The Forever Engine - eARC

by Frank Chadwick

  “I know. But Gabrielle told me the Prince of Wales described you as ‘one of the bravest officers in our service.’”

  Gordon shifted and looked down.

  “I can’t imagine why,” he said.

  “I couldn’t, either, especially since I got the feeling in Munich you two had never met. Thomson actually introduced you, and neither you nor the prince batted an eye.”

  “What’s your point?” he said, a hard edge now in his voice.

  “You gave me a little lecture about British politics, and how the Prince of Wales is the only man in Britain who can stand up to Lord Chillingham. It was pretty clear where your sympathies rested in that matchup.”

  “What of it?”

  “Well, I got to asking myself a question. Why would someone who admired the Prince of Wales, and loathed Chillingham, ruin his reputation to stay assigned to the one branch of the army under Chillingham’s direct control? And why would the prince think that was an act of bravery? And then I got it: you’re the prince’s spy on the inside of Chillingham’s organization.”

  The silence dragged out for almost a minute before Gordon spoke.

  “I won’t answer that,” he said.

  I laughed. “It wasn’t a question.”

  He looked at me intently for a moment, then his expression softened, and he smiled.

  “Did he really say that about me? One of the bravest officers in the service?”

  “Gabrielle said he did, and the term he used was ‘in our service.’ That was another clue. You know how royalty talks; he said our when he meant you were in his service. For what it’s worth, I think what you’re doing takes a lot of guts.”

  He took the revolver out of his sash and hefted it in his hand, getting the feel of it.

  “Perhaps, but it’s not the same thing.” He brandished the revolver. “This dashing about with bullets and knives flying, or those damnable killer birds—well . . .”

  “I know, physical courage is different. But honestly, if you have the one, you can learn the other. It’s a matter—”

  “—of muscle memory. Yes, yes, I remember, teaching your body to respond correctly. To tell you the truth, I was nearly worthless every time the shooting started. But then during the attack on Brezna, I was so preoccupied with the troops under my command, and not making a hash of things, I forgot to be frightened about myself.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much the trick,” I said.

  “Well, you might have told me so,” he said, a trace of indignation in his voice.

  I chuckled again. “Doesn’t do any good to tell someone. That’s one you just have learn on your own.”

  He checked his watch again and then sat down in the chair by the desk. I pulled the armchair over and sat beside him.

  “Speaking of spies,” I said, “Professor Meredith is Tesla’s man in London.”

  “Meredith? The cabinet science advisor? That round little nothing of a man?”

  “Sometimes they’re the ones to watch out for. Tesla told me his agent passed the coin to his assassin. I saw Meredith give the coin to the thug that got away, just before he went through the window. It was the only time Meredith broke cover once the attack started.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “You were still . . . out of the room when he did it.”

  He smiled ruefully and shook his head.

  “Meredith—who could believe it? You know, I really was going for help, odd as that sounds. It seemed to make sense to me at the moment.”

  “Unless people are very well trained, most of them will panic in the face of a sudden and unexpected emergency. Only good training, or a lot of experience, prevents it.”

  “I’ve wanted to ask for some time, how do you know all this?”

  “Well, experience for one thing. You already figured out I wasn’t just a translator. But after my wife died, they pulled me out of the field, moved me into training. That’s when I learned most of the scientific end of the physiology of stress response. It’s pretty fascinating science. I liked training people, too. That’s probably why I got into teaching afterwards.”

  We sat quietly for a few minutes. He looked at his watch again.

  “Time to go. Oh, I brought something for you,” Gordon said.

  We walked softly to the door, and I saw a bulky, rifle-sized package lying against the wall.

  “Just in case there is trouble.”

  He handed me Gabrielle’s leather gun case.

  I unzipped it and pulled out the Winchester twelve-gauge, carefully worked the lever to check the magazine, made sure it was empty, then loaded five rounds from the ammunition bandolier. I carefully lowered the hammer, clicked on the safety, and slipped the bandolier over my head and shoulder. I nodded to Gordon I was ready.

  He opened the door a few inches. Zoran turned to us and shook his head. I could still hear the voices from upstairs. Gordon closed the door and turned to me.

  “We can’t wait any longer. Sergeant Melzer and Corporal O’Mara will begin squabbling if I’m not there to sort things out.”

  I thought about Gabrielle at the top of the stairs, alone in bed, and I wondered if she slept. Was she able to switch off at night, like a machine? Or did she lie awake and wonder about all the things she had dreamed of for years, wonder what it meant when dreams come true in ways we never quite expected, and what she would do next, now that she’d come to the end of her rainbow. I took a deep breath.

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  We managed not to set off any alarms on our way out. Clouds masked the thin crescent moon, and we ran noiselessly across the soft grass to the wooded foothills, then climbed for twenty minutes at a pace that left Gordon and me both panting. The clouds parted for a moment, and moonlight illuminated the valley behind us, turning the big house silver, the surrounding landscape dull iron, the lake oiled steel. I stared, finding it hard to think of it as real, as a place where flesh lived, until Gordon touched my shoulder and nodded after our guide. Again we climbed.

  Durson’s voice called out from the darkness ahead. I couldn’t make out the Serbian, but I caught the teasing tone. Zoran, our guide, turned and made a sour face.

  “Your friend the Night Killer says we make too much noise,” he said in German.

  “Tell him we wanted him to hear us coming so he wouldn’t be surprised and wet himself,” I said.

  Zoran grinned and passed on the message. Durson’s laugh came back as a low rumble in the night.

  “I’m surprised to see you here,” I told Durson when we entered the clearing. I glanced around—no fire, men well dispersed, very little activity except men cleaning their weapons and checking their gear.

  “Your Professor Thomson is very persuasive, even through a translator. Also, I’ve made new friends,” he answered, and then repeated the last part in Serbian for Zoran. Zoran held his right bicep with his left hand and gave him the finger. Nice to know some things never change.

  “We have a difficult task ahead of us,” Durson said, studying me. “Captain Gordon says you are a soldier of experience. That is surprising. I had thought you were a gentleman.”

  “Man, were you wrong.”

  He looked at me a moment more and then nodded.

  “You have thought about the problem?” he said.

  Gordon stood beside me and motioned Sergeant Melzer and Corporal O’Mara to join us.

  “I’ve thought about if for most of yesterday and all the way up the mountain. Cevik Bey will attack at sunrise? We can count on that?”

  “His column passed Brezna this afternoon,” Durson said. “We left a heliograph team in the village and exchanged messages with him. The attack will come tomorrow.”

  “And Intrepid’s joining in?”

  “Yes. We are to help with diversionary attacks, although I am uncertain what effect a diversion will have.”

  “No effect at all. Cevik Bey doesn’t need a diversion. Tesla can bring four field guns to bear on the attack down the vall
ey, and potentially on Intrepid. Harding and Cevik Bey need us to silence those guns. Fortunately, Tesla’s defenses are set up to stop big attacks from outside, not small ones coming from inside the perimeter. If we’re going to do this, though, and do it without getting half our people killed, we’ll need the defenders occupied elsewhere, looking elsewhere.

  “The main attack will be our diversion.”

  FORTY-TWO

  October 15, 1888, Kokin Brod, Serbia

  The clouds and moon cooperated, denying any watchful eye the aid of a reflection from gunmetal or a shadow flickering across open ground. Durson’s men moved like silent phantoms, a single-file column which quickly vanished into the uneven foliage along the banks of the lake. Gordon’s men—Melzer’s riflemen and O’Mara’s Marines—moved more slowly, but they didn’t have as far to go. They disappeared into a shallow drainage ditch a hundred yards east of the southern gun redoubt.

  Five minutes passed—no challenges, no alarms. Durson and his men would take another half hour to get into final position, but I couldn’t afford to wait any longer. Already the mountain peaks to the west were distinguishable as ink black against a charcoal sky.

  I signaled Zoran and we rose from the underbrush in our improvised ghillie suits—gray-brown wool blankets with branches, sprigs of foliage, and long tentacles of hanging moss pushed through slits in the fabric, the whole thing worn as a hooded cloak. There wasn’t a lot of ground cover, but October leaves had piled up around the flower beds and low garden walls on the east side of the big house. We got there well before first light and settled in. Between the dead leaves, and a couple pruned branches from a waiting burn pile to break up our shape, we became all but invisible by the time the sky grew pink in the east.

  The lights were already on in the big house, and angry voices carried over the still-dark lawn from open windows. They’d figured out I was gone, probably untied the guard and not gotten much of an explanation from him. Tesla would really be pissed now.

  Torches appeared at the main doorway, flickering light played across the lawn, and a half-dozen guards searched for some sign of our trail. We hadn’t made any effort to hide our tracks when leaving, but they still didn’t manage to find anything. Tracking at night is damned near impossible unless you’re a pro, and none of these guys were. After about twenty minutes they got tired of looking and went back inside.

  I knew it wouldn’t be much longer, so I gave my equipment a final check, maybe as much from nerves as foresight. Gordon had given me a Very pistol to signal when we were clear of the building or when Tesla was dead, whichever came first. The design hadn’t changed much between the 1880s and my own time. The flare cartridges I was used to were about half the diameter—better propellants and bursting charges—but the design was the same. I stuck it in my belt in back, where it wouldn’t get in my way.

  Gabrielle’s ammunition bandolier had open loops holding twelve-gauge rounds with leather flaps which snapped over each of the ten groups of five rounds. I’d loaded five, and there were three more empty loops—rounds she’d fired at the waterfront in Uvats—so forty-two rounds more. I opened the snaps and took inventory: ten deer slugs, fifteen number-eight birdshot, and twenty-two double-ought buckshot, including five in the magazine. That was a good all-around load, but the fifteen birdshot rounds were less useful for what I wanted. I thought for a moment. If I knew what situation I’d end up facing, I could decide on a mixed load, but I didn’t, so for now I stayed with buckshot.

  I sat with my back to the stone wall and waited. The big house had settled down after the tardy discovery of my absence. The distant report of a field gun caused renewed activity and shouted orders, but this time the activity had a more practiced sound to it. Men closed and bolted the front door. Rusty hinges squealed in protest, and metal rattled and clanged as servants closed heavy iron shutters over the windows. After ten or fifteen minutes, these sounds faded as well and silence settled over the lower floor of the house. I listened but heard nothing for a while, then caught the faint rattle of rifle fire and a distant field gun firing. The attack had begun.

  I motioned to Zoran. We rose and moved across the thirty yards of open ground to the rear of the house. We faced the east side, the side away from the direction of Cevik Bey’s attack, and I counted on all hostile eyes being on the valley. I also figured that, once I’d broken out and escaped, the last thing they would expect was a return visit. The firing grew louder, and the distinctive metallic rattle of a Gatling gun joined in from the roof of the house.

  We’d already worked out our means of entry. We dropped our ghillie suits on the ground, and I leaned forward against the brick wall of the house. Zoran scrambled up my back, onto my shoulders, and then used the prominent stone facing work for handholds to climb the last meter or so up to the second-floor balcony. He lowered a knotted rope, wound around the stone railing, and I climbed up behind him.

  We paused there, waiting to see if our ascent had alerted anyone—nothing. I already had the Winchester out, and now Zoran unslung his own weapon, a short breech-loading carbine.

  We moved the iron shutter aside, and I went through the door to the interior, with my shotgun pointing straight ahead and braced against my shoulder, a buckshot round in the chamber. Empty room. We moved quickly to the door, cracked it, looked out, moved out into the empty hallway. I glanced down the main stairs and saw a heavy iron girder dropped into brackets to either side, holding the front door closed. It would take an explosive charge to force it open, and we might need reinforcement, but we’d already worked this out as well. The door was Zoran’s job—open it and then hold it until I came out or good guys came in. I pointed down to it, and Zoran nodded and started down. I headed up to the next floor.

  The stairs creaked softly, no matter how carefully I climbed them. I felt sweat trickle down my face and neck, and I paused to dry my palms on my shirt.

  The third floor was empty as well, but the sound of two men talking in loud voices drifted down the open staircase. I knelt for a moment at the foot of the stairs and leaned against the balustrade, steadying myself, gathering myself, feeling the blackness around the edges of my vision take shape like a living thing emerging from the fog. I did five cycles of tactical breathing and figured I was as settled as I was likely to get.

  I started up the stairs, shotgun up and at my shoulder, my left hip sliding along the banister for support and balance. Halfway up I could tell the voices came from my right, so I turned and let my butt rest against the banister. I moved slowly up until I could see the top of one of their heads, and then I dropped into a crouch. If I could see his head, he could have seen mine if he’d looked in the right direction.

  One more complete cycle of breathing, and then I sidestepped quickly up the stairs, the shotgun aimed at their voices and then at the upper torso of the closest one as I cleared the banister at the top. They stood in front of a door, their rifles lying against the wall behind them.

  The one a little farther from the stairs saw me first. His eyes grew wide. The other one turned and saw me as the first one cried out in surprise.

  “Hands up!” I shouted. “Hande hoch!”

  Maybe they didn’t understand German. Maybe they didn’t hear anything through their panic. The closer one turned and grabbed for his rifle, and the other one started to as well.

  “No! Stop where you are. Hands up!”

  Nobody listened.

  My first shot took the closer guard in the side as he rose and turned with his rifle, slammed him back against the wall. He slid to the floor, leaving a bloody smear on the wall. My second shot hit the second guard right below the chin and slightly to one side. It nearly took his head off.

  I took a moment to look at them. Even with all my breathing exercises, my heart rate shot through the roof and my peripheral vision had gone, but I looked hard at them, trying to make myself notice anything that might be useful.

  They were dressed as local farmers, not in the black of Tesla’s air crew
s.

  I knelt and checked the first guard—he still lived, but red foam bubbled from his mouth with every breath. I kicked the two rifles down the stairway and left him. If he woke up, he could make his peace with his maker. I didn’t feel like hurrying him along.

  I kicked in each doorway on the floor and did a cursory search, but couldn’t waste too much time here. The noise of the Winchester would probably attract attention, even in the middle of a battle. I pushed two more buckshot rounds into the magazine as I took the stairs to the fifth floor two at a time.

  Four men moved cautiously through the main hallway toward the stairs. As my head cleared the level of the floor and I saw them, they called out and raised their own weapons. I had the advantage of being in the stairway, effectively down in a hole and under cover while they were wide open in the corridor. One fired, but the rifle shot went high and to the side. I fired and dropped him. I crouched down to lever another round into the chamber and stepped two paces to the side. I stood up; two men fired, but their aim was off, expecting me to come up where I’d been. I fired and dropped the man who had not fired. I worked the lever for another shell while the two still standing fumbled frantically with the bolts of their rifles. I fired again; a third man went down in a spray of blood, and the fourth man dropped his rifle, raised his hands as far over his head as he could, and began babbling in Serbian.

  It was very hard not to shoot him, because I was in a rhythm, a groove, and it was easier to just keep going, but I stopped myself.

  I climbed the rest of the stairs and motioned with the barrel of the Winchester for him to back away from his rifle. I kicked it and the other one close to it down the stairway. One of the men on the floor groaned and writhed in pain. I let go of the shotgun’s front grip to point at the wounded man with my heft hand and motioned the uninjured guard to drag him into the closest bedroom. He scrambled to do it, eyes wide with terror.

  I’d have given a lot right then for a pocket full of plastic quick restraints. Instead, once they were in the room, I used the butt of the shotgun to break off the interior door handle and closed the door on them. Now all there was between me and the observation platform above the roof was the unfinished attic.