Many Words

“My captain—a real captain, mind—wanted me to convey his condolences that we couldn’t bring your craven hide to decisive action today.”

“I only wish I had the time to deflate another one of the King’s airships,” Cannon said. “Fortunately for you, I have a schedule to keep. Have a nice day.”

“This, Captain Mousegun, isn’t—”

Cannon set the headphones and microphone down and said, “Ignore them. How many pilots do we have left to land?”

“The last two are getting on the skyhooks now,” the traffic controller replied. “Thirty seconds.”

“Good work.” Cannon looked forward and called, “Mr. Churchill! How far to the storms?”

“About five miles, sir!”

Cannon cracked a crooked grin. “Good work all around. Turkey, here we come.”

Two thousand years ago, Nicomedia had been a vibrant port city and a key stronghold in the eastern Roman Empire. The centuries had not been kind to it. A fire, the great Roman schism, and a hundred years of war between the crumbling Byzantine Empire and the ascendant Ottoman Turks had reduced it to ruins. Izmit, the city the Ottomans had established in its place, had never grown out of nearby Istanbul’s shadow.

It was a land of towering hills and steep-sided valleys, its usual green turned brown by a long, harsh summer. The city of Izmit laid low along the coastline, overlooked by the ruins of a Byzantine fort. Inland, to the west and over the crest of the first ridge, stood a small village, clustered beneath the northern wall of the run-down remains of a Crusader citadel.

“Castle Incus,” said di Giacomo. “You can land on the road to the south, capitano.”

Cannon put the transport into a gentle turn. The Albatross—officially, according to the United States Navy, the Chance-Vought T2U-3A Pathfinder—was an ungainly aircraft, one of a handful of asymmetric designs Chance-Vought was famous for. It started with a long, wide wing, which canted upward a few degrees about two-thirds of the way along its length. Two fuselages, separated by three yards of thickened wing just tall enough to fit a crawlspace, were centered in the main airfoil. Half the length of the left fuselage, the right fuselage began with a fully-glazed nose and sported a twin 30-caliber machine gun turret aft of the wing, fitted with synchronizer gear to fire through the propeller disk just further aft of it. The left fuselage had an engine and propeller at its front, forward of the wing. A windowless cargo compartment took the rest of the space within. At its aft end, a single horizontal stabilizer poked out to the left, and a vertical stabilizer rose above the narrowed end of the fuselage, canted slightly to correct the plane’s trim.

His fighter jolted and swung on its hook as it came to rest in the aircraft park. Below him were the big bombers and transports, four altogether, which hadn’t been launched. The rest of the fighters, along with the single-engine torpedo bombers, would fill in around him on the second level. He slid his canopy back until it clicked in placed, and as he stood, the deck crew leaned a twenty-five-foot ladder against his cockpit sill. Joe’s fighter pulled into place beside his.

Cannon ignored the ladder and waved his arms at Joe until he pushed his cockpit open. Over the growl of aero engines and the whine of the skyhook hoists, he shouted, “Get six Kestrels turned around and ready to take off! I want them in the air as soon as we clear the storms!”

Joe showed him a thumbs-up. Cannon went down the ladder two rungs at a time, gave his ground crew a wave, and headed forward. Once he’d closed the hangar hatch, the noise became less deafening, and he tucked his leather flying helmet under his arm. The ventral catwalk had few interesting sights—the ladders up to the engines and broadside guns couldn’t be called interesting in their own right, and enormous fabric gas cells overhead blocked the view of the crew quarters, common spaces, and supporting framing in the nose.

Before he reached the hatch into the forward living space, Cannon took the ladder down into the control gondola. It descended into the map room, dominated by the chart table at its center. Shelves full of map cases were strapped to the bulkheads, and armored shutters had been rolled over the windows. Forward was the bridge, where Churchill stood. He had taken the helm personally, and Cannon didn’t bother him. He had an instinct for aerial navigation, and nobody aboard could guide the zep through a storm better.

Instead, Cannon turned aft to the radio room and air wing command center. The wraparound windows there were shuttered, too, and the lookout at the aftermost point in the compartment pointed her binoculars through a narrow vision slit. A traffic controller stood beside her, a microphone in hand, directing planes onto the skyhooks. A few men and women sat at the radio sets lining both sides of the compartment.

“You might want to hear this, Captain,” one said.

Cannon took the headphones she offered him and put them on.

“—calling Inconstant. HMS Sparrow, calling Inconstant. Are you there, pirate scum?” The voice was impeccably British.

Cannon waved for the microphone, and a radioman put it in his hand. “Captain Cannon here. What’s the word, Leftenant Limey?”

Cannon flipped a switch on his instrument panel, and his fighter’s arresting hook unfolded from its place in the upper fuselage behind his seat. A few framing pieces supported a long bar, currently straight but hinged so that the forward half could swing down and lock the plane onto the skyhook. A light on the panel turned from red to green, and Cannon pulled the flap handle. His plane slowed, the airspeed indicator dropping below one hundred miles per hour. His attention was focused upward, though, watching the skyhook, his arresting hook, and the Fresnel guidance lights on the zeppelin’s underside. He pulled the throttle back further, and the stick shook in his hand as he rode the very edge of the stall. Tiny adjustments brought him in line, and his arresting hook slid neatly through the eye of the skyhook. In one practiced motion, he threw the arresting hook locking lever and pulled his throttle all the way back. The arresting hook clamped his Kestrel firmly onto the skyhook, and the growl of his engines softened to a purr. He flashed a thumbs-up over his head, and with a jolt, the skyhook rose on its hoist cables into the zeppelin.

As he passed through the hatch in the skin, his eyes protested at the sudden dark, and he only caught a glimpse of the bracing and framing between the skin and the hangar before the hook pulled him up through the hangar floor.

The hangar bustled as the deck crew prepared to land all of Inconstant’s remaining fighters. From the left, a transfer hook ran along the overhead rail system, then settled into place around Cannon’s arresting hook and locked there. Cannon released his arresting hook, and the skyhook slid off of it, while the transfer hook carried Cannon’s fighter off to the port side of the hangar. The skyhook shot back down out of the zep’s belly for the next fighter in line, and Cannon’s fighter swung as the transfer hook turned forward toward the aircraft park. Cannon killed his engines and looked over his shoulder. The deck crew had Joe’s fighter on the big, central skyhook, the only one big enough to handle Inconstant’s torpedo bombers, twin-engine bombers, and transports. Like the fighter hooks ahead and astern of it, it was pushed to the starboard bulkhead as possible, leaving room to move airplanes along the rails on the port side. Joe’s Kestrel moved from the skyhook to the transfer hook, and Cannon started to undo his restraints.

Panama, he thought, had played better in the papers and on the radio than it had gone down on the ground, where Cannon had ankled himself and his crew into some serious trouble. They’d escaped by the skin of their teeth, and even though a little more luck had been on their side in their more recent ventures away from traditional air piracy, Cannon still had his doubts. A luxury he could hardly afford, he reminded himself. Once the story of their latest exploits in the East Indies hit the presses in France, he would need to know for sure whether he was willing to commit his crew to this new sort of caper in good conscience. A job from a bunch of monks struck him as a good place to start. How wrong could it go?

It had started a week ago, in Australia, when Pietro di Giacomo, one of his mechanics, had received a telegram.

“From my cousin,” di Giacomo had explained. “He read of your venture in Panama several years ago, and he thinks he has a problem you can solve. He says he can pay, but mio capitano, he is a monk, a man who has taken vows of poverty.”

Cannon had given him the third degree, and decided that most monks weren’t of the type to lie outright. Inconstant was due for a trip to Europe in search of spare parts anyway, so Cannon had rounded up his crew from Darwin’s bars, gambling halls, and houses of ill repute, and set his course for Istanbul by way of Arabia. It had been an uneventful crossing until the Sparrow turned up.

Joe’s fighter dropped back onto Cannon’s wing, and Joe clicked his mic and said, “Looks like you’re leaking fuel from the fuselage, boss.”

Cannon rolled into a tight turn, and saw the telltale trail of white vapor arc out behind his plane. “Looks like I am,” he said. He eased back on his throttle, and the roar of the twin radials grew less oppressive. A thousand feet below, the one British bomber that hadn’t taken fire hastily turned to follow its fellows back toward the Sparrow.

“Got your wing back to the zep,” Joe replied.

Cannon thumbed his microphone switch to click an affirmative, then turned for Inconstant. The zeppelin was much closer to the squall line now, and any minute Cannon expected to hear the signal for all flights to return.

“Good practice, anyway,” Cannon said.

Joe’s voice crackled back, “Expensive.”

Below them, the main dogfight raged on. A British fighter, trailing tongues of fire and a line of smoke, fell out of it and toward the sea. “I wonder if he’s going to call his fighters back,” Cannon mused.

“Have them follow us through?” Joe said. “Risky.”

“British,” Cannon replied. He switched his radio to Inconstant‘s frequency and said, “Bandit One here, coming in with damage and Bandit Two on my wing, over.”

“Roger that,” Inconstant‘s controller replied. “You’re cleared straight in to the number one and number two hooks, over.”

“Bandit One, acknowledged,” Cannon said, then tuned his transmitter back to his and Joe’s private frequency. “I’ll take the forward hook.”

They drew nearer to Inconstant now, the fifteen hundred-foot zeppelin dwarfing their aircraft—six Kestrels could have flown wingtip to wingtip in her shadow. Cannon pushed his fighter’s nose forward and throttled back until he was looking up at the zeppelin’s belly. Panels there had opened, trundling along their rails, and all three skyhooks reached down into the slipstream. Each was all steel, a long, telescoping bar, supported by two stranded hoist cables and terminating in the hook proper, a triangular frame.