Airship Hunters (26 page)

“Get back,” he ordered Cabot, and crawled out to the airship.

Valiantine’s head swam. Whether it was the vox gas or the head trauma he’d received or a lifetime of hard knocks had finally resulted in the dementia suffered by old pugilists, he could not say, but he struggled through it toward the looming danger of the airship.

Just as he neared it, arriving mere feet from its hull, it lifted up into the sky. Valiantine stood up quickly, cocked his arm back and hurled the canister into space. He heard a clunk, and surmised that it landed somewhere on the ship itself.

Cabot caught him as he fell. Propping him back onto his feet, the two men watched as the great airship floated away, building up speed as it departed. It looked like a great wooden sailing vessel, yet swimming through the sky, not the ocean. The men cast their eyes over its rounded hull and the way the wood planking of its immense bulk fit together. It struck Valiantine that the ship should not be able to fly as it was, but it did, in complete disregard for any physical laws he knew.

The sound of a cannon firing made them swing their heads around to view the factory. The upper floors of it exploded and crumbled in on themselves.

“Covering their tracks?” Cabot asked.

“Perhaps,” Valiantine responded, choking back a sob. “I do not know, Cabot.”

A great flash of light filled the sky. The airship lurched. Fire belched from the upper portion of it, which to Valiantine’s eye looked something like the deck of a sailing vessel. Thanks to the canister he’d thrown, the explosion meant for the President’s train engulfed their enemies’ unnatural transport.

Another fiery expulsion covered almost the entire airship in one blinding burst. Its prow dipped and the entire vehicle fell out of the sky, crashing to the ground with a sickening mélange of sound and fury.

In seconds, the wreckage was ablaze, strangely tinted tongues of fire engulfing it from end to end. Screams were carried across the field, giving the impression of a view into Hell itself.

“Come on,” Cabot said, looking back and forth between his partner and the crash site.

Valiantine flowed into his wake, tremors wracking his body as the action subsided and he began to dwell upon what the future held.

Unable to approach the blazing enigma, government officials cordoned off the entire area from the local populace and began to wait it out. After almost twenty-four hours had passed since the crash, the fire had not died down in the slightest.

Upon returning to the District of Columbia from the outskirts of Philadelphia, Valiantine had sent a telegram to Eileen Warren, asking after her health and if he could possibly see her again.

Two days later, he and Cabot were ushered into the Oval Office at the Executive Mansion for a meeting with the President.

There they learned their Commander in Chief possessed what they believed to be a very good sense of the absurd when he announced he was creating an actual “Department A-13.” Valiantine and Cabot would be its first two agents.

“You’re Aero-Marshals now,” the President said in all seriousness, “in actuality, not in pretense of a legitimate office of this government. We won’t be issuing you new badges; the ones you already carry will suffice.”

With the President’s admonition that he had very real concerns over “incursions from other spheres” and the two men were now charged with “heading them off,” they left the office and went out for a drink. It would take them a few more days, or even possibly a week, to digest it all.

They also noticed they’d been afforded no opportunity to decline the commissions.

Six days later, the wreckage still burned.

On the seventh day after the incident, Lieutenant Michael Valiantine sat quietly at a desk at the War Department in Washington, D.C. amidst a well-organized mix of papers, pens, and a few knick-knacks. To one side of the lieutenant sat a picture frame with a photo of a very handsome woman.

A nearby door opened and Cabot stepped through it, a bandage on his face and bruising still evident around both sets of knuckles. He approached his partner’s desk and observed its tidy layout.

“What did she say?” Cabot asked, indicating the portrait of Eileen.

“Being the very intelligent woman that she is,” Valiantine said without looking up, “she informed me that she would take the matter under very serious consideration.”

After a moment of silence, the lieutenant glanced up at his partner. “So, what brings you here? We haven’t been summoned at last, have we?”

Cabot nodded, running a finger along the brim of his new hat.

“Yes, in fact. The fire’s gone out, Valiantine. We’re needed.”

After alighting from the coach, the Aero-Marshals approached the still-hot and steaming wreckage of what had become known in the intelligence community as “their” airship. It wasn’t entirely accurate that the two agents were needed, but rather they were promised by the President himself they would be the first to view the debris once the fire had died down.

Handed long metal rods and cloaked in damp blankets and wearing extra-thick boots, Valiantine and Cabot waded into the wreckage, poking and prodding it as they went.

In less than a minute, they both tied handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths.

Here and there they could see human remains, but saw that identifying them would be quite a challenge. That said, they had no doubt the cabal of Gallows, Wellington, and Scarborough had met its end in the crash of the ship. It was very clear no one could have possibly escaped the fiery destruction.

What concerned them more was the absence of Awanai’s body. After the agents saw they could not approach the wreckage after the crash, they had made their way over to the ruins of the factory. There, they had found no sign of the bandit’s corpse, only a dried spot of blood where his head once rested on the cobblestones.

In the present, Valiantine and Cabot were hard-pressed to make much out in the debris of the airship. Mostly wood, apparently, its bones were picked rather clean by the strange fire.

A yell from behind brought them to another government man who was bent over a small pile of ash and charred wood. He had moved aside some of it to expose an object.

“What do ya make of it?” the man inquired of the Aero-Marshals, worrying his brow with one hand.

“A badge?” Valiantine pondered, prodding it with his metal rod.

“Another coin,” Cabot suggested. The previous specimens had all but fallen apart a few days after the airship crash.

“Hmm, it’s bigger than the others, then,” the lieutenant said. “More like a plate of some sort.”

Valiantine called for an insulated glove, the kind that might have been used in the foundry they witnessed in the building some days before. When it was brought to him, he donned it and reached down to pick up the round, metallic disc.

Turning it over in his gloved hand, he read its face. Cabot stared over his shoulder as he did so.

The raised words on the disc were very plain, and also very illuminating. They changed the two agents’ lives completely, from that day forward and forever:

FIRST AIRSHIP OF THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

OF THE INCORPORATED STATES OF AMERICA

1894

THE DEBRIEFING

Duane Spurlock

November 1897

M
en had combed and sifted through the airship’s wreckage for more than a week. The heat of the fires that followed the explosions had been so great that any metal found was twisted or melted beyond anyone’s ability to identify its purpose. Only small bits of bone were recovered, so no one was even sure how many people had been aboard when the ship was engulfed.

The Aero-Marshals examined each piece of material recovered from the wreck. Neither Cabot nor Valiantine could add any useful information about the numbered and bagged bits brought from the crash site. They had no information to help identify the scraps brought out of the ash piles.

Cabot returned to the site twice in the hope of finding some clue. Valiantine would not join him for the trip. “There is a pall in the air there,” the lieutenant explained. “It seems to choke me. I know we stopped the Trio from carrying out their plot. But even thinking about the ruins of that ship fills me with a sense of... of failure.”

For the better part of a month, the Aero-Marshals wrote report after report based on their notes and memories. Cabot had an office in the Treasury Building, but he frequently could be found working in Valiantine’s War Department office. A courier from the White House picked up files from their shared work space each week. The two men received no response from their reports. But putting their thoughts on paper—documenting their activities—served to empty them of much of the frustration and anxiety they had experienced, and so they stayed busy: comparing notes, asking questions of one another, and sharing meals at which they tried to make sense of the few things they had learned from Awanai, Wellington, Gallows, and Scarborough.

One morning the courier arrived, collected the new batch of files, and left behind an envelope marked with the seal of the President of the United States. Cabot opened it and read the missive it contained while Valiantine poured coffee for them both.

“The President thanks us for our very thorough reports,” Cabot said. “He states the strains of our mission leading up to our encountering him on the train must have been considerable. He has been advised that we should share our information with an independent, neutral party.”

“To what end?”

Cabot referred to the note. “Let’s see, to help clarify our thoughts, promote genuine and rational deductions, and objectively judge our conclusions. Oh, and make sure we aren’t yammering lunatics.” Cabot looked up. “I added that last bit, but I think the President forgot to write that one down.”

Valiantine lifted his cup. “What is the name of this paragon of lucidity?”

“Dr. Roderick Yarrow.”

The lieutenant held his coffee without drinking. He frowned. “Yarrow?”

“You know him?”

Valiantine turned away and stared out the room’s only window. “I know him. I saw him during my recuperative leave before we were assigned together. He’s an alienist.”

“Really?” Cabot scanned the letter again. “I’ve never met one. I thought they worked only with those unfortunates who already had been locked away in houses for the disturbed. I didn’t realize they conferred with those for whom the jury was still out.”

Valiantine smacked his desktop with his palm. His cup went clattering, spilling coffee onto the floor. “This is no joke, Cabot!” He held his breath a moment. When he resumed, he had regained control of his temper. “Yarrow offered me help. He has some standing among the President’s advisors, clearly. Perhaps it won’t be a bad idea. What we have seen and encountered... perhaps the doctor can help us make sure we are seeing what we should be seeing.”

Cabot nodded. “And really seeing what we think we’re looking at.”

As directed by President McKinley’s note, Cabot and Valiantine reached the door of Dr. Yarrow’s home the next morning at ten o’clock. They were bundled against the late autumn chill, and the steam of their breathing hung in the air. The lieutenant turned the bell. A tall, slender servant opened the door. “Lieutenant Valiantine,” he said. “How good to see you, sir.”

“Brilson,” Valiantine said. “Treasury Agent Cabot and I are to meet Dr. Yarrow.”

“Absolutely, sir. This way.”

Brilson took their hats and coats and showed them to a drawing room. It was a large, square room off the foyer, comfortably furnished with embroidered sofas and leather upholstered chairs. A Persian rug covered the floor. A second door with louvered panels was closed on the opposite side of the room. The servant said, “Dr. Yarrow will be with you presently.” Then he exited to the foyer and closed the door behind him.

Other than the sofa and leather chairs, the room was furnished with a bookcase that covered one wall of the room and a single cabinet. Large hand-tinted engravings of flowering plants were framed and arranged on three walls of the room. Two walls offered two windows each; all but one was shuttered. Bars of morning light brightened the room. A small stove in a corner filled the space with warmth.

Dr. Yarrow entered through the door with louvered panels, which he closed behind him. “It is a pleasure to see you, Lieutenant Valiantine,” he said as he advanced.

The lieutenant introduced Cabot. Handshakes all around. At Yarrow’s gesture, the Aero-Marshals took seats on the embroidered sofa, and the doctor sat across from them in one of the leather chairs.

Yarrow was tall and, though he was tending toward stoutness, he looked like a man who had been devoted to vigorous activity rather than to bookish pursuits. He was in the neighborhood of fifty years old, but his hair was a rich black and rolled back from his forehead in thick waves, and he wore muttonchops that billowed out from his jowls. Seated in the black leather wingback chair, he resembled in some ways a bat, as though the chair’s extensions were meant to funnel all sounds to his ears.