by Guy Worthey
“I will shoot you!” Darko Dor screamed.
“Think twice about that, Ottoman. We’ll both die if you do!” Ace said, voice unyielding as solid metal.
The car split the chain-link fence with a wallop that slowed it momentarily and tore off a headlight. Ace steered straight for the forest, eyes straining to see in the wildly jiggling rays of the one remaining headlight.
“Ha! There is no escape for you! Forget you, madwoman! I wash my hands of you and your crazy American ideals … Ahhh! Watch out! The tree!”
Ace was doing nothing but watching the tree. This was going to be some tricky driving.
The thick tree stood alone at the edge of the forest. Ace kept accelerating to the very end. The tree loomed larger and larger. Darko Dor screamed. His gun went off, but the bullet punctured a hole in the center of the windshield. He had aimed at the tree in his panic.
Ace suddenly twisted the steering wheel. The car turned sideways amid a shower of dirt. Broadside, it struck the tree. There was a booming crash of metal and a shattering explosion of glass. And then all went quiet.
Very quiet.
Lifelessly quiet.
Chapter 1 1
Bert was shot. The numbing sting tore through his shoulder and staggered him as he ran toward Uwe. Uwe clicked another cartridge into place in his gun, but by then Bert was there, in agony, true, but also at the very peak of rage. Bert had one good arm, and he used it, punching Uwe in the face with all his pent-up frustration and anger. Uwe was bowled over backwards by the terrific punch, his rifle falling from nerveless fingers.
Bert stood there panting, feeling warm wetness spread down his ribs.
Belatedly, he told the limp body, “Eh … take that! Ha!” and reached down to take Uwe’s rifle.
Bert staggered back to the fence. “Bumbling, comedic pack of dolts! This is no way to win a war! A shot has been fired! The camp is probably about to be swarming with guards, and Ace is still—”
“Bert.” Quack was at his elbow, his voice full of concern. “Come on. We got Gooper unstuck. So sorry. You got your man, though. By the thunder of the Wakinyan,[11] I think you broke his face!”
Bert chuckled, pleased. “Heh. I did, didn’t I? I didn’t know I had it in me!”
Sam had the presence of mind to retrieve Uwe’s electric torch. He snapped it off, then hurried to join the retreat.
They moved on until they were at the edge of the woods.
Quack begged, “Let’s stop, please. And listen for pursuit. And … see if Ace is coming.”
“An’ blow up the fuel,” Tombstone said.
Bert said, “Yah, yah! Blow up the — Ow! Ow! Stop!”
Quack handled Bert’s pierced shoulder. “Hush. I’m a doctor. We have to stop the bleeding. We’ll get the bullet out later.” Quack was as gentle as he could be, in the dark. He ripped the blood-wet coverall over the bullet hole with his fingers. He undid his own coverall far enough to get to his undershirt, then hastily ripped it until he managed to make strips. He crudely bound Bert’s injury.
Bert jabbered dizzily. “You are not a doctor, sir! You were barely enrolled in medical school when the war broke out! Why else should I call you a quack? It’s only the truth.”
Meanwhile, Tombstone triggered his radio transmitter. Then triggered it again. Then a third, fourth, and fifth time, saying, “Aw, nuts, I don’t think it—”
The sky turned orange. The fuel dump turned into a fireball, which dimmed and rose and curled into a mushroom shape.
“D’awww, now hain’t that a beautiful sight!” Gooper sighed lyrically. A second later, the thudding concussion made him smile even larger.
Quack said, “Beautiful, indeed! Plus, it let me see what I was doing for a second. That bandage will have to do for now, Bert.”
“Thanks, friend.”
“Gentlemen, I do not see any guards coming this way, but what is that engine?” Sam said.
Soon they all could see and hear. A black Ministry sedan skidded and swerved its wild way between house and barn, heading toward them.
“Ace?” wondered Sam.
“Ace! C’mon, Ace!” cheered Bert through teeth clenched against the pain of his bullet wound.
They all laughed with relief and cheered as the car burst through the chain-link fence and headed, as it seemed, straight for them.
“Erm,” Gooper said.
“Um. Slow down, Ace!” Quack urged.
“She will crash! She will crash!” Sam bleated.
The car ran straight at a large tree, but at the last second, the wheels turned and the car slid sideways. It might have started tumbling and rolling had the tree not been there, but with a bone-rattling crash, it came to a very, very abrupt halt.
As the sounds of tinkling glass faded, the men ran toward the scene. Sam had Uwe’s electric torch. He played it upon the wreckage. The car had struck the tree broadside, at the level of the back seat. The light illuminated a crumpled form. It was a body, covered in glass, bark, and blood.
“Lady Ace?” inquired Sam in choked tones. “But no, that is the minister!” He reoriented his light.
In the driver’s seat, a woozy, bruised Ace smiled fuzzily at them. “Up here, fellas. My door’s stuck. Help a girl out?”
Gooper guffawed. “Wif pleasure!” He put a hand on the door handle and gave a mighty yank. Metal bent, and the door yielded to Gooper’s bunched muscles. He handed Ace out like a gallant prince of old.
“You crashed on purpose, to get rid of that guy?” Quack inquired.
“Yes. I didn’t have a lot of options. He had a gun on me. Oof! I hurt all over, but we can’t stay.”
“I should say not!” Sam agreed.
“Inter th’ woods, then! We can make a few miles before sunup,” Gooper said.
They melted away into the night trees.
♠♠♠
They traversed steep slopes in the darkness, weaving in and around barely-seen trees. Ace and Bert were both dizzy and weak, and the other three helped them along through the obstacles.
Gooper lectured them as they walked, feeling in high spirits. “Now, don’t yew fret about hounds. The thing about trained hounds is they’ve got ter ’ave a scent ter start off with. If they just release hounds at the start of our trail, the hounds are goin’ ter chase squirrels an’ rabbits, not us. Mind you, we stink to ’igh ’eaven. So one thing ter do is ter find a clean stream to bathe in.”
“It’s last quarter moon. The moon should be rising in about an hour,” Ace said. “Head more west for now. The terrain’s more rugged. We’ll turn north later on.”
The moon rose as Ace predicted. Its wan light helped to navigate the increasingly precarious paths.
“Mah boots are fallin’ apart,” Tombstone fretted.
“I can help when we stop,” Quack said. “I stole some leather scraps.”
Ace grew stronger as the night wore on, but Bert flagged. “Look for shelter, Gooper,” Ace said.
“Yeah. I’m down to socks fer shoes now,” Tombstone said.
But it was Sam that spotted something. He patted Gooper on the meaty arm and pointed. “Sahib. Down there. It is a limestone cave, I think.”
Gooper peered and said, “It hain’t but a hole in the ground.”
“Please allow me the benefit of the doubt, sahib. This is Karst topography,” Sam cryptically insisted, leading the way.
The cave entrance was indeed little more than a hole, but it opened into a vast chamber. Gooper turned on the feeble electric torch and played it on the walls.
“Cor!” he gasped.
The rest stared, too. Ghostly stains decorated the walls, painstakingly applied by the hands of artists that lived millennia before the dawn of recorded history. Deer, bears, bison, mammoths, sabretooth cats, and stick figures of people paraded across the limestone.
“Who’s got the rifle?” Quack inquired.
“Sahib, I do!” said Sam with an air of surprise. He couldn’t remember who had handed it to him, or when.<
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“How many bullets does it have?”
Sam opened the breach. “Ah. Three, sahib. Three bullets.”
“You take first watch, Sam. Wake me for second watch.” Quack was helping Bert to nest. The floor was a loamy soil with large divots the right size to sleep in all curled up. Bert sank into one with a faint groan and closed his eyes, immediately falling into an exhausted slumber.
“These ’ere dimples in the floor are bear beds!” sunnily announced Gooper. He looked around to see many eyes looking roundly at him. He amended, “Erm, old bear beds. Old ones. Th’ cave’d be all smelly if bears were livin’ here now.”
Tombstone said, “Y’all git yerself a bear bed then, and turn off the torch. Save the battery.”
The darkness that came was absolute. In the cool and quiet the Allies fell comatose. Sam heroically kept his eyes open, but nothing, not even a bear, came to disturb them.
Chapter 1 2
Gradually, they came awake. Afternoon sun diffused into the cave. From time to time, the buzz of an airplane rose and fell.
“Lookin’ fer us, mebbe,” Tombstone said. He had squirreled away a couple of metal cans in his duffel. Gooper took them and left the cave to find water. Ace exercised, dauntlessly stretching despite deep bruises.
Quack watched Gooper from the tiny cave entrance. “It is odd. Somehow, he blends into the scenery. His red hair is like the red leaves. His pale skin is like birch bark.”
Tombstone said, “He’s so wrong he ends up right? Typical.”
Gooper returned with spring water and pockets bulging with walnuts. Bert was parched, and Gooper had to make two trips more before everybody’s thirst was slaked.
Quack took Tombstone’s boots and looked them over. “They’re done for, Tombstone. But don’t worry. I have enough leather to make you moccasins.”
“You kin do that? Where’d you learn that?”
Quack drafted the wire cutters into service as shoemaker tools. “I’m part Sioux.”
“Huh? But you’re blond.”
“Part Sioux. My grandfather was a Swede. My mother had blond hair.” Quack settled down to leatherworking. “What’s Karst topography, Sam?”
Sam answered readily. “It is land built with the rock called limestone, sahib. It makes for steep canyons, and sinkholes, and caves like this one.”
Ace cracked walnuts, then passed the nutmeats around, hand to hand. She said, “Can you tell us about the cave paintings?”
“I am afraid not, Lady Ace. The paintings are older than written history. In my mind, they are written history, but written in pictures. You can see that the artists knew animals that no longer roam the earth. The mammoth. The sabretooth cat. The cave bear.”
Tombstone said, “Shewt. We think we got it tough. Jes’ think about them cave people. Even if they hunted a critter, next thing you know they’d be fightin’ t’ keep it against sabretooth cats or giant bears!”
“Probably drove them a bit,” Ace popped a walnut into her mouth, “nuts.”
Bert grinned. “Very punny.”
“Bert? We never got your full name, or how you ended up a prisoner.”
Quack wheedled, “Tell them, Bert. If you don’t, I’ll tell lies about you.”
“Very well. My given name is Hubert Ewing Devery Christopher Bostock the Third. One of the Boston Bostocks, if you know East Coast society.”
“Ah shore don’t,” Tombstone drawled.
Bert said, “Good! I like life better when unburdened by expectations. But my branch of the family strayed from tradition anyway. My father was a doctor, and he squandered his inheritance to try to bring modern medicine to remote parts of the world. He met my mother in Panama, and that is where they live. I had trouble choosing a career. I had my own interests—”
“Namely, chasing girls,” Quack inserted.
Bert did not bother to deny it. “I ended up studying law. I had just passed my bar exam when the war broke out. I was earning my officer stripes when Quack ruined my life, but I’ll let him tell that part.”
“Oh? All right. Quack?” Ace said.
“You shyster,” Quack said darkly. “My name is Boxnard Warburton Snana. That last name is Lakota Sioux. Growing up, I split my time between South Dakota and Boston. I know Bert from Harvard.”
Bert interrupted. “That’s Hahvahd.”
“…often mispronounced Hahvahd. We were on the fencing team together. Take it from me, he was a donkey’s rear end back then, too. When the war broke out, I was in medical school. That is why they made me a field medic.”
“Get to the good stuff,” Bert urged, “such as sending me a letter so full of lies you should be court-martialed.”
“Well, I did imply that there were pretty girls. And there were, but they were orphans, not date material for Bert. They needed rescuing. The trouble was, this orphanage was in Luxembourg, and that’s behind enemy lines. I needed an officer’s approval to do anything, and I knew Bert was an officer, or trying to be. So, yes, I sent a letter. To his credit, he came to see me.”
“Then he got me drunk!” Bert said.
“Then I got us both so drunk that neither one of us could see straight. We dressed up in coveralls like delivery men. We took a motorcycle with a sidecar and tried to drive to Luxembourg. Somehow, we thought that our disguises would fool the border guards. They did not. We were captured.”
“Yeah, imagine!” Bert snickered. He turned to Ace. “So where do we go next?”
Everyone looked at Ace. It seemed natural. It was more than the fact that Ace always seemed several steps ahead. It was more than the fact that Ace had laid three of them in the dirt in the space of a heartbeat. It transcended the twin oddities that the leader of the group would be the youngest and the only female. It was a simple sense of harmony, almost like music. It was the configuration that made the engine run smooth and powerful.
Ace was the carburetor, injecting the right mix of fuel and air into the conversation. “I was shot down over Verviers, and what I saw there gives me an idea. Maybe we don’t have to walk all the way to France.”
“What did you see, Lady Ace?” said Sam.
“Outside Verviers there are brand new airship hangars. They are very large and very secret. Like the Falke, I bet it’s something new the Ottomans are cooking up. Verviers is not far. My guess is it’s about twenty miles from here, almost due north. What would you say if I proposed stealing an airship and flying home in it?”
“Wot? Stealin’? Us?” Gooper said with exaggerated innocence.
“New, experimental airships, eh?” Bert mused.
“Lots of secrecy, then. Lots of guards with lots of guns.” Quack tapped a wise finger on his temple.
“A closely watched, highly secure area, most assuredly.” Sam nodded.
“Blinkin’ suicide mission ter try to take a whole airship!” Gooper grinned.
“Oh, and a long journey there on foot, through enemy territory crawling with soldiers,” Bert said.
Tombstone drawled, “Ma’am? Let me offer a translation on behalf o’ my cohorts. All of that means: We’re in, and when do we start?”
Chapter 1 3
The party left the prehistoric painted cave and forged ahead through autumn forests that hugged Belgian ridges. Tombstone padded along gratefully in moccasins. They ducked under cover at the sound of airplanes. Once, they dodged a group of four armed soldiers. They hid in an overgrown ditch. After a tense quarter-hour, the soldiers went away. A sweating Tombstone whispered, “Lookin’ fer us, do ya think?”
Ace said, “Probably not. They’d expect us to go west, not north. There’s a war on, too. They can’t spare too many soldiers for backwoods chases.”
They crept north. As shadows lengthened on the forested slopes, they heard distant gunshots. They froze.
“Resistance fighters,” Quack said.
“Right,” Bert said.
“There are many that would rather die than march to orders issued from Istanbul,” Sam said.
“That bullet’s got to come out,” said Ace.
Still miles short of Verviers, they selected a lonely farm. It lay near the end of one of the cultivated valleys that poked like fingers between forested mountain ridges. Dusk fell.
“Who besides me speaks French?” Ace asked.
Shifty-eyed looks crisscrossed the group.
“Perhaps if it were written down,” Sam said.
“You are it, Ace,” Quack said.
Ace stripped off her greasy mechanic coveralls to reveal her bloodstained aviator suit. It was recognizably Allied, though the insignia had been torn off. As the others lurked out of sight, Ace knocked on the door.
A sober couple answered. A small boy peeped out from between them. After a few minutes of conversation, Ace beckoned the men out of hiding. “Come on out, fellas. These are the Knoxes. Their elder son was taken by the Ottomans. They’re eager to help. We talked about risk, but they don’t mind us staying for a day. They say the soldiers don’t come by very often.”
The Knoxes and the Allies bowed and smiled to each other across the language barrier.
The next item of business was bullet extraction.
Ace and Quack scrounged for improvised instruments and supplies. They boiled their tools to sterilize them. The living room transformed into an operating theater. Quack handed Bert a bottle of whisky and said, “Permission to get glassy-eyed granted.”
“Permission? I outrank you, Quack,” said Bert.
“So order yourself to do it, then!” Quack turned to Ace. “Who’s doing what? You were further along than I was in medical school.”
“I can do the extraction,” Ace said, cool as a cave.
“Done! I’ll assist. I was more interested in psychology anyway. So, you’ve done surgeries like this before?”