The Beekeeper's Bullet

by Lance Hawvermale

  Arms, back, pull!

  She removed her boots and walked in stocking feet to the narrow door in the kitchen. Once there, having safely crossed the house in silence, she put her boots back on, chewed on her bottom lip for a few moments, and then let herself outside.

  The world was mostly quiet. Insects chirped and buzzed. The ceramic wind chime on the barn awning tinkled in a breeze so faint it was little more than a whisper. At four-thirty in the morning, the estate grounds felt empty, as no kerosene lamp burned in a window and no oven had yet been stoked to life for morning muffins. The animals slept soundly in their pens.

  Ellenor struck off toward the grain fields. If her boots left tracks in the dew, it was too dark to see them.

  Arms, back, pull!

  She knew her escape route. As soon as the plane’s engine caught, she’d shout a last goodbye to Alec and then move quickly to the far side of the barn, keeping that rambling structure between her and anyone who emerged from the house in response to the sudden noise. From there, she’d be able to return to her room either through the kitchen door or—if that way was blocked by a sleepy-eyed occupant—she’d use the glass door at the garden. She’d left it unlocked just to be sure.

  Her eyes made sense of the shadows. The silhouettes of the planes appeared.

  She’d memorized their positions so as to move directly to the one that Alec called the Rumpler. She touched them as she passed, these unlikely inventions that allowed man at last to leave the ground after so many failed attempts by inventors of the previous century. She’d witnessed her first airplane at a public demonstration four years ago, and like everyone else in the crowd, she’d had to force herself to exhale. That’s how fantastic it all was, this business of sailing the sky. It had seemed like part of a fairy tale then. The war had seized that fairy tale and turned it into a weapon.

  Smelling the castor oil, the axle grease, and the wax on the wings, she reached the largest of the planes just as a voice said, “Fancy meeting you here.”

  Alec sat on the Rumpler’s lower wing, between the taut wires that held the two decks in place. Ellenor drew closer so she could see his face. “You were worried I wouldn’t come?”

  “I’ve heard it said that modern women have a tendency to change their minds.”

  “Women have always changed their minds,” she said. “But only recently have we been permitted to get away with it.”

  “And soon you’ll even be voting in political elections, by the looks of it.”

  She shrugged, near enough to him that he could see her expression of disinterest in the matter. “I’m no suffragette, but I wouldn’t mind having a say in what fools are elected to govern us.”

  He smiled. “If you’re looking for fools, search no further.” He slid off the wing. “Here, I brought you something.”

  She accepted the pith helmet. “You’re welcome to keep it, if you think it would help.”

  “You’ll need it for the bees. But if you’re willing to part with these gloves…”

  “Of course. They’re yours. And here are your clothes and a few other things I packed.” She handed him the satchel, then hung the helmet down her back by its leather chinstrap.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Really. For all of this. You’re taking a serious risk for a bloke you barely know.”

  “Maybe I’m doing it for the bloke’s sister. I’m sure she’s the more sensible twin.”

  “That goes without saying. Well, then. We’ve about thirty minutes until daybreak. Shall we?”

  Ellenor gathered a breath, let it out, and nodded.

  Alec went over it one final time as he tightened the goatskin gloves over each individual finger and buttoned up his coat. Ellenor never looked away from his eyes as he spoke. Should she hug him goodbye? She hardly knew him. When he was finished, she resisted the urge and offered her hand instead.

  He took her hand gently, leaned toward her, and kissed her on the forehead. “It’s been a pleasure being shot in the hand by you, Miss Jantz.”

  She swatted him lightly on the arm. “Tell your sister I said hello.”

  He held his smile in place, nodded firmly, and then turned and pulled the wedge-shaped chocks from the wheels. Nothing but hundreds of yards of open ground lay in front of the Rumpler’s nose. Once the engine caught, the plane would begin rolling forward. He dropped the satchel into the observer’s seat, moving differently than he had a few minutes before; a new energy infused him and gave him grace. He’d probably already spent time checking the integrity of the plane’s many components, so with the chocks gone, he climbed onto the wing and then lowered himself into the man-sized hole that was the cockpit, a British pilot at the controls of a German plane.

  Ellenor went to the propeller.

  Alec had already turned it several times—something about settling the oil or positioning the cylinders—and now one long wooden blade waited almost parallel with the ground. He’d placed an overturned Red Cross crate to give her the height she needed, and now she stepped up on it and placed both hands along the blade’s top edge. The wood was smooth and thick.

  Arms, back, pull!

  She waited for him to say it, counting her breaths, and then he did, his voice carrying clearly to her in the dark: “Contact.”

  She heaved down on the propeller.

  Nothing happened.

  She did it again, repeating the motion. The engine ticked as things moved inside of it, but that was all. She heard Alec adjusting levers or handles or—

  “Contact,” he said again.

  Wishing she would have hugged him, Ellenor heaved.

  The engine barked hard three times. Ellenor leaped back, hands going instinctively to cover her ears…

  The plane sputtered. The propeller turned twice more and stopped.

  She looked in the direction of the house. No one was there.

  “Contact.”

  “I’m trying, damn it.” She got back on the Red Cross crate, grabbed the stupid propeller, and yanked downward with all the strength she could muster.

  The engine snarled, stuttered…and then banged out a long, unsteady rhythm so loud that it made Ellenor wince. She hurried backward, and a moment later, lamplight appeared in one of the house’s upper windows.

  The plane barely moved, its cadence not yet established. The engine sped up, the propeller churning the air madly. With agonizing slowness, the aircraft crept forward.

  Ellenor looked back and forth from plane to house. Another light winked on. The din was unbelievable. All of that noise, and yet the plane was barely moving. Ellenor thought about jumping close and trying to push the thing along—

  And then another sound, somehow even louder than the howling motor, cracked the starry night a few feet away. A full second passed before Ellenor realized what was happening.

  She was being shot at.

  She stared at the house and saw a man framed there against the glare of kerosene maps. He was nothing but a figure cut from black crepe, a man-shape with one arm extended. A muzzle-flash appeared in his hand.

  A bullet struck the ground in front of her.

  All sense of place and time abandoned her. The fear was so delicate, so weightless, that it crystallized her, so that she felt as if she might break into frail pieces and float away. Someone was trying to kill her.

  She turned and ran beside the plane.

  Two hundred yards separated the makeshift airfield from the shooter at the house, no easy shot at night for even a trained marksman. The bullets flew by her, aiming for the engine racket. By now, some of the German airmen were running toward her, barefoot but armed. This was not how it was supposed to happen. They’d reacted too quickly. The plane had taken too long to move. Hell, it was barely moving now.

  A bullet whined a few inches overhead.

  Ellenor ran with everything she had. Terror squeezed a tiny sound from her throat, but she couldn’t hear it. Her heart tried to punch through her ribs…

  “Get in!”

 
; She heard him but didn’t know what to do. She pumped her arms up and down as she ran, her boots biting into the soft soil, the pith helmet banging against her back. Tears glazed her eyes and streaked into her hair from the wind.

  “Get in, goddammit!”

  The plane was starting to pull away. Alec leaned halfway from his hole, waving his arm at her.

  More bullets lanced the darkness.

  “Get in or die!”

  Ellenor latched onto his voice like a drowning woman reaching for a rope. She veered toward the rolling plane, almost cut in half by the wing. Grunting for air, she lunged upward, grabbing the rim of the observer’s seat and hauling herself up with undiscovered strength. Alec leaned on the throttle, almost causing her to lose her grip. Frantically, with panic nearly blinding her, she dropped onto the hard, round seat behind him.

  The Rumpler jumped and jolted over the field, building speed by the second.

  Ellenor choked down each new breath. Eyes mashed shut, she leaned forward as best she could, arms locked around herself. The engine roared in one long, protracted sound, the air whistling through the wires. She bit down forcefully to keep her teeth from banging.

  And then, abruptly, the world dissolved.

  Ellenor’s stomach performed a weird little wobble inside her, and a sensation she’d never known coursed through her body. The knocking and jostling of the wheels vanished at once, and a strange force pushed her back against her seat. She opened her eyes to see herself pointed straight at the stars.

  I’m flying.

  She looked over the side. It was too dark to see anything. Was the field of barley down there somewhere? The vibrating terror of moments before was wiped away by the tranquility of disconnection. The earth had let go of Ellenor Jantz. For the first time in her life, she escaped gravity, and now she rushed through the unfettered wind.

  “Are you all right?”

  Some distant part of her knew that Alec had shouted these words over his shoulder, but she was too awestruck to respond. To go from almost dying to sweeping skyward left her unable to reply. Speaking actual human words felt like a violation.

  “Ellenor, are you hurt?”

  She had nothing to say. She felt like weeping in relief and laughing in girlish delight. She reached forward, found his shoulder, and squeezed.

  He patted her hand, then flew them high and far toward the east and whatever the coming dawn might bring.

  Part Two

  Pursuit

  Chapter Eleven

  Gustov Voss stood barefoot in the field and listened to the stolen machine fly far beyond his reach. Panting for breath, he raised his pistol and fired the last of its eight rounds in the direction of the departing sound, purely from frustration rather than intent, as the Luger’s effective range was no more than fifty meters. He kept his arm extended, glaring along the barrel at the stars, trying to understand what had just occurred.

  “Captain?”

  Twenty minutes ago, he’d awakened peacefully and made his way from his borrowed bedroom through the dark house to the kitchen. He prepared a kettle for tea. Then the noise alerted him, and he’d retrieved his gun. Now he stood hard-jawed and breathing heavily with an empty sidearm pointed at an equally empty sky.

  “Captain Voss?”

  He lowered the gun, finger still on the trigger. He wore a long nightshirt and trousers and nothing else. He’d just raced across an airfield as one of the craft in his care was taken from him, leaving him with dirt between his toes.

  What had just happened? How had it happened?

  It angered him to look away from the sky, to admit that he’d been outwitted, robbed. The sound of the vanished plane was not even that of a buzzing insect. A second later it was entirely gone.

  Gustov gathered himself, turned, and said, “There is a teapot on the stove, Lieutenant Mier. See that it is removed before the water boils away and ruins the kettle.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  That helped. Gustov restored order to himself with that simple command. Mier trotted away, his own sidearm still in his hand, its magazine depleted.

  Resisting the urge to cast another angry glare at the vacant sky, Gustov stalked to the remaining planes. Swinging lanterns revealed more of his men, all in various stages of undress. Ignoring them for a moment, Gustov inventoried the squadron, noting instantly that all eleven Fokkers were accounted for. The Rumpler C.IV was gone. Over fifteen hundred kilos of plane and munitions had been spirited away.

  Gustov’s rage was not really rage. He realized it was embarrassment. Thank Christ the men could barely see his face in the dark. Without looking at any of them, he said, “Does anyone hold any information that I do not possess regarding this incident?”

  Almost at once they replied, “No, sir.”

  He held very still, making random, baseless guesses at to what might have happened. They were too far from the Front to be the target of enemy provocateurs. Weren’t they? And if a trained pilot had gotten drunk and fancied a midnight flight, why not choose one of the unbeatable Fokker triplanes?

  “I want six of you in the air immediately. Though our craft just departed on an eastward heading, they might very well change direction. Split up. Fly at different elevations. Cover as much airspace as you can. Go now.”

  They quickly chose who among them would go; Gustov always encouraged them to make choices rather than blindly follow orders. To those who remained, he said, “Assemble the household. Everyone. But do it politely.”

  In a moment, he was alone.

  An earlier, pre-war version of himself would have chuckled at his plight. He’d always been a jovial youth who enjoyed horsemanship and hunting and anything in skirts. He’d intended to pursue a career in finance, if he was ever forced to give up gallivanting and put a roof over a woman’s head. But then a Serbian assassin had put a slug into the Archduke of Austria, the world lit itself on fire, and six months later Gustov learned to fly.

  He turned and walked purposefully to the house.

  While the others gathered in the drawing room, he attended to his appearance, dressing in the full service regalia of a German officer of the Air Force. He donned his gray M1910 field tunic. He buttoned its high collar, where double silver braids of metal flashed on dark velvet. With the help of a mirror, he straightened the tunic’s shoulder boards, each outlined in red piping and featuring a gilt-metal winged propeller device in the center. He inspected his wool field cap for lint, cleaning its black visor on his palm. He carried it with him as he went downstairs.

  As soon as he entered the drawing room, he knew he would need to move everyone outside. The chamber was appointed in stained walnut with brass accents. The writing desk was a great bear of a thing, a slab of wood on legs carved with an aggressive Etruscan motif, with a bust of some honored ancestor or perhaps a Roman senator resting sternly on one corner. Due to that desk and the fine cabinetry around it, there simply wasn’t enough space, as the aircraft mechanics, cooks, couriers, and valets had arrived last night, tripling the property’s population.

  With assistance from Father, they herded the sleepy crowd outside, where a thin band of light appeared in the east, casting pale light over the lawn. Even Karl and Truda were here, the latter slumped against Father’s shoulder while the former looked around expectantly with his hair rampant on his head. The first birds had awakened. The air smelled crisp and faintly of apples.

  Gustov took his place at the front, facing them, hat on his head at the prescribed angle. His men stood at attention; the civilians blinked and looked around, wondering why they’d been summoned. Gustov loved them all, these hardworking, scrappy men and women who cooked good food and raised respectful children. This is why he fought, not for the government in Berlin—a congregation of craggy old misers who provided inadequate boots for their soldiers—but for people who whistled, people who chopped cabbage, people with heart.

  Yet…one of them might know something they’d yet to share.

  “My deepest a
pologies,” he began, his voice carrying easily across the morning field. “As you are no doubt aware by now, one of our flying machines was taken from us within the last half hour. Quite…daringly, an unknown person absconded with property not their own. I will be frank with you, my friends, and admit that I have not the faintest notion as to how or why this happened. And so I beseech you, please, if you have any insight into this matter, come forward now.”

  His men did not move, iron rods in their backs. The mechanics and the rest of the enlisted men did the same, though many of them were unshaven, with dirt under their nails. The household staff and family members, not bound by rank, traded confused glances, shook their heads, or shrugged.

  Gustov had anticipated this precise reaction, and so he leveled his gaze on individual faces, rapidly moving from one to the next, depending on his instincts as a hunter. He thought he noticed something almost immediately, but he needed to be sure.

  “Do not be afraid,” he told them. “I have complete faith in your good intentions. Please.” He spread his hands, palms out, in a gesture that invited cooperation.

  One of the women, the cook, looked around as if seeking something.

  “Madam?” Gustov smiled. “Dagmar, isn’t it?”

  Everyone looked at her. She nodded.

  “Madam, I find myself rather desperately in need of your assistance. What do you know that can help me?”

  “Nothing, sir. I swear it. I was…I was just looking for…”

  “For whom?”

  “For Miss Jantz, sir.”

  Gustov studied the small crowd again. Miss Jantz? How had he overlooked her absence? “The American is missing,” he said, as much to himself as to his audience. “She’s not in her room?”

  “She is not, Captain,” Schmit confirmed, never breaking attention. “I checked every room myself to make sure all had heard the summons.”