The Forever Engine (32 page)

Durson’s voice called out from the darkness ahead. I couldn’t make out the Serbian, but I caught the teasing tone. Zoran, our guide, turned and made a sour face.

“Your friend the Night Killer says we make too much noise,” he said in German.

“Tell him we wanted him to hear us coming so he wouldn’t be surprised and wet himself,” I said.

Zoran grinned and passed on the message. Durson’s laugh came back as a low rumble in the night.

“I’m surprised to see you here,” I told Durson when we entered the clearing. I glanced around—no fire, men well dispersed, very little activity except men cleaning their weapons and checking their gear.

“Your Professor Thomson is very persuasive, even through a translator. Also, I’ve made new friends,” he answered, and then repeated the last part in Serbian for Zoran. Zoran held his right bicep with his left hand and gave him the finger. Nice to know some things never change.

“We have a difficult task ahead of us,” Durson said, studying me. “Captain Gordon says you are a soldier of experience. That is surprising. I had thought you were a gentleman.”

“Man, were you wrong.”

He looked at me a moment more and then nodded.

“You have thought about the problem?” he said.

Gordon stood beside me and motioned Sergeant Melzer and Corporal O’Mara to join us.

“I’ve thought about if for most of yesterday and all the way up the mountain. Cevik Bey will attack at sunrise? We can count on that?”

“His column passed Brezna this afternoon,” Durson said. “We left a heliograph team in the village and exchanged messages with him. The attack will come tomorrow.”

“And
Intrepid
’s joining in?”

“Yes. We are to help with diversionary attacks, although I am uncertain what effect a diversion will have.”

“No effect at all. Cevik Bey doesn’t need a diversion. Tesla can bring four field guns to bear on the attack down the valley, and potentially on
Intrepid
. Harding and Cevik Bey need us to silence those guns. Fortunately, Tesla’s defenses are set up to stop big attacks from outside, not small ones coming from inside the perimeter. If we’re going to do this, though, and do it without getting half our people killed, we’ll need the defenders occupied elsewhere, looking elsewhere.

“The main attack will be
our
diversion.”

FORTY-TWO

October 15, 1888, Kokin Brod, Serbia

The clouds and moon cooperated, denying any watchful eye the aid of a reflection from gunmetal or a shadow flickering across open ground. Durson’s men moved like silent phantoms, a single-file column which quickly vanished into the uneven foliage along the banks of the lake. Gordon’s men—Melzer’s riflemen and O’Mara’s Marines—moved more slowly, but they didn’t have as far to go. They disappeared into a shallow drainage ditch a hundred yards east of the southern gun redoubt.

Five minutes passed—no challenges, no alarms. Durson and his men would take another half hour to get into final position, but I couldn’t afford to wait any longer. Already the mountain peaks to the west were distinguishable as ink black against a charcoal sky.

I signaled Zoran and we rose from the underbrush in our improvised ghillie suits—gray-brown wool blankets with branches, sprigs of foliage, and long tentacles of hanging moss pushed through slits in the fabric, the whole thing worn as a hooded cloak. There wasn’t a lot of ground cover, but October leaves had piled up around the flower beds and low garden walls on the east side of the big house. We got there well before first light and settled in. Between the dead leaves, and a couple pruned branches from a waiting burn pile to break up our shape, we became all but invisible by the time the sky grew pink in the east.

The lights were already on in the big house, and angry voices carried over the still-dark lawn from open windows. They’d figured out I was gone, probably untied the guard and not gotten much of an explanation from him. Tesla would really be pissed now.

Torches appeared at the main doorway, flickering light played across the lawn, and a half-dozen guards searched for some sign of our trail. We hadn’t made any effort to hide our tracks when leaving, but they still didn’t manage to find anything. Tracking at night is damned near impossible unless you’re a pro, and none of these guys were. After about twenty minutes they got tired of looking and went back inside.

I knew it wouldn’t be much longer, so I gave my equipment a final check, maybe as much from nerves as foresight. Gordon had given me a Very pistol to signal when we were clear of the building or when Tesla was dead, whichever came first. The design hadn’t changed much between the 1880s and my own time. The flare cartridges I was used to were about half the diameter—better propellants and bursting charges—but the design was the same. I stuck it in my belt in back, where it wouldn’t get in my way.

Gabrielle’s ammunition bandolier had open loops holding twelve-gauge rounds with leather flaps which snapped over each of the ten groups of five rounds. I’d loaded five, and there were three more empty loops—rounds she’d fired at the waterfront in Uvats—so forty-two rounds more. I opened the snaps and took inventory: ten deer slugs, fifteen number-eight birdshot, and twenty-two double-ought buckshot, including five in the magazine. That was a good all-around load, but the fifteen birdshot rounds were less useful for what I wanted. I thought for a moment. If I knew what situation I’d end up facing, I could decide on a mixed load, but I didn’t, so for now I stayed with buckshot.

I sat with my back to the stone wall and waited. The big house had settled down after the tardy discovery of my absence. The distant report of a field gun caused renewed activity and shouted orders, but this time the activity had a more practiced sound to it. Men closed and bolted the front door. Rusty hinges squealed in protest, and metal rattled and clanged as servants closed heavy iron shutters over the windows. After ten or fifteen minutes, these sounds faded as well and silence settled over the lower floor of the house. I listened but heard nothing for a while, then caught the faint rattle of rifle fire and a distant field gun firing. The attack had begun.

I motioned to Zoran. We rose and moved across the thirty yards of open ground to the rear of the house. We faced the east side, the side away from the direction of Cevik Bey’s attack, and I counted on all hostile eyes being on the valley. I also figured that, once I’d broken out and escaped, the last thing they would expect was a return visit. The firing grew louder, and the distinctive metallic rattle of a Gatling gun joined in from the roof of the house.

We’d already worked out our means of entry. We dropped our ghillie suits on the ground, and I leaned forward against the brick wall of the house. Zoran scrambled up my back, onto my shoulders, and then used the prominent stone facing work for handholds to climb the last meter or so up to the second-floor balcony. He lowered a knotted rope, wound around the stone railing, and I climbed up behind him.

We paused there, waiting to see if our ascent had alerted anyone—nothing. I already had the Winchester out, and now Zoran unslung his own weapon, a short breech-loading carbine.

We moved the iron shutter aside, and I went through the door to the interior, with my shotgun pointing straight ahead and braced against my shoulder, a buckshot round in the chamber. Empty room. We moved quickly to the door, cracked it, looked out, moved out into the empty hallway. I glanced down the main stairs and saw a heavy iron girder dropped into brackets to either side, holding the front door closed. It would take an explosive charge to force it open, and we might need reinforcement, but we’d already worked this out as well. The door was Zoran’s job—open it and then hold it until I came out or good guys came in. I pointed down to it, and Zoran nodded and started down. I headed up to the next floor.

The stairs creaked softly, no matter how carefully I climbed them. I felt sweat trickle down my face and neck, and I paused to dry my palms on my shirt.

The third floor was empty as well, but the sound of two men talking in loud voices drifted down the open staircase. I knelt for a moment at the foot of the stairs and leaned against the balustrade, steadying myself, gathering myself, feeling the blackness around the edges of my vision take shape like a living thing emerging from the fog. I did five cycles of tactical breathing and figured I was as settled as I was likely to get.

I started up the stairs, shotgun up and at my shoulder, my left hip sliding along the banister for support and balance. Halfway up I could tell the voices came from my right, so I turned and let my butt rest against the banister. I moved slowly up until I could see the top of one of their heads, and then I dropped into a crouch. If I could see his head, he could have seen mine if he’d looked in the right direction.

One more complete cycle of breathing, and then I sidestepped quickly up the stairs, the shotgun aimed at their voices and then at the upper torso of the closest one as I cleared the banister at the top. They stood in front of a door, their rifles lying against the wall behind them.

The one a little farther from the stairs saw me first. His eyes grew wide. The other one turned and saw me as the first one cried out in surprise.

“Hands up!” I shouted.
“Hande hoch!”

Maybe they didn’t understand German. Maybe they didn’t hear anything through their panic. The closer one turned and grabbed for his rifle, and the other one started to as well.

“
No!
Stop where you are. Hands up!”

Nobody listened.

My first shot took the closer guard in the side as he rose and turned with his rifle, slammed him back against the wall. He slid to the floor, leaving a bloody smear on the wall. My second shot hit the second guard right below the chin and slightly to one side. It nearly took his head off.

I took a moment to look at them. Even with all my breathing exercises, my heart rate shot through the roof and my peripheral vision had gone, but I looked hard at them, trying to make myself notice anything that might be useful.

They were dressed as local farmers, not in the black of Tesla’s air crews.

I knelt and checked the first guard—he still lived, but red foam bubbled from his mouth with every breath. I kicked the two rifles down the stairway and left him. If he woke up, he could make his peace with his maker. I didn’t feel like hurrying him along.

I kicked in each doorway on the floor and did a cursory search, but couldn’t waste too much time here. The noise of the Winchester would probably attract attention, even in the middle of a battle. I pushed two more buckshot rounds into the magazine as I took the stairs to the fifth floor two at a time.

Four men moved cautiously through the main hallway toward the stairs. As my head cleared the level of the floor and I saw them, they called out and raised their own weapons. I had the advantage of being in the stairway, effectively down in a hole and under cover while they were wide open in the corridor. One fired, but the rifle shot went high and to the side. I fired and dropped him. I crouched down to lever another round into the chamber and stepped two paces to the side. I stood up; two men fired, but their aim was off, expecting me to come up where I’d been. I fired and dropped the man who had not fired. I worked the lever for another shell while the two still standing fumbled frantically with the bolts of their rifles. I fired again; a third man went down in a spray of blood, and the fourth man dropped his rifle, raised his hands as far over his head as he could, and began babbling in Serbian.

It was very hard not to shoot him, because I was in a rhythm, a groove, and it was easier to just keep going, but I stopped myself.

I climbed the rest of the stairs and motioned with the barrel of the Winchester for him to back away from his rifle. I kicked it and the other one close to it down the stairway. One of the men on the floor groaned and writhed in pain. I let go of the shotgun’s front grip to point at the wounded man with my heft hand and motioned the uninjured guard to drag him into the closest bedroom. He scrambled to do it, eyes wide with terror.

I’d have given a lot right then for a pocket full of plastic quick restraints. Instead, once they were in the room, I used the butt of the shotgun to break off the interior door handle and closed the door on them. Now all there was between me and the observation platform above the roof was the unfinished attic.

Rapid steps thudded down the narrow stairs to the attic. I pushed another round into the magazine, but that was all the time I had before the first man scrambled out of the narrow doorway to the stairs. He looked around, not sure what was going on, and I caught him with a quick shot to the hip which spun him around and dropped him. He crawled away into an open room, but he left his rifle behind, so he was out of the fight. Another man stuck his head around the corner of the doorway, and I drove large splinters of wood from the door frame but missed him.

I put two more rounds into the magazine and moved to my left, toward a doorway, when a rifle cracked from behind me and I felt as if someone had hit my right leg with a baseball bat. I went down and rolled onto my left side. Ahead of me someone looked out the doorway. I fired, and the shot went high but drove him back.

I wriggled a little closer to the stairway, raised my head and looked down. The first guard I’d shot down there, now almost covered with his own blood, struggled to work the bolt on one of the rifles I’d just kicked down to him.

Son of a bitch.
Talk about no good deed going unpunished.

I crawled away from the stairway. At least that guy wasn’t coming up after me.

A hand holding a revolver appeared at the doorway to the attic stairs. It fired once in my general direction, disappeared, appeared and fired again. The shots went high, but sooner or later he might get lucky. I fired and knocked a lot of plaster dust away but wasn’t accomplishing much.

I crawled to a doorway, pushed open the door with my shoulder, fired another round at the stairway, and rolled in. I did a quick scan of the room—an empty bedroom with four thin blanket-covered mattresses on the floor. Servants’ quarters.

I worked the lever, ejected the spent casing, but saw the empty loading slide in the receiver. I was dry. I fed in three buckshot rounds, then felt higher on the bandolier and pushed two deer slug cartridges in behind them. I chambered a round and waited.

I leaned away from the doorway and checked my leg. It hurt like hell, but the wound was a simple in-and-out, two-thirds of the way down the thigh and behind the femur. No broken bone and no compromised artery. I was a lucky guy.

I coughed, realized the corridor had filled with black powder smoke. My eyes burned and my mouth was dry. I was out of practice with a shotgun, and I hadn’t held it tight enough against my shoulder, so my whole upper right arm and shoulder felt on fire.

The revolver appeared at the doorway and fired a round, withdrew, then came back to fire again. It must have been a single-action revolver and the guy had to cock it by hand each shot. Before he could fire again, I aimed at the wall just beside the splintered door jam, about where I figured his center of gravity would be, and fired a deer slug. It punched through the lathe and plaster wall and I heard a scream of pain from the other side. It wasn’t a short scream of alarm; it was a cry of genuine agony, and it went on and on, rising and falling, pausing for ragged gasps of air.

Across the hallway the guy locked into the bedroom started banging on the door and calling to his pals. I put a round through the door deliberately high, just to scare him, and the pounding stopped.

This was getting me nowhere. I had to get up to Tesla, and I couldn’t see any good way to do it except over the bodies of all these guys. The
pistolero
in the attic stairway still screamed, but the sound grew distant. They must be pulling him up the stairs. I pushed a buckshot round in and then a deer slug and chambered it. I used the shotgun as a prop to get to my feet and then limped down the corridor, the shotgun trained on the opening. Ten feet from the stairs someone looked around the corner, saw me, and ducked back in alarm. I corrected for where I figured he’d pull back to and fired a slug through the wall. I heard him hit the stairs and then he slid down and out the door into the corridor, arms and legs awry like a discarded rag doll.

I stopped at the bottom of the stairs, reversed the shotgun so I held it left-handed, leaned it around the corner and fired it at a forty-five-degree angle upward. Men cried out in pain and fear. I worked the lever and repeated, and again, and again.