1637 The Polish Maelstrom Read online

  The plane came to a halt.

  “I wonder who the bimbo on the nose cone is.”

  Alex squinted. “The caption just reads ‘Lady Fair.’”

  “Yeah, I can read it. That’s probably because Dustin swaps out girlfriends like most men change shoes. This way he’s got a reusable all-bimbo portrait.”

  “You really do dislike him.”

  Her voice rose. “The bastard pinched my ass once!”

  Alex tried to imagine any man stupid enough to pinch Julie on the ass. His imagination failed.

  “What happened?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. Well…nothing from me. I was still trying to decide which way to retaliate when Chip found out about it and beat me to the punch. Pretty much literally. I was half-pissed at him and half-pleased.”

  The pilot climbed out of the cockpit. “Hey, Julie!”

  “Hey,” she replied, her tone expressing as much enthusiasm as she’d express looking down at a sink full of cold, dirty dishwater. Which was still full of dirty dishes.

  But she brightened up when the lower cockpit was slid aside and another man emerged. That cockpit had a peculiar design that only provided a narrow forward view, so she hadn’t been able to make out his features until then.

  “Ent!”

  “Hi, Julie. Been a while.”

  “Sure has.” She frowned, theatrically. “Last I knew, though, you were a pilot. What happened? Get demoted?”

  Still smiling, he finished getting out of the cockpit and shook his head. “Nope. I’ll go back to being a pilot once this is over. We’ve got a new—really new—weapons system here and Colonel Wood wanted me to do the combat trial so I could give him a full report.”

  He glanced at the plane’s pilot, who was now entering the hangar. The glance did not seem to be an admiring one. “Ol’ Dustbucket there is the pilot on this mission because he’s the one who trained on this bizarro new plane. This time around, I’m the nose gunner.”

  By then, he’d reached them. Julie waved back and forth between the two men. “I don’t think you two ever met. Not to speak to each other, anyway. Ent, this is my husband Alex Mackay. Alex, meet Enterprise Martin.”

  “But please don’t call me ‘Enterprise,’” he said, shaking Alex’s hand. “I always go by ‘Ent.’”

  Julie was now looking at the plane. “It is pretty weird-looking. I’ve never seen a plane that’s got the propeller on the rear end instead of the front end.”

  Ent turned his head. “It’s called a ‘pusher.’ The big advantage to it is that you don’t have a propeller you have to shoot around since it’s behind you.”

  Alex frowned. “But I’ve seen—in more than one movie—where you had planes with propellers in front that were shooting at other planes.”

  “That’s because they had what are called ‘synchronization gears.’ They were developed in World War I, up-time. They timed the rounds fired by a machine gun so that the bullets always passed in between the spinning propellers.”

  “That seems awfully…”

  Ent grinned. “Chancy? In our day and age, it’s just not possible. Not so far, anyway. We have only two practical plane designs that will allow us to mount machine guns. One of them is to put the gun or guns somewhere far enough away from the propeller that it fires around it. Usually that’s on the wings. Alternatively, if you have two engines you put them on the wings. That’s the design Kelley Aviation is following. The other is to make a pusher, where the propeller is out of the way entirely.”

  “How well does it fly?” asked Alex.

  Ent shrugged. “Well enough. It’s not a fast plane—top speed is a hair below ninety miles per hour—and it’s pretty ungainly. Being fair about it, that’s not so much because it’s a pusher as that it’s got”—he pointed his finger at the cockpit he’d emerged from—“that big bulbous nose. That’s where the machine gun and the gunner ride. We’re slung a bit below the pilot’s cockpit so he can see clearly.”

  “Do you really have a machine gun in there?” Julie asked. “A real one, I mean, not a mitrailleuse or a Gatling.”

  “No, this is a genu-ine machine gun,” said Ent. “The first ever made in this universe. Come here, I’ll show you how it works.”

  “Good thing Dell’s not here,” Alex muttered, as the three of them headed toward the aircraft. “We’d be lucky to get home before sundown.”

  “Before sunrise, you mean,” muttered Julie.

  Ent heard them, and chuckled. “You’re talking about Dell Beckworth, right? This is based on one of his designs. Well, partly. Paul Santee had a lot of input too. Enough so that Dell got grouchy and broke off working with us on it. You know what gun nuts are like. Put two of them in the same room and within five minutes it’s either Best Friends Forever or Family Feud. We got Family Feud.”

  When they reached the cockpit, Ent waved Julie forward. “Climb in. You can see it better that way.”

  * * *

  At first, Julie didn’t know what she was looking at. It was like no gun she’d ever seen.

  “What the fu…frog?”

  Ent laughed. “That was my reaction, too, the first time I saw it. Start with this, Julie—we made it out of two semiautomatic rifles. FN FALs, to be precise.”

  She nodded, knowing the weapon. She’d fired one herself, several times. The FAL stood for Fusil Automatique Léger, which was French for “light automatic rifle.” The FN came from the manufacturer, a Belgian company named Fabrique Nationale.

  It was a rugged weapon, and had been one of the two major NATO battle rifles of the Cold War era. More than ninety nations had adopted it. But the United States hadn’t been one of them, so it wasn’t as familiar to Americans as by rights it should have been.

  Julie had once asked her uncle Frank why the US hadn’t adopted it. His answer had been caustic and blunt. “Whaddaya think? If there’s anybody in the world who suffers worse from Not Invented Here Syndrome than the U.S. military-industrial complex, I don’t know who it is.”

  “It’s a .308, if I remember right.”

  “Not quite, although you can load it with a .308 cartridge. But it’s technically a 7.62 by 51 millimeter.”

  Julie nodded. “Same difference, pretty much. Nice straight trajectory.” She was partial to that caliber. Her beloved Remington 700 was a .308.

  Ent smiled. He wasn’t as good a rifle shooter as Julie—who was?—but he’d been a deer hunter and he shared her appreciation of firearms. Of course, saying that someone in West Virginia appreciated firearms was like saying someone in Los Angeles appreciated cars.

  “What’s even better is that we actually have examples of tracer rounds in stock. I forget exactly what the bullet boys told me, but it’s either one or two tracer rounds in each of the one hundred round belts that came along with that M-60 your uncle swiped from the army.”

  “Hey! He didn’t swipe it,” Julie protested. “Frank just figured that since they made him fight in that stupid war in Vietnam the least the army could do was let him take a souvenir home.”

  “Pretty damn big souvenir.”

  “My uncle’s a pretty damn big improviser. How do you think he went from coal miner to army chief of staff, after the Ring of Fire?”

  “Point. Getting back on topic, we’ve had to modify the copies a little bit, just to make sure that they burn hot enough and long enough. But that’s a whole lot simpler than coming up with incendiary rounds from scratch.”

  Julie continued her examination of the strange-looking weapon. “I’m guessing it must be the same thing with this machine gun, because you sure didn’t build this out of downtime parts.”

  “Not hardly. Looks like hell, but it’s a lot simpler and a lot more reliable than having to create a brand-new machine gun using local metals and technology.” He leaned over the dual-barreled device. “Probably the most disorienting thing about it is that the guns are on their backs. And only six inches apart.”

  “Why the hell did you put them on their ba
cks? Isn’t the brass flying out of them right into the gunner’s face going to be a problem?”

  He leaned over further and pointed. “See that? We’ve fixed downsloping shunts over each ejection port. That’ll keep the casings bouncing down, not flying up. And as far as putting the FALs on their backs, there’s no reason not to in terms of accuracy and operation. But there’s a big reason to do so when it comes to reloading.”

  She reconsidered the gaping—and very handy—magazine wells of the twinned weapons. “Okay, I see it now. In a cockpit, or any enclosed environment, it’s going to be easiest to reload them from the top. Kind of like an old Bren gun.”

  She was sitting behind the weapon and leaned forward as much as she could. From that vantage point, she realized that it was neither as big nor as awkward as it seemed at first. The stocks of both weapons had been removed, reducing their overall length considerably. Held together rigidly in a welded brace made out of what looked like steel salvaged from an old car, all the pieces now made sense. Except for a black box that straddled the two weapons, both stabilizing them and encasing their respective trigger guards. She looked up at Ent and asked, “So is that where you keep the magic machine-gun power?”

  He reached over her shoulder, and flipped down the access panel on the back of the box. Inside were mechanical guts that looked like the rear axle of a car had mated with a spring-driven clockwork.

  She frowned. “Okay, so no magic. But we could either spend half an hour while I try to figure out what all these doohickies do, or you could give me the short version now.”

  “My pleasure.” His tone bordered on that which a parent uses to brag about a child’s report card. “You see the camshaft that runs between the trigger guards of the two guns?”

  “You mean the thing that looks like a car axle?”

  “Yes. That. Every time it makes a one-half revolution, the cam on one end of that shaft pushes down the trigger on that gun. In the next half-revolution, that cam releases that trigger, just as the cam on the other end of the shaft depresses the trigger of the other gun.”

  She nodded again. “So they’re shooting in rapid sequence, one after the other.”

  “Right. Now in most machine guns like this, you have to turn the crank by hand to operate the camshaft. But that makes the gun unwieldy and really hard to aim accurately. So we found a way to turn the crankshaft just by pushing a button. Except we made it by pulling a trigger on account of shooters are cranky and set in their ways.”

  “That’s because ‘cranky and set in their ways’ translates into gunnerese as ‘hits the target regularly.’” Her eyes grew as wide as her sudden smile. “I get it. That’s what the coiled spring is for. When you push the button—pull the trigger—it releases the spring and the camshaft starts turning.”

  “Got it in one. We adapted the mechanism from the guts of a wheel lock, just made it bigger. And although you could re-crank it while you are in the cockpit, that spring has enough stored energy to fire off every round you can carry on the aircraft.”

  Julie spent another couple of minutes studying the weapon and handling its various components. It really wasn’t hard to learn. She was quite sure she could fire the thing successfully herself, even in combat conditions.

  “You done good, Ent,” she pronounced.

  Ottoman headquarters

  Ennsegg Castle

  Enns, Austria

  Eight miles east of Linz

  “And they are sure about this?” Sultan Murad demanded. His finger was planted on one feature of the sketch.

  “Yes, My Sultan,” said Süleyman, who commanded the irregular cavalry and scouts known as the akinji. “It is definitely placed at the rear of the machine, not the front.”

  Murad turned to look at the three chief artificers whom he’d summoned to the castle. “Can you explain to me the significance of having this…whirling thing, what do you call it?”

  “Propeller, My Sultan.”

  He remembered the term now. His airships used propellers to move themselves—and now that he thought about it, many of them were facing to the rear as well.

  “We are not certain, My Sultan,” said one of the artificers, answering the first question. They all knew full well that not telling Murad the truth was far more dangerous than shading it in hopes that his temper would not be roused. Angering the sultan in that way would result in a beating, sometimes. Not telling him the truth—all of it, blurring not a thing—was likely to get you garroted.

  One of the other artificers spoke up. “One possibility is that the kâfirs have succeeded in mounting a small cannon in the nose of the aircraft. They would then place the propeller at the rear so as not to impede the weapon.”

  That made sense. “And could such a cannon—it would have to be a very small one, yes?—do great damage to one of the airships? How accurate could it be?”

  Before any of the artificers could answer that question, Murad added: “I see no way it could be aimed, other than to fly the vessel directly at one of our airships.”

  “We believe that to be true, yes, My Sultan. As to the possible damage…”

  He looked to one of the other artificers.

  He provided the conclusion. “It could, My Sultan. There is such a thing as what the unbelievers call an ‘incendiary round.’ We have not been able to make one ourselves yet, but we believe there are several ways it could be done. If the cannon could fire such a round—”

  Murad provided the answer himself. “Then it could—might, at least—set the flying gas on fire.”

  “Yes, My Sultan.”

  Murad stroked his beard for half a minute or so, pondering the matter. Then he turned toward the commanders of his janissaries and sipahis. “Be ready to launch an assault tomorrow. We will need to test this new aircraft of the kâfirs before we begin any attack. But I want you ready in case we can defeat it.”

  “Yes, My Sultan.” The four of them left the chamber.

  Murad now turned to Semsi Ahmed, the commander of the Gureba-i hava. “We will modify the plan for tomorrow. Leave the janissary gunners in ten of the airships. Both of the forward lines. We will only use the rear two lines as bombers.”

  Semsi Ahmed hesitated, but only for a second. He knew as well as the artificers that the greatest danger when dealing with Murad IV was not to speak frankly to him. That had its risks, true—no sultan reacted well to disagreement—but if Murad discovered later that you had not told him something you should have…

  “The gun turret armor has been removed from all of the ships, My Sultan.”

  “Yes, I know. But that simply means—”

  He paused, wincing a little at a crashing sound. The whole meeting had been taking place against the background noise of the castle being rebuilt. The kâfirs had erected the stone structure centuries earlier and had let it become dilapidated with the passage of time. Since there was now at least the possibility that the siege of Linz would be protracted, Murad had ordered the castle to be repaired.

  It made for a lot of noise, though, which could sometimes be an impediment. He waited for a few seconds before resuming.

  “The janissaries in the airships will take some risks, that’s all.” He shrugged. “Why should they not? The whole crews will be taking the same risks. I want those gunners in the first ten ships in case this new airplane can attack us. I want to know what will happen—especially, can we fight against it?”

  “I understand, My Sultan. It will be done.” And with that, he left.

  Linz airfield

  Linz, provisional capital of Austria-Hungary

  Late that afternoon, Rebecca Abrabanel landed in Linz. There was only a small delegation to meet her, however, along with a carriage. She’d given the authorities very short notice that she’d be arriving.

  By now, however, they’d gotten accustomed to that. The term “jet-setting diplomat” hadn’t entered Amideutsch lexicon—yet, anyway—but Rebecca was getting a large portion of the European continent accustomed
to the concept. She not only traveled frequently but also took full advantage of the mobility provided to her by having an aircraft specifically assigned to the secretary of state. One of King Fernando’s diplomats had been heard to complain, “That pestiferous woman moves so quickly she’s got both sides of a dispute in full agreement before either of them has had time to think about it. She cheats, I tell you.”

  “It looks like the hangar’s already occupied, boss,” said her pilot, Captain Laura Goss. She’d been promoted just a few weeks ago, at Rebecca’s insistence. Colonel Wood had just been another victim of her diplomatic knife work.

  * * *

  Her opening argument: How can I expect to be safe, being flown about by a mere lieutenant?

  The colonel’s rebuttal: Her rank has nothing to do with how well she flies.

  Her concluding argument: Perhaps so. But we are not dealing here with how well she flies. We are dealing with my expectations of how well she flies. As it stands, I worry constantly. Once Laura—Lieutenant Goss—is a captain, I will be able to relax and concentrate on important matters of state.

  Jesse Wood had stared at her for a bit. Then: “You’re cheating,” he’d complained.

  * * *

  “It shouldn’t matter, Laura,” she said, as the plane taxied to a halt next to the hangar. “I don’t expect to be here more than a day or so.”

  Goss nodded. “No partying, in other words. Sobriety is the order of the day.”

  Rebecca smiled and climbed out of the cockpit.

  “Madame Secretary!” exclaimed the Austrian courtier who advanced to greet her. “What a surprise! Another surprise, I should say. Your husband just arrived yesterday evening.”

  Rebecca frowned. She and Michael tried as best they could to spend time with their children. “I thought he was back in Magdeburg. He was supposed to be.”

  “He was. But the emperor summoned him here yesterday morning. He’s thinking the Ottomans may be planning an assault.”