Down to the Sea

by William R. Forstchen

  “I hope not,” he whispered, remembering the bubbling gasp, what the Bantag was saying. He had heard it before in Jurak’s camp, the ritual prayer to the Ancestors, calling upon them to witness.

  The companion of the wounded soldier came over, knelt down, and started to speak in Gaelic.

  Abe shook his head.

  “English. Speak English, trooper.”

  “Oh. Me baby brother, sir. Thank you, sir.” The man fell silent, embarrassed, then withdrew.

  Togo leaned closer to Abe. “You did the right thing, Keane. The men here will follow you to hell after this.” Abe laughed softly. “Sergeant, we’ve been trapped here now for nearly four days. I thought we were in hell.”

  “It’s only started.”

  “Lieutenant Keane, is the lieutenant all right?”

  Keane looked up. It was Sergeant Major Mutaka.

  He slipped down behind the rock wall just as a rifle shot zipped in, kicking up a shower of splinters. One of the men cursed and peeked up over the side.

  “Damn, there’s a whole parcel of them out there.”

  The sergeant major sat down with Abe. “You hurt, sir?”

  “No, I’m fine, just winded.”

  Before he could say more, Togo quickly related what had happened.

  “I figure we got around half a quart of water per man, not much, but it will keep us going another day. The lieutenant and I got lucky. We found four or five hundred rounds of carbine ammunition as well.”

  Abe, remembering the haversack slung around his neck, reached down and opened it up. A sickening stench wafted up, and he quickly closed it.

  “If we do this again tomorrow night,” the sergeant major announced, “sir, you stay behind. I know why you volunteered to lead the first one, but you’ve proven your point with the men. So do us all a favor and let one of the other lieutenants go.”

  Abe would not admit it, but he was more than glad to nod in agreement.

  “And, sir. The major started coming around while you were gone. Started saying he was in command again.”

  “Oh, damn. What did you do, Sergeant? For God’s sake I hope you didn’t hit him again.”

  Mutaka chuckled softly. “No, sir. It’s twice now I’ve whacked him. Any more, and I think it’d kill him.”

  He paused, and Abe wondered if the sergeant was quietly waiting for some sign to simply go and finish the job. “Sergeant, don’t even think about it.”

  “What, sir?”

  “We both know, so let’s drop it.”

  “Anyhow, one of the boys finally admitted he had a quart of vodka still stashed away in his saddlebag. How he’d hung on to it without drinking it is beyond me. The captain drank it all and passed out, so we don’t have to deal with it for a while yet.”

  “Thank God.”

  Two men had rigged up a stretcher from a blanket and two Bantag rifles. They started back up the steep slope carrying the wounded soldier, his brother walking beside him.

  “There, I see another one,” a watching soldier whispered, pointing over the rock wall. He started to raise his carbine.

  Abe crawled up beside him and peered over. He could see several of them, crouching low, weaving their way across the flat open plain. On impulse he touched the trooper beside him on the shoulder and shook his head.

  He looked back at the stretcher team heading up the slope, keeping low, quickly moving from the cover of one boulder to another. He was suddenly aware that it was getting lighter. On the other side of the butte the first dim glow of dawn must already be visible.

  He knelt and cupped his hands.

  “No shooting!” he cried, struggling to remember the Bantag words. “Your wounded and dead we honor. Take them back to their yurts.”

  The men around him shifted uncomfortably. Togo cursed softly under his breath.

  One of the Bantags slowly stood up, then held his rifle over his head with both hands, the sign that he would not shoot. Others stood up, and Abe was surprised to see not two or three but a dozen or more, one of them less than fifty yards away. He wondered if the closest had seen the stretcher party going up the slope and had been waiting for a kill.

  Wounded and dead out on the ground in front of the butte were picked up and carried off.

  The lone warrior, rifle over his head, remained still until the last of the bodies had been retrieved. Finally he lowered his gun and turned away, walking upright.

  “Not even a thank-you, damn them,” Mutaka hissed.

  “I didn’t expect one,” Abe replied softly.

  He started up the slope, Togo falling in by his side.

  “This isn’t no gentleman’s war, sir,” Togo whispered.

  “I know that, Sergeant.”

  “But, sir, maybe you were right,” Togo finally conceded.

  Abe thought of the warrior he had cut apart with the knife and then what was left of the two troopers in the wrecked wagon. What the hell is right out here? he wondered. Was this what my father saw? Is this what he felt?

  They gained the crest of the butte, the horizon before him shifting from deep indigo to a pale glowing red. The troopers who had gone on the expedition spread out, passing out canteens. Desperate men eagerly took the precious loads, gulping down a drink, but Abe could see that in almost every case a man would drink but briefly, then pause and pass it on to a comrade waiting beside him.

  He could see the men who had been with him returning to their friends, squatting down, whispering, and gradually heads would lift, turn and gaze in his direction. Under a roughly made shelter, rigged from blankets and ground clothes, was the hospital. The surgeon was a lone surviving medical orderly who had worked without rest for three days on the forty odd men who had been wounded and dragged to the top of the butte. The orderly was already at work, the men who had gathered around to watch were turning as well, looking at Abe.

  The look, he realized, they are giving me “the look.” He had seen it wherever his father went, the gaze, the flicker of a smile, the slight straightening of the shoulders. Always he had associated it with his father, and for a second he wondered if somehow his father had come into their midst and was standing behind him.

  But then he knew that it was him they were looking at. These were now his men.

  Embarrassed, he lowered his head, slumped down behind a boulder, and within minutes was asleep, untroubled by the nightmare he had just survived.

  And when he awoke an hour later with dawn, he found that someone had put a blanket over his shoulders and left a cup of water by his side.

  Dawn was obscured by banks of clouds marching along the eastern horizon, their interiors glowing with flashes of lightning.

  It had been a hard night of flying. The summer heat was at its height, the ocean below heavy with warmth that, during the night, would continue to evaporate, the warm air rising, changing it to clouds and then towering thunder-heads. To drift into one was almost certain death. The wind shears were capable of ripping the wings off a steamer in a single, cruel slash. It was the perfect brew for the beginning of the cyclone season.

  Richard had weaved and darted around the storms, going down so low at times that salt spray coated his windscreen, then rising up again through canyons of open air. The stars twinkling overhead guided him as they had guided all navigators who sailed or flew at night.

  In the dawning light he looked out across the massive wings of his four-engine aerosteamer, one of the new Ilya Murometz models, capable of ranging outward a thousand miles. He had run with all four engines through most of the night, wanting to get as far out to sea as possible, pushing the range. His fuel was nearly half gone. For the journey back he’d cut two of the engines off, add buoyancy by releasing additional hydrogen into the aft gasbag, which was tucked into the huge, hundred foot tail boom, then lift to the thin air of fourteen thousand feet.

  His forward and aft observers had been violently sick through most of the night flight as they bobbed up and down in the warm thermals, and it was hard t
o keep them at their tasks. Both of the men kept groaning, their agony echoing through the speaking tubes.

  Richard tried to block out the sounds. He was just as susceptible as they were and had leaned out the port side window more than once.

  His copilot and navigator, a hearty Rus flight sergeant, had taken the entire ride as an immense joke, laughing at the agony of his three companions. Propped above and behind Richard in the top gunner position, he kept shouting ribald songs to the wind…and then fell silent.

  “Cromwell, off to starboard!”

  Richard looked to the right, but saw nothing.

  “Igor, what the hell is it? You are supposed to tell me what you see,” he cried, turning to look up past the feet of the man behind him.

  “Smoke. I see smoke.”

  Richard called to his forward observer, who came back with a negative. Banking the huge aerosteamer slightly to port so that the windscreen to his right rose, he tried to see what Igor was shouting about, but saw nothing.

  “Igor, get down here, damn it!”

  Igor slipped back down into the cabin and sat in the chair beside Richard. He could see that Igor’s face was beet red from the wind as he pulled up his goggles and grinned.

  “I saw it. Smoke, lots of smoke.” As Igor spoke, he pointed off to starboard, roughly twenty degrees from their heading. Igor then reached around behind the seat and pulled out the plot board, their map tacked to it. Igor’s estimates of their speed and heading had been checked off every fifteen minutes. According to the chart, they were fifty miles northwest of the previous day’s sighting of smoke.

  Richard knew it was all guess work. Without the sun it was impossible to shoot a sighting, and even when it was out, most of the time the navigator would calculate that they were two hundred miles north of Suzdal and in the Great Northern Forest. Shooting an angle might work on a boat, but in a plane, surging and falling with the wind, it was a waste of time.

  So everything had to be based on airspeed, and estimated winds, and in ten hours they could be a hundred, even two hundred miles off from where they were supposed to be this morning. For that matter, the pilot of this aircraft from the previous day could be two hundred miles off from where he claimed he was.

  They had not sighted any known landmark so far, not the Tortuga Shoals, the Caldonian Isles, or the Archipelago of the Malacca Pirates. Their only fix had been on the Mi-noan Shoals, ninety miles due south of Constantine, and that had been less than two hours into their flight. It was all guesswork, and he wondered if Igor, given his reputation on land, had been secretly sipping vodka during the night.

  “You take the controls, Igor, and aim us toward where you think you’re seeing things. I’m going topside for a better look.”

  “You’ll see, Commander,” Igor said with a grin, “and we’ll get the credit.”

  “Great, just what I wanted,” he replied glumly. Unbuckling from his seat, he scrambled up through the circular opening just aft of the pilot’s seat and popped out, bracing himself against the breech of the topside gatling. He remembered to clip the harness around his waist to the safety ring and then stood up into the wind, pulling down his goggles, then clipped on the speaking tube and earplugs.

  Bracing his hands on the top wings, he felt a momentary thrill. The great wings of the Ilya Murometz, more than a hundred feet across, spread out to either side. Clouds whisked by overhead, stretching to the hazy glow of the all-encompassing horizon. The plane banked, Igor, demonstrating a good touch on the controls, gently bringing them around and then leveling out.

  “I think I’m flying straight toward it!” Igor shouted, and Richard winced. In the earplugs the man’s voice was far too loud.

  Leaning against the wind, Richard looked straight ahead, but saw absolutely nothing but the milky haze of the horizon. “I don’t see a damn thing.”

  “Look careful. It’s coal smoke. Darker. I know, I’ve seen it from our ships many times.”

  Richard squinted, tried to use his field glasses, and gave up after a few seconds. The plane was bouncing too much.

  He squatted back down a bit and leaned forward, as if the extra few inches might somehow clear the view. He carefully scanned ahead, not even quite sure where the horizon ended and the ocean began…and then he saw it, a dark smudge.

  It gave him a chill, and he had a sudden flash of memory, of the indistinct smudge on the horizon at sunset the night the Gettysburg went to her doom. It was a barely distinguishable difference in light, a darker shadow against a light gray sky and sea.

  “About five degrees to port!” Richard shouted. “Ask Xing up forward if he sees it yet.”

  The plane slipped ever so slightly, then leveled out again.

  “Xing is blind,” Igor cried, “he sees nothing. You see it, though.”

  He still wasn’t sure. Had he thought he’d seen something simply because he was looking so hard for it? But then it reappeared, a dark greasy smudge.

  “Yes! Hold us steady on this bearing. You’re almost straight on it.”

  Igor laughed.

  Long minutes passed, and gradually the darkness began to spread out.

  “I can see it from in here,” Igor announced. “That Xing is blind. Throw him off now. It will lighten the load so we get home.”

  Richard said nothing, trying again with the field glasses, momentarily catching it, then losing it as the plane surged yet again.

  Finally he saw something more, a dark spot, looking like the blade of a knife turned almost edgewise, two small dark pins rising from it. The pagodas of a battleship?

  “Give us a little more speed, Igor.”

  “Cromwell, our fuel. A little reserve would be comforting.”

  “Just edge us up another five knots. We’ve got plenty.”

  “Not if we have to start running.”

  “Just do it.”

  He heard the slight change in tone of the engines.

  He extended one hand, holding his fingers open before his face at arm’s length. The smoke extended far beyond either side of his fingertips. If they’re still twenty, thirty miles off, it was definitely not one ship. That much smoke had to be dozens of ships.

  “A little lower, we’re brushing into the cloud base.”

  The nose of the aerosteamer dropped slightly, and he could feel airspeed picking up. After several hundred feet they leveled out again, where the air was slightly clearer.

  He saw not one ship, but dozens of ships. In the van was definitely one of the battleships that he had seen in the harbor, the distinctive twin pagodas almost lined up on each other. Forward, surrounding the huge vessel, were half a dozen smaller ships, tiny slivers of darkness against the gray sea. Plumes of smoke trailed out behind them, drifting into a cloud astern, obscuring what he was convinced were more ships yet farther back.

  “Got it!” Richard cried, and finally he heard Xing up forward shouting as well.

  The moment of exuberance gave way to a knot in his gut, a strange mixed emotion that was part that they’d made a sighting, but with it a realization that the nightmare was indeed true.

  Now what?

  He was tempted to order them to turn around and get the hell out of there. The Kazan had some catapult-launched scout planes and a small ship for carrying additional planes and launching them. If they catch us and we don’t get back, the fleet will never know. They were nearly six hundred miles out, two days sailing, more likely three. Go back now and we can get a better read as they come closer in.

  Yet, on the other hand, in another ten minutes we’ll find out what they really have.

  “Commander?”

  It was the first time Igor had called him that, and he could not help but grin. Igor was nervous, and it showed in that one word.

  “Straight in, Igor. Xing, I don’t care how blind you are, start keeping a watch for scout planes. Octavian, same with you in the tail. If they spot us, you know they’ll send something up, and I want to be long gone.”

  The dark shadow
began to rapidly spread out, an indication that they were closing in.

  He now had two battleships in view, then three, and in another moment five, all of them riding in line astern, each a mile or so back from the other.

  He firmly braced his elbows on the wing, leaned down, and raised his field glasses. This time he caught and held the target. The lead battleship had a smaller vessel to its windward side, connected to it by what appeared to be cables. Why? Transferring coal perhaps? That could be the explanation for how they could travel so far and hope to return.

  He looked farther back, until the fourth battleship caught his eye. It was flying the red banner of the emperor, just below it the gray of the Order. It was the flagship, and both of them were on board.

  Sweeping over him was the memory of Hazin, the curious strange mix of emotions, of loathing and yet of attraction, of outrage and, also, most disturbing, of admiration and even of awe. He wondered if poor Sean was with him.

  He felt a prickling sensation that felt almost like a warning; that somehow Hazin had sensed him and was turning his attention on him.

  “Ship off the portside wing.”

  It was Octavian, his voice pitched high with excitement.

  Richard turned, craning back to look, and then he saw the ship, half a dozen miles upwind almost directly abeam. How they had missed it was beyond him. It was a cruiser, obviously riding forward point, and he wondered if they had gone past any other ships.

  “I see it,” Igor announced, “and if he hasn’t seen us he’s blind.”

  The chill triggered by thoughts of Hazin deepened. Anxiously he scanned around, and then he spotted two Kazan scout planes, nearly forty-five degrees astern of the starboard beam of his own airships, noses high, climbing steadily. They were maneuvering to come around him from behind.

  He unclipped, turned, and descended into the cab. Dropping into his seat, he immediately pitched the huge aerosteamer over into a sharp banking turn to port, feeding in full throttle and edging the nose back to head to the clouds.

  “We’ve been spotted! Octavian, keep a watch as we come around. Xing, wake up. Igor, I want you to sketch the ships as you saw them, then get yourself topside!”