Apparently someone was doing enough screaming for both of them. The voice in his dreams was real, as it turned out. It was Chief Wilson.
Afraid to make any sudden moves, Burke kept his body as still as possible and just moved his head to one side, but he saw nothing in that direction but open sky. Turning back the other way, he found his partner.
Like Burke, the chief machinist was also hanging on by a thread, but in this case that thread happened to be his right foot. Somehow it had gotten caught inside a mess of wire and twisted steel and that was all that was keeping him from falling to his death.
One dip in the wrong direction and it was all over. There was no way Burke would be able to reach him.
Stop worrying about him and save your own ass, said a voice in the back of his mind, but Burke ignored it. Abandoning an injured man just wasn’t in his nature. He told the dark side of his mind to shut the hell up and focused on figuring a way out of their predicament.
“Don’t move!” Burke shouted, before realizing how stupid the order sounded. Of course he’s not going to move, you idiot. He’s trapped, hanging upside down.
Burke closed his eyes tightly as he fought to clear his thoughts. He, too, was trapped. His harness held him strapped into the firing chair, but the explosion had tipped the entire gun platform on its side, leaving the chair pointed downward. If he was going to be of any help to Wilson, he was going to have to get out of the chair and get himself onto the remains of the platform, all the while not making any moves that might change the balance of the wreckage.
At the moment he had no idea how he was going to do it.
Come on, Burke. Think!
He glanced around, looking for anything that might support his weight long enough to let him clamber into a more secure position. Half the cage had been torn away by the explosion, revealing wires, cooling conduits, and the guts of the gimbal system that had supported the firing platform. In particular, his attention was drawn to a long piece of rail on which the cage had traveled in and out of the airship’s hull.
If he could reach that . . .
“Help me, Burke!” Wilson screamed, as his foot slipped slightly inside the twisted nest of metal.
I’m trying, you fool! he wanted to scream in return, but he said nothing, focusing instead on the idea that had just reared its head for a moment in the back of his mind. It was a crazy-ass plan, as plans go, but it was better than staying where they were.
As if to prove his point, a flurry of bullets from a passing German aircraft ricocheted off the wreckage around him. The aircraft swept past, headed for the bulk of the Victorious behind them. The gunfire failed to strike either Wilson or himself, but Burke knew they would only be lucky so long.
The wind was causing the cables to swing this way and that, and he waited until one drifted close enough for him to lunge forward and grab hold of it. His motion caused the ruins of the firing platform to creak loudly and dip lower as the metal rail that held it bent with the pressure.
“What are you doing?” Wilson screamed at him, while trying to remain still. “Stop!”
Sorry, man, no can do, Burke thought. We’re getting our asses out of here.
With his right hand he pulled on the cable as hard as he could, wanting to be sure it could hold his weight. It seemed fairly solid, but he wouldn’t really know until he put his full weight on it.
“I’m coming to get you!” he shouted and then prepared himself for what he had to do.
“What?” Wilson cried, trying to lift his head high enough that he could see what Burke was doing. “Stay where you are! You’re going to get us killed!”
But Burke was already committed to his plan. If he stopped, they’d hang there until they were either cut down by a bullet from an enemy aircraft or dropped into oblivion when the remains of the gun platform finally broke free. He had no intention of waiting around for either eventuality.
Burke pulled the cable tight and then wrapped the end of it around the outside of his forearm, making sure that it wouldn’t slip through his fingers. When he was ready, he took up the slack on the rope and smashed his mechanical hand into the hook that secured his body harness to the remains of the platform.
For a second he hung there, and then the hook surrendered to the application of a more powerful force and he was suddenly swinging through the air.
The cable held the few feet it took for him to reach his target, a thick metal pipe jutting out of the opposite side of the gun cage. At the apex of his swing, he reached out his mechanical hand and clamped it tight around the pipe, securing him in place. From there it was an easy matter to find footholds for his feet and to transfer his weight to what was left of the cage rather than the cable.
For the moment, he was safe.
Wilson was staring at him, his eyes wide in horror, terrified that Burke’s motions were going to shake his foot free.
From where he now clung to the side of the firing cage, Burke could look down and see Wilson about six feet below him. To rescue him, Burke was going to have to clamber down the side of the cage until he was close enough to grab the other man’s leg and pull him up onto the platform.
There was only one problem. He had no idea if that section of the wreckage would hold both of their weights.
He carefully began to clamber down what was left of the metal shell toward his companion. The frame creaked and groaned beneath his weight, but otherwise seemed to hold.
Burke had managed to get to within a few feet of the other man when he noticed something ominous. The rat’s nest of tangled steel and wire that Wilson’s foot had caught itself upon was tearing away from the main structure. Even as Burke watched he could see it bend, the metal turning white from the strain.
Burke lunged forward, his hand outstretched and hoping for the best.
“Gotcha!” he crowed, as his fingers locked around Wilson’s ankle.
Just as he did, the piece of wreckage that had held Wilson’s foot suddenly broke off and fell away from the rest of the gun cage, disappearing into the abyss, leaving the chief machinist hanging by his heel from Burke’s outstretched arm.
“Pull me up! Pull me up!” Wilson was screaming.
When Burke tried to do just that, he discovered a new problem. He simply didn’t have the strength to pull Wilson up. It was all he could to do keep his fingers locked around the other man’s ankle.
“I can’t!” he yelled back. “You’re going to have to do it yourself! Reach up and grab my arm and then climb up over me. Can you do that?”
The Victorious was still moving under her own power as the dogfight raged in the sky around her, planes wheeling about, tracers cutting the sky with sudden bright flashes of color, and Burke suspected that most of what he’d said got lost in the wind and the roar of battle. Wilson must have understood because he began to rock his upper body back and forth like a trapeze artist.
What the hell is he doing? Burke wondered and found out a moment later when Wilson suddenly arched upward, using his stomach muscles to pull himself forward.
Wilson’s fear worked as a powerful motivator, for he reached all the way up and grabbed Burke’s arm in the first try. Once he had a secure grip, Burke let go of his foot and Wilson was able to climb up over Burke’s body until he too was clinging desperately to the metal shell of the gun cage.
That’s when the platform lurched beneath them.
Both men tried to sink themselves deeper into the metal against which they clung, praying the whole thing didn’t break free, and they were surprised a few moments later when they realized that the platform was moving horizontally back toward the airship’s hull. It could mean only one thing; someone inside the weapon’s bay must have realized they were still alive and had begun to haul them in!
The damaged platform took twice as long to go in as it had to go out. The corpse of the British gunner, one side of his head nothing but a bloody, gaping mess, that greeted them when they stumbled out of the weapons platform and onto the dec
k of the Victorious served as a stark reminder of how perilously close they had come to dying.
Wouldn’t be the first time, Burke thought as he fought to control the trembling of his adrenaline-fueled limbs while pulling the goggles off his face.
A hand gripped his good arm.
“You all right?” Wilson asked.
Burke nodded, not yet trusting himself to speak.
“Good. Sit tight.” Wilson got up and stumbled over to the talk box on the far wall. He spoke for a few minutes, then returned to Burke’s side.
“The captain’s had no choice but to make a run for the storm, hoping the weather will give us some cover and allow us to leave the enemy fighters behind.”
It sounded like a reasonable plan. “Will it work?”
“See for yourself,” Wilson told him, pointing back out the open bay door behind them.
They watched the firefight continue for several long moments. Just when Burke was convinced there was no way of escaping, airplanes from both sides, friend and foe alike, began turning back as the Victorious reached the edge of the storm and slipped inside the clouds. The British escort craft kept their focus on the German fighters, who, in turn, were more than happy to oblige them with the same level of attention. Following the Victorious must have looked like a losing proposition.
Burke wasn’t ready to breathe a sigh of relief, however. “So what happens now?” he asked.
Wilson shrugged. “I don’t know. We’ve never flown into a thunderstorm before.”
As the crew began closing the bay doors to keep out the wind and rain, Burke turned and looked hard at Wilson. “And why’s that?”
For a moment, Wilson appeared surprised at the question, and then he burst into laughter. “Bloody hell, mate!” he said. “Did you forget where you are? A lightning storm’s just about the last place we’d want to be!”
That’s when it hit him. They were two miles up, trapped in what was, for all practical purposes, a six-hundred-foot cigar-shaped metal cylinder that was about to double as the world’s largest lightning rod!
We are so fucked.
Seeing the expression on his face, Wilson clapped him heartily on the back. “Don’t worry about it, mate!” he said, with the same maddening enthusiasm he’d shown throughout the rest of the day. “We’re in a giant flammable balloon. If we get hit by lightning, it will all be over so fast you won’t even know it!”
For a man who’d just avoided falling thousands of feet to his death, Wilson was awfully cheery about the fact they might suddenly blow up like a giant bonfire. Unable to foster the same kind of enthusiasm for going out that way himself, Burke suggested that it might be best if he returned to the wardroom to check on his men. Once there, he brought them up to speed on what was happening, though he carefully avoided any mention of giant flammable balloons.
They had enough to worry about as it was.
Chapter Twenty-two
STORMS’S HEART
Most ordinary German pilots wouldn’t have dared to follow HMS Victorious as she climbed into the bank of angry storm clouds to escape the German pursuit craft, but Manfred von Richthofen was anything but ordinary.
For the last few years, he hadn’t even been human.
As the rest of his squadron turned the noses of their planes away from the storm, Richthofen grinned into the face of it and sped after the British airship.
At first it wasn’t bad. The Fokker D.VII he was flying was a highly maneuverable aircraft, and it handled the increased winds without difficulty, chasing after the Victorious like a hound on the hunt. The sheer size of the vessel made it easy at first for him to keep it in sight, and he pushed his smaller craft for all it was worth, trying to close the gap between them.
But as the airship continued its steady drive deeper into the clouds, the impact of the storm grew worse. The winds buffeted Richthofen’s craft like the breath of an angry god, tossing the Fokker triplane across the sky with seeming abandon, and it took all his not inconsiderable strength to recover from the wind shear.
The winds weren’t the only problem. The rain gradually changed from a light sprinkle to a steady downpour, until it was heavy enough that water began to accumulate inside the cockpit and interfere with the action of his feet on the pedals. He was forced to periodically roll the aircraft to dump the water out. His clothes were soaked through, but his resurrected body no longer felt such human frailties and he was able to ignore both the wet and the cold.
What he couldn’t ignore was the growing difficulty he was having following the airship. As the storm worked to push them farther apart, the clouds began to obscure his view, hiding the larger craft in their embrace for longer periods of time. Soon he lost sight of the enemy altogether, the black thunderclouds swallowing the ship whole, like Jonah in the whale. Unable to see more than a few feet in front of him, Richthofen was reduced to flying by compass alone. He kept the nose of his plane pointed due east, the direction the airship had been going when he’d first encountered it, and he hoped the pilot of the larger craft did the same.
Lightning flashed, lighting up the clouds, and for a moment he thought he caught a glimpse of the airship ahead of him in the distance, like a behemoth rising from dark seas, there for a flash and then gone again beneath the waves. There wasn’t anything he could do about it though, for he had his hands full just trying to keep his plane under control.
Just when he thought it couldn’t get any worse, the rain turned to sleet and hail, pelting his aircraft with fist-sized chunks of ice, threatening its integrity by tearing through the cloth-covered wings in several places. Ice began to build up on the leading edges of his wings and at that point Richthofen knew he’d pushed things far enough. With his quarry lost from sight and the storm threatening to knock him out of the sky, he chose prudence over pursuit and concentrated on breaking free of the storm.
But the storm had other ideas.
Once it had his tiny aircraft in its grasp, it didn’t want to let go. It pushed and pulled him across the sky, preventing him from making any discernible headway toward finding the edge of the storm. Thinking the winds might be reduced at a lower altitude, he pointed the nose of the plane earthward and tried to find some gentler air below, but after descending several thousand feet, it only seemed as if things had gotten worse. Frustrated, Richthofen turned the nose of his craft skyward again. If he couldn’t get out from under the storm, he decided, he’d just have to climb above it.
By now even his controls were covered with a thin sheet of ice, and it took a sharp rap with his knuckles to break the coating on the face of the altimeter. He watched as the red needle spun around the dial in conjunction with his rapid climb.
Ten thousand feet.
Eleven thousand feet.
Twelve . . .
The Fokker D.VII he was flying had a maximum ceiling of just over nineteen thousand feet and he could feel the thinner air starting to have an impact on the thrust of his engines and the lift beneath the wings, but he kept going, refusing to let the storm beat him.
Thirteen.
Fourteen.
At just over fourteen thousand feet the clouds suddenly fell away beneath him and he found himself in clear blue skies. To his surprise the vast bulk of the British airship loomed only several hundred yards away, its silver skin gleaming in the light of the sun and the blue, white, and red insignia on the tail fin looking like a giant bull’s-eye.
If he’d been a religious man, he would have thought the gods were smiling on him.
He emerged from the cloud bank behind and below the airship, which meant for the next few moments he would effectively be hidden in their blind spot. From his position he had a good view of the engines that jutted from beneath the tail fin of the craft. While he’d never encountered this particular model before, he knew they all operated on the same general principles. Knocking out the main engines would effectively cripple the craft, leaving it unable to do anything more than maneuver against the wind. He’d then have a
ll the time in the world to finish it off at his leisure.
Ever the careful combatant, Richthofen held back for a few minutes, observing the airship’s course and making sure that none of its escort craft had followed it into the storm. When he was certain it was on its own, he opened up the throttle and started his attack run.
The airship was moving at a leisurely pace, the captain obviously believing that the fox had outrun the hounds, and it was literally child’s play for Richthofen to line up the engines in the crosshairs of his guns and pull the trigger.
Tracers arced out across the sky as the twin Spandau guns spit bullets in the direction of the Victorious at a rate of four thousand rounds per minute, tearing into the engines and shredding their interior components into useless scrap. The airship visibly lurched as the thrust from the engines was cut off in midstream and great billowing clouds of black smoke began to spill forth.
Richthofen let up on the guns and shot past the twin gondolas hanging from the bottom of the airship, getting a good look inside each one as he did. The stern gondola was empty, but he was able to see the crew in the bow gondola quite clearly and smiled in response to the collective expression of fear he saw on their faces as he swept past. He knew they recognized his aircraft; after all, there was only one Fokker D.VII painted bloodred at a time in Jagdgeschwader I, never mind in the entire Imperial German Army Air Service. The psychological impact of that recognition was why he had ordered all the planes in the Flying Circus painted in such brilliant colors. He wanted the enemy to know that the ace of aces, the Red Baron himself, had them in his sights and it was only a matter of time before they would fall beneath his guns. Their fear would cause them to make mistakes, and he would use those mistakes to his advantage, hastening their demise.
Grinning wickedly in anticipation of what was to come, Richthofen arced away from the British airship, swinging around for another pass.
Chapter Twenty-three
HMS VICTORIOUS
By the Blood of Heroes Page 16