Airship Hunters

by Jim Beard

  “No, Lieutenant,” Scarborough said, staring at him coldly. “Rather it’s the culmination of much planning. With a bit of improvisation here and there, admittedly.” He glanced at Wellington. To Valiantine’s surprise, the major cocked his head to one side and spat onto the floorboards.

  The Executive Director smiled. “Bertram’s no admirer of the President, as you can see. So, he will die since he cannot be... replaced, and then we,” he favored Wellington with another sideways look, “will join with our, ah, brothers in the center.”

  With those words, Scarborough smiled in a fashion that seemed to indicate some private joke or bit of humor.

  The coins fairly burned against Valiantine’s woolen sock, forcing him to flex his foot to move them to a less sensitive spot. He looked all around, but saw little in the way of hope. McKinley would be killed, and he and Cabot left to shoulder the blame.

  It was beyond the pale of reason. The abject lunacy of it made his temples throb.

  “There’s one last thing,” Wellington said, suddenly sitting forward and positioning himself only inches from the lieutenant. “Where are the coins you took?”

  Valiantine almost yelped out loud as the objects in question abruptly burned at his foot like red-hot pokers. A large shadow fell across the window next to him and the train shuddered as the engineer or someone began to apply its brakes.

  He assessed his superior’s face. “You know, I’ve been quiet about it all along, but it’s gnawed at me the entire time, Major. You have a spot of lint on your coat, just there.”

  Before Wellington could stop him, Valiantine reached out with one hand, fingers questing for the objectionable material. Just below the major’s chin, the Army man curled his fingers into a fist and drove it into the man’s throat with great force.

  The train slammed to a halt. The shadow grew larger. Wellington gasped and gurgled, clutching at his Adam’s apple, eyes rounded in shock and pain.

  Cabot kicked out with one boot, smacking the very bottom of Scarborough’s cane. The head of it toppled toward him and, deftly catching it, he knocked the big man’s hands away in lightning-fast succession and drove the stick into his face.

  Scarborough’s head whipped back, blood spraying from his nose. He howled in agony.

  Valiantine clubbed Wellington down onto the floorboards and leapt from his seat. His partner had already moved into the aisle. Together, they flung themselves at the black-clad soldiers around them, Cabot wielding the cane like a war axe.

  Committed to their course of action, the two agents waded into the fray. Valiantine dispatched one soldier easily with a firm uppercut to the jaw, the man taken almost completely by surprise. The next opponent benefited from the sight of the prisoner’s attack on his fellow by steeling himself for the coming assault.

  Valiantine pushed down with both hands upon the shoulders of two passengers who sat across from each other on the aisle and swung both feet up and into the soldier’s chest. His momentum and the force of the blow sent the man flying backwards and into a group of suited gentlemen. They all toppled down into a clump of writhing arms and legs.

  The quartet did not pause, but continued with their tunes.

  Cabot battered at two soldiers simultaneously, swinging the stick with vigor and accuracy. Such was the unrelenting violence of the agent’s play that his adversaries could not retaliate. Smacking one soldier on the side of his head with enough force to knock him back into a seat, with no hesitation Cabot shattered the cane against the other.

  Flinging his insensate opponents from his path, he made a leap and a run for the door at the end of the car, joining Valiantine there and pushing through to the small landing just outside the door and between the railcar and its neighbor.

  “I’m angry,” Cabot said.

  “As well you should be,” Valiantine replied. “We have to—”

  Cabot grabbed his partner’s arm before he could continue and hauled him through the door of the next railcar. Slamming it shut, he locked it and urged Valiantine to talk as they moved.

  The passengers in the car, apparently reporters or some such, turned to look at the two agents, already bewildered by the train’s braking.

  “You have to get to the President. We have to stop them,” Valiantine said.

  “Where are we?” Cabot asked, moving hurriedly down the aisle.

  “Over water,” Valiantine said, glancing out the windows. “From the width of it, I’d say the Susquehanna.”

  They stopped at the far door of the car. “We should both attend to McKinley,” Cabot insisted.

  “No,” his partner answered. “The airship is here. Overhead. They mean to escape by it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You saw the shadow. My foot is burning, too. No time for further explanation.”

  “If they mean to escape the train... oh, Lord.”

  “Yes,” Valiantine said, “they intend on total destruction. The President, the train, its passengers. Go to him, protect him. I’ll take the locomotive.”

  Cabot watched as the other agent opened the door to the next car and moved off their landing. Behind them, their opponents battered at the door to the car they’d exited and locked.

  “Godspeed, Valiantine.”

  The lieutenant glanced back over his shoulder to see Cabot’s legs disappearing up and between the cars. He’ll enjoy running along the tops, he thought to himself, and ran off toward the train’s engine wondering what in the hell might await him there.

  Valiantine peered over the top of the coal tender at the cab of the stilled locomotive. A man there, dressed all in black with a high collar, whipped his head around, caught sight of him, and raised a pistol in his direction.

  The bullet missed Valiantine by mere inches.

  He dove off the railcar’s landing and down onto the bridge next to the track. The river far below beckoned to him. He could hear shouting and what sounded like grunts that fisticuffs might produce.

  Hugging the tender, he slipped along its flank toward the cab. A head sprang out from the engineer’s domain and produced a small yelp. Valiantine flattened himself against the coal car as another bullet tore past his chest.

  In a split second he was underneath the tender and, making his way to its far side, prayed the shooter would not release the brake.

  Exiting out from the underbelly of the car, he ran toward the engine with all his might. Reaching it, Valiantine hit the footstep at the cab’s side and vaulted up into its maw. Every muscle in his body protested the action.

  Two men dressed as soldiers gaped at him: one, the shooter, hanging down off the far side of the cab, the other clenching the front of the train engineer’s uniform, one fist cocked and ready to strike again.

  Valiantine kicked out at the legs of the shooter, knocking him from his precarious position and down onto the bridge. He swung his arm at the other soldier, aiming at his head, but connecting with the man’s shoulder. Pain lanced up his arm, but his adversary grunted and released the engineer. The lieutenant leapt upon the soldier, pummeling him repeatedly.

  A sound behind him indicated the shooter had returned to the cab. Valiantine swung his dance partner around in front of him. The man’s forehead imploded from the bullet that ripped through it. The engineer wailed in terror.

  Using the corpse as a ramrod, the lieutenant forced the shooter back and out from the cab. He heard the man hit the bridge, yelling out in distress.

  Valiantine coldly threw the corpse he held down upon the prone figure of the soldier and leapt down from the cab to land beside the tangle of bodies. He snatched the pistol from the man’s hand and fired one shot into his brain.

  Looking back up at the cab, he addressed the horror-stricken engineer.

  “What were they about to do?” he asked, climbing up to the platform with haste.

  The man gestured, trembling, to the floor of the cab. There lay another dead man, the engineer’s mate, and beside him a small, smoking canister. With the
door to the fire hole swung open, it was obvious the soldiers’ intent was to drop the device within.

  Wrapping it gingerly in a handkerchief, Valiantine secured the item in his coat pocket and, wielding the pistol, leapt back down to the ground to run across the bridge, alongside the train.

  “Stay there!” he yelled back at the engineer. “Touch nothing!”

  Expecting to be shot at any moment now, the lieutenant scanned the cars for anything that might look like the President’s quarters. He didn’t know the new Chief Executive well, but assumed the man was not above traveling incognito when it suited him.

  Who knows what lark the Trio set him upon? he asked himself. They most likely had arranged everything, the entire excursion.

  Valiantine attempted to look up over the railcars, to the sky above them, hoping to catch a glimpse of an airship.

  A sharp lance of sunlight shot out from behind something large that hung there in the air, blinding him.

  He rubbed at his eyes, cursing violently from the solar assault. Black spots danced across his vision as he stumbled onward in his headlong rush to reach the President.

  “Valiantine! Good God, what are you doing!”

  Frowning deeply, he looked up at the spot on the backside of a railcar he approximated his partner to be.

  “Looked up at the sky, Cabot, tried to see but the sun blinded me... oh, dammit all, never mind. Is the President safe?”

  A hand clutched at him and hauled him up onto a platform. Finally in the shade, the Army man blinked several times and began to make out his surroundings. Cabot stood there, encircled by several men in dark suits with bowlers and moustaches and raised pistols.

  “The President’s men, his real men,” Cabot assured him. “Gentlemen, my partner, Army Lieutenant Michael Valiantine.”

  “What the hell’s going on?” Valiantine demanded, stumbling through the door of the car and into its interior.

  “That is something I’d very much like to know myself, sir.”

  The agent looked up into the broad, unsmiling face of the President of the United States.

  “Who are you? What’s this all about?’

  Valiantine glanced over at Cabot, who caught his eye and held it. The lieutenant blinked once, twice, then shrugged his shoulders. Remarkably, in unison fed by some form of unspoken communication, both men reached into their pockets very slowly and carefully, so as to not alarm the President’s guards, and produced badges from their wallets. They held them up for McKinley to see.

  “Aero-Marshals, Mr. President,” Valiantine said. “Department A-13.”

  It wasn’t until they presented their true bonafides that the President’s countenance took on a look of confusion rather than anger. Valiantine and Cabot’s earnest talk of their ordeal seemed to placate their Commander in Chief, enough that the man agreed to listen further to their story while the train got underway once more.

  “I have a war brewing on the horizon, gentlemen,” the President told the two agents. “And while the stories of these ‘airships’ had intrigued me, I was confident that the matter was being investigated and addressed so that I may focus my attention on Spain.”

  “You may have another war on your hands then, Mr. President,” Valiantine said.

  They told McKinley all they knew, after the President ushered many of his associates out of his private train compartment, retaining only a few of his closest and most trusted advisers. Valiantine outlined the scope of his and Cabot’s explorations and encounters, all the while fretting over the time that slipped by and the distance between them and the leaders of the conspiracy.

  Though Valiantine guessed he might regret it later, he held back some of what he and his partner had learned on the train from Scarborough; there was no way to credit it or present it in any way that would not make them sound like lunatics.

  “I met Barnaby Scarborough when I was Governor of Ohio,” the President told the agents, “but he did not strike me at the time as a man with much ambition. Then, roughly a year ago, he seemed to change, become bolder, started espousing grand ideas. I welcomed him into my administration as a visionary.”

  Valiantine frowned, looking over at Cabot. “Major Wellington also changed, while I was away on leave. Everything’s backwards now with him. Disconcerting. I should have realized something was terribly wrong in the beginning.”

  “Gallows, also, but perhaps not to the extent of the other two,” Cabot added. “But, suffice to say, we know their stripes now. And that they aim to cause untold trouble for the nation.”

  “We shall band together ourselves to hunt them down, to bring them to justice,” the President said with resolve. “I will write out the order now for their arrest, and any who serve them.”

  For the next twenty minutes, Valiantine and Cabot pleaded with the man to allow them to track down the Trio themselves. Only they, so they reasoned, knew enough of the conspirators’ minds to find them, and a smaller hunting party might not alert their prey to being hunted and drive them further underground.

  “Very well,” McKinley said, looking back and forth between the two agents with steel in his eyes. “Tell me what you will need for your, ahem, expedition, and I will see that you have it.”

  Valiantine considered, but it was Cabot who spoke.

  “Horses,” he said.

  They were granted their request on the border of Maryland and Delaware. The President had the trains stopped and sent men to procure two fine equine specimens from a nearby farm, then presented them to Valiantine and Cabot for their approval.

  “I never want to ride another train in my life,” the lieutenant opined as he mounted his horse. He had gained experience as a rider throughout his Army career, and felt at home in the saddle. He assumed Cabot also felt no unease at all with the arrangement, for it was the Treasury man himself who had read Valiantine’s mind and made the request.

  “Indeed,” the younger man said as he climbed atop his own animal. “Where to now?”

  Valiantine sighed, scanning the horizon. It was mid-day and the sun still beat down upon them. His eyes ached from the shaft of it that had burned him before and his hands trembled a bit.

  “Scarborough made that remark about joining their ‘brothers in the center.’ I feel strongly that he meant Philadelphia—‘brotherly love’ and all that. It must mean that.”

  Cabot nodded his agreement, but narrowed his eyes. “But how will we know once we arrive there? How will we find them?”

  “By these.” The lieutenant held up a small, cinched bag. “The coins will show us the way. They’re reacting to the airship, somehow. Damn near burnt my foot off back there on the train. We will know very soon if we are on the right track, though I believe we are.”

  Cabot swung his horse around to point its nose toward the northeast. “They’re desperate,” he said matter-of-factly. “They could do anything at this juncture.”

  Valiantine smiled slightly. “And does your Yankee Bligh have any words of wisdom about such desperation?”

  “‘Desperate men are a danger both to you and to themselves,’” the Treasury man quoted as he cracked his reins and rode off.

  “That’s what I was afraid he’d say,” Valiantine murmured as he urged his own horse on.

  By pushing the horses, they crossed the upper reaches of the state of Delaware in under two hours. While they rode, they attempted to collate everything they knew to that point; Valiantine found the rhythm of his horse’s gait to be conducive to thinking.

  “They meant us to fail all along,” Cabot called out over the sound of pounding hooves.

  “Apparently,” Valiantine agreed, chewing on the sour taste of it. “Made them look like they were doing something about the phenomenon to the President. We were cherry-picked for asses.”

  “Never mind that,” Cabot said. “Think about the coins; the metal is unstable? So, the degradation of their composition somehow reacts strongly to more of the same metal?”

  The lieutenant reached
into his coat pocket and drew out the bag containing the coins. It was warm to the touch, perhaps slightly warmer than an hour before. His brain balked at it, but it was a mild impossibility compared to all else they’d been asked to accept and believe.

  “They’re definitely heating up again. A divining rod to lead us right to our friends.”

  “The vapor, the gas, is part of it?” Cabot asked, watching his horse closely for signs of fatigue.

  His partner shrugged. “Of the coins? I don’t know, but it figures into the bigger picture mightily, of that I’m certain. I suspect it powers the airships.”

  Cabot remained silent, as if mulling it over himself. Valiantine suddenly pulled back on his reins, bringing his animal to a stop beside a large gate, part of a long line of fencing that paralleled the road.

  “Catch,” he told his companion, and tossed the bag of coins to him. Cabot caught it with one hand. His eyes widened a bit by holding it a moment.

  Valiantine pointed across a broad field that stretched away from them. Some distance away, a collection of buildings sat to the north. To the northeast they could see the outskirts of Philadelphia.

  “I’ve a feeling about this,” he said.

  A low fog had settled down upon the ground around them, but not the extra-normal variety they’d encountered too many times before; this looked to be a product of nature. Together, they drove their horses to vault the fence and they took off at a canter across the field and toward the buildings. The coins grew hotter within the cinched bag.

  “Is this the place?” Cabot asked, eyeing the compound before them.

  Valiantine nodded once, curtly, as he set the bag of coins down on the grass next to the fence they peered over. It was a low structure, serving more to define the property than as any sort of barrier to keep onlookers such as themselves from entering. The entire area looked almost deserted, with weeds growing up around the cobblestone walkways and buildings, and a general taint of disuse hanging in the foggy air.

  The gigantic stone structure they surveyed was one of five, dark and foreboding, with massive chimneys and blackened windows. The fog parted here and there, intermittently, allowing the agents glimpses of its massive presence, and sounds emanated from within its walls, indicating some activity.