Chapter 26
Déj
Denise had to circle above the city three times before she found a landing site suitable to her needs. Her first option was a cobbled street that cut through the town’s central square. She dipped low enough to get a good view of the cobbles. They looked adequately uniform and smooth enough to warrant a try, but would she be able to slow the craft down soon enough to avoid slamming into a narrower passage at the end of the strip? A twenty-foot passage and a thirty-foot wingspan did not mix.
She opted for option two: a small dirt road running alongside a stone wall butted against a field where a large amount of cavalry mingled about. The wagon tracks on the road provided some challenge for the Dvorak’s tires, but Denise managed well enough. A lieutenant by the name of Enkefort guided her down.
A small group of officers approached. She did not bother climbing out of the cockpit to meet them. She left the motor running and motioned them forward. “Come on, gentlemen!” she shouted over the noise of the engine. “It won’t bite you.”
One advantage to a pusher design was that the propeller was safely in the rear where no one could bump into it accidentally. So, the men came forward without much hesitation.
“Welcome to Déj, Fräulein Beasley,” said the man in the forefront, who seemed to be in charge. “I am Colonel Renz.” He was just about to salute, then perhaps thought better of it. Denise had to keep herself from smiling. The man had probably never saluted a woman in his life.
Instead, he offered her a short bow of greeting, then turned and introduced the others. “This is my aide-de-camp, Major Schmidt. This is Captain von Jori, Second Cavalry Regiment. And this is Lieutenant Karl Enkefort, Captain von Jori’s aide. He’s the gentleman who found this road.”
Denise removed her goggles, blinked, and looked at Enkefort. “You the radio man, too?”
The lieutenant nodded.
“You’re pretty good with that thing,” she complimented him, before turning back to Colonel Renz. “I’m Denise Beasley.”
“Yes,” Colonel Renz said, “and we are glad to have you here. What can we do for you?”
She pointed into the back of the cockpit. “First thing, you can remove those fuel tanks. They’re all I have, and that’s all the fuel I’m going to have until the rest of the air force arrives with General Roth. Find a nice, dry, safe place for them and keep them secure. If we lose those, I’ll be grounded.”
Colonel Renz nodded. “Major Schmidt, see to the removal and protection of those tanks.”
“Yes, sir.” Schmidt trotted off.
“Before I land for the night, I want to do some scouting for you. Let me get up there and have a look around, get a good feel for the lay of the land. You got a map?”
Captain von Jori stepped forward. He touched his coat as if he were looking for a pen, then pulled a satchel around hanging from his shoulder and produced a piece of neatly folded parchment. He unfolded it and handed it to Denise.
“Déj sits at the crossroads of two valleys,” he said, pointing to the town sketched in the center of the parchment, “one from the east, one from the south. If a Moldavian army is moving this way, it’ll be coming up one of those gaps, or both.”
“Where are we on this map?” Denise asked.
Von Jori stepped forward and touched the map near mid-center. He was wearing his riding gloves so his touch was imprecise. “On the west side of the city. A small road just about there, which, as you can see looking this way, leads out of the city and south. We thought it best to place your landing site away from the two most logical approaches the Moldavian army may take into Déj.”
“Good thinking,” Denise said, nodding. She studied the map further. “Can I keep this?”
Von Jori nodded. “Certainly, sir. Ah…madam.”
She smiled. “Just call me Denise.”
The captain nodded. “As you wish.”
“What’s the weather been around here?” she asked.
“Some clouds, some wind,” Colonel Renz said. “The air has been cool, but ample sunlight, praise God. No rain, but I don’t know what it’s going to be like tomorrow.” He pointed to the Dixie Chick. “Can this thing predict the weather?”
Was that a joke? Denise wondered. She couldn’t tell from the colonel’s expression. “No, sir. We up-timers have a lot of fancy machines, but I’m afraid predicting the weather is out of my skill set. If it rains tomorrow, it rains. We’ll deal with weather when the time comes.”
Major Schmidt returned with four men. Denise coordinated their efforts in removing the tanks. They were a little too quick in pulling them free of their bindings, and one of them almost fell to the road. “Careful!” she snapped and flashed a stern look. “Handle them like babies, or, new foals, if you prefer. Gently now!” They slowed down and got both tanks out and away from the road.
Denise laid the map on her lap and leaned back into her seat. “Okay, gentleman, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off. I’ll scout east and then turn back south. About fifteen miles both ways.” She pointed to Enkefort. “Keep that radio on. I’ll contact you every ten minutes or so with updates.”
Denise replaced her goggles and waited until the men stepped off the road. “And keep those tanks secure!” she shouted, then taxied the plane forward about fifty feet, turned it around, and gunned it.
It felt so, so good, to be back in the air.
“She needs wide open spaces—”
* * *
“This should give us an advantage,” Christian said as he and Colonel Renz and Lieutenant Enkefort returned to the nearby field where the lion’s share of cavalry awaited.
“Yes, it should,” Colonel Renz said. “But I don’t care what the up-timers say about the quality of their machines. Nothing will replace, in my mind anyway, good, on-the-ground reconnaissance. We need to keep up our scouting.”
“What can I do for you, Colonel?” Christian asked.
Colonel Renz cleared his throat, looked around at his cavalry companies. “I’m ordering Neuneck and Keller to keep up their patrols day and night. I want them moving up those valley roads and rivers as far as they can go. I want you and Kinsky to pull your cavalry back into Déj and protect those people from another attack from those goddamned Impalers.”
“The townspeople will not like that, Colonel,” Christian said. “Their mayor has already said they don’t want us here.”
“I don’t care what he says,” Colonel Renz said, pausing to turn and look at Christian directly. “You and Kinsky will move into town and take charge of the situation. You understand my orders?”
Christian nodded. “Yes, sir. We’ll take care of it.”
“Good.” Colonel Renz began walking again. “Now, another thing I’d like to you do is—”
A loud, high-pitched voice squelched out of Lieutenant Enkefort’s radio.
“What the hell is that?” Colonel Renz asked.
Enkefort turned his radio around and pointed it toward the colonel and his captain so that they may hear it better. “It’s Denise, sir. She’s singing.”
* * *
“I’m walking on sunshine…whoa…and don’t it feel good?”
In truth, she was walking or rather, flying, under sunshine. But the air was cool with no appreciable wind shear. A few low clouds, but no rain. Denise could not have asked for better conditions for her first official reconnaissance mission. Thus, it was a good time to try out some new singing material.
She had always loved that song, and minus a radio station that she could tune into and sing along with, she tried to recall the video of Katrina and the Waves belting out their signature tune, as they enjoyed a rather gloomy day in London. The song was released before she had even been born, but somehow, it still mattered, resonated, as a lot of songs did with her. It seemed to Denise that music, perhaps more than any other human endeavor, endured. What was that biblical passage? Men come and go, but Earth abides? Add music to that list as well.
“…I feel alive, I feel the love, I feel the love that’s really real…”
She certainly felt love for Eddie, with his big…airplane.
She chuckled to herself and hoped that she hadn’t spoken any of that out loud; sometimes, in the midst of musical ecstasy, she would forget herself, and sometimes even forget that her radio was on. Lieutenant Enkefort and his superior officers were listening in, and she had no problem with those men hearing her sing. In fact, perhaps it was best. Let them laugh at the little up-time girl and her silly ways and fancy pusher plane. Give them all the joy of music before the battle begins.
She loved singing. It took away her stress and reminded her that what mattered most in her life was Eddie, all her old up-time friends, and all her new down-time friends as well.
She glanced at her fuel gauge and dipped lower, bringing Dixie Chick down another three hundred feet. From this height, she could see nearly everything, save for what lurked under the canopy of trees. A Dvorak did have its limitations, after all. But if anything—especially a large army—was moving down the valley toward Déj, she’d see it. Her height and speed was such that she had little concern for snipers, and besides, what kinds of weapons did the Moldavians really have? Matchlocks? Wheellocks? Flint? A good shooter could perhaps give her pause, but not now, not today. She was walking on sunshine.
She spoke clearly into her radio. “Dixie Chick now out about fifteen miles east, following the river. No sign of Moldavian forces, over.”
Lieutenant Enkefort responded. “We hear you, Dixie Chick, over.”
“Will now turn south and scout in that direction. Dixie Chick out!”
She steered right and gave her engine a little punch of speed. Sun glare off the sloped windshield bothered her a little, but it always had, and she had gotten somewhat used to it. She drew her goggles down and set them over her eyes while she braced against the inertia of the turn. “Woo-hoo!…I love this plane!”
The Dixie Chick straightened, and Denise settled in for the final leg of her mission.
The only blemish on her day was that she wouldn’t be seeing Eddie again for a while—possibly quite a while. Morris had been trying to get one or (preferably) two Jupiter V cargo planes from Markgraf & Smith Aeronautics in the Netherlands, and apparently he’d been able to get one. Markgraf & Smith would provide a pilot and a flight engineer to get the plane to Prague, but the provision was that Eddie would have to be part of the flight so he could learn the ropes. The Jupiter was a four-engine plane, much bigger and more complex than anything Eddie had even flown before.
It would be up to him to get the plane from Prague to wherever Morris wanted it. Markgraf & Smith weren’t willing to let their employees go any further. From Prague, there were plenty of commercial flights they could use to get back to the Netherlands. From Transylvania? That was not a gamble they were prepared to take.
Eddie would also need to provide himself with a copilot and flight engineer, after he reached Prague. Who? How?
Eddie would figure it out. Denise had a lot of confidence in her boyfriend to handle most anything.
That reassuring thought was enough to start her singing again.
“…walking on sunshine…”
* * *
Sergiu Botnari stepped behind the protection of a tree and watched as the up-time plane flew by overhead. To him, it almost looked like a crow or a hawk, save for the sound of its engine. It suddenly dropped lower, and now, he could see it better, get a better sense of its size and speed. God, it was moving fast. But can it see like a bird? That was his question. Whoever is flying that machine, can he see me?
One of his men came up beside him and leveled a musket in the aircraft’s direction. Sergiu pushed the barrel down. “Don’t waste a shot, you fool. You’ll never hit it, and it might see the puff of smoke.”
“Can it fire at us?” the man asked.
Sergiu shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe. Let it fly past us.”
“It might find General Radu and his army!”
Sergiu worked the muscles in his jaw. Indeed, it might, but what could it do when it found them? If it had long-range weapons of some kind, like the Sultan’s airships, or like one of the USE airships that he had heard about, it could possibly do some damage to the Moldavian force before it reached Déj. But there was nothing he or any of his men could do about it right now. “Let it pass.”
They dared to step out into the clear as the plane flew further and further away. Sergiu’s heart began to race, and he began to feel real anger, the kind he often felt before he killed someone, the kind he relied upon most often to give him the courage to pull that trigger or draw a knife across a windpipe. Anger because it just didn’t seem fair: the enemy using such a weapon against his countrymen. What an unfair advantage did the USE have on its down-time enemies! A very, very unholy advantage.
Sultan Murad had sent his own up-time-inspired weapons into the engagement, true, but they were hundreds of miles away in service to Lupu’s and Basarab’s armies. How was he, Sergiu Botnari, supposed to fulfill Lupu’s demands of beating these people if they could see everything marching toward them from a bird’s-eye view?
“It’s turning.”
Sergiu looked up from his despondence.
The plane had turned sharply right and was now flying south over the wooded ridge line, away from the Szamos River Valley. “Idiot!” Sergiu barked. “Another five miles, and it would have found the whole army.”
“Maybe it can see that far away,” the man said.
Sergiu shook his head. “The Carpathians have never given up its secrets that easily. No way that bird can see through its canopy of trees five miles away. Whoever is in that thing has made a mistake…a big mistake, changing its direction.”
Sergiu tucked his pistol away and said, “Is everything in place for later?”
The man nodded. “Yes, sir. We lay in wait.”
“Good. Afterwards, we will return to Déj and have a closer look at this flying machine.”
“Do you think it’ll be there?”
Sergiu nodded, surprised at the question. “I know it will.” He smiled. “Even birds need to rest.”