Trouble in the Wind

by Chris Kennedy

  Then the loader went on in English:

  “Many brave men will die very soon now.”

  There must be eighty or a hundred German airplanes diving from the north, dots swelling into shapes and the insect buzz of their engines growing towards a roar—sleek molded-plywood Albatross V fighting-scouts, the latest German model with twin Maxims. From the south came a similar sound, and an equal number of French Spads and Curtis Pumas—these climbing slightly, since the high overcast was lower there. They must be closing on each other at two hundred and fifty miles an hour combined speed…or better.

  “We’re not here to watch a football game,” he said, as the tacka-tacka-tacka of machine-gun fire punctuated the engine-growl. “Here come the scouts.”

  A guvvie was coming down the frozen ruts of the muddy, tree-lined country road from the north—a little four-wheel-drive Model T in Army colors. It was crowded, with Captain Sanders of the regimental reconnaissance company, one of his men at a pintle-mounted Browning .30, and a scout-sniper team, one man with a scope-sighted variety of the old bolt-action Springfield called a Sharpshooter, and his spotter-partner cradling a Thompson. They wore white-and-brown covers over their winter parkas and helmets, and the rifle was decked out in strips of burlap to break the telltale outlines.

  “Report, Corporal,” Roosevelt called.

  The spotter with the Thompson unwound his lanky height from the guvvie, hopped down, sprang lithely onto the bow of the commander’s Lobo and up to the turret. Close-to, his face had a narrow knobby angular look that his hillbilly twang confirmed. Many of the best scouts and snipers came from the southern hill country, and an old Regular Army outfit like the 2nd recruited from all over the country, not just from a single military conscription district.

  “Well, we-uns went up the road a ways, Colonel,” he said with respect but no particular formality, tracing the north-trending road on the map with a gloved fingertip. “Them lumps unner the snow, they wuz bodies, like you figured.”

  Roosevelt’s eyes went northward for a moment; that was about a thousand yards north and east, not far from the roadside.

  “Whose?” he said.

  “Frenchies, sir—civilians, a lot of ‘em women and kids.”

  The Tennessean spat over the side of the tank into the snow, which might be an expression of opinion, or just a result of the chaw of tobacco that bulged one lean cheek and had stained his teeth brown, or both.

  “Massacred?”

  The Intervention in Mexico had been merciless enough, especially in the three years of putting down guerilla-bandit resistance by the likes of Villa and Zapata after the first stand-up battles, but what had happened in France over the last few weeks had set whole new standards in butchery. Equaled only by the Turkish destruction of the Armenians, but in the heart of what had called itself the civilized world and on an immense scale as the whole population of France seemed on the move.

  “No, sir. Just…daid. From the looks of ‘em, they ran as far an’ as fast as they could after what the Boche did to Paris, then just laid down hungry and died in their sleep,” the observer continued. “Them hard freezes we been gettin’ the last week would do it, with them havin’ no food to speak of and bein’ city-folk not used to movin’ cross-country and not dressed for it neither. There were some fires, burned out. All right pitiful to see, let me tell you.”

  His finger moved across the printed silk, up the road to the northeast until after it straightened and turned due north.

  “Then just like the map says, there’s a farmhouse—big place before it burnt, sorta like the one a planter would have down to Nashville way. There’s outbuildings west of it, barns and stables ‘fore they wuz wrecked up. Now here—”

  His finger tapped a spot north of the buildings, about a thousand yards.

  “Was where that there airboat came down. Crashed, but not too hard an’ not burned. Not one of them big ‘uns with a frame inside, looks like. Gondola ‘bout, oh, fifty, sixty feet long, envelope about five, six times that afore the gas got out and it came down like an ol’ wet sock.”

  Roosevelt nodded. “Semirigid, Naval type. We use similar ones.”

  Which is because there was mutual copying again.

  “We didn’t get close ‘cause I could see movement east of the house, thousand, two thousand yards out and they’d see us if we broke cover, but I’m pretty sure whoever came down in that airboat lived through it an’ made tracks for the farmhouse. And there’s folks there—I could smell their smoke, cookin’ smells like.”

  Roosevelt looked over his shoulder to the southwest. He could hear the thudding of artillery back there—German whizbangs, something louder that was probably howitzers, and the distinctive sounds of American field artillery too. The 1st Mechanized was mixing it in with whatever the Germans were sending forward, while he’d pushed northeastward at a slant right across the front of the German force with nothing more than some light skirmishing with men shocked and terrified with the unexpected impact of the tanks. They’d moved fast, too; he glanced at his wristwatch, a new fashion for men that the Great War had brought in, and it was still a little shy of 1030.

  Such a temptation to hook northwest and take them in the flank, he thought. But this up ahead must be exactly what the orders from GHQ were talking about. And orders are orders…

  “Chief,” he said to the radio operator. “On the regimental push: we’re going to rush them, in column up the road and don’t deploy until we’re under fire. Captain Johnson—”

  Who commanded the reinforced company of dragoon infantry and their mortars.

  “—is to swing west and take the outbuildings when we’re in sight of the objective. Dismounted action and be cautious about fire support, there are friendlies in the farmhouse. Detach one platoon of dragoons to follow the HQ company. Lieutenant Kovacs—”

  Which was a Magyar name, and meant…smith; some things were apparently universal.

  “—is to have his engineers ready for a hasty salvage mission on the crashed airship. Get me confirmations.”

  Chief did. A year or two ago Roosevelt would have had to take time to get his commanders together and give his orders face-to-face, or risk one-way communication by runner if he was in a real hurry…which was generally the case. Sending things in code made the process far quicker and smoother.

  The drawback, of course, was that this still wasn’t like being able to talk to someone. Pretty soon wireless radio-telephones would be small and rugged enough to be used for jobs like this, but that day wasn’t here yet.

  He cocked an eye upward at the melee in the sky. His youngest brother Quentin—at nineteen just barely old enough for field service and with a teenager’s conviction of his own immortality—was a fighting-scout pilot. When you combined that natural recklessness with the burden that being called Roosevelt put on a young man…not only from their father and the memory of San Juan Hill, but now from Ted’s own Medal of Honor, too…that was a dangerous combination. Quentin might be up above his head right now.

  A burning fighting-scout falling in a corkscrew nose-down spin plowed into the ground not two hundred yards to the north and exploded in a ball of flame, throwing bits and pieces all around. The tank commander shook his head; nothing to be done about that. Soldiering wasn’t a safe profession.

  “Let’s go!” he said, waved a hand around his head and chopped it forward.

  Before someone can strafe us from the air, he added to himself. And our flanks are as exposed as a cootch-dancer’s, too.

  * * *

  A green flare went up from behind the ruined manor; that was Captain Johnson going in, and automatic weapons fire chattered—the typewriter clatter of Thompsons, and something sharper and faster that he didn’t realize.

  God-dammit, the Germans are inside there too! Roosevelt thought.

  Tanks had any amount of punch, but they were an invitation to friendly fire losses if you if you tried to shoot into a hand-to-hand melee. His height gave him a good view o
f a fight he couldn’t intervene in until his infantry came up—they’d dismounted and were running forward, but seconds counted.

  “Get those!” he barked to McGregor.

  The gunner was already turning the turret, and his first burst walked towards half a dozen Germans running towards the farmhouse, all of them carrying some sort of stubby automatic rifle with a curved high-capacity magazine, one he didn’t recognize at all. They very sensibly pivoted in place and started running the other way, towards a creek running northwest-southeast about four hundred yards away.

  “Load HE!” Roosevelt barked. “McGregor, let them have it as soon as they’re far enough away!”

  Behind the waist-high remains of the manor-house wall a deadly drama was unfolding inside the house. A big blond man, helmetless but in a German officer’s uniform, smashed an American away, blood flying as the butt of the German’s weapon cracked across his face.

  A wounded man lying on the floor—also, oddly enough, in German uniform—was trying to shoot him with a Thompson, but it clicked empty.

  Behind them in what had probably been a rear room—maybe a kitchen—a short figure in a leather flight-suit struggled to raise a Lewis as a German came at her in a limping but snake-fast rush, with a sharpened entrenching tool raised, his hideously scarred face contorted and pale blue eyes staring. Another American in flight gear fired a Sharpshooter sniper rifle from the hip.

  Crack!

  The little German’s body snapped sideways as the bullet hit the blade of his entrenching shovel, punching through it and at a slant into his belly, the distorted shape of the bullet pinwheeling like a tiny buzz -saw. He screamed and staggered right into a burst from the Lewis gun that sent him flopping backward with most of his torso smashed into fragments of meat and bone. The gunner froze; nobody else was on their feet there, but two women in tattered civilian clothes were bandaging a wounded man in a French uniform that was almost as ravaged.

  And out in the burned remnants of barn behind the house a brief savage firefight was raging, American Thompsons against the German whatever-they-were, a couple of grenades, and then a shout in an unmistakable hillbilly rasp:

  “All daid, Loo-tenant! Ever’thang clar here!”

  CRACK!

  The tank rocked, oddly since the turret was turned to one side; Roosevelt darted a quick glance that way and saw most of the fleeing Germans fall, though one man managed to dive into cover. Inside the front room—what had once been an elegant country living-room, with the smashed remnants of a piano still lying in one corner—the flight-suited American dropped the sniper rifle. A knife came up in his—

  No, that’s her hand—I recognize that knife! Roosevelt thought, as whispers of blasphemous amazement dropped from his lips.

  —her hand, but her left was pressed to her side and face twisted in a rictus of effort.

  The big blond German pulled his rifle free; the point of the bayonet had struck in the boards of the floor. He saw the knife-wielder.

  “¡Híjole!” she blurted, confirming his guess.

  He’d known that voice since they were both children; Luz O’Malley—Luz O’Malley Aróstegui, daughter of one of the Rough Rider officers who’d gone to Cuba with his father, and childhood friend.

  And Black Chamber agent since 1912. No wonder there’s a secret weapon stolen from the Germans! She’s the one who handed us Villa!

  The German screamed, an endless racking snarl, weapon levelled leveled as he charged in a blur of motion. She left it until the last second, and twisted to her right, sweeping the knife at the rifle. Steel clanged on steel and the German went past her, dodging her backhand cut at his face by going under it with cat-quick grace. Roosevelt’s breath caught.

  Crack!

  The German jerked and fell. The wounded American on the ground in German uniform started to laugh, looking at another ragged woman where she lay flat two paces away with a Luger in a clumsy two-handed grip. A woman…girl, he realized…half- dropped, half-flung a head-sized chunk of rock she was carrying down on the German’s wound and slumped backward herself, collapsed against a snag of wall.

  And Luz hobbled over and kicked the fallen German in the head, hard enough to make him go limp—but carefully, Roosevelt noted, not hard enough to kill him.

  “¡Ay! But I bet that hurt you worse than it did me,” she panted.

  The one with the Lewis gun came up, sans machine-gun, and Luz leaned a hand on her shoulder—it was yet another woman—as she hobbled to the doorway.

  Luz started to smile. The woman she was leaning on buried her head in Luz’s neck and sighed, sliding an arm around her waist, and they helped each other out into the open.

  “Hola,” Luz said, as she closed her navaja and slipped it into the pocket of the flight suit.

  Then: “Ted? Ted?”

  Roosevelt pushed his goggles up onto the leather helmet he wore. He spoke into the cone of the speaking tube in front of him and the engine noise dropped to a ratcheting idle amid a cloud of blackish acrid-smelling exhaust fumes.

  “Luz?” he said.

  Almost as incredulously now that he was really sure, looking past the flight suit, and the scrapes and dirt and blood. The sharp comely dark features were unmistakable, full-lipped and high in the cheekbones, despite the way she wore a bandana over a head that seemed to lack her usual raven-black bob-cut.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he said.

  “Spy work,” she replied.

  Yup, I guessed right, Roosevelt thought.

  She pointed to the wreck of the airship to the northwest.

  “Secure that, would you? Important ultra-secret German machinery in there. We need to get it back to our lines, pronto, and shipped home.”

  He called and waved and sent a squad of the dragoons to guard it: the engineers followed, moving their Model T truck—the new model, with four rear wheels—carefully.

  “And what are you doing here, Ted? Not that I’m not grateful, but…”

  He looked around at the wreckage of the farmhouse, and signaled several men with Red Cross armbands forward.

  Then he slapped the side of the turret, where the 2nd Cavalry’s palmetto leaf and eight-pointed shield were painted in white.

  “I’m doing what the cavalry always does, Luz—ride to the rescue!” he said; that was what happened in those lurid tales in Argosy All-Story magazine she liked so much.

  She laughed, though from the look of it that hurt. Ted Roosevelt joined in, though it jarred his arm and that hurt.

  “Old times,” he said; they’d been wounded in the same actions before, too. “Old times, Luz.”

  * * * * *

  S.M. Stirling Bio

  S.M. Stirling was born in France in 1953, to Canadian parents—although his mother was born in England and grew up in Peru. After that he lived in Europe, Canada, Africa, and the US and visited several other continents. He graduated from law school in Canada but had his dorsal fin surgically removed, and published his first novel (Snowbrother) in 1984, going full-time as a writer in 1988, the year of his marriage to Janet Moore of Milford, Massachusetts, who he met, wooed and proposed to at successive World Fantasy Conventions. In 1995, he suddenly realized that they could live anywhere and they decamped from Toronto, that large, cold, gray city on Lake Ontario, and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. He became an American citizen in 2004. His latest books are Theater of Spies (May 7th, 2019) and Black Chamber (July 3rd, 2018), Roc/Penguin Random House, with Shadows of Annihilation upcoming (March, 2020). His hobbies mostly involve reading—history, anthropology, archaeology, and travel, besides fiction—but he also cooks and bakes for fun and food. For twenty years he also pursued the martial arts, until hyperextension injuries convinced him he was in danger of becoming the most deadly cripple in human history. Currently he lives with Janet and the compulsory authorial cats.

  # # # # #

  The Blubber Battle: The First Falklands Campaign

  by Joelle Presby and Patrick Doyle

&nb
sp; April 1916

  “Finally! Let’s get off this rust bucket and go blow some shit up!” Lieutenant Marshall said.

  The officer’s pale skin and dark hair combined with his infectious grin had a recruiting poster polish to it, which was ironic since Navy staffers and political handlers alike had learned to avoid letting him anywhere near officer candidates or voters. His resemblance to his important uncle only intensified the effect.

  Lieutenant Marshall threw a grease-stained set of coveralls at me underhand and a grin lit up his face like I hadn’t seen on him since we left the Port of Hamburg.

  This man will be the death of me. I struggled into the rough cloth, pulling it on over my pressed uniform. I hoped we’d be on land only for a night or two but this entire plan was short on details. Petty Officer Wicklow’d suggested we double the layers in this backwards southern hemisphere weather, and I agreed we’d be grateful for them during the chill nights.

  And I’d not mentioned that it’d decrease our chances of being hung as spies if it all went wrong.

  The USS Denver (CL-14) was a U.S. Navy protected cruiser in fine repair with a history of transporting lots of raiding parties small and large. It almost certainly did not qualify as a rust bucket. I checked the ship’s deck for senior officers who might take offense and found none.

  Nearly two dozen of the toughest sailors I could find assembled on deck in uniforms stained by years of coal dust shoveling. This lot would fade into the darkness quite as well as our brave rowers back in Port Doula had. Petty Officer Wicklow, with his telltale Boston Irish red hair, had the seventeen others lined up smartly and walked between them checking their packs and their boots. At least our petty officer had served on several raids in the past, even if the lieutenant and I were new to this business. Belatedly, I thought about just what the boss had said.