Tom Horn--NaNoWriMo Project

[glen]

TOM HORN VERSUS THE WARLORDS OF KRUPP

Chapter 1: “Vaya con Dios, Pancho Villa”

He wasn’t the biggest man that Tom Horn had ever seen. Heaven knows; Tiny Angulfssen back in Saint Louis stood a hair’s breath short of seven feet and had shoulders like a Brahma bull. He once carried two full grown women, one on each shoulder. Of course, a lump of lead smaller than the tip of his little finger had put him in his grave, just like so many other men.
No this, man was big, but far from the biggest. Nevertheless, the minute he stepped into the bar, every eye was upon him. He wore a blue coat that wrapped around him as if made two sizes too big—if that were possible—and then form fitted by wrapping the extra material around him. And he wore baggy grey pants over some black rounded boots with thick hobnail soles and shiny black toes covered in metal.
But the way that he dressed—odd that it was for this part of Texas—was nothing compared to one additional feature that drew everyone’s attention. As big as the man was—and he was big, mind you—two beats after he stepped through the swinging doors of the Javelina Cantina, the place burst into laughter. The big man paused as if he were expecting the outburst, but didn’t crack a smile. Instead, he stood at the entrance and scanned the occupants of the room, apparently looking for someone special.
As the laughter continued, he stepped forward to the bartender, who chuckled as well, but sobered up as the man stepped up to the bar.
“Pardon me,” the dark skinned man said in a clipped accent. “I am seeking someone. A Tom Horn.”
The bartender stared at him, a smile threatening to break through his lips. “Don’t know anyone by that name here,” the bartender said. “But would he be wearing a diaper on his head like you?” At this the bartender burst into laughter, followed by the rest of the cantina. For the man who spoke to him wore a flowing white cloth wrapped around the top of his head.
“Hey, maybe he just washed his hair, and can’t do a thing with it,” someone shouted from the back, which was followed by more laughter.
In response, the big man reached out quickly and snatched the lapel of the bartender with one massive hand and lifted the man off the ground several inches, at the same time dragging him up to his eye level. He held the bartender effortlessly with one arm and stared into his eyes, no hint of amusement in his face. And the bartender—and most of the bar—stopped laughing.
“I—am a Punjabi, born of the high country of my native country of India.I am the son of a warlord and grandson of a king. I have killed a tiger—a man eater—when I was eight with my bare hands. And I have killed more men since then than I care to think about, or tell you about. Now my question was a simple one. Is there a Tom Horn in this fine establishment?”
“He ain’t here.” The words came clear and loudly from the back of the room, and the Punjabi let go of the bartender, letting the small man drop to his feet behind the bar. The big man turned to look at a smaller man, wiry, of about 40, who sat with his feet propped up on another wooden chair in the corner of the room. He was totally nondescript in the western saloon, dirty jeans and faded shirt over a worn pair of black cowboy boots. He was of average height, with a frame that appeared to have seen a lot of abuse, yet still moved smoothly and with the potential for great speed, like a rattlesnake. Steel grey eyes peered from beneath a ten-gallon Stetson with no hint of emotion in them but the sense that they were taking measure of everyone and everything they surveyed. Behind the smaller man, propped against the wall in the corner was a customized Winchester 30-30 with a brass inlay and the initials “T.T.H.” etched in script across the side.
The Punjabi stepped forward, the bar now grown quiet as everyone watched him cross the room, each step he took a heavy stride across the oak flooring. He crossed the distance in three steps and faced the smaller man, who looked up without emotion, at the same time reaching into a shirt pocket and pulling out papers to roll a cigarette. The Punjabi watched as his fingers flew across the paper in a drill that they obviously had gone through thousands of times, and now completed without a casual thought. The cigarette rolled, the smaller man flicked it to his lips in an effortless motion, then left it dangling from his lips. He looked up slowly at the Punjabi, who still stood in front of the table like a massive oak in a forest of smaller scrubs.
“Something else I can help you with, pardner?” the smaller man asked, one eyebrow coming up.
“You would not be this Tom Horn I seek?” the Punjab asked.
The smaller man shook his head slightly.
“Tole you, he left here for New Mexico Territory about two days ago. Said he had a date with some cattle rustlers.”
The Punjabi eyed the smaller man warily, his eyes flashing back to the Winchester propped against the corner, then back to the man’s face.
“I suppose someone with a reputation like that of Tom Horn must be careful with whom he associates,” the Punjabi said.
“S’pose,” the smaller man agreed.
“There might be danger for a man who has been known to kill as many men as he.”
The smaller man nodded. “Might be.”
“Perhaps you can pass along a message to Mr. Horn if you come upon him in the near future,” the Punjab said. “Tell him that I have a proposal for him, a task of great import.”
The smaller man chuckled.
“Tasks of great import are the very thing that Tom Horn don’t need these days,” he said. “That’s what got him in trouble in the first place.”
“Tell him that I, Bashu, will wait for him two days. After that, I must leave, for the task I speak of will wait for no man. Not even the infamous Tom Horn.”
The smaller man, clucked his tongue and winked.
“Now that’s a shame, ‘cuz you know Tom Horn won’t be back this way anytime soon, I imagine.” He pulled his booted feet off the chair and onto the wood floor, reached behind him for the Winchester and pulled it to him, standing.
“Right nice to meet you, Bashu,” the smaller man said to the Punjab, reaching up and touching his fingers to the brim of his hat. “I’ll be sure to pass the word along.”
Bashu stood and watched as the smaller man walked across the floor to the bar and threw two small silver coins to the bartender, thanked him and walked out the front door.
The twilight had turned to darkness outside, and the man with the Winchester on his shoulder paused for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He took the time to strike a match and light his rolled cigarette, which still hung limp from his lower lip. A moment later, a man with a bowler hat and a badge on his lapel stepped up on his right.
“Sure hope you and your buddies aren’t planning any trouble tonight, Tom,” the lawman said, making a show of pulling his coattail free from his gun holster on the right side. Tom glanced down at the move by the lawman, then looked back into his eyes.
“Oh, you know me, Sheriff. I don’t like trouble any more than you.”
“That’s good, because I have strict orders from Austin that we don’t stir up anything with the Mexicans or the Germans across the border. Let them stick to their business, and we will stick to ours. We don’t need any more border skirmishes.”
“War’s coming, Sheriff.”
“Not if I can help it,” the sheriff said. “Not in my town.”
As if in reply, guns went off at the far edge of town, and Tom heard voices shouting in Spanish.
“What about those who come into Presidio from across the border?” asked Tom. “Some of them is just looking for fun, but some are looking for trouble too.”
“I’ll take care of the trouble,” the sheriff said quietly. “You just steer clear of all of ‘em, hear me?”
Tom nodded slightly, and the sheriff left him, walking quickly in the direction of the gunfire.
“Don’t mind me, Sheriff,” Tom said under his breath. “I just got to take care of a little business. Real quiet like.” He stood in the dark of the wood walkway and stared across the street into a black alley. A few minutes later, he saw movement there, and heard a low whistle.
Tom strode across the dirt street toward the alley, which was next to the Presidio bank. He turned his back to the alley and leaned against the bank, looking out over the street. With the gathering darkness, the town had become more active. Lights came on down the street, and the gunfire continued at the edge of town. Tom was thankful that Sheriff Wicker would have his hands full with them, leaving Tom and his boys available for their own project.
“Everyone ready?” Tom muttered under his breath.
“Si, Senor Horn,” came a man’s voice with a heavy accent. “We be ready when you are.”
“OK, Pablo, you and Lupe go join the rest of those Mexes headed back to the base. Kid and I will tag along, back about a quarter mile or so. You know the signal. We’ll be ready when you give it. Vaminos, muchachos.”
He felt rather than heard the two men in sombreros slink off into the darkness, ready to join those who were returning across the border to the barracks in Ojinaga, Mexico. Tensions ran high between ranchers here in the Big Bend area of the Rio Grande Valley and the new escalation of military in Mexico along the border. Tom had no idea what had led the Mexicans to start the military build-up, but the Germans were quick to take advantage of their insecurity, and had turned a small adobe fort into a state-of-the-art Army garrison.
And then there were those big grey things in the sky. Zeppellins, they called them. Tom thought they were the biggest tomfoolery he had ever seen. They were as huge as a mountain, and yet he still had seen no practical use for them. So far all he had seen they were good for was scaring the cattle.
“And horses,” Tom muttered to himself as he left his spot by the bank and headed south down the street. Horses. That was the business for tonight. He stopped for a long minute outside the livery stable, and watched as a barefoot, skinny, strawberry-haired kid of 14 in bib overalls gestured with a man in a German uniform over a contraption with two wheels and metal handlebars. Tom saw that it had started off as a bicycle, but steam came from vents on its side, and a bulbous canister rested beneath the seat.
“Nein, nein,” the German said to the young boy. “Ist kaput. Kann nicht reparieren.”
The kid gestured palm out for the man to wait, then pushed the German’s insistent hands back and reached into his back pocket for a giant end wrench. He adjusted the nut at the top of the canister, tapped it with the side of the wrench, then pushed a lever forward. The bike chugged into life.
“Unmöglich!” the German said. “Vielen dank!” He reached over and grasped the hand of the kid and shook it vigorously, before mounting the metal bike with steam coming from its sides and putting into the street and off to the south.
“Another happy Heinie,” Tom said quietly, following the uniformed man with his eyes. “We can all sleep more soundly tonight.” The kid looked over when he heard Tom’s voice and ran out to join him. He glanced up at him and tried to stand just like Tom.
“You got the uniform?” Tom asked the boy quietly. The kid nodded and tilted his head to gesture back toward the livery stable. Tom followed him back inside and put on a German uniform that the kid had stashed behind some bales of hay. It was long enough, but tight across the chest and shoulders. Tom grimaced.
“Don’t these Germans eat anything? Oh, well, I don’t have to wear it long.”
Tom looked down at the kid and raised an eyebrow. “Now listen to me, Kid. You’re 14 years old, and if it were up to me, you’d still be home. But you’re not, you’re with me. So if you want to live to be 15, you have got to learn to mind. You got me?”
The boy paused, smiling up at Tom, then nodded.
“None of this daredevil stuff, hear me? You do what I say, when I say it. Got it?”
The kid nodded again.
“OK, we got to be on foot tonight, but just for the first part. Now let’s go get our horses.”
Kid reached out, waiting for Tom to give him something, but Tom shook his head.
“You get the gun when we get there. No sense blowing your foot off until we’re at a point where you can use it.”
Kid’s shoulders slumped, then he nodded. The boy followed a few steps behind as Tom continued south and to the bridge that spanned the Rio Grande River.
The two of them could see the three massive, grey airships in the distance to the northwest, and they cut away from the road to Ojinaga and across country toward the base. Tom led the way, with Kid following close behind, as they wandered through the barren rocks and sagebrush that surrounded them. They climbed an embankment, and soon they looked out over the base.
Tom had spent a year in the Army when they were storming San Juan Hill in Cuba, and so he was used to the look of a military base. This had some of the same trappings, but with some major changes. Tom was used to see a darkened base, perhaps lighted by campfires or a kerosene lantern here and there. This one was brightly lit by electric lights throughout. A large steam engine near the river puffed, its heavy metal arm visibly churning out the needed electricity for the base. This side of the power generator, the three airships floated in air as if held up by invisible wires.
Tom continued to scan for his goal until he saw what he wanted. On the far side of the camp were the horses, corralled along with the many others that the base needed. The military base was a mixture of about 100 German officers, advisors and airship specialists. Beyond that, the base was occupied by about 1,000 Mexican troops. And while the Germans were equally comfortable on horses as well as their mechanical contraptions Tom had seen once or twice—the things they called motor-sickels–, the Mexes still hadn’t mastered the mechanics of the wheeled dervishes. They were strictly hands on horses.
And Tom’s Parker Ranch had the best horses in all of south Texas and north Mexico. Actually it was Mary, Tom’s sister’s, ranch, but after he returned from Cuba, she had enlisted him as foreman and unofficial ranch manager. The Kid kinda came with the package. Mary’s husband Horace Parker died when the Rio Grande overflowed two years ago. Since that time, the Kid hadn’t spoken a word, but had latched onto Tom like he was the Second Coming. Tom shrugged to himself. Could be worse, he thought. But not much.
When Mary had refused to sell her horses to the Mexican General Pancho Villa, who Tom realized had designs on being president not too far in the future, the Generallisimo had sent his troops to take them by force. Mary told the local sheriff, but the sheriff had more common sense than bravery, and told Mary to claim that renegade Comanches had taken them, and to file with the Bureau of Indian Affairs for redress of grievances.
“Shoot,” Tom muttered, and Kid looked over at him curiously. Tom had never had much trust in the government. In fact, every experience he had had taught him to avoid government types like he was back on the Plains avoiding Sioux. That was his first reaction when he saw that rag-headed giant back in the cantina. The big man had government written all over him.
Back to work, Tom told himself, and focused on the business at hand. He took one more long look at the lay of the land before him, then turned to Kid.
“Look, here’s where we split up,” Tom said. “I can fit in as one of those German officers—thanks to this borrowed uniform—but you’d stand out. The best thing you can do is stay right here and cover us when we come out. We’ll be traveling fast, so you’ll have to catch anyone who is on our tail. Got it?”
Kid nodded quickly, then used the hand signals Tom had taught him from Indian sign language.
“I stay—shoot those who chase—meet you after.”
Tom nodded. “Pretty good, Kid. Here–.” He handed him his Winchester and a bandolier of shells. “Your mama would skin us both if we knew what we were doing out here. And I’ll skin you myself if anything happens to my baby there.” He gestured at his Winchester. “That gun means more than your sorry butt ever will, so take good care of her.”
Kid grinned and nodded again. He took his sleeve and wiped dust from the brass magazine.
“OK, remember. Don’t shoot till we are coming out. Cover us until we are away, then hightail it across the river. I’ll meet you back at the ranch.”
Tom slid back down the embankment and then dusted himself off before walking back to the street that headed into town and toward the base. A line of Mexicans and Germans was spread out on the road, some headed back into Presidio, others headed south to Ojinaga and the base. Tom joined the line headed south, wondering whether Pablo and Lupe were ahead of behind him.
Tom had spent eight months in the Army when they fought the Spanish in Cuba, during which he had gotten a sense of military uniforms and protocol. But it had been five years, and he had never put much effort into remembering that part of his life. Nevertheless, he watched the other German soldiers and noticed how they walked more erect and stiffly than their Mexican counterparts. At one point, a German soldier passed him in the other direction and saluted him. He hesitated before saluting in return, a second after the other man had passed.
The road to the base trailed off to the right, and Tom followed it. Two Mexicans and a German stood at the entrance. All three saluted him as he came in the gate, and this time Tom saluted promptly in response.
“Alles in ordnung, Herr Major,” he heard the German guard say, and Tom grunted in response. He didn’t know what the other words meant, but he figured out that Ma-yore in German probably meant Major in American. He shook his head and cursed under his breath. He’d asked Kid to get him a uniform. He didn’t expect a major’s uniform. That would make it harder to blend in.
He marched down the main street between tent rows, and had to put up with soldier after soldier saluting him. Finally, he saw that the tents had given way to more rustic surroundings, including a large corral area with about 200 horses in it. A dozen Mexicans, some with uniforms but many with bandeleros and sombreros, stood around the outside of the corral. All had bolt-action rifles. He glanced to the right and saw Lupe talking in Mexican to one of the soldiers there. He didn’t know for sure where Pablo was, but he hoped that he would know in a minute.
As if in response, he heard firecrackers going off not too far away. The noise spooked the horses, and many of the man as well. The horses whinnied and screamed and began to run around the corral.
“Placido! Placido!” one of the guards shouted by the corral. Suddenly he saw Lupe hit the man over the head and quickly pull the gate to the corral open. Men rushed into the corral, trying to keep the horses from rushing out the gate. Tom responded by letting out a shrill whistle.
A stallion in the back of the pack responded with a loud whinny and by rearing up on its hind legs. The others took up the call, and all of the horses bolted for the entrance.
Tom waded deftly through the charging horses, while the men around him ran in panic. Lupe stood on the fence and leaped onto the back of a brown mare that passed by. A beat later, the palomino stallion that had started the panic bolted by. Without missing a step, Tom grabbed hold of the big stallion’s mane and vaulted onto its back.
Tom and the line of running horses charged down the main walkway in the middle of the base. Occasionally a man would hold up his hands and try to stop them, but most ran in panic. They were used to riding horses into battle; they weren’t used to standing in front of a stampeding herd of 200 beasts. And they weren’t getting paid enough to risk their life to do so.
Then one or two saw that Lupe, Tom and now Pablo rode among the herd. Tom heard order shouted in German and Spanish, then a gunshot. Instinctively, he ducked low on the side of the stallion and urged him onward. He glanced down as they rushed through the main gate to see the soldier that had called him Major staring up in surprise.
“See ya later, Pardner,” Tom muttered, and the eyes of the German grew wide.
The roar of the thundering hooves was met a second later by a different sound. Tom heard the roar of the steam cycles revving behind him, and then glanced up to see that one of the zeppelins was rising above its moorings.
“The big airship,” Pablo said from a few feet away. “They are coming after their horses.”
“Let ‘em come!” Tom roared. “What are they going to do? And they’re my horses, dang it!”
Tom heard the cycles coming up behind them, and glanced back to see that at least one of them had a sidecar. A German in a pointed helmet held a strange looking gun in his hands. Tom didn’t like the look of that. Just as the man aimed his awkward looking gun at him, the front tire of the bike blew out, and the vehicle went careening off to the side. Tom looked up at the darkened hillside, where he knew that Kid lay with his Winchester.
“Good shooting, Kid,” he muttered.
But other steam cycles were pulling forward. Instead of trying to catch the horses, they decided the best strategy was to go to the bridge and block the way into the United States. Unfortunately for them, Tom had a completely different strategy in mind from the beginning. Tom and his stallion led the herd off an embankment and onto the sandy banks of the Rio Grande, which was running low as it always did this time of the year. He suspected that the cycles would have a harder time following them on the soft sand. And he was right. Tom looked back to see that the steam cycles and their armed riders had paused at the edge of the road, and they argued about which direction to go with the vehicles.
“Yee-haw!” Tom shouted, and Pablo and Lupe yipped in response. He drew in a breath and relaxed, their path ahead apparently assured.
It was then that a dark shadow came between Tom and the full moon above. He looked up to see the sinister grey shape of the zeppelin creeping across the sky above him. Above the sound of the horses, he heard a tinny sound of a steam engine running the propellers that drove the airship forward.
What could they do? Tom asked himself, but a cold fear came over him. A few second later, a gatling gun opened up above him.
Wham-wham-wham came the sound, and Tom saw the water spray off to their left. The moving airship combined with the moving horses made it hard to be accurate with any kind of gun, but Tom knew that time would help them find that accuracy. He needed to get them under cover—and quickly.
Tom whistled shrilly and he and the stallion charged across the shallow river. The other horses followed quickly across. The airship moved ahead of them to the north side—the American side–of the river, anticipating them coming up the embankment and once again into open range of its gatling gun. Instead, Tom stayed in the river bottom, hugging the lower edge of the embankment and keeping out of sight of the airship. He followed the river for another mile, occasionally hearing the airship’s engine whining in the sky.
Then the embankment broke open and Tom and the horses were once again exposed to the open sky. He glanced around him to see where the airship was and saw that it lingered to the northeast, still believing that they would double back to the road headed into town. Instead, Tom led the horses into a narrow ravine that opened up before them and headed straight east.
The sheer walls of the ravine were a comfort to Tom, and once again he was glad for Kid, who had scouted out the hidden trail earlier that day. In rainy weather, it was a wash from the higher ground to the Rio Grande. Today it was a windy—but hidden—trail that led them away from town and directly to the Parker Ranch.
When they got deep into the ravine, Tom got the horses to slow and then to stop. They had left in a panic, and even though he knew the stallion could take the abuse, he didn’t want to jeopardize any of the horses. Pancho Villa and his men had stolen 50 horses from Parker Ranch. Now they had stolen back 200 in return. He doubted that anyone could identify him to the authorities—German, Mexican or American—but he knew Sheriff Wicker would have a pretty good idea who was stirring up trouble. At least he knew that the sheriff sympathized with the Parker Ranch. Relations with Mexico were strained, and this didn’t help matters, but what was fair for the Mexes ought to be fair for everybody else. He’d have to have a talk with the sheriff tomorrow. He’d understand. Sure he would.
They stayed in the ravine for another three hours. Occasionally they heard steam bikes pass by somewhere in the distance, or heard the airship buzz past somewhere above. But in the ravine, the horses began to calm down as well as Tom and his men. After everyone was rested and Tom thought enough time had passed, they led the herd quietly through the rest of the ravine and out to the open range of Parker Ranch.
Despite it being January, Tom was sweating by the time they had the horses penned up in the box canyon and headed back to the bunkhouse. Tomorrow Tom would treat all the men to a big dinner with all the frijoles and tortillas they could eat. But tonight everyone was satisfied to held back to and empty quiet bunk and a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
Tom said goodnight to Lupe and Pablo, then walked over to the main house. He started to reach for the door, then heard the whinny of a horse nearby. His senses once again heightened, he stepped quietly north around the house and saw that four horses were tied to a tree on that side of the house. Someone stood in the darkness nearby, watching to make sure that no one took them or spooked them. He also saw that that someone wore a fancy, two-gun rig, a bowler cap and a shiny badge on his lapel that gleamed in the moonlight.
Tom stood there for a minute, trying to decide what to do. Then he sighed.
“I’m just too tired to care,” he muttered to himself, and turned to enter the door.
The living room of the adobe and log house was lit with a fire in the fireplace and a couple of oil lanterns. It was bright enough, in any case, to see that Sheriff Wicker stood in the center of the room with two other men, talking to his sister Mary. They turned toward the door when Tom entered. One of the men, big and burly, who looked somewhat familiar, reached for his sidearm when he saw Tom. Tom resisted responding in kind: there were three of them to his one, and Mary would likely be shot in the process. To his relief, Tom saw another lawman, also somewhat familiar, reach out and restrain the man pulling the gun.
“There’s no need for gunplay here,” the lawman said. “He’s not going to be any trouble, are you?” He turned to Tom, who raised an eyebrow without responding.
“Tom Horn, I don’t know if you remember me, but I am Deputy Marshal Joe Lefoers from Gunnison County, Colorado. I have a warrant for your arrest for the murder of Willie Nickells.”
When the lawman opened his mouth, Tom instantly recognized both the men.
“Long time, Joe,” Tom said. “Didn’t you use to be a Pinkerton?”
“Nope,” the lawman said. “Never left Gunnison County before this trip. Good to see you, Tom.”
“Well, Joe, you know me. You know my record. I been a lawman, a Pinkerton, a range detective, and an Indian scout. My job has called for me to kill more than my share of men, and even more because they came gunning for me. But I honestly can’t recall any of them named Willie Nickells.”
The big man roared. “That’s my son, you bastard.” He stepped forward, but Lefoers stepped in his way.
“Calm down, Mr. Nickells,” he said. “We’re going to do this, and you’ll get justice. But we’re going to do this my way.”
“I remember you,” Tom said to Nickells. “You ran that sheep ranch out near the foothills. You got into that trouble with the railroad men.” He paused thinking, then the reality dawned on him. “The kid…outside the saloon…that was yours?”
“That was my Willie,” the man spat. “And you gunned him down like a dog.”
Tom looked toward the corner, speaking more to himself than to the others in the room. “It was dark. The kid came at me sudden like. I fired before I realized that he was only..only what, fifteen?”
“Fourteen,” the man moaned. “Fourteen years old.”
The same age as Kid, Tom thought. Old enough to get in trouble; young enough not to know any better.
“Not to repeat myself on anything, but I have a warrant here to take you back to Gunnison County for trial,” Lefoers said.
“And execution,” Nickells added.
“If need be,” Lefoers added.
Tom scratched his chin and once again considered the odds.
“Well, you aren’t making my options very attractive, Joe,” Tom said. “I don’t like trouble, but it sounds like you have a heap of it waiting for me up north.”
“Sounds that way, Tom. But I reckon you don’t have much choice, lessun you want to pull down on the three of us with your six guns and put your sister here at risk.”
Tom paused. “No, no, I don’t want that. Hmm.”
The three visitors, Tom and Mary stood staring at each other for a long minute. Suddenly the door behind Tom opened and Kid stepped in, the Winchester held barrel-first, pointed toward the three men. Both Lefoers and Nickells drew their sidearms. Tom knew that Lefoers would pause long enough to consider the risk, but he didn’t know what Nickells would do. He stepped in front of Kid and threw him to the floor. A gun boomed behind him and a bullet twanged against the doorjam. Kid looked up and fired the rifle as he fell. The gun boomed and the third man, up to this minute unidentified, folded in half and collapsed to the floor.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” Tom yelled, falling full against his nephew. He raised his hands in surrender, then reached down and loosened his gunbelt and threw it across the floor. Then he grabbed the Winchester and slid it across the floor to Lefloers.
Mary bent over the injured man, while Leflours picked up the Winchester and stepped toward Tom, who still lay on the floor.
“Don’t hurt the Kid,” Tom said urgently as Lefloers approached.
In response, Tom saw the butt of the Winchester smash into his face, and everything went dark.

[glen]

Ch. 2—“Teddy Roosevelt, I hardly knew ye.”

Tom Horn awoke with the too-familiar feeling of pain between his eyes and the taste of blood in his mouth. The floor beneath him vibrated and rumbled and he heard the distant chug of a steam locomotive. He opened his eyes to find himself lying on the weather beaten oak floor of a train car. A further glance showed him solid iron bars set into the floor and arching upward into the ceiling. He was in a cell inside a train, apparently headed north for Colorado.
He lifted his head slowly, and a wave of nausea overwhelmed him. He groaned and lay his head back down.
“Awake I see,” he heard Joe Lefoers’ voice say with a rumble from across the room. “I’d take my time getting up if I were you. That whack on the head has got to hurt.”
“Little bit,” Tom responded, his face still plastered against the floor. “You know you didn’t have to do that. I was planning on coming peaceably.”
“Things were getting out of hand. Between you and the sheepherder, I was afraid somebody else was going to get shot.”
His words refreshed Tom’s memory and he sat upright, a flash of pain hitting Tom’s head like a pile driver. He gritted his teeth and sat back against the heavy oak planks of the cell wall.
“So what happened to Nickells?” Tom asked, looking across the darkened room at the U.S. marshal. Lefoers sat in a wooden chair on the other side of the iron bars, whittling on a stick with his pocketknife. A pile of pine shavings lay on the floor beneath him. Lefoers grinned slightly, then gestured to a metal cot in the far corner where the other big man from Colorado lay asleep.
“Finally got him to settle down,” Lefoers said. “Never seen a man so high strung since…well, since Willy Pike. ‘Member him? Used to sleep with a loaded gun under his pillow.”
“I remember,” Tom said. “Went to wake him one night and he plumb near blew my head off. That boy needed some serious relax time. Whatever happened to him?”
“Got his hand blown off in a mining accident,” Lefoers said, matter-of-factly. “Married a widow lady and moved to Minneapolis.”
“Hmm. Could have been worse. I never expected him to live to be 30. He was the shakiest man I ever seen with a gun. Was scary just being in the same room with him when he had that piece drawn.”
Tom gingerly moved from a sitting position to standing against the metal bars, where he could look around in the darkened train car better. He paused when he saw another form on the metal cot inside his cell. A minute later, he recognized the faded bib overalls and sandy colored hair of the still form.
“Nah, nah, no,” Tom said, shaking his head. “Joe, tell me you didn’t bring the boy too.”
Lefoers shook his head. “Had to. He shot a deputy marshal. There’s bound to be an inquiry.”
“He’s just a boy, goldang it!” Tom said, an edge coming into his voice. “Is the marshal dead?”
“No, I think he’ll make it. But he got shot, nevertheless. Judge will want to know that I did my duty and brought the shooter in.”
“Dang it, Joe, you were there just as I was. You saw what happened. It was an accident, pure and simple.”
“Was it, Tom? I saw someone come in the door, drop to the floor when he saw our guns and pull off a shot that hit my deputy in the gut. And I’m pretty sure that’s what Nickells will testify to as well.”
“What about the fact that Nickells shot first? And the fact that I was pulling him to the ground when the gun went off?”
Lefoers leaned back in his seat. “Well, that’s for a jury to decide, ain’t it.”
“Blast you, Joe. You got a heart of coal. I promised his mother that I wouldn’t lead him down the same path I went down. He’s no gunslinger. He’s going to be a rancher, like his daddy. I promised, and now he’s on a prison train headed to watch his uncle hang, and maybe do so himself.”
Lefoers didn’t answer, but stood and walked over to the black potbellied stove in the middle of the room. He opened the door, threw shavings from his woodcarving into the burning maw inside, then reached down and threw another small log into the fire before closing it.
Tom sighed and turned to look out the small barred window that faced the blackened exterior. Blurred shapes outside told him that they had risen in elevation, leaving the desert of south Texas behind to enter the scrub trees of the New Mexico mountains.
“What time you figure we’ll arrive in Gunnison?” Tom asked over his shoulder.
“Sometime mid-morning tomorrow,” Joe answered. “The trial is scheduled for three days after that.”
“So soon?” Tom asked.
“Shoot, they already got a gallows built. They want to make sure you hang.”
Over the years, Tom had learned the value of conserving energy, especially in crisis situations. When there was nothing that could be done, he automatically went into sleep mode so that he would be rested when the time to do something came. He looked over at Kid resting peaceably on the cot, then sat down in the corner with his back against the wall, tipped his hat over his eyes, and went to sleep.
That is, he appeared to the world to be asleep. He opened one eye slightly every few minutes to keep an eye on Joe Lefoers, who put his whittling down, lean back in his chair and decided to close his eyes as well.
Sometime after that—Tom really did fall asleep—he felt the railcar jerk. The train jerked and bumped regularly, but somehow this felt different to Tom. He was awake in an instant, but didn’t move. He watched to see if Lefoers responded, but saw no reaction.
The railcar jerked again, and this time Lefoers did raise his head in surprise. Suddenly there was a wrenching sound from above, and both Tom and Lefoers looked up. The timbers in the ceiling groaned and then began to collapse into themselves. In the darkness, Tom saw two giant metal hands like scoops tear across the wood ceiling, tearing the boards in half. A gap about eight feet square appeared in the ceiling, and Tom could see stars through the hole. He looked beyond the hole and saw what looked like a rope or chain running from the rooftop to the dark sky above.
Tom saw Lefoers automatically reach behind him on the wall for a rifle. To his chagrin, Tom saw that the rifle Lefoers chose was his own Winchester 30-30. The brass inlay on the side shone in the moonlight. Tom suddenly decided that Lefoers would not own his gun when he was hanged. That is, if he had any choice in the matter.
Lefoers looked up into the dark hole above both their heads, straining to see anything in the darkness. He squinted, then his eyes opened wide as if he recognized something. He was raising the Winchester to his shoulder when a canvas bag filled with sand flew through the opening and hit him square in the head. The gun flew through the air, and Lefoers dropped to the floor. Tom looked over at Nickells, who lay snoring in the darkness. Kid, on the other hand, raised his head and looked up from the other cot. Tom looked back at the black hole above and waited.
A second later, a rope ladder dropped through the hole and to the floor. Two legs followed quickly behind and the large man from the bar scurried down the ladder and dropped to the floor.
Tom’s mouth dropped open. “Injun Joe!” he said, the quickly corrected himself. He snapped his fingers and pointed at the big man.
“B-something! Bastille! Barry!”
The large dark man loomed toward Tom, his brow dark in the shadows.
“Bashu,” he said darkly. “My name is Bashu.”
“Right,” Tom said quickly. “Behind you, Bashu, over on the wall somewhere, there should be a ring of keys. Be a good Injun and pop this lock, would you?”
“Stand back,” the big man said. Tom stepped back and Bashu grasped the iron door of the cell and pulled upward. The metal squealed, and a second later, the iron door creaked and broke free of its hinges. Bashu pulled the door toward him and set it down to the side.
“That’s a nice skill to have,” Tom murmured. He looked back at Kid, who was already up and standing behind him, then looked back at Bashu.
“I s’pose you’re still trying to recruit me,” Tom said. “Well, considering the alternatives, brother you got me.”
“Up,” Bashu said simply, and gestured toward the rope ladder. In response, they all heard a noise behind Bashu and realized that Nickells was waking up from his sound slumber. Bashu began to draw a huge, wicked curved blade from his belt, but Tom held up his hand. He crossed to the cot where Nickells was sitting up, still disoriented, and aimed a right uppercut at Nickells’ chin. The old man fell back on the cot, unconscious again.
Tom turned back to Bashu and Kid.
“The man’s only guilty of loving his son,” Tom said, shaking his head. “I’d do the same thing.” He glanced at Kid. “Let’s go.”
Kid went up the ladder first, and Tom followed, as Bashu steadied the moving rope ladder. Tom climbed out of the train, and quickly felt a blast of cold mountain air hit him. He looked above, worried about Kid’s ability to hang on, but the natural daredevil above him was already high up the ladder. He hadn’t really thought about where they were going, but now he saw the huge grey shape of a zeppelin above them.
Halfway up the ladder, Tom paused and looked down and saw that the airship was anchored to the train by two grappling hooks, one on front and one of the rear of the prison car. He saw that Bashu was right below him, so he quickly continued upward.
When his head was right below the base of the cupola that rode on the bottom of the zeppelin, he saw hands reach down and grab his shoulders pulling him up and into the compartment.
At the same time, he heard a twang and the ladder lurched beneath him. As his feet rose above the ladder, he looked down to see the ropes fall away from the zeppelin and the train suddenly fell away beneath them. It made him sick to his stomach to look down at the ground getting farther away, and the big Punjabi clutching to the ladder as it swayed beneath him in the darkness. But the image was a fleeting one, and an instant later his feet stood on solid planking with only a hint of movement and vibration beneath them.
He looked around him and realized that the room was illuminated by electric lights. Two soldiers dressed in the tan pants, blue shirt and floppy hat he recognized from the recent war looked at him from bushy moustaches. One difference he noticed was that instead of a U.S.A. patch on their shoulder, they displayed a diamond with the letters “N.Y.M.” Both were a decade younger than him, but a look in their eyes told him that they were battle hardened and wouldn’t flinch in the face of danger.
“This way, sir,” one of them barked at him matter-of-factly, and Tom nodded. As he followed the soldier down a narrow hallway, he heard Bashu come through the entrance and the trap door close behind them.
The soldier led Tom and Kid down the hallway to what appeared to be the control room. A series of windows stretched from floor to ceiling in front of him and wrapped around each wall, curving around the corners in the room. About half a dozen men worked on various equipment in the room, all dressed in the same uniform. One man stood talking to what looked like the airship captain, who stood at the helm and held onto the wheel of the ship. The man speaking to him was a big, loud man in a uniform and floppy hat pinned on the side, who seemed familiar to Tom, and became recognizable as they approached.
“Bully!” the man roared. “I see Bashu brought you to us in one piece, Corporal Horn.”
“Colonel,” Tom Horn said quietly, holding out his hand. “Long time.”
“Indeed, young man,” the colonel said, grasping Tom’s hand vigorously with a gloved hand. “But it’s governor now. Governor Theodore Roosevelt of the great state of New York, but just Teddy if you prefer.”
“I didn’t think you would remember me after I left Cuba early,” Tom said.
“Nonsense,” Roosevelt said. “You were one of my best men. It wasn’t your fault that you picked up that nasty malaria. In fact, if you weren’t so memorable, I wouldn’t have gone through the bother of coming to get you.”
“Well, thanks for that,” Tom said. “I much prefer your company to that of Marshal Lefoers.”
Roosevelt threw back his head and roared at that. “Yes, well I don’t think you need worry about that little incident in Colorado anymore. That is, if you are willing to work with us.”
Tom shrugged. “Looks like I don’t have much choice.”
Roosevelt grimaced and nodded. “Choices. That’s the rub, then. We all want to have choices. And that’s where you come in. Follow me.”
Roosevelt saluted the captain, who straightened to attention and returned his salute. Roosevelt went back down the hallway past the room where they had entered through the trap door. At the opposite end of the hall, a door opened on cue and Bashu stood at the entrance, holding the door. Roosevelt led them into a spacious office, complete with a oversized desk by the entrance. At the far end the room featured a curving series of windows exactly opposite the windows in the control room. Tom stepped gingerly forward and peered over the edge to the dark ground below. In the distance he could see a single light, which he suspected was the campfire of some lonely traveler.
Roosevelt laughed. “We’re over southern Colorado as we speak. Within an hour, we will be entering Nebraska, headed east.”
“East?” Tom echoed.
“East,” Roosevelt nodded. “I—we have work ahead of us in New York City. Have you ever been to New York?”
Tom shook his head. “Farthest east I’ve ever been is St. Louis. And of course, Miami, before we sailed to Cuba. And Fort Benning, Georgia of course.”
“Well, that sounds like you’ve seen a bit, then.”
“What’s this all about, Colonel?”
Roosevelt frowned and look out the window before responding. “Do you want the short answer, or the long answer?”
“You know me,” Tom said, grinning. “Straight to the point.”
“The short answer is, I want to hire you to protect my niece. But that is only a partial picture of a very complex puzzle.”
“Protect your niece? I’m no sort of a bodyguard.”
“You served four years as a Pinkerton detective, who, among other things were responsible for protecting President Abraham Lincoln during the War Between the States.”
“Yeah, but--.”
“I realize that your job was never to serve as bodyguard. But that’s really not why I sought you out.”
Tom sat silently and waited.
“You did a lot of dubious things in your many jobs on the frontier. One of your job titles was Prairie Detective, which consisted mainly of killing men.”
Tom said nothing.
“As I suspected, I will take your silence as an affirmative response. “In Europe, the occupation is referred to as assassin, after the hashashin warriors from the Near East. Although you didn’t rely on drugs like hashish to keep your courage up, you have honed the skills necessary to be successful—very successful—at this craft.”
Tom frowned. “So I killed a lot of men. How does that protect your niece?”
“The men who are seeking to hurt her—kill or kidnap her—are professionals from Europe. If it were simply a matter of projecting a physical presence or bullying people around through brute strength, my colleague Bashu would do an adequate job of protecting her. But as you have probably noticed, he does tend to stand out in public and makes a more than adequate target if need be.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed,” Tom said, looking at the big man in the corner and grinning. “Nothing against the Injun, but he would make a pretty good target for a bullet or a Comanche arrow or two.”
“No, for this task, I am seeking someone who can become one with the environment, fade into the terrain, but also think like the men who are after my Ellie.”
“Your niece,” Tom said, and Roosevelt nodded.
“I am a man with a gift for leadership and for politics,” he continued. “I have risen to governorship of the leading state in our fair country, and I suspect that soon I will find a position on a national level. I hope—I plan—to lead this country out of its backward stance as an isolationist state to its proper position as a world leader.
“But Ellie—Eleanor—has a gift for statesmanship that I could never come close to. She can sit in a room of men and convince them of anything she has a mind to. She also has a burden for mankind, to do what’s best for the common man. I will go to the White House someday, but she will go far, far beyond that position to become a true statesman. While I will influence our America, she will influence the world.”
“And this is why these men want to hurt her?” Tom asked. “Why would anyone want to hurt a girl who only wants to help people?”
“Because she—as well as I—are firm believers in peace. While I feel that a strong government is the best way to prevent war, she belongs to a group that believes that other methods should be followed to preserve the peace.”
“And not everyone wants peace?”
Roosevelt shook his head and stood up from his chair.
“War is big business,” he said. “There are many millionaires in the world who have made their fortunes on the dead bodies of young men. And these wealthy men will stop at nothing to make sure their money continues to line their pockets.”
Tom nodded. “So what we’re looking at is a bunch of rich donkeys somewhere in Europe who don’t want peace to become too popular. And they think that by getting your niece out of the picture, they keep getting rich.”
“Exactly,” Roosevelt said.
“So where is your niece now?”
“At her home in New York. But she will be making a trip to Europe in two weeks. And you will be coming along. In the meantime, I would get some rest.”
Tom nodded, then looked up.
“Colonel, you hired me because I can think like a killer.”
Roosevelt turned and an eyebrow went up.
“And…there are two approaches to a killing. One is to be choosy, select your target, find the best location, wait and strike at the right moment. That’s the way I work, but the downside is that you only get one shot. No, if I was this rich guy who wanted her dead, I’d be using the second approach.”
“Which is?”
“Come after her with both guns blazing, and come often and fast. You already know they are out there, and what they want. They don’t have to be subtle. They just have to be efficient.”
“So what do you propose, Tom?”
“I would think their first target would be me, the guy you hired to protect her.”
Roosevelt’s eyes narrowed, then he nodded slightly.
“It’s possible they have someone right here on this airship.”
“Likely,” said Tom. “It’s what I’d do.”
“Very well,” Roosevelt said, smacking one hand with his leather glove he held in the other. “I think it is prudent for us to interview the staff here. Let’s plan on that first thing tomorrow.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Tom said.
“Very well. Get your rest and we will assemble right here tomorrow after breakfast.”
Roosevelt gestured for the door and Tom and Kid followed Bashu down the hallway again to a small bunkroom. Kid jumped onto the top of a three-tiered bunk and was asleep within seconds. Tom took a minute to lay his Winchester down between him and the wall, then unstrapped his holstered handguns. Bashu stood in the doorway, a boulder in the small room.
“You got something to say?” Tom said to the big man.
“The Roosevelts—Eleanor and the Governor—are under my keeping. I have sworn to protect them with my life. And I will uphold that honor.”
“You got a point here, Bingo, or are you just flapping your gums?”
Bashu stepped forward and towered over Tom.
“My point is this. Their protection is not just a job to me. If you do anything to harm them or put them in jeopardy, I will personally cut off your hands and feet and drop you in the desert for the wolves to devour.”
Tom stared up at the Punjabi.
“You done now? Through? You know, I may not look it, Bisquick, but I do have a code of honor too. I have my word. And I gave my word to the Colonel that I would take care of his little niece. And when I give my word, I do it, come hell or high water.”
Tom returned Bashu’s stare with an icy glare of his own.
“I will be watching you,” Bashu grumbled through his deep voice.
“Go ahead if you want, Pardner. But if you really want to help, stop worrying about me and start worrying about those other guys who want to do her in. Use those eyeballs for something other than trying to intimidate me.”
Bashu stared at Tom for another moment, then exited the room and closed the door behind him.
Tom closed his eyes for what seemed like an a moment, then opened them to see Kid shaking him awake. Noise of pots and pans clanking and the aroma of bacon and fried potatoes filled the air. Tom was reminded that he hadn’t eaten in two days, and his mouth watered at the smell of familiar and welcome food.
Kid and Tom used a basin to clean up, then exited to find the dining hall. Roosevelt’s office was reorganized to play the part of a cafeteria, with a long table being summoned for somewhere to stretch the length of the room. Tom and Kid took their seats, and were soon finishing up a hearty breakfast. Afterward, while the staff was cleaning up the breakfast area and removing the table, Tom and Kid stepped over to the end of the room where the windows offered a panorama of the rolling plains below.
Tom was surprised to see Teddy Roosevelt standing outside the window on a small balcony with a wooden railing that Tom had missed the night before. The windows had slid back to either side, allowing the Governor to go outside and look down. Tom and Kid stepped through the small opening and did the same.
When he looked down, however, Tom grabbed the railing before him and pulled back. He heard a chuckle from Roosevelt.
“Takes some getting used to, doesn’t it? We are close to a mile above the surface of the earth. I’d wager that you’ve never had this experience before.”
“Nope,” Tom said, his fingers still desperately clinging to the handrail. “Figure I might have made a mistake coming out here.”
“The young boy doesn’t seem to mind the height,” Roosevelt said, nodding to the other side of Tom. Tom turned to see Kid grinning wildly while leaning far over the railing and looking all around them. Tom reached over with his arm and pulled the young boy in.
“Dern fool,” he muttered.
“That should be the Platte River,” Roosevelt said, pointing off to a silvery ribbon in the distance to the left. “We should be nearing Sioux City within an hour or so, then the plains of Iowa, and then the Mississippi.” He turned to Tom and tipped his hat.”It shouldn’t be long before we are ready for our interviews. In the meantime, I have some correspondence I need to catch up on. If you will excuse me.” He nodded at the two of them, and went through the small entrance to the inside compartment.
Tom looked over at Kid again, who still grinned and fidgeted as his looked at the ground, the distant river, the birds that flew around them, the buzzing motors and propellers that were on either side of them, and the scattered clouds.
“Look Kid,” Tom said quietly, facing the young boy. Kid lost his grin, and turned expectantly toward Tom.
“I didn’t plan for things to turn out like this. I know your mother is worried sick about you. She thinks both of us are headed for our hangings.”
Kid gestured like he were putting a noose around his throat, then pulled it tight on one side while grimacing and sticking his tongue out.
“Not funny, Kid,” Tom said, not smiling. “Hangings are definitely not funny. I’ve taken my share of men to meet their Maker and many of them were through hangings. I’m just glad you didn’t have to experience them first hand, either by watching me or by watching yourself hang.”
Me too, Kid gestured. But this is great. He gestured out at the panoramic view and then behind them at the airship. I am having a great adventure.
“Yeah, like I said, this wasn’t in the plans. I was planning on you growing up to be a Texas borderlands rancher whose idea of a big city was El Paso if he was lucky. Now you’re off with me to New York City.”
And then Europe, Kid signed.
Tom inhaled through his nose, then shook his head.
“Not sure about all of this,” he said. “If I had any sense, I’d have them set this thing down and put you on the train back to Presidio. But you and I are still wanted in Colorado, and I suspect that sending you back might not be such a good idea.”
I guess you are stuck with me, Uncle.
“Looks that way,” Tom muttered. “Well you know the rules. You follow my instructions to a T, and I might let you live to see 15. Got it?”
Kid nodded vigorously, the grin coming back onto his face, and his eyes as big as saucers.
Tom and Kid went back inside when they saw that the interviews were ready to begin. They sat on a long couch behind Governor Roosevelt who was seated at his desk. Staff members were called in one at a time and stood before the desk, answering questions from Roosevelt with Tom interjecting a comment once or twice. After all 10 of the staff members had come through, Roosevelt looked back at Tom with a raised eyebrow.
“Well?” he asked.
Tom shook his head. “I didn’t see anything that made me suspicious. Is that everyone?”
“Only the captain and Bashu. And I can personally vouch for both of them. I’ve known the captain for 30 years, and Bashu….”
“Yeah, I know,” Tom said. “He’s already let me know that he would cut off my hands and feet if I proved myself unworthy somehow.”
Roosevelt roared. “That’s Bashu. He’s not subtle, but he gets the job done.”
“Yeah, kind of like a big club. The best way to get it done is to walk softly, but carry a big stick.”
Roosevelt looked at the ceiling and smiled. “I like the sound of that. Mind if I use that in one of my speeches?”
Tom shrugged. “It’s all yours, Colonel.”
“What do we do now, Tom.”
Tom frowned and looked at the floor.
“Well, if it isn’t a traitor in our midst, then most likely it’s someone fixing this durn contraption so’s to keep us from getting back.”
“Sabotage? That seems unlikely, but possible. I’ll have the crew keep their eyes open for anything unusual.”
As if in response, the continuous buzzing of the motors outside the window suddenly stopped. Tom and Roosevelt looked at each other. A moment later, a staff member ran into the office.
“Sir, we’ve got trouble. Both engines are out, and there’s a storm coming behind us.”

[glen]

Chapter 3
“He flies through the air with the greatest of ease.”

Instinctively, all three looked out the rear windows of the airship to see what was following them. Without the motors to steer them, the giant airship was beginning to turn in the wind to face south rather than east. Tom felt the floor tip slightly as they turned.
Roosevelt didn’t hesitate, but ran over to the window and ran out to see better. He was followed by Kid, but Tom opted to stay inside. The constant buzzing of the motors was now replaced by a slight whistling as the wind blew through the wire struts that surrounded the back balcony. Other than that, they were enveloped in an eerie silence.
Roosevelt scanned the motors on both sides of the airship, then ran back inside, motioning for the attention of the crew member.
“Tell the captain that I can see oil running from the side of each of the motors. Someone has apparently cut the oil lines.”
The crewman nodded, and disappeared down the hallway to the control room. Roosevelt stood deep in thought, then started toward the control room himself. Tom turned to see Kid frantically gesturing to him.
“How did they time it so that the oil would run out of oil out here instead of in dock where we could get help?” Roosevelt wondered aloud.
“They didn’t,” Tom said, gesturing to Kid. “The Kid says it had to have been done in the last 30 minutes or so, and locally.”
“But we interviewed the staff and they all seemed loyal,” Roosevelt protested.
“Either we did a piss-poor job of interviewing,” said Tom. “Or there’s someone on board that we don’t know about.”
Roosevelt shook his head. “Airships are very sensitive to differences in weight. I am sure that the captain would know if there was an extra person on board.”
“Unless the captain was part of this,” Tom argued.
Roosevelt shook his head again. “I can’t believe that he would do anything like this. The man has been in my family’s employ since shortly after the Civil War.”
“You got another answer?”
Roosevelt frowned. “In either case, let’s gets some answers.” He gestured to Bashu, who nodded and disappeared out the door toward the control room. A long moment later, the captain appeared with Bashu right behind him.
“Governor Roosevelt, we will have the issue under control shortly,” the older man said with a French accent. “My men are approaching both engines as we speak. They will have the repairs done in no time.”
Tom watched the man for any indications of nervousness while Roosevelt responded.
“Captain Vascon, I am concerned about how something like this could happen. Didn’t you have those lines inspected before we left dock in Chicago four days ago?”
“Yes, it is a mystery to me as well. I have no idea how an accident so terrible could happen. Especially on my ship!”
Roosevelt gestured to Kid. “The young man seems to believe that the accident was an act of sabotage, and that it likely happened in the last half hour.”
The eyes of the old captain grew large. “Impossible! How could such a thing happen?”
“That’s exactly what we’d like to know,” responded Tom, stepping forward. “Captain, why are you sweating?”
Roosevelt stepped forward and inspected the brow of the older man. Sure enough, a sheen of sweat had broken out on Captain Vascon’s forehead.
“Why Henri,” Roosevelt asked, his voice suddenly quiet and smooth. “Why ARE you sweating?”
“I am just excited over the accident…it is warm in here….”
His excuses were interrupted by the sound of a thingying handgun and the sight of Tom raising his Colt revolver and placing it against the side of the captain’s temple.
“If you are the nervous type, Captain, I’m about to give you something to be really nervous about. This pistol hasn’t been used since I put a Mexican bandido in the ground about, oh, about three weeks ago. It’s been itching to go to work, and I’m about ready to let it. That is, unless you suddenly decide to tell us the truth.”
The Captain’s eyes grew wide, and he began shaking. He looked from Tom back to Roosevelt, who threw up his hands in surrender.
“Tom Horn is my new head of security, Henri,” Roosevelt said. “He’s doing what he thinks is right in this situation. It would be inappropriate to intervene.”
“Looks like you’re list of options is running short,” Tom said, a smooth inhuman sound coming into his voice. “Best tell us what we want to know.”
Henri shuddered and closed his eyes. He slowly reached up and touched the barrel of the pistol carefully, pulling it slowly away from his head.
“Please…please…I will tell you what you want to know, only please take the gun away from my head. I cannot think when it is so close to my face.”
“OK, Henri, you just bought yourself about 30 seconds to tell us what in Sam Hill is really going on here,” Tom said, withdrawing his pistol, unthingying it and returning it to his holster. Now talk!”
“They…they have my daughter,” he said. “They broke into her school in Paris and took her. They told me I would never see her again unless I did what they asked.”
Roosevelt stepped forward. “What did they do?”
“They have cut both lines from the oil pump to the engines and put sand in the bearings. The idea was to burn out the engines right before a storm so you would have to put down on the ground somewhere and repair for several days, perhaps a week.”
“Why the delay?” Roosevelt asked.
“They want you out of the picture while they deal with your niece.”
“Deal with her? What do you mean?”
The captain shook his head. “I do not know. They just told me about this part of the plan.”
Roosevelt nodded. “We’ll have to repair both lines, and drain and flush the pan to get the sand out.”
“There’s something else you should know,” the captain added. “There is another man on board. And he has a gun. An Austrian.”
“Where?” Tom said.
The captain shrugged. “He hid inside the storage compartment, but when I checked there this morning, he was gone.”
Tom instinctively pulled out his handguns to make sure they were loaded, and Kid went back to their bunkroom and returned with Tom’s Winchester.
“No! No! You cannot use guns anywhere around this airship,” the captain pleaded.
“Why not?” Tom asked, reaching for the Winchester that Kid gave him.
“He’s right,” Roosevelt said. “The whole lifting bag is filled with hydrogen. It’s explosive.”
Tom thought a moment. “How were they able to cook breakfast this morning?”
“There’s no hydrogen in here. It’s all up there. But get a spark in the bag and whoosh—we could all go up in a few seconds.”
“And then we fall in a fiery mess to the ground,” said the captain.
“Well, let’s just hope our freeloader isn’t anywhere near the bag. In fact, I have a good suspicion on where he might be.”
A moment later, a crew member entered and saluted.
“Captain. Governor. We have succeeded in repairing the line and cleaning out the oil pan on the starboard engine. But the man who went out the scaffolding to the port engine hasn’t reported in yet.”
The captain shook his head. “With one engine, we can maintain our position relative to the storm, but we cannot move forward. When it arrives, it will blow us where it will, and we will end up crashing to the ground.”
Roosevelt and the captain went out to the balcony and peered over toward the engine on the port side. Tom followed them and looked. In the afternoon light, they could see the Mississippi River stretching from north to south ahead of them. A light grey walkway hung from the bottom of the airbag, stretching to the posts supporting the port engine, which lay idle. And suspended from the bottom of the scaffold hung a man. The limp form lay still.
“Is he dead?” Roosevelt asked as they all stared at the man.
“Unsure, sir. We will check on it.”
While they watched, a crewman stepped out onto the scaffold leading to the engine and started toward the suspended man. He took three steps then fell with his chest to the scaffold. Tom thought he saw a puff of smoke and a flash from the engine housing.
“There’s your stowaway,” Tom said, pointing to the engine supports. “He’s holed up there. Anyone who tries to come get him will get a belly full of buckshot.”
“What about our crewman hanging below? Is he alive or dead?”
Tom shook his head. “No telling. In either case, he’s probably safer than if he were on that scaffold.” Tom looked back at the captain and Teddy Roosevelt. “Any ideas?”
Roosevelt frowned. “That man’s got to be cold out there. What if we went up in elevation until he grew unconscious and passed out or perhaps fell off?”
The captain shook his head. “That man hanging under the scaffold is possibly injured. In any case, we can’t risk having him die from the elevation. In addition, we have a snowstorm behind us. This is something that needs to be taken care of right away.”
Tom stared at the scaffold and shook his head.
“I know what needs to be done,” he muttered. “It’s the doing that’s the problem.”
“What do you have in mind?” Roosevelt asked, raising an eyebrow.
Tom unstrapped his gun holsters and handed them to Kid. Kid started to hand him his Winchester, but Tom waved him off.
“This time, Kid, you get to do the shooting,” he said.
“No shooting!” the captain said. “We can have no shooting.”
“Look, you already said that there can be no sparks around the lift bag. There won’t be. I’m just going to have the Kid keep the bad guy a little busy while I work my way over to him, Injun style.”
Kid listened, then nodded slowly, realizing what Tom had in mind. He followed Tom over to the hallway and back to the compartment where they had entered the airship. Two doors entered from the sides; one to port, the other to starboard.
A crewman opened the side door and Tom stepped to the edge. He looked down for a long moment and almost changed his mind. Then he turned to the crewman.
“That man who’s hanging there. What’s he hanging from?”
“There’s a guy wire that runs along the base of the scaffold. Everyone who gets on the scaffold has to wear a harness with a lead attached to the guy wire. If you fall--.”
“I’m not going to fall,” Tom said quietly, with a hint of nervousness in his voice.
“Anyone who does fall is suspended by that guy wire, like our man down there,” said Roosevelt. “We usually take two men out there and help them back up, but, well you see the problem.”
“How do you plan on getting close to the man with the gun?” asked the captain.
Tom frowned. “By being a blamed fool.”
Roosevelt stepped forward with what looked like a small backpack.
“Here, put this on,” he said.
“What is it?”
“It’s a parachute,” Roosevelt said. “If for some reason you do fall, pull this red cord. It will save you. Theoretically.”
“Theo-what?”
“I’ve never seen someone use one of these,” Roosevelt said. “Frankly I’ve been looking for a chance to try one myself. But if you use it, well, that will be just as good.”
Tom frowned again. “Boy, you fools have a way of stoking a guy with confidence.”
He strapped on the parachute, then walked out onto the scaffold. While the crewman hooked the leader to the guy wire, Tom climbed over the railing and under the scaffold. He could just see Kid and the others around the edge of the scaffolding, and he nodded to him, then began to clamber, hand over hand across the bottom of the scaffold. A few seconds later, her heard Kid open up with shots from the Winchester, keeping the shooter occupied.
“That’s it, Kid,” Tom said. “Just keep his attention.”
About ten minutes later, he reached the man who hung from the scaffold by his leader. Tom hooked his legs around a bar beneath the scaffold and reached for the man. The man was small, and he was able to pull him up to the bottom of the scaffold, where a small platform area was large enough to hold him. He pulled the man into the platform area, then used the leader to tie him in place. He took a quick scan of the man and didn’t see any injuries or gunshot wounds.
He looked back behind him, and saw that Kid had moved to the balcony by Roosevelt’s office. Hanging from his legs, he used sign language to tell Kid where the man was, and that he was alive. Kid gestured OK.
Tom took a brief rest on the small platform, then continued with his climb along the bottom of the scaffold. His arms were tired, but they had been tired before. He rested when he could and eventually made it to the platform below the port engine compartment.
It was late evening by that time, and Tom grinned to himself when he realized that Roosevelt had anticipated his need and shifted the airship so that the airship was west of the port engine compartment. The light from the setting sun hit the gunman right in the eyes as he looked at the bulk of the zeppelin. The storm was approaching fast, and the wind buffeted the scaffold, guy wires and platform more and more with each passing moment. Tom watched the man who huddled in one sheltered part of the compartment, clad with heavy woolen clothes, but shivering just the same. He timed it for a moment when the man was looking away, and then Tom leaped over the side and onto the platform.
The man was startled, totally surprised that Tom had been able to climb the distance out to the engine. The man raised his rifle, but in the tight space, Tom had the advantage. He blocked the rifle with his arm, then kicked the man and rifle against the engine block. The man’s rifle flew over his head and behind to the ground below. The man pulled out a switchblade knife, and grinned at Tom.
“Please,” Tom muttered, and drew out his own 12-inch Bowie knife. The man’s face grew pale, and he hesitated.
“This here is your invitation to give up peaceably,” Tom said, waving the knife in front of him.
The man looked at Tom, then behind him at the open sky. At that moment, a shot whanged off a nearby metal covering, and the man lost his balance. Tom reached for the man, and the shifting weight caused the floor to shift beneath the two of them. Tom felt the floor come out from under him. He tried to retain his grip on the smaller man, but the man began to slash at his hand with his small knife.
“Dang it!” Tom swore, and the floor shifted again. The man fell away, and then Tom fell himself falling over the side. He had disconnected himself from the guy wire when he had jumped over the side, and now nothing stopped him from falling.
“Yaaahhhh!” Tom screamed as he fell, spinning to the ground. He saw ground, then airship, the ground again.
The Colonel had told him to do something if he fell, he remembered. Oh yes, pull the red cord….
He pulled it and felt a jerk as his parachute opened above him.
Tom was falling. He’d fallen many times before; often from horses, when he was a kid from trees. When he was in Cuba, he had perched up in a mangrove tree and used it to pick off Spanish soldiers until the branch he was standing on broke off. He fell 30 feet and broke his ankle. A week later they discovered that Tom had malaria and sent him home.
But he’d never really experienced falling until today. He had been uneasy the whole time they were in that airship. It had lots of hot air, but blamed if it weren’t no ship. And his biggest fear came to reality. A knife fight with a fellow he’d never even spoken to led to both of them falling out a mile over the Mississippi River.
The Austrian sharpshooter that Tom had gone after was still holding on to him when he finally figured out how to pull the lever that opened up his parachute. It opened above him with a jerk, but then Tom realized that he was still falling too fast. The other guy was latched around one of his legs. Tom shook his leg and tried to get him off, but the Austrian was latched on fast like a hungry tick. He looked down at the rapidly approaching blue water below us, then back at Tom.
“Bitte,” he said.
Tom had no clue what bitte meant, but he had a pretty good idea what the scared look on the man’s face meant. He didn’t want to die anymore than Tom did. Trouble was, the clip they were traveling, they were both going to make a pretty big splat. And after all, the Austrian had stowed aboard uninvited and then tried to kill them all. So the time it took for Tom to make a decision was pretty short.
At the rate they were traveling, the blue water below began to look pretty close. Tom decided he’d better do something quick, or it all wouldn’t matter much. He pulled back his free leg and planted a cowhide boot right in the middle of the Austrian’s forehead and pushed. His grip held on. Tom pulled his leg back and whopped him again. This time his grip came loose, along with Tom’s other boot. The man fell to the water below, making a little splash.
“Dang it!” Tom yelled at me. “Gimme back my boot!”
The loss of added weight made the parachute once again slow its descent, bobbing in the air like a cork on a stream. Tom looked up at the cloth above him, wondering at how a sheet of material could slow him enough to save his life. He looked down again at the water and saw that the Austrian had come to the surface, more or less alive. The wind continued to pick up strength and his parachute drifted quickly toward the eastern shore of the River.
The east bank of the Mississippi included a long muddy stretch where shallow water turned into a mud flat. Tom was relieved, then frustrated when he suddenly hit the mud with both legs and fell backwards into the soggy mess. The parachute blew behind him, and the wind blowing from the west dragged him free of the mud and across the flat.
“Shoot!” he shouted, as he was dragged into some driftwood, banging it with his shoulder. The parachute dragged him on his back over the driftwood and continued across the mud flat.
“Dang it!” he swore when he hit a large rock on the shoreline. “Enough of this.” He reached into his pants leg and pulled out the Bowie knife he kept there. He reached over his shoulder and slashed the cords holding him to the parachute, then cut the ones on the other side.
He lay on the ground for a long moment before standing and examining his condition.
It was pretty poor. His shoulder was banged up from the dragging, he was covered in mud from head to toe, and he was missing a boot. In addition, snowflakes began to fall, and he realized he wasn’t ever wearing a coat.
He looked around himself, frowning. The only thing he knew about where he was was that he was on the eastern side of the Mississippi, which probably put him in Illinois somewhere. He stood there for another minute, deliberating over his options.
He could just give everything up and go home to Texas. That’s what sounded the most inviting at this point. He could build a raft and follow the Mississippi south to the Arkansas and travel west, or just take it all the way south to the Gulf. He knew an old Pinkerton buddy who lived in New Orleans.
But he knew that Kid was still on that strange ship headed east, and he still had a sense of duty. So the only thing to do was catch up with the zeppelin, wherever it was. The way the storm was blowing, he suspected it was a hundred miles east of here by now and headed quickly for New York.
So he decided to head for the nearest town and try and find a telegraph company. He had an obligation to Mary to let her know that Kid—and he—were still alive and not in jail. And he probably should send a telegram to the Colonel, letting him he was still alive—and on his way to New York.
He’d lived through plenty of dust storms, and had gone weeks without a bath when he was out on the range. But the mud that stuck to him had plant and animal material in it, and stunk. He tried to ignore it and started walking east.
Eventually he found a road, as he had assumed he would, running parallel to the river. He mentally flipped a coin and started walking south. The wind continued to grow, and snowflakes began to fall more heavily. After about an hour of walking, an old black man with a mule and a wagon stopped and offered a ride.
The man wasn’t much of a talker, which was just fine with Tom. He had plenty to think about, and wasn’t in the mood for answering questions about why he was so muddy and walking down the road with just one boot. Besides, the old man would have a hard time believing that Tom had fallen out of the sky.
“Cairo,” was the old man’s only words after the second hour of traveling in the wagon, and he pointed to a small city which seemed to serve as a port where the Mississippi and some other river merged. The old man pronounced the town “Ka-row.” He kindly took Tom directly to the front entrance of the town’s telegraph office.
Tom stood in the falling snow, dried mud caked on his back and legs, sore all over. He stomped his one booted foot to get some of the dried mud off, and brushed his legs and shirt off as much as he could. His unbooted foot featured a red sock with a big hole in the toe. He took a deep breath, straightened up and stepped into the doorway of the telegraph office.
“May I—help you,” the small, bald, mustachioed man behind the desk said, pausing as he turned and saw the muddy man who faced him.
Tom reached into his pocket and pulled out a gold coin and slapped it onto the counter.
“I need to send two telegrams,” Tom said. “One to Presidio, Texas and one to New York City. And…” he paused and looked around at the floor, spying a coat rack with boots beneath it. “With the rest of this, I want to buy a pair of those boots and a warm coat.”
The man was sympathetic. Not only did he get the two telegrams sent out right away, he found a warm coat and a pair of boots that fit Tom. Tom thanked the man, then asked him if there was a restaurant in town. The man gave him some change from his $20 gold piece, and directed him down the street to the Divine Harbor Restaurant.
Tom found a quiet corner and ordered a tall iced tea and a ribeye steak. The steak and drink arrived quicker than he thought it would, and soon he relaxed with a good meal. He was just putting the last bite into his mouth when a chair came from his blindside and hit him across the shoulders. He fell out of his chair, automatically reaching for the sidearm that wasn’t there.
“Scheisskopf!” a small man yelled at him. “Esel! Du bist ein Blode!”
Tom realized that he was looking at the Austrian who had fallen into the river with him. While Tom had gotten a warm coat and boots, the Austrian looked like he had just climbed from the river.
“You!” Tom shouted, pointing at the Austrian. “I want my boot back!”
“Du hast mir fast vertotet!” the Austrian yelled back.
“I did not!” Tom yelled back, not sure what the man was accusing him of. “But you’re a dumb mother-loving donkey kisser, if you ask me,” Tom said, throwing a chair in the man’s direction.
The Austrian responded by throwing himself across the table at Tom, who welcomed him with a clutch to the man’s throat. Both of them fell to the wooden floor, clutching at each other’s head and neck. Suddenly they heard a third voice, and Tom paused when he heard the click of a hammer being pulled back. He looked up at the bearded, grey-haired man who had been behind the bar, holding a double-barreled shotgun on him and the Austrian.
“Now I don’t want to shoot you, and you don’t want to be shot,” the man said. “So instead of breaking up my restaurant, you can either take it outside, or I can call the sheriff to lock the two of you up.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” said another voice. Tom sat up and without looking knew that the sheriff had entered the room. And he suspected he knew what the next words out of the sheriff’s mouth would be.
“Tom Horn, you have a federal warrant out for you,” he said, helping Tom to his feet. “I just got it in from Denver on the telegram. You’re wanted for murder, escaping from jail and a bunch of other stuff I won’t go into here. So are you going to come along peaceably?”
Tom inhaled through his nose.
“You gonna lock up this loonie Heinie, too?”
The sheriff looked at the other man. “If Mike here wants to press charges, I can hold him overnight. But that’s about all I have against him.”
“He tried to kill me—twice! Once when he pulled me out of a zepellin--.” Tom paused when he realized how ridiculous he sounded. “Never mind,” he said finally.
Tom followed the sheriff down the street to the city jail. It was warm and brightly lit, and actually looked inviting to Tom. He entered the last jail cell and threw himself happily down on the cot inside the room. As he was drifting off to sleep, he heard the telegraph operator come in the front door.
“I have a message here for Mr. Tom Horn,” he told the sheriff. “It’s a response from New York.”
“What’s it say?” the sheriff asked.
“They say for him to stay here, to go nowhere.”
The sheriff laughed. “That boy ain’t going nowhere anytime soon.”
And Tom Horn smiled in his sleep. That sounded just fine to him.

[glen]

Ch. 4
The Wright Day to Stay Inside

That night, Tom Horn got the first good rest that had had gotten in a long time. He’s been restless in the zeppelin. Before that, he had been beaten and stuffed in a train jail car. Before that, he had been fighting horse rustlers. Now all he had to worry about was himself, which he usually didn’t worry about that much.
As he drifted in and out of sleep, he could hear the wind outside. The gently falling snow had turned into a blizzard, a bad one. Tom took comfort in the fact that most reasonable people knew that the best thing to do in a blizzard was hunker down with a fire, something warm to drink and ideally, someone to love.
Tom didn’t have anyone he could snuggle with. He didn’t have a warm drink and the fire was in the other room. But he was content with a heavy wool blanket, boots that fit him—somewhat—and no one to fret about.
The clock in the main room of the sheriff’s office donged four when he heard a strange sound out front. It was a mechanical clanking sound that grew louder, as if someone was driving or pulling something down the main street of the town. He opened one eye and looked through the open door into the sheriff’s office. The front door opened and the sheriff got up from his chair to meet the deputy at the door.
“Somethin’s coming, sheriff,” the deputy said. “Don’t know what it is, but it is big—and metal. It’s near big as a house!”
The sheriff went to his gun rack on the wall and pulled down two shotguns, handing one to his deputy. They went out the front door.
That got Tom’s interest. The peace he had felt in the jail cell had turned to a strange foreboding. The bartender had refused to charge the Austrian with destruction of property, and the man had gone free. Either Roosevelt had sent someone to rescue him, or--. After all, the Austrian seemed persistent.
Then Tom heard both shotguns go off outside. The clanking sound grew louder. Tom sat up and tried to see what was going on, but could only see motion and no forms outside the front window of the office. Then he heard a high-pitched whiffing sound, again and again. It sounded like arrows, lots and lots of arrows, being shot from a hundred Comanche bows. An instant later, the sheriff ran back in the front door of his office. There was blood on his shirt. He held one arm across his chest and used the other one to place a heavy bar across the inside of the door.
“What is it, sheriff?” Tom asked, an edge coming into his voice.
“Nothing,” said the sheriff. “Just stay where you are and I will take care of it.”
“Come on, I ain’t going anywhere. I just want to help out. Those aren’t my friends, are they?”
The sheriff looked back at Tom and shook his head. “No, I reckon they aren’t your friends. They were talking strange like that other feller back in the restaurant. And they have some kind of contraption that looked like a wagon with metal all over it. But it’s big. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
Tom paused to visualize what he had described, then banged on the bars even more forcefully.
“Let me out of here, sheriff! Let me defend myself.”
The sheriff continued peering through small window in front, and motioned with his arm.
“You’ll be safe right where you are,” he said.
In response, Tom and the sheriff heard the clanking sound grow louder and then a boom. The whole building trembled and dust filtered down from the ceiling. The front wall of the sheriff’s office shook and bowed inward. The sheriff turned back to Tom, his eyes suddenly big.
“Maybe I will give you that gun,” he said quietly.
“Thanks,” Tom said, equally shaken.
The sheriff reached into the desk drawer and pulled out a revolver and slid it across the floor to Tom. Tom reached down and snatched it up, immediately flipping it open to make sure the chamber was full of bullets. He snapped it shut and spun the chamber for good measure. He went back to the cot he had slept on and flipped it over to make a barricade, then crouched behind it.
The sheriff saw what Tom did and backed into the corner behind a second desk. An instant after he had taken his new position, the wall shook again. The clanking sound returned and dust was everywhere. Bricks fell from the front wall and a big crack appeared in the wall.
Tom and the sheriff waited quietly while the noise continued out front. An engine chugged outside, and the clanking continued.
Then the machine outside hit the front wall a third time. This time, the wall collapsed. The heavy oak door remained standing in its frame, but the brick wall it was attached to turned into a pile of rubble. Dust flew everywhere. The sheriff coughed where he was, but remained crouched behind the desk.
Tom watched the darkness of the street outside through the new opening in the front wall. A big shape like a oversized wagon stood to one side of the opening, and he suspected that whoever they were had used it to break down the wall. It continued to chug, and as the dust cleared, he could see steam rising from the sides of the heavy metal object.
Then he saw one, then two, men stepping alongside the metal wagon. They too were all clad in metal. Tom had once seen a picture book about King Arthur and his knights, and the men reminded him of a drawing in the book. But these men had metal plates over their faces with only slits where their eyes were. They dragged heavy hoses behind them that were attached to the wagon outside, and steam vented from the metal suits behind their shoulders.
The men stepped through the opening in the wall and looked around. The sheriff raised himself up slightly from behind the desk.
“OK, hold it right there,” the sheriff barked. The men paused, looked at each other, then advanced on the sheriff. The sheriff responded by firing his shotgun into the chest of the nearest man.
The gun roared, and the man staggered, but didn’t go down. Instead, both men raised one arm and pointed it at the sheriff. Tom saw that the arm included a pipe that ran along the outside of the armor and opened just short of the metal glove that each man wore. The two men clenched their fists, and a flurry of darts flew from the opening, making a whiffing noise. Tom saw the air filled with darts, and heard the sheriff go down.
Tom frowned, and bent lower behind the cot. If a shotgun couldn’t stop them at point-blank range, what good would a handgun do? He asked himself. Then he got an idea.
He raised himself again where he could see what the two men were doing. They moved slowly, as if they were moving underwater. They had been looking around the room, and now they moved toward his door.
Tom aimed carefully and shot first at the kerosene lantern behind one of them. The glass container beneath it shattered, and flames exploded around the lamp across the wall and floor. The armored man nearest the fire, turned and noticed the flames, but then turned back to Tom. He raised his arm toward the opened door.
Tom ducked just as a flurry of darts hit the mattress he held onto. Tom jerked back when the points of several darts appeared through the mattress. Then Tom raised himself again and fired.
He aimed for the small opening in the faceplate left open for the armored man to see. The bullet went into the darkened opening, and Tom visualized that the bullet went into either the man’s forehead or an eye. In any case, the man toppled over with a clank like a heavy metal sack of potatoes.
He heard a muffled, “Pass auf!” shouted from the other armored man, who slowly withdrew through the opening.
Tom knew that they attackers weren’t finished, and knew that eventually they would get through, especially since he was still locked in his cell and had only four bullets left in his gun. He patiently waited behind the cot for what would happen next.
His patience was rewarded by an engine roar and the clanking of the infernal machine out front. As he watched, the big machine back away from the opening, then charged back into the hole. More bricks and rubble fell, and the ceiling sagged. Tom realized that the attackers were intent on destroying the building with him in it. He had nothing to shoot. All he could do was wait for the building to collapse and hope for a chance to run from the falling rubble.
The machine hit again, and the center beams of the building began to give way. Dust filled the room. The machine back away again, and Tom suspected that another hit or two would result in a collapsed roof.
Then he heard a pop outside , followed by a boom right outside the front door. The machine paused, and he heard another pop.
Kaboom! An explosion outside in the street rocked the building. He heard excited voice speaking in German, and the metal wagon pulled away from the front of the building. He heard it clank away down the street.
“Mister Horn,” Tom heard behind him. He stood and looked outside the small window and was surprised to see a dark face with a turban.
“Barney!” Tom said to the Punjabi. “You here for the party?”
“Why do you refuse to call me by my proper name? I am Bashu,” the man said.
“Sure, whatever,” Tom said.
“I am here to rescue you.”
“ ’Bout time. I’m getting tired of this place.”
“Stand back,” the big man said, and Tom pulled back against the bars.
He watched as Bashu reached up to the barred window and pulled on the bars. Tom’s eyes grew wide as the iron bars bent in their place. Finally, one of the broke loose from the wall. Then the other.
“Pretty strong for an Injun,” Tom said, then corrected himself when he saw the look on Bashu’s face. “S’cuse me, Pajami, uh Pashti, Pashtu.”
“Punjabi. I would be very happy to leave you behind, you know.”
“Look, I’m trying, Bashu,” Tom said. “What do you expect for someone with a third-grade education?”
“I would expect more,” Bashu said. “Come, we must hurry.”
Tom climbed on the edge of his cot and pushed his way through the entrance of the small window. Bashu grabbed his arms and pulled his quickly through the entrance. Outside the snow continued to fall as Tom saw that Bashu was joined by two other men dressed in heavy coats and a young boy that he recognized.
“Kid! How did you get here?”
Tom watched Kid sign back to him. We stopped to save you.
“And I sincerely appreciate it,” Tom said. “Who are these critters?”
“Orville Wright, and this is my brother Wilbur,” one man with glasses said, stepping forward and shaking Tom’s hand. “Now, if you don’t mind, we need to leave post haste.”
Tom nodded, then looked around them.
“Where are your horses?”
“We have a vehicle parked several miles to the east. We thought it prudent to approach the jail on these.” Orville gestured to three mechanical boxes with wheels with teeth in the back and flat boards curved upward in front. Steam rose from the side of one.
“What are those?” Tom asked.
“It’s my brother and my latest invention,” Oroville said. “We’ve been eager to try them out, and the snowfall and the rescue gave us a fortuitous opportunity.”
You sit on the back, signed Kid.
Tom looked at the three contraptions and then back at Oroville.
“No horses?”
Oroville and Kid shook their heads.
“Sure you wouldn’t rather shoot it out?”
Oroville shrugged. “We were able to buy time with the mortar shells, but we have run out of those. Now we really need to get moving.”
Tom opened his mouth to protest again, but a roar came from behind as the jail building collapsed. The clanking he heard earlier came from inside, and moved toward them as if it were about to come out the back wall.
“Get on the steam sled—now!” Oroville yelled. Tom ran to machine nearest him, and joined Oroville. A second later, he heard the wall collapse behind them, just as the three vehicles took off with a roar across the snowy field and away from town.
Tom looked behind them and saw that the metal wagon and come through the wall. It was his first chance to see what it really looked like. In the darkness of the early morning light, the wagon loomed like a giant metal bull. He noticed that instead of wheels it had tracks like he had seen the steam tractors use when working on the railroad and in the mines. But he suspected that this machine was not intended for constructive work.
In response, the machine lurched into action, following them across the field. A puff of steam came from a pipe on the top, and the machine roared to life. It was surprisingly fast for its size, and clanked across the snow at breakneck speed. Tom suspected that a fast horse could keep ahead of it, but not by much. He turned and aimed his pistol at the machine, then changed his mind. He turned back and put the pistol back in his belt.
“A wise choice,” Oroville said over the buzz of the steam sleds. “The bullets would do not damage to the war wagon behind us. In the meantime, it would be wise to conserve your ammunition for a time when it could be put to better use.”
Tom nodded. “We’ll get our shot, soon enough.” He watched Oroville handle the machine with deft ability, controlling its forward movement and direction with metal handles and a fuel pedal for his foot. Then he looked over at Bashu on the second sled, and Wilbur on the third, with Kid perched on the seat behind him.
He looked back at the war wagon, as Oroville had called it, and realized that the wagon was gaining on them.
“I might be wrong,” Tom said. “But I think that thing behind us is closer than it was before.”
“You’re not wrong,” Oroville said, shouting over his shoulder. “Now you understand why I was so insistent on us leaving quickly. It has a larger capacity for steam, and a bigger compressor. Our steam generators are miniscule by comparison. We are smaller but have significantly less power.”
“What you’re saying is that thing is going to catch us sooner or later,” Tom said.
“Sooner, probably,” Oroville said. “Later, not so likely.”
“So you got a plan?” Tom asked.
“Our plan was to get you out of town undetected,” Oroville responded. “Apparently that didn’t work.”
Tom thought for a second, then nodded to himself.
“What we need is a river or lake,” Tom said.
Oroville nodded. “I like the way you are thinking. We could travel across a frozen stream that the war wagon could not, but aren’t any frozen rivers right now.”
“Get a pond shallow enough and it might be.”
“Right. I think I might know of one that would be frozen. But it is quite a distance ahead. We need to buy some time; somehow get ahead of that beast.”
Tom nodded, then looked back at the machine behind, which looked bigger and bigger with every passing moment. “Loop around behind the monster and let me get on it. I’ll buy you the time you need.”
Oroville reached down beside him and pulled out a strange looking weapon. It had a straight barrel, like a rifle, but shorter. Beneath the magazine was a barrel shaped chamber; behind that was a second handle that stuck downward.
“What’s that?”
“Something my friend Ernest Thompson is working on. He calls it a sub-machine gun.”
Tom took the Tommy Gun and looked at it carefully, noting where the safety was on it. Oroville told him that he would have to thingy back a lever on the side to engage the magazine, and showed him another button that switched from single fire to automatic. In the meantime, he gestured for the others to continue, while he and Tom Horn veered off to the right in the swirling snow and came back behind the machine that chased them. It took a little while, but Oroville was able to come up beside the clanking treads of the beast. Tom stood on the seat behind and then leaped onto the metal machine.
The bulky machine featured two metal hatches on the top, with toggle bolts that kept them shut. In addition, two barrels protruded toward the front of the beast, one that he decided had been used to batter its way into the jail. Another smaller one was open on the end, and he suspected that it was a gun of some sort.
Just then, a flight of darts exited the barrel in pursuit of the fleeing steam sleds. One or two darts embedded themselves in the seat behind Oroville, just where he had been sitting. Oroville was desperately trying to keep ahead of the giant steam machine, but Tom could see that his steam sled—as well as the others—were slowly losing power. Now was the time to do something.
He took the sub-machine gun and banged on one of the hatches with the butt end of the gun.
“Hey Heinies!” he shouted. “I’m out here! Come out and play!”
He watched the hatch intently, waiting for some indication that it was open. Instead he looked over to see a uniformed German climbing out of the other hatch. He raised the barrel of the sub-machine gun to fire, and pulled the trigger. The gun clicked.
“Dang!” he said, and reached down to switch the safety off. He then tried to fire again, only to have the same thing happen. In the meantime, the first man was standing on the top, pulling out a wicked looking handgun and a second man was joining him.
“Dang again!” Tom realized that he hadn’t pulled the lever back on the side of the gun. He thingyed it back and pulled the trigger.
Brapapapapap! The gun sounded as a solid line of bullets erupted from the barrel. Tom was thrown off balance by the force of the gun and steadied himself as he caught his balance. He looked to see that the first man had fallen from the top of the machine and was lying in the snow behind them. The second man had gone back inside and locked the hatch shut.
“Chickens!” Tom shouted. “Come on, you chickens!”
Tom realized that if the Germans remained inside the war wagon, they would be invulnerable. They could use their dart gun to shoot the men on the steam sleds at their leisure, or just run over them with the war wagon. Either way, they would be dead, and Tom would be stuck on top of the wagon with no escape available.
Tom looked around at the vehicle and tried to determine how he could stop it. He doubted that bullets would go through the armor on the top, sides and front of the wagon. But what about the bottom—and back? Tom suspected that the Germans were arrogant enough to think their machine would never be running away from the enemy and would therefore not need as much protection in the back. He carefully walked back to the trailing edge of the machine and looked down at what was there.
Tom saw an exhaust pipe that allowed steam to escape, as well as a couple of copper pipes that ran from the engine to each tread. He thingyed the lever back on the Thompson and fired multiple shots at the copper pipes. Steam exploded in all directions, and Tom felt the machine losing speed. He jumped off the back of the war wagon as it shuddered and came to a stop and ran to a grove of nearby elm trees. By the time he had reached the trees, he turned back and saw that a team of Germans had climbed out onto the machine. Four stood around the machine with guns while two fretted over the damage that Tom had done to their piping.
Half a minute later, Oroville roared up on his steam sled, and Tom climbed aboard. They took off without another word.
The three machines continued onward across the snowy landscape, headed east. The storm had died down, and the sun struggled to burn through the clouds. Tom saw that about six inches of snow had fallen from the storm, and he longed for the warm comfort of the Parker Ranch. Texas never sounded so good.
The three machines finally climbed a steady rise, then suddenly turned right. By this time, their speed was not much faster than a man could run, and Tom knew that if he hadn’t stopped them, the Germans would have captured or killed them long before this. They descended down the other side of the ridge and found a road. There on the side of the road were parked an automobile and a large truck.
Tom stared at both vehicles as the two Wright Brothers, Bashu and Kid loaded the steam sleds into the back of the truck. Tom had heard about auto cars, had even seen one steam car from a distance in St. Louis, but had never been this close to one. He walked to the front of the truck, then to the back, then looked at the automobile behind it. Something was wrong.
“Where’s the boiler?” Tom finally asked Oroville.
Oroville looked at Wilbur and laughed.
“It doesn’t have one. These aren’t powered by steam. They’re electric.”
“Electric?” Tom echoed.
Oroville nodded and pulled the hood of the engine well open. Instead of a network of pipes and compressors, Tom saw a simple magneto and a small engine block.
“They don’t accelerate like the steam vehicles, as they don’t have the same compression. But give them a running start, and they will go for a longer distance, and are more reliable.”
Tom frowned, still confused.
“I suspect you are feeling a little overwhelmed by all this new technology,” Oroville said.
Tom nodded. “Pretty much.”
“Well, get in. We’ll tell you all about it on our way back to Dayton.”
“Dayton?”
“Ohio. We have about 150 miles to go. We should be there in about five hours.”
Bashu rode in the truck with Wilbur Wright, and Kid and Tom rode in the automobile behind with Oroville. Oroville told Tom that he and Wilbur ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, but their real passion was for invention.
“Steam power has really been the driving force in technology in the past forty years. That and hydrogen power,” said Oroville. “And the Germans have had a stranglehold on development in both of those areas. Every zeppelin built comes from Germany. Every steam locomotive and steam auto—well, steam everything—has parts that come from Germany. Deutschland has made lots of money off this technology for years. But we have some plans of our own. Plans that will remove the stranglehold and possible allow the United States of America to become a world leader.”
“Such as?” Tom asked, surprised as his own curiosity.
“Electric power, for one,” Oroville said. “There are lots of potential inventions that can be tied to developments in electric power. Right now, all of our lighting comes from kerosene or oil lamps or electricity generated from steam generators. But I see a day not too far off when we will generate electricity through harnessing water.”
“Water? How can water make electricity?”
“Actually, falling water. Ever seen the damage that a torrent of water can do to a pasture, or a pile of rocks, or even a forest?”
“Shoot, yeah.”
“That demonstrates that water has power within it. Actually, it’s gravity that instills the power, but if we can harness the power….”
Tom nodded. “Like a water mill.”
“Exactly. The miller uses the power of the water going downhill to grind his meal. You can do the same thing with a lumbermill.”
“So what you are trying to do is take that power and bottle it up somehow.”
“We’re already doing it. We bottle up that electricity in batteries. We just need to find better, more efficient ways of bottling it up.”
“Sounds pretty ambitious.”
Oroville smiled. “If you only knew.”
“What?”
“My brother Wilbur is the quiet one. But he’s the one who has all the big ideas. Electric power is small potatoes. He has much larger dreams.”
“Such as what?”
Oroville smiled knowingly at Tom. “Heavier-than-air flight.”
Tom’s eyebrow shot up, but he said nothing, obviously confused. It didn’t take much beyond riding herd on cattle and talking about rifles to confuse Tom. This was getting pretty high above his head.
Oroville wasn’t giving up though.
“Right now, zeppelins rule the air. Or at least, they think they do. The only other real option you have for flight are hot-air balloons that move at the whim of air currents. But what if you could go up when you please in a vehicle that would allow you to move like a bird?”
Tom stared at him, then snorted. “You’re pulling my leg.”
Oroville shook his head. “No, listen. Leonardo daVinci drew up plans for a manned flying machine three hundred years ago. We’ve taken ideas from those plans and actually been able to sail above the ground with them.”
Tom stared at him.
“Well, we’re not alone. There are others, many others, in Europe who are doing the same thing. But the real goal is powered flight. Taking an engine—perhaps something like this electric engine here—and using it to push us—or pull us—through the air. Imagine what it would be like.”
Instead Tom thought of his experience in the zeppelin and the resulting fall from grace with a parachute.
“No thanks, I’m just fine here on the ground.”
Oroville laughed. “Well, you might like the ground, but my brother and I aren’t content to remain here on terra firma. You’ll see. Controlled manned flight will change the world.”
Tom shook his head. “Yours maybe. Not mine.”
Oroville laughed again.
Tom and Kid watched the world go by as they drove through southern Ohio and into the city of Dayton. The Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop and workshop was located on the southern edge of town. They arrived in late afternoon, where Wilbur and Bashu backed the truck up to the workshop and unloaded the steam sleds.
“Governor Roosevelt will meet us outside of town when it gets dark,” Oroville explained. “He wants there to be as little attention as possible drawn toward you and the zeppelin. So in the meantime, let’s all stay inside.”
Tom and Kid went into the kitchen and were able to put an evening meal together while Wilbur and Oroville tended their bicycle shop and Bashu fretted in the living room. Tom watched Bashu and grinned to himself as the big man paced back and forth like a caged bull.
“Better learn to relax, big fella,” Tom told him. “All that energy is going to burn you up eventually.”
“I am eager to be back in the service of Governor Roosevelt,” Bashu said. “My place is at his side.”
“That may be, Bashu, but right now he ain’t here. I’m sure the Colonel is just fine, wherever he is. You just got to learn to get rest while the getting’s good.”
“Perhaps that is easy for you to say. Not me.”
“It is easy for me to say,” Tom said. “I wouldn’t say if I didn’t believe it. And I learned it the hard way. Lots of miles behind me, and I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t learned when to kick back and smell the coffee.”
Bashu grumbled in response, and Tom grinned.
The Wright Brothers shut down their shop with the coming darkness, and returned to their house to share the evening meal with Bashu, Kid and Tom. Kid and Tom had found some ground steaks and some potatoes and tomatoes and had mixed them into a thick porridge. Bashu turned his nose up at the ground steak, so Kid made some potatoes and tomatoes separately for him. They continued to talk with the Wright Brothers, who Tom were growing to like. As he watched Kid, he realized that the young boy has found another couple of men to idolize. Kid has shadowed Wilbur on the way back and in the workshop until Tom had to tell him that they had to stay out of sight. Reluctantly, they had entered the house and worked on food when Tom knew Kid would have loved to sit and watch Wilbur for another few hours.
When it got good and dark outside, the four men and boy exited the house by the back door and got into the automobile. Wilbur drove this time. He took the back streets out of town until they were out in the empty farmland south of Dayton.
They left the road and drove up onto a lonely hill with one giant oak tree on top of it. The five of them got out of the car and stood out on the hill. Tom could see a few lights of Dayton twinkling in the distance, reflected on the snowy ground.
“Beautiful night,” Tom said, his breath puffing out in front of him. “When did you say they would be here?”
“Right about now,” Oroville said, pointing at a silent black shape that appeared over the top of the hillside. Tom and Kid both gasped at the sudden appearance of the zeppelin, and Bashu, for once, smiled.
“It will be good to be back on the ship again,” he said deeply. As he said it, the rope ladder dropped from the sky, unrolling at their feet.
“Tom Horn, I certainly will never forget you,” Oroville Wright said, holding out his hand. “You’ve put some excitement into our otherwise ordinary existence.”
“I doubt very much if you and Wilbur can be called ordinary,” said Tom. “Now or ever.”
Tom followed Kid and Bashu up the rope ladder. As hands came down and helped him into the compartment, he took one look down at the Wright Brothers. Somehow he knew he would be hearing about them again.

[glen]

CHAPTER 5
“New York, New York”

The rest of the trip eastward to New York City was uneventful. Governor Roosevelt made sure that the trio they had rescued from the hillside in Ohio got rest and plenty of good food.
And Tom was surprised to see the next morning that they were already coming into the big city. Despite his distaste for air travel and heights, the elevation of the zeppelin gave him a panoramic view of the metropolis he never would have imagined possible. As he stood at the window looking down in the control room (the city was still in front of them), he saw the crowded streets below and recognized that he would not have been able to see as much of the city from that vantage point. They flew over the tips of the towers, and Tom was amazed how tall they were.
“Don’t people get scared being up in those tall buildings?” Tom asked Roosevelt. “After all, what if a big wind came up and blew those buildings down?”
Roosevelt laughed. “Well, it hasn’t happened yet, at least not in our town. And there are plans to build towers even taller. One, the Fuller Building, is scheduled to be completed in two years. It will be the tallest building in the world—almost 300 feet tall!”
Tom shook his head, and Roosevelt laughed again.
“We will need taller towers soon, because the use of zeppelins is made easier if there are tall towers they can anchor to to load and unload passengers.”
“Well, you won’t catch me going up in one of them towers anytime soon,” said Tom. “I’ve had my fill of high places.”
“Corporal, I promise to keep you close to the ground for the foreseeable future.” Roosevelt slapped him on his shoulder and motioned for him to follow him to his study.
The zeppelin anchored with two others on Staten Island. All the passengers unloaded, Tom taking great care to carry his Winchester off in a special buckskin sleeve that Roosevelt had given him. The anchorbay for the zeppelin included a ramp to a small tower with a circular stairwell inside. Kid and Tom followed Bashu and the Governor to a small dock that featured a small waiting steamship. The ship then took them into the harbor, past the tall Statue of Liberty to docks on the other side. Kid stared at the giant green statue as they passed.
“That was given to us by our friends in France to celebrate the centennial of our independence,” Roosevelt explained. “America is loved throughout the world as a shining beacon of everything right and good.”
Tom didn’t respond, but thought of the countless Apaches, Sioux and Comanches who had been massacred in the name of western expansion by America. He then thought of the Cubans he had seen killed in battles just a few years ago. He looked over at Kid.
“Sure hope you don’t have to go to war,” he muttered to the Kid.
I will serve my country when the time comes, Kid signed back. And gladly.
“War is not a pretty thing,” Roosevelt added. “It’s not a desirable thing. But it is often a necessary thing.”
Tom shrugged. “Seems like your niece might find fault with that statement.”
Roosevelt sighed. “Eleanor is a smart girl and has a lot of talent. But she is naïve about a great deal many things. I think of what’s best for America; she is caught up in a vision of doing what’s right for the whole world, for all mankind. How can a man dream so big, much less a teenaged girl?”
Tom stared at the Governor. “Colonel, I don’t know much. Heaven knows, I just got a third-grade education. But I seen Americans, Indians, Mexicans, Germans, Cubans and Spaniards. I even met a Chinaman once. And I seen that they all bled red blood, they all ate and slept and drank the same way, they all cried when they was sad, and they all called out for their mamas when they was lying on the ground dying. There’s a lot that makes us different, that’s for sure. But seems to me there’s a lot more that draws us all together.”
Roosevelt stared at Tom for a long moment.
“My dear corporal, I believe you’ve become a philosopher of grand caliber. Smashing, I would say so. I do believe that you and my niece will get along just peaches.”
Tom shrugged, and Roosevelt laughed again.
They boarded an oversized steam automobile that met them at the docks near Battery Park. Roosevelt sat in the front next to the driver, while Tom and Bashu sat behind them in the back seat. Kid took great joy in sitting in a flip-down seat in the very back, something Roosevelt referred to as a “rumble seat.”
Tom now had the view of New York City streets that he had imagined when they had flown over in the zeppelin. He could see a lot less, but what he saw filled him with awe and curiosity. Street venders were lined up shoulder to shoulder along the street. One block featured fruit and vegetable vendors, the next featured clothing for men, women and children. The third featured baked goods. Kid sat with his mouth open the entire time. When they passed bakery after bakery, Tom could see the drool falling from his mouth.
“Close your mouth, Kid,” Tom said. “You’re catching flies.”
Roosevelt watched them, and roared in laughter when he heard Tom’s comments.
“You are scheduled to leave tomorrow, but we will make sure we schedule time for the two of you to see more of the City before you leave,” he said.
“I’d be obliged,” Tom replied.
The auto wheezed and puffed its way up Fifth Avenue until it got to the City Hall, where it parked outside the front entrance. Tom looked at Roosevelt, who started to get out.
“Figgured we’d be going to the State Capitol or Governor’s Mansion,” Tom said.
Roosevelt shook his head. “The state capital is in Albany, north of here,” he said. “When I am in town, this is my headquarters. It’s about as safe a building as you will find in this fair city.”
Tom nodded and followed Roosevelt into the building. A uniformed guard inspected Tom’s Winchester when they came into the front entrance, and frowned when he saw that it was loaded.
“Let him go, O’Malley,” Roosevelt said to the guard. “I’ll vouch for him.”
O’Malley nodded and handed the rifle back to Tom. Tom and Kid followed Roosevelt down the hall to a small glass-paneled door. As they walked, an entourage of men and women began to form, assaulting the Governor with all kinds of questions that Tom assumed were related to his governmental duties. Roosevelt held up his hands and told them to come to his office and he would deal with the issues one at a time.
The glass doors opened, revealing an elevator. The four of them got in and the doors closed behind them, shutting them off from the clamoring crowd outside.
Roosevelt turned and smiled thinly at Tom.
“Now you know why I look for any excuse I can to go on one of my adventures,” he said, then slapped Tom on the shoulder. “Man, do I envy you!”
The doors opened and Roosevelt exited with the other three behind. They walked about 20 feet down the hall to a set of glassed double doors with writing that read, “Office of the Governor of New York.” Roosevelt pushed through and the others followed.
Three men and a woman sat at desks in the room. All of them looked up, and started to say something, but Roosevelt held up his hand.
The woman smiled and simply said with a nasally twang, “Welcome back, Governor.”
“Thank you, Margaret,” Roosevelt responded, pushing through doors on the other side of the room. Tom and the others followed.
The interior office was decorated similarly to the office Roosevelt had maintained on the zeppelin. A big desk welcomed the person who came in the front door. Two wooden chairs sat facing it, in what Tom assumed was his formal business arrangement. Behind him, however, Roosevelt had overstuffed chairs and a couch situated around a picture window overlooking the street below. This is where Roosevelt took them, and Tom saw for the first time that two people sat on the couch, talking.
One was a man in his late 20s with wire rimmed glasses and brown hair parted in the middle. Where many man of that era constantly tried to make themselves look older and more established by wearing beards or mustaches, this man was clean shaven. His clean, round face made him look younger still, but the man had a serious look about him that told Tom that this man was no young fool.
The other was a young, teenaged woman with sandy brown hair. Again, while men tended to want to make themselves look older, women wore their hair long and dressed to make themselves look as young as possible. This young woman did neither. Tom could tell that she was barely old enough to marry, yet she wore her honey blonde hair short and swept to one side. She also had a rounded face and a soft expression to her countenance. But it was her eyes that captured Tom. She had eyes that were uncommon for a young person; eyes that appeared to have both seen many things in this lifetime, as well as things that only one can dream of. Tom didn’t see a lot of laugh lines on her face, and he suspected—rightly, he discovered later—that she laughed seldom. But she had a tenderness that tugged at Tom’s heart. Here was someone who cared about people.
The two of them stood up when Roosevelt entered, and the Governor paused and turned to introduce his guests.
“Tom, this is my niece Eleanor. With her is a good friend of the family, and someone you should definitely get to know. His name is Thomas Edison.”
Tom stepped forward and held out his hand.
“Eleanor and Thomas, this is Tom Horn. He is a man of exceptional talent. I served with him in Cuba, and I can say that he is unsurpassed in tracking, clandestine operations and is an excellent marksman.”
“My understanding is that you are a killer,” Eleanor said, not raising her hand to take Tom’s offered one.
Tom paused, then dropped his hand. “Some people call me that. But who is worse, the person who kills, or the fat businessman who hires him?”
“Touche,” Eleanor said. “I think both of them should be locked away in a cold, dark place for the rest of their natural lives.”
“What, not strung up?” Tom said. “I’m surprised at you, ma’am.”
“It’s miss, and I abhor violence of any way, shape and form,” she said. “It’s not natural.”
“Pardon me for saying, miss, but nature is filled with violence.”
“An animal kills to eat, to survive. Man kills because of greed.”
“Some of us kill to survive too.”
“Tell me, Mr. Horn, were you killing to survive when you signed on with the Pinkertons?”
Roosevelt held up his hand. “All right, you will have plenty of time to pursue this conversation when you are crossing the Atlantic together. Tomorrow.”
“Atlantic?” echoed Eleanor. “But uncle, what are you talking about?”
“Mr. Horn is your new bodyguard.”
“Bodyguard, that’s preposterous. No one will harm me. I am totally safe in this city, and when I fly across the Atlantic tomorrow, I will have Bashu to watch over me.”
“As it is always my pleasure,” Bashu crooned from behind Tom.
“Bashu will travel with you, that’s true,” said Roosevelt. “But I want someone who can blend in, knows the killer’s mind, and is a crack shot. The decision’s made, and that’s final.”
“Uncle!” Eleanor said, her bottom lip coming out and her foot stamping. Tom felt a grin coming on, but he decided to suppress it.
“Yes, that’s right, I am your uncle,” Roosevelt said, moving closer to the petulant young woman and putting his hands on her shoulders. “And I promised your father that I would take care of you, sometimes despite what you try to do on your own.”
“But Bashu--,” she whined.
“Is good for what he is and he does,” said Roosevelt. “He can keep a crowd at bay and help out in a fistfight. But regardless how big and intimidating he is, one bullet will stop him just like any other man. He will continue to be by your side, but so will our new guest.”
Eleanor stared down at the floor, nodding soberly. But Tom could see that the fight had far from left the girl. He then realized that Kid stood behind them all, still barefoot and shirtless, dressed in his worn-out bib overalls. Tom stepped to one side and dipped in a bow.
“My apologies, Miss Roosevelt. In all the commotion, I’m afraid my nephew didn’t get introduced. Lady Eleanor, this is Kid.”
Eleanor looked at the thin, wiry boy in bib overalls, and her eyes widened in surprise. She stepped forward and held out her hand to shake Kid’s. In contrast, Kid looked like a frightened deer, confronted by the young, attractive girl in her puffy white dress. He looked to the side as if looking for somewhere to hide, then finally stepped forward and took her hand with hesitation.
“What is your real name?” she asked. “It can’t be Kid. Really.”
Kid hesitated, then gestured his response.
“Kid says he never liked his real name. It’s Arnold,” said Tom.
Eleanor looked at Tom, then motioned back at Kid with a series of gestures. Kid looked at her strangely, then gestured back at Tom.
“He doesn’t understand your gestures,” Tom said. “I taught him Indian Sign Language when he was little.”
Eleanor nodded. “That’s why. I am using the new American Sign Language. It is used by the deaf and mute community here in New York.” She turned back to Kid, and motioned more slowly, speaking at the same time.
“I would be glad to teach you American Sign Language, and you can teach me your Indian symbols,” she said.
Kid watched her hands and her lips, then nodded.
“He ain’t deaf,” Tom said. “He just can’t talk. Got a bump on the head a few years back, and hasn’t spoken a word since.”
“Can he make any noise at all?” she asked Tom, then turned to Kid. “Sorry, I should have asked you directly.”
Kid shrugged, then nodded. He put two fingers from his right hand between his teeth and whistled shrilly. Eleanor jerked back in surprise, and Roosevelt laughed heartily.
“Indeed, the young man can make substantial noise after all,” said Roosevelt. He then turned to Eleanor. “My dear, Mr. Edison and I have business to discuss with Mr. Horn. Perhaps Kid would like to see more of New York.”
“You think that’s wise?” Tom asked Roosevelt.
Roosevelt nodded. “I will send a full security team with them, and make sure they don’t go anywhere they would be in obvious danger. And of course, Bashu will be with her.”
He turned toward Tom and Edison. “In the meantime, Mr. Edison and I have something to show you and a story to tell.” They all stepped out of the office and into the hallway. A team of guards met Eleanor, Kid and Bashu in the hallway and led them down to the stairway and outside.
Meanwhile, Roosevelt, Edison and Tom went the other direction and got back in the elevator. Roosevelt reached into a pocket and pulled out a key, fitting it into a slot on the elevator control panel. He turned it, and the elevator began to descend. Tom watched the numbers that lit up as they descended, and realized that they were going into a basement. After a long moment, the doors opened and the three of them found themselves in a large sitting area with a white sheet attached to one wall. Roosevelt motioned for Tom to sit on the couch, and Thomas stepped into the back of the room to uncover a large boxed device. While he worked on the device, Roosevelt began to speak.
“About a hundred years ago, there were two men in Europe. Both made money through war. One of them, Emil Rothschild, made his money by loaning cash to governments who went to war, and then collecting it after they won. He was very successful, as were his sons, and his son’s sons. They started off in London, then opened banks in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and right here in New York. They became so wealthy that they stopped worrying about making money and started worrying about the countries that used their services.
“The other man was located in Prussia. His name was Friedrich Krupp. He made his money by making and selling guns, bullets, cannons, and other instruments of war. And he too was very successful. But he never lost his desire to make money. Money became so important to him and his family that whenever a war ended, he would look for ways to start a new one. Because to him, war and preparing for war were his only sources of revenue.
“Ten years ago, the two men decided that they wanted to stop speculating about when and if war would come. They hired Mr. Edison here and another man, Mr. Jules Verne of France, to create a way to predict when and where war would come.”
Tom stared at Roosevelt, at first disbelieving, then realizing all that he had seen in the past few days.
“And were they successful?”
“Yes, and no,” Roosevelt said. “Both men realized that having such a device—what they called a panopticon—in the hands of one man would be very dangerous. So they created the device in two parts. One part is in Berlin. The other is located in London. Each tells a little of what the future holds. But no man can tell exactly what will happen unless he has access to the information from both parts.”
Tom looked at Roosevelt, then at Edison. Finally, he shook his head.
“I seen a lot of crazy stuff in the past few days. Flying armies, horseless wagons that shoot arrows, sleds that slide for miles and miles. But this kind of stuff—telling the future—that’s fairy tale stuff. That’s pretty hard to swallow.”
Roosevelt nodded. “I suspected that you would be dubious, and rightly so. That’s why I asked Thomas to prepare a little demonstration. We don’t have direct access to the panopticon, but Thomas here has found a way to capture the images from the machine and share them with people who are elsewhere.” He nodded at Thomas, who flipped a switch. To Tom’s surprise, the lights in the room disappeared, leaving them in darkness. Suddenly a powerful light shone from the black box in the back of the room. Spools like rolls of paper began to turn. The white light coming from the box suddenly began to show shapes on the sheet affixed to the wall, and Tom turned to see what it was.
The light on the wall showed images. Tom saw men on foot and on horseback with rifles slung over their shoulders. Soldiers appeared with many different uniforms. He recognized the pointy helmets of the Germans he had faced in Mexico and elsewhere, but then he saw other uniforms, including finally uniforms of the American army.
“Germany, Austria, France, Poland, Russia, Britain, America,” Roosevelt said. “What we see when we look at this is war. War unlike anything this world has ever seen. It will be a war to end all other wars. Millions will die, and it will last for years, possibly as long as a century. “
Tom stared at the images, overwhelmed.
“I’m sure that people like Krupp will appreciate the opportunity that provides for him.”
“Oh, yes,” Roosevelt said. “He has an inkling that this information exists. And we have only a faint idea of what the other machine in Berlin is telling him. But you have already seen the danger the world is in. Mexico is on the verge of war with the United States, thanks to their German friends.”
“Yeah, I seen that already, up close and personal,” said Tom.
“Germany, France, and Britain have colonies around the world. And wherever there are colonies, there will be war. A war that no one can win, no one but Krupp.”
Tom stared at the images that continued across the screen. It showed monstrous metal ships firing cannons at each other, strange flying vehicles that fired bullets and dropped exploding bombs, and lots and lots of bodies.
“So where do I come in?” Tom said finally.
“The Rothschilds have grown tired of war,” Roosevelt said. “They have plenty of money, enough to invest in the panopticon to begin with. Now that they see what the future holds, they have also invested in a Foundation, an organization committed to doing whatever it can to help prevent this World War. You have already met some of our members—the Wright Brothers are recent recruits—and Eleanor is our elected spokesman, er, spokeswoman.”
“You said she needed to get to Vienna,” Tom said.
“There is a meeting of bankers and diplomats meeting there in a week. Krupp will be there to convince them that the only way to prevent war is to prepare for war. By arming each side to the teeth while continuing to scare them, they will capitalize on the war fever. And then when it strikes, they hope to gain more money from each side.”
“So what is Ellie going to do?”
“Krupp will share with them the information from his panopticon in Berlin and argue his case. Eleanor will be there with the images you have seen, and will convince them that our way is better.”
“And I suspect Krupp don’t want the guys in Vienna to hear what Eleanor has to say.”
Roosevelt nodded. “Or see the images we have here. There are two parts to our puzzle. It would be a problem if Krupp were to prevent the images from arriving at the conference. It would be disastrous if Eleanor were not to appear.”
Tom stared at Roosevelt. “I’m s’pecting that y’all won’t want to put all your eggs in one basket.”
Roosevelt looked at Tom and smiled. “You’re an astute student, Tom.”
# # #
After their conversation, Tom joined a couple of Pinkerton detectives working at City Hall to go round up Eleanor, Bashu and Kid. Tom didn’t worry about Kid; the boy was as resilient as an alley cat. But he suspected that Eleanor was a magnet for trouble, and the walking mountain that was Bashu didn’t fill him with a lot of confidence.
To Tom’s relief, the Pinkertons mounted a couple of roan horses, and offered him a third. Tom immediately relaxed when his buttocks hit the saddle, and he looked around him at the street vendors, shops and traders with a new perspective. It was late evening. The gas streetlamps were being lit by the lighters with their long handled wicks, but business continued to bustle on the streets. Even in St. Louis, Tom had seen that evening usually meant business was done for the day. Here in New York City, it appeared that the city never slept.
They traveled through the section they called Little Italy, with the Pinkertons stopping whenever they saw a policeman—there were quite a few of them—and asking them about Eleanor and Bashu. Finally, they came to the section of town that bordered on a big overgrown area locals called Central Park.
Tom looked where one of the Pinkertons was pointed and saw Bashu standing on a street corner. A second later, he realized that the young boy standing next to him was Kid.
But Kid was dressed completely different than he had been. He had white and brown two toned saddled shoes on his feet, a striped shirt with puffy sleeves, and pants that ballooned out on the leggings, but then drew tight around the calves and ankles, showing striped socks. On top of his head, he wore a flat cloth hat that slouched forward in the front. Tom barely recognized him.
The three of them rode up to the corner and Tom stared at Kid and Bashu, then Tom whistled at Kid.
“Whoo-ee, ain’t you pretty,” Tom said, and Kid gestured, Stop it. You wanted us to blend in.
Tom looked blankly at Kid for a moment, then nodded.
“That’s the smartest thing I heard you say today, Kid. Guess I need to doll myself up too.”
Tom turned at looked at Bashu and immediately knew something was wrong.
“Where is she?” Tom asked.
“She asked me to help the boy with his clothes,” Bashu said. “When I returned, she was gone.”
“Dang it!” Tom shouted, jumping off his horse and throwing his reins to Kid, who threw them over a nearby post. “You’re just about blamed worthless.”
Bashu hung his head. “I will gladly sacrifice myself for my lost honor.”
Tom stared at him, then shook his head. “Just help me find her.’ He motioned to the two Pinkertons who started down the street in the opposite direction. Even though it was nearly dark, the street was still crowded with shoppers, and the doors of almost every shop stood open. Tom stood quietly for a long minute with Kid staring at him, and scanned the environment. Then he saw an alleyway off to the right. He pointed.
“There. That’s where she went.”
“But sir,” Bashu protested. “There are so many possible places she could have gone. How can you be sure…”
Tom ignored him and pushed through the crowd and entered the alleyway. The light from the gas lamps didn’t touch this part of the neighborhood, and the only light they had was from windows of shops above them. In the gloom, Tom saw three young men—hooligans, ne’er do wells, they called them here; back home he would just call them trouble—with their backs to Tom and Kid. Tom saw that one of them held something in his hand. And on the far side of the three men, he saw Eleanor.
She faced Tom and Kid and was talking urgently to the young men. As they got closer, Tom saw that one of the men held a large, wicked looking knife pointed at the young girl. Every once in a while, he would wave it around as if to threaten her. But as Tom looked at Eleanor and started to raise his Winchester up to his shoulder, Eleanor gestured to him with palm held low, telling him not to use the gun.
Tom paused, then slowly dropped the gun, watching and listening to Eleanor. She continued in her serious talk to the young men.
“I realize that things are difficult here in your neighborhood,” Eleanor said. “But believe me, violence is not the answer. What will it get you?”
One of them chuckled. “It’ll get us whatever you got, that’s something.”
“And what do I have? My clothes? A few dollars? My body? And where will that leave you afterward? You will have to do the same thing over and over again just to get by. And sooner or later you will get caught, and then you go to prison for the rest of your life. What kind of a choice is that?”
“What other choice do we have?” another one said, holding his hands open as if in surrender.
“You can work. Work will make your life better. It will make your neighborhood better. And it will make New York a better place to live.”
One of them snorted. “That sounds like the governor speaking.”
“That governor is my uncle,” Eleanor replied. “And I can guarantee you that he wants to know what people like you are going through. He wants you to tell him how things can be different, better.” She stepped forward and put her hand on the sleeve of the young man.
“Will you do that for me? Will you tell the Governor how to make things better?”
The three men hung their heads and nodded. The one with the knife dropped it to the cobblestones beneath them. Tom and Kid took that as their cue to step forward quickly. When the three men saw Tom with his Winchester, they stepped back quickly to the side of the alley and let them through. Tom kicked the knife across the alley in the opposite direction.
“You see,” Eleanor said, smiling smugly. “There is no need for violence when talking can solve the problem.”
“You were lucky, young lady,” Tom said, grabbing her roughly by the sleeve. Nine times out of ten, a young man like that would rough you up first and talk later. Believe me, I’ve known plenty of men like that.”
“You’ve BEEN men like that,” Eleanor said coolly. “And I would kindly ask you to let go of my arm.” Bashu stepped forward, and Tom let go of Eleanor’s arm. The young girl stepped out of the alleyway and onto the busy street. Tom shared a meaningful stare with Bashu, who returned his gaze, then nodded. He followed Eleanor, much closer than before.
Tom grabbed Kid by the sleeve and stopped him as they started for the street.
“I got a job for you, Kid,” Tom said. “And it’s just about the most important job you will ever have. It’s this: don’t let that girl out of you sight. Not ever. I don’t care if she screams bloody murder and calls out all the Pinkertons and her big baboon Bashu on you. Don’t leave her. You got me?”
Kid stared at Tom for a long second, then nodded.
I will not leave her side, he gestured. Tom nodded back and the two of them joined the group on the busy street.

[glen]

CHAPTER SIX
“Sailing, sailing, over the bounding wave”

Governor Roosevelt and Thomas Edison drove Tom and his team to the docks in Brooklyn the next morning. They arrived before sunup, with two large steam autos delivering Eleanor, Tom, Kid and Bashu to the docks in the darkness. Passengers had just started to arrive, and Tom watched the seamen go about their duties preparing the gigantic ship for its ocean voyage.
Before he stepped out of the covered automobile, Tom felt his arm clutched by Roosevelt, and he paused to hear what the older man had to say.
“I have a lot riding on your shoulder, Tom,” the Governor said. “Don’t trust anyone, and don’t let me down.”
“I won’t,” Tom said, looking the big man in the eyes. “I give you my word.”
Roosevelt smiled thinly. “For some men, their word would not be worth much. I know for you, your word is your honor.” He paused. “There’s one more thing I need you to do.”
“Anything, Colonel.”
“Edison and I will take the zeppelin directly to Vienna. You will sail to France, then anchor at LeHavre, and then drive overland to Paris, then Vienna. I need you to stop in Paris at the World’s Fair to see a man. His name is Rudolph Diesel. I believe he may have the key to helping the United States take a lead in the technology race. Give him this.” Roosevelt gave Tom one of his business cards. “He may be able to help you complete your task.”
Tom nodded, and took the card. He grabbed his Winchester in its sleeve and followed the porters who were taking the baggage from Eleanor’s auto up the ramp and onto the ship.
Tom had traded his traditional Stetson, jeans and faded shirt for clothes similar to the outfit he had seen on Kid the day before. The new clothes felt odd, and he felt as if he would stand out in the crowd, but he realized that the change actually made him a lot less obvious. He refused, however, to part with his Winchester.
A purser meet them at the top of the ramp, asking for identification. Tom gave him the falsified identification that Roosevelt had made up for them.
“Mr. Elias Sherman with party. Please follow me.” He led them down the deck to a bulkhead door and went inside. Tom and the others followed him through hallways, down stairs, and down more hallways, all the time listening to the purser provide a nonstop overview of the services on the ship.
“You will find that we are far-reaching in the conveniences we offer. We offer three meals a day, as well as two snack times, both in the main dining hall and the two smaller cafeterias. We offer shuffleboard and other sports activities throughout the day, and dancing and concerts each night.”
“We’ll be mostly staying to ourselves,” Tom said quietly.
The purser nodded. “I understand. Well, Mr. Sherman, if you do have any needs, feel free to call on me at any time, day or night. If you can’t find me, just ask any of the white uniformed staff members on board.”
“How long is the voyage?” Eleanor asked.
“We dock in Le Havre in five days time.”
Tom nodded quietly. He turned and looked behind him at the entourage. Eleanor took everything in stride, Bashu watched Eleanor closely and ignored all else. Kid, once again, was overwhelmed by the strange sights, smells and sounds. His eyes large, he constantly turned to look around him. Finally, he looked at Tom, who locked eyes with him.
Remember what we are here for, he signed to Kid, who nodded and grew sober.
Finally, the purser led them to the suite they had chartered for the trip across. He unlocked the door, then handed the key to Tom, who slipped it in his pocket. The purser turned the knob and opened the door, leading them inside.
Inside was an expansive room with two doors on one side and a third on the other side leading to bedrooms. The main room was set up like a parlor with overstuffed furniture. Opposite the entry door were three portholes that looked out over the water. Tom looked at the three doors to the bedrooms, then noticed a fourth.
“Where does the fourth door go?”
“The head,” the purser said.
“Head of what?” Tom asked.
“The water closet. The loo.”
Tom’s eyebrow raised, still unsure what the man was talking about. Eleanor stepped forward and spoke up.
“Thank you so much, sir. You’ve been very kind.”
The purser nodded and held out his hand expectantly. Tom looked at him suspiciously, before realizing the man was looking for a tip. He fished into his pocket and pulled out a two-bit piece and dropped it into his hand. The purser nodded and closed his hand, perhaps a little more frostily than he had before. He exited, and Tom locked the door behind him.
Tom looked over at the fourth door, still curious. Eleanor smiled and watched him.
“Well, go ahead and take a look,” she said. “You won’t satisfy your curiosity until you do.”
Tom and Kid both went to the door and looked inside. There was both a sink and a seat with a hole in the middle. Kid hit Tom in the shoulder, and Tom turned back to the other two.
“It’s a crapper,” he said. “Why didn’t he just say so?”
“You will find, Mr. Horn, that the names for many things will change as you travel across great distances,” Eleanor said. “And there are many who object to calling a toilet a crapper.”
Tom shrugged. “It’s a crapper to me.”
“I understand. Perhaps we should talk about precautions while we are on ship?”
“If it were up to me, we’d stay in this room for the whole time,” said Tom. “But I know that’s not going to be practical. While we are here, you three can have the bedrooms. I will sleep on the couch out here in the living room.
“We made our reservations in secret and are traveling under assumed names, so that’s something in our favor. But I don’t want us taking any chances. Whenever Eleanor leaves this room, I want both of you right behind her. You get me?” Tom pointed at Kid, then at Bashu, who both nodded.
“And where will you be while I am escorted by these two?” Eleanor asked.
“I won’t be far away,” said Tom. “Your uncle wanted me to fit into the crowd, and think like the killers. The best way for me to do that is to go out on my own. I will sometimes be invisible to you, but I will never be far away, Eleanor.” He turned to Bashu.
“Big guy, I am counting on you to keep any admirers away from her. Don’t be nasty, but don’t let anyone get too close to her.”
Bashu rumbled in response. “I will keep them at bay.”
“Kid, we’ll keep communication between us. You can sign if you want, or whistle if you have to. Like I said, I won’t be far away.”
Kid nodded and signed. I know my job. I will stay with her.
Tom nodded. “Good going.”
A long moment later, the four of them heard the ship horn blow once. Tom and Kid looked at each other, then at Eleanor.
“That’s the signal for anyone going ashore to leave now. We cast off in 15 minutes.”
Tom nodded. “Guess we should go to the windows and watch them cast off then.”
Kid would have preferred to go back on deck to watch them leave port, but Tom decided they shouldn’t take any chances. Not only was Tom concerned with someone taking a shot at Eleanor, he knew that the more they were in public, the more likely it would be that someone would recognize Eleanor, or Tom himself. In addition, Bashu stood head and shoulders above everyone else, and immediately drew attention to him whenever he entered a room. Tom worried that he would be more of a detriment than a help this time around.
The ship slowly pulled away from the Brooklyn docks and sailed past the Statue of Liberty in the morning light. Tom gazed at the enormous structure, wondering if and when he would see her again. Kid stood with his face at the other porthole watching everything he could as they left land. Bashu and Eleanor watched for a few minutes, then sat down at the couch. After they sailed out of sight of land, Tom stepped back from the small window, but Kid kept staring out his.
“Come on, Kid,” Tom said to him quietly. Kid didn’t respond, but kept staring at the open sea.
“Kid, wouldn’t you prefer to look from the deck instead of through a little window?” Tom said.
Kid pulled back and stared at Tom at that. Tom grinned, and Kid grinned back.
“I doubt if anyone will try anything while the sun’s shining,” he said. “’Sides, a body’s got to eat sometime, you know.”
Eleanor smiled again, and Tom realized that he enjoyed watching the young girl smile, not the least because she did it so infrequently. Bashu stood with his usual aloof air, and waited while Eleanor went into her room and then the head to quickly “freshen up,” as she put it, which Tom completely didn’t understand.
“Now remember,” Tom said. “Once we leave these doors, we are the Shermans. We have been apart for many years. We are taking an ocean voyage to get to know each other again as a family.”
“Am I family too?” Bashu asked.
Tom stared at the huge, dark man before shrugging then nodding.
“You’re a distant relative,” Tom said. “A kissing cousin.”
Bashu raised one eyebrow in skepticism. Eleanor turned and patted his arm.
“You will be my manservant, as you always are, Bashu,” she said, taking his arm.
“My pleasure,” he crooned in response.
Tom had to admit that the fresh salt air was a lot more invigorating than the stateroom had been. All of them bundled up against the winter wind, and there weren’t many people bold enough to brave North Atlantic chill in January. But all of them apparently had a touch of claustrophobia, and the bright sunshine and cold air made them feel a lot more energetic.
Tom followed the others at a distance as they climbed the stairs, then followed the labyrinth of hallways to the top. When they entered the sunshine, the others turned left and started around the deck toward the bow of the boat. Tom purposely turned right and scanned the small clusters of people who lingered on the deck. After a few moments, he turned left again and continued following Eleanor and the others.
They made a slow traverse of the entire ship, Kid staying right beside Eleanor, with Bashu two steps behind. While they walked, Kid and Eleanor taught each other sign language. By the time they had made one circuit of the ship and returned to the stairwell where they had come up, Tom could see that the two of them had developed a working dialogue using only signs.
The rest of the day was spent leisurely. Eleanor taught Kid how to play shuffleboard, and even got Bashu to try it. Tom kept his distance, sitting on the deck chairs and sunning himself. He missed his Stetson, and thought about Texas as he rolled a cigarette and watched the others as they played. Only twice did anyone approach them. The first time, it was a crew member who asked Eleanor if she would like anything to drink, which she politely refused. The second time, a couple of curious kids came up to Bashu and asked him if he was from Africa. Bashu started to snarl at them until Eleanor gave him the evil eye. After that, he was courteous to them, answering all of their questions.
They ate in one of the smaller cafeterias for lunch, once again Tom sitting by himself several tables away. Tom was just finishing his meal when he heard a soft voice behind him.
“May we join you?”
He turned to see a beautiful, dark woman with an accent standing behind him. A steward carried a tray of food for her, and a small dark-haired boy stood beside her.
Tom shrugged. “It’s a free country,” she said.
The woman laughed quietly. “That’s so easy for you Americans to say. Not everyone in the world has that same luxury.”
Tom turned and stood. “Pardon my rudeness, I should have stood in the presence of a lady. Allow me to introduce myself. I am T—uh, Elias Sherman.”
The woman held out her hand to Tom, who dipped his head and brushed his lips against her fingers.
“And I am Margaret Zelle. It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Sherman.” She turned to the small boy. “Allow me to introduce my ward. He is traveling back to his native Austria. His name is Adolf.”
Tom looked at the dark-haired boy with the somber face. The boy nodded slightly to Tom, but then turned quickly away.
“He’s shy, and he doesn’t speak any English, I am afraid,” said the woman.
“Margaret Zelle,” Tom repeated. “Interesting name. Where you from, if I may ask?”
“I was born in Belgium, but I have been traveling quite extensively for several years now. I am a dancer and an actress. Perhaps you have heard of me. My stage name is Mata Hari.”
Tom frowned, then shook his head. “Don’t reckon I have. Sorry, Ma’am.”
“That’s quite all right,” she said. “I get the impression that you aren’t from Europe, or from New York.”
“No ma’am. I’ve lived all over, but most recently I lived in Texas. I’m in the cattle and horse business.” He smiled at her. “But there ain’t much call for dancer and actors where I live.”
“Pity,” Mata Hari said. “I think I would like to see Texas.”
They talked for a few more minutes, until the young Adolf began fidgeting in his seat.
“Pardon me,” she said, standing. “I must keep Adolf busy, or he tends to get into mischief. It was a pleasure meeting you.”
“Likewise,” Tom said, standing with her. He watched as the dark woman with the hourglass figure all dressed in black left with the small, angry boy in tow. It took him a long minute to remind himself what his task was, and then switch gears in his mind back to Eleanor.
The other three were just completing their meal after a hearty discussion and decided to take another walk around the deck. Tom waited another five minutes and followed them.
As the hours dragged into days, Tom’s mind went from anxiety into relief, then from relief into boredom. Eleanor bought a book that was being sold by a vendor on the deck, and the three of them spend much of the next couple of days just sitting on the deck while Eleanor read, much to the agony of Kid. The young boy had never been much for school, and had learned just enough reading to be able to cipher out signs that mainly told him he was too young to go into a saloon. Beyond that, Tom didn’t have a lot of hope that Kid would become a scholar.
It was the evening of the second day that the Captain invited “Mr. Elias Sherman and Family” to join him at his table for dinner. Tom almost refused, but Eleanor told him that to say no would be construed both as an insult and would look suspicious. An invitation to sit at the Captain’s table for dinner was a high honor, and wasn’t to be refused lightly.
So the four of them accepted the invitation and appeared in formal wear at the evening meal. It was Eleanor’s foresight that had included formal clothes for all three men with her. Tom wore a woolen suit and formal tie for the first time in his life. He watched as Kid fidgeted and squirmed in his own wool suit. Bashu was quite comfortable with a brightly colored coat and turban, and looked just as comfortable in conversation at the dinner table as Eleanor was. He wore a large red ruby on the front of this turban, which fascinated Kid. Tom spent much of the evening wondering if it was real or not.
Eleanor turned out to be the star of the evening, demonstrating a profound ability to discuss virtually any subject, and on an intelligent level. The men and women who sat around the captain’s table sat enthralled as she talked about ship’s navigation, then astronomy, then cooking, then politics in Europe. Tom watched nervously, concerned whether she might draw too much attention to herself, and especially whether she could keep her identity hidden.
After the conversation started dying down, Tom slipped away from the table and outside to light up a cigarette. He was surprised to see the beautiful Mata Hari standing by the railing, looking out at a full moon over the ocean.
“All alone?” Tom said to her, and she turned and smiled.
“Mr. Sherman, it’s good to see you again,” she said. “Yes, my ward is safely tucked away in bed. I look forward to times like this when I can have a few moments to myself.”
Tom stopped. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you wanted to be alone.”
She touched his arm. “Please don’t go. I’d like to share the view with you. I just wanted some time away from the role of babysitter.”
Tom chuckled and looked behind him. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“Your daughter seems not to need a babysitter.”
“Niece…not daughter,” he said, perhaps a bit too quickly. “The boy is adopted, she’s my niece, and the big man’s….”
“He’s what?”
Tom shrugged. “An extra piece of furniture we carry around?”
Mata Hari laughed, and her voice sounded like music. Tom found it hard to keep his focus, and found himself being very happy that they had met again.
“So you’re not married?”
“No,” he said, then added. “Widowed. The Kid is actually my late wife’s son from a previous marriage. So he’s pretty much the only kin I’ve got.”
“Ah,” Mata Hari said, nodding in understanding. “Do you miss your wife?”
Tom paused, then shrugged. “Happened a long time ago.” Another pause. “Yes, I do.”
She put her hand on Tom’s upper arm.
“It must be hard raising a son alone. I would think you would get lonely that way.”
Tom looked out at the water, than back at Mata Hari.
“Excuse me, but are you sparking me?”
Mata Hari paused, then drew back her hand.
“I do not understand,” she said. “Sparking?”
“Are you interested in courting?” he said, raising one eyebrow.
“Ahh,” she said. “I am familiar with that term. What we call courtship.” She looked at Tom in the moonlight, then kissed him softly on the lips.
“I am a believer in taking one day at a time,” she said. “I don’t know where the west wind will blow me next. But tonight,” she paused again, kissing him lightly. “I am right here.”
Tom felt a simmering flicker become a hot flame inside him. It had been a while, and his body let him know it. It took a determined effort on his part to keep his mind on business.
“Well, that’s very thoughtful of you,” he said, kissing her in return. “I like the way you are thinking. Trouble is, I got a previous commitment tonight. Can we plan on seeing each other tomorrow night, just like this?”
“Who knows what tomorrow night will bring?” she said, once again kissing him. “Tonight is here right now.”
Tom held his lips to hers for another long moment, then tore himself away.
“Sorry, but I really am going to have to get back to you tomorrow night,” he said, pulling himself from the railing and stepping back. “I’m so sorry.”
“So am I,” she said, an edge of sadness in her voice. Tom took a couple more steps away from her, walking backwards. She smiled softly and waved at him as he turned and went back to his stateroom.
“Everything in order here?” he asked hastily as he entered the room.
“We’re all under control,” Eleanor said quietly, then turned to him, smiling. “What about you?”
He fumbled with the deadbolt on the door and finally locked it.
“I’m just fine, just fine,” he said.
“Looks that way to us too,” Eleanor said. Tom looked up to see the other three staring at him. He turned to Kid, who grinned at him, touching his finger to his lips. Tom paused, then rushed to the head. He looked in the mirror on the wall and saw red lipstick on his mouth. He used water and his sleeve to clean it off. A faint buzzing rang in his ears.
A moment later, he stepped out of the washroom and stood before them.
“I don’t want you three to get the idea that I am not serious about our job here,” he said.
“We can see that,” Eleanor said.
“Blast it, girl,” he said. “This don’t concern you. Well, maybe it does concern you…just know that I still got my mind on my job.” His head began to feel dizzy.
Eleanor stepped forward and nodded to Tom.
“Mr. Horn, despite what I may think about your past and your use of violence, I want you to know that I have every confidence in your abilities. I trust you implicitly.”
Tom paused, then thanked Eleanor. “I am glad….”
Tom felt the room turn upside down and the floor rushed up to meet him.
# # #
“Wake up, Tom Horn! Wake up!” he heard a deep voice hissing in his ear. Tom opened his eyes to see Bashu clutching his collar and shaking him. His face and hair were wet and he was lying on the couch in the stateroom. His head still felt woozy and his legs felt like rubber.
“What’s…what’s going on?” he asked slowly. His tongue felt like it was three times its normal size.
“You were drugged last night,” Eleanor said. “You have been unconscious for six hours.”
“Six--.” Tom started to sit up, but felt his head splitting as he sat up.
“I have seen this before,” Bashu said. “Once he is awake, the effects should dissipate quite quickly.”
“Drugged?” Tom repeated. “But I didn’t drink anything. How…?”
“You drank of that woman’s virtue,” Bashu said.
Tom touched his lips and frowned. “Her kiss?”
“Was drugged,” Bashu said. “As I said, it is an old trick from Persia and other countries. I have seen many a man duped in just such a way. Most of the time, their intent was to rob them.”
Tom shook himself, trying to wake himself from the grogginess that refused to go away.
“But I wasn’t robbed,” he said finally. “Not that I know of.”
“You were robbed of time,” Bashu said.
“Time?” Tom said, finally coming awake. “What’s happened while I was asleep?”
Bashu looked at Eleanor, who shrugged. “We knew it was best to stay here with you unconscious. I don’t know what has happened since you were last awake.”
Tom sat up and looked around. “Kid, time for you and I to take a look around the ship. Real quiet like.” He stood up and staggered over to where his Winchester lay propped against the wall and took it up. He turned back to Eleanor and Bashu. “You two lock the door behind us and don’t open it for anyone.”
Kid jumped up from his chair on the other side of the room and nodded. He kicked off the hard soled shoes happily and headed for the door.
“Good idea,” Tom said, kicking his own off. They exited the room and entered the hallway, barefoot.
The hall was quiet. Tom didn’t know exactly what time it was, but knew it must be close to morning if he had been asleep for six hours. And Mata Hari had had her reasons for making him sleep. Something had happened; something he might have been able to prevent had he been awake. Tom thought about what happened, how he had been betrayed by Mata Hari. The more he thought about it, the madder he got. He’d been shafted by women before, and one sleeper in Denver even stuck him with a knife. But none had so completely fooled him before. He didn’t know if he was more angry because she tried to kill him, or because she tricked him.
And then he realized that she hadn’t tried to kill him. She probably could have killed him in a dozen different ways, but she didn’t. Instead she just got him out of the way while other things happened.
That was the problem, and that was the mistake that she made. Now he was awake, armed and angry. And he was going to do something about it. Whatever IT was.
They continued through silent hallways for two more levels. When Kid and Tom finally reached the third level up, they heard voices. A fist knocked at a door ahead, then he heard a thick German-accented voice call after: “Please to get up! All are needed to come to the main dining hall! It is sehr important!”
Figures, Tom thought to himself. Wherever he went, there were bound to be Germans. But how did they get on board? He hadn’t seen or heard any Germans on board in the past two days, but of course, they could have just holed up in their rooms. Or knowing the tricky Heinies, they could have swum up to the boat.
Tom and Kid knelt in the stairwell and watched the two Germans continue down the hall, knocking on doors. Tom whispered something to Kid, who grinned and nodded his head vigorously.
“Just be careful,” Tom whispered to him, and Kid nodded his head again.
Tom slipped back down the stairwell, and Kid climbed the stairs. He started walking down the hall toward the two men, who paused when they saw Kid coming toward them.
“You!” one of them said to Kid. “Little boy. Please to come with us. You are to go to dining hall.”
Kid froze in his tracks and started backtracking toward the stairwell. The two men started after him, and Kid broke into a run. The men ran after him.
“Kommt hier!” shouted the one. Kid thundered down the stairs and rounded the corner, with the two men right behind. The first turned the corner and his face ran directly into the butt of Tom’s Winchester, collapsing like a dead pig. The second man skidded to a halt when he saw his comrade fall to the floor. He started to reach to his belt holster for his sidearm, but Tom pulled his Winchester up and aimed it at the German’s face.
“Not a good idea, pardner,” Tom said. He motioned in a circle with his finger. “Turn around.”
Crestfallen, the German turned around and faced the wall. Tom raised the butt of his rifle and struck him on the back of his neck. The man collapsed to the floor.
Tom looked at Kid, who shrugged.
“Sounds like we need to go over to the dining hall and see what’s what,” Tom told Kid, who nodded.
They finished climbing the stairs to the main hallway and followed it to the entryway to the deck. They got to the top deck to find that it was daylight outside. They carefully poked their heads out of the doorway and saw one armed German guard standing a few feet away with his back to them. Tom used his rifle again to knock the German out, and they dragged him inside and around a corner. They came out onto the deck and started toward the dining room.
Kid grabbed Tom’s arm at one point as they neared the edge of the ship. He pointed down to the water. Tom looked and saw a smaller, rounded boat with a solid metal deck below them. Another German stood on top of the smaller ship with a rifle. Tom leaned close to Kid.
“We might need to take him out later, but for now, let’s just deal with the dining room,” he said.
They followed the deck farther down until they saw the windows of the dining hall. Tom used hand signals to tell Kid to sneak in and then motion for him. Kid crawled to the entrance and then motioned for Tom to join him.
Tom got grim when he saw what they were facing. Already the dining hall was filled with ship staff, including many sailors. Gradually the staff were being joined by rising passengers. Surrounding the small band of staff and passengers was a line of German soldiers, about 50, who lined all four walls. They all had submachine guns.
Tom looked at Kid, who signed back. What do we do now?

[glen]

Chapter Seven
Into the Fire

Tom tapped on the stateroom door and added, “It’s me.” Bashu opened it after a moment, and they rushed it. Tom explained to Bashu and Eleanor what was happening.
“It looks like close to a platoon of soldiers,” Tom said. “And we all know what they are here for.”
“We have to decide what to do,” Eleanor said. “Perhaps I can talk to them, convince them that there is another way.”
“I’ve already thought about a plan, and it doesn’t involve giving ourselves up. At least not you giving yourself up.”
“Does it involve killing someone? Because if that’s the case, I don’t want anything to do with it.” Eleanor folder her arms across her chest and leaned back, a hard look coming across her face.
“We might have to do some killing,” Tom said, staring at her. “I won’t eliminate that possibility. But if we are lucky—or smart—we might get by without spilling too much blood.”
“How comforting,” Eleanor said flatly. “If that’s the case, I’d just as soon surrender.”
Tom gestured toward the door. “This way, ma’am. Don’t let it hit you in the backside on your way out. Just remember this: do it our way and maybe a few will die. Do it your way, and millions will die.”
“So it’s all about numbers?” she said, stepping forward, her normally soft voice gaining an edge to it. “A dozen dying is better than a million? Is that it?”
Tom shrugged. “Something like that.”
“Well, I won’t stand for anyone to die.”
Tom chuckled and shook his head. “Boy, what kind of fantasy land have you been living in? Young lady, people will die no matter what you do. And there ain’t guldurn much you can do about it.”
Eleanor started to protest again, but Tom held up his hand for silence.
“If we all work together, as I was trying to say before, we can keep the damage down to a minimum. But sometimes a little damage is just what we need to keep the big damage from happening. Now here’s the plan. Bashu, the first step is to get you to surrender. That will give you the opportunity to do what you do best.”
Bashu thought for a moment and then grinned, realizing what Tom had in mind.
“Indeed,” he said.
# # #
Actually, the first thing Tom had them do was collect the Germans that he had knocked unconscious. The three men were tied hand and foot and then put inside one of the lifeboats that were lined up along the side of the steamship.
Then Bashu walked calmly over to the dining hall, hands held aloft on either side of his head in surrender. A German soldier at the entrance turned to see the giant Punjabi walking their way and motioned to the others.
“Achtung! Pass auf!” he shouted, and three men with automatic rifles ran out to intercept him.
“I surrender,” Bashu rumbled. “I see the awesome power of the mighty German army—and navy—and realize that surrendering is the best thing for me to do.” He said this flatly, trying to convince himself that what he said was true, even though his eyes still showed defiance.
The three soldiers pushed and prodded him over to where they main officer stood. The small man stepped forward, a single monocle over his right eye. He looked at Bashu up and down, then spoke.
“You are the giant from India we were told to expect,” the German said. “I am not disappointed. Now you will tell us where your ward is. Where is the girl called Eleanor Roosevelt?”
Bashu looked at the smaller man, sniffed and raised his nose in disgust.
“I do not know,” he said simply, and turned his head away.
“We will find out, you know,” the German said, smiling slightly. “We always find out.”
# # #
Kid crept past the dining hall to the kitchen. All of the kitchen staff had been collected to add to the mass of hostages under guard in the dining hall. He found his way to the storage room attached to the kitchen and began searching through the barrels and bottles there until he found what he was looking for. It was a large barrel with the label “kerosene” on its side. He took a metal dolly from the corner and placed it beneath the barrel, then tipped it back, supporting the barrel on two wheels. Then he wheeled the barrel out the side door and onto the deck.
At awkward as the dolly with the barrel was, Kid was still able to move quietly. More than once he wished that this had all happened at night, but that couldn’t be helped. If Tom had not been drugged—well, if he hadn’t kissed that woman—they might have been able to stop them from boarding, or they might have had a better chance to move around in the darkness. But as it was, and as Kid had experienced many times before, you worked with what you had.
He paused as he came to the side of the ship, looking for sentries. He looked up at the bridge and thought he saw someone standing there. Another guard stood at the stern of the ship, a third at the bow. Kid watched the guards at either end of the ship and realized that they didn’t seem to look his way, being more concerned with watching for ships that might come to their rescue. Knowing that he couldn’t continually watch three men in three different locations effectively, he decided to concentrate on the man on the bridge, especially since he was closest. He waited until the man moved away from his side, and began rolling the kerosene to the side of the ship.
Once at the side of the ship, he realized that he had to deal with the sentry on the submarine. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his trusty slingshot. He looked around for ammunition, and found a loose bolt that the Germans had used to connect the ramp from the submarine to the ship. He unscrewed it and put it in the pocket of the slingshot. He stood up and waited.
The German sailor on the submarine turned a moment later and saw Kid standing on the side of the ship, grinning at him. The sailor unslung his rifle from over his shoulder and started to raise it. But Kid was faster. He drew first and shot the sailor right between the forehead with the bolt that he had found. The sailor splashed into the water behind him.
Satisfied, Kid unscrewed the lid from the top of the barrel of kerosene, then tipped it over to let it pour out onto the ocean water.
# # #
“Tell us where she is!” the little officer said to Bashu, after striking him across the face with his fist again. The big man turned slightly with the blow of the strike, but then smiled back at the officer, not saying a word.
The officer paused. “Obviously, we need to move to stronger measures. Hans!” The officer stepped aside and a younger, bigger soldier took his place. Although not as tall as Bashu, the soldier they called Hans was well over six feet and built like a bull. He took a moment to remove the gloves he had been wearing, unbutton the top button of his tunic, and to crack his knuckles loudly. The smile left Bashu’s lips.
A big fist rammed into Bashu’s face, and he jerked in response.
# # #
Kid poured about half the barrel of kerosene into the water around the submarine. Then he rolled the barrel to the top of the ramp. The man he had knocked into the water had been stunned, but had recovered in time to climb back onto the submarine. He had lost his rifle in the water, but he yelled down one of the hatches. Two more men appeared on the deck of the submarine, and one raised his rifle to fire.
At that moment Kid pushed the barrel toward them, and it rolled down the ramp. The sight of the big barrel rolling down toward them, liquid splashing out as it rolled, threw the aim of the sailor off, and he fired at the barrel. This just put another hole in the barrel, and more kerosene poured out all over the water, the ramp and the deck of the submarine.
While the sailors were trying to stop the barrel from rolling farther into the submarine, Kid pulled out a wooden match and struck it. He threw it onto the trail of kerosene that ran down the ramp, and watched as the submarine, ramp and water around it started to burn.
# # #
“Feuer! Es gibt Feuer!” a soldier said, looking toward the submarine and seeing black smoke and flames rising.
The men in the dining hall instinctively started toward the fire, but the officer halted them. He motioned for four of the men to remain guarding the hostages, and left Hans to continue working on Bashu, who sat tied to a chair. The rest ran out the door and toward the smaller ship.
Hans watched the men race out the door and across the deck, then turned back toward Bashu. To his surprise—and consternation—Bashu’s face had broken into a broad grin. Hans frowned at Bashu puzzled. A second later, Bashu’s head crashed upward toward Hans’ chin, and the big German went down.
Still tied to his chair, Bashu raised himself up on his legs, and pushed backward. The chair smashed into the wall and shattered into small pieces of wood. The Punjabi stood and stretched, the ropes falling away from his arms and legs.
# # #
Bullets hit the deck and chips of wood flew in all directions as Kid ran as fast as he could in a zigzag pattern back to the main entryway of the ship. Kid heard rifles firing from the bow and stern at him. Then he heard only the bow rifle, then silence. He looked up at the bridge and saw a familiar figure wave at him. He waved back and looked at the guards. Both guards lay on the deck, clutching their knees which Tom had shot out from the long distance of the bridge.
Kid watched from the safety of the forecastle as a line of Germans ran toward the submarine he had just left. They stood on the edge of the deck, watching helplessly as their submarine and the ramp that led to it were covered in flames.
Suddenly he saw one of them standing on the end collapse, clutching his knee. The man next to him saw him collapse and turned to shout at the others. He collapsed as well. All of the Germans standing at the edge of the deck started to look around and raise their automatic rifles, but they apparently could not see where the shots were coming from.
A third man, on the opposite side of the group collapsed, screaming and clutching at his knee. Then the officer in charge shouted and pointed at the bridge of the ship, high above them. They all raised their automatic rifles and began firing.
# # #
Tom Horn had picked off three of the Germans before they spotted him. He would have preferred to have shot them all down, but you played with the hand you were dealt, as he knew only so well. The instant the German officer raised his head and pointed at the bridge, Tom ducked to the floor. Two seconds later, a hail of bullets shredded the glass window and the wood wall in front of him. From what he had seen, Tom knew that the submachine guns were great at short distances, but their short barrels made them unreliable at a distance. He grinned to himself, then frowned. The Germans would make up for inaccuracy with sheer volume. A stray bullet would kill you just as dead as a carefully aimed one.
The bullets continued, and Tom knew it was time to find a different site to shoot from. He crawled out of the bridge and into the stairwell that dropped down to the main deck. He saw a German soldier circling around to meet him, and Tom raised and shot the man before he could pull up his automatic rifle. As he descended the stairs, Tom took the time to shove more bullets into the magazine of the lever-action Winchester.
“You and me, baby,” he crooned to the rifle. “Just like so many times before.”
He came to the bottom of the stairwell and turned the corner. A machine gun came out of nowhere and its barrel stuck in his ribs. He reacted without thinking, pulling the barrel toward him and jerking the German holding it off balance. The gun fired, but it was aimed past him at that point. He slugged the German in the chin, hard, and he went down.
“Five down, fifteen to go,” Tom said, turning the corner and looking out the door into the morning sunlight. Germans were scattered everywhere, some still trying to fight the fire on the ramp and submarine. About half a dozen were running his direction.
“Time to get out of here,” he muttered to himself. He looked around and realized that behind him was only the bridge, with no other alternate route. Ahead of him were more Germans and bright sunlight with nowhere to hide.
“Danged if I do, danged if I don’t,” he breathed. He waited until the crowd of six soldiers were just entering the door, then he charged into the crowd, shoulder first. The mass of soldiers, caught off guard, fell backwards and ran into each other. Tom pushed ahead, taking advantage of the surprise of his attack. One soldier hadn’t fallen as he came out. He stared at Tom, startled. Tom responded by slinging the butt of his rifle up as he passed, clipping the young man in the chin.
“Six down,” he said, running past the folding chairs and chaise lounges lined up against the wall and into the next doorway. It was the doorway that led down to their stateroom, and Tom suddenly grew concerned for Eleanor’s safety. He ran down the hallway and descended the steps two at a time. When he was about 20 feet from the stateroom door, he realized it was open. He rushed in, only to see four men with automatic rifles pointed at him. Eleanor was held by a fifth man, and didn’t seem to like it one bit.
Tom froze for a second, realized that resistance would be foolish, and dropped his Winchester to the floor, raising his hands in surrender.
“Sehr klug,” one of the Germans said, smiling. “Sehr klug.”
# # #
“So this is the famous Tom Horn,” the German officer said as they climbed back into the sunshine. “It is a privilege to meet you.”
Tom Horn smiled lop-sidedly in return. “Yeah, well you can go take a running leap into a tank of sheep dip, for all I care.”
The German laughed. “Your cowboy sense of humor is quite refreshing. But you have proved to be quite a nuisance. The fire on the submarine and the shooting of my men has been—troubling. I will have fun taking that sense of rebellion out of you, piece by piece.” He turned, still smiling, and looked at Eleanor.
“And this young girl is the one everyone is so concerned about,” he said. “Tell me, Miss Roosevelt, is ocean travel as exciting as you expected? Maybe a bit more?”
He reached up and grasped her cheeks with his right hand, but Eleanor jerked away. The German smiled at her greasily.
“Oh come now, Miss Roosevelt, your reputation precedes you. Surely you have something diplomatic to say in a situation such as this?”
Eleanor stared at him, then suddenly spit in his face. The officer jerked back in surprise, and Tom grinned.
“How’s that for diplomacy? Eleanor, you just came up a couple of notches in my book.” Tom grinned at her, and was rewarded by a fist in his stomach by one of the Germans.
“Eselkopf!” the German said.
The officer reached in his pocket and pulled out a linen handkerchief, wiping the spittle from his face. He stared at Eleanor, who stared back at him in defiance. Finally he smiled thinly back at her.
“No matter,” he said. “We will have you back in Berlin within a few days. In the meantime, put them with the others.”
The entourage of German officers and soldiers, Tom and Eleanor walked across the deck toward the dining hall. Tom looked over at the men still fighting the fire, and grinned. Win or lose, it had been fun for as long as it lasted.
They came to the door of the dining hall, and Tom and Eleanor were pushed through the doors before the officers. As they came through, Tom saw immediately what was happening, and shoved Eleanor to one side. The German officer and the soldiers with him froze when they saw that a dozen American sailors held rifles pointed at them.
For a long moment, the Germans were unsure what to do. Then following the lead of their officer, they dropped their rifles and sidearms to the deck floor. The ship captain stepped forward slowly and faced the German officer. A man in his 60s, the captain showed the stress of being under guard. His uniform was wrinkled where he had apparently been roughed up, and there was a nasty bruise on the side of his face. But the man had regained his dignity, and now he faced the man who had tried to take it from him.
“You realize, don’t you, the penalty for piracy on the high seas?” the captain said coolly to the German, his eyes narrowing. “It’s a hanging offense, completely at the discretion of the captain.”
The German officer tried to remain calm, but Tom could see the sweat beginning to appear on his temple. “I still have men out there. We have a submarine with torpedoes that can easily sink this boat. I think this is a time for negotiation.”
Tom grinned. “If I was you, I’d start worrying about your hide. That submarine ain’t gonna be much help to you when you got a noose around your neck. And as for those men out there….” He turned as the half dozen men who had been fighting the fire were marched in the doors of the dining hall, followed by American sailors with rifles.
Tom turned to the captain. “Captain, I know you are plumb eager to get on with the hanging, but I wonder if I could borrow this old goat for a few minutes. I want to see if you can tell us anything about what we should expect when we arrive in Le Havre. I guess the secret is out; they were here looking for us.”
The captain nodded. “Yes, their insistent questioning made me realize that you were not who you said you were. You were responsible for rescuing us from this plight. I suppose the least we can do is give you ten minutes to talk to this—piece of tripe.” He turned and looked at the German officer in disgust.
“Well, I am truly sorry for what we put you through. And I suspect that my interrogation methods are a bit behind the times. My preferred method of asking questions is what I learned from the Apaches. They tend to talk pretty well after an hour or so of turning them over a campfire.” He looked over at Bashu, who leaned against the wall, talking with Kid.
“No, I think I know someone else who can be pretty persuasive, and probably has his own reasons for wanting to talk to the German gentleman.” He looked from Bashu to the German officer, then back again. The officer followed his eyes and saw Bashu, then gulped.
“Perhaps I was a bit hasty,” the German said. “I am sure I would rather converse with you, kind sir.”
Tom grabbed the officer by the shoulder and pushed him toward the big Punjabi. “I’d just feel terrible if Bash-boy here didn’t get his chance to ask you questions, real personal-like.” Tom led the officer over to Bashu, who looked at Tom then at the officer and grinned.
“Let me know if he has anything important to share,” Tom said to Bashu. Bashu nodded and took the officer into the kitchen. Tom looked at Kid, who seemed fine.
“You okay?” Tom asked. The boy nodded, then gestured.
That was fun. This is the best adventure.
“Yeah, just don’t forget what I told you. No unnecessary risks, and no drinking or cigars until you’re sixteen.”
Kid grinned back at him, and Tom tousled the boy’s hair. He turned and looked at the crowd of hostages, now returning to their roles as merely passengers. He stood scanning the crowd for a long moment before he realized that Eleanor was standing beside him.
“She’s not here, is she?” Eleanor said.
Tom shook his head. “I suspected she wouldn’t be. I’ve known her kind before. Maybe not as polished as she is, but alley cats all the same. They always seem to land on the ground feet first.”
“I suspect that we will be seeing her again,” Eleanor said.
“I sure hope not,” Tom said. “I mean, she’s a real dish, but she’s strictly bad news. And I don’t need bad news, now or ever.”
“What will happen to the officer in charge of the Germans?” Eleanor asked.
Tom shrugged. “After Bashu is done with him, they’ll take him to port and try him as a pirate. If they get him to talk and say who’s behind all this—and we both have a pretty good idea who that is—then they will probably go after him. That is, if he is someone who can be gotten.”
“What does that mean?”
Tom frowned. “I done a lot of bad things over the years, and most of them was for rich men who didn’t want to get their hands dirty. As long as they didn’t actually do the killing, but hired someone else to do it, they felt like they were innocent. And they had enough money, and enough friends in high places to convince others that they were innocent as well.”
Tom grew sober and turned to Eleanor.
“You want to change the world, Eleanor? You want to do something really good? Find a way to get rid of those fat cats whose greed leads to good men getting killed. That would be something. That would be changing the world.”
Eleanor looked back at him, a newfound respect in her eyes.
“That sounds more like a job that you would be good at, Mr. Tom Horn. Perhaps you have found a new calling.”
Tom stared at her for a moment, then shook his head.
“Nah. I’ve seen too much badness, done too many bad things, to ever convince myself that I could do something good like that.”
“Look at what you are doing right now, Mr. Horn,” she said. “You’re doing good just by getting me to Vienna, safe and sound.”
Tom shrugged. “Maybe. But really, it’s just a job.”
Eleanor wrinkled her nose and shook her head.
“You can’t convince me of that. I know you, or at least am beginning to know you. And there is a lot of good in you.”
Tom tipped his head. “Well, I am glad at least one person thinks so.”
Tom watched as Bashu waded through the crowd to him and Eleanor. He had blood on his shirt. Eleanor blanched and Tom knew better than to ask the details.
“The German knows something,” Bashu said. “I will get it from him. But it may take a few more minutes.”
Tom shrugged. “Take your time. But don’t kill him. I suspect that the captain will take great joy in making sure the Heinie swings from a rope.”
Bashu nodded, then turned to go. A second later, they all heard a gunshot. Bashu charged into the kitchen, followed by Tom, Eleanor and the captain. An American sailor stood next to the bloody body of the German officer.
“I turned for a second, and he grabbed my pistol,” the sailor said. “He had it pointed at his head and pulled the trigger before I could react.”
Tom looked at the body lying on the floor, then at Bashu and the captain, who were obviously disappointed. He then turned to Eleanor, who had turned away when she saw all the blood.
“Well that was our last, best chance to know what Krupp was planning for us,” he said.
“We’ll just have to be careful and observant,” Eleanor said, still staring out the doorway and away from the corpse.
“As usual, we’re flying blind,” said Tom. “Won’t be the first time. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

[glen]

Chapter 8
“Gay Par-ee”

It was two more days before the steamship came to the port city of Le Havre, France. Eleanor and the others seemed nervous after all that had happened. But Tom was relieved, knowing that the Germans had ruined their chance to capture or kill Eleanor. The captain and his crew were a lot more alert now, and Krupp and his cronies would be hard pressed to attempt another hijacking. No, Tom thought, if anything else were going to happen, it would happen after they arrived in France.
And he was right. While the other fretted and jumped at every knock at the door, Tom got his best sleep in days. When they arrived in port, Tom was well rested and ready to face whatever challenges were ahead of them.
Just as he had promised, Teddy Roosevelt had a steam car waiting for them when they arrived. But the four of them had discussed it and agreed that it would be safer if they took their own transportation. Someone had tipped the Germans off that they were on the steamship, and likely that someone would know what arrangements Roosevelt had made.
Instead, Tom and the others slipped off the ship as quietly as possible and headed for the train station. They bought tickets and caught an express train headed for Paris within 30 minutes. Leaving all of their luggage behind—with the exception of one small bag that Eleanor had insisted had her “absolute essentials—they boarded the train and climbed into a private compartment, shutting the door behind them.
The gamble they took apparently paid off. The trip to Paris was uneventful. They arrived three hours after they had arrived in Le Havre. Tom had become convinced that the best way to fight Krupp army was to stay two steps ahead of them.
They took the Paris metro into the center of town. Eleanor was excited, because she explained that the subway system was brand new and had just opened to help them compete with other big cities like London and New York. As usual, Kid gawked at the buildings, the subway trains and the people as they walked down the street.
Eleanor knew of a small but nice hotel a few blocks away from the Exposition Universelle, which is what the French were calling the World’s Fair. France had hosted the world’s fair twice before, with each one larger than the one before. The first had featured the Eiffel Tower, which had been completed just in time for the fair’s opening. Eleanor explained to the other three that Gustave Eiffel had built the tower, as well as the Statue of Liberty that they had admired just a week before.
Eleanor and Kid begged and pleaded for Tom to allow them to go to the World’s Fair, but after what had happened at sea, Tom flatly refused.
“You have a great room with a good view of the Eiffel Tower and the rest of the fancy fixings,” he said. “I got a little business to attend to at the Fair. I’ll get it done quickly, then we will get back on the train and be on our way to Vienna.”
Kid and Eleanor, as adult as their responsibilities had been in the past few days, reverted to petulant children. Tom again shook his head.
“The meetings in Vienna will be done in a few days. After all is said and done, there will be plenty of time to come back here and play around.”
He looked from Kid’s dejected face to Eleanor’s pout.
“I promise, kids.”
Eleanor taught—or tried to teach—Tom a few words in French that might help him get to the Fair and around it once he was inside. She need not have bothered. The clerk at the hotel spoke English, as did many of the people on the street on the way to the Exhibition. Tom tried to stay focused, but found himself in awe of the architecture of new buildings build specifically for the Fair. The demonstrations, displays and exhibitions were scattered through a dozen buildings around the Eiffel Tower, with six of them new. All Tom knew was that he had to find a man named Rudolph Diesel.
He wandered through the Gare de Lyon, then the Gare d’Orsay without success. He was starting to get frustrated as the minutes became hours. He entered the Grand Palais and was walking by a historical reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg presented by a Dutch benefactor when he saw a sign posted in French. He didn’t understand any of it, not only because of the language but because of the flowery calligraphy that the poster used. But he did recognize one word: Diesel. He turned and grabbed a young couple, asking them if they spoke English. Fortunately they did.
“Where is this?” Tom asked them.
“That is in the Ancien Palais du Trocadero.”
“And where—pray tell—is that?”
The man smiled at Tom patiently. “That is just on the other side of the Tour d’Eiffel,” he said. “It is the big glass building. You cannot miss it.”
“Gotcha. Much obliged,” Tom said, tipping his hat. He ran out the doorway to the wide walkway that passed in front of each of the buildings and turned left. He started to run, then realized that the fair was much larger than he had thought it ever possible, and that he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. He slowed himself to a walk and made his way over to the Ancien Palais du Trocadero.
The building was massive, and looked even more so as Tom entered the main doors and began scanning for Diesel. There were five floors, and of course, all signs were in French. He found what looked like a directory of sorts and saw that Diesel would be making a presentation of his newest invention in 45 minutes. Tom thought about it. If Roosevelt was right, whatever this man’s invention was might be the difference between Germany controlling technology and commerce in the world, and the United States and others giving them some competition. He thought it might be important for him to meet with Diesel before his presentation.
The presentation was on the main floor, in the back of the building. Tom found his way to a large auditorium that featured large, red overstuffed chairs and a vaulted ceiling. He trotted down the aisle toward the main stage where a large object was veiled by heavy cloth. A man he assumed was Diesel stood talking to another man with wire-rimmed glasses. As he drew closer, the second man became familiar.
“Oroville!” Tom shouted. “I thought we left you behind in Ohio!”
Oroville Wright looked up, started, then grinned when he saw Tom.
“Well, if it isn’t my old friend Tom Horn,” he said, shaking Tom’s hand. “Tom, this is Rudolph Diesel.”
Diesel straightened from looking at the covered device and nodded at Tom.
“Mr. Diesel, our mutual friend Colonel Teddy Roosevelt wanted me to look you up,” Tom said, handing him the business card that Roosevelt had given him. “He believes you can help the United States.”
“Mr. Horn, I in no way presume to have invented anything that significant,” Diesel said, and Tom was surprised to hear an English accent. “I will share with you what I have built however.”
“English?” Tom asked.
“Born right here in Paris, educated in London, with parents from Germany. So as you Yanks might put it, I am a bit of a mongrel.”
Tom grinned. “That suits me just fine. Let’s see what you got.”
“What I got, as you put it, is an internal-combustion engine that has three times the horsepower of a steam engine, with half the weight.” Diesel unveiled the engine and Tom stepped back to look at the hunk of metal before him.
“I wish I could say it looks purty, but it don’t to me,” Tom said. “Gimme a good quarterhorse any day.”
Diesel looked startled, and Oroville laughed. “Tom tells you exactly the way he sees it.”
Oroville turned to Tom and his smile vanished. “Tom you must realize what this means. Weight to power ratio is the defining problem holding back heavier-than-air flight. This is the breakthrough that Wilbur and I have been waiting for for ten years. It’s what the world has been waiting for.” He turned to Diesel. “What do you use for fuel?”
Diesel lifted a small glass container which held a golden liquid.
“What’s that?” Tom asked.
“Peanut oil.”
“Peanut oil? That’s what makes this machine go?”
Diesel nodded.
Still excited beyond measure, Oroville turned back to Diesel.
“I know it would be unfair to ask you to sell us exclusive rights to this invention,” Oroville said. “Frankly, I would be offended if you said yes. But in light of the monopoly the Germans seem to have in the areas of hydrogen and steam power, I would think you would feel obligated to share your secrets with other countries of the world.”
“Especially the good guys,” Tom said.
Diesel looked overwhelmed. While he hesitated, Oroville continued.
“I can’t wait to see what this machine would do in our prototype flying machine,” he said. “Tom, no one else knows this, but Wilbur is setting up a demonstration of our glider and the concept of the heavier than air flight. We plan on making our demonstration tomorrow morning from the top of the Eiffel Tower. If we could only get this engine into the glider.”
Tom turned as they talked and saw someone in black standing in the doorway of the auditorium. It was a woman whose form was very familiar to him. Someone who had eluded him before, but would not elude him again. It was Mata Hari.
The figure recognized him and disappeared from the doorway. In response, Tom bolted off the stage and up the aisle to the doorway.
He entered the open area outside the auditorium. The room was filled with people, milling in all directions. He paused for a long moment, then saw a trace of black turning a corner in the far end of the room. Pushing his way through the crowd, he charged through the room and around the corner after the woman who had betrayed him.
In front of him was a long, empty hallway. He knew that she had nowhere else to go but straight ahead, and so he ran as fast as he could after her. The hallway emptied out into another large room filled with people. Tom paused to look for her, and then stood on a nearby bench to see if he could see her. There was no indication that she was there, or had been there anytime recently. He paused and closed his eyes, focusing on his innate tracking abilities. Then he made a guess and turned left into another hallway. There ahead of him was the elusive Mata Hari.
She had turned down a hallway that had no exit. All of the doors were locked. She had realized her mistake and turned to come back out just as Tom had turned the corner and blocked her exit.
“Mr. Sherman,” she said brightly, raising her chin and stepping forward toward Tom. “I didn’t have the opportunity to say goodbye on the ship.”
“Neither did I, and you can drop the act,” Tom said. “You know very well that I’m not who I say I am. Just as you aren’t who you claim to be. So let’s get down to brass tacks.”
Mata Hari paused, taking a second to gather her wits, then smiled at Tom again. “I don’t know what you are talking about.” She was close enough to Tom to either once again step up and kiss him, draw a knife or step by him and run. Tom didn’t give her the chance.
He reached up and backhanded her across the face. Mata Hari’s hands flew to her face, and she looked down. Then she slowly looked back at Tom, her voice a little lower and more sophisticated than it was a moment before.
“I suppose I deserve that after what I did to you on the ship.”
He nodded. “I don’t like striking women, but I’ve done it once or twice. Usually when they are threatening to kill me.”
Mata Hari stepped closer to him, and he stiffened. “Oh come on, Mr. Horn. You were never in any danger from me.” She reached up and ran her hands up his arms in the beginnings of a caress. Before her hands reached his back, however, his own hand shot up and caught her under the chin and grasped her throat. Her eyes opened wide, and her mouth popped open like a fish. Tom gave her throat a gentle squeeze, pushing her backward against the nearby wall. She threw her hands up to grasp Tom’s arm, which had a death grip on her throat. He slammed her against the wall, and then softened his grip.
“Now you and I are going to have a serious conversation,” he said quietly but with an iron voice. “No more playing around. You tell me what I want to know, and maybe, just maybe, you will live to be an old woman with grandkids on her knee. Lie to me, and they will find you floating face down in the Seine River. And believe me, you won’t be the first person that ended up that way on account of me.”
Mata Hari said nothing, but stared at him. Finally she nodded.
“Where is Krupp going to strike us next?” he asked.
“You confused our forces by not taking the steam car that waited for you at the docks in Le Havre,” she said. “We had planned on blowing the car up a few miles down the road. When no one got in the auto, we had to go to our other resources.”
She paused, and Tom pushed her again into the wall.
“Stop it, you’re hurting me,” she said, a whine coming into her voice.
“I’ll hurt you a lot more if you don’t tell me where we can expect the next attack.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
“There are too many of them. They know your every move.”
“How? How do they know our every move? Tell me.”
“Someone who has been with the family for a long time is actually working for us.”
“Who? Who?” He slammed her into the wall again.
She paused, then pain coming over her face. Tears formed in her eyes and then ran down her cheeks.
“The Punjabi,” she sobbed.
Stunned, Tom let her go. She fell to the floor, clutching her throat. He backed away, turned and started to run down the hallway. A couple stood there, seeing what he had done to Mata Hari. As he reached the end of the hallway, a uniformed gendarme stepped forward and grabbed his sleeve.
“Monsieur, please come with me,” he said in English. In response, Tom turned and hit the policeman with a right hook that sent him sprawling to the floor. The couple gasped as Tom ran past them.
Tom found his way down the hallways and into the lobby of the Ancien Palais du Trocadero. As he entered the big room, once again having to shove his way through the crowd, he heard a whistle blow behind him, followed by an answering whistle outside. He pushed his way past the people inside and out the doors. He turned left and saw four gendarme with billy clubs running his way. He turned right and ran down the walkway.
Again and again, he heard whistles behind him. He had no experience with whistles, other than using them to call horses or get someone’s attention, but he had a pretty good idea that they were not happy noises. At one point, when he rounded the corner of a building, he looked behind him and saw that the four policemen had become eight.
He started to run down the side street and saw three policemen coming toward him from the other direction. He turned back just in time for a gendarme on horseback to come toward him. The uniformed man on the back of the horse reached down and tried to strike Tom with his billy club. Tom ducked, then grabbed the man’s arm as he missed. He pulled the gendarme out of his saddle and vaulted onto the back of the horse.
The horse was a young one and in good shape. Tom wasn’t used to riding on cobblestones, and the horse slipped once or twice, but he found that they made good time to the hotel, much better than if he had still been on foot. He parked the horse in an alley between the hotel and a local restaurant. He ran through the lobby and up to the room they had been in. The room was empty, as he had suspected. Where would Bashu have taken them?
He ran down to the lobby again.
“Excuse me,” he said quickly to the clerk at the front desk. “The people I checked in with a few hours ago.”
“Yes, they have left,” the small man said. “They left with some men in a steam car. I believe they were headed for the Velodrome d’hiver.”
“What is that?”
“That? Why, that is where the grand airships land. That is where the zeppelins anchor.”
“Where is this place?”
“South,” he said. “Go south, past the Arc d’Triumphe. You will see the zeppelins in the air.”
I hope not, Tom said to himself as he ran back to the horse and jumped into the saddle. If they are in the air, I don’t know what I will do. In fact, he thought, I’m not sure what I will do now. The velodrome was bound to have more gendarmes—or soldiers—around it, and the Germans never seemed to do anything halfway. He realized that he was pushing the horse too much and backed him down from a full gallop to a more tolerable lope. He left the street that the hotel was on and got onto the main street where the Arc d’Triumphe was located. He could see the famous arch in the distance. And just beyond that, he saw a zeppelin going through the last-minute preparations for takeoff.
He was too late. As he watched, he could see the men on the ground casting off the lines of the giant airship. There was always the possibility that another airship was taking off, but he doubted it. To believe so would be too much of a coincidence. No, this was the airship bound for Berlin, and two young people he was responsible for were in it.
He slowed the horse on the cobblestone street and let it come to a stop. What would he do now? If it were a train, he could find a narrow spot in some pass and try to jump on, or find some steep grade that made it slow down and use a fast horse to catch it. But even with a fast horse, there was no way he was going to catch this train.
Unless…, he thought. A wild idea flashed into his mind, and his mind responded with a fit of panic. No, that was incredibly stupid and it wouldn’t work. Or would it?
It took him another instant to make up his mind. He kicked the horse in the ribs and yelled “Hyah!” The horse responded by leaping forward and going into a gallop back toward the Exhibition and the Eiffel Tower.
Tom avoided the main street, but still heard whistles here and there as gendarme caught a glimpse of him passing on the horse. The gelding was still festooned in the red and blue colors of the Paris police, and it was obvious that Tom didn’t belong to them. He still wore the clothing they had bought in New York, and he longed for his regular jeans and chaps, spurs and boots and good worn-in ten gallon hat. But he didn’t think about it long. The police whistled and signaled to each other, and by the time he had wound through alleys and come out into the gardens surrounding the Eiffel Tower, they were waiting for him.
Dang it, he thought. They’re more pesky than Comanches. He spurred his young horse again, and it leaped forward, but he saw that the gelding wasn’t used to prolonged running. He would not be able to force it forward much longer.
Police were scattered through the gardens, most with only clubs, but a few with guns. He heard them shout at him in French as he passed, and he presumed they were calling for him to stop and surrender. But he had no intention of doing so. He galloped under the spreading metal legs of the tower and looked for a way to climb it.
He saw a stairway that wove its way back and forth all the way to the top high above their heads, and immediately knew that he didn’t have the time or the legs to run up the stairs. Across from it on the other side of the tower, a line formed at the bottom, weaving its way to a caged room that Tom knew was elevator similar to what he had seen in New York City. He couldn’t wait in line and the policemen on horseback behind him would subdue him before he could get in the elevator. Instead, he had another idea.
“Hyah!” he said to the gelding again and kicked it in the ribs, and to his surprise the young horse found strength for another burst of speed. He charged headlong into the line of people waiting for the elevator. Women screamed and men shouted, scattering in all directions. As he rushed by, the elevator doors closed and it started to rise. Tom stood in the leather saddle of the police horse and leaped at the elevator as the horse ran past it. He flew onto the top of the elevator, grabbing the metal beams with his hand and sprawling face first onto the platform there. He looked down to see three policemen on horseback reining in their horses as they came up to base of the elevator. By the time they arrived, Tom and the elevator were at least fifteen feet in the air, and moving steadily upward.
He paused to catch his breath, looking down at the retreating ground, then looking up at the metal scaffolding that surrounded him. The elevator seemed to last a long while, but Tom soon saw a platform approaching above them. He also saw a uniformed guard waiting at the top. Tom stood on top of the elevator and the guard was surprised to see him appear from the floor below. While the guard stared at him, Tom responded by leaping off the top of the elevator and knocking the guard down.
“Sorry,” Tom muttered, then looked around him. Oroville had said they were launching a glider from the top of the Eiffel Tower, but he didn’t see the brothers or anything that looked like a glider.
Then he realized that they were not yet at the top of the tower. He looked up and gulped. The platform they stood on was close to the top, but the very top of the Eiffel Tower stood another hundred feet above his head. Halfway between him and the top, he saw two men working on some sort of winged machine, suspended at the edge of another, smaller platform. It was the Wright Brothers.
“Hey!” he shouted to them. “Oroville! Wilbur!”
Oroville looked down at the noise, and then shouted back in surprise.
“Tom? What are you doing here?”
“Stay right there,” he shouted back. “I’ll be right up.”
Tom ran to a straight ladder that ran from the platform he was on to the smaller platform above. He began to climb as quickly as he could, but paused when he got halfway up the ladder. He looked around him and realized that he was very, very high above Paris, higher than he had been since he had ridden in the zeppelin. He remembered falling from the airship and shuddered. He clutched the ladder and hesitated.
In response, he heard police below him, just arriving on the next elevator. He continued up the ladder, trying to block the height from his mind.
Stupid idiot, he thought. If you are this frightened to be high while still on solid ground, what are you going to feel when you do what you have planned? He shook his head and continued climbing. A moment later, his head broke through to the platform where the Wrights were working. Oroville and Wilbur paused to pull him up the last rungs of the ladder.
“What are you doing up here?” Oroville said. “The demonstration is not until tomorrow.”
“Oroville, Wilbur, I need to borrow your glider,” Tom said, still out of breath.
“What? You can’t--,” Oroville started. “We barely know how to fly it. How can you expect to fly it just like that?”
Tom shrugged. “I’m a fast learner. Besides, this is a desperate time.”
“What’s so desperate, other than the police are after you?”
“Krupp and his men have Eleanor,” he said.
“Eleanor? Where are they?”
Tom pointed to a dark, grey shape to the south that was slowly headed their direction.
“There. I have to get on there.”
Wilbur stared at Tom slack jawed in disbelief. Oroville paused, then nodded.
“Wilbur and I have done some crazy, crazy things in our lives. Heck, we were ready to jump off the Eiffel Tower in a glider that hasn’t been proven yet. But you—you take the cake. Roosevelt was right to recruit you.” He paused again, then nodded. “Do what you have to do.”
Tom looked at the thing in front of him. It was about 12 feet across and had wings like a bat, but in two levels. A tail stuck out in back, and another one stuck out in the front. On top of the lower set of wings were a series of straps and a stick that stuck up, similar to the stick he had seen on the zeppelin.
“Wilbur is the aeronaut here, so I will let him give you directions.” They heard voices below, and they realized that the police were climbing the ladder to where they were. “I will try to hold off the police.”
“Sorry for putting you two in this mess,” Tom said to them.
Wilbur chuckled, and Tom realized it was the first time he had heard him speak.
“We are familiar with trouble with the police,” he said. “Oroville has been in jail for scaring cattle, reckless endangerment and destruction of public property that we are pretty used to it.”
“Well, whatever we do, we need to do quickly,” Tom said, an urgency coming into his voice. Wilbur nodded.
As Wilbur explained how the glider worked, Tom saw that Oroville had flipped the trap door for the platform closed, then put a heavy toolbox on top of it. A moment later, they heard banging on the bottom of the trapdoor, and shouting in French.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand you,” Oroville shouted back. “We’re involved in an important scientific experiment, and we can’t be disturbed.”
“Pay attention, Tom,” Wilbur said. “Knowing how things work will keep you alive.”
Tom nodded, shaking just a bit.
“OK, this stick is the rudder. It controls the curvature of each wing as well as whether you go up or down. Don’t oversteer, or you will turn in a tailspin and crash. Don’t try to rise to quickly, or you will stall out and crash. Don’t dive too rapidly, or you--.”
“Yeah, I get it, I’ll crash. So the idea is as much as possible to fly straight and level.”
Wilbur nodded. “That’s essentially it. Look for updrafts. Those are places where warm air rises, and will help you gain height too. Circle slowly in an updraft and it will take you up.
“Also watch your airspeed when you land. Land too slowly and you will stall and crash.”
“Yeah, I heard that,” Tom said wryly.
“Land too quickly and you will crash just as easily.”
“So how fast should I be going when I try to land?” Tom said.
Wilbur and Oroville looked at each other.
“We don’t actually know,” said Oroville. “We haven’t landed the glider safely yet.”
“You mean you have crashed every time?”
Oroville shrugged. “There are crashes and then there are crashes.”
“Actually this is a new design based on past experience,” said Wilbur. “I have a lot more confidence in this one.”
“What about me? Do you have confidence in me?” Tom said.
Wilbur looked at Oroville again, who turned to Tom and smiled.
“Admiration,” Oroville said. “We have nothing but admiration.”
By this time, the police were banging quite vigorously on the bottom of the trap door. Tom looked at the two men then at the giant grey shape that was crossing in front of them and covering the skyline.
“Time to go,” Tom said. “Wish me luck.”
“Go with God, Tom,” Oroville said. “Don’t worry about us.”
Tom nodded, then lay down on the bottom wing of the glider and allowed Wilbur to strap him in. Then Wilbur started pushing Tom and the glider to the edge of the platform.
“Wait,” Tom said, as the glider teetered at the edge between solid ground and empty air.
“What is it?” Wilbur asked.
“Don’t I get a parachute?” Tom asked.
“What’s a parachute?” Wilbur responded, just as the glider tipped forward and fell from the side of the Eiffel Tower. Tom was flying—or falling.

[glen]

Chapter 9
“On the Good Ship Lollipop”

Tom Horn was falling—or was it flying? The glider left the edge of the platform high up on the Eiffel Tower, and fell straight down. He felt the wind whistle by him as the rickety structure of cloth and wood dove like a hawk for the ground, and he felt a cold chill of fear.
“Pull back on the stick!” he heard Wilbur shout to him from high above. Tom looked down at the wooden rudder in front of him and pulled back on it. He was ready to pull all the way back when he heard Wilbur’s voice again.
“Careful. Don’t pull all the way back or you’ll stall out.” He felt the plane pulling out of its dive and leveling off, and carefully relaxed the rudder as it began to maintain normal flight. The chill of fear diminished, at least for a moment, Tom looked around him and saw that he was flying straight away from the Eiffel Tower and across the River Seine. He craned his neck and saw that the zeppelin was behind him and several hundred feet higher. He had to find a way to turn around and rise in elevation.
“Shoot,” he muttered to himself. He wished that Wilbur were standing over his shoulder to give him directions. But the inventor and aeronaut was hundreds of feet behind him and well above him. It was time to turn around.
He carefully turned the rudder to the left and slowly saw the glider begin to bank to the left. He was still going at a great speed, and he wanted to make sure he didn’t do anything too suddenly. The glider responded faithfully to his touch of the rudder, and he gained new confidence. He turned it some more, and found himself flying back toward the Eiffel Tower. But he needed to gain altitude.
What was it that Wilbur said about making it go up? Something about updrafts, places where warm air rose. He looked for some place that looked like it would provide heat to warm the air.
A moment later, as he passed low beside the Eiffel Tower, he saw the answer. It was a factory with a tall chimney to the east. He could see the heat rising from the factory in the evening air. He turned his glider east and headed for it. He glanced over his right shoulder and saw that the zeppelin was slowly rising as well, and had passed the Eiffel Tower on its way north.
“Patience,” he told himself. He was tempted to chase after the zeppelin right away, but he knew that by the time the glider got to it, he would be much too low to do any good. He had to gain elevation! A couple of flying minutes later, he passed over the large factory, and immediately felt the updraft from the warm air. The little glider fluttered against the updraft, and he looked down to see that he was, indeed, going up. His glider got to the far edge of the factory and he realized that he would have to turn around. He carefully turned the rudder to the right and swooped around to the right.
The time he spent above the factory was well spent for two reasons, he discovered. First, it helped him gain the elevation necessary to catch the zeppelin. He realized that as the airship got farther away and continued to rise in elevation that he would need even more elevation to catch it. He found himself in tighter and tighter circles as the glider continued to climb. He looked over at one point and saw that he had climbed higher than the top of the Eiffel Tower. Wilbur and Oroville still stood on the platform, and one of them—he couldn’t tell who from this distance—waved at him.
The second benefit he discovered was that the more he operated the rudder, the more experienced and confident he became. His careful wide turns became tighter and tighter turns. By the time he got higher than the Eiffel Tower, he felt he finally had the skill he needed to catch the airship.
He continued to let the glider rise in the updrafts, trading time and distance from the zeppelin for more elevation. Finally he realized that the air had cooled significantly and he was no longer rising. He looked around and felt a stab of fear when he realized how high he really was. The zeppelin was below him now, still accelerating away north from Paris. He pointed the little glider toward the escaping zeppelin, hoping that he either had enough elevation or that he would be able to find more updrafts ahead of him.
He dipped his glider slightly downward and felt a thrill as its speed increased. He could hear the sounds of the city far below him, and the sound of the zeppelin’s engines far ahead. But around him all he heard was the sound of the wind whistling through the struts and wires that held the glider together.
The glider picked up a great deal of speed, and the zeppelin rushed up to greet him. He tried to stay above the airship, but he saw that his elevation was dropping. He realized that he had not figured out where or how he would land his glider on the zeppelin, and as he approached, he realized that the time to decide was fast approaching.
The German zeppelin was built much like the airship that Teddy Roosevelt had flown in, but it was much, much bigger. This one also had a compartment on the bottom, with catwalks running out to each engine platform on the left and right. Tom looked closely and saw that men with automatic rifles stood on the catwalk on either side.
If he wanted to sneak up on the zeppelin and take them by surprise, he realized he would not be able to land anywhere on the bottom. With that in mind, he realized that left him only one other choice.
He continued to rapidly approach the airship from behind, and Tom realized as he approached that he was going way too fast to move from glider to airship. He would crash, and the glider—and possibly the zeppelin as well—would end up falling to the ground many feet below. He thought about the instructions that Wilbur had given him, and came up with a plan.
He swooped down on the zeppelin’s tail from above, passing just a dozen feet above the monstrous airship. When he got halfway down the length of the airship’s top, he pulled back on the rudder and purposely stalled the glider. Its nose rose up, and the little plane dropped like a lead feather onto the top of the airship. Tom felt a soft bump as they hit the stiff canvas of the airship’s top. He breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that he had safely landed on top of the giant airship.
A second later, his relief turned to alarm. The wind as the airship pushed through the air caught the glider and it tried to take off again. Tom pushed the rudder forward to keep it on the surface of the airship. The wind began pushing the tiny craft backward. Tom watched with fear as he and the glider began sliding backward toward the tail of the zeppelin.
Quickly, Tom reached into his boot and pulled out his Bowie knife. He began cutting the straps that held him to the glider. He had just cut the last one when he realized that he and the glider had already been pushed back to the tail of the zeppelin. He rolled off the bottom wing and onto the surface of the zeppelin, then watched as the glider lifted off the zeppelin and flew backward into the air, to circle like a leaf as it fell to the ground, thousands of feet below.
Tom looked over his shoulder and watched as the glider disappeared, then turned to see where he was. If he didn’t look to either side and realize that he was thousands of feet in the air, he could imagine that he was on the back of a very big whale. His job was to rescue the fellow travelers who were trapped in the belly of this whale.
But how to get down there? He considered for an instant—a very brief instant—just cutting through the balloon and hydrogen inside and falling through to the bottom, but when he considered what would happen if he did, he threw that idea out. He saw that the balloon portion of the airship was held to the compartment below by a coarse netting of cable that looped over the top of the balloon. Could he climb down the netting? The only problem was when he got to the underside of the balloon, he would be hanging from the netting with nothing beneath him but thousands of feet of empty air. He frowned.
He mentally visualize where the compartment was in relation to the balloon below him. Then he had another idea. A wild, crazy, possibly fatal idea. But he thought it held a better chance of getting him closer to the compartment than climbing, hand over hand, across and down the side of the balloon. And since he knew there would likely be some fighting once he got down there, his idea at least would save him some energy.
He ran—more like staggered—down the top of the airship to the area he had seen with the netting. He used his Bowie knife to cut loose one of the cables that ran from side to side. He tried to make it as long as possible—better to be too long than too short—he thought. He disconnected it from all the cross cables and made sure it was loose and free. Then he wrapped it around his waist twice and tied it off. He sheathed his Bowie knife and put it away. Finally he stood on the far starboard side of the zeppelin’s top, facing the port side. He took a deep breath, said a little prayer and ran toward the port slope of the balloon and leaped outward.
Tom threw himself into the air and the cable snaked after him. His body flew out from the side of the zeppelin into the air. He could see French countryside far below him, and a river snaked lazily in the late evening sun. He felt himself falling, then breathed a sigh of relief when the cable caught and swung him inward, toward the compartment.
Tom saw that three German soldiers were stationed on the catwalk to the port engine and a fourth was on the engine platform itself. They were surprised to see the cowboy flying through the air on the end of a heavy rope, and then swinging toward them. Tom saw the catwalk rushing toward him with a German right in his path. The cable that Tom was attached to was longer than was necessary to reach the catwalk, and he swung below the walkway. But the surprise of the man rushing toward him was too much for the German. He fell backwards and off the catwalk into the open air below.
“Yahh!” Tom heard him yell as he fell, and he felt a chill as he thought of the last time he had fallen from an airship. His cable hit the walkway about eight feet above his head, and he grabbed the rope to steady himself as it bounced back against the force of the impact against the catwalk. It swung another ten feet backward, then he felt the rope swing once more under the catwalk.
He started to climb up the rope to the base of the catwalk, then heard the crack of a rifle. He looked to see the German at the engine platform raising his rifle to shoot again, but someone else was yelling at him.
“Nein! Nein! Nicht scheissen! Nicht scheissen!” He looked over at the doorway that led from the catwalk to the compartment, and saw that an officer stood there, waving at the German soldier at the engine well. The soldier paid no mind at him, but drew back the bolt on his rifle and began shooting at Tom again. Fortunately for Tom, he was not a good shot. And after the second attempt to shoot him, Tom was surprised to hear the kak-kak-kak report of a semi-automatic rifle. He looked and saw the soldier at the engine well fall to the ground, then turned and saw that the officer stood there with a submachine gun. At that moment, he realized two things. First, they were very unlikely to shoot at him, just as the French captain had been on Roosevelt’s ship. That was good news. Second, they didn’t need to. There was only one way on the ship, and that was up the catwalk. There was nowhere else for Tom to go, and the officer knew it.
“Blamed fool,” Tom muttered to himself, then climbed the rope to the catwalk above. A German soldier was waiting there for him, and reached down to help him climb onto the walkway.
The man grabbed Tom’s hand and pulled him onto the walkway, smiling. Then when Tom stood, the German slammed a fist into Tom’s stomach. Tom doubled over, just as he heard someone else yell, “Nicht behruhren! Nicht necessiert!” Whatever it was that the second German yelled, it got the first one to stop slugging Tom, and for that he was grateful. The first one shoved Tom in the direction of the cupola, and Tom began walking.
Tom and the two Germans were met by two more soldiers with rifles as they entered the doorway to the compartment. Tom stared at the grim faced soldiers and grinned.
“All this for little old me? Boys, I’m honored,” he said. In response, the German who had hit him earlier pushed him with the butt of his rifle.
The layout of the German airship was virtually identical to the one that Roosevelt had flown and taken Tom to New York City in, but it was much bigger. Tom noticed that the wooden frames and flooring that Roosevelt had used was replaced my steel everywhere in this airship, and he wondered if it made the ship heavier.
Where Roosevelt’s airship had a crew of about ten men, this one seemed to have about 30. The boys who ran the American airship were professionals and presented themselves with the discipline of American military—even though Tom had learned they were actually New York State Militia rather than U.S. Army regulars. But Tom had to grin as he watched the spit-and-polish antics of the German soldiers here. Each took pride in turning, walking and saluting as if every movement were being scrutinized for exactness. And when he finally met the officer in charge, he understood why.
Tom was walked to the back of the cupola to the room that Roosevelt had used for his office. This one was much larger, and was set up as barracks, briefing room and observation center. In the far back, next to the windows that looked out over the French countryside, sat Eleanor and Kid, trussed up and tied to wooden chairs. Behind their chairs stood Bashu, his eyes watching the two of them like a hawk. And to the left of them stood a small man that Tom knew he had seen before. When he realized where he had seen him, he was tempted to rub his eyes in disbelief.
“Mr. Horn, so good for you to drop in and join us,” the small monocled officer said to him, smiling greasily.
“Didn’t you die on that steamship? I know you did. I saw your bloody body.”
“That was the brother of our host,” Bashu rumbled. Tom ignored the big man.
“Ahh, yes. Unfortunate about my twin brother, Heinrich. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Colonel Heisel von Lippendorf. Welcome to the airship Graf Sterben. It is the largest zeppelin in the entire Krupp fleet.”
Tom shrugged. “I’ve seen bigger.”
Lippendorf chuckled. “I seriously doubt that you have. In fact I know you have not. There is no bigger airship in the world.”
Tom shrugged again. “That just means that you are filled with more hot air than anybody else, I guess.”
“No, no, they are filled with hydrogen, not hot air.”
Tom shook his head. “It’s a joke, Esel.”
The smile left Lippendorf’s face. “My name is Heisel. An Esel is a donkey.”
Tom grinned. “Guess I got one word in German right after all.”
The German guard that stood next to Tom punched him in the jaw, and Tom jerked back. Then he reached up and rubbed his chin, looking at the guard.
“Why’d you have to go and do that? That’s the second time. Now I am going to have to kill you.” He turned and looked at Lippendorf. “Right after I kill you.”
Lippendorf reacquired his thin smile. “That might be a bit difficult, given present circumstances.”
“The man is quite resourceful,” Bashu boomed again. This time, Tom turned and looked at the giant, his eyes cold and as sharp as diamonds.
“I usually don’t talk to traitors, but I am going to make an exception in your case. I’m going to kill you last,” he said to the Punjabi. “And I’m going to take my time.”
Bashu threw back his head and laughed. Tom turned and looked at Eleanor, who sat tied to a chair with the same cold stare that she had held in her eyes when captured on the steamship.
“How’s that diplomacy working for you, Ellie?” Tom asked quietly.
She smiled slightly and shook her head. “It appears that your style of negotiation would be more effective in this situation.”
Tom smiled back. “Glad you are realizing your limitations.” He turned back to Lippendorf. “Kids get smarter every day, don’t they?”
“Indeed,” Lippendorf said. “And we sincerely appreciate your willingness to bring Miss Roosevelt all the way to Paris so that we can take her the rest of the way to Vienna. We have men on the way to secure the recording of the London panopticon to join with our recording. And with Miss Roosevelt safely out of the way, the summit meeting will be safely under our control. We plan on making all of Europe so war-crazy that Krupp will be on the lips of every government and banker in every country.”
“You know that your plan to make money will destroy Europe,” Tom said. “Possibly the world. A war’s coming, and it will be so big that not even mighty Krupp can stop it.”
Lippendorf smiled and shook his head.
“Oh, we have no intention of stopping it. In fact, it is what we have worked for for decades. Germany and Austria have had many successes in recent years, and now they firmly believe that they will be the dominant force throughout Europe. And we want to encourage that belief, just as we want Britain, France, Russia and the United States to believe that they will prevail in war, with the help of Krupp munitions, of course.”
As Lippendorf continued to ramble on about the glory that would come to the Krupp Corporation, he wandered around the room, talking more to himself than to Tom. In the meantime, Tom turned and looked at Kid, who dipped his head as if trying to get Tom’s attention. Tom looked at him, then saw Kid’s hands below the chair. In stilted sign language, Kid gestured to him.
I got free. What should I do?
Tom kept his arms at his sides, but every time Lippendorf turned away from him, he used his hands and fingers to gesture back at Kid. He saw that Eleanor was watching and caught what he was gesturing.
Follow my lead.
“….and when the capitals of every nation are in shambles, when the mighty buildings are rubble, when people no longer have food to feed themselves, they will still be coming to us to provide them with the rifles and bullets they need to kill their enemies. Because nations rise and fall, people may eat well or they may starve, but greed and profit will prevail in the end.”
Tom stared at the little man and shook his head.
“You know, you really are a sick, twisted critter. Someone ought to put you out of your misery.” As he talked, he looked out the window as if he saw something approaching. “And that someone should be here any minute.”
Lippendorf turned to see what Tom was looking at in the sky behind them. The guards on either side of him did the same. At that instant, Tom reached into his boot and pulled out the Bowie knife. He spun and slashed across the throat of one guard, who fell to the floor, blood flying everywhere. The other turned and stared to speak, but Tom’s knife rammed into his stomach and up through the diaphragm into his heart. The man’s eyes grew wide and his mouth opened to speak, but the words didn’t come out. Tom pulled out the knife, and blood poured on the floor, and the man collapsed next to the other one.
Still fixed on the sky, Lippendorf was slow to react to the commotion behind him. He turned and his mouth opened to shout for the guards, just as Tom’s knife sailed through the air and caught the German officer in the throat. Lippendorf’s eyes opened wide, and he fell backwards into and through the glass window. The panes shattered with a crash, and the officer fell through them and into open space beyond without his mouth making a sound.
In the meantime, Kid had grabbed his chair and run to the doorway. He jammed the chair against the door and then sat down on it. So far there was no noise coming from beyond the door, but Kid and Tom knew that it would only be a matter of time.
Tom looked at Eleanor, still tied to her chair. “Sorry, we didn’t have a chance to cut you loose.”
Eleanor looked at Tom, then at the bulk of Bashu standing behind her. “I realize that you have other priorities at present. Do what you do best, Mr. Horn.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he nodded. Then he looked at the Punjabi, who stood relatively calmly behind Eleanor. The broken window blew cold wind in behind him, and Eleanor’s hair blew slightly in his direction. Bashu looked at her, then at Tom.
“I suppose that the easy thing to do would be to break Miss Roosevelt’s neck and be done with it,” Bashu said deeply.
Tom shook his head. “But that just wouldn’t be sporting would it? You want to see if you have what it takes to kill old Tom Horn, don’t you?”
Bashu’s eyes shone fire. “Indeed,” he said. He drew his curved, long-bladed knife from his belt and held it in front of him. Then he pulled a German pistol from a hidden pocket on his right side. He held both of them up, then gestured at the men on the floor.
“You have guns at your access,” he said. “But if you go for them, I will be forced to use mine. And in addition to the danger that comes with using firearms on an airship, there is a very good chance that one of the two young people could get injured.”
Tom nodded. “Ok, no guns.”
Then Bashu held up his knife. “It’s a pity that your knife fell from the airship with Colonel Lippendorf. It would have made things more interesting.” He looked at the shining blade of the knife again, then lay it down on a table in front of Eleanor.
“Tell me, Bashu, what made you decide to become a yellow-bellied turncoat?”
Bashu still stared at his knife, then looked up at Tom. “I could say that it was because my loyalty never fully lay with the Roosevelts. Or that they had done something unjust to me in my childhood. But the truth is simply: the Krupps offered me more money. I could go back to India as a Rajah if I so desired.” His face broke into a grin, then his eyes grew sharp and he stared at Tom.
“But we have talked enough, cowboy,” he said, stepping toward Tom. “It is time for you to die!” He emphasized his words by grabbing the table that he had lain the gun and knife on and throwing them to the side as if the table were made of paper. In two steps, he was on Tom Horn.
Tom Horn had been in many fistfights, and had done his share of wrestling with Indians and Mexicans. But he had never felt anyone as strong as Bashu. The man’s iron grip fastened around Tom’s ribs and he picked him up, ready to throw him down. Tom gritted his teeth against the pain of Bashu’s grip, and slapped both hands against Bashu’s ears. The pressure of the sudden impact sent a sharp pain through Bashu’s head, and he lost his grip on Tom. The American fell to the ground, but didn’t hesitate to take advantage of the brief reprieve to kick Bashu in the side of the knee.
Bashu’s legs were like oak trees. Tom had kicked Bashu as hard as he could. Although the big man staggered, he did not collapse as Tom had hoped. Instead, Bashu looked down at Tom lying on the floor beneath him and smiled. His giant fists went up and came down, right at Tom’s head.
Tom rolled to the side, just as the fists came down on the steel floor. Tong! The floor reverberated with the impact of the giant fists, and Tom fantasized that he saw the floor dented where he had hit it. Tom whirled behind Bashu and jumped up on the big man’s back, climbing like a monkey on a palm tree. He clutched at Bashu’s shoulders and wrapped his legs around the Punjabi’s waist. He reached up and grabbed Bashu by the throat with both arms, attempting to put a sleeper hold on him. His right arm hooked around Bashu’s throat, Tom used his left arm for leverage. But before he could get locked onto the big man’s throat, he felt Bashu duck forward and grab him with both arms, throwing him over his shoulders and onto the broken table he had crushed in the corner.
Tom fell on the knife and gun, looked at them, then cast them away across the floor in the direction of Eleanor. Instead he picked up a table leg and held it in front of him. As they stood facing each other, he heard German voices outside the door where Kid sat with his chair. Then heard pounding. Tom looked back at Bashu, who glanced at the door as well, then back at Tom.
“You see, there is no hope,” the Punjabi said. “Even if you are victorious in your fight with me—which I cannot see happening—you have nowhere to go. The men will break down the door eventually. And even if they don’t, well, what will you do? Where will you go?”
“Bruce, old boy, we have a saying in America,” Tom said. “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings. Well, I ain’t heard no fat lady.” He followed up his words with a yell and a charge at the giant Punjabi. Bashu easily sidestepped Tom and picked him up, throwing him to the ground. He followed up the impact of the throw by stomping Tom with his giant foot.
Tom whoofed with the impact against the metal floor, but saw that Bashu would try to stomp him. He grabbed the foot that came toward him and twisted. The Punjabi twisted with it and fell with a crash to the side. Tom didn’t hesitate, but threw himself on the Punjabi while he was still on the ground. He jumped atop Bashu’s chest and straddled him. In the meantime, he began to pummel the Punjabi’s face with his fists.
While his hit Bashu in the face as hard as he could, Tom could hear the banging of the Germans on the door grow louder, and wondered how long they would be able to hold them off. He turned back to his job of hitting Bashu, but was dismayed when the big man growled in anger and picked him up as if he were a small cur and threw him against the wall.
Stunned for a moment, Tom shook himself and tried to think straight. Before he could get his senses together, Bashu was on him. He picked Tom up and slammed him to the floor again. The impact of the throw to the floor stunned Tom even more, and realized that he was losing the fight. He tried to kick against the chest and stomach of the Punjabi, but this time Bashu had a strong grip on the American. He felt Bashu switch his grip from around his shoulders to around his throat, and the steel grip of those hands caused him to start blacking out.
He slapped his hands against Bashu’s ears again; once, then again. This time, the trick did no good. Bashu sensed that he was close to the end, and would not release his grip for anything. Out of the corner of his eye, Tom saw Kid approach Bashu with another table leg and smashed it down across the top of the big man’s head. Bashu loosened his grip on Tom and turned to grab Kid. Tom watched as Bashu threw Kid across the room and out the opened window. Tom heard Eleanor gasp, then saw Bashu return to finish him off.
“The boy was nothing, street trash,” Bashu said. “I see thousands just like him die every day in the streets of Calcutta. There mean nothing to me. He is dead, just as you will be in just a moment. And after I finish with you, I will take joy in handing Miss Roosevelt—Eleanor, as you call her—over to the Germans, who will make sure that she never again speaks in behalf of peace.”
He grabbed Tom by the collar and held his still form up against the metal wall. He reached once again into his belt and pulled out a second knife, this one a small dagger, and pointed it at Tom’s eye.
“I see that you’re not the sportsman I thought you were,” Tom said, coughing up blood through his broken face. Blood ran from his forehead into his eyes, and his cracked lips smiled thinly back at the Punjabi.
Bashu held the American as he would a small puppy and grinned at him. “I had no intention at all of fighting fair. You Westerners talk about fair fight and being good sports. You are so naïve.”
“You know what my pappy told me?” Tom said weakly.
“What is that?”
“If you can’t fight fair, at least win,” he said. And Bashu looked down to see that Tom had pulled out a small knife of his own. At that instant, Tom drove the small blade into the chest of the Punjabi, and looked at the big man’s eyes grow large. Bashu let Tom go in surprise and dropped him to the floor, the knife still sticking from his chest. He looked down at the blade, then reached down and pulled it out of his flesh. He held it out and turned to face Tom and Eleanor.
“You see? Even your knives cannot hurt me. I am Bashu, son of a warlord and grandson of a king!”
“Oh yeah? See if this hurts,” he heard. Tom turned to see Eleanor still tied to the chair, but with her arms free. She held the German handgun that Bashu had dropped on the floor. As Tom watched, she pulled the trigger three times. The gun barked, and smoke puffed from the barrel. Bashu jerked three times, but remained standing. He staggered toward Eleanor, his eyes filled with shock. He reached for the young girl, but suddenly Tom hit him from behind. The big man fell against the broken sills of the windows, and then disappeared through the glass and into the open air.
Tom’s momentum almost took him with Bashu, but he tried to grab the sills. Eleanor also grabbed at Tom, and pulled him back, just as he was about to fall with the Punjabi. Together they were able to steady him. They grabbed and hugged each other, both grateful to be alive.
“What about Kid?” Eleanor said, pushing herself away and looking around them. “Look,” she finally said, pointing.
Tom looked over at the broken edge of the windows where she pointed. There he saw Kid’s hand, still holding onto the edge of the window sill. He ran over and reached down to pull Kid up, who was shivering from the cold, but was also happy to be alive.
“Before we get too excited about being alive, there’s still the matter of several dozen German soldiers on the other side of that door,” Eleanor said.
Kid signed. I have an idea about that. Is that ok?
Tom looked at the two of them. His face and hands were bloody and his head hurt as if he had been kicked by a mule—several times. He sighed and then shrugged.
“As long as it doesn’t involve me jumping out of this thing,” he said.
Eleanor and Kid looked at each other, then grinned back at Tom. Tom stared at them, then shook his head.
“No way,” he said. “No way.”

[glen]

Chapter 10
Goodbye, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen

“There is no way you are getting me to jump out of this airship,” said Tom. “Not after all I have already been through.”
“That is the whole point,” Eleanor said. “We’ve risked so much already. Why give it up at this point? Why surrender when we don’t have to?”
Tom looked from Eleanor and Kid to the metal door from which shouts and pounding continued.
“We’ll fight our way through,” he said half-heartedly, more to himself than to the others.
“Really, Tom?” Eleanor said, a faint smile on her lips. You have great skills as a pugilist, I am sure of that. But could you really fight your way through all of them? And even if you did, what then? Could you fly this airship?”
“We’ll just have to cross that bridge--.” He paused, thinking. “Aw, dang it. You’re right. Unless we surrender ourselves, there’s no way we are going to land in this thing. OK, where are the parachutes?”
Kid and Eleanor looked at each other sheepishly.
“That’s the only problem,” she said. “The locker for storing the parachutes is usually right on the other side of that door.”
“Dang it!” Tom shouted. “Why can’t anything be easy? Guess we will have to fight our way out of here after all.” He looked around the room and collected as many loaded weapons as he could, assembling them on the smashed table that lay on the floor on the far end of the room. The pounding continued incessantly. Eleanor stood at the door and frowned, while Kid continued to stare out the window. Suddenly Kid made a squeaking noise that caught Tom’s attention. It was a noise that he had only heard Kid make when he was really, really excited.
“What is it, Kid?” Tom asked. Kid responded with a flurry of emphatic gestures.
“Slow down, Kid. You’re losing me,” Tom said.
“I think what he’s trying to say is that he has come up with another idea,” said Eleanor. “A way to get to the parachutes without going through the door.”
Tom perked up at that. “Go on, Kid. I’m all ears.”
Kid slowed down his gestures and told them what he had in mind. Tom’s face broke into a smile, then a grin. Eleanor’s face lost its color, however, as he spoke. Finally Tom nodded.
“Sounds like a crazy idea, Kid. And sounds like it just might work.”
“Yes, or get him killed in the process,” Eleanor added. “He’s just a kid, after all.”
Tom looked at her and shook his head. “Look who’s talking, Princess. You can make yourself useful by talking to those Heinies behind the door and slowing them down. We need time to get this done. Do you speak any German?”
“Ein bisschen,” she said, then nodded. “If talking is what I do, then I will contribute what I can.”
She stepped over to the door, which, even with being made of steel, was beginning to show the wear of constant beating on it by men on the other side.
“Bitte, horen sie mal,” she said. “Bitte!”
“Machen Sie die Tur offen!” the angry man’s voice on the other side said.
“Warum?” she said, then held her breath, a small smile coming on her lips. Why should she open the door, she had asked.
The man on the other side of the door paused, confused by the question. He muttered to his friends, then came back to her, pounding on the door again.
“Was ist das, warum? Ich verstehe dass nicht. Dass macht keinen Sinn!” he shouted back at her. She smiled to herself at the anger she heard in the man’s voice and then decided to take another tack.
“I’m sorry,” she said in her softest, most feminine voice. “I don’t know very much German. Is there anyone over there that speaks English?”
Another pause and more muttering. Finally a second voice came to the door.
“Ja, I am here,” said a young voice.
“Who is this?” she asked.
“I am Siegfried,” the man said.
“Siegfried, it appears that there has been a scuffle over here and in the process the door has become jammed and several pieces of furniture have become lodged against the door. We are trying our best to dislodge it. But we ask that you all be very patient with us.”
While the men on the other side of the door discussed this new development, Tom and Kid worked on their plan. Tom had found a length of rope that they measured against the side of the wall from the bulkhead where the door was to a window on the port side of the airship. Then they looped the rope around Kid’s middle and around each thigh. Finally, Tom leaned against the portside window and gave it a sharp jab with his elbow. The glass shattered and cold air blew into the room. Tom broke the sharp shards out of the window frame, then gestured to Kid.
Tom looked at Kid, and suddenly saw how white his face was. He paused, looked at the floor and then looked the young boy in the eyes.
“You know you don’t have to do this,” he said quietly. “No one will think less of you if you back out.”
I do have to do this, Kid gestured. Just don’t drop me.
“You have my word, Kid.” Tom nodded again, and Kid climbed onto a chair and through the small window. He sat on the edge of the window frame with his feet hanging over the floor, and looked back at Tom.
Ready?” Tom asked.
Still white as a sheet, Kid nodded quickly, then vaulted himself out the open window. Surprised that Kid had reacted so quickly, Tom had to get a sudden grip on the rope as Kid’s weight was added to Tom’s hold. He twisted the rope around his wrists, then slowly walked to the side of the room by the broken window. He looked out the window, and saw Kid with his feet shoved against the outside of the zeppelin.
Tom had seen a photograph of a mountain climber in the Alps once, who stood in the same way. The only difference was that the climber didn’t have men with guns after him, and a lot farther to fall if he messed up. Kid looked at Tom and waved, then started running across the side of the zeppelin to the front in a pendulum motion. Tom held on tight and braced himself. Then he saw Kid run back to where he started. Tom watched him closely, and Kid gestured More rope.
Tom nodded and stepped closer to the window, letting off on the rope gradually. Then he watched as Kid ran across the side of the zeppelin and toward the front again. A minute later, he was back at the starting position. More rope, came the message.
Tom looked at what was left of the rope behind him. There was about three feet left. He let out another couple of feet, realizing that if his hands slipped, there was no way for him to recover. Which left no margin for error. He wrapped the last of the rope around his hands and prayed.
Kid nodded and ran across the side of the zeppelin again. This time he didn’t return. He held the end of the rope and waited, praying that Kid had made it to the other window—and the other room—where the parachutes were being kept. Then he needed to somehow get entry to the room. The final challenge would be to get the three parachutes back to the open window that he had left, get them on and all three escape before the men broke down the door.
But Kid’s plan didn’t have time to be completed. Eleanor tried to keep the men talking as long as she could, but suddenly both of them heard a tremendous banging sound start up again.
“Back up, Ellie,” Tom warned her, and she stepped back several steps.
A moment later, there was a huge bang, and the door flew off its hinges. Tom and Ellie stood there watching as six men with pistols charged into the room. Eleanor threw her hands up in surrender, but Tom continued holding on to the rope connected to Kid.
“Hande hoch!” one of the Germans barked at Tom. He stared at the man.
“I ain’t letting go of this rope,” Tom muttered.
“Lass es frei!” the man said again, then backhanded Tom. Tom turned his face with the blow, then turned again to face the German.
“I said, I ain’t letting go of this rope,” Tom said grimly.
“Dummkopf,” a German officer said to the other German, and stepped forward. He pulled out a saber and slashed the rope. The end of it quickly slithered out the window.
“No!” shouted Tom, leaping after the end of the rope. In response, the officer brought the handle of his saber down on Tom’s head. He collapsed to the floor.
The officer surveyed the room and muttered something to his fellow soldiers. Then he brought a young soldier forward, which Tom surmised was the fellow who had identified himself as Siegfried earlier.
“Please…to come with us,” the younger soldier said. Two men got on either side of Eleanor and whisked her out the door. Tom was slow getting up, so another two soldiers came in and grabbed him roughly on either side and dragged him out the door following the others. They followed Eleanor and the others down a hallway that Tom recognized and to the control cabin at the front of the compartment.
Tom shook his head, still overwhelmed by the thought of losing Kid. He hung his head and heard very little of what the Germans were saying. They were trying to talk to Eleanor through Siegfried, who was a pretty poor interpreter. In the meantime, Tom saw that Eleanor continued to drag things out, as if she were buying time.
Tom thought of Kid, and of his sister Mary. Life had been hard for them after she had lost her husband two years ago. Tom had been recovering from a broken ankle and malaria that he had gotten in Cuba. He was in a military hospital in Miami when he had received the letter from his sister that called for his help.
He had taken a train the thousand-plus miles to Presidio as soon as he could. Both their parents were long gone, and Mary was the only family he had left. She had introduced Kid to his new uncle, and Tom had had a loyal follower from that point on. No matter how much Tom tried to discourage Kid from following, and no matter how much his mother had punished him, the boy was determined to follow in Tom’s footsteps. Now Tom winced as he thought what he would tell his sister. Kid was hard headed, overwired with energy, resourceful and brilliant when it came to machines. And now he was gone.
Or was he? Something in the back of his mind tickled him. An unreasonable hope sprang in his mind as he subconsciously listened to Eleanor. Again, he got the sense that she was buying time as she talked to the Germans. But buying time for what?
His heightened tracking senses sprang into gear, and suddenly he smelled smoke. This was not the smoke one smelled with a campfire, or when you lay in bed while your mother cooked the morning breakfast. This smoke had an acrid tinge to it. And when he smelled it, it gave him both an excitement of hope and a rush of fear.
He looked over at Eleanor, who was continuing to talk to the Germans. She had been successful in charming them, and now she talked at length about the history of Germany compared to the history of the United States. She glanced at Tom as she talked to the soldiers and suddenly Tom realized that she knew what was going on.
“Feuer! Es gibt Feuer!” a voice shouted from down the hall, and the soldiers listening to Eleanor jerked their attention away from her and toward the voice. The officer barked out an order in German and two soldiers remained behind while the others rushed back to the room where they had left. Tom smelled smoke clearly now, and he realized that the added time had given the fire an opportunity to grow from a small flame to something that threatened the entire airship. Time was short, he realized.
Eleanor began talking again, and even though Siegfried had left with the others, the young soldiers were entranced by the beautiful young American who was spending time with them. They were engrossed in her discussion when the door opened and Tom saw Kid step in.
His jaw dropped, and his first impulse was to grab the young boy and hug him. Instead he saw the interruption as an opportunity. The soldier nearest Tom turned to look. At the same time, Eleanor saw Kid come in the door facing her, and grabbed the soldier near her by the face and kissed his full on the mouth. Tom turned and caught the soldier near him with an uppercut and the young German folded. While he was falling, he pulled the man’s sidearm out of its holster and pointed it at the second soldier, who was recovering from Eleanor’s kiss.
“Nice move, fraulein,” Tom said to Eleanor. “Soldier, I would hold still if I were you. Kid, welcome back.” Tom stepped forward and took the gun from the holster on the soldier. He looked over the soldier’s shoulder and saw that the airship captain stood at the helm, both hands on the wheel, but glancing over his shoulder at Tom and the others.
“Hey Cap’n,” he said in a loud voice. “Do you speak English?”
“Nein, nein,” the captain said. “Nur Deutsch.”
Sighing, Tom stepped forward and whacked the middle aged man across the top of his head with the butt of the pistol. The man sagged, and the wheel began to spin.
“What did you do that for?” Eleanor said, frowning. “He was controlling the ship.”
“Exactly,” he said. “He didn’t speak English, the place is already on fire. What good would he be for us?”
“I am pretty sure they are putting the fire out,” Eleanor said. “At least they are trying to. You’re just making the problem bigger.” As if in response, the ship twisted and turned to the portside. The nose tipped down, and briefly Tom saw ground in the evening gloom as he looked out the front window.
“Well, I thought the idea was to jump out with parachutes,” Tom said sarcastically. “Why do we need to worry about the ship?”
“You are just looking for ways to get people killed, aren’t you?” Eleanor yelled back at him. “Including us.”
“What are you talking about?” The ship lurched again, and Tom saw that it was definitely headed down now. A mountain ahead of them filled the front window. “Oh, I see.”
“Well, I guess we’d better get our parachutes on and get out while we can, then,” Tom said.
“What about the captain and the others? Aren’t you going to save them?”
“Save them?” Tom echoed. “They weren’t concerned with saving us? Why should I worry about saving them?” Tom saw that the mountain loomed bigger and bigger in the front view screen. Kid stepped forward and pulled on Tom’s sleeve.
“What is it?” Tom barked.
We have to go now, Kid gestured.
“Kid’s right, Princess,” Tom said to Eleanor. “We have just plumb run out of time.”
“Wait,” she said, and before Tom could protest again, she quickly strode over to the helm. She glanced back at Tom and Kid, then reached down and ripped a strip of cloth about three feet long from her underskirt. She tied one end of the strip to a handle that protruded from the wall on the starboard side. Then she turned the wheel until they were directed away from the mountain and toward an open space. She then tied the opposite end of her strip to the wheel to hold it steady.
“We’re still losing altitude, but that will keep us steady for a while,” she said.
“Good old Eleanor, saving the world one Heinie at a time,” Tom muttered. “Can we go now?”
Eleanor nodded, and Tom turned to exit out the door to the hallway. As he turned, the door opened and Siegfried entered the door. Tom locked eyes with Siegfried, and both reacted.
“Achtung!” Siegfried yelled before Tom hit him hard across the temple with his pistol. The young man fell against the wall and slid to the floor.
“Will you stop doing that!” Eleanor said.
“Eleanor, I don’t know if you noticed, but we have men with guns after us,” he yelled back at her. They opened the door to the hallway and Tom saw a row of men coming down the hall from the observation room. Tom locked eyes with the man in front. Before the soldier could react, Tom pulled his pistol up and shot the man between the eyes.
“Forward!” Tom yelled, and charged into the retreating Germans. “Get the parachutes and get downstairs!” Kid obeyed Tom without hesitation, and Eleanor followed.
The Germans retreated into the smoke-filled room they had just left. Apparently they had not been successful in putting out the fire. Tom heard them cough, then shout back to each other. A burst of submachine gun fire filled the hallway, and Tom fell to the floor. Tom raised the pistol without getting off the floor and fired into the smoke.
The Germans responded with another burst of submachine gun fire and more coughing. They’re getting desperate, Tom thought. Any minute they will charge me. He flashed back to a fight he had had with a bunch of Sioux in his early days. The braves had holed up in a cave and the cowboys who followed them stacked brush in the entrance to the cave until the Indians had rushed the cowboys. It had seemed a good idea at the time. Three cowboys had died and 12 Sioux. The sound of screaming as the Indians burned still haunted his dreams.
That’s what’s going to happen here, if I don’t get us off this ship and give them a chance to either fix things or get out themselves. He thought of yelling into the smoke and negotiating with them, but realized that Siegfried, their designated interpreter, was lying on the floor behind him. That frosted it.
“Aw, dadburn it,” he muttered, then jumped to his feet, disappearing into the side door where Eleanor and Kid had dropped to the lower level. He slid down the steps and got to the deck where Eleanor and Kid had just got their parachutes on.
“Are you two--,” he said, before machine gun fire erupted from above him. He threw himself at Kid, who held out his parachute. “Go, go, go!” he shouted at the two of them, and pushed them out the door. Bullets sprayed across the floor of the lower compartment, and Tom was torn between taking time to put on his parachute and getting out of the way of flying bullets. He chose the latter.
Kid didn’t hesitate in jumping out the open doorway and Tom saw his parachute open almost immediately. Eleanor was another problem. She froze when she came to the open doorway. Bullets spraying his heels, he leaped through the door with his parachute in hand, and threw Eleanor and himself into the open air.
He once again spun in the air as they fell. He let go of Eleanor, and breathed a sigh of relief as he saw her parachute open above him. In the meantime, he struggled to throw his arms into the bands on either side of the parachute. He saw the ground rushing up beneath him and realized that he wouldn’t have time to get his legs into the slots on the parachute. Instead, with his arms in place and the ground rushing up to meet him, he folded his arms across his chest and pulled the handle.
Tom caught his breath as his parachute opened above him. The force of the slowing jerked against his shoulders, and Tom felt a pop and a bright pain as he realized that his shoulder had just dislocated. Pain rolled over him, and he tried to remain focused. He looked down at the mountainside he was approaching with scattered pine trees. He tried to avoid the trees, but mostly he just tried to stay conscious through the pain. As glad as he was to have the parachute, he knew that he was coming down way too fast for comfort. Before he knew it, he felt his chute catch in the top of a pine tree. He jolted to a stop, and a wave of pain from his shoulder rolled through him. He looked down and realized that he was suspended about eight feet above the ground. He uncrossed his arms and felt himself fall into the snow below.
He must have lost consciousness for a moment. The next thing he remembered was seeing Eleanor in a torn dress and hair all mussed climbing and sliding through the snow toward him.
“Tom…Tom!” she said urgently. She reached out to him and put her hand on his face, concerned.
“I’m…I’m all right,” he said, his head slowly clearing. “Where is Kid?”
“I think I saw his parachute land east of here. I saw a town that direction too. Can you walk?”
Tom nodded. “Walk, yes. Just don’t ask me to carry you anytime soon.”
Eleanor nodded, smiling slightly. “I promise.”
“Where are we?” Tom asked.
“I overheard the soldiers saying something about Vienna.”
“Vienna? But that’s where we were going!”
“Relax,” she said. “First, we aren’t there yet, but we might be close. Second, they also said their orders were to push you and Kid out before we got there…without parachutes.”
“And you wanted me to save them,” Tom said. “I hope they crash and burn.”
Eleanor tsked him and smiled, helping him walk through the deep snow. They continued walking east and downhill as they stumbled through the dark. Twice they walked into holes hidden under brush, and although he didn’t say anything, Tom was glad when they finally made it to a road. He was able to walk, but found himself leaning heavily on Eleanor as they got close to the road. She was slight, but she didn’t complain as she helped Tom walk to the road. When they got to the road, Eleanor insisted that the sit down on the side and rest. A couple of minutes later, a farmer with a daughter and wife came riding up in a two-wheeled cart pulled by a hairy pony.
With her minimum German, Eleanor was able to let them know that Tom was hurt. They loaded him onto the wagon, the back of which was filled with hay. Eleanor sat on the back and talked to him as they traveled. They still saw no sign of Kid.
“He’ll show up, I guarantee it,” Tom said. “That kid’s got more lives than an alley cat.”
Half an hour later, they saw the lights of a small town ahead of them. The farmer didn’t stop at the edge of town, however, but took them to a small house with the sign, “Arzt” outside of it.
“That’s doctor,” Eleanor explained, and Tom nodded.
They helped Tom into the doctor’s office, and into a room reserved for treatment. The doctor came in and immediately they were relieved to know that he spoke fluent English.
“It looks like you dislocated your shoulder,” the doctor said to Tom. Tom nodded.
“I knew that already doc. Did it once before when a horse threw me in Colorado. Can you fix me up?”
The doctor nodded, and reached behind him and came back with a needle.
“Whoa there, doc. No shots,” Tom said.
“But sir, it will be quite painful to put it back into proper position,” the doctor said.
“Tom Horn, after all you’ve been through, and you’re afraid of a little shot?” Eleanor said, winking at him.
“Yes I am, but that’s not why I don’t want it. I don’t know what’s ahead of us, and I want to be alert. You give me a shot, doc, and my reflexes will be off.”
The doctor stared at him, then nodded. “As you wish.”
The doctor had Eleanor hold onto Tom’s other side and he grabbed Tom’s ailing arm.
“On the count of three…one…two,” the doctor said, then suddenly he jerked Tom’s arm as hard as he could. A wave of pain hit Tom again.
“Ahh! Dang it! Dang it!” Tom said, then he took a deep breath and looked at the floor, then at the ceiling.
“Are you all right?” Eleanor asked, looking at Tom.
Tom nodded. “Just give me a minute.” He stared at the front door, then he smiled as the front door opened and a familiar form came in the door.
“Well, look what blew in with the winter wind,” Tom said brightly. Kid grinned back at him and came in to the treatment room. Eleanor reached over and hugged Kid, and Tom started to do the same, then just patted on the side of the face with his good arm.
“Looks like the team is back together again,” he said, then looked at the torn dress and bedraggled hair of Eleanor. He took another look at Kid and realized that he had split one leg of his pants all the way from cuff to crotch. Then he looked at himself. “Back again, but a little worse for wear.” He looked again at Eleanor. We’re going to have to get you fixed up before you present to all those fancy men in Vienna.”
“Vienna? I’ve given up on Vienna,” Eleanor said. “We don’t even know where we are, and if we did, we certainly don’t have a means to get there.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” the doctor said. “I have an autocar in the shed out back. I would be happy to drive the three of you to Vienna. It is only about an hour’s drive from here. But before we do that, it appears that you could all use a bath and new clothes. Come, we need to go see my sister, Hilda.”

[glen]

Chapter 11
Beginning of the End of the Beginning

The doctor, whose name was Dr. Emil Woldheim, introduced them to his sister, Hilda, who not only owned a boarding house, but the tailor’s shop downstairs. Woldheim explained their situation to Hilda, who was more than happy to find them clothes that would fit. At the same time, her daughters put water on to boil and prepared a bath for the three of them.
Kid and Tom let Eleanor use the tub first, since they didn’t mind sharing water that someone had used. That was pretty much routine on the range, when and if you ever got a chance to bathe. Kid insisted that Tom take the bath second, who used the bath to soak his aching muscles and his sore shoulder. Woldheim and Kid had to help Tom get undressed, and as they took his shirt off, Tom and the others saw the true extent of his injuries.
In addition to the scattered cuts and bruises across Tom’s body, a exceptionally nasty black bruise ran from halfway across his chest to down his bicep on the arm that had been dislocated. Tom didn’t complain, but he suddenly found himself unable to lift his arm. The two others helped him into the hot bath, and Woldheim promised Tom that he would return with more hot water.
When Kid returned with hot water for the bath in fifteen minutes, he found Tom asleep in the tub. He gave him a few more minutes, then helped him get out and into a bed.
The next morning, Woldheim met them at the door with his Stanley Steamer. The steam automobile was the latest rage throughout Europe, and this vehicle was decked out with all the accoutrements. Eleanor took the passenger seat next to Dr. Woldheim, with Tom stretching out in the back seat. Kid was once again happy to take the rumble seat behind Tom in the very back.
As they rode toward Vienna, Eleanor was disturbed to see Tom reaching into a satchel and pulling out two revolvers. He popped open the guns and spun the barrels to make sure they were unloaded. Then he took time to clean them with a soft cloth and a bottle brush.
“What are you doing?” Eleanor asked.
“I learned a long time ago that you never know when you will need a gun,” he said, still focusing on the pistol that he was polishing. “So it’s especially important to make sure that they always are clean. A dirty gun will jam on you. And a jammed gun.” He stopped to spin the mechanism. “Is worse than no gun at all.”
“I believe that the time for guns is over with,” Eleanor said. “Look, we are already on the outskirts of Vienna.” She gestured around her as the buildings became taller and more stately.
“Ellie, your uncle hired me because I have a talent for sizing up the competition. And one thing I have learned for this competition is this: they never give up, and it’s never over.”
“That’s two things,” Eleanor said, smiling at him. “In any case, I hope you are wrong.”
“I hope I’m wrong too,” said Tom. “But I’m pretty sure I’m not.”
Teddy Roosevelt had told them to meet him and Thomas Edison at the Hotel New York just a few blocks away from the International Hall where the delegation was meeting. Woldheim drove up to the steps of the hotel. To their surprise, Roosevelt walked down the steps and met them.
“How did you know we would be here this morning?” Eleanor asked, hugging her uncle. “We didn’t even know we would be here.”
Roosevelt nodded at Woldheim, then winked at Eleanor. “I have many friends in unusual places, and so do you. Woldheim and I are old friends. He telegraphed me.” He stood and motioned to a waiting automotive behind them, which drove out to join them. “We don’t have any time to waste. Let’s hurry on to the International Hall.”
Tom watched the alleyways and streets as they drove closer to the Hall, and when they got within two blocks of the Hall, he held up his hand.
“Wait right here,” he said. Woldheim pulled his car over to the side of the road. “Look,” Tom said, pointing to one of the rooftops they were approaching. A man with a rifle stood on top. “And there.” He pointed to the other direction, and another man appeared, also with a rifle.
“They don’t know me,” Woldheim said. “Let me drive closer and see what we are facing.” Tom nodded and he and the others piled out of the car. Woldheim waved and drove away, while Tom and the others waited under the canopy outside a local bakery. A few minutes later, Woldheim returned.
“You suspicions are confirmed, sir,” he told Tom. “The steps to the International Hall are covered with gunmen. There are snipers on all the rooftops surrounding the square. Even if we were to get you to the front door without them shooting my car full of holes, you would be shot down as soon as you stepped out of the car. There is no hope.”
Eleanor’s face fell, and she looked over at Teddy Roosevelt, who had joined them on the sidewalk. He put his hand on Tom’s shoulder, who winced, since that was his bad shoulder.
“Well, we tried, my boy,” Roosevelt said. “I am all for charging into overwhelming odds, but this mission is…is just suicide.”
Tom stared at the two of them, then at the men in the distance on the rooftops, then at the car. Finally he frowned.
“Dang it, this is not happening,” he muttered. “You two wait here. Kid, you’re with me.”
Roosevelt and Eleanor stared at Tom and Kid as they marched down an alley that split the block in half.
Tom and Kid kept a low profile as they neared the town square. Intersections leading up to the town square were blockaded with gunmen at each stop. Tom and Kid blended into the irate crowds who were upset for having traffic blocked in an area that usually had lots of traffic. Finally Tom saw what he was looking for.
Considering their love for contraptions, Tom had suspected the Germans would have one of their War Wagons nearby, whether they needed it or not. He spotted one parked in an alleyway, with a soldier leaning against it casually. Kid walked up to the soldier, and tapped him on the shoulder. The man turned around and saw the scrawny kid.
“Weg, weg!” he said to Kid, gesturing with his hand as if to dismiss Kid. While he did so, Tom snuck up behind him and whacked him behind the ear with his pistol. The man collapsed, and the two of him dragged him off to the side. Then Kid and Tom climbed onto the giant metal beast and opened one of the hatches. They dropped in and closed it after them.
To their relief, no one was in the metal tank. Tom struck a match and looked around. The contraption was filled with levers, dials and switches. None of them looked familiar—or friendly—to Tom. Kid on the other hand scanned the dials and levers and seemed both excited and acquainted with what he saw.
“Still think you can drive this thing?” Tom asked Kid. Kid looked across the dials and nodded quickly, then dropped into a seat and fastened himself in. Tom, on the other hand, refused to sit. Kid opened a small slit in the front of the wagon through which he could see ahead of him, then pulled a latch and pushed a lever forward, similar to the drive lever on a railroad locomotive. Tom caught himself as the metal wagon roared to live and pushed forward into the street.
As loud as Tom remembered the War Wagon being when they had been chased through the snowy field in Illinois, being inside was just this side of hell. Tom tried to cover his ears with his hands. Then Kid reached over to the second seat beside him and grabbed a pair of ear mufflers. He put one pair on himself, and handed the second pair to Tom. It helped a lot.
Because of the noise, Tom couldn’t hear anything outside, and so he didn’t know that the war wagon was causing a great deal of commotion outside. The crowd scattered when they saw the strange vehicle approach, and Kid didn’t stop for the barricade at the intersection, but charged up and over the blockade. They were a block away from the city square and rapidly leaving it by the time riflemen began firing on them.
Tom felt the Wagon lurch to a stop, and Kid gestured for him to open the door. While the first wagon they had experienced had only had two hatches on top, Tom saw that this one had a door in the back as well. He opened it and saw Eleanor and Teddy Roosevelt huddled against a brick wall by the bakery, their eyes as big as saucers. Roosevelt relaxed when he saw Tom stick his head out the doorway and gesture to them.
“Get in fast,” he shouted at them over the roar of the steam engine. Teddy grabbed Eleanor’s hand and ran for the doorway. They leaped into the open doorway and Tom clanged it closed, just as a hail of bullets began to hit the wagon.
The hail became a torrent of bullets in a steady stream that sounded like a hailstorm of apocalyptic proportions. Tom took his ear muffs off and put them on Eleanor’s ears. The chugging engine and rain of bullets on the outside of the made Tom feel like he was under a waterfall of noise.
The Wagon chugged back up the street toward the town square, with Kid the only one who could see where they were going. Tom imagined that he heard voices outside shouting in German, but considering the wall of noise that surrounded them, he doubted that he could hear anyone shouting. And then he realized that he would probably be deaf for a while after they got to the building.
Suddenly he saw light and looked above to see a head appearing in the open hatch above. Without thinking, he drew and fired at the face. It disappeared, and he leaped to grab the hatch.
“Lock the doors shut!” he shouted at Roosevelt, and then toggled both hatches above closed. Roosevelt stepped back to the door in the rear to close it. As he reached for it, a hand appeared and the door began to open. Roosevelt grabbed the handle to the door and pulled against the door to keep it closed. There was apparently more than one person pulling on the other side, and the big man began losing the battle. Tom leaped forward and put his gun barrel to the crack in the door where fingers gripped it. Blam! He fired and the fingers disappeared. Roosevelt slammed the door shut and together they toggled the door shut.
Then Tom felt a bang against the side of the Wagon. He looked at Roosevelt and realized they someone had brought in a bigger gun, perhaps a howitzer, which they were using to fire on the wagon. Tom looked around and saw a seat that stood higher than the others, with a scope descending from the ceiling in front of the seat. He took the chair and pulled the scope down in front of him with the handles attached to its sides. He noticed a red button attached on one side to the handles. He looked through the scope and saw the outside street, with men and women running in all directions in front of them.
“You’re not running over any people, are you?” he said loudly to Kid, who jerked back, startled. Tom realized that Kid had been straining to focus on the job of keeping the Wagon moving in the right direction. Kid frowned at the comment, then gestured back.
I won’t if they stay out of my way.
Tom laughed, then shouted back, “Well, just don’t ask me to jump out and tell them to get out of the way.” His comment resulted in another, bigger, bang on the side of the wagon. This one was big enough to rock the whole wagon. Tom turned back to the scope and then saw what was causing the banging sound on their wagon.
It was a howitzer cannon, albeit a small one. It was located just to the left of the steps that led to the front door of the International Hall, which meant they would have to get very close if they were to get to the front door. Tom saw more men with guns running their way, and pushed the red button. He heard a sliding sound above him, and saw a sheaf of feathery darts fire from the Wagon. Four of the men fell where they stood, and the others leaped to the side.
The first shot of the darts gave Tom a pretty good idea that the dart gun was for short range only. If he had built such a machine, he would make sure it had a cannon on it as well. But perhaps that was too impractical, he thought to himself.
Boom! The cannon across the street fired again, and the cobblestones in front of them flew into the air. Kid turned to Tom, his face white, and gestured Get those guys!
Tom shook his head. “Closer. We have got to get closer.”
“If we get any closer, that gun will open us up like a can opener,” Roosevelt said behind them. And Tom knew that he was right. They wouldn’t get another chance if he had anything to say about it.
“Lock it after I get out there,” Tom told Roosevelt. He gripped the back door and turned to Kid. “Kid, get as close as you can to that front door.” And then Tom opened the door and jumped.
He leaped out onto the broken cobblestones and rolled onto his bad shoulder. He gritted with the pain, but didn’t let it stop him. He kept rolling until he was behind a wagon that apparently had been left behind by a startled team of horses. He looked up and saw two men with rifles running toward him. He drew and shot twice, and both of them fell. He leaped to his feet and ran toward them, picking up one of the bolt-action rifles as he ran. He drew his bolt back and thrust a bullet into the magazine. Then he stopped behind a lightpost and aimed.
The wagon roared ahead of him in the direction of the front steps of the Hall. The four men stationed behind the howitzer had just loaded another shell into the firing chamber and were aiming the gun for what they probably hoped was their final shot.
Tom fired and took down the man apparently in charge behind the big gun. The others hesitated when the saw him fall. That gave him the chance to draw back his bolt and fire another bullet. A second man went down. Then the other two saw him across the street and pointed at him. He reloaded and fired the third shot, and the third man went down.
Then two things happened. The street around him began to explode as gunfire from every rooftop hit around him. Chips of cobblestone sprang up everywhere, and Tom leaped for the nearest doorway.
At the same time, the howitzer went off. The shot hit the back corner of the War Wagon, and Tom saw a huge chunk of metal rip off the machine. Smoke and steam filled the air as Tom realized that steam lines that he had shot out in Illinois were shot out here as well. Still rolling, the wagon began to chug up the granite steps toward the front door of the International Hall. Bullets continued to clang on its shell, and Tom knew that leaping out of the machine would be instant death for anyone who tried it.
He watched helplessly as the wagon chugged up the steps but clanked to a stop just before it got to the top. It was partially under the overhang of the Hall, and Tom realized with glee that although the back door was exposed to the rooftops, one of the hatches at least was covered by the overhang.
He stood and ran across the open space to the Hall, and zigzagged as the bullets rained down on him. Chips again hit him from all sides, and once again Tom was coated with blood. He charged under the overhang, amazed that he had made the run without being shot, and angry at himself for even trying it.
He ran across the covered front porch, and climbed up onto the front of the War Wagon. He banged on the hatch with the handle of his rifle and saw the toggle slowly open and the hatch crack wide.
As Roosevelt started to climb out of the hatch, Tom saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned and fired from the hip as two men ran around the corner of the building toward them. Both fell. He then turned and saw another one coming from the other direction. He fired and he collapsed against the wall.
He scanned the steps and saw three more coming. He fired and two fell, but the third fired his rifle. The bullet caught Tom in the shoulder and he spun to the ground.
“Tom!” Eleanor shouted, and turned to him. She and Roosevelt were two steps from the front door. Tom waved them on.
“Go!” he shouted. “Go! Go!”
Another German ran around the corner and aimed his gun at Tom. Sitting on the ground, leaning against the War Wagon, his shoulder running red with blood, Tom raised his pistol and fired. The chamber clicked empty.
Smiling, the German raised his rifle and aimed to fire. Tom braced himself for the inevitable final bullet. Instead he heard a whirring flurry of darts. The German looked down to see four small arrows in his chest, and fell on his face.
Tom sat against the War Wagon, listening as Kid fired the dart gun again and again. He heard men yelling and crying as they fell in all directions. Finally, there was silence.
He lay against the War Wagon, the blood pouring from him, and faintly heard the latch of the hatch above him open. He felt rather than heard Kid jump down beside him, and then saw him disappear. A moment later, he reappeared with Roosevelt and two other men, who carried him into the lobby of the Hall.
Dr. Woldheim somehow made it into the Hall as well, and once again worked on Tom. He faded in and out of consciousness while he worked. And it was some time—possibly hours, maybe days—before he could think clearly again. When he did, he saw that not only Kid, Roosevelt and Woldheim were there. Eleanor walked toward him, a new New York-style dress on, and a smile on her lips.
“Did you talk to them?” Tom asked. Eleanor nodded.
“And they believed you?” Tom asked. Eleanor grinned.
“Now what do you think?”
“I think, young lady, that you could convince a polecat to give up its spots.” He reached up and took her hand. “Good job.”
“And you’re probably right,” she said. “But I will settle for getting the most powerful men in the world to refuse to give money to Krupp to wage war. Remember what you said about stopping powerful men who hire others to kill for them? Well, that’s just what we did.”
“That’s good,” Tom said. “That’s real good.”
“You know, Tom, the Foundation might have a permanent job for you along these lines if you are interested,” said Roosevelt. “You know that this isn’t over.”
Tom looked from Eleanor to Kid then to Roosevelt.
“You mind if I heal up first? I’m kind of beat up at the moment.”
Roosevelt threw back his head and laughed. “Take your time, Corporal. Take your time.”

[glen]

So that's the story from my second year with National Novel Writing Month. Obviously, I left room for a sequel or two here, and although it is far from polished, I think there's some potential here.

Let me know what you think, eh?

Glen