Airman

by Eoin Colfer

  He must separate from the balloon now. He was lower than he would like, but the wind was taking him out to sea faster than he’d calculated, and with his injured shoulder, Conor would be pressed to keep himself afloat for any length of time.

  It was vital that Conor disentangle his arm from the netting, but he found that even a simple act such as finding one hand with the other was almost impossible in this situation. Pain, disorientation and wind shear would make normal motor functions a challenge for a man at peak physical condition, not to mention an injured and exhausted convict.

  He had no control over joints or fingers, and the pain now seemed to come from his heart. Conor had dropped the bayonet and was forced to tug at the netting with fumbling fingers. It was impossible. His arm was wrapped up snugger than a turkey in an ice box. Conor Finn was ocean bound. His only hope was that the balloon was badly made and would pop its seams in the next minute.

  Below him, the second from last balloon exploded, turning a black sky gold and red for a moment before the darkness reclaimed the night.

  Perfect, thought Conor, smiling numbly. It worked perfectly. High-class fireworks. Holding their light for several seconds. What a pity I am not suspended below that balloon, instead of stranded in the night sky.

  In his original plan he would be suspended far below one of the balloons when the Sharpshooters shot it down. The balloon would lift him free from the prison, then a bullet would bring him back to earth.

  He wondered absently if he was the first person to see fireworks from above. Probably not. No doubt some intrepid aeronaut had sent up a balloon on an anchor.

  A thought struck Conor.

  I am flying as no man has flown before. No basket, no ballast. Just a man and his balloon.

  And, somehow, this thought gave him some comfort in spite of his dire situation. He was alone in the skies, the only man here. Breathing rarefied air, blue-black expanse on all sides. No walls. No prison door.

  Where will they find me? Wales? France? Or, if the wind changes, Ireland? What will they make of the device on my chest? My innovations?

  Conor felt a measure of triumph too.

  I have defeated you, Bonvilain. You will not use me, or torture me at your leisure. I am free.

  There was also regret.

  Mother. Father. Never an opportunity to explain.

  But even in this mortal danger, Conor harboured a touch of bitterness.

  How could you believe Bonvilain, Father? Why haven’t you saved me?

  The Coronation Balloons were a tremendous success, drawing huge applause with every successful pop. The sharpshooters were putting on a great show, with only Keevers missing his mark, and even then only because his nitroglycerine bullet exploded in the barrel, buckling his weapon like a rye-grass drinking straw.

  Those firework boys were clever blighters, Declan had to admit. Each balloon was a bigger bang than the last, all carefully sequenced. The last one had shaken the very Wall itself. If Queen Isabella wasn’t careful she might lose her crown.

  Catherine looked beautiful tonight, up there beside her queen. She looked beautiful every night, but he hadn’t noticed for a while. For two years in fact.

  Conor would want his mother to be happy, perhaps his father too.

  ‘Excuse me, sir.’

  It was Bates. No doubt looking for his Guinness.

  ‘A minute, Bates. I’m having a moment here. Thinking about my wife. You should try it instead of harassing a superior officer for beer.’

  ‘No, sir, it’s not the Guinness, though I haven’t forgotten it.’

  ‘What then?’ said Declan, trying to hold on to his good mood.

  ‘The moving target. The big finale, sir. They’ve let ’er up too early. Not my fault is all I’m saying. No one could hit that target. Must be over a mile, and the sea breeze has got her.’

  Declan gazed across the square at Catherine. Glowing she was, and he knew why. Maybe her husband was coming home, at last. She needed a sign.

  He held out his hand to Bates. ‘Give me your weapon, Sharpshooter.’

  As soon as Declan’s fingers wrapped around the stock, he knew he would make the shot. It was fate. Tonight was the night.

  ‘Is she ready?’

  ‘Yes sir. One in the saddle, ready for the off. Little jerky on the recoil – hope your shoulder hasn’t gone soft. You being a captain and so forth.’

  Declan grunted. Bates had a mouth on him and no denying it. Any other night and the young lieutenant would be slopping out the latrines.

  ‘Target?’

  ‘Big glowing ball in the sky, sir.’

  ‘Your sense of self-preservation should be all a-tingle right now, Bates.’

  Bates coughed. ‘Yessir, I mean, target eleven o’clock high and right, sir, Captain, sir.’

  Declan caught the balloon in his sights. It was barely more than a speck now. A pale moon in a sea of stars.

  Holy God, he thought. I hope this is a straight-shooting rifle.

  But he knew Bates, and the only thing sharper than his mouth was his aim.

  Declan pulled the rifle’s nose up a few inches to allow for the drop off, then a few to the left to compensate for the cross breeze. Marksmanship could be learned up to a point, but after that it was all natural talent.

  Balloons and guns, thought Declan. Just like Paris the day you were born, Conor. But that time you came down with the balloon.

  Declan felt his eyes blur and he blinked them clear, this was not the time for tears.

  Conor, my son, your mother and brother need me now, but I will never forget you and what you did for the Saltees. Look down and see this as a sign.

  Declan took a breath, held it, then caressed the trigger, leaning into his right foot to absorb the recoil. The nitroglycerine bullet sped from the extended barrel towards its target.

  That’s for you, Conor, he thought, and the final Coronation Balloon exploded, brightly enough to be visible from heaven.

  Behind him, the entire island roared in appreciation, except for Bonvilain, who seemed lost in thought, which was never good for the one being thought of.

  Declan tossed the rifle to Bates. ‘Nice weapon you have there, Lieutenant, nearly as dangerous as your mouth.’

  Even Bates was awed by this impossible shot. ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. That was a historic hit, Captain. Where do we stand on the beer now?’

  But Declan was not listening; he was staring across the square, over the heads of the cheering mob. Catherine met his gaze across the distance. Her hands covered her nose and mouth; all he could see of that beautiful face were her dark eyes. In the orange glow of electric orbs, Declan could see that his wife was crying.

  Her husband has come home.

  The balloon exploded, flames igniting the fireworks pack before the fuse ever had the chance. The concussion perforated one of Conor’s eardrums and a riot of sparks peppered his skin like a million bee stings. He was engulfed in a cocoon of raging flame which ate his clothing and crisped the hairs on his arms and legs, singeing his beard back to the jawline. As serious as these injuries were, Conor had expected much worse.

  Then gravity took hold, yanking him back to earth with invisible threads. Down he went, too shocked to cry out. This had never been the plan. There was supposed to be ten fathoms of rope between him and the balloon, dangerous certainly, but a lot healthier than riding the balloon itself.

  There was something he was supposed to do. The plan had a next stage surely.

  Of course! The device!

  Conor forced his good hand down against the airflow, pulling aside the smouldering remnants of his jacket.

  My God! There were sparks on the device.

  The device was, of course, a parachute. Aeronauts had been jumping out of balloons for almost a century with varying success. In America, dropping animals from balloons had become popular after the Civil War. But jumps had only been performed as entertainment, in perfect weather conditions. Rarely at night, hardly ever from an
altitude under 6,000 feet and positively never with a flaming parachute.

  Conor located the release cord and pulled. He’d been forced to pack his chute carefully into a flour bag then strap it across his chest. He could only pray that the lines would come out untangled, or else the parachute would not even open. As it was, at this low altitude it was quite possible that the parachute would not have time to spread at all, and would merely provide him with a shroud for his watery grave.

  The release cord was sewn to the tip of a tiny parachute, much like those Victor and Conor had often used to sail wooden mannequins from the palace turrets. In theory, the drag on this parachute would be enough to pull out the larger one. This was one of the many new ideas Conor had scrawled in the mud at the back of his cell. He had hoped, at the time, that all of his inventions would not have to be tested in such outrageous circumstances.

  Though Conor did not see it happen, his small parachute performed perfectly, slipping from its niche like a baby marsupial from the pouch. It shivered in the wind for a moment, then popped its mouth open, catching the air. Its fall was instantly slowed, while Conor’s was not. The resulting tension dragged the larger parachute into the night air. The silk rustled past Conor’s face, bouncing the wind in its folds.

  No tangled lines. No snagged folds. Please, God.

  His prayers were answered, and the white silk of the parachute sprang open to its limits cleanly, with a noise like cannon shot. The severity of the deceleration caused the harness straps to snap hard against Conor’s back, leaving an x-shaped rope burn that he would carry for the rest of his life.

  Conor was largely beyond rational thought now and could only wonder why the moon seemed to be following him. Not only that, but it appeared to be on fire. Angry orange sparks chewed away large sections, so that he could see the stars through the holes.

  Not the moon. My parachute.

  It seemed to Conor then, that he was still in his cell, in the planning stages and his imagination was throwing up possible problems.

  If sparks from the balloon catch on the parachute silk, that will indeed be a dire development, because it will mean that someone has shot the balloon, in spite of me loosing it from the wall. If this happens, I can only hope that my velocity has decreased sufficiently to make a water landing survivable.

  Conor’s descent was steady enough now that he could distinguish sea from sky. Below him the islands were rushing up fast. He could see Isabella’s palace and of course the Great Saltee Wall, with its rows of electric lamps, that had been described by The New York Times as the First Wonder of the Industrial World.

  If I could steer, Conor thought, the lights would guide me in.

  The boats spun below him in a maelstrom of light. Quickly the largest of the boats filled his vision and he realized that he would land there. There was no avoiding the craft. It loomed from the black depths like one of Darwin’s bioelectric jellyfish.

  Conor felt no particular sadness, more the disappointment of a scientist whose experiment has failed.

  Ten feet left and I might have survived, he thought. Science is indeed a slave to nature.

  But chance had one more freakish card to play on this night of unlikely extremes. A heartbeat after his parachute dissolved into blackened embers, Conor crashed into the royal yacht Victoria and Albert II at a speed of some forty miles an hour. He hit the third starboard lifeboat, slicing a clean rent in the blue tarpaulin, which would not be noticed for two days. Below the tarpaulin was a bed of cork lifejackets, temporarily stored there until hooks could be hung to hold them.

  Two days earlier and the recently requisitioned jackets would not have been on-board, three days later and they would have been distributed about the yacht.

  Despite the parachute and tarpaulin, Conor’s bulk and speed drove him through the cork to the deck. His dislocated shoulder punched through to the floorboards, where he bounced once then came to rest.

  The bilges must be spotless, he thought dimly. Nothing to smell but wood and paint.

  And then: I do believe the impact righted my shoulder. What are the odds? Astronomical.

  This was his final thought before oblivion claimed him. Conor Broekhart did not move a muscle for the rest of the night. He dreamed vividly but in two colours only: crimson and gold.

  PART 3: AIRMAN

  CHAPTER 12: ANGEL OR DEVIL

  Little Saltee, 1894

  On the night Arthur Billtoe met the devil, he was indulging himself in one of his favourite pastimes. The prison guard was on the skive in a comfy spot near the cliffs on the island’s seaward side. Billtoe had half a dozen such spots all over the island, places he could set down his head when prison life did for his nerves.

  Dossing off was not a simple thing on a walled island with a fort perched on the south-eastern wedge and a dozen lookout towers along the wall itself.

  Stupid electric lighting, Billtoe often thought. How’s a man supposed to grab a kip?

  This particular comfy spot was Billtoe’s favourite, a shallow little dugout near the salsa garden, fifteen paces from the base of the wall. The floor was an ancient tarp the ferry boys were flinging, and the roof was one of the old doors from Wandering Heck’s days, frame and all, still on the hinges. The entire thing was near invisible from the outside, covered as it was with mud, grass and scrub that had crept down over the door.

  Billtoe felt a swell of pride every time he sneaked himself into its pungent, welcoming darkness. Of all his doss spots, this was his favourite. Dry as a bone come hell or high water, and he could uncork the spy-hole and use it as a chimney, which saved him revealing his embers to the watch.

  One more smoke, thought Billtoe. One more and then back on the job.

  Arthur Billtoe had been spending more and more time in his hidey-holes in the six months since Conor Finn had disappeared. He wasn’t nursing a tender spot for the soldier boy, but he was fearful that Marshall Bonvilain had a plan for that young man, and him being dead was not part of that plan.

  On the night of Finn’s disappearance, Billtoe had stood in the chimney stack roaring for hours. When that had proved fruitless, he had fetched a twelve-year-old Cockney boy who was doing a dozen or so years for robbing toffs, and sent him up the stacks with a promise of a few years off his sentence. The boy came down empty-handed after half a day, and Billtoe sent him right back up again at gunpoint. Forty-eight more hours in the labyrinth and the boy came back down with bloody knees and no news. It was no use. Conor Finn was not up there. Somehow, Arthur Billtoe had been duped.

  Then he began to wonder about the butcher who had become entangled in one of the coronation balloons.

  Could that have been Finn? Could soldier boy have got above ground somehow?

  Billtoe could never know for certain and this itched him like a beetle crawling under his skin. Maybe Finn was desiccated in the chimneys, or perhaps he had a lungful of brine in Saint George’s Channel. Dead was dead and bones was bones. But that wouldn’t be the end of it. Sooner or later Bonvilain would come looking for his special prisoner and then all hell would be brought down on Arthur Billtoe’s head.

  Unless. Unless…

  Unless the marshall would be fooled by his deception. Billtoe had considered upping sticks and hopping a steamer to New York when Finn disappeared; one of his possible fathers was in New York, if he were still alive. Even if he weren’t, then there could be some form of estate. But that was all eating rat and calling it turkey. He hadn’t the money for the Atlantic, nor would he have with a year of saving. It was frustrating to have a fortune in stolen diamonds that he could not convert into hard cash.

  Anyway, things were rosy on the island at the present moment. He was Bonvilain’s boy, what with his coronation balloons being such a success. Pretty soon, he might find himself at one end of a promotion’s handshake. Maybe then Arthur Billtoe might be in a position to smuggle some of his diamonds off the island, and then maybe he could travel first class on that steamer to New York.

  U
ntil then, he would have to pray to whatever god would have him that Marshall Bonvilain did not look too closely at the bearded youth he had slung into Conor Finn’s cell. The boy was roughly the same age, build and colouring. After a few beatings he had the same haunted eyes and lopsided looks. It could be the same young man, if you didn’t look too hard. Billtoe hoped that Conor Finn was a simple hostage job and not someone with facts in his skull, because if it was information that the marshall was after, then he’d best be looking up high and down low, because he wouldn’t be finding it in Conor Finn’s cell.

  Billtoe had a sudden idea.

  I should cut out the ringer’s tongue. Say it happened in a fight with Malarkey. The marshall couldn’t hold me responsible for that, as it was he who ordered me to set Malarkey on the boy.

  That, as far as Billtoe was concerned, was a capital idea, far better than salsa gardens or coronation balloons. Or twelve-shot revolvers for that matter, which had turned out to be a pile of fool’s gold. A Kilmore gunsmith friend of Billtoe’s had nearly lost a finger trying to build that particular weapon.

  I will slice that boy’s tongue out as soon as I get back, thought Billtoe, tapping his boot to make sure his good knife was nestled there against his shin.

  Mightily pleased with this notion, Billtoe blew a final flute of smoke through the peephole, then stubbed out his cigarette on a clamshell he kept in the hidey-hole for that purpose. He toed the door open a crack to release any lingering smoke or smells, then clambered up into the darkness like a corpse rising from its grave.

  Not only will cutting that ringer’s tongue out serve a purpose, vis-à-vis my plan, but it will also improve my mood.

  Billtoe’s general routine was to hug the wall until he reached a stairwell, then trot up as if he were simply taking the air. No one would challenge him, especially since the coronation. He was a big shot now, was Arthur Billtoe.

  That’s Mister Billtoe, to you, Pike.

  As he had become fond of saying lately.