The Steel Ring

by R. A. Jones

  He screeched as a powerful, painful jolt shot from the woman’s hands and into his torso. He was lifted from the ground as if by an invisible hand and sent hurtling backwards. When he slammed to the pavement, he groaned and went limp. From the burnt and blackened patch in his shirt, thin wisps of smoke rose.

  This was a power most of the gypsies did not know Natalia possessed, for she tried to keep it hidden and used it sparingly. Anything she could touch with her hands, she could repel with a powerful force that for all she feared was called up from the very depths of Hell.

  As she turned to face her second assailant, she could tell that this electric display had jolted him as well – out of his lustful stupor. Before she could act against him, he moved with a speed that belied his bulk.

  A vicious backhand swing from him caught Natalia in the temple. Like a rag doll, she was slammed against the wall of the alley. Stars exploded behind her eyes as the back of her head met rough stone. Stunned, she felt her knees turn to water and she slumped to the pavement.

  Before she could regain her senses, the thuggish Karl was upon her. His legs straddled her body, his knees pinning her arms to the ground so she could not touch him with her hands.

  His own hands, thick fingered and callused and already stained with the blood of other innocents, wrapped around her neck.

  “Don’t,” she managed to wheeze before his fingers tightened so hard that her voice was cut off.

  Not that her voice could have saved her this time. So enraged was Karl, so consumed by murderous desires, that her seductive powers would not have been able to pierce the blood red veil that now made his eyes seem less than human.

  “You’re dead, witch!” he snarled, bearing down harder. His teeth were bared in a deathlike grimace, foamy spittle bubbling from between them and dripping down on her.

  Natalia continued to struggle as best she could, in a vain attempt to buck him off her. He giggled, as if her efforts merely enhanced his murderous enjoyment.

  The uncontrollable flickering of her eyelids made her crazed assailant blink in and out of existence. If she simply closed her lids completely, she thought, as her eyes rolled up in their sockets and the world began to grow gray around her, perhaps he’d disappear forever.

  Instead, her eyes popped open farther, as she heard Karl grunt loudly. Her head was jerked roughly to one side, but it seemed his grip on her throat had weakened slightly.

  A loud, harsh, cracking sound pierced the ringing in her ears and now Karl’s hands fell completely away from her neck.

  Still unable to move much more than her head, Natalia strained to focus her eyes on the man above her. His own eyes were still open, but unseeing. His mouth had dropped open as well, and his tongue lolled limply out of it to one side.

  Seemingly from below the thug’s hairline, a thin stream of blood, so red it was almost black, oozed forward and slid down his forehead. It was followed by yet another trickle of blood, and yet another.

  The first stream crawled over his right brow and began to fill the hollow of his eye. He convulsed slightly, then pitched over sideways.

  Natalia loudly sucked in air; his weight upon her chest had prevented her breathing nearly as much as had his fingers tightening around her throat.

  With her vision clearing rapidly, and Karl out of the way, she was now able to see another young man standing over her. He had none of the look of the beast about him, such as had informed the faces of her attackers. She did see fear there, and could tell from the rapid rising and falling of his chest that he had probably been running when he came upon the scene of her travail.

  In his right hand, he held a short, thick length of board. The end pointing away from him was slightly splintered, and painted with sprays of what was undoubtedly Karl’s blood.

  She flinched as he now stepped toward her. But it was his empty left hand that he extended toward her.

  He was not a large man, but when she placed her hand in his and he grasped it gently but firmly, he had no trouble pulling her to her feet.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, gripping her shoulder to steady her when she wobbled slightly.

  “I will be,” she replied.

  She looked down at the limp form of the man who had tried to kill her. He was in a position such that he almost looked as if he had been praying before pitching face forward to the pavement. His knees were slightly under him, his rump up in the air. His face was turned to one side and pressed against the ground. The dark spreading stain beneath it had begun to slow, and Natalia could see that he was still alive.

  Gripping her rescuer’s forearm for support, Natalia pulled her right foot back. She swung it forward with all the strength she could muster, kicking the fallen Karl right between the legs. His body lurched, but she knew he was in no condition to feel the blow.

  But he would tomorrow, and the thought of that made her smile.

  “Come on,” her rescuer said, and she could see that he too was grinning. “We’d better get out of here.”

  With Natalia’s hand still in his, the young man headed toward the mouth of the alley. Their path took them past Walter, Karl’s fallen partner. He was beginning to regain full consciousness, and had raised himself up on his elbows, looking about with puzzlement.

  Without so much as a word, Natalia’s rescuer swung the board he still carried. With a sharp crunch, it connected with Walter’s jaw, breaking it and again robbing him of consciousness.

  The young man threw the board away just before he and Natalia came out of the alley. They paused when they reached the street, and he quickly looked around them.

  “This way,” he said, heading off to the west. “I was walking home when all this madness began. If we can reach my apartment, I think we’ll be safe.”

  “Hold up,” Natalia said. As he looked at her with amusement, she straightened her dress, smoothing the wrinkled fabric as best she could with her hands, then did the same with her hair. He reached up and pushed a strand of hair she had missed back over her ear. Smiling, she put one arm through his.

  “If we look like we belong here,” she said, settling into a slow, measured walk, “we’re less likely to be harassed.”

  “I do belong here,” the young man said, his soft tone unable to hide his bitterness. “My family has lived here for nearly two hundred years.”

  “Then you’re a Jew?”

  “I’m a German.” He glared at her for a moment, then his eyes softened. “One who just happens also to be a Jew.” He sighed deeply, clearly pained.

  “Forgive my manners,” he continued, patting her hand lightly. “My name is Otto Berenger.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Herr Berenger,” she replied with mock formality, tipping her head toward him. “My name is Natalia Nastrova.”

  “A lovely name. For a lovely girl.”

  They walked along in silence then. Both did an excellent job of appearing calm, but both cast their eyes continually back and forth for any signs of impending trouble.

  “What happened back there,” Natalia said at last, “between me and those animals. How much of it did you see?”

  “Nearly all of it, I’m afraid,” Otto replied.

  Natalia tensed. Even among the Roma, those who saw what she was capable of often reacted with fear and suspicion.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t intervene sooner,” Otto said, and she was relieved that she heard neither emotion in his voice, “but I felt it would be wise to find a weapon before I tried to be a hero.”

  “You’re forgiven,” she said.

  “I do have one question, Natalia.”

  “What’s that, Otto?”

  “The brute who tried to kill you. Was he right?”

  “About what?” Uneasiness crawled up her spine.

  “Are you a witch?”

  “Not the kind you think,” she replied, smiling weakly.

  “Oh,” he said, sound slightly disappointed. “Because if you were … I have a rude neighbor I was hoping you coul
d turn into a pig.”

  Unable to help herself, Natalia began to laugh. Snickering, Otto started laughing as well.

  Even after the humor had faded they continued to laugh as long as they could, even as the world around them seemed to be destroying itself in fire and blood. And broken glass.

  Perhaps both of these young people knew it might be years before they would have reason to laugh again.

  CHAPTER III

  January 5, 1939

  Amelia Earhart sat on what had become her favorite spot; a rocky outcropping that extended several feet out into the ocean. Each wave that crashed against it sent a fine spray upward that cooled her face as she stared out to sea.

  Watching the rolling waves diverted her from staring upward into the sky. She tried not to look at its blue expanse if at all possible; it had been too long since she had flown through its currents, and she missed it too much. She was meant to be in the air, not on the ground.

  Both the sky and the sea had seemed impossibly far away from her as she was growing up on the flatlands of Kansas at the turn of the century. Neither would prove as difficult for her to navigate as had been the social aspects of her young life as it moved forward. She’d watched her father Edwin battle the bottle, and endured the friendless high school year in Chicago, capped by the telling caption placed under her yearbook photo: A.E. – the girl in brown who walks alone.

  But then the airways called to her, and she willingly submitted to their seductive allure. From the moment she first sat in the cockpit of a surplus Curtiss Canuck, under the direction of the pioneering Neta Sook, Amelia knew she had found her true home. At the age of 26, she became only the sixteenth woman to be issued a pilot’s license.

  There were other women who could fly better than she, she knew. But none of them was her equal when it came to capturing the imaginations and the hearts of the public.

  As Charles Lindbergh was called “Lucky Lindy”, so did the media dub her “Lady Lindy” and the “Queen of the Air”. She was paid handsomely to endorse Lucky Strike cigarettes and was invited to meet President Calvin Coolidge in the White House. Later, she met and became good friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, with whom she had continued to communicate regularly.

  In recognition of her feat of flying the Atlantic alone, Amelia had become the first woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross from Congress. She had also been presented with the Cross of the Knight of the Legion of Honor by the French government and the Gold Medal of the National Geographic Society from President Herbert Hoover.

  Amelia smiled now, and looked down at the Flying Cross, which she had worn as a good luck charm on this last flight. She still thought of it as such, despite the crash; after all, she was still alive, despite someone’s best efforts to kill her.

  She ran her thumb over the center of the medal, where she had added a little something extra: a pale blue gem that had been sent to her by a secret admirer and which she had set in the middle of the Flying Cross. Its color reminded her of the sky.

  And she did so miss the sky, being a part of it.

  She missed it almost as much as she missed her mother and her little sister Pidge. Or her husband, publisher George Putnam. And though it might surprise those detractors who thought of her as a glory hound, she missed it far more than she did the fame and the adulation.

  She thought again, as she did so often, of the grand adventure that had left her marooned on this small, lonely piece of non-sky for the past eighteen months.

  It had been a warm day in that early June of 1937 when Amelia, accompanied by navigator Fred Noonan, had set off from Miami on a flight intended to carry them completely around the globe.

  It was meant to be a journey of distance and purpose, not of time; they made numerous stops before landing in Lae, New Guinea on June 29. They had completed some 22,000 miles of their planned circumnavigation by that point, with 7,000 more to go, all over the vast Pacific Ocean.

  Poor Fred had been blissfully unaware of the real reason for Amelia’s flight, or for her many stops. She convinced him she had merely wanted to take the time for once to be a sightseer, a tourist.

  In truth, she was more like a meteorologist, gathering information in the face of a coming storm. This, she came to believe, would be a storm that rained blood.

  Only a handful of people, who, like her, belonged to the secret society known as the Steel Ring, were supposed to know Amelia’s actual mission, but obviously there had been a leak. That was why, during her layover in New Guinea, someone had planted a bomb aboard her Lockheed Electra.

  She was oblivious of this fact, of course, when she took off on July 2 on the next leg of her journey, one intended to end 2,500 miles later on the island of Howland.

  Her first hint of trouble came when Fred informed her that their radio and navigation systems had begun to fail, doubtless due to deliberate sabotage. The smell of leaking fuel had drifted into the cockpit even before her instruments showed they were losing petrol.

  Unknown to Amelia, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca, stationed at Howland Island, did receive her calm yet urgent transmissions about running low on gas. Those onboard tried to communicate back, but she was no longer able to receive their signal; her radio antenna had been broken off by the saboteur.

  Amelia had managed to nurse her sputtering plane along for another couple of hours, desperately scanning the featureless ocean below for even the tiniest spit of land upon which she might attempt an emergency landing.

  That’s when the small bomb planted inside the fuselage detonated.

  Almost certainly it had been meant to go off even sooner, over an expanse of sea sure to swallow the craft whole.

  Amelia had just spotted land below when the explosive device rocked the center of the plane. To her horror, as she looked back over her shoulder, she saw that a jagged, gaping hole was all that remained of what had been the navigator’s seat.

  No amount of time would ever erase from her memory the image of Fred Noonan’s face, twisted in pain and fear, as his mangled and bleeding body fell away from the plane into oblivion.

  The Electra pitched forward on its nose and began a downward plunge. Amelia pulled back on the stick with all her might, ‘til it felt as though her arms might be torn away from her body.

  She had almost succeeded in pulling the rebellious hulk back to the perpendicular when it struck the rolling ocean. Her teeth, her eyes, her brain were rattled in her skull as the mortally wounded bird skipped like a smooth stone over the water.

  The instant it stopped skipping, it started sinking.

  Gasping in shock, the aviatrix clawed at her seat harness, managing to free herself from its restraint as the water rose to her chin.

  That which had nearly killed her now likely saved her. As the water closed over her and the crippled plane pitched over onto its back, Amelia found herself facing the hole left by the explosion. Kicking free of the cockpit, she arrowed through the dark aperture and left the plane falling below her.

  She had calmed considerably by the time her head broke the surface of the ocean. Treading water, she turned slowly, scanning to all sides. She almost laughed when she saw land rising up no more than a half mile from her position.

  She fought the sense of urgency twisting within her, and began to slowly paddle toward salvation, stopping as needed to simply float on her back and rest.

  It was nearly an hour later when she allowed her limp body to be washed ashore with a small wave. She lay face down, sobbing deeply and gratefully digging her fingers into the soft black sand of the beach.

  She’d been here ever since, eighteen months now, on what she believed was the tiny Gardner Island. Her first and greatest hardship had been the lack of potable water. For three days she had fruitlessly searched for any sort of stream or pool, until she began to fear she would fall victim to the old sailor’s saw: Water, water everywhere … but not a drop to drink.

  As much by accident as anything else, she had at last found a nearly hid
den spot where a minuscule trickle of water bubbled up from below ground. It tasted of dirt and chemicals, but it didn’t sicken her; that first day, she would have drunk deeply of it even if it had. With her fingers she scooped it between her dry, cracked and bleeding lips and into her mouth.

  The water not only kept the woman alive, it provided moisture to a few fruit bearing trees and edible tubers. Later, she fashioned a makeshift spear, with which she was able to snag the occasional fish.

  Mostly, she ate crabs. The island was literally crawling with the spidery creatures; it seemed she could never kill and consume enough to make any discernible dent in their population.

  After all these months, she was so sick of crabmeat that some days she chose not to eat at all. It was no wonder that the worn and tattered remnants of her flight suit hung so loosely on her gaunt frame, making her look almost like an animated scarecrow.

  Amelia rose to her feet, glancing at a familiar sight upon the rocks to the south of her perch. There could be seen the rusting hull of a beached freighter, the SS Norwich City.

  There was little to it save for that hull, but she had scavenged what little could be of use, mostly a few narrow metal beams she had used to form the framework for the simple lean-to she had built and now called home.

  Miraculously, she had also found two battered books aboard the Norwich, relatively undamaged by water and smelling only faintly of mildew.

  She had always loved to read, and had grown to cherish these two volumes: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Charles Dickens’ Bleak House.

  She had read them again and again over the long and never changing months. She credited them with having saved her sanity, these stories she could now practically recite by heart.

  Soon, though, Amelia would have new books to read. She smiled and lovingly rubbed the distinctively decorated steel ring she wore on her right hand. As had been the case since it had first been given to her, the ring fit her perfectly, even though her fingers were little more now than bony projections from her hands.