by Eric Flint
Eddie shook his head. “No. In fact, I just got a message from him this morning ordering me to stay here. ‘For the duration,’ as he put it. Of course, ‘duration’ is a pretty vague term and ultimately Don Francisco is the one who’ll define it. But I don’t see much chance he’ll call me back until you’ve dealt with Holk.”
“Good.” She now looked at Christin. “And you are supplied with bombs, yes?”
“Oh, yeah. My little girl’s been busy. She’s having fun, actually. Which probably makes me the world’s most disreputable mother, but so it goes.”
Gretchen went back to studying the map. “The day after tomorrow, then. At the crack of dawn—no, before then. As soon as there’s enough light to see.” She did a quick measurement, using her thumb. “In a straight line, Brzeg’s about thirty miles from here. If we make twenty miles the first day—I hope for better, but we’ll see—then we will be in position to attack the bastards when there’s still plenty of light on the second day.”
So might a glacier predict its forward progress—except Gretchen would move much faster than a glacier. Rebecca had once heard Ernst Wettin call Gretchen as ruthless as an avalanche. It was a grotesque simile, in some ways. In others…
Quite accurate.
Vienna, former capital of Austria-Hungary, now occupied by the Ottoman Empire
“Yeah, I’ve got some eyeliner,” Judy said. She nodded toward the chamber that she and Cecilia Renata slept in. “I’ve got it in my purse. But why in the world do you want it?”
She gave Minnie an evil sort of smile. “Is the archduke fussing about your appearance? You look fine to me, allowing for too many weeks spent living in a cellar when one week is seven days too many.”
Minnie shook her head. “I’m not worried about keeping Leopold interested.” A bit smugly: “I’m managing that just fine. But I need to make sure that when I go out into the city I don’t get any other man interested. As in, bored Turkish garrison soldier with too much time on his hands and a very low threshold of interest. Taking out my eye won’t be enough by itself.”
She reached up and ran fingers through her hair. “I’ll muck this up good, of course. And I’ll stink of shit. But I want to have black teeth, too. The best thing I can think of that I could maybe use for that is your eyeliner. Cecilia Renata has some henna, but that won’t blacken my teeth.”
“Eyeliner’ll work,” said Judy. “I used my mom’s once on Halloween, trick or treating. She had conniptions when she found out, but it was just because of the principle of the thing. The stuff’s not dangerous.” She made a little moue of distaste. “And given everything else you’ll be doing to yourself, I guess blackening your teeth is small potatoes. Speaking of which, I’m starting to dream about French fries.”
“Wouldn’t that be a treat?” Minnie was quite fond of the American way of frying potatoes—which were called “American fries” by everyone in the USE except the up-timers themselves.
“How soon are you going?” Judy asked.
“Day after tomorrow.”
“I thought you’d want to get it over with as soon as possible.”
“I would,” said Minnie. “But the shit hasn’t dried enough yet.”
Judy stared at her. “I can remember a time when I’d get upset if my shoes had gotten scuffed. God, the Ring of Fire’s got a lot to answer for.”
Steyregg, on the north bank of the Danube across from Linz
Mike Stearns looked around the bunker where Jeff Higgins has established the headquarters for his Hangman regiment. “Looks pretty sturdy,” he said.
“I think so,” Jeff agreed. “It helps a lot that we could bring the logs down the hill—from not too far away, either—instead of having to drag them across a mile of farmland.” He reached up and rapped one of the logs that formed the roof of the bunker with his knuckles. It was a good six inches in diameter.
“I’m pretty sure it’ll stand up to rocket fire. Cannonballs too, at least up to twelve pounds.” His lips twisted into a grimace of sorts; part hope, part skepticism. “What I don’t know is how well these bunkers will do if the Turks start dropping incendiaries on us.”
Mike nodded. “For whatever it’s worth, none of the reports we got from the assault on Vienna had the incendiaries being delivered by anything except airships. We can’t be sure, of course, but I don’t think the Ottomans have equipped their rockets with incendiary warheads.”
Jeff looked back up at the log-and-mud wattle that formed the roof of the bunker, as if he could see the sky beyond. “Think Julie can do it?”
“We’ll find out. The only other way to take out an airship that anyone’s figured out, unless they fly low enough for ground fire to hit them, is to try dropping bombs on their envelopes.”
“Huh?”
Mike smiled. “Yeah. Jesse Wood had a couple of his pilots look into it. They found a reference in one of the computers—why it was ever on the hard drive is anybody’s guess—that the first English pilot who took out a German zeppelin during World War I did it by flying over the airship and bombing it.”
Jeff’s eyes narrowed, as he tried to visualize how that might work. Then, he shook his head.
“With our contact fuses? Good luck with that.”
Mike shrugged. “Yeah, nobody’s too optimistic it’ll work. But we’ve equipped all our warplanes with bombs and we’ll give it a try. We’ve got three of them now, since Becky sent her Gustav down here to join the two Dauntlesses.”
Jeff was familiar enough with the design of the planes to immediately spot a problem. “The Gustav, maybe, since the pilot can release the bomb himself.”
“Herself, in this case. The pilot’s Laura Goss.”
“Herself,” Jeff corrected. “But there’s no way it’ll work with a Dauntless, with that clunky design Bob Kelly came up with. The guy who actually drops the bomb can’t see squat. What was he thinking, anyway?”
Mike shrugged. “I imagine he was thinking of the Dauntless as a civilian plane. I can remember a time, you know, when I didn’t automatically put everything in a military framework.”
Jeff chuckled. “So could I, if I tried real hard. I’d cuss the Ring of Fire again, but…”
“You got Gretchen and I got Becky. All things considered, I figure it was one hell of a deal.”
“Yeah, me too.”
They were silent for a moment, each man lost in thoughts of his wife. Then Jeff gave his head a little shake to clear it, and said: “Day after tomorrow, you figure? That’s when they’ll come at us?”
“That’s what all the reconnaissance reports are telling us. Day after tomorrow.”
Chapter 53
Vienna, former capital of Austria-Hungary, now occupied by the Ottoman Empire
Minnie set out a couple of hours before dawn. She figured she’d get at least halfway to her goal before the sun came up, and was less likely to be spotted than at any other time. Even if she was spotted, the explanation for her presence on the streets was simple and obvious—so obvious, not to mention repellent, that she’d probably never get questioned at all.
In Vienna, as was true throughout central Europe, night soil was collected by a disreputable group of workers. They were a European analog to one of the untouchable castes of Hindu India, although their position in society was not formalized by religion. In most of the Germanies, there were harsh laws governing their work and status. No such laws were in place in Austria-Hungary, but their social position was pretty much the same.
As a rule, the work was done by the men of the caste’s families, but that was not a legal requirement, since night soil collection and disposal was not a guild matter. The rule was broken fairly often even under normal circumstances, and was even more likely to be broken after a recent foreign occupation. So having a woman pulling a night soil cart through the streets was not likely to seem suspicious to anyone.
Minnie could disguise her appearance, but the one feature she could not disguise beyond a certain point was her age. She
did her best to behave as a middle-aged woman might, but there were limits to that ability. For one thing, the cart was heavy, even only half-full as it was with the substance she and Judy and Cecilia Renata had loaded into it a few days earlier. Her vehicle was a hand cart, similar in design to the handcarts pulled across North America by the Mormon pioneers of the mid-nineteenth century. She simply couldn’t behave in too decrepit a manner, or she’d never be able to accomplish her purpose.
Oddly enough, though, her greatest worry had nothing to do with the perils of the journey itself.
“Make sure—make sure!—that Leopold doesn’t see me when I get back,” she’d whispered to Judy and Cecilia Renata, after she and they had muscled the cart down to the ground floor and she was preparing to leave the tower. “I don’t ever want him to know what I looked like.”
That was part of the reason she’d decided to leave so early; earlier, even, than night soil workers usually started their chore. The young Austrian archduke was a heavy sleeper, and she’d been able to ease her way out of their bedding without waking him.
* * *
Looking at her in the lamplight, Judy had to struggle mightily not to wince—or gag. Minnie looked…
Horrible. Her eyesocket gaped open and she’d done something to it—Judy didn’t know what and didn’t want to know—that suggested there was some sort of infection there. Her mouth hung slack and loose-lipped, exposing just enough of the blackened teeth to make it seem that she was mostly toothless. Minnie even managed to shape her lips in such a way as to reinforce that impression.
Worst of all, in some ways, was her hair. Minnie’s hair was normally quite full, colored somewhere between chestnut and auburn. It was perhaps her best single feature, from the standpoint of beauty—and the one Judy had wondered how Minnie could possibly disguise. Everything about her normally cried out: look! healthy young woman!
She’d managed it, though. She’d used a combination of dust and ashes to turn the color into a dull gray-brown. Somehow—Judy really didn’t want to know how she’d managed this feat—she’d turned the fullness of her hair into tangled braids and matting. The hair just looked plain mangy, now.
And, finally, there was the stench. She smelled—literally, not figuratively—like shit. The odor was detectable within ten feet; up close, it was quite nauseating.
“Remember,” Minnie had repeated—three times—“keep Leopold away from me until I’ve been able to clean up.”
Which was going to be a project in itself. Judy had already discussed it with Cecilia Renata and the two of them would spend the time after Minnie left getting her bath ready. They’d use one of the wine casks that was close to being drained, upend it and remove the lid, and fill it with water. There’d be enough wine still left to serve as a disinfectant, and wine was actually quite a good cleaning agent, especially for hair.
So Cecilia Renata had assured her, at any rate. The thought of using wine to shampoo her hair had never once occurred to Judy—and never would have, if she lived to be ninety-five years old, if it hadn’t been for the be-damned Ring of Fire.
Of course, if it hadn’t been for the Ring of Fire a lot of other things would never have happened to her either, she reminded herself. Good things! Like… like…
Associating with genuine royalty in a cellar while hiding out from slavering foreign conquerors.
“Talk about turning a silk purse into a sow’s ear,” she muttered.
* * *
They dowsed the lamp before opening the exterior door to the tower. Except for a few brief explorations by curious soldiers, the Ottomans had for the most part ignored the detached wing of the royal palace. There was nothing worth stealing beyond some saddles, since the building had been used for the storage of spare lumber, old furniture, tackle and the like. There were valuable items in the wing—extraordinarily valuable, given the passage of time, since they consisted of Leopold’s art collection—but they were in the hidden cellars.
There were Turkish officers now residing in the main palace, however. It was unlikely that any of them would be awake yet; and, fortunately, the tower door was not visible from the main palace entrance where janissaries stood guard at all times of the day and night. But a gleam of light could be spotted in darkness where the shape of someone easing a handcart into the courtyard would not be.
It was done within a minute. Without saying a word or glancing back, Minnie set out, pulling the cart behind her. Carefully, quietly, Judy and Cecilia Renata closed the door and retreated back up the tower to the hidden entrance to the cellars. Not long thereafter, they were back in hiding.
* * *
Minnie didn’t so much as glance at the main building of the Hofburg, as she passed it by. It was tempting to try to retrieve the battery and antenna that Leopold had overlooked in the palace’s radio room, since they were so close, but that would be a mistake. By now, there was a good chance all the remaining radio equipment in that room had been removed and brought to Murad to be turned over to his artisans. But even if the battery and antenna were still there, Minnie thought there was no chance she could make her way through the palace up to the top floor and back without being spotted. And while Ottoman soldiers would probably ignore her if they encountered her on the street or in poor areas of the capital, they certainly wouldn’t if they found her in the Hofburg. Night soil generated in royal palaces was removed by servants, not by outcastes.
Her goal lay elsewhere. Following basic principles of their tradecraft, she and Denise had rented a small space—they’d had Eddie rent it for them, rather—in a warehouse halfway across Vienna, not long after they arrived in the city. That was where they had cached their own radio equipment, in case they had need for it later, and that was where she was headed now.
Breslau (Wroclaw), Lower Silesia
Poland
“Remember,” Denise said to Jozef Wojtowicz, both her tone of voice and her gaze very intent. “This one”—she pointed to the bomb that two Air Force members were attaching to the hard points on the left side of the plane’s fuselage—“is the regular bomb. Just high explosives—well, stretching a point—that’ll send out shrapnel.”
She shook her head, the gesture expressing quite a bit of pride. “I got some nasty stuff in there. Rusty nails, pieces of broken horseshoes, you name it. Okay, it’s probably not as good as real shrapnel, but still.”
She now stooped over and pointed to the bomb already attached to the set of hard points on the right side of the fuselage. “That one, though, that’s napalm. Well, close enough. It’s an incendiary, you know.”
Now, she straightened back up and looked at her mother, who had also been following the little lecture. “You got that, Mom?”
“Yeah, it’s simple enough. Left side, fireworks; right side, fire.”
Christin frowned and looked up at the plane’s fuselage. “I never asked, though. Do the release levers match the position of the bombs? What I mean is—”
“Yeah, they do,” said Denise. “I checked just to make sure this one worked the same way as the one I was in when me and Keenan Murphy and Lannie Yost… well…”
Her mother chuckled. “When you bombed your boyfriend and Noelle.”
“Hey! That’s not fair. Eddie wasn’t my boyfriend yet.”
Jozef reflected that Eddie Junker had to be a brave man, picking Denise Beasley to be his paramour. He wondered what that might imply about himself, given his intense attraction to Denise’s mother. Was he also a brave man? Or just, as Lukasz said, an idiot?
But that was a matter for later. For the moment…
He gave Christin the big smile that seemed to come to him automatically whenever he dealt with the American woman. He thought of it as a “beaming” one. Lukasz was just being churlish when he labeled it a village idiot’s sort of smile.
“So let us be agreed,” he said. “Tell me which lever you want me to pull before you give me the signal.”
Christin nodded. “Got it. ‘Left bomb.’ Then—w
henever the time’s right—I’ll holler ‘Now!’”
Eddie stuck his head out of the pilot’s side of the cockpit. “Any time you’re ready, folks.”
Christin and her daughter exchanged mutually admiring looks. “Have at ‘em, Mom!” said Denise.
Steyregg, on the north bank of the Danube across from Linz
Mike Stearns lowered his binoculars. “And here they come, just like they did at Vienna. Five airships leading fifteen more—except here they’re coming in four lines of five airships each.”
“It’s a narrower front here, sir,” said Raimondo Montecuccoli. He was standing next to Mike and still had his spyglass in place. “I thought they might try to bomb Linz itself, but apparently they plan to focus entirely on our positions here, north of the river.”
Mike had speculated on that possibility himself. Linz wasn’t a major city even by the standards of the time, but it still sprawled out much further than Steyregg and the fortified positions the Third Division had built in front of the town. That made it a softer target because whatever anti-airship ground fire the defenders of Linz might be able to manage, it would be more spread out than whatever they might have in Steyregg.
Which was not much anyway, being honest about it. They’d briefly considered trying to mount one of the ten-inch naval rifles as an anti-airship gun—“briefly,” because Major Simpson’s reaction to the proposal had been blunt, forceful and profane. He’d pointed out that he had enough trouble mounting the guns in such a way as to enable them to cover both the Danube and the Traun. Trying to add an elevation capacity to the mounts that would be sufficient to shoot at airships was simply impossible.
“If you gave us weeks to do it, maybe,” he’d said. “Maybe—and I’d make no guarantees even then. There’s no way we can do it in a couple of days. As it is, if the Ottomans manage to get a flotilla very far up the Traun we won’t be able to bring the guns to bear on them.”