Airship Hunters

by Jim Beard

  “And Assistant Director Gallows,” Cabot observed. “But the third man... ?”

  Almost a giant, with wide, square shoulders, a massive jaw, and thick, wavy black hair, the man’s eyes scanned the platform, his hand gripping a massive wooden cane with a silver top.

  “I’m assuming,” Valiantine said, stepping backwards into the shadows cast by the porch’s roof, “that he is our mystery ‘Executive Director,’ Barnaby Scarborough. This has become quite a tangle.”

  “I’ve no desire to talk with them, or be spoken to by them,” Cabot said.

  “Too late to leave by coach,” Valiantine observed, whipping his head back and forth, seeking an escape route. “The train... wherever it may take us.”

  The two agents exited quickly through the rear of the tavern and made their way by a circuitous path along back streets to the train station. Once onboard the train, they settled into seats and looked all about them to see if they’d been noticed.

  As the train began to chug away from the station, Valiantine looked out the window to see Wellington rush onto the platform and peer at the departing train, his face livid. A half-second later, Gallows and the man they presumed to be Scarborough appeared, too.

  Valiantine suppressed an urge to lean out from his window and wave.

  MAPS AND PLANS

  Duane Spurlock

  October 1897

  Why are we here?”

  Cabot watched Valiantine sip coffee and shrug his shoulders. “Consider it a strategic retreat,” the lieutenant said.

  “We’ve been kicked off the case we were purposefully chosen for. To our knowledge, no one else is working on this investigation. This is no retreat from a battle. We were dismissed. And, we’re hiding.” He glared at Valiantine. Seeing no response, Cabot added, “In terms you might better understand, you are absent from duty without leave.”

  They sat over the remains of lunch in a Dayton chop house. Cabot frowned more deeply when he saw his partner shrug again.

  Valiantine ignored Cabot’s jab. “To lick our wounds? To plan?” the lieutenant suggested. “We set up headquarters here because the sightings occurred most often in the center of the country. But we’ve hardly been here since establishing the place.”

  Cabot slurped his own coffee.

  Valiantine pointed a finger at him. “To be a bit more accurate, we are absent from duty without leave. But really, absent from what duty? We have been relieved of duty. Perhaps we are absent without telling our superiors where we are and what we are about. Enough of that.”

  “Enough? We fled our superiors! We fled—we fled a battle scene.”

  Valiantine’s expression soured.

  Cabot continued: “We witnessed a battle between two factions, foreign combatants on American soil! Leaving that behind, not reporting—isn’t that like desertion?”

  “I am not a deserter!” The lieutenant’s anger boiled in the glare he directed at his partner.

  Cabot raised a hand. He’d gone too far. “I’m sorry. I’m a bit worried. I’m not sure where we fit into all this. I’m not even sure what all this is. I am sure we’re in some sort of trouble for running away from Gallows and Wellington.”

  “You think you’re the only one worried?” Valiantine knotted his hands on the table. “I’ve dedicated my life to serving my country. I’ve lived by the rules and regulations of a professional military man in large and small conflicts for years. Don’t you understand that leaving a battlefield—that was no retreat, we simply ran away. And we didn’t report to our superior officers. I’ve responded to each of our recent encounters in the exact opposite manner to what I would expect of myself.”

  “You’re right.”

  “That’s enough!” Cabot watched the lieutenant’s face. The signs of the fight going on in the man’s mind were plainly evident in his rapidly changing expressions.

  After a couple of minutes, Valiantine sighed and looked at Cabot. He appeared to have gained some control over his volatile emotions. “I apologize. I’ve followed orders, just as you have. And then I was told I was foolish to do so. I’ve worked to be a good soldier, and now I’m reacting as a bad soldier.” He exhaled deeply. “I’m simply working from a place that is completely unfamiliar to me. I don’t have the first idea about what should be the correct response to anything that’s been told me recently.”

  Cabot nodded, but remained silent. He recognized his own conflicting emotions in his colleague’s description.

  Valiantine gave him a sharp look. “You’re always talking about the lessons you learned from Yankee Bligh. What would he do in this situation?”

  The question made Cabot stop chewing his anger. “I haven’t considered that.”

  Valiantine sat back in his chair. “We have plenty of time for it now.”

  The lieutenant’s sudden nonchalance momentarily refreshed Cabot’s irritation, but the Treasury agent chose to focus on Valiantine’s suggestion. He tried to recall if his mentor had faced a similar situation.

  “This isn’t like any sort of case he might have been warned away from,” Cabot said.

  “Of course it is. We’re investigating a mystery. We’ve been told to stop. And we’ve encountered every sort of strangeness in the mountains by Luray.”

  “Yes, I mean it’s different. We weren’t directed to investigate a crime, but a mystery.”

  “Mystery or not, crimes have been committed,” Valiantine said.

  Cabot sighed. “Yes.” He poured more coffee. “I don’t know if Yankee was ever told to stop working a case, but he told me, ‘What does the case demand? Don’t follow orders. Follow the case. Chase down the clues.’”

  “Sounds good.” Valiantine emptied his cup into his mouth. He stood up. “Let’s get to work.”

  The agents had set up shop at the Atlas Hotel on the corner of Third and Ludlow. They had taken adjoining rooms on the third floor. The two rooms didn’t have a connecting door, but one agent could knock on the wall to call to his partner.

  A large map of the United States and its territories was tacked to a wall in Cabot’s room. Pins tied with scraps of colored ribbon were stuck into the map.

  “Let me say this aloud, and you correct me where I’ve gone astray,” Cabot said. “There were no official reports on the airships before we started our investigations, only newspaper clippings. Those are represented by the blue pins.”

  “Are you sure those are all legitimate reports,” Valiantine questioned, “and not a mixture of journalistic hyperbole and bad whiskey?”

  “I’ve heard nothing different from Assistant Director Gallows. Had Wellington said anything to you?”

  The lieutenant shook his head.

  “Unless we travel to each of these sites—Sacramento, San Francisco, Omaha, and the others—and question people there, we won’t know for sure. We could split up and do that, but I’m not sure we have that luxury.”

  “We certainly can’t turn in travel expenses now. And I doubt we’re being paid during our suspension.”

  Cabot reviewed a handwritten list of locations and dates. He frowned at the map.

  “Sightings started in California. There were at least three last November. Nothing else until this past February, northeast to three sites in Nebraska: Hastings, then Inavale, and eleven days later over Omaha. South to Texas. North again to Kansas. Northeast to Iowa. South to Missouri. By April it traveled northeast again, arriving in Chicago. East to Kalamazoo by April 15.”

  Valiantine said, “Then in May, I saw it in Indiana—south—and you saw it again in Kansas—southwest.”

  “The red pins, those are us. That’s a lot of territory covered in May.”

  “Do you think there’s more than one airship?”

  Cabot looked at his partner. He saw the sign of Valiantine’s displeasure, the furrow above his nose.

  “I suppose if there’s one, it’s possible there’s another. Or it travels remarkably quickly.”

  “It wouldn’t be slowed down by obstacles in th
e landscape,” Valiantine said. “It would simply fly over hills or rivers. It wouldn’t need roads or bridges.” He tapped the knuckle of an index finger against his chin. “We have seen only one of the factions with an airship. I suppose it is possible only one of these groups has such a device.”

  Cabot returned his attention to the map. He gestured at the final three pins bearing bits of yellow ribbon. “And we encountered the airship in Detroit, Louisville, and near Luray.”

  “To the northeast, south, and then east.”

  Cabot remembered Yankee Bligh once drawing lines on a street map of Louisville as a method for determining a murderer’s path. If you know where someone’s been, you maybe can figure out where he’s going or where he’s from, he’d said at the time. Cabot plucked a ball of twine from atop a wash stand. He wound an end around the first blue pin representing Sacramento, advanced the twine to wind it on the San Francisco pin, and on to each of the following pins according to the dates on his list. Finally, he cut the twine with his Barlow knife and wound the loose end around the final pin. He tossed the ball to Valiantine. “A possible map of the airship’s journeys.”

  “That shows a lot of zigging and zagging,” the lieutenant said. “For what purpose? From a strategic perspective, a lot of time is spent on covering the same ground several times. From a military sense, that’s very inefficient.”

  Cabot stared at Valiantine. “So, from that way of thinking, you’re suggesting more than one airship seems likely. That one craft isn’t tacking all over the countryside, but multiple ships are traveling different paths, in different parts of the country.”

  Valiantine frowned at the map again, then nodded and looked at Cabot. “That’s a possibility. One traveling in the north, the other taking a southern route.”

  Cabot sighed and crossed his arms. “If we’d ever had a clear enough look at all of these sites to determine if there is more than one. That would help.”

  He took a step closer to the map. He stared at the path he’d marked. He wanted the pins and twine to reveal the map’s secrets.

  Nothing.

  If Yankee Bligh had looked at this map, what would he have said?

  Cabot remembered his mentor saying this: “A pile of lumber and a pile of stone don’t look like much until you put them together to build a house. A pile of clues doesn’t look like anything until you put the parts together to see what they build.”

  Cabot faced Valiantine and raised a finger. “Perhaps two ships. But we don’t know. So maybe there is only one ship. If so, we don’t know why it zigs and zags. But we can guess: maybe it’s chasing someone.”

  He saw the furrow disappear from Valiantine’s brow as the lieutenant considered the proposition.

  “Or,” Valiantine said, “it’s being chased.”

  “Ah.” Cabot spun back to the map. “Two possibilities for one airship. I’ll buy a lighter or darker twine later, and maybe we can come up with two separate paths that follow your proposal for two ships.” He reached and lightly touched one pin head, then another. “We still don’t know why they are showing up in these places.”

  “Maybe it was just spotted in each location on its way to somewhere else?”

  “That’s possible, yes. But you said the fellow you met in Indiana had seen the ship more than once, correct?”

  “Yes. And I saw it there, so it was staying in that location for some reason.” Valiantine’s frown was back. “Did anyone other than you see it in Kansas?”

  “My questioning didn’t turn up anyone who said so.” Cabot took up a ladder-back chair and arranged it so he could sit and look at the map. Valiantine brought another chair from the other side of the room and did the same. The two men sat side by side.

  Valiantine rubbed his chin. “We know the ship arrived in Detroit to destroy the factory and the meteor. Its purpose for appearing there seems obvious.”

  “And you saw this fellow Awanai both there and in Indiana. So there is some link there.” Cabot felt constricted by the mystery facing them—he wanted to unravel its threads as he had unwound the twine. Even his throat felt tight. He noticed that not only had he crossed his arms, but his legs were crossed at the knees. He put both feet on the floor and placed his hands on his thighs. You are not the case, he remembered Yankee Bligh saying. But that wasn’t completely true in this situation: Cabot and Valiantine had been in peril from injury and death during their encounters with the airships; and now their superiors had suspended them from the investigation.

  He took a long, deep breath and focused a few moments on relaxing.

  Once his mind felt a little clearer, Cabot asked aloud, “All right, Awanai showed up at three of these sites. What else do these places have in common?”

  Valiantine tapped him on the arm. “Your coins. And those... beasts.”

  A thief in Indiana named Awanai. Gold coins that supposedly didn’t exist and had a tendency to disappear. And murderous monster men.

  The youthful features Cabot had seen on the creature in the Ohio River flashed before his mind’s eye, but he swept away the image when he pushed up from his chair.

  “The coins give me an idea. I’m going downstairs to send some telegrams.”

  “We’re essentially personae non gratae in Washington now.”

  Cabot waved away the warning. “I don’t need the muscle of the federal government for these messages.”

  Valiantine stood also. “All right. I’ll go buy some twine.”

  When Valiantine returned, Cabot was pacing a short path, back and forth, before the map. He had an empty cup in his hand, and he gestured to a pot on a tray resting on the bedside lamp table. “Coffee’s there.” He took a spindle of twine from the lieutenant and began to mark off two routes: one starting in San Francisco, the other starting from Sacramento. When done, Cabot crossed his arms and studied the map.

  “Do you suppose they were constructed in California?” he asked.

  “They,” Valiantine said. “You’re sure now there are two?”

  “Based on the timing and the tracks, it makes more sense.”

  “Perhaps constructed there. But perhaps they just entered the country at that point,” the lieutenant said. “It would be hard to conceal a construction project of that size, I’d think.”

  “Unless it were done near a boat works.” Cabot cocked his head. “Or at a shipyard. But if they were built elsewhere, and entered the country there—where did they come from?”

  Silence.

  Cabot spoke up again. “If we associate the coins with the airships, we know—or think we know—one lingered in Kansas for several weeks. And your encounter in Indiana suggests it was in that region, including Chicago and Kalamazoo, for some time.”

  “Yes?”

  “So there may be a base near those areas in Kansas and Indiana. Like we found outside Luray.”

  “Kansas is flat as a pancake. How would you hide something like that?”

  Cabot nodded. “Flat for the most part, yes, but also sparsely populated. It could be done, but you’re right. You’d have to find a very lonely spot to remain undetected.”

  “Lots of timbered and remote areas in Michigan to hide in,” Valiantine said. “Or perhaps they might use an island in Lake Michigan.”

  A rapid knock interrupted the two. Cabot opened the door, and a bellhop handed him two envelopes. The agent tipped the messenger and dismissed him.

  He opened the first note. “Responses to some of the messages I sent. The Chief of Police in Broken Toe, Kansas, has agreed to use his position to send queries to his counterparts in other states—where the ships have been sighted—and ask if strange coins have turned up there.”

  “Good idea. The other note?”

  As Cabot read the second telegram, he felt a heaviness settle near his diaphragm. “Chief Taylor in Louisville. Replies the coin we left in his possession has disappeared. Replaced with a worthless slug. Just as happened to Chief Barker in Kansas.”

  Valiantine made a noise. “Wha
t makes these coins so valuable?”

  “Enigmas and conundrums. I gave the other two Louisville coins to Gallows. He didn’t say anything about the Kansas coin I’d already turned in. I wonder if he still has possession of any of them?”

  Cabot watched a frown take over the lieutenant’s face. Then Valiantine wagged a finger at him. “You got involved when you were sent to Kansas because of the coins. Not for a ship sighting.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does that mean something?”

  Cabot considered. “As soon as I returned to the Treasury Department, I was transferred from being simply a Treasury agent to being a Secret Service agent.”

  “And we were partnered immediately after. As though a plan was already in place for our Aero-Marshal assignment—before either of us had turned in our reports.”

  Cabot nodded. “It’s inconclusive—perhaps coincidental—but it looks like I was sent to investigate the coin report by Gallows while he already had knowledge about the airships.”

  “And, most likely, their connection to the coins.”

  “We were urged to get to work immediately.”

  “And then,” Valiantine sighed, “our superiors put a sudden, inexplicable stop to our investigations. It doesn’t make sense. The logic doesn’t follow.”

  The spot of heaviness Cabot had felt now burned within his chest. “From appearances—it seems we’ve been manipulated from the start.”

  He saw Valiantine’s frown slowly melt. He nodded. “It looks that way. We took our assignment, followed it—”

  “And we’ve been dismissed from active duty because of it. We’re being used as scapegoats.”

  “Scapegoats? For what purpose?”

  Cabot noticed pain in his fingers. He unclenched his fists. He began to pace before the map again. “I’m not sure. But Gallows and Wellington must know. And perhaps this Scarborough, who sent the note to us in Louisville. Do you know anything about him?”

  “Nothing. I’ve not met him or heard his name other than from that telegram. And we can only suppose it was Scarborough we saw with the other two in Luray.” Valiantine scrubbed his face with his hands. “The way you’re talking—it’s as if we weren’t really sent out to investigate a mystery. As if there was already a plan in place for us, and we’ve been following it as directed by someone who knows that plan. Certainly we don’t know it. Is there some political agenda in place that encompasses our investigation? Something above the level of the Army and the Treasury Department? What the hell is going on?”