by Anders Blixt
Linda remained in our room, exhausted after the demanding hours in the workshop. She did not want to face Peter Lee tonight. I would also have preferred to abstain, but somebody had to do it.
“Well done, B’rnwald. I’ll reques’ that airpl’n,” he slurred. “If things g’m’way, we’ll drop th’ bom’ in two days. Th’ gates of hell’ll open for the’ tyran’s.”
Raving mad, I thought. “We’ll need a cargo parachute, too. The bomb must land safely inside the crater. If it smashes into the ground, it won’t work.”
“I see. I’ll take care of that.”
Linda and I waited with covered faces and protective goggles at the entrance to the large cavern. An icy wind swept along the cliff face and pummelled us, but our polar clothes ensured that we would endure its attention. The sun, high in the sky, made the ice glitter all the way to the horizon. Three ursines stood next to us, seemingly unaffected by the cold. The bomb rested in its rack on a sled behind us, next to a simple movable crane built by the ursines. They had also dragged some barrels of aviation fuel and a hand pump from a dump.
The bomb was not red any longer. Yesterday, while Linda and I waited for Peter Lee to confirm that the transport plane would arrive as requested, we had used the available time to paint it medium grey to make it less conspicuous.
Aeroplane engines buzzed in the distance, the noise increasing for every second.
“How come Lee and the ursines possess all these resources?” I whispered to Linda. That question had churned in my mind for many days.
“Well, if a European government stands behind them it’d be possible.” Linda kept her voice low, to, but seemed unconcerned.
“It isn’t that easy. This ursine base – no republic is able to sponsor it from the other side of the world. Also, the fighting in Europe devours all resources that the republics possess,” I said.
“Maybe the Orange State is involved?” said Linda.
“That’s one possibility. They have the gold to pay for it.” I still felt doubtful. “Unsavoury co-belligerents, anyhow.”
“These ursines belong to a powerful clan federation as far as I have learned by listening. But I’ve no idea who their leaders are. There are lots of ursines that hate humans in general and Russians in particular,” said Linda.
“And we’ll let those aliens play in our team?” My question was rhetorical.
“When in dire straits…” mumbled Linda.
“I don’t want our cause to be corrupted.” I was not ready to budge on that issue.
“Lee seems less determined than you in that regard,” said Linda.
I nodded. “Are you ready?”
“As ready as one can get.” Linda voice had lost that confident edge. She suddenly squeezed my hand through the thick mittens.
What sane person will ever feel ready to kill? I thought.
The aeroplane approached from the north. I raised my binocular and zoomed in a carmine twin-engine biplane. The landing gears were equipped with both wheels and skis. The name of the owner was painted in white along the fuselage: Boelcke Luftfahrt AG.
“A Blériot 230N bush plane,” I said. “Decent cargo capacity and a good range.”
The plane flew over us at a low altitude, turned into the wind and descended to the ice. The pilot parried a few gusts of wind and put her down smoothly. That fellow knew his line of work. I wouldn’t be able to fly that well, because so far I had only piloted smaller planes. The Blériot taxied up to the cavern entrance, turned the tail in our direction and came to a halt twenty yards away.
Two men climbed out of the cockpit when the engines had stopped. They were covered by bulky electro-heated overalls and lumbered toward us. My back stiffened by sudden pain: these two unknown men would soon be killed by us.
“Guten Tag. I am captain Boelcke,” said one of them in the dialect of Saxony. “This is pilot Arnold. You two, are you my mechanics?”
“Jawohl, Herr Kapitän,” I said quickly to hide my annoyance with his haughty manner.
He pointed at the bomb. “Make sure that that thing is secure fastened in the cargo hold. Use a weld if you need. Make sure that your assistant tops the tanks. I will inspect everything before take-off. Arnold will come out every thirty minutes and run the engines to keep them warm.” His phrasing showed that he believed that Linda was a boy; unsurprising, because the arctic clothes camouflaged her gender.
“Of course,” I said.
Boelcke and Arnold continued into the cavern, while Linda and I hurried over the ice to the Blériot. The ursines pulled the crane behind us. Linda opened the cargo door on the starboard side of the fuselage and started to inspect the deck to decide how she would secure the bomb rack to it. I sneaked into the cockpit to check one important function. The instrumentation was familiar and I found what I was looking for: two buttons for electrical starters. The pilot could kick-start the engines from his seat without outside help, a practical arrangement in polar lands. My knees wobbled for an instant from relief and then I returned to the cargo hold with light steps.
“We won’t have to kill,” I whispered in Linda’s era while she crawled over the deck to check the eyelets.
“Dei gratia,” she said and I saw how her tense body relaxed. “Thanks Johnny.”
Two hours of hard work ensued, during which pilot Arnold came out every half hour to run the engines for a while, but he generally ignored us. That attitude suited us perfectly.
When everything was ready, Linda sent the ursines to fetch the pilots. While they were away, we entered the cockpit, and got into the pilots’ seats. I pressed the ignition buttons and the engines started with no hassle. I hardly believed my eyes when we accelerated into the wind and left the base behind us. The scheme had succeeded far better than I had ever hoped, and that just because Lee and Boelcke consistently had misjudged Linda and me.
I pulled the wheel toward me and the Blériot slowly ascended into the dark blue sky. Some cloud tufts provided the only contrast. Freedom, freedom. They can’t keep us shackled no more, I triumphed in my mind. The plane trembled under my inexperienced hands, but it obeyed every command. Soon I lowered its nose to level flight. Now it was time to fix our position and set the course to Acheron.
Chapter 14
“Linda, you must take the controls now.” The propeller din forced me to shout. We had been flying for half an hour toward Hephaestus Mons, an uneven snow-capped cone at the horizon. Fredriksborg lay somewhere behind it, but we could not go there with a stolen aircraft. The Blériot cruised at 120 knots and the weather favoured us for the moment: sunshine and a steady wind from behind. “I need to use the radio to reach a colleague. It’ll be easy to keep the plane on course.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Linda gripped the co-pilot’s controls. I explained how to handle the wheel and the pedals. Her stressful breathing produced white wisps in the cold air. After ten minutes I said: “Now you know enough. Keep everything steady and you’ll do fine.”
Linda nodded.
I moved to the signalman’s nook behind the cockpit, where an Uher Beta, a sturdy radio made in Brünn, waited for me. While warming its tubes, I prepared my message in German, encrypted parts of it and translated the individual letters to the dashes and dots of the signal alphabet. When the apparatus was ready, I started to tap a call at 137 myriacycles per second: “S-C-H-W-A-R-Z-E-R F-U-C-H-S S-U-C-H-T F-I-G-A-R-O”. The cold hurt my exposed hand.
Two or three minutes later I perceived a response in the buzzing earphones. I jotted down its dashes and dots: “Figaro here, Figaro here. Go to the well for water. Over.” That was the correct identification phrase.
I confirmed: “A wedding requires green wine. Over.”
“Understood. Begin. Over.”
I tapped a series of seemingly random letters and digits, my brief encrypted message.
“L-I-L-A F-U-E-N-F.” Those words confirmed that the message had arrived and that a response would come within three minutes. I put my hand in the mitten an
d sighed with relief. “Linda, how are doing?”
“Quite well,” she said.
“Five to eight minutes, then I’ll take over the controls again,” I said.
The earphones started to tap three minutes later and I jotted down every dot and dash. I deciphered the text with hands that got clumsier and clumsier from the cold. A glance at a map of the Sea of Tears transformed its latitude and longitude to a geographical location. We would reach that spot in a few hours, though with little fuel remaining in the tanks.
“Now I am done. I just have to thaw my hands before I take the controls.” I got into the pilot’s seat. The fingers ached while getting warmed by the electrical pilot gloves. “Do you know the Rasmussen Bay in the Sea of Tears?”
“I know where it is on a map, but no more,” Linda said.
“We’re going there to meet one of my colleagues. I’ll take the controls now.” A moment later, I put the plane in a shallow starboard turn to a new course.
When we reached Acheron, patches of brown and black vegetation appeared in the white landscape and they grew wider the further downslope we got. I put the plane in a shallow dive to stay at two thousand feet above ground. Here and there cattle grazed on the slopes and soon we spotted the first tilled fields bordered by dry-stone fences. The temperature increased, a relief for our weary bodies. Far ahead I glimpsed the Sea of Tears, or at least so I imagined.
“Give me a Maxidin pill. I’m getting sluggish.” I spoke with reluctance. I wanted to quit that drug for good, but now I had to complete this flight without food and rest.
Linda got a pill from my medikit, pushed aside my face mask and put it in my mouth. I swallowed and in a minute or two the drug swept like a fresh spring breeze through my body and banished the feeling of exhaustion. I smiled, even though I knew this was phony joy.
Three hours and 400 miles later we cruised 11,000 feet below the ice sheet along a narrow deep river that was labelled Grieg-fluß on the map. The air was warm compared to what we had endured during the past few weeks. The barometer touched 45 inches mercury, one and a half times the atmospheric pressure at the ice sheet, so breathing was easy. The sky had changed to a paler blue.
The Rasmussen fiord jabbed like a dagger into the mainland eleven miles ahead and its tip served as the Grieg River estuary. Steep hills surrounded it, bare grey rock mixed with meadows covered by black grass and shrubberies. I spotted scattered ursine settlements with the characteristic wide circular huts, but no signs of human presence. That was advantageous, because the news of our arrival would spread more slowly among settlers without radios. In minutes, I would cross the estuary at 1,000 feet and the agreed meeting spot was less than five minutes away down the fiord.
“Where will we land?” said Linda.
“That’ll be tricky. I need three thousand feet of flat open ground for a safe touchdown. There aren’t any such spaces in sight,” I said. The fuel indicator showed that we could fly for another forty minutes so I felt no urgency.
When the Blériot crossed the shoreline, I descended to 600 feet. Far ahead I glimpsed a streak of black smoke rising from the water. A sea-borne reception committee? I thought. The seconds ticked by. The afternoon sun gleamed in west beyond the black landscape. Yes, that’s a ship!
A small blocky vessel with a single smokestack producing a pillar of coal smoke steamed in our direction at the agreed-upon position. I circled above her and waited for a signal. At her stern I saw a red flag with a white, green, and red canton, the flag of New England. Three signal rockets rose from the foredeck: blue, white, and green – the colours of the Nobel Institute. We had arrived at the right place. Only touchdown remained.
“Is this the reception you expected?” said Linda.
“No, not the ship,” I said. Has Figaro assumed that we have a floatplane?
“Who are on that ship?” Linda asked.
“I only know my colleague Figaro. The others are unknown,” I said.
I turned the plane and continued along the fiord in search for a decent landing spot, but without success. “It’ll be an emergency touchdown.” My voice stuttered from tension. “I’ll go down on a lakeside meadow, facing the water because of the wind. It’ll be shaky. We’ll end up in the water so fetch life jackets, please.”
Linda returned presently and strapped life jackets on us.
“Right above your head, you see a hatch in the ceiling. You must open it to give us an escape route if the plane starts sinking.
Linda looked straight up and nodded. “I understand.”
I continued: “Good. Get up and stand on the seat. Hold on to some steady with one hand and unlatch the hatch with the other. Then get down and get belted. Repeat what I said.”
Linda repeated exactly what I had said.
“Good. Get moving,” I said.
The hatch slid down and rearward. A roaring whirlwind swept through the cockpit, tossing about papers and loose objects. Conversation was no longer possible, but it did not matter – we were ready.
I turned the Blériot toward the meadow I had selected. We made a wide circle while I nudged the plane down to 40 feet above ground and reduced its speed. Earlier I had only piloted single-engine planes and now I would crash-land a much heavier craft. My handed trembled when the Blériot reached the edge of the meadow.
I shut off both engines. The wheels hit ground. The fuselage quaked and the landing gears groaned. Linda and I bounced in the seats. I struggled to keep a straight course. The starboard landing gear buckled with a gunshot sound after 150 yards. A wing struck the ground and snapped. The starboard engine was torn loose and disappeared to the rear. The plane slewed violently to the right and the twist fractured the port landing gear. The fuselage struck the ground with a thud that pushed the air out of my lungs. The plane skidded sideways across the black grass. The fuselage hit the water, white foam sprayed in all directions and we stopped with a jolt.
I took a deep breath, uncoupled the safety belt and leaned over to Linda. She was shaken but conscious. I opened her safety belt and urged her upward. She moved through the open hatch and I followed her into safety on top of the fuselage with my backpack in a firm grip.
We had been lucky. The Blériot rested in a stable position ten yards from the beach. The top of the fuselage was several inches above the waves, but I heard the gurgling of water seeping into the aircraft. The plane was wreck, but it had not caught fire.
Linda huddled close to me, gripped my arm and mumbled: “Johnny, Johnny, you made it.”
I could not answer because of battle jitters: my vocal chords did not obey my will. A salt-smelling breeze caressed my face. Low waves lapped the fuselage. All was well – we had survived the ice inferno and that felt like crawling out of a dark cramped cave into sunlight. The ship approached us slowly. Now we merely had to wait for our rescuers to pick us up and provide hot food and soft bunks.
The ship stopped more than a hundred yards away and launched a dinghy manned by two sailors. Both were young and wore blue trousers, black knitted sweaters and navy blue knitted caps. The tallest of them hailed us in German: “Ohoi, schwarzer Fuchs!” His accent indicated that it was not his native language.
“That’s me,” I responded in the same language, “but where is Figaro? I know him.”
“Aboard the Nereid. We’ll take you there,” he called.
“We’ve got the jitters so come and help us.”
They approached the fuselage. The short rower grabbed a wing strut and held the dinghy in place while the other one helped us aboard. His face, adorned with thick glasses, looked familiar, but I could not place it. He scrutinized me, as if he had a similar experience. The dinghy shifted restlessly when I planted my feet on the deck, a pleasantly familiar feeling. I stretched out at the bow, faced the sky and listened at the gurgling of the prow cutting through the water. It felt almost like my youthful excursions in the Kattegat; only the screeching seagulls were missing.
A seaman on the Nereid lowered a rope ladd
er and he and the rowers assisted Linda and me. The ship had a low freeboard, because the Sea of Tears is a lake, not an ocean, but those yards were still hard to climb. Her captain waited for us, a man I knew well: Paul von Rosen, my old schoolmate and the institute agent called Figaro. He was two inches shorter than me, swarthy with a wispy beard, a peaked cap, a leather jacket and navy blue pants. I let him initiate the conversation.
“I’m Sebastian Thorn, master of the Nereid,” he said in English. In our line of business, you change name as often as you buy new shirts. “Welcome aboard, Miss…?” He extended his hand to Linda.
She shook it. “Miss Linda Connor.”
He turned to me and waited for my greeting.
“Good day, captain Thorn,” I said in English, shook his hand and entered the role-playing game in the customary manner. “I’m Johnny Bornewald from the Netherlands.”
“Welcome, sir. I am happy we could rescue you.”
“Thanks a lot, captain,” I said
“I have ordered the cook to prepare something hot. Please come to my cabin and he’ll serve it there.” Paul gestured towards an open hatch.
The meat stew was filling and spicy, just the right thing after our hardships. Linda and I occupied a narrow couch while Paul had unfolded a wooden stool in front of us. The cabin was cramped, but no worse than inside a cloudship. I felt at ease.
“You – a skipper under New England’s flag,” I said.
“Well, I never thought I’d catch you falling out of the sky in Alba,” said Paul.
Time is short. No beating around the bush, I thought. “One major matter must be taken care. There is a barrel inside the wreck. We must salvage it.”
“Can’t be done. The plane is in shallow water and the Nereid cannot get close enough to use the deck crane,” said Paul.
“It’s a transuranium bomb,” I said in a low voice.
Paul turned and gazed at the Blériot through an open porthole.
“I’ve a suggestion, provided that you have an acetylene torch,” said Linda.
