Raise the Red Flag

by Eric Del Carlo

  Jonny, at his side, glanced at him. There had been no time to tell him any of it. Hamilton said, “I can tell you the contingencies the officers of the Fleet were trained to prepare for, the unlikely scenarios, tactics, and weapons so theoretical they had never been used in the field. They may give Chicago its fighting chance.”

  JONNY WATCHED as the two lieutenants—there was no other term for them—produced pen and paper and took down Hamilton’s words. The more Hamilton spoke, the crazier his scheme seemed. Schemes, actually, for he swiftly outlined a slew of harebrained scenarios, neatly and efficiently detailing each one.

  The Brits train for shit like this? wondered Jonny. Every situation seemed as likely to occur as the moon turning into a gigantic brooch and falling into the ocean. But as he listened at Hamilton’s side, fascinated by the audacity, the schemes started to take on the ring of credibility. Hell, maybe one or two of these ideas could actually be implemented by the rebels.

  The woman listened as well. Her gaze was full of resolve, but Jonny saw the fresh sadness just beneath. She’d lost someone dear tonight, was his guess. But he didn’t doubt that she was authentically with the Colonial Underground and that, even from her bunk here, she could set these countermeasures in motion, if she chose to.

  Hamilton finished. After pausing for a breath, he said, “There are other hypothetical means of attack against an airship, but I’ve given you the ones most likely to succeed.”

  Jonny tried to imagine what this information had cost him and his image of himself as a staunch military man. Jonny had no real notion what it meant to serve in something so much greater—though not necessarily better—than oneself. Certainly being in Kane’s gang didn’t qualify, and even now he wouldn’t have willingly joined forces with the rebels. He might empathize with them as fellow Americans, but he didn’t know if the dictates of the revolution allowed a person to run away. And that was an option he always wanted available.

  The woman spoke to the two men at her bedside. One left with one of the sets of pages. She shifted on the rude bunk, wincing but making no sounds of discomfort. She fixed Hamilton with steely grieving eyes.

  “You say the Royal Airborne trains for these same contingencies, Captain.” She spoke in educated tones. “That means they will have an answer to each one of those salvos.”

  Hamilton let out a creaky, disturbing laugh. Jonny bit his lip, wondering if fatigue and strain had finally overcome his friend. “The scenarios are deemed so unlikely by the officers that no one under them takes them seriously. The drills are considered fool’s errands, necessary idiocies, to be suffered through by crews and captains. I don’t believe anyone aboard the birds up there will easily recall the appropriate theoretical responses to these absurdly conjectural attacks. If your people are fast enough, they might make those tactics work.”

  Hamilton swayed noticeably on his feet. His eyelids fell shut, then twitched back open. His eyes were red-veined, the orbs dulled.

  To Jonny he said, “If you’re not using your billet, then I am going to lie down on it awhile.” Turning to the woman, he added, “If you’ll excuse me, Miss…. Missus….” He left it at that and went staggering away.

  Jonny made to follow but then hesitated. The dice game was proceeding apace. More of the treated wounded were being brought in from the nearby improvised operating theater. Jonny gazed down at the woman on the bunk. An important thing had occurred here tonight. Hamilton’s information might turn out to be vital. What he’d witnessed might, in the end, prove historical. He felt the unexpected need to mark the moment in his mind.

  He said, “My name’s Jonathan Callahan, from New York.”

  The woman put her eyes on him, and he felt the strength of her gaze. “Mary Ann Todd,” she said. “Actually, just Mary will do, young man. I will omit my last name, for security purposes. I am from Kentucky and more recently Springfield, Illinois. It’s where I met my husband, who gave his full measure for the cause this night.”

  It wasn’t easy to hold that proud glower, but Jonny managed it for several seconds. Then he executed what he hoped to hell was a courtly bow and backed away from the bed.

  SIXTEEN.

  SLEEP WAS blackness. Hamilton was grateful for that. It told him of his accumulated fatigue of the past hours and days, yes, but it was also an indication, he believed, that his conscience was clear. His slumbering mind hadn’t tortured him with phantasmagoric dreams holding him up as a Judas, the supreme betrayer. He was satisfied he had done the right thing.

  He knew he had slept deeply but not for how long. As he stirred, Jonny’s head came immediately up over the lower edge of the bunk. He must have been lying beside the bed, on the ground.

  Jonny looked sharply at him. The bandages around his eyes made his gaze all the more intense. He laid a hand on Hamilton’s arm. “You okay?”

  “How long did I sleep?”

  “An hour. A little more, maybe. You should probably rest longer.”

  “You’re the one swaddled in gauze, like a mummy. This should be your bed.” Hamilton sat up, no longer feeling the terrible strain of earlier, following his ordeal through Chicago’s streets.

  “It was my bed,” Jonny said wryly. “You commandeered it, remember?” He had acquired a shirt from somewhere. He winced a bit as he stood up, a hand pressed lightly to his right side. He had his boots on.

  Hamilton rose from the bottom bunk in a stack of three. His head felt light, but it was almost a buoyant feeling. The recovery area was quiet. Evidently the dice game had finally ended, and many of the people appeared to be silently convalescing. It was a relatively peaceful atmosphere.

  He realized that the barrage from the sky hadn’t resumed. Shells weren’t impacting the ground above.

  “I’m going up for a look,” he said. He’d been using his brown leather jacket as a pillow. He put it on now.

  Jonny gave him a cautious gaze. He appeared ready to take Hamilton’s arm in support or even catch him should he fall. But Hamilton promised himself he wouldn’t fall. His steps proved steady as he made toward the stone stairway leading up to the streets.

  He paused, however, at the foot of the stone-cut steps. “Do you know what’s happening with the Colonial Underground? Are they fighting back?”

  Jonny offered another lopsided smile and took on the tone of familiar badinage, which Hamilton found surprisingly welcome. “I’ve been planted by your bedside. All the rebels among the wounded who could move on their own left at the same time, that woman with the singed head included. All I know is it’s been more or less quiet up above for a while.”

  They ascended together. Only one stretcher passed them going down. Hamilton could smell the burning from above. Had it already happened? The thought touched him with bilious dread. His unconscious mind had been merciful, but now his waking one threw a hideous image of Chicago’s skeletonized ruins across his eyes, not a wall left intact, the scene strewn with blackened, brittle corpses. He shuddered.

  He distracted himself with the brutal fact that it was quite likely that the loyalists themselves, in their encampment, would be immolated as well in the event of citywide destruction. If not direct blasts of artillery, then fire or even waves of smoke would snuff them out. The Fleet Command had indeed decided that the devastation had to be total. How heartless. How inhuman.

  A glow spilled onto the stairway as they reached the top. The dread grew cold in Hamilton’s guts. They came to the final step.

  Jonny was at his side as he peered out at the city. Hamilton grasped for Jonny’s hand. Jonny held him firmly, his touch a solace. Hamilton saw with relief that the city still stood, though the damage was gruesomely conspicuous. Fires continued to burn, and smoke spilled skyward. But the ranks and files of the urban buildings remained for the most part, including the impressively tall structures along the great river, which cut through the city’s heart.

  He looked upward. The airships still hovered, but, it seemed to Hamilton, they weren’t of the same number as bef
ore. Some noticeable percentage was absent, though a formidable contingent lingered aloft. They were still waiting for resupply, then.

  But where had the rest gone? Then it occurred to Hamilton: some of those captains might very well have refused their orders and withdrawn. It was at least possible that such a mutiny had taken place. Hamilton didn’t think so highly of himself that he alone would have had difficulty with the ruthless command issued from Richmond. It heartened him to think that others in the Fleet had shown such integrity.

  Of course Hamilton had done more than they had. He had taken that extra treasonous bound, in that he had aided the enemy. That act was already a permanent part of him. He knew he would never be free of what he had done, regardless of whether the rebels tried to make use of his information.

  What would his father have thought of his actions? What about Rowland Arkwright, his grandfather, who had also served in uniform? That, however, called starkly to mind what the elderly man had once told him as a boy: Nations can be foolhardy. They can be misguided. He had been speaking of the abolished practice of slaveholding, but his wisdom wasn’t limited to that one injustice, Hamilton saw now. Rowland could have been talking about the nakedly illegal order that had come down from American Operations Headquarters. Do not give ecumenical sanction. So his grandfather had cautioned an impressionable lad of ten or so. Now his sagacious words were still guiding the man that boy had grown into. A simpler rendition of that same maxim might have gone: Don’t follow orders blindly.

  “You’re smiling,” Jonny said, still gripping his hand.

  “I was remembering something someone once said to me. Turns out to be a very significant memory.”

  Jonny tugged his hand for his attention. Hamilton finally lowered his eyes from the sky. “I got something to say to you too,” Jonny said.

  Hamilton couldn’t imagine what he might have in mind at this time, when the city of Chicago waited on its final fate.

  Jonny said, “I love you, Hamilton.”

  The soft heartfelt statement landed on Hamilton like a great tender blow. He felt the profound impact. The two men stood gazing at each other. Jonny’s breathing appeared rapid.

  “I… just wanted you to know,” Jonny added, the coda unnecessary.

  Hamilton smiled. He leaned forward and kissed Jonny gently on the lips. Litter-bearers went by them right then, and he heard one suck in a sharp breath and didn’t care at all. Hamilton, after the kiss was done, said, “And I love you. And so we love each other. I am very happy about that.”

  Then they turned together and took in the view they had of beleaguered Chicago. And they waited, as Hamilton had just observed, to see what fate awaited the city.

  “IT’S A resupply vessel,” Hamilton replied grimly to Jonny’s question. Jonny had never seen so many airships at once, even though Hamilton said some number of them had withdrawn from the vicinity. The things were floating up there like bloated fowl on a pond. They’d started to make Jonny feel sickly and dizzy, or else that was the aftereffect of the morphine.

  But then this new ship had just appeared over the city, a quick craft, smaller than the Brit vessels that earlier had been pounding the streets and buildings with artillery shells. It carried fresh loads for the cannons, Hamilton said.

  “They’ll do a midair transfer of ordnance,” Hamilton continued in a calm tone, as if narrating some scene in nature.

  Jonny felt sicker still. “Maybe we ought to get back below….” The resupplying vessel was homing in toward a battleship, which hung in the sky perhaps two miles distant. The smaller ship slowed. The bigger craft turned in a stately manner. Jonny squinted at the sight. He could just make out something extending between the two air vessels.

  “That’s the gangplank,” Hamilton said, still maddeningly composed. “They’ll wheel the shells across. It’s a delicate exercise.”

  Jonny thought of the tunnels beneath their feet. How bad would the bombardment get? Almost certainly they could survive the general impacts of the barrage below. But what if the shells hit long enough and hard enough to collapse the open areas down there? The tunnels might come down, one by one. He imagined being trapped underneath tons of dirt and stone, living only long enough to fully experience the excruciating weight of the city itself pressing down on his shattered body. He shuddered.

  But he held on to his one great accomplishment this night. He’d finally said it to Hamilton. He’d told him the words. I love you. It was done. He had said it and meant those words for the first time in his life, and nothing could undo that or take it away from him. If he died tonight—if they both died—he wouldn’t die an unloved man. That counted for something.

  He waited for Hamilton to resume his cool narration. But at that instant a new commotion erupted in the skies. Jonny thought for a second or two that the shelling had already recommenced, even though the transfer still seemed to be underway between the two airships.

  But this volley was coming upward. It rose from the ground. It was a great messy spray of fire that broke apart short of the two ships and fell in flaming pieces back toward the streets.

  “What—” Jonny started. When he frowned, he felt the tug of the bandages around his eyes. “Does somebody have a cannon?”

  “That’s no cannon,” Hamilton said. At last emotion crept into his voice. Excitement shook his words. “They’re doing it! They’ve built the launchers!”

  “The what?” But even as Jonny asked, another slovenly fiery salvo rose in an arc from the ground. It was no firm artillery shell, that was for sure. It was as if the hot embers from a brazier had been scooped together and catapulted aloft. The flaming “cannonball” could never hit its target with any significant impact. It had no structural integrity. Even as this one rose, it was breaking apart like the previous one.

  This time, however, a few of the burning bits reached the two ships.

  “Hah!” Hamilton cried out triumphantly. Jonny turned in time to see the man catch himself in the midst of this emotional display. He saw Hamilton compose himself, saw also a terrible look pass over his handsome features, an expression of boundless remorse and curdling guilt. But he settled again into a stolid cast and said, “The larger bird there, see? The flaming pieces, if they’ve done it properly, have been coated with tar or some other gummy substance that won’t put out fire. The fragments adhere—see? See there? The outer skin has started to burn. It is now just a matter of time until the fire finds a fuel tube or burns through to the gas bags, which allow the craft’s buoyancy.”

  Jonny gazed at the scene. He could just make out the distant details. The gangplank still connected the two ships, but the bigger one appeared to be rising. It lifted like some ponderous beast of the sea, with at least three patches on its underside burning. The gangplank twisted, and the smaller ship tilted at a precarious angle. Jonny was startled to see a person fall from the link that had been extended between the vessels.

  “The battleship is trying for altitude,” Hamilton said. “They should have a fire control team on the exterior walkways by now, dousing the flames. Instead, their fool of a captain is panicking. He’s destabilizing the resupply ship as he climbs.” Hamilton sounded disgusted.

  Jonny was about to speak when a ball of fire bloomed like a sudden violent sun over the city. The explosion was vast, loud enough to press in on Jonny’s eardrums and shake the ground underfoot. It wasn’t just the battle craft exploding, he realized, but that fiery eruption had taken the resupplying vessel as well, and that blast had touched off the artillery shells aboard.

  Debris expanded. The blazing orb grew and grew, until its outer edges became smoky and blurry. Jonny waited for the remains of the two airships to go plummeting toward the earth, but there was virtually nothing left up there, just wafting scraps and charred bits that rained down on the streets.

  Jonny gaped. It wasn’t just the impressive spectacle; it was the very notion of a formidable Brit craft being brought down, the simple fact that it could be and had been done.<
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  His mind raced back to the unlikely strategies Hamilton had outlined for the Colonial Underground woman in her bed. He thought he recalled this one. It had sounded positively medieval to Jonny at the time, like out of a tale of the siege of some ancient city. What it required more than anything, he remembered Hamilton saying, was nerve and a total disregard for personal safety. The pieces had to be dipped in some gluey flammable substance, lit on fire, and launched into the air by some means. Since it was doubtful there was a handy catapult anywhere in Chicago, a flinging machine would have to be contrived. Hamilton had explained how a truck or even an electricar’s axle could be used to generate enough power so that, were an open container of flaming pieces of tarred wood attached to a cable, and that cable hooked to the vehicle’s spinning wheel, it could, with the aid of a crossbar around which the cable would also wrap, be hurled with great force upward. Or else spill out all over the ground. At any rate, enough collateral damage would almost certainly occur that the launcher could only be used once, and very likely some or all of those operating the damnable thing would be killed or at least seriously burned.

  But if enough of these launchers were put into use, one of the barrages might reach a ship if it was hovering low enough. And the rest would happen just as Jonny had seen it occur before his eyes—flaming pieces sticking to the ships, the fire spreading, the explosion inevitable.

  “I have to see more,” Hamilton stated. He strode away from the relative cover nearby the underground entrance. After the barest hesitation, Jonny followed.

  Hamilton, eyes on the skies, looked all around as they moved out into the semiruins of the city. Chicago wasn’t demolished, but it had taken a hell of a hiding. Something exploded behind them, and Hamilton spun about, as Jonny winced at the far-off thud. But he too turned, seeing the flaming framework of a craft twirling in the air, miles away. Its response to its mortal wounding seemed almost animallike to Jonny, a damaged creature running in a last frantic circle as death closed on it.