The Forever Engine (22 page)

She smiled and nodded, patted my arm softly, and curled up on the open blanket I’d spread on her ground cloth. I covered her with my own blanket, and in moments the lines in her face disappeared and she began snoring softly.

I looked across the fire and saw Durson watching me, waiting. I rose and found Gordon eating by himself. At least he’d waited until his men were fed.

“Time we brought Sergeant Durson up to speed,” I said.

“Up to speed?”

“Tell him what our plan is.”

I knelt next to him.

“So, what’s our plan?”

He sipped his mug of tea and thought for a moment before answering.

“First, we’ll find out if the Turks know anything about Kokin Brod. If not, we will march to a closer campsite tomorrow. Hopefully we can find a place as secure as this one. Damned lucky of the Turks to stumble on it without a proper officer along.”

“Well, now they’ve got you, so their worries are over,” I said.

Gordon looked at me suspiciously before continuing.

“We’ll see how well defended the area is. We will be moving mostly downhill, on the back side of this ridge. My thought is to leave a small party in this camp, our walking wounded and those too weak to continue. They will send up our signal rockets from here when we are ready to break in and seize Tesla.”

“And Thomson,” I added.

“Naturally. I doubt the rockets will be seen from down in the Lim River Valley if we fire them from the east side of the ridge, but from up here they’ll be visible for miles. Hopefully that will bring our Turkish friend Cevik Bey with the rest of his Bosnian cutthroats. We’ll march as hard and fast as we can and meet up with him.”

Aside from still not knowing squat about how well defended Tesla was, or how we were going to get in undetected, locate and grab Tesla and Thomson, fight our way back out, and stay ahead of armed pursuers with a prisoner and a fat old Scotsman, up seven or eight miles of mountain trails back to this camp—aside from all that, it was as good a plan as any.

We rose and walked around the fire to where Durson waited for us.

“You know we are here on a mission,” I said in Turkmen.

“For two weeks my men and I have had our own mission. We scout these hills, staying ahead of the Serbian Army in the valleys and the
hajduci
in the highlands. The men are tired and hungry, and fear wears them down as well. I keep them going with the promise that tomorrow we march home. Tomorrow.

“We thank you for sharing your food. I will do what I can to advise you, tell you what I know about the land and the enemy, even delay our departure for one day. But my men have done enough.”

“Cevik Bey ordered you to help us,” I said.

“The extent of the help he left to me.”

Shit.

“What seems to be the problem?” Gordon asked.

“Cevik Bey left Durson’s cooperation to his discretion.”

Gordon’s face darkened with anger of his own.

“And now he’s balking? Why I ought to—”

“What? What
exactly
ought you to do? Thrash him within an inch of his life? Go ahead, pal, take your best shot. I imagine he’s got some experience of thrashings from arrogant white assholes like you. Not recently, and I bet he’s waited a long time to even the score. But don’t let that stop you. I’ll hold your coat.”

My words took Gordon by surprise. For several long seconds we all just stood there, three angry men, glaring at each other.

Gordon’s anger faded first. He looked away, out into the woods, before speaking.

“We need his help, Fargo. Perhaps if you explained what we are here for, it might make a difference.”

I didn’t have high hopes, but it was worth a shot.

“We have come to recover a man and bring him back,” I told Durson in Turkmen. “Can you at least tell us about the Serbs in and around Kokin Brod and the new lake?”

His eyebrows went up a bit at that.

“We scouted that area three days ago. I have drawings of the new gun mounts and the machinery buildings by the lake. But why does that concern you? The man you want is two miles up this mountain, in the village of Brezna.”

“He is? You are certain?” I asked.

“It was from a distance, but I saw him with my own eyes.”

He looked from one of us to the other, and his anger gave way to uncertainty.

“You are looking for the old, stout Englishman with the big beard, are you not? From the crashed zeppelin?”

THIRTY

October 11, 1888, near Brezna, Serbia

We made our plans that night and got a good sleep. Gordon, Durson and I spent most of the next morning hiking the mile up the mountainside. Durson knew a good observation post on a spur from the main spine of the ridge, but if we were going to avoid detection, we couldn’t chance any more than three of us. Gordon and I expressed our concerns about the raptors, although I had to explain what I meant by the word.

“The
azhdaja
,” Durson said. “They are nocturnal hunters, but even then we have little to fear from them. Our second day in the area they attacked. We killed three of them and they have not come near us since. They learn, so they are intelligent, as animals go.”

“
Azhdaja
. A
jandarma
back in Uvats used that word, but I’m not familiar with it. The local people know this species?”

“No one ever saw them before a few months ago.
Azhdaja
is a local word, the same in Bosnian and Serbian. In Turkish we would say
iluyankas
.”

“Dragons?”

He gave me a hard look.

“No, they are not real dragons,
Effendi
. They do not fly, they do not breathe fire, and they are not very large. The local people simply had no other word for them.”

They also had feathers instead of scales, but their mouths were lizardlike, and their crests reminded me of the crests of some oriental dragons and hooded lizards. Their coloration—green and black and flashes of yellow—blended in surprisingly well with the mountainous country, but it also reminded me of how some dragons were colored in art. I supposed dragon made as much sense as anything.

Durson had no more idea where they came from than we did, but my money was still on Tesla. If Tesla really could open doorways to different times, no telling what sort of fell beasties he could bring back.

On the way up the ridge we passed the twisted frame and deflated gas sack of the black zeppelin I’d last seen climbing away from the hotel on Agnes-Bernauer
Strasse
. There was no sign of the gun turret which had shot up
Intrepid
. The gas bag bore a name painted in white Cyrillic letters, which Sergeant Durson deciphered for me—
Djordje Petrovic.
I hadn’t noticed it before.

“Petrovic was a famous Serbian warrior a century ago, against the Turks, of course,” Durson explained. “Bosnian women still frighten their children with stories of how he ate Turkish babies.

“I do not believe that, myself,” he added.

Dense, sweet-smelling purple lilac shrubs sheltered our observation post, which wasn’t much more than a half mile from Brezna but was separated from it by a deep ravine, all but impassable, so there was no reason for the
hajduci
to guard this spot. The town lay northeast of us, slightly higher on the main ridge. Beyond it the ground fell away into a deep valley which led down to Kokin Brod, seven twisting miles away.

The town sat near the summit of a long, steep-sided ridge of mostly bare granite. Gardens and vineyards surrounded the town, but the closest orchard stood a quarter mile farther up the northwest thrust of the ridge. A half mile of open ground stretched between the village and closest growth of thick woods to the south, the approach all uphill.

The stone houses of the village huddled together as if taking shelter from the winds which must have come howling in from the west in winter. Stone walls linked the buildings and made the place look like an Afghan hill fort, a comparison which did not put my mind at ease.

I handed the binoculars to Gordon and turned around to face Durson.

“How many men in the village?” I asked in Turkmen.

“About two hundred people live there, so perhaps fifty or sixty grown men aside from the whitebeards. I think a dozen actual fighters. Others would help but without the same skill or enthusiasm.”

“Doesn’t matter. A dozen good men can hold that place against a small army, unless the army has artillery or air support.”

Durson looked at me and nodded his agreement, and his expression grew harder when he did so.

“That would not stop the English from ordering an attack,” he added in Turkish, “with my riflemen in front, of course.”

There was a depth of feeling there which surprised me. What did a former slave know about the British? Durson saw my expression and shrugged.

“When Britain and Turkey were allies against the Russians, forty years ago, few Turkish soldiers survived the experience of being under English command. The old ones still speak of it.”

“Did I mention I’m from Illinois?” I said, trying to distance myself from the Anglophobia.

“Since coming to Turkey twelve years ago,” Durson said, “three American gentlemen have sought me out, each one attempting to collect the bounty for returning me to my former owner. One of them was from Illinois.”

Swell. So much for bonding.

“Ah, more visitors,” he said and pointed over my shoulder toward Brezna.

I turned to look. A black zeppelin, the twin of the wreck we had passed earlier, rose above the skyline in the valley beyond Brezna, and as soon as it cleared the ridge I heard the distant drone of its engines. Gordon heard as well and raised his glasses.

“Damn. Well, that ties it,” he said. “We’re too late. Tesla will snatch him up and that’s that.”

Sergeant Durson said nothing.

“What do you think, Sergeant?” I asked.

“I do not know what to think,
Effendi
. I am interested to see what will happen. Farther down the mountain, on this slope but below the wreck of the airship, my men and I found twelve large iron fire boxes with grates on the sides. They were rusty from having been there for months, but had recently been used.”

I didn’t see what that had to do with Tesla’s zeppelin coming to pick up Thomson. Tesla’s stronghold was in the opposite direction, on the other side of the ridgeline. They couldn’t have been used to signal him.

So what
had
they been used for? If the
hajduci
were going to signal with them, why not put them up on the ridge, where they could be seen from farther away? And why did they need a dozen of them? The Brits didn’t need a dozen Aldis lamps to send signals.

I looked at Durson, but his eyes were on the zeppelin approaching Brezna.

“Were the fire boxes all together or spread out?”

“They were spread out,
Effendi
, irregularly spaced over perhaps fifty
kulaçi
—one hundred meters.”

Huh.

I settled down to watch as well.

The zeppelin slowed and made a broad circle over the town, came toward us but made a slow turn to its right and doubled back, coming almost to a halt above the open ground on the ridge south of the town.

“Can you see any movement in the town?” I asked Gordon.

“No. The windows are all shuttered. There is nothing moving anywhere except some laundry drying on a line.”

The zeppelin hovered there for a few minutes, edging forward against the wind then dropping back.

“There’s someone at a window. I think he’s shouting at the zeppelin,” Gordon said. “Now he’s waving. I think he is waving for it to leave. Yes, he wants it to leave. More shouting. He’s gone. No, he . . . oh . . . I say!”

Durson and I didn’t have binoculars, but we didn’t need them to hear the crackle of small arms fire from the village. The zeppelin remained in place for as long as a minute. The first volley of rifle shots died away, and then started up again, less evenly as the riflemen loaded, aimed, and fired at their own pace.

The zeppelin’s engines grew louder, higher in pitch, as if someone had reached the controls, or regained their senses. The airship accelerated and turned away from the town, made a wide circle to the south, passing close by our clump of brush and rocks. It drew off, made several sloppy figure eights, as if considering its next move, and then closed on the town.

I knew the sound of the Gatling gun on the airship as soon as it started, that steady pop-pop-pop-pop-pop—I’d heard enough of them in films. The zeppelin passed on the far side of the town from our vantage point and then began circling it, like a C-130 gunship hosing down the target with a minigun. The popping stopped.

“Changing magazines,” Gordon announced. “Either that or it’s jammed.”

The
hajduci
must have figured the same thing. A ragged volley of rifle shots crackled from the ground.

The fight went on for a few minutes longer. Then the zeppelin beat a retreat back down the valley to the east. The airship had a Gatling gun, but the gas bag was made of canvas, the gondola of something light and flimsy. The
hajduci
had stone walls and overhead cover. I imagined some maintenance people would spend a fair part of the day slapping patches on that big black gas bag once they got back to Kokin Brod. No telling how many casualties the crew took.

“Interesting,” I said. “Not everyone in Serbia seems to get along.”

“I believe the Brezna
hajduci
support the king in Belgrade,” Durson answered. “Their neighbors incline more toward the Kradodevici. I have never heard of them shooting at each other, though.”

I translated that for Gordon, who looked thoroughly confused by it all.

“Well, if these chaps in Brezna are shooting at Tesla’s lot, maybe we can get them to help us out,” he suggested, and I translated that for Durson.

“Perhaps they will help you. They will not be happy to see me or my men. The royalists are more moderate in their views than are the Kradodevici. The royalists simply believe all Turks should be killed, while the Kradodevici believe unspeakable things should then be done to our corpses.”

I found it interesting that Durson thought of himself as a Turk, but then what else would he consider himself?

“I wonder if this is about money instead of politics,” I said to Durson, and he nodded in agreement.

“When I was a child in Carolina,” he said, “my mother told me of the wreckers, people on the islands along the coast. The wreckers lived by taking the cargoes from broken ships. When storms did not provide enough wrecks, the people lured ships onto the rocks with false lights, or so it was said.”

“I’ve heard that story myself,” I said.

“Yes, many people have, and many people believe the stories of the false lights. But later I became a sailor. I learned the stories of the false lights were legends, fairy tales. They could not be true, and any sailor will tell you as much. At night, ships near the coast do not steer
toward
lights; they steer clear of them.”

“Or over them, if the ship is a zeppelin,” I said.

“Yes,” he answered, and for the first time he smiled. “But perhaps not very high over them.”

“And on a moonless night, the light shining through the grates of a dozen iron fire boxes spread out along the side of a ridge would look like the lights of a village on top of the ridge.”

“Yes,
Effendi
.”

“Especially if everyone in the village was told to keep their windows shuttered or their lamps extinguished on that night.”

“It is possible,
Effendi
.”

“Gordon,” I said in English, “we may be able to do business with these guys. How much cash is left in your war chest?”

Getting back to the camp was a lot easier on the lungs than climbing the mountain had been, but was strangely harder on the legs. You would think going down hill would be easier, and in a lot of respects it was, but it used a whole difference set of leg muscles, and a set you don’t use that much. Halfway down, Gordon and I had to call a break. My legs did not feel tired; they simply would no longer support me. While we waited for the strength to return to them, I outlined my plan.

We would return to Brezna that night, or rather to the wood below it. Durson, one Marine, and I would approach the town alone. I would need Durson to translate into Serbian for me. We would have to find some civilian clothing which came close to fitting, but a Marine overcoat would be the main element of his disguise, allowing us to pass him off as my servant.

We would have one of Gordon’s leather-wrapped rolls of fifty gold sovereigns, and we would buy Thomson’s release. If necessary, we would send the Marine as a runner back to the main party and retrieve the second roll of sovereigns. If the Brezna
hajduci
wanted more than that, everyone was out of luck.

If all went well, we’d have Thomson back. If something bad happened to us, Gordon would still have Gabrielle as a Serbo-Croatian/Bosnian translator. They could make a try for Tesla or attempt to get away.

I told Gordon and Durson followed along—the English was simple enough that he picked up most of it. I’d intended to tell him in Turkman once Gordon agreed, but he was ahead of me and shaking his head.

“Since we are not attacking the village, I agree to help. But there is a problem. All the people in these hills know me by sight, or at least by reputation. I am called
Noć Ubojica
. It means Night Killer.”

I translated for Gordon but kept my eyes on Durson, looking for a clue as to what this name meant about the person behind it, but Gabrielle was right. His face gave away little.

“I have killed very few people,” he volunteered, “and never at night. I believe my color has to do with the name they give me, that and fear. People are very superstitious. In any case, such a name has its uses.”

Yes, it does.

“They know your face?” I asked.

“They know my race and physical build. I do not know if anyone in Brezna knows my face, but it is possible. I have questioned and released many people during patrols into these hills in the last two years. Always I tell them I would kill them, but I cannot because, unfortunately, that day is a holy day on which I may not shed infidel blood.” He shook his head and smiled. “So many holy days.”

That said something about the guy right there.

“Okay, I’ll have to take one of your men. They speak Turkish, right?”

“They speak enough to take orders from Turkish officers, but they would have a hard time understanding you,
Effendi
. What you speak—it is
like
Turkish, I suppose.”