Chapter 8
Ottoman airfield
Formerly Racetrack City
Just east of Vienna
Murad IV was a big man, so he satisfied himself with looking into the narrow, armored space rather than trying to climb into it. “And it will withstand the Jooli?” he asked the engineer at his side.
The engineer’s name was Özil Demirci. He belonged to the Ottoman Empire’s Cebeci Corps, one of the branches of the Topçu Ocaği, their corps of gunners. It was being expanded by Murad to support the new weapons. The cebeciyan were the armorers who made and maintained guns as well as almost everything else used by the artillery.
Özil had been in Murad’s service long enough to learn that whatever anxiety he might have about the young sultan’s reaction, the most foolish thing to do was to lie to him—or even fudge the truth too much.
“The problem is not the Jooli, My Sultan. It’s the type of gun she will be using.” He leaned into the gun turret and rapped his knuckles against the steel sheet that formed one of the walls. The sound produced was tinny, not solid. “I am confident that if she uses the same type of gun I believe she used at Linz—and her shot does not strike the armor head on—that this will be enough to deflect the bullet. But if she uses a more powerful gun…”
He spread his hands as if making a presentation of something. “Our airships will only carry so much weight, My Sultan. As it is, this light armor leaves only enough lifting power for a skeleton crew, one janissary and an assistant, two guns and some ammunition. Adding thicker armor would only deduct from the mission’s very purpose.”
Now he pointed to the firing port at the front of the turret. Like everything about the turret, the design was simple, even crude. The two thin steel sheets that formed the walls of the turret were angled toward each other but they did not join. Instead, a gap of about fifteen inches—what the Ottomans called an ayak—had been left, allowing the shooter enough space to aim his rifle. “And you understand that even with a normal rifle, if the Jooli’s aim is good enough, and she fires from the right angle, she will be able to kill our man.”
“And by all accounts, the monster’s aim is that good,” said Murad, nodding. He looked at Özil and smiled. It was a thin smile but not an unfriendly one. “Do not call her ‘she,’” he commanded. “The Jooli is just a monster. My janissaries will be disgruntled if I order them to go into battle against a mere woman.”
“Yes, My Sultan.” Özil thought most janissaries were idiots, so he was not surprised that they would not care to hear the truth. So be it. They would be the ones to have their brains spilled by the woman-who-was-not-a-woman, not he. Özil designed the gun turrets. He was not the one who would be manning them in a vessel no one had even dreamed of until a few years ago.
Why should it be a wonder that such a vessel would have a woman as its jinni?
“How soon can you finish the rest of the turrets?” asked Murad.
“They should all be ready within twenty days, My Sultan.” He nodded toward the hangar entrance. “Sooner, if I could have more workmen.”
“No. Building as many hangars as possible is the priority, or we will lose too many airships over the winter.” Murad straightened up from his examination of the turret’s interior. “It is too late in the year to launch a major assault on Linz, so there would be no great advantage to destroying the Jooli now. We will deal with her—deal with the monster—come the spring.”
Özil had expected that answer. There had already been a snowfall three days before. Just a short flurry that soon melted, but it was a portent of what was to come. The sultan would need to order his men out of the siege lines soon, so they could retreat to Vienna before winter really set in.
The assault on Linz would have to wait until spring. By then, even with just the two workmen Murad had provided him, Özil could have all the Sultan’s airships fitted with the gun turrets.
All the ones that survived the winter, at any rate. The hangars were so huge that no matter how many men Murad threw at the work, they couldn’t possibly get enough of them built for all the airships. Some of the airships would have to make it through the winter—try, anyway—just tethered to masts.
Some would fail to do so, that was a surety. Even the airships sheltered in the hangars were at some risk. The hangars were sturdy enough not to collapse after a heavy snowfall, but they had no doors. They were shaped like the top half of giant cylinders planted on the ground, with both ends open to the wind and the elements. That should be fairly safe given the mild winds in this part of Europe, but…
The winds were usually mild. There could always be an exceptionally powerful storm, and if it was mighty enough some of the airships would be battered apart inside the hangars.
But that was not Özil’s problem. He just had to have the gun turrets ready for the assault, and he had months to do it in. From there, come spring, it would be up to the airship crews and the janissaries in the turrets to destroy the monster so an aerial bombardment could clear the way for the sultan’s army.
He fully expected several of those janissaries to die in the opening battle. He’d heard depictions of what the Jooli had done to the fleet that had tried to bombard Linz two months earlier. But he didn’t like janissaries anyway. Arrogant bastards, they were.
Airship hangar
Chiemsee (Bavarian Sea)
Bavaria
Julie Mackay (née Sims) was not a particularly big woman. Somewhat on the stocky side, muscular—but she was no more than five and half feet tall. So she had no trouble at all clambering into the newly installed gun turret on the Magdeburg and giving it a slow and careful inspection.
It helped, of course, that the turret was a lot bigger than the ones the Ottomans were retrofitting into their airship gondolas. The Magdeburg was a much bigger airship than anything the Turks had built—or even could build, for the moment. It never paid to underestimate the industrial capacity of the enemy empire. The Ottomans had great resources, personal as well as material and financial. But it was just a fact that their technology was in most respects less advanced than European technology—and had been even before the Ring of Fire.
The Turks handled that challenge much the same way the Soviet Union in World War II had handled the disparity between its level of technological development and that of its enemy, Nazi Germany. The USSR had concentrated on making crude but workable—above all, reliable—machines and weapons of war, and then making a lot of them.
Julie was well aware of the Ottoman approach, and it guided her in her assessment of the gun turret she’d be fighting from when the aerial war resumed. No one expected that to happen for a few more months, however. Not with winter coming. So there was still time to make whatever modifications were felt to be necessary and she wasn’t about to get sloppy.
“I can’t say I’m real happy with these welds, Dell,” she said, running her finger down the seam between two steel panels. “I mean…tack welds?”
The man who’d crowded into the turret with her shook his head. He had an aggrieved expression on his face. “Julie, give me a break. Those are just temporary. Don’t worry, we’ll have ’em replaced with full welds within a couple of days. We weren’t expecting you here this soon.”
“I told you I was coming out this week.”
The aggrieved expression on Dell Beckworth’s face got replaced by one of exasperation. “Julie, when most people say ‘this week’ they don’t mean Monday morning.”
“Alex’s birthday is Thursday,” Julie said defensively. “I wanted to be sure I could get back in time.”
“How’s he doing these days?”
“You want the official opinion or the wife’s opinion?”
“Let me have both.”
Julie went back to studying the seams. “The official opinion is that he’s the best thing in the cavalry department since hay was invented. Ever since he got promoted to colonel it seems he can do no wrong. There’s already noises being made about promoting him to brigadier. If they actually do it, he’ll have to start sleeping outside ’cause his head barely fits through the door as it is.”
Beckworth chuckled. “Sounds like I got the wife’s opinion already.”
“Oh, hell, no. The wife’s opinion is that if he keeps thinking his expertise on galloping around on a horse and waving a saber makes him an expert on every subject under the sun—including gunhandling, if you can believe it—then he won’t have any trouble at all fitting his head through the door because he won’t have one left.”
She turned away from the seam she’d been inspecting and gave the five gunports an intense scrutiny. “Bit wide, aren’t they?”
“Not given your normal firing position, which”—he slapped a flat, wide rail that ran around the center of the chamber—“will be using this as your gun rest. That way you don’t have to expose yourself so much and the enemy will have a hard time spotting which gunport you’re using. But the gunport can’t be too narrow or you won’t have a wide enough angle of fire.”
Julie thought about it for a moment, and nodded. “Okay. That makes sense. I’ll always be staying two to three feet back from the ports.”
“Well, unless you have to start using the Lahtida. Which you won’t be able to do until the spring, because I won’t have it finished for a few months.” He cleared his throat. “Uh…it’ll have to be permanently fixed into that forward firing slot, since you won’t be able to move it.”
“Why not?”
“Well…it weighs about one hundred and twenty-five pounds.”
“Jesus H. Christ, Dell! That’s almost as much as I weigh.”
“Relax, willya? It’ll rest on a solid tripod and have a muzzle brake and a padded recoil pad. Think of more like a cannon than a rifle.”
“You’re not really planning to call it the ‘Lahtida,’ are you?”
He grinned. “Sure. We gun nuts have a reputation to maintain.”
“For what? Having the world’s stupidest sense of humor? Who the hell calls a twenty-millimeter rifle a ‘Lahtida’?”
Beckworth’s grin didn’t so much as flicker. “A gun nut screwy enough to design a seventeenth-century airship gun based on a World War II Finnish anti-tank gun. That’d be the Lahti L-39.”
“Is it a requirement to be an official gun nut that you have to win some sort of obscurity contest? ‘Hey, guys, betcha I know about a gun none of you dilettantes has ever even heard of.’”
Beckworth was still grinning. “Yup. We hold the contest every year in Ruso, North Dakota.”
“Where?”
“Smallest town in the state. At last count, the total population was four. One of those towns nobody’s ever heard of.”
“How do you know about it, then?”
“One of those four people happens to be my cousin.”
Julie tried her best to frown disapprovingly at Beckworth’s low sense of humor, but gave it up after a few seconds. Actually, she thought the joke was sort of funny.
Sort of. “If you’re done with the stand-up routine, are you going to show me a heavy rifle I can use?”
“Follow me. I’ve made an anti-tank rifle modeled on a Polish design. It’s a lot lighter than the Lahtida. It only weighs a little over twenty pounds and fires an eight-millimeter round.”
Beckworth climbed out of the gondola onto the deck below. The hangar holding the Magdeburg was still under construction but the basic framework was in place. The huge wooden structure floated on the lake, supported by pontoons. That way it could be turned to face into or away from the wind whenever the airship was entering or leaving.
Once Julie had joined him on the hangar deck, Beckworth headed for the entrance where the boat that had brought them to the hangar was tied up. “The gun’s in my shop on shore,” he explained.
“So what silly name did you give this one?”
“I just call it the ‘Karabine.’ On account of I can’t begin to pronounce the full name the Poles gave it. Talk about a language with screwy spelling! They could give the Welsh a run for their money.”
* * *
It was quite a name, all right. Dell had copied it from one of his books across the diagram he’d used to design the weapon.
Karabin przeciwpancerny wzór 35. Julie wasn’t even going to try to figure out how to pronounce it. “Karabine” it was, “Karabine” it would be.
It was quite a gun, too, truth be told. A pure bitch to lug around or even shift a little to aim properly if you had to lift the tripod holding up the barrel. On the other hand, that same weight made the recoil something an average-sized woman could withstand.
The Karabine was more accurate than she’d expected, although it didn’t measure up in that respect with the rifle she normally used, which was a Remington 700.
“Okay, I forgive you,” she said, after she was done test firing it.