Against the Eldest Flame (Doc Vandal Adventures Book 1)

by Dave Robinson

  Doc had already taken advantage of the plane’s wireless apparatus to send a message to one of his agents who was in Cape Verde, telling him to have fuel ready, but he hadn’t heard back. If necessary they could make for Lisbon, but Doc didn’t want to take any more time than he had to. It was bad enough that they were going to have to land and refuel. A side trip to Portugal would probably add at least a day to their flight: and there were plenty of agents in Lisbon, and Doc didn’t need to find himself on the run from the law again. Not thousands of miles from where he wanted to be, at any rate.

  Gus had already sacked out, and was snoring loudly enough that Doc wished he didn’t have such sensitive ears. Vic was forward in the pilot’s seat, while Gilly had moved back to the navigator’s station. The course looked pretty straight-forward to Doc, and they were all old hands at transatlantic flights. After a quick check on Vic, Doc found his own bunk and was soon fast asleep.

  #

  Vic stretched in the pilot’s seat. Usually a big tri-motor like Sky Cloud needed two pilots, but the controls were so finely balanced it was easy for her to wrestle the plane around the sky.

  “I just wish I could,” she muttered, running her hand over the throttles.

  “Just wish you could what?” Gilly said from the navigator’s station behind her.

  “Wrestle this thing around the sky.” Vic grinned. “Straight and level’s no fun. I’d love to get in some barnstorming.”

  “Probably not a good idea,” Gilly told her. “The bunks back there are small, but not that small. You’d send Doc and Gus flying.”

  “I thought flying was whole point.” Vic stuck out her tongue.

  “Not that kind.”

  Vic sighed, and scanned the instruments. All three engines were running well, showing the reliability of big radials. They weren’t as much fun for aerobatics as a rotary, but they had a lot more power.

  She laughed softly, here she was comparing the merits of different engine types while on a night flight across the Atlantic. Her grandmother would be so scandalized; engines were no fit subject for a proper young lady. Etiquette, not engineering, was what mattered to her. She hadn’t been a weak woman though; she’d raised Vic in exile after her parents had died in the Civil War following the Revolution.

  At least she hadn’t tried to marry her off. Vic shivered, that had been her biggest fear growing up. Being tied to some man who had a real life while she stayed home and looked after children was her own personal vision of Hell. She wanted her own life, damnit! As for men, she still couldn’t figure the attraction.

  Vic shook her head; the past was the past, and that was more than enough time spent dwelling on it. Taking one hand off the controls, she clenched her fist. Her palm was a little stiff, but otherwise it felt as if she’d never been burned.

  One more glance at the controls, and then she was back staring into the night. It was a long flight.

  #

  It was still dark when Doc woke. The drone of the engines had changed and that had been enough to bring him to full consciousness.

  Going forward, he saw both Vic and Gilly were in their seats, with a map unfolded on the console between them. “How’s the flight?”

  “Not bad,” Vic said, her teeth white in the glow from the instrument panel. “We’re going mostly by dead reckoning, but we should be reaching Cape Verde within an hour or so.”

  “Good, good.” Doc leaned forward and put his arm on the back of her seat. “So how long do you want to stay here?”

  “It all depends on fuel. If your source has a proper pump unit we can probably be in the air within an hour or two, tops. If he’s got people ferrying it out in rowboats full of jerry cans we’ll be lucky to get out of here by noon. Sky Cloud takes a lot of fueling, even if we haven’t run the tanks dry.”

  Doc nodded. Jorge Botelho was a good man, but he was more likely to have the fuel in all his cousins’ fishing boats than a proper tender. That was if he got the message. Otherwise it would mean flying to a city and refueling there, which he really didn’t want to do unless he had to.

  At least there was a moon. Doc trusted Vic to land in the dark, but he wanted to be able to see the land before they hit it. If he could ever get radar working, he would have to put it on the Sky Cloud, but that was a long-term plan. He’d seen some of the British test results and they looked very interesting. For the meantime all he had to count on was his, and Vic’s, superb night vision and the benefits of moonlight. Black blobs grew on the horizon, and Doc knew they were getting close. Vic must have seen them too, because she throttled back and dropped down to about a thousand feet.

  Doc started scanning for lights. If Botelho had got the message, he should have set out lighted buoys. They crossed over a sandbar, then he caught sight of them: two lines of lights, bobbing in the water below. He tapped Vic on the shoulder. “There they are.”

  She nodded and pulled Sky Cloud around. Gilly reached for a lever to start the compressors to inflate the landing gear. The noise woke Gus, who growled and grumbled from his bunk aft.

  “Keep still, you big ape,” Vic called back over her shoulder. “I’m flying.”

  “And I was sleeping,” Gus replied; but he lay back down and stopped moving.

  Vic laid Sky Cloud down on the water as if it were made of glass. She lined up perfectly and brought Sky Cloud down between two swells to a perfect landing so smoothly that Doc couldn’t tell exactly when they touched the water. “Touchdown!”

  She feathered the props and pushed her flying helmet back off her head. “I hope it takes a while to fuel, I could use a nap.”

  Doc smiled. “We’ll see.”

  Gilly took the controls and taxied Sky Cloud toward a raft with lanterns glowing on its corners. As they got closer, Doc could see a man standing on the raft and a small boat tied on the other side. Botelho had got the message. Gilly laid the plane alongside the raft and Doc opened the hatch. He dropped the ladder and hopped onto the raft. Turning his back on Botelho, he caught a rope Gus threw him, and quickly tied up the plane.

  “Thank you for coming,” Doc told Botelho as soon as he was sure Sky Cloud was safe. “Were you able to get any fuel?”

  “Yes, Senhor Doc,” Botelho said in accented English. “I will have your fuel by the morning. There was no time to get it here today.”

  “Vic will be happy,” Doc grinned. “She wanted a nap.”

  Botelho matched his grin. “That is a good thing, women get cranky when they don’t get enough sleep.”

  “Pilots are particularly bad,” Gus added from the hatch. “And when they get cranky they tend to fly into mountains.”

  Surprisingly, Doc didn’t hear any response from Vic. She must have already fallen asleep.

  Gilly climbed out the top hatch and headed over to the right engine. “She’s been running rough. I’m going to take a look at her once she cools.” He pulled some tools from his belt and started removing the cowling. Doc let him work. Gilly was a mechanical genius and the best driver Doc had ever seen. When he said an engine was running rough, Doc believed him.

  Botelho brought out a bottle of wine, which Doc waved off. Gus came down the ladder and joined the man in a drink.

  “Bad news, Doc.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Number sixteen’s cracked. I’m pulling the plug so she can run free, but we’ll be down a little on power.” Gilly wiped his forehead with a greasy rag. “Don’t work her too hard unless you have to, crank won’t be fully balanced and we don’t want another to go.”

  “It won’t affect being able to reach Leopoldsville will it?” Gus asked. “I’d smell terrible if we had to swim the last couple of hundred miles.”

  Gilly laughed. “We should be fine. Might use a little more gas in the other cylinders but I’ve cut this one off from the carburetor so it should balance out.”

  Doc turned back and looked out over the Atlantic. All his answers were seeming further and further away.

  #

>   The sun was already high by the time the last of the fuel was in Sky Cloud’s tanks. Vic had been counting the minutes while Jorge’s extended family fueled the plane. They had used so many different containers that she was surprised at least one of them hadn’t brought gas in a kitchen sink. It wasn’t quite a fill up, but it was good quality aviation gasoline and still gave them almost three more hours endurance than they were likely to need. Vic waited for Jorge and his people to get safely clear before she started the engines. One at a time they sputtered, coughed, then caught and she turned into the wind for takeoff.

  Vic grinned as Sky Cloud surged up onto the step, the fuselage thrumming with leashed power. The shore was already disappearing behind them as she heard Doc breathe a sigh of relief. The refueling had taken much longer than she had liked; there was little worse than being trapped on the water with dry tanks. Now there was only one more hop to Leopoldville: where they might be able to find answers.

  Sky Cloud rocked, almost pulling the yoke out of Vic’s hands as a spout of water fountained just off the right wing. Seconds later, she heard the deep roar of artillery. Waving Doc off the controls, Vic kept flying while he poked his head up through the observation dome above the navigator’s station. Letting Doc do a scan, Vic focused on takeoff. Getting the plane off the water with a full load of fuel took more time than she liked. Two more shots fountained the water around the plane as she fought to hold Sky Cloud on the step in the suddenly rough water. Where were they coming from?

  Seconds later, she saw it, a silver reflection obscuring part of number one’s propeller disc. A destroyer of the LuftKriegsMarine floated lazily in the sky, smoke coming from both forward five-nines. The German airship was a great silvery shark, with a swastika picked out in black in the red band on its rudder. Five turrets hung from its underside, each showing the long snout of a five point nine-inch naval rifle. Machine guns and auto-cannon poked from the four blisters that lined the side of the gondola, and Vic knew they were mirrored on the other side. Sometimes Vic thought Doc had made a mistake in releasing lyftrium to the world even if the Germans had stolen it. Yes it had changed the world by making airships viable, but too many countries had ignored peaceful uses and turned Doc’s invention into an arms race.

  Nazi Germany was one of the worst offenders, and not just because they had stolen the process. Their early lead in airship technology had made them the ones to beat when it came to the aerial battleships lyftrium made possible.

  Vic kept an eye out for its partner, LKM destroyers normally operated in pairs, and the time they spent refuelling had given the Germans plenty of time to get them there. The second airship was behind the first, about a thousand feet higher and a mile or two further down range. She was going to have to pass right between them, giving both destroyers a clear shot with full broadsides.

  A brief rattle of gunfire from behind her told her that Gus must have popped up in the dorsal turret and he cleared his guns. Sky Cloud carried twin oerlikons in the turret, but they were designed to take on pursuits, not stand gun to gun with naval ordnance.

  All five turrets on the nearer destroyer swiveled toward them, the long snouts of the guns foreshortening as the Nazis sighted in.

  “Get ready to weave,” Doc called down to Vic. “We’re about to have incoming.”

  “About to have incoming? What do you call what we’ve already got?” Vic grinned bright enough to be reflected in the instrument dials, and shoved the throttles forward.

  “The LKM. Two destroyers blocking our takeoff... Weave now!” One of the destroyers shuddered backwards as all five cannon fired. Vic put the helm hard over, skidding Sky Cloud over to the left as the nearly six-inch rounds barreled through the air toward them. Vic actually saw one round as it passed over the plane, probably missing Gus in the dorsal turret by less than a yard. The plane shuddered, almost falling off the step and then lurched back up as Vic went to full emergency power on all three engines.

  “Time to dance,” she cried. “Doc, try to give me a little more warning on the next one.”

  The second destroyer was moving up to support the first, though it could only bring its forward guns to bear. “Incoming!”

  “And it’s a twist to my left,” Vic sang out as she swung Sky Cloud over. “...And a step to my right!”

  She pulled back on the yoke as if she were trying lift the plane out of the water with her own strength. The engines screamed in protest, and then the water let go and Sky Cloud reached for the sky just as five more shells hit the water where she had been a second ago.

  “You need to pick better dance partners, Doc!”

  “We’re not past them yet,” Gus said, squeezing off a short burst toward the nearer destroyer.

  “But we’re faster,” Vic told him as she did her best to coax every last ounce of power out of the engines.

  “And they’re better armed,” Gus reminded her.

  Doc pulled his head back in from the observation dome as Vic climbed, dodging as best she could to avoid the incoming fire. “Gilly, how’re we doing for smoke?”

  Gilly swiveled his seat with an audible creak. “I’ve got it fitted on both wing engines, but I’m not promising anything from number three. We’re already down one can, remember?”

  “We’ll be down a lot more than one cylinder if we catch a five-nine,” Doc said.

  “You’re the boss.”

  “As soon as Gilly starts making smoke, I want you to head between those two. Once you get between them, head straight for the far one!”

  “Aye, aye, sir!” If she hadn’t needed both hands to fly Vic would have snapped a mock salute. The way the destroyers had them boxed she didn’t have much choice but to go right up the middle.

  “Cannon to the left of them, cannon to the right…” Vic muttered. “Hope the jaws of death brushed its teeth this morning.”

  Both destroyers were firing now, and Vic figured they only had a couple of moments before the secondaries got the range. It was going to be tight. A five-nine shell exploded close enough that Sky Cloud shook; as if to punctuate the thought. Gilly opened a valve that sprayed a hot oil compound onto the cylinder heads. Thick black smoke streamed out from under the wings, making their own storm cloud.

  Vic almost stood the plane on one wing as she pulled them in between their two assailants and weaved toward the further attacker, hiding the lower destroyer in a cloud of smoke. Tracers streaked from the top of the airship as they climbed away, safely out of the five-nines’ arc.

  The upper destroyer swung wide to bring all its weapons to bear. The five-nines went to rapid fire, turning the air around them into a garden of exploding flowers. Tracers streaked from the blisters, crossing the fire from the airship below. Gus snapped off short bursts, trying to silence the secondaries. Vic could already see the letters ZL-38 painted on the airship’s skin and they were growing with each passing second.

  Sky Cloud lurched as if it had been picked up by a giant and thrown across the sky. Pulling out of a steep bank, Vic saw a fireball blossom where the first destroyer had been. One of ZL-38’s five-nines must have scored an unlucky hit on its consort’s magazines. Vic fought the controls as the rest of them hung on to avoid being rattled around the cockpit. The shock wave flipped them upside down despite all of Vic’s efforts, giving everyone in the cockpit a perfect view of ZL-38 as they passed above it.

  One of the destroyer’s upper gun teams must have been more on the ball than they had any right to be because a stream of tracers stitched a line through Sky Cloud’s right wing, adding a spray of fuel to the smoke coming from the engine. Another tracer cut through the cloud, sparking the fuel and sending a stream of fire from Sky Cloud’s right wing. Vic put them into a roll and dived for the deck, with all engines screaming.

  “We have to kill number three!” Gilly yelled.

  “Not yet.” Vic gritted fighting the shuddering yoke. “Give me another minute.”

  The sea was getting closer, its calm green water belying the vio
lence above. The air speed indicator was climbing toward four hundred as Vic put everything into a power dive. Explosions ripped the sea ahead of them as the ZL-38’s gunners tried to find the range. They struck so close that Vic could pick out individual waves before she arched her back and pulled on the yoke.

  “Come on baby, come on. Fly for Momma.”

  The wings groaned and the whole plane shuddered as Vic fought to pull her out of the dive. Metal spars creaked as the wings flexed against the strain. It took all her strength to keep her eyes open and the yoke steady as her weight more than tripled from the gee force of the pullout. Then it was gone and they were hurtling across the water, bare feet above the waves. ZL-38’s fired a few more desultory shots, but they fountained behind them, and no airship could keep up with Sky Cloud.

  Gilly reached past Vic and killed number three, then triggered the fire extinguishers. Almost without thinking, Vic pulled back the throttle on number two and feathered the propeller on three. As the smoke died away, Vic took a moment to take a glance at the damaged engine. Three of the cylinders she could see were split wide open, their pistons rattling in the slipstream. The fuel leak seemed to have stopped, Sky Cloud was equipped with self-sealing tanks, but the gauges were spinning so fast Vic had no idea how much fuel they had lost.