by Eric Flint
It was a foolish maneuver, however heroic, which resulted in his own death. But you couldn’t really call that death a “fluke.” His plane was struck by a volley of shots fired at it as he drew near.
And it had happened in this war also, just four months earlier, when Jimmy Andersen had been killed by a stray bullet fired by someone who wasn’t even aiming at him.
Now, it happened again.
* * *
Heinrich Holk had been relaxing in his chamber on the top floor of the Tower of Lions when the bizarre buzzing sound alerted him that the enemy airplane had returned. Immediately, without taking the time to put on his boots, he leapt up and began racing down the stairs to the courtyard below.
He knew that airplanes could be brought down by ground fire, as rare an event as that might be. He’d been born and raised in Denmark, his father being the commander of the fortress at Kronborg, and spent the first years of his military career fighting against the Austrian imperialists, first under General von Mansfeld and then under General Wolf Heinrich von Baudissin—the same Baudissin who’d just been killed when the Turks overran Vienna. And while Holk had switched sides after the Peace of Luebeck in 1629 and entered Wallenstein’s service, he had kept ties with a number of his former countrymen. So, two years earlier, he’d received by mail a detailed account of Hans Richter’s death in battle from one of his confidants.
If it could be done by a wretched naval commander, it could certainly be done by him!
“Form up! Form up!” he was shouting, as he reached the ground level and rushed toward the door of the tower leading outside. Seeing him coming, the guard at the door hastily opened it for him.
Holk had just reached the open doorway when the first of the two bombs struck the ground of the courtyard.
Christin George and Jozef Wojtowicz both had excellent reflexes. Still, both of them had been slightly behind the pace at which the action had unfolded. In Christin’s case, she misjudged the right time to release the bombs; in Jozef’s—who had his eyes closed by them and was just listening for the signal—because even the quickest human takes a split second to translate a shout into jerking a lever.
So, the first bomb missed its intended target. Instead of landing squarely in the middle of the small mob of soldiers clustered in the courtyard, it overshot the mark. The bomb did kill one of them, crushing his skull as it passed by, but it didn’t explode until it struck the ground right in front of the now-open door of the tower. Because of the low angle at which the bomb came in, most of the shrapnel was blown straight forward.
It was as if Heinrich Holk was hit by a gigantic shotgun blast. One piece of shrapnel—part of a horseshoe—struck him under the nose and removed the top half of his head. One of his arms and both legs were blown off. Another big piece of shrapnel came into his torso, ricocheted around his rib cage and more-or-less eviscerated him on the way out.
The guard at the door would have been horrified except he didn’t have time. The second bomb, the incendiary, passed right through the doorway and exploded inside the vestibule of the tower. In an instant, both the guard and the dismembered corpse of Heinrich Holk were obliterated. For all practical purposes, the bottom floor of the Tower of Lions had been turned into a crematorium.
If Eddie Junker and Christin George and Jozef Wojtowicz had deliberately planned the perfect assassination of Heinrich Holk, they couldn’t have done a better job. In fact, they had no idea they had killed him—or even hurt him. They didn’t really know how much damage the bombs had done, and when Christin suggested they fly back to see, Eddie vetoed the idea.
“We’re getting low on fuel,” he said. “I don’t want to risk it.”
* * *
In the courtyard outside the Tower of Lions, the little mob of soldiers stared open-mouthed at the raging pyre the structure had become. Some of Denise’s homemade napalm had splattered into the stairwell before it ignited, so the flames were already spreading to the second floor. It wouldn’t be long—so much was obvious to everyone looking on—before the entire tower was in flames.
“General Holk’s up there!” shouted one of the officers, pointing at the top floor.
Another officer cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted: “Get out, General! Get out! Jump onto the roof of the castle! Don’t try to come down the stairs!”
As a theoretical proposition, what the officer suggested was feasible. Holk was still a fairly young man, in his late thirties. But years of war—years of carousal and dissipation, even more—made it unlikely that he’d be able to escape safely by that route. Getting out of a window on the top floor would be easy enough, and from there he could reach the roof of the main castle. But that roof was quite steep, there were no handholds except the chimney on the opposite side, and the tiles were not in good repair. One slip and he’d be plunging to his death onto the ground thirty feet below.
But Holk never emerged from the tower.
“Are you sure he’s up there?” asked a third officer of the first one.
The man shrugged. “I think so. That’s where he usually is in the morning.”
Pieces of the tower, some of them still burning, were starting to fall into the courtyard. The men there retreated. By now, everyone in the main castle had emerged and the crowd numbered around sixty.
“Maybe he spent the night with his whore,” suggested one of the sergeants. He pointed toward Brzeg. “The one at the tavern.”
“Let’s go find out.” Within a few seconds, most of the soldiers present were heading for the village. Only a handful stayed behind to watch the conflagration.
Which, soon enough, spread to the main building of the castle. Before the day was over, the entire edifice would be a gutted ruin.
* * *
Once they reached the village, the soldiers found the tavern’s barmaid who doubled as a prostitute for Holk when he was in the mood, and questioned her.
Frightened—she was sure she’d be the one blamed if anything bad had happened to Holk—the woman fudged the truth. The general had indeed spent the night with her, but he’d left early in the morning.
“Where did he go?” demanded an officer. He pointed a finger at the Tower of Lions, now a roaring pyre visible to anyone in Brzeg. “Did he go to the tower?”
To her, that finger was one of incipient accusation. Any moment, those men would charge her with setting the fire.
Granted, that made no sense. But none of those soldiers was especially sensible and the barmaid was not very bright to begin with. Floundering, she came up with an alternate tale.
“He said he was going to Grodków,” she blurted. It was the only place she could think of. Holk had mentioned to her once that he kept a small garrison in that town.
Grodków was only twelve miles away. An hour’s ride for a man on horseback.
The stables hadn’t been attached to the castle, so the horses were safe. The mob charged back and within a short time most of them were mounted up and heading for Grodków. Not more than two dozen stayed behind.
Who went, who stayed, and by what command? In essence, everyone did whatever they chose to do. Holk had never established a clear chain of command in his army. That had been deliberate on his part, as a way of making it difficult for anyone to oust him from his position—which was not unheard of among mercenary companies in the Thirty Years War.
Had he dropped dead right in front of them, whether from a wound or a heart attack, the top officers in Holk’s army might have been able to work out an arrangement suitable to all of them over his cooling corpse. But in this atmosphere of uncertainty and chaos, none of them was even thinking in those terms.
A day passed. Many of the soldiers who’d ridden off to Grodków came back to Brzeg, but the uncertainty was not cleared up. No, Holk was not at Grodków—but he might have been there. The villagers and the men in the garrison had produced several stories, ranging from we never saw him to yes, he was here but I don’t know where he went to he went to—any of three othe
r locations named. Soldiers went riding off to all three.
By now the fire had burned itself out and it had rained for several hours. Soldiers began picking their way through the embers.
They found one skeleton—more precisely, they found parts of one skeleton. Between the heat of the flames and the eventual collapse of the entire edifice, the bones—those which survived at all—had been badly scattered.
Still, it was clear that most of the skeleton was positioned near the doorway. So, that had to be the remains of the guard. There was always a guard stationed at that doorway and the one holding the duty on that day was also missing.
Clearly, therefore, that was him. What was left of him. The rest of the bones they found—pieces of bone; none of them had been intact and many had simply been burned away—were obviously his remains also.
Holk had not been there. He was still alive. But where had he gone?
* * *
Word came that an army was nearing Brzeg. A huge army, led by an angel in armor accompanied by hussars flying Polish battle flags.
Clearly, it was time to seek greener pastures. No one even suggested that they engage in a battle. Obviously, King Wladyslaw had tired of their depredations and had sent an expedition to chastise them.
Probably severely. Gibbets and stakes were likely to be popping up everywhere. And if it struck anyone as unlikely that an angel—and where would Wladyslaw find an angel anyway? in Poland?—would stoop to hanging and impaling people, they kept their own counsel.
Wars were being fought all over Europe, so it wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of employment opportunities. Most of them opted for Russia. There was a civil war brewing there, it was said.
* * *
The mystery would never be cleared up. As time passed, Heinrich Holk became one of the legends of Silesia. The troll—the ogre, the bloodthirsty fiend—who came to eat children who didn’t obey their parents. A horrible man had become a horrible monster.
Breslau (Wroclaw), Lower Silesia
Poland
“So how’d it go?” Denise asked eagerly, after they disembarked from the plane. “Did my bombs work right?”
“They worked swell, honey,” replied her mother. In truth, Christin didn’t know one way or another whether the first bomb had exploded. By the time she was able to look back and see the castle they were much too far away to tell. But it was obvious that the incendiary had gone off splendidly. So, in good conscience, she was able to add:
“By now, that castle’s just so much charcoal.”
“What about Holk?”
Christin shrugged. “Who knows? He might very well not even have been there.”
Denise wasn’t pleased by that ambiguity. But she wasn’t given to moping over contingencies and she was delighted that Eddie and her mother were back and in good health. She’d been a little worried. That was a combat mission they’d been on, after all.
* * *
She spent most of the day and the entire evening with Eddie, celebrating. It wasn’t until the next morning that she saw her mother again, after she came down to the kitchen in response to the odors of breakfast being cooked.
“Mom!” she cried out, staring at the breakfast-maker.
Christin was sitting on a stool at the table, with a cup of coffee in her hands—well, coffee wannabe—and wearing a robe. And from the looks of things, nothing else. Except a very satisfied smile on her face.
Denise recognized the robe, since her mother had owned it forever. More to the point, she recognized the other robe in the kitchen, since her mother had owned that one forever too and it really didn’t fit the person who had it on which made it blindingly obvious that he wasn’t wearing anything at all under it.
“What’s he doing here?” Denise demanded. She recognized the smile on her mother’s face, too, although she hadn’t seen it in…
In…
Had it really been that long since her father died? A year?
Closer to a year and half, actually.
“What do you think he’s doing here?” Christin said acerbically. “I’m not that old, young lady. We didn’t see any reason we shouldn’t celebrate either.”
Jozef Wojtowicz turned away from the skillet he was working at, with a smile on his face.
A really wide, self-satisfied sort of smile.
“In Poland, we call breakfast śniadanie,” he said. “Usually I prefer cold cuts on bread but supplies are tight in Wroclaw so we’re making do with sausage. German-style sausage, I’m afraid. But we do have some eggs, too.”
“I know we do,” she said, almost snarling. “I bought them yesterday while you were gone.”
God, that smile was disgusting. He looked like a village idiot who’d hit the jackpot.
Chapter 56
Steyregg, on the north bank of the Danube across from Linz
Since the assault began, Abraham Zarfati had never let his gaze move away from the huge enemy airship for more than a minute. At first, the airship had remained hovering in the same position over Linz, about a mile from the river, and not facing him directly. The vessel had been turned almost broadside to the Ottoman flotilla. He’d hoped that they might simply be assigned to protect the city that was now the new Austrian capital.
But now he could see that the airship was coming around and heading toward them. And he was not a bit surprised to see that the enemy vessel was faster than their own as well as much bigger.
“That thing is enormous,” hissed Isaac Capsali, who’d come to stand alongside him. “Do you think it’s going to ram us?”
“I have no idea what they plan to do,” replied Abraham. That was nothing more than the simple, if very uncomfortable, truth. None of the officers and soldiers in the sultan’s Gureba-i hava had yet been in an aerial battle between airships. There had been a great deal of speculation and theorizing on the subject, some of it quite wild. But in war, more than in any other human pursuit, practical experience was essential.
And of that, there was none. None at all. Abraham had been told privately by the Muslim commander of the airship fleet that even the American texts—which were officially still labeled “manuals of witchcraft” but were being assiduously studied by scholars assigned to do so by the sultan—carried no record of such an encounter.
Abraham’s own supposition was that rockets would probably be the devices used, eventually. He knew that engineers of the Gureba-i hava had already designed and tested several ways of attaching and firing rockets from the airships’ gondolas. The key problem to be overcome was the risk of having the initial rocket exhaust set fire to the airship which deployed the weapon. The solution the engineers seemed to be leaning toward was to drop the rocket seven or eight kulaçs before igniting the propellant with a timed fuse. Guidelines would be used to keep the missile level as it fell—basically, four strings feeding through small holes drilled in flanges welded to the fuselages.
Abraham didn’t think the rockets would work very well, even if the design proved to be functional. There was no way to guide the missiles once they were fired, beyond the crude mechanism of spinning them. In practice, that meant that rockets were only effective as area saturation weapons—which was exactly the way the katyusha forces used them. But to do that effectively required firing barrages of rockets. Not even the most enthusiastic proponent of using rockets as airship weapons thought the missiles could be fired in volleys.
“It’s not coming at us,” Isaac said, pointing with his finger.
Abraham saw that he was right. As it drew nearer, the enemy airship was also angling its course to take it between the first and second line of the Ottoman airships—and closer, he thought, to the second line than to his own.
He looked toward the Ottoman airship flying just to his left, to see if there were any messages. But there were none. Not yet—he was sure there would soon be a flurry of them.
The Gureba-i hava had gotten the first radios produced by the sultan’s artisans, but they were big and heavy thi
ngs. Only the commander of the flotilla, Şemsi Ahmed, had been provided with one to take aloft on his airship—and he’d had to leave some of his bombs behind in order to retain the vessel’s lifting ability.
Şemsi Ahmed would maintain contact with the sultan with that radio. Whatever orders he or the sultan wished to send to the other vessels in the flotilla had to be transmitted using a semaphore system. The decision had been made to position the commanding airship of each line on the far left of that line, beginning with Şemsi Ahmed’s own vessel, the Pelekanon, in the fourth and last line. Moving forward, the commander of the third line was Mevlana Kadri, aboard the Savra. Moving forward again, the airship on the far left of the second line was the Chaldiran, commanded by the only Jew of that rank, Moshe Mizrahi. Moshe would be the commander of the first ships which did actual damage to the enemy by dropping incendiary bombs. All five ships in the first line were only going to be laying down smoke, at least in the initial stage of the assault.
It was a high honor for Mizrahi and Abraham was pleased by it. Truth be told, Abraham didn’t much care for Moshe Mizrahi personally, but any honor received by a Jew in the sultan’s service was of benefit to all other Jews.
The commander of the front line was Mustafa bin Ramazan, aboard the Turnadağ. Abraham’s own vessel, the Preveza, was the next one over in the line.
Within a short time, the monstrous enemy ship was passing directly behind the Turnadağ and the Preveza, not more than a quarter of a mile away. Abraham could now see that crew facilities had been built right into the hull of the vessel, not simply placed in the gondola the way the Ottoman ships were designed.
But he didn’t spend much time examining the enemy, because the Turnadağ was beginning to send semaphore signals. It was time to start deploying the smoke.
Two minutes after the smoke began to billow out from the baskets hanging below the airships in the first line, Abraham heard a sharp cracking sound coming from behind. Followed closely by another, and another, and yet another. He moved to the rear of the gondola to see what was happening. And, soon, came to realize what the enemy’s tactics were going to be, in an aerial battle between airships.