1637 The Polish Maelstrom Read online

  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 almo
st 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.

  Chapter 9

  Linz, provisional capital of Austria-Hungary

  Julie returned in time to celebrate her husband’s birthday. The festivities went well, but they would have gone better if, after one too many alepots, Alex hadn’t ventured to explain to Julie the inadequacies of a measly 8mm rifle against an armored Ottoman airship.

  “You should have insisted on at least ten millimeters,” he pronounced.

  Approximately 7,000 feet in the air over the Tuscan countryside

  Italy

  First Lieutenant Laura Goss was proud of herself. She’d managed to keep a grin off her face—not even a smile—ever since they’d lifted off from the airfield at Linz. The straight face had lasted all the way to their landing at the Venice airfield on the Lido sandbar. Once her passengers had deplaned and gotten on the boat that would take them over to Venice for their various diplomatic and other meetings, she’d finally broken into laughter.

  Nothing uncouth; more of a giggle, really. She’d then enjoyed herself for the next three days, staying in the small tavern that serviced the airfield and (mostly, because there still wasn’t much air traffic) the local fishermen.

  Now they were on the second and final leg of the journey, which would end at the newly built airfield at Florence, capital of the duchy of Tuscany. She’d put the straight face back on when her passengers returned from Venice and had kept it on ever since.

  For someone with her insouciance about flying, it was a bit of a struggle. All pilots tended to be relaxed about the so-called perils of aviation, but Laura was carefree even by those standards. Quite unlike the man sitting in the aircraft’s right front seat next to her, whose white-knuckled grip on the armrests and face woodenly devoid of any expression at all were sure signs of acute aviophobia.

  You’d think a former prizefighter, former prime minister, current commander of an army division, a man who’d gotten into a gunfight the same day as the Ring of Fire, and had been in several pitched battles since, would be casual about something as comparatively safe as air travel. (Okay, it wasn’t as safe as flying had been up-time. But it was still pretty safe, as far as Laura was concerned. She’d never crashed once. Never come close.)

  Fear of flying wasn’t rational, of course, which she knew perfectly well. In a moment of empathy, she smiled and said: “Hey, Mike, relax.”

  She pointed with a forefinger at the window on the passenger’s side. Beyond, clearly visible, was one of the Dragonfly’s two engines, securely attached to the lower wing of the biplane. “This plane’s got two engines, you know, and it can fly just fine if either one of them goes out. It’s quite a bit safer than the single-engine planes Colonel Wood’s put you on before.”

  Mike Stearns pulled back his lips in a rictus that bore precious little resemblance to a smile. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this plane is a new model, made by an upstart manufacturer whose owner is a down-timer—that is to say, has hardly any experience building airplanes.”

  “Oh, hell, it’s not that new. The first Dragonfly came into service a year and a half ago. This is the fifth one they’ve made.”

  From the rear came Rebecca’s voice: “It’s slightly new, because it was modified for the needs of the State Department. But Lieutenant Goss is right, Michael. You really should try to relax a bit.”

  “As far as the rest of it is concerned, General,” said Laura, “it’s true that Ziermann Flugzeugwerke was founded by a down-timer, but the aircraft itself was designed by Kitt and Cheng Engineering—and they didn’t suck it out of their thumbs. This beauty’s closely modeled on an up-time airplane that saw a lot of service, the de Havilland DH90 Dragonfly. They even named it after her.”

  Mike Stearns glanced out the window. “I noticed right from the start that it was a biplane. That is to say, an antique. When did the original see service?”

  “Mid-thirties. Mind you, that’s the mid–nineteen thirties. Three centuries from now.”

  Mike’s tight lips tightened further. “Swell. Three hundred years from now means it was built thirty years before I was born. Like I said, an antique—and this particular one was built three centuries before that.”

  He closed his eyes. “I appreciate the effort, Lieutenant Goss. But I didn’t even like to fly in Boeing 737s.”

  Behind him, his wife clucked her tongue reprovingly. “You really should try to keep up with the times, Michael. The days when you could count the number of aircraft in the world on the fingers of one hand—even two hands—are long gone.”

  “Two years gone, anyway,” said Goss. “These days you’d need all your toes also. Even that might not be enough.”

  The only response made by the former prime minister of the United States of Europe, former prof
essional boxer and now Major General Stearns, was: “How soon will we be landing, Lieutenant?”

  * * *

  Sitting in one of the back seats next to Rebecca was Mike’s quartermaster general, David Bartley. He hadn’t been paying much attention to the conversation because he’d been engrossed studying the landscape below. They were passing over the Apennines now, and the scenery was pretty spectacular. Unlike up-time commercial jets, which typically flew at an altitude between thirty and forty thousand feet, far above the land they were passing over, the Dragonfly seemed to be grazing the mountains.

  That was mostly an optical illusion, David knew.

  Mostly.

  “What’s the ceiling for this aircraft, Lieutenant Goss?” he asked.

  “Twelve thousand, five hundred feet. But there’s nothing to worry about, Major Bartley. The northern Apennines aren’t very high. The tallest peak is Monte Cimone, but that’s sixty miles northwest of us—and it’s only seven thousand feet or so.”

  She tried to keep the smile on her face seraphic rather than sly, but suspected she was failing. It didn’t really matter, though, because Stearns still had his eyes closed. “The reason it seems we’re flying pretty close to the ground is because we are.” She glanced out of her window. “About half a mile, thereabouts. I’m doing that because we’re not too far out from Florence. We’ll be landing soon.”

  “How soon?” asked Mike, without opening his eyes.

  * * *

  The Dragonfly was a six-seater. The two men in the very back were both radio operators—and repairmen, if need be—who’d be staying in Florence along with the equipment they were bringing. Both of them were down-timers, but their disparate reactions to the experience of flying for the first time showed once again that fear of flying had little rhyme or reason. The one on Mike’s side, like Mike himself, had his eyes closed and a death grip on his arm rests. The one on the other side shared all of David’s interest in the view—and then some.