Chapter Twenty-Two

There it is!”

Capt. Ubaldo shouted over the noise of the steam turbines, pointing downwards through the port-side windows towards a vast cleared space in the middle of the forest, at one end of which a cross made of whitewashed boulders had been laid out as a marker.

It seemed to Liam that they had been flying forever, and that the arctic temperature inside the half-Delta had long ago frozen him nearly as solid as those woolly mammoths the Russians were always chopping out of the Siberian permafrost.

Like most people who’d never been inside one, Liam had reckoned a “half-Delta must have the same basic amenities found in a full-size Delta, the warship of the U.S. Aerial Navy. Shaped like a wedge in the form of an enormous isosceles triangle, lifted by revolutionary hydrogen “cells” held rigid by a graceful framework of aluminum struts, the standard Delta was big enough to mount multiple steam-driven Gatlings and carry a company of heavily armed aeronauts in reasonable comfort.

But as it turned out, the only thing the half-Delta shared with its namesake was its triangular shape. Designed purely for speed, it was nowhere near even half the size of the big Deltas, and anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary had been stripped out of it. As far as Liam could see that included everything connected with warmth, quiet, and basic creature comforts, and at high altitudes it seemed that his time was divided between trying to get a deep breath and uncontrollable shivering. Fortunately, Becky had flown on these things before and had dragged along a life-saving armload of fur coats and blankets.

The odd thing was that although they were already into the second week of summer, there seemed to be flakes of snow swirling around them as the big controlled-descent fans drove them closer and closer to the clearing below. Not only that, but the night skies had been clear on the St. Paul side of the Mississippi, while here the moonlight was broken by heavy, wind-driven clouds that had given Ubaldo some bad moments as he crossed into Little Russia and flew over the countryside north of New Petersburg.

“Not bad enough, though,” thought Liam with a flash of irritation. Ubaldo had been grating on his nerves ever since the flight from New York to Alexandria, with his showy nonchalant-aeronaut swagger and his dandyish blue flying-suit and sealskin boots. Not to mention the patent-leather hair and that damned little moustache, whose tips Ubaldo was perpetually twisting until Liam expected them to unwind all at once, possibly (if Lady Luck was any sort of pal at all) whipping off his ostentatiously patrician nose and whirling away with it.

Not that he could really blame Ubaldo for posturing, Liam thought, forcing himself against all his inclinations to be fair for a moment. Becky Fox was a ridiculously beautiful woman as well as being a world-famous reporter and as staunch a comrade as any of his pals among the Butcher Boys. But damn it all, anyway, why did she have to simper when Ubaldo oiled her up with extravagant flatteries, and what was all that folderol about his profile reminding her of Maurice Barrymore, whom she’d just seen in Under the Gaslight?

“Hang on tight!” shouted Ubaldo as the roar of the fans rose to a shriek. A moment later there was a thump as the bottom of the airship bounced against the ground, followed by a half-dozen rapid fwomp!-thud!s as steam guns fired anchoring stanchions into the dirt. A moment later Ubaldo cut the engines and stood.

“Nous sommes arrivés!” he announced with a grin.

“Why can’t he speak bloody English?” thought Liam crossly. He stood up and helped Becky to unfasten the safety belt that had kept her in her seat.

“Thank you, Mr. McCool,” she said as she got to her feet.

“Nichevo,” he said gruffly. “If we’re to be speaking in tongues, that’s Russian for think nothing of it …”

“I know what it means,” she said with a quizzical look.

More to hide his embarrassment than for any other reason, Liam gave her an elaborate bow and gestured towards the hatch which Ubaldo had just opened to the outside.

“After you, Miss Fox,” he said with stiff formality.

Becky gave him another inquisitive look, shook her head almost imperceptibly and then turned to go out the hatch and down the steps that Ubaldo had just set up. Liam closed his eyes and counted to ten before he followed her out the hatch.

Outside, it appeared that the snow had started falling in earnest. Ubaldo pulled out his watch and checked it, then tucked it away again and turned to Becky and Liam.

Eleven hours, twenty-three minutes. Not bad at all for a run from Shelter Island to Little Russia. I must applaud Mr. Clemens’ choice of a location for the Party’s clandestine headquarters, there’s no aerial traffic except for seagulls, yet it’s scarcely a hundred miles from Manhattan!”

Becky smiled reminiscently: “And I must say President Lincoln seemed thrilled to be at the seashore, even if he must negotiate the waterfront in a wheelchair.”

Ubaldo cleared his throat apologetically and looked at his watch again: “Miss Fox, Mr. McCool, I’m afraid I’ve got to turn around right away and head back to Shelter Island to start my next assignment. Are you two going to be all right out here in the middle of nowhere?”

“Of course we are, Captain,” said Becky firmly. “We’ve got our furs and our blankets, and if our contacts here are as good about keeping to their schedule as you have been about yours, we shouldn’t be waiting more than a half hour.”

“I don’t like leaving you here in the middle of a snow storm,” Ubaldo said dubiously. “There’s something freakish about this weather that’s got me a bit spooked. Sure, I’ve heard of late snows in New Petersburg and St. Paul both, but I’ve never ever heard of snow falling on one side of the Mississipi while it’s a nice, clear summer evening on the other.”

“Really,” Becky said, taking Ubaldo’s hand. “You need to go as far as you can before sunrise, and we’re going to be equally busy with our missions here. I’m sure we shall all meet again in New York before long.”

Ubaldo smiled at her in a way that Liam found insufferably smarmy. “I’ll go peacefully if you promise to let me take you to dinner at Delmonico’s when you’ve come back.”

Becky gave him a warm smile in return. “That would be very nice indeed, Captain.”

“In that case,” he said, and bending over her hand he kissed it with a warmth that Liam was sure went beyond the bounds of propriety; in fact, if he kept it up much longer Liam was going to give him a good sharp rap on the bean with the brass knucks he carried for special …

“Au revoir, then, Miss Fox,” Ubaldo said, standing up again. “Mr. McCool,” he said with a courteous nod to Liam. A moment later he had pulled the steps back into the ship, slammed the hatch shut, cast off the lines to the anchoring stanchions and begun an eerily silent climb into the moonlit clouds.

Liam looked after the departing airship with an exasperated frown. “I just wish they’d given the OK for Ubaldo to come back for us instead of leaving us to fend for ourselves. Three days to take care of old Pilkington’s assignment and make our way back to Shelter Island seems a bit of a stretch.”

“I expect Mr. Clemens and the others have confidence in our resourcefulness,” Becky said tartly. “And as for Capt. Ubaldo, he’s already taken an uncommon lot of risks in order to help President Lincoln escape.”

Liam knew he should keep his mouth shut, but it was as if his infantile self had taken over the reins and was driving him hard towards a smashup:

“Well,” he said in a sniffish tone, “we certainly wouldn’t want to put your darling Capt. Ubaldo in harm’s way!”

Becky’s eyes flared and Liam could sense a thunderbolt coming: “Liam McCool,” she snapped, “I’ve a good mind to …!”

Before she could finish she was interrupted by a sound more chilling than the blizzard wind—from just beyond the edge of the forest behind them, first on one side and then on the other, came the plaintive, hungry howling of a pack of wolves.

“Oh, oh,” muttered Liam, “that’s torn it!”

He snatched his Colt out of an inside pocket and thumbed back the hammer. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a big handful of the bullets for Maggie’s Webley.

“You’d better keep these handy,” he said to Becky, “with any luck we’ll have enough bullets between us to stop them.”

Becky already had the pistol out and the hammer back. “I’ve never shot a wolf,” she said uneasily.

“I’ve heard it can take a couple of shots to bring one down,” he said, “just keep shooting till it keels over.”

As if his words had been a signal, one wolf after another moved forth out of the screening trees and formed a menacing crescent around Becky and Liam, their jaws hanging open and their tongues lolling out in what looked like hungry grins, while the intermittent moonlight made their eyes glint with cold fire.

“I never could abide dogs,” Liam said grimly, “too many big teeth.” He opened the front of his coat to free the handle of his sword cane.

At that, the wolf that seemed to be in the center of the crescent stepped towards Liam and snarled furiously, wrinkling up its muzzle and baring its front teeth.

“If it takes another step I’m going to shoot,” Liam said.

“Try a warning shot,” said Becky, “maybe it will scare them off.”

The wolf took another step towards Liam and he fired into the ground a foot in front of it, throwing up a big spout of dirt and stones.

Unnervingly, none of the wolves so much as flinched. Instead, the lead wolf stepped forward again and let loose an ear-splitting howl. For a moment the creature just stood there, baring its teeth. Then it seemed to waver like a reflection in a puddle and when it solidified again it was twice as big—a good five feet high at the shoulder—and, Liam thought, considerably more than twice as nasty. It growled ominously, the sound as deep and hair-raising as the lions Liam had heard in the Central Park Zoo.

“Hold this a minute,” Liam said, handing his Colt to Becky.

Then, with the same impossible-to-follow whirling move she had seen on the sidewalk in Five Points, Liam swept the katana out of its scabbard and flashed it through the giant wolf’s middle, so that the two halves of the huge animal simply fell to either side with a thud, gushing blood onto the fresh snow.

For a moment, the tableau froze in place. Then, all the wolves started howling at once until the heaped mess of blood and guts started to stir as if something were trying to emerge from it, slowly drawing together again into a vaguely wolf-like shape until finally the creature stood before them again, its eyes glowing and its tongue lolling hungrily.

“Aw, hell!” Liam muttered, “How are we supposed to kill one of those werewolf things?””

He was interrupted by a loud and insistent yip-yip-yip! from behind them, the sounds wolflike but with a commanding human overtone, and no sooner did they hear it than the wolves melted back into the forest, leaving the snow behind them as smooth and unmarked as if they’d never been there.

“What on earth did we just …?” Becky began, but before she could finish she was interrupted by the sound of sleigh bells and shouts:

“Miss Fox! Mr. McCool!”

As they turned to look they saw a troika—a sleigh drawn by three horses—whizzing towards them through the snow. There were two men in it wearing shubk i, heavy, hide-outside, wool-inside sheepskin coats, and tall, black sheepskin hats called shapki, and as the sleigh slid to a halt next to Becky and Liam, the men leapt out and advanced with their hands outstretched in a mixture of greeting and apology.

“How you can forgive for being such late?” said the sleigh’s driver, a stocky man with a deeply tanned complexion, broad cheekbones and an aquiline nose. “And this when you go to such many trouble for us?”

Liam listened with fascination to the man’s Russian accent, as heavy as any he’d heard back in Five Points, but overlaid with London vowels and a bizarre, French-sounding “r” borrowed from some British teacher who had tried to conquer the Russian burr.

“Chief Crazy Horse?” he asked.

“Vash pokornyi slugá, sir,” the stocky man said, grasping the hand proffered by Liam and shaking it warmly. “Serving you humbly and also you, Miss Fox, be welcome in ancestor land of Dakota Sioux. As Russian invader calls,” he added with an ironic smile, “outer skirt of New Petersburg.”

Becky smiled radiantly and took Crazy Horse’s hand. “I’m delighted to meet you at last,” she said, “as well as your friend Mr….”

She turned an inquiring eye towards the other occupant of the sleigh, a tall, slender, blue-eyed man with a very prominent nose and a slightly receding chin. He gave Becky a gallant bow and swept off the sheepskin shapka to reveal a dense mass of curly blonde hair:

“Laughing Wolf, Miss, very much at your service and praying that you will forgive us for your … ah, rude reception by my namesakes. At least I was able to scold them and send them away before they got rambunctious, though I doubt they would have done more than make a nuisance of themselves.”

“I will happily forgive you both, your lateness and your—ah—pets,” Becky said, “if you will be so kind as to explain the wolves and their curious metamorphoses, uh … General. Ah …”

The blonde-haired man replaced his shapka and grinned at Becky: “Yes, Miss Fox, you have caught me out. In a previous life I was George Armstrong Custer of the U.S. Army, now proudly Laughing Wolf of the Oglala Lakota Sioux and …”

“… to me blood brother and comrade,” said Crazy Horse. “But please, we are explaining that and all other back in Petersburg, where is also the hot drinks and food.”

“S glubochaishim udovol’stviem,” concurred Liam with a big grin, then, catching himself and turning to Becky: “Ah, that’s to say …”

“Yes, Mr. McCool,” she said with mild irony, “I know it means ‘with the greatest pleasure,’ I do believe you’re inclined to underestimate me!”

And with that she led the way to the sleigh, followed closely by Crazy Horse, Custer, and a much chagrined Liam McCool.