach it in time.

  ‘Sorry, Captain,’ he said, hefting his machete, ‘I’m not overly fond of crowds. Though time to kill sounds pretty good. Are you as brave without your men?’

  Von Falkenburg raised his saber and one eyebrow simultaneously. ‘A rash choice, Mister Finnegan,’ he said. ‘I was the captain of the student dueling society at the University of Königsberg. It was there that I received my scar.’ He adopted a fencing stance and began to circle the American.

  ‘That must be nice for you,’ said Finnegan. ‘Where I was raised, it’s better to give than to receive.’

  From the corner of his eye, Finnegan saw that Eve had recovered Huysman’s gun from his severed hand and was pointing it at the German. He caught her eye and shook his head, directing her toward the suspended floatplane with a flick of his eyes.

  Von Falkenburg leaped forward, aiming a savage cut at Finnegan’s head. Instead of parrying or falling back the American twisted to his left, letting the sword miss his shoulder by a fraction of an inch. Carried forward by the momentum of the blow, von Falkenburg’s chin was in exactly the right place to meet the butt of Finnegan’s machete as he slammed it upward. The German staggered back a few paces, blood streaming from his lower lip.

  ‘The thing about duels,’ said Finnegan, ‘is they’re for gentlemen. Me, I prefer a good, old-fashioned knife fight.’

  Wiping his chin on his cuff, von Falkenburg raised his sword. ‘I shan’t make that mistake again,’ he said.

  Using the superior reach of his sword the German beat Finnegan back, rain
ing blow after numbing blow on the blade of the machete until the American’s wrist ached. Finnegan kept blocking his attacks, moving counter-clockwise until he had his back to one of the work benches.

  Thinking he saw an opening, von Falkenburg pressed his attack. Finnegan stepped aside, snatching up a heavy wrench in his left hand and crossing it with the machete just in time to prevent the German’s cut from splitting his skull open. He caught the next slash on the shaft of the wrench and struck at von Falkenburg’s midsection, gashing the German’s sleeve but missing his skin.

  Von Falkenburg replied with a slash across Finnegan’s ribs that left him gasping, followed by a flurry of blows that forced him to his knees, the wrench and machete crossed defensively above his head. Finnegan’s arms felt like lead, numbed by blow after blow, and it took all his strength to keep them raised. He felt the wrench jerk almost out of his hand as von Falkenburg’s blade struck the open jaws.

  Reacting rather than thinking, Finnegan twisted the wrench savagely, trying to jerk the sword out of his opponent’s hand. Instead the blade snapped, the broken end ringing as it skidded across the deck. Von Falkenburg stared for a moment at the broken stump of a sword in his hand, and then threw himself on Finnegan with a guttural cry.

  Finnegan dodged, tripping the German as he swept past. Von Falkenburg rolled and turned, bringing up his broken sword. Finnegan threw the wrench at him. It struck his left temple and hit the deck with a dull sound. Dropping what was left of his sword, the German fell back against the electrical generator, upsetting a can of kerosene.

  He tried to stand, slipping in the liquid that pooled around him. His tattered sleeve caught in the generator’s drive belt and pulled his arm round. He screamed as the unforgiving mechanical force dislocated his elbow. A grinding sound came from within the generator as it its engine labored to keep turning. Sparks lit up the inside of the casing and the kerosene ignited with a soft whumph.

  Yelling to Eve to get into the floatplane, Finnegan turned and ran as quickly as his exhausted legs could go. Looking through the open hatch in the airship’s floor, he could see that the zeppelin’s altitude was a little over a thousand feet. He prayed it would be enough.