His forward and aft observers had been violently sick through most of the night flight as they bobbed up and down in the warm thermals, and it was hard to keep them at their tasks. Both of the men kept groaning, their agony echoing through the speaking tubes.
Richard tried to block out the sounds. He was just as susceptible as they were and had leaned out the port side window more than once.
His copilot and navigator, a hearty Rus flight sergeant, had taken the entire ride as an immense joke, laughing at the agony of his three companions. Propped above and behind Richard in the top gunner position, he kept shouting ribald songs to the wind…and then fell silent.
“Cromwell, off to starboard!”
Richard looked to the right, but saw nothing.
“Igor, what the hell is it? You are supposed to tell me what you see,” he cried, turning to look up past the feet of the man behind him.
“Smoke. I see smoke.”
Richard called to his forward observer, who came back with a negative. Banking the huge aerosteamer slightly to port so that the windscreen to his right rose, he tried to see what Igor was shouting about, but saw nothing.
“Igor, get down here, damn it!”
Igor slipped back down into the cabin and sat in the chair beside Richard. He could see that Igor’s face was beet red from the wind as he pulled up his goggles and grinned.
“I saw it. Smoke, lots of smoke.” As Igor spoke, he pointed off to starboard, roughly twenty degrees from their heading. Igor then reached around behind the seat and pulled out the plot board, their map tacked to it. Igor’s estimates of their speed and heading had been checked off every fifteen minutes. According to the chart, they were fifty miles northwest of the previous day’s sighting of smoke.
Richard knew it was all guess work. Without the sun it was impossible to shoot a sighting, and even when it was out, most of the time the navigator would calculate that they were two hundred miles north of Suzdal and in the Great Northern Forest. Shooting an angle might work on a boat, but in a plane, surging and falling with the wind, it was a waste of time.
So everything had to be based on airspeed, and estimated winds, and in ten hours they could be a hundred, even two hundred miles off from where they were supposed to be this morning. For that matter, the pilot of this aircraft from the previous day could be two hundred miles off from where he claimed he was.
They had not sighted any known landmark so far, not the Tortuga Shoals, the Caldonian Isles, or the Archipelago of the Malacca Pirates. Their only fix had been on the Mi-noan Shoals, ninety miles due south of Constantine, and that had been less than two hours into their flight. It was all guesswork, and he wondered if Igor, given his reputation on land, had been secretly sipping vodka during the night.
“You take the controls, Igor, and aim us toward where you think you’re seeing things. I’m going topside for a better look.”
“You’ll see, Commander,” Igor said with a grin, “and we’ll get the credit.”
“Great, just what I wanted,” he replied glumly. Unbuckling from his seat, he scrambled up through the circular opening just aft of the pilot’s seat and popped out, bracing himself against the breech of the topside gatling. He remembered to clip the harness around his waist to the safety ring and then stood up into the wind, pulling down his goggles, then clipped on the speaking tube and earplugs.
Bracing his hands on the top wings, he felt a momentary thrill. The great wings of the Ilya Murometz, more than a hundred feet across, spread out to either side. Clouds whisked by overhead, stretching to the hazy glow of the all-encompassing horizon. The plane banked, Igor, demonstrating a good touch on the controls, gently bringing them around and then leveling out.
“I think I’m flying straight toward it!” Igor shouted, and Richard winced. In the earplugs the man’s voice was far too loud.
Leaning against the wind, Richard looked straight ahead, but saw absolutely nothing but the milky haze of the horizon. “I don’t see a damn thing.”
“Look careful. It’s coal smoke. Darker. I know, I’ve seen it from our ships many times.”
Richard squinted, tried to use his field glasses, and gave up after a few seconds. The plane was bouncing too much.
He squatted back down a bit and leaned forward, as if the extra few inches might somehow clear the view. He carefully scanned ahead, not even quite sure where the horizon ended and the ocean began…and then he saw it, a dark smudge.
It gave him a chill, and he had a sudden flash of memory, of the indistinct smudge on the horizon at sunset the night the Gettysburg went to her doom. It was a barely distinguishable difference in light, a darker shadow against a light gray sky and sea.
“About five degrees to port!” Richard shouted. “Ask Xing up forward if he sees it yet.”
The plane slipped ever so slightly, then leveled out again.
“Xing is blind,” Igor cried, “he sees nothing. You see it, though.”
He still wasn’t sure. Had he thought he’d seen something simply because he was looking so hard for it? But then it reappeared, a dark greasy smudge.
“Yes! Hold us steady on this bearing. You’re almost straight on it.”
Igor laughed.
Long minutes passed, and gradually the darkness began to spread out.
“I can see it from in here,” Igor announced. “That Xing is blind. Throw him off now. It will lighten the load so we get home.”
Richard said nothing, trying again with the field glasses, momentarily catching it, then losing it as the plane surged yet again.
Finally he saw something more, a dark spot, looking like the blade of a knife turned almost edgewise, two small dark pins rising from it. The pagodas of a battleship?
“Give us a little more speed, Igor.”
“Cromwell, our fuel. A little reserve would be comforting.”
“Just edge us up another five knots. We’ve got plenty.”
“Not if we have to start running.”
“Just do it.”
He heard the slight change in tone of the engines.
He extended one hand, holding his fingers open before his face at arm’s length. The smoke extended far beyond either side of his fingertips. If they’re still twenty, thirty miles off, it was definitely not one ship. That much smoke had to be dozens of ships.
“A little lower, we’re brushing into the cloud base.”
The nose of the aerosteamer dropped slightly, and he could feel airspeed picking up. After several hundred feet they leveled out again, where the air was slightly clearer.
He saw not one ship, but dozens of ships. In the van was definitely one of the battleships that he had seen in the harbor, the distinctive twin pagodas almost lined up on each other. Forward, surrounding the huge vessel, were half a dozen smaller ships, tiny slivers of darkness against the gray sea. Plumes of smoke trailed out behind them, drifting into a cloud astern, obscuring what he was convinced were more ships yet farther back.
“Got it!” Richard cried, and finally he heard Xing up forward shouting as well.
The moment of exuberance gave way to a knot in his gut, a strange mixed emotion that was part that they’d made a sighting, but with it a realization that the nightmare was indeed true.
Now what?
He was tempted to order them to turn around and get the hell out of there. The Kazan had some catapult-launched scout planes and a small ship for carrying additional planes and launching them. If they catch us and we don’t get back, the fleet will never know. They were nearly six hundred miles out, two days sailing, more likely three. Go back now and we can get a better read as they come closer in.