He got back on the walkie-talkie. “How much room do you have in that thing? Can you carry another man, with-”
He looked at Corporal Baier, quickly gauging the weight of the radioman himself as well as that of the equipment he carried.
“Say, two hundred and twenty-five pounds, all told. Over.”
Rita’s answer came immediately. “You’re not talking about yourself, obviously. Yeah, I’m pretty sure, especially because we can subtract my weight from the equation. Your guy gets on, I get off. That brings it down to a net gain of less than a hundred pounds. Hold on, I’ll check with Stefano.”
Tom winced. He’d been afraid she’d come up with that alternative. With thousands of Bavarians running wild, he wanted his wife to stay right where she was-way, way, way too high for the bastards to get to her.
Rita came back on the air. “ No problem, as long as we make the switch. Stefano says the Pelican could handle at least two more people-if we weren’t low on fuel. But he says we’ve got enough to land and take off with an additional hundred pounds or so. Where do you want us to set down? Over. No, wait-don’t tell me, tell Dina. She’s the copilot and she’ll double as the navigator. I’ll put her on.” A couple a seconds later: “Oops. Forgot. Over.”
Tom would have handed his walkie-talkie to von Eichelberg, since he was the one who’d actually be providing the directions. But he didn’t think the Brunswick captain was familiar with the device. He’d show him how to use it after they were done here, but for now he’d keep serving as the intermediary.
While he waited for Dina Merrifield to come on the air, he contemplated some of his wife’s personal characteristics. There’d been a good reason he’d thought she could bully Hank Siers within five minutes.
He foresaw some difficult times ahead. In about…two hours.
Chapter 9
By the time the rendezvous was made, Tom had figured out what to do. He and Rita-and von Eichelberg, whenever further directions were needed-had stayed in regular contact throughout those two hours. Once she told him about Hank Siers’ condition, the solution to his problem was obvious.
The key was getting enough weight removed from the Pelican to be able to add Corporal Baier and his radio to the gondola without endangering the airship because of its fuel shortage.
And… voila! The surveyor weighed almost twice as much as his wife did. And was useless aboard the Pelican because he was still unconscious. And-could it get any better? — badly needed medical attention, which Tom could provide since they’d brought the regiment’s ambulance along with its doctor.
True, the doctor wasn’t exactly a medical titan. Dr. James Nichols, he was not. In fact, the soldiers usually referred to him as “the surgeon”-which was not a prestigious title in the here and now-because what he mostly did was amputate limbs and extract teeth. He also served as the regiment’s dentist, a trade whose principal tool in the here and now was a pair of pliers.
But he knew and followed the principles of sanitation and sterilization, and however meager his skills they were better than anything they had aboard the Pelican.
Well… That was pushing it, so he’d better leave that argument aside. Rita was a very good practical nurse in her own right, and had quite a bit of experience at it. During their long captivity in the Tower of London, she’d wound up being the prison’s de facto medical expert. The Yeoman Warders had credited her with keeping several of their children alive when disease struck, and they were probably right.
Still, she didn’t need to deal with Siers. There wasn’t much anyone could do for him now.
“You want to put Hank in a wagon?”
“Hey, hon, it’s an ambulance,” Tom protested.
“It’s a fucking wagon with a red cross painted on it-except you never even got around to painting on the cross. Don’t bullshit me, Tom. This is just a scheme to keep me on the Pelican. ” Rita turned and pointed at the airship, which was tethered to a tree not far away in the clearing. A number of soldiers were helping to keep it down and steady with ropes.
“You see that?” she demanded. “It’s not a wagon.” Her hand made a gliding motion. “Flies right through the air, as gentle as you please. And you want to take a man with a bad concussion-maybe worse! — off that best-ride-you-could-ask-for and put him in a fucking wagon? On seventeenth-century roads? Are you fucking nuts?”
When his wife got agitated, she tended to lapse into the Appalachian patois of her not-so-far-back youth. This ran heavily toward short Anglo-Saxon terms, which perhaps lent support to the theory that Appalachian speech was closer to Elizabethan English than any other dialect had been in the twentieth century.
Or maybe hillbillies just liked to cuss a lot. The habit had been a source of trouble when Rita first met Tom’s very blueblood parents.
Rita crossed her arms. Tom was familiar with that gesture. Alas.
“No,” she said. “N. O. Absolutely not. Siers stays on the Pelican.”
A third party intervened. “If I might interrupt…”
Turning, Tom saw that the speaker was the province administrator’s secretary, Johann Heinrich Bocler. Tom hadn’t even been aware the man was standing nearby. The three middle-aged auditors were with him, along with Bonnie Weaver.
Tom didn’t know the man very well, but any interruption was welcome. “Sure, what is it?”
Bocler gave Rita an apologetic glance. “I agree with your wife that Herr Siers should remain on the Pelican. Truthfully, it would be much safer for him. But I also think, for the same reason, that it would be foolish for her to leave that safety. She should also remain aboard the airship.”
Well. It turned out he was a splendid fellow. Who knew?
Rita was glowering at him. “Why should I be any safer than anyone else?”
Bocler made a face. “Mrs. Simpson-please. You must be realistic about these things.” Now he gave Tom an apologetic glance. “Meaning no disrespect, Major, but the key political factor here is that your wife is also the sister of General Stearns. Short of recapturing the two young heirs to Bavaria now in Amberg, Duke Maximilian could have no better hostage than she.”
He was right, Tom realized immediately. He hadn’t even considered that. Rita was so unpretentious that no one who knew her thought of her as a “big cheese.” And like most up-timers, even years after the Ring of Fire, Tom didn’t really think of holding people hostage as a political tactic. Kidnapping was just a crime, dammit.
But in the seventeenth century, as had been true for at least a millennium in Europe, holding high-ranked captives for ransom or blackmail was considered business-as-usual.
But then, why…
Rita had seen the same flaw in the logic. “That’s bullshit, Heinrich!” she snapped at Bocler. “You came in right after it happened, so you should know. Those guys who broke into our home weren’t trying to take me hostage. The first thing the bastards did when they came through the door was try to shoot me.”
“That happened in the heat of the moment, when they’d just smashed through the door,” countered Bocler. “I think they expected to find you in bed, not standing right in front of them. That first shot was probably fired in reflex. Thereafter, of course, since you were shooting back with the shotgun, they had no choice but to try to kill you.”
The secretary spread his hands. “A great deal depends on the instructions the assassins were given, which we don’t know. In particular, were they offered a share of the ransom? If they were, then they’d have had a keen incentive in keeping you alive. But Duke Maximilian is just as well-known for his penny-pinching as his ruthlessness. They probably weren’t offered any such incentive, so they had no great reason not to simply murder you.”
It made sense. Tom had been there himself, and remembered the chaos and fury of that brief gunfight. Unless the assassins had been tightly focused on the goal of capturing Rita, their natural fighting instincts would have overridden everything else.