35

Night into Day

Forteresse des Nyajs

Montay San, Northern Haiti

Wednesday, 5 September 1888

10:19 p.m.

From the western side of the compound I heard strange shouts, punctuated by shots.

“Pyos!” . . . bang . . . “Pyos!” . . . bang . . . “Tyoya mat!” . . . bang.

Corny heard it too. “Russian cursing. Well I’ll be damned.” He raised a finger toward the barn and shook his head. “Look at that!”

It was Roche. He was coming from a wagon at the northwest corner of the airship barn. Quickly back stepping at an even pace, a valise slung over his left shoulder and rifle butted into his right, he methodically swiveled and fired at Bizango targets while making his way in our direction. He’d hit Sokolov’s men from their western flank unexpectedly, forcing them back away from the airship hull. A temporary respite.

Suddenly I felt arms beneath my shoulders, then saw a right hand reach around my chest and grab a spiked appendage coming from the left side. Rork lifted me up, grunting with the effort. “Get in the bloody friggin’ boat, ya daft sonovabitch! Now’s no time to be standin’ about.”

My feet dangled in air for an instant, then I was bodily slammed down in the bilge of the airship’s hull. “Damnation, laddie, yer gettin’ heavier by the day!”

Cynda was in the bilge too, and reached for me, her face contorted in anguish, but I had no time to console her, for all hell was breaking loose. Dull knocks rattled on the hull and holes appeared everywhere. One round missed Cynda’s face by inches. Forward of me, Dan was pulling and pushing some levers and Rork was swearing in Gaelic as he cast off the hawser. The ship at once lost height and bounced roughly along the ground, going astern until Dan moved the throttle forward and the propeller’s thrust stopped our sternway.

The ship gathered steerageway forward and we crossed the open yard again until the forward hull—only a few feet aft of the crucial propeller—smacked into the northeast corner of the inner wall, knocking everyone inside off their feet. Dan, swearing a blue streak, leaped up and slacked off on the throttle. The bow fell off from the wind, the aerial ship drifting west once more across the rail tracks.

While this was going on, Roche was trying to stay immediately below us. He was still firing to the south, where the enemy had now taken cover. Corny and Absalom yelled at him to get aboard. Leaning their bodies halfway over the gunwale they clasped his hands at the last minute, straining to hold him as Dan got us higher.

The Bizangos took advantage of our lack of return fire and made a final rush, a dozen of them running across the intervening fifty feet, obviously hoping to bayonet Roche as he struggled aboard with a gasp of pain. I remembered the six rounds in my pistol and shot them into the crowd, but they kept coming as our leeway drifted us across the northwest inner wall.

I could see that our stern was going to crash into the fort’s large cistern tower, located between the northwest inner and outer walls. Rork saw it too and dumped bags of ballast sand overboard. Dan frantically opened the throttle again and tried to correct the course. We slowly lifted up, but it was too late and our stern hit at the battery mount, swinging the bow around to the northwest.

A throaty cheer went up from the Bizangos, still led by the last horned bourreau, as they jumped over the inner wall—they wanted blood and were about to get it. It was then that the northwest Hotchkiss opened fire from its guard platform, sweeping the ground just below us, missing the bottom of the ship by just a few feet, and cutting into the last of the mob.

Woodgerd. In the pandemonium, I’d forgotten him. He’d stayed on the ground to fight a rear guard so we could escape.

The hull’s cockpit was directly over him now—not more than ten feet above—and I watched as he systematically fired four or five round bursts, reloaded, and fired again, hunched over the barrel’s gunsights, grimly traversing back and forth. The gun was so loud he couldn’t hear our cries to him.

“Rork, lower that line to him!” I pointed to a line by his foot. He coiled it and slung it down to Woodgerd. The ship was past the platform now and the line was running alongside him, about to run out, but he still didn’t notice. My shoe snagged on a wrench in the bilge. I picked it up and threw it at Woodgerd, striking him on the shoulder. He looked up, furious, then saw everyone pointing at the last few feet of line near him and nodded. Knocking the Hotchkiss over the side of the tower, he wrapped the line around his fists and held them up in the air.

The next moment, rifle slung on his shoulder, Woodgerd stepped off the guard tower. I heard him groaning as we hauled him up and over the gunwale. As Woodgerd collapsed, blood gushing from his slashed arm, Roche took the rifle.

In agony himself from those ribs, he laid the rifle on the wicker gunwale, sighting along it toward a large wagon by the corner of the barn. It was the one he’d come to the airship from. The wagon had a machine on the cargo bed and a pile of shiny metal tanks stacked next to it.

Roche laughed quietly, “How very careless of the brilliant Professor Sergei Alexandrovich Sokolov. Everyone knows you never put hydrogen near a flame. Ah, well, now he’ll get his wish to be a martyr to the people’s will.”

It was then that I saw what had become of Sokolov. I’d assumed Roche had killed him outright during the chaos, but he hadn’t. The scientist was lashed hand and foot to the rear wheel of the wagon. Even at our quickly increasing distance, I could tell he was yelling something at us. Or maybe at the black men now surrounding him. The Bizangos weren’t untying their boss. They appeared to be taunting him.

Roche swung the rifle slightly to the right and fired. A lantern on the ground twenty feet from the wagon exploded into pieces, the burning wick igniting the fuel. Flame raced along a trail of oil until it reached the hydrogen generator on the wagon.

A fiery cloud erupted, blossoming out in all directions, covering the building and rail yard in a yellowish-white glare, rising into a luminescent mushroom-shaped form that roiled up into the sky.

Incendiary bombs lying nearby on the ground provided the secondary flash, flaring even bigger than the first and engulfing everything near them that was flammable, including the corner of the airship barn. Solid flames rose hundreds of feet into the air, a giant torch turning night into day, with every aspect of Forteresse des Nyajs in stark detail as the fire cloud lit up the mountain.

We were now well over a quarter-mile away, sailing downwind, but the heat wave reached out to us. For several seconds everyone held their breath and prayed, watching the bag of hydrogen above us, expecting to join the incineration on the ground behind us.

Our prayers were answered. We didn’t ignite. Exhausted, stunned, we continued our course northward toward the coast, the thumping of the propeller making the only sound.

In the lone dim light of the binnacle, I surveyed the ship we’d commandeered. The crew compartment of the hull was indeed a wicker, tightly woven from native vines. The open section of the hull was framed in a very light-colored wood.

The rigging that held us below the massive gas bags above was also composed of vines, far thicker than the wicker. From my vantage point below, I could see what was not apparent from the observation point on the mountain—the cigar form of the airship was an outer envelope covering three elongated bags, or balloons, I suppose, inside. The outer envelope was a sheath, as it were, open along the bottom. The hull we were within was suspended by the vines twelve or so feet below the balloons and swung like a pendulum as we pitched and rolled our way through the air.

The barometer on the forward bulkhead should indicate our approximate altitude, Dan announced. But, he added, he wasn’t sure of the relative measurement conversion of pressure into elevation, so he periodically looked overboard to try to find the forest tops below. He said he was attempting to stay a couple of hundred feet aloft so he’d have time to maneuver if something went wrong.

The helm was a common ship’s wheel, attached in normal fashion by lines and blocks to the rudder aft. Dan also dealt with four levers, one of which I could tell controlled the motor’s throttle. Another engaged the shaft clutch. The third operated the short wing structures protruding out on either side, just aft of the bow. They tilted up or down, much like the diving planes on the Peruvian submarine I once had the misfortune to be aboard. I couldn’t deduce what the other lever controlled, as it was seldom used.

Behind Dan stood Corny, who was in charge of ballast and several lines that ran up to the balloon. He explained that Dan told him the lines controlled escape flaps to let the gas out of the bags in an emergency. I wondered what that did exactly, but Corny did not look confident—well, none of us did—so I didn’t press him on the issue. Absalom stood beside him, gazing ahead to the north, where his islands waited over the black horizon.

Rork and Cynda were aft of me, tending to Woodgerd’s wounded arm, a nasty gash that showed raw meat. They were wrapping a ripped section of her petticoat around it to staunch the bleeding, as Woodgerd growled curse words in the various languages he knew. The enigmatic Roche sat at the back of the compartment, staring aft at the receding fire on the side of Montay San.

In a tired sigh, Dan called our attention to a ragged line of white far below us—a line of surf breaking on reefs. I checked my pocket watch. It was four minutes until midnight. By my dead reckoning, beneath us were the reefs off Baie de Caracol. The aerial warship was supposed to meet the stolen cable steamer somewhere in the area. I looked, but could not see the ship below us. Did Kingston and his gang manage to steal her? Were they waiting for Sokolov’s war machine on this coast? Could they see us in the night sky?

We’d made just over twenty-five miles in an hour and a half, admittedly assisted by the following wind, but much better than the French had in their aerial warship. I estimated we had another hundred miles until we reached Great Inagua Island. Four hours, maybe five, in the dark.

“Dan, please steer northwest from this point and reduce the throttle a bit so we slow down. I want to arrive at Great Inagua at first light, which should be in six hours. And I think it’s time to start a watch system, gentlemen.”

Everyone nodded wearily. I again called to Dan, who was bent over, watching the compass swing in the binnacle. “You need a break, so teach Rork how to operate this thing. He’ll take first watch and relieve you at the helm.”

Dan didn’t reply right away. Instead, he gradually straightened up and turned to face me, one hand still on the wheel. His face showed a sickly grin in the faint light. Slowly, his mouth opened and he looked right at me.

“Too late, Peter. I’m so sorry . . .”

I waited for him to finish his thought, but he didn’t. Five seconds later, Dan Horloft fell down dead.