Many Words

“Isea, you’re up.” Burr spun her machine pistol the right way around, sighted in on the pursuing British truck, and laid down a barrage of covering fire.

“Jump when the lassie says go,” Iseabail told Masaracchia, “an’ we’ll haul ye up, aye?” Clambering up atop the cab, she followed di Giacomo up the rope.

“You, me, and the monk, skipper!” Burr shouted.

A British fighter screamed past the Albatross, pursued by a Kestrel as it rolled to show its graceful elliptical wings and pulled away out to sea. More tracers flashed by, accompanied by the chatter of machine guns, as another British pilot tried his luck.

“Get Masaracchia out as soon as the other two are in the plane, and you follow him,” Cannon replied. The gauges in front of him, needles shaking wildly at the edges of their travel, told a dire tale about the engine’s health. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Burr slammed another magazine into her machine gun, and sprayed it at the truck behind them, ducking as the British soldiers returned a ragged fusillade.

Emma and di Giacomo grabbed Iseabail’s arm and pulled her into the Albatross.

“What’s she saying?” di Giacomo said, squinting out the door.

Emma looked over his shoulder. In the truck’s bed, Burr pointed at the plane, then swung her arm at the elbow, then pointed again. A moment later, Masaracchia jumped over the slatted side of the bed, swinging away from the truck, then crashing into the slats, perilously near the back wheel.

Emma hauled on the rope. “Pull him in!”

Hanging onto a framing member in the cargo hold, Emma plugged her headset into the intercom panel, and leaned out through the open cargo door into the slipstream. “Slower!” she shouted into the microphone.

“Merde,” she heard in reply. Hydraulics whined as the landing gear lowered. Emma braced herself against the thump which shook the plane as they locked down. Slowly, the truck gained ground.

Emma pushed herself back into the hold, checked her knots—she’d tied two ropes, one knotted for climbing, through holes in the framing beams—then played the ropes out the door.

Tracers shot past, and Emma caught herself just before she dove for cover. A British plane roared just overhead. “Where the hell are our escorts?” Emma yelled, watching the British fighter bank away. She looked back to the ropes and added, “A little more left!”

Burr reached out for the ropes trailing the plane as di Giacomo emptied a magazine toward the British truck. Tantalizingly, the ropes swung closer, one brushing Burr’s fingertips before it fluttered away again. Splinters flew by as the truck smashed through the barrier at the start of the breakwater, and the truck bounced harshly onto the dirt road. Burr nearly lost her footing, reached out again, and swore as the end of the rope seesawed just beyond her grasp.

“Now wou’ be a guid time,” Iseabail said.

Burr bit back a nasty retort, then her face lit up. She grabbed her borrowed machine gun, spun it around to hold it by the barrel, and hooked the ropes with the stock. “Tie him in,” she said, passing the plain rope to Iseabail. The knotted one she tied around the cab’s passenger window. “Pietro! Go!”

di Giacomo dropped his gun, jumped onto the cab, looped his arms and legs around the rope, and shimmied up.

Lecocq spun his radio knob to ‘Intercom’ and said, “No time. Go to the cargo hold and be ready with the grappling hook. The captain will be alongside in twenty seconds. You will have to talk me close enough.”

Emma’s voice cut off in the middle of a stream of inventive profanity, as she tore off her headset and scrambled down from the turret. Lecocq leveled out, lined up parallel to the road, and pulled the throttles all the way back. Fifteen seconds later, the plane reached the shore.

“I tell you, I can still drive!” Masaracchia protested.

In mid-slither through the shattered rear window, Cannon said, “You can’t climb, not with your shoulder hit.” He twisted to the left and gave himself a good push, and fell into the cab with his head on the dashboard and his feet sticking out the back. Righting himself, he said, “Give me the wheel.”

Masaracchia shifted, grunting as blood oozed from his wounded shoulder. “After this turn. It puts us on the coastal road.” He spun the wheel, and the truck skidded around the corner. The throaty rumble of idling aero engines filled Cannon’s ears as Lecocq’s Albatross soared past, slowing rapidly. Its wing passed a mere ten feet over the truck’s roof.

Cannon grabbed the wheel and half-stood as Masaracchia slid past beneath him. Sitting heavily, he gunned the engine. “Burr, give the monk a hand.”

“This is not the first time I’ve been shot,” Masaracchia objected, as Burr and Iseabail pulled him through the window.

Cannon looked for his mirrors before remembering he didn’t have them anymore, then stuck his head out the window and looked back. Quickly, he ducked back inside, as a soldier in the British truck fifty yards back leveled his rifle. Cannon heard the Lee-Enfield crack, hunched over the wheel, and glanced down at the speedometer, just in time to see it pass seventy-five. He risked sitting up for a moment to peer ahead—two miles or so. The Albatross grew further ahead every second, and Cannon figured he had less than a minute and a half to catch it before he ran out of road.

“Whiskey Two, I will soon be low and slow. Keep them away from me. Over.” Lecocq rolled into a gentle right-hand turn as his Albatross crossed the shoreline. The two Kestrels still in formation broke the other direction, wheeling to cover him. Out the right side of the cockpit, the shoreline, then Alexandria, came into view. Lecocq squinted. A road ran along the edge of the peninsula, fifty meters from the surf. The depth of the city behind it shrank as it ran toward the breakwater, and it pressed closer to the shore. There the paving stones gave way to dirt, and the road stretched another three kilometers, ending in a jumble of rocks rapidly descending into the sea.

Lecocq cut his throttles and dropped lower, the city crossing from his right to his left, which posed its own problems. From the cockpit in the right-hand fuselage, visibility to the left was poor, blocked by the the other fuselage. He would take one practice pass to get a feel for the distance—

“Whiskey One, I hope you’re ready, because we’re going to need to get out of here in a hurry.”

“Miss Burr?” Lecocq said, surprised.

“No time for that, Marcel—ready or not?”

“If I must.”

“Swell. We’ll need another rope. Our friend took a bullet. We’ll be on the coastal road in thirty seconds.

“Rope, thirty seconds. Out.” Lecocq pulled the flaps lever, and as the plane bucked, fed in left rudder and right stick. The plane slowed as thought it had hit a wall. At the same moment, the guns in the turret chattered, and in his earphone, Emma said, “I had one lined up!”

The city fell away beneath the plane. Lecocq’s compass read 315 degrees, and directly ahead was the T-shaped peninsula jutting out into the deep blue of the Mediterranean. To its southwest, boats clustered in the harbor, behind a breakwater perhaps two and a half miles long. A road ran along the top of it.

In his headset, he heard Emma’s voice. “Check check.”

“I read you,” he said. Turning a knob on his radio panel, he called his escort. “Whiskey Two, I have the pickup in sight.”

The British truck drew closer. A Tommy stood behind its cab, then set a Lewis gun on its roof.

“Duck!” Iseabail shouted. The British machine gun chattered, and a row of holes appeared in the cab. The truck swung left, then right. Cannon looked over his shoulder and saw Masaracchia hunched over the wheel. Through the windshield, all he could see was the corner of a building. He braced himself for the crash, but somehow, the front bumper barely scraped across the wall. Still sliding, the truck squeezed into a tiny alleyway. The walls on each side closed in, and glass shattered as the side mirrors snapped off. The empty frames fell to the brick road behind the truck, joined by an occasional shower of sparks as Masaracchia scraped the walls. In the cab, he sat up and held down the horn.

Iseabail slumped and exhaled. “Tha’s a fright ye gave me there!”

Behind them, the British truck skidded to a stop outside the alley, turned in carefully, and surged after them. Ahead, a man tucked himself into a doorway just before the two trucks screamed past, running out into the street and shouting after they went by. A row of barrels shattered under Masaracchia’s wheels, and wine and grain mixed in the road.

Burr and di Giacomo fired a few bursts between them, then reloaded together. In the lull, Masaracchia shouted, “Call your plane! We’re nearly there!”

The distant buzz of aero engines grew more immediate. A bullet snapped past Cannon’s ear, and from the cab, Masaracchia roared in pain.