Airship Hunters Read online

  AIRSHIP HUNTERS

  JIM BEARD & DUANE SPURLOCK

  Meteor House

  Contents

  Orchestrations

  Broken

  The Mists of Morning

  Grace for the Dead

  Above It All

  Maps and Plans

  The Last Hunt

  The Debriefing

  About the Authors

  Meteor House Titles

  AIRSHIP HUNTERS

  by Jim Beard & Duane Spurlock

  Copyright © 2015 by Jim Beard and Duane Spurlock. All rights reserved.

  Cover art and frontispiece copyright © 2015 by M. S. Corley. All rights reserved.

  This ebook edition of Airship Hunters is published by Meteor House.

  Visit our website at www.meteorhousepress.com.

  v. 1

  Meteor House • 2015

  Dedicated to The Little Woman, the enticing Mystery

  I hope never to completely solve. —Jim Beard

  With love to my sons, who—since the bedtimes I read

  Treasure Island and Kidnapped—have a great enjoyment for mystery and adventure. —Duane Spurlock

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Meteor House and the authors would like to thank the following readers who preordered this limited edition novel and helped it take flight:

  Stephanie Wagner, Anthony R. Cardno, Art Sippo, Michael R. Brown, Josh Reynolds, Steven Smith, Georgina Eloise Spiteri, Madeleine Lucy Spiteri, Claire Spiteri, Shawn Vogt, Paul Niedernhofer, Thomas Potter, Anthony Kapolka, Scott Gibson, Katherine Stites, Derek Cockerham, Elizabeth Cseri, Laurie Wolberton, Katherine Shaw, David Rains, Chuck Welch, Kim & Scott Turk, Max Mathis, Mark Martinez, Theodore Gregory, Ralph Grasso, Lucas Garrett, Robert Deis, Cathy Keibler, Alexander Grant, Mike Hunter, Scott Selle, Terry Krieger, Eric Timm, Blue Derkin, J. Scott Radel, Bertha Hunt, Bill Kirschbaum, Logan County Public Library, Dan Silvers, Ben Schellhase, Elizabeth Silvers, Ronald Weston, Russell Wright, Charles Millhouse, Larry “Chile Pepper” Brown, John Del Col, Julie Moore, Lige B. Rushing III, Lisa Eckert, Patricia Wildman, James Caliban, M.D., John Bruening, Mike Chomko, Herbert Jacobi, PulpFest, Don Youel, Edward Stuart, Lynn Carter, Raymond Navor, Kathleen Honigford, Aries Ropp, Joanie Asendorf, Donna Legree Rohlff, Jennifer Collins, Rick Lai, Harold Pickard, Enrico Barisione, Terry Chio, Steven Hager, Ken Kessler, Rodney Rhodus, the JoeErin Mathias Family, Trent Spurlock, Elie Harriet, Martha Spurlock, Robert Craig, and Ralph Carlson.

  Additionally, Jim Beard would like to thank Duane Spurlock, who believed in him and the concept and helped flesh it out into something far beyond its humble initial thoughts. Duane Spurlock would like to thank Jim Beard, for trusting in him enough to share the world of the Aero-Marshals. Together they would both like to thank M. S. Corley for his wonderful skills in translating their prose descriptions into a delightful cover illustration, and the entire Meteor House crew: Christopher Paul Carey, Michael Croteau, Win Scott Eckert, Keith Howell, Ray Riethmeier, and Paul Spiteri, who made everything better.

  ORCHESTRATIONS

  Jim Beard

  June 1897

  Airships, sir?”

  Major Wellington gave the officer who sat in front of his desk a pointed look, one that spoke of some slight annoyance at the question.

  “Yes. Coined by a newspaper writer. Seems to have stuck.”

  Lieutenant Michael Valiantine looked down at the dress hat he held in his hands and back up at the major. He said nothing, unsure of what he could say about it all.

  “This,” Wellington said, tapping a file that lay on his desk, “says you’ve been prone to speak your mind at times. Well, speak it, man.”

  Valiantine had been away from the service almost a full year and everything around him seemed odd. Nothing looked familiar, though he couldn’t see how that much could have changed in a relatively short span of time to afford him such disquiet. The major in particular came off as a different sort of man, though he hadn’t been Valiantine’s direct superior before the lieutenant had been wounded and ordered to convalesce for an “indeterminate period” after his release from the Army hospital. Wellington’s office looked rearranged, a status that nudged the lieutenant into the uncomfortable position of desiring nothing more than to march around and set it back to right.

  Instead, Valiantine reached up and opened another file the major had set at the edge of his desk for him to peruse. Inside it lay several sheets of paper, all of them choked with reports of “airships.”

  “I’ll go over it again, Valiantine. They tell me you’re fit for duty, so I expect you to listen and get a firm handle on the situation.”

  Wellington leaned forward in his chair, took a cheroot from a wooden box, and lit it from an ornate lighter he was using as a paperweight. Valiantine hadn’t known the man to smoke before.

  “First sighted in California last year,” the major said around puffs on the stick. “Several reports in the local papers. Big things, some of them moving at a rapid pace, others just floating there, in mid-air.”

  The man paused. Valiantine wondered if his own reactions were being gauged by Wellington. He felt suddenly very self-conscious of his new moustache and his over regulation-length hair, both grown during his off-time.

  “Unlike anything anybody’d ever seen before,” the major continued. “And able to move at a speed that staggered the imagination. And no two of these things described alike in their physical make-up.

  “Then, they started moving eastward.”

  Valiantine turned one report over to glance at the next. He spied the word “Nebraska” there.

  “Seem to be following rail lines,” the major said, puffing away. “Or at least that’s what some genius somewhere deduced. Can’t nod to the validity of that. Anyway, these airships started appearing over Wyoming, Nebraska... Illinois. Latest reports were only just last month, right up to the Illinois-Indiana line. Then, nothing.”

  The lieutenant looked up at Wellington. “Flocks of birds? Eagles?”

  “No, absolutely not.”

  “Cloud formations?”

  “At night? Look at the damn reports, Valiantine.”

  “Then, if there’s anything to this, someone’s made some advances, certainly.”

  The major appraised him with half-open eyes. “Yes. But who? And how?”

  Valiantine’s head swam. He hadn’t expected to return to anything like this. In the service since he was eighteen, he’d been on “detached special duty” for almost ten years, operating out of the War Department building in Washington, D.C. and going where he was needed, doing what he was ordered to do. During his convalescence at Virginia Beach, on the ocean, something substantial had occurred. He’d met a woman and began to question thoughts of returning to active duty.

  The woman. No, that was unfair. She was Eileen, but Valiantine had joked with her that no name could ever do her pretty features justice. She in turn quoted Shakespeare, telling him there was “no thought of pleasing him when she was christened.” From that moment on he was decidedly smitten with the woman, yet their flirtation did not exactly extend to love though, and thoughts of his career began to weigh heavily upon him. Finally, he had made his decision.

  Eileen had failed to comprehend his instinctual desire to return to the service; truth be told, he didn’t fully understand it himself. Despite the rare happiness he’d experienced with her, something pulled him back, an intangible compulsion that ultimately drove a wedge between him and a woman with whom he thought he might be able to spend the rest of his life. Instead, he returned, unsure of what exactly he thought he was doing and why.

  Valiantine had been wounded when a cannon had exploded near him on a test range in New York, pitting one whole side
of him with shrapnel. The doctors said he’d been lucky not to have taken any to the head, but deep inside he felt as if he had. His once-clear thoughts were no longer as sharp as before his accident; though his body had healed, the lieutenant doubted he was entirely rested. He often awoke to the sound of the exploding cannon ringing in his brain.

  On his first day back on duty, he was called in to Major Wellington’s office, a man he never much liked, and told what on the surface seemed to be a fairy story.

  “Lilenthal made a glider six years ago,” the major grumbled. “Maxim got close a few years later, and then that disaster in Massachusetts last year. But the latest leap was a ‘bi-plane’ experiment in Indiana, also just last year. Went south, as was expected.”

  “Indiana? And you say these airships were last seen approaching Indiana? Could there be something to that?”

  Wellington speared the lieutenant with a look. “That’s what we want you to find out.”

  “Sir,” Valiantine replied, “why not just send a few troops in to check things over?”

  “Done that,” the major said, stabbing out his barely smoked cigar in a glass ashtray with a spark of annoyance. It was all the lieutenant could do not to wipe away some of the ash that had fallen outside the dish. Valiantine wanted to bite his own hand to still it from reaching out.

  “Caused too much of a stir,” Wellington continued, “and so we realized we couldn’t operate out in the open and hope to learn anything useful. That’s where you come in, Valiantine. You’re going in, but in mufti.”

  It was almost as if a series of steel gratings had popped up around the lieutenant, feeling trapped as he did just then. It made his insides squirm.

  “With all due respect, sir, I don’t feel I’m the right man for this.”

  “And yet,” Wellington said with clear annoyance, stabbing one finger down upon the officer’s file again, “this says your experience with covert work is rather extensive. Ireland in ’86, Samoa in ’88, South Dakota in ’90, Wyoming in ’92, and then of course, Nicaragua last year, before you were wounded. Should I go on, Lieutenant?”

  Valiantine said nothing. The backward feeling of the office and of the man in front of him grew so strong as to cause him physical pain in his temples. This had often been the case when he’d been confronted with discordant stimuli, and the odd mix of the familiar and unfamiliar of the major and his office certainly qualified as that.

  “No, I don’t need to go on because you are the man for the job. And this is a direct order.”

  The lieutenant gazed out the window, at the executive mansion beyond and the trees blossoming around it. He sighed, yet very quietly.

  “Sir, is the... supposition that this is the work of a foreign power, or that it is domestic?” he inquired, facing the major once more.

  Wellington nodded, seemingly pleased. “Good. Good. You’re thinking again. Both of those are somewhat frightening questions, eh? Some other country flying things above our heads without our knowledge or say-so... or our own citizens doing the same?

  “That’s for you to uncover, Lieutenant. And this goes all the way to the top office, by the way. The President’s looked at that file, read it, so there’s some weight being placed upon it.”

  “Where should I begin?”

  “Indiana. We don’t care where. Your choice.”

  “And what should I do there?”

  “Look into it, Valiantine. Keep watch. And report back. Dismissed.”

  As Valiantine rode the chugging Chesapeake & Ohio into Indiana, clouds outside the window turned to great sailing vessels in the sky.

  The train ride had afforded him some peace of mind, and he found his thoughts clearing to line up and be assessed. He felt it was now possible he might regain something of his old self and carry out his orders, no matter how vague or fanciful they might seem to him.

  In planning his attack on the problem of where to begin his “watch,” Valiantine turned to a map of the state of Indiana and narrowed his focus. He immediately dismissed Chanute and Paul’s Dune Park flight experiment the previous year in Indiana as too incongruous with the known airship sightings and swung his attention to what he imagined as a kind of trajectory of the impossible vehicles—if even vehicles they were.

  Ultimately, the rail line he rode would end in Chicago, but he’d no intention of riding it to that conclusion. If his research held any weight at all, the latest glimpse of a supposed airship occurred miles to the south of the big city, somewhere below Gary, Indiana. Valiantine intended to disembark in either Peru or potentially the next stop and then make his way northwest, watching and observing all the way.

  As a plan went, it lacked clearly defined parameters. This niggled away at the lieutenant’s usually well-ordered approach to a mission, but he had far less to go on than possibly ever before in his career.

  In short, he would be not much more precise than a blind man stumbling around in the dark.

  In a way, he understood and somewhat sympathized with his superiors at the War Department and their concerns. A bloody conflict with Spain loomed on the horizon, a foregone conclusion to a bout of saber-rattling and bellyaching the likes of which had not been seen for many years in the halls of government. But, that said, the thought that the Spaniards had somehow crafted and launched a fleet of flying machines over America came across as overly ludicrous. War would most certainly come, and soon, but the lieutenant felt secure in his opinion it would not be waged in the skies above them.

  He waved down a boy on the platform at Marion from his window and bought a newspaper. Flipping through it, Valiantine hoped to gain a sense of Indiana’s cultural mindset. Within its pages he found reports of farming and mining, political squabbles, and the like. The most interesting bit of news sprung from an article detailing a series of robberies throughout the central portion of the state, the latest one in a bank in Lafayette.

  The swaying of the train and the progression of type across the page lulled the lieutenant into dozing in his seat. The flat countryside moved past him out the window, the sailing vessels of the clouds forgotten as he nodded off into a light sleep.

  The sharp, shattering blast of a whistle brought him back to consciousness with a start and he realized with cold dread that he’d missed his stop in Peru. Valiantine gazed out of his window and tried to make out the station’s sign through the thick smoke that choked the platform.

  Finally, he made it out: Manitou.

  The name was unfamiliar to him; he didn’t remember it from his perusal of his maps. The whistle blew again, signaling the train’s imminent departure and, in a burst of reckless adrenalin, Valiantine leapt from his seat, snatched his bag from the upper rack, and swung out the door and onto the platform.

  A split second later, the train lurched and pulled away from the platform. A uniformed railwayman stood with hands on hips nearby, glaring at the lieutenant and shaking his head from side to side in disbelief. Valiantine tipped his hat to the man and made his way into the station, pulling his watch from his vest as he entered.

  Stepping up to a large map that hung on the station’s wall, he studied it in hopes of pinpointing his location. He found himself landed almost fifteen miles outside of Peru, and a small trek south of a lake also named Manitou.

  The lieutenant grinned a bit at his impulsive behavior, picked up his bag and went in search of a hotel.

  Manitou, Indiana would have to do for a start, he reasoned.

  A few hours later, after checking into the small town’s single hotel, he found himself, of all things, attending a town meeting.

  Valiantine looked down at his civilian attire and fussed with it a bit, wondering for the hundredth time since he left his room over the extent of his ability to blend in with the locals. He’d chosen a plain brown suit with no ornamentation save for a straw hat and his watch and chain. He’d even eschewed spats for a solid pair of commonplace boots.

  As entertainment went, a town meeting wasn’t exactly high on the bill for
a pleasurable experience, but Valiantine knew that immersing himself in the heart of a populace, in a venue designed to air thoughts and debate, would potentially reward him far more than a saloon would.

  At first glance, Manitou appeared to be a typical small town in the heartland of the country. Valiantine hadn’t yet gotten a lock on the industry that fed the town, but, he told himself, he was more concerned with what hung above it than what transpired at ground level. And if the first several minutes of the meeting were any indication, Manitou, with its population of slightly more than a thousand citizens, had a monopoly on mundanity.

  There came a loud noise from off to one side of the meeting hall. Forty sets of eyes narrowed and focused on the disturbance. Valiantine rose a bit from his seat in the back of the room to glimpse the source of the commotion.

  A man at a side door jostled another man, clearly trying to block him from entering. The second man had become quite vocal and was yelling his protestation over his treatment by the first man.

  “Can’ keep me out, you corn-fed idiot! I got rights, too! I went t’school here! I got papers! Papers!”

  Valiantine saw that people around him were beginning to wag their heads and even snicker at the man’s antics. Low whispering spread throughout the small crowd.

  The man was dressed in what could charitably be called a haphazard fashion. He wore a pair of pants perhaps one size too big for him, with only suspenders holding them on to his lanky frame. He wore no socks, only a pair of worn shoes, and no vest underneath his well-patched topcoat. A small, dusty bowler sat perched on the man’s head, barely containing a wild mop of salt-and-pepper hair.

  “Take him out, take him out,” said the man at the front of the room who led the meeting. “We’ve no time for such foolishness.”