Storming

Twenty-Four

HITCH HAD HEARD of dirigibles. They’d been big news during the war, bombing London and all that. But this was the first he’d seen of the beasts.

A double row of round windows lined the long side of the ship. On the back end, two massive propellers churned, thrumming like very big, very off-key bass fiddles. The ship’s bottom flashed egg-shell blue, the color of the sky. No wonder nobody had spotted it before. It blended right in.

It sank lower and lower, right over the grandstand. People scattered just as if they were being blown away by the propeller blast.

All around Hitch, the racing planes kept screaming right on toward the pylon. He was the only one facing the field, so he was the only one who could see what was going on. None of the other pilots probably even knew the rearmost plane had gone down.

The Jenny pitched her nose one degree too many toward the ground, and his hand on the stick came back to life. He hauled her nose up.

In the front cockpit, Jael leaned forward and clenched the rim with both hands. She shot him an agonized look over her shoulder.

All right. So Schturming had come to them, just like they’d hoped. Now the trick was to keep the thing here long enough to get Zlo off, without getting anybody else electrocuted. His heart pounded its way up his windpipe.

First thing he had to do was move out of the way before Zlo or one of his buddies spotted him. Otherwise, he and Jael would be the next ones to end up toast.

He hauled back on the stick, slammed the throttle forward, and screeched skyward into the protection of the sun’s glare. Then he banked wide around the end of the field and swooped in low to land behind the rows of parked motorcars. The Jenny didn’t exactly blend in, but she’d be a whole lot less conspicuous there than she was in the air. With any luck, the dirigible’s propellers would be running too loud for anybody to hear his own plane growling.

He cut the engine and jerked his safety belt loose.

Even before the plane stopped rolling, Jael squirmed around in her seat. She groped for his shirtfront, eyes wide. “What is it we are doing? We should fly to it!”

“Not yet!” He had to shout to be heard over the thrum of the big propellers. He jumped out and grabbed her arm to half-help, half-haul her out. “They’ll stick around for a little bit. They’ve obviously got something in mind. No sense buzzing around and getting ourselves shot out of the air like that guy back there. First, we find Earl and figure out what they’re doing.”

And when and if Hitch went back up there, Jael was staying firmly on the ground—even if he did have to tie her up. No way he was going to risk her jumping out of the cockpit again.

“C’mon,” he said. “And keep low!”

He hustled her through the motorcars, running bent over. In the bleachers ahead, people were screaming, fleeing.

One grizzled farmer in overalls shook his fist. “The Huns! The blamed Huns are invadin’!”

Hitch scanned for Griff. He’d be in the thick of the melee somewhere, trying to keep order.

Instead, Hitch spotted Earl.

Earl wasn’t scrambling. He stood with his head hung back, staring straight up past the brim of his ball cap, open-mouthed. He was probably slavering over the kind of engine that could power those monster propellers.

Schturming kept right on dropping. By now, its sky-blue bottom was only a couple dozen feet off the ground. From this close, the thing looked like the hull of a pirate ship, planked and weathered—but without the barnacles. On the narrow end at the prow, two barn-sized doors split open and revealed a cavity with twenty or so men standing inside in ranks. Zlo, in his long coat and bowler hat, stood at the front. The eagle rode his shoulder.

Here it was then. Wouldn’t be any kind of a surprise if these guys pulled Tommy guns and started mowing everybody down.

The propellers cut out, and the whole ship bobbed. In the booming silence, the screams and the stamp of running feet suddenly sounded tinny and small.

At the near end of the bleachers, Hitch stopped short. He crouched in its shadow and pulled Jael down after him. Earl was still staring, so Hitch took advantage of the all-around shock to stick two fingers in his mouth and whistle, loud and sharp.

Earl twitched his head around.

The durn fool was going to get himself fried for sure. Hitch motioned him over.

Earl came running and ducked around the corner to join them. He skidded in the dust and sat down, his back to the bleachers. He looked at Jael. “Okay, sweetheart, so you’re not crazy.”

She stared past him. “The glavni, the Enforcement Brigada. To be able to do this, Zlo must have finished with killing them all!”

Up above, Zlo took a megaphone from his lieutenant in the red coat. “I give you greetings, Scottsbluff! You are wondering who I am and what I am wanting. So I will tell you. I am Rawliv Zlo. I am master of Schturming, and that makes me master of you. If you do not as I say, I will destroy your city, your farms. I will bring floods, and I will bring hail. And lightning. The storm you saw last time I was here? It is but nothing. Can you understand that?”

People stared and murmured. The screams became low-pitched wails.

A man with hulking shoulders—Campbell—pushed through to stand at the front. He looked grim. “What do you want?”

“I want what you call ransom. And, oh yes, I want my yakor.”

Hitch looked around at Jael.

She shook her head. “Then he does think I still have it.”

Oh, great. Hitch scowled. “What’s he going to do when he finds out it’s somewhere between here and Cheyenne?”

She knit her brows, staring up. “It is not maybe. The way it pulled from me—it caught on something. What if it is still there?”

“Small chance of that.” But still, he craned a look upwards.

She clenched her fists against her bent knees. “He is wanting it because if he has it, he can go to anywhere he wants. Do all things he wants. And things he wants are very bad.”

“Well, even if he does have it, he obviously doesn’t know it. And there is no guarantee it snagged on something up there. More than likely, it fell right to the ground.”

She shook her head. “Then he can make storms nowhere but in this place. He will not like that. He will do his threats.”

“Give to me yakor and eighty thousand dollars,” Zlo shouted.

Jael put a hand on Hitch’s shoulder and started to push herself up. “I should go—”

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her back down. “You can’t seriously still want to go back?”

“No. My people—maybe they are letting Zlo do this thing, or maybe they cannot stop him. If it is first, then they are betrayers. If it is other, I can only help them if I help all of you.”

“And you’re telling me Zlo is a man of honor?”

“Honor?”

“Is he the kind that keeps his word, that gives a Lincoln penny about whether anybody down here thinks he’s a good guy or not?”

She shook her head.

“I didn’t think so. So you stay put. If he finds out you don’t have that pendant, then he’s got no use for you. He’s likely to shove you right on out of there again. And this time you won’t be wearing a parachute.”

Her gaze flickered from him to Schturming, then to the people huddled in the grandstand. “But—”

“Look, I got enough on my mind right now. So just you promise me you’re not going to go turning yourself over. Trust me when I say that’s not going to do anybody any good. The man’s a pirate. He’s going to try to wring that money out of the folks down here whether you go up or not.” He rattled her arm. “Promise me.”

Her gaze came back. Her throat bobbed in a swallow. “I promise.”

The next trick would be keeping everybody else from figuring out who she was and forking her over to Zlo anyway. He huffed.

Earl thumbed Hitch in the ribs. “You better pay attention to this.”

One of Zlo’s men kicked a rope ladder out the door. It unfurled with a snap and swayed a foot or two above the ground.

“What happened?” Hitch asked.

“The sheriff’s going up to talk.”

“Oh, well, that’s swell.”

Griff pushed through the crowd behind Campbell and spoke to him for a second. Campbell waved him off, took hold of the ladder, and started hauling himself up. Hands on his hips, Griff stood watching. He looked as happy about the whole thing as Hitch felt.

Campbell would do his best to bring Zlo to his knees. He wouldn’t be satisfied with just getting the ship out of the county now. Zlo had challenged him, and like Campbell’d said, he didn’t take it lightly when folks threatened things he thought belonged to him. That meant, from this moment on, Campbell would be dead set on bringing down Schturming any way he could.

If Campbell figured things out, that probably didn’t mean anything good for Jael.

Hitch growled. There had to be another way around this. Something he could do. He was, after all, about the only person on the ground right now who knew what was really going on here.

He scanned the length of _Schturming_’s gas envelope, then squirmed around in the dust to face Earl. “I’m going back into the air.”

“What for?”

“To see if I can pop their bubble.” He pointed at Jael as he got up. “You stay here, you cotton?”

She frowned. “You are going to do what?”

He left without answering. As soon as the bleachers were between him and Schturming, he straightened and started jogging toward the Jenny.

Two pairs of footsteps sounded behind him.

“What’s your plan?” Earl asked. “Please don’t tell me it’s to ram it with your propeller.”

“It’s like a balloon, right? Stick a pin in a balloon and it pops.” He reached the Jenny and hauled himself into the rear cockpit. “Give her a crank.”

Earl scrunched his face. “What are you going to puncture it with?”

Hitch pointed at his left wing. “The handkerchief hook.”

“Oh, fantastic.” Earl rolled his eyes. “That’s brilliant. You hook that hulk, and you’ll rip your whole wing off. Anyway I don’t think it’s quite that simple. The air chambers are probably pocketed. You could blast it with a shotgun, and it’d still float. And even if it did work, you’d have to hope your exhaust didn’t ignite the whole thing when the gas spurted out.”

“Well, I gotta do something, so crank her.”

Earl threw up his hands and walked around to the propeller.

A frown creased Jael’s forehead. She gripped the cockpit rim. “I am coming with you.”

“No sense both of us buying it if this doesn’t work.” And Earl was right. It probably wouldn’t.

“I am part of what is happening here.”

“There’s nothing for you to do right now. Just stay out of sight.”

Her brows came down, looking pretty stormy themselves. But the spin of the propeller and the cough of the engine kept her from saying anything more.

The engine sputtered and backfired once, and the propeller jerked to a stop.

Hitch circled his finger in the air. Earl spun it again. This time the engine caught with a chuckle that rose to a roar.

Overhead, Campbell’s megaphoned voice shouted: “All airplanes have to stay on the ground! The man says if any more take off, he’ll bring the storms!”

Hitch pushed the throttle forward anyway. Better to take a calculated risk and call Zlo’s bluff than sit here and do nothing.

Jael flung herself at his cockpit again. “No! He will do it!”

Frustration cramped his throat. He hesitated, fist still tight on the stick. Schturming was in reach right now. If it disappeared again, Zlo could unleash all the storms he wanted from his invisible perch in the sky.

Jael shook her head hard.

But if she was right and going up only brought the storms that much faster, that’d hardly do anybody any good. He loosened his grip and reached for the switch to kill the engine.

Jael whipped her head around to look at the western sky.

Hitch followed her gaze, his hand hovering over the switch. He heard the rumble over his own engine’s before he saw them.

The rest of the competitors were finally roaring in.

“That’ll work!” He caught Jael’s arm and pulled her in close enough to shout in her ear. “I can take off under the cover of their engine noise. Zlo’ll never hear me.”

She still shook her head, but the crease in her forehead eased a bit.

“Once I get up there and distract them, you and Earl see if you can’t figure some way to mark that undercarriage! I’ll try to force it lower!” So long as Schturming couldn’t blend into the sky, they might have a chance of finding it again if it ended up getting away.

Overhead, the plane engines screamed in louder. The pilots would be wondering what was happening. Half of them would probably think the dirigible was some stunt of Livingstone’s. They’d close in right over its top just to get a look. With any luck, they’d spot Hitch, realize what he was doing, and follow his lead.

Jael nodded and stepped back, out of the prop wash.

He exhaled, faced forward, and opened the throttle.

“Hitch!” She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Be careful of cannon!”

Cannon—? Even as the plane taxied past, he jerked a look back at her.

She was kidding. Surely, she was kidding.

Except Jael never kidded.

He faced into the wind again and tried to pretend his gut hadn’t just done a snap roll.