Isaac Bell saw that his one-day timetable to Shemaha had been wildly optimistic. They’d be lucky to make that first town in two days. Then seven or eight more towns and four hundred eighty miles to go.
27
Of the six longest, hottest days and freezing cold nights ever endured,” wrote Edna Matters, typing up her shorthand notes as she did every night when the autos finally stopped rolling, “today was the longest yet, and I’m afraid it is not over.
This afternoon’s shoot-out, our third since escaping Baku, ended inconclusively. Those who were shooting at us are still out there. Neither IB nor WC are ceasing their vigilance. Neither has slept more than a catnap. The autos are circled, as tightly as the narrow cliffside clearing will allow, like a latter-day wagon train besieged by Indians, and we are watching the steep slopes and the fast-falling darkness.
She looked around her. When they left the hotel stable in Baku, the Peerless autos’ tires had been white as snow. They were black now, blackened by the oily streets before they were even off the Absheron Peninsula, caked with road dust and marred by the pries used to work them on and off their rims to patch punctures. Wish Clarke was fixing one now. Nellie was helping him. JDR was stretched across a backseat, sound asleep. The plutocrat was the envy of all; he could sleep through anything. Isaac was draped over the Maxim gun, as still and watchful as a cat, the bag in which he carried his rifle in easy reach, as always.
She typed.
The roads are abysmal, verging on the nonexistent, except for the occasional better-graded stretch, which IB identifies as forty-year-old Russian military roads built to subdue the region. There are fortresses and barracks, some abandoned, some occupied by soldiers disinclined to venture out. Occasionally we trundle across handsome iron bridges the Army built over rushing rivers. The road often snakes beside the railroad tracks, on which we have not seen a single train moving, though we did pass a smoldering line of blackened oil tank cars set afire.
IB, reading over EMH’s shoulder, was just informed by EMH that nothing in our agreement says I cannot reveal Envoy Stone for the louse JDR is, so long as I don’t reveal his true identity. Although if IB were not so exhausted from his wonderfully successful efforts to keep us alive, he might have read further to see that I gave Envoy Stone his due, albeit grudgingly, admitting that Stone actually believes, truly believes, that he and his ilk deal, in his own oft-repeated phrase, ‘fairly and squarely and aboveboard.’ I base this conclusion on an interview granted by sister Nellie, who’s been stuck driving his Peerless all this time and arguing incessantly to no effect. Sister Nellie feels, as does this reporter, that the trouble comes by how differently we estimate the location of that board he purports to be above.
For example, in the midst of today’s running gun battles — first with renegade Cossacks bent on relieving us of our vehicles, then gangs of Social Democrat revolutionaries who probably want our Maxim gun — the ‘envoy’ suddenly scampered into a railroad telegrapher’s hut. He was not trying to hide, not running from the fight, but trying to send another business cable to America. No one denies his bravery. (He gave his borrowed pistol to sister Nellie before running a gauntlet of bullets in his abortive attempt to communicate God-knows-what.)
His elastic ethics don’t trouble him at all. He bald-facedly insisted to this reporter that because he was unable to send his cable, as the wires were cut, the contents do not fall under the terms of our agreement and therefore he does not have to admit them to me. It would take a herd of expensive lawyers to get around that one. Which, of course, has always been his specialty. He said, incidentally, that before the wires were cut the telegrapher had received reports of bigger fires, continued looting, and hundreds more murdered in Baku.
Suddenly Edna heard what sounded like thunder and felt the ground shake. She stopped typing and looked up. Then she resumed typing, faster than ever, as if something was chasing her fingers.
A boulder just rolled down the hill…
Here comes another… They’ve started shooting again. IB can’t see them. He has abandoned the Maxim gun and is running up the road with his rifle…
IB is shouting at EMH to close up her typewriter and take cover behind our “rock-solid, Cleveland-built machines.” EMH keeps typing because it beats being terrified. IB appears prepared to shoot EMH if she doesn’t close up her machine. But she can’t stop. She just keeps typing. She is not exactly hysterical. In fact, not at all. She’s typing because, against all logic, it feels like it makes her bulletproof.
Isaac is retreating from the curve in the road where he was trying to see who was shooting. He is running back to the Maxim gun. Bullets pluck his sleeve.
Isaac Bell dodged rifle fire and a blizzard of stone splinters to vault into Wish Clarke’s Peerless so he could feed the belt into the Maxim gun. But Wish was pinned down under another car, from where he was shooting back with his pistol. Bell slid behind the Maxim, cocked it, and jerked the trigger, grinding out ten shots before the belt caught on the tripod.
He untangled it and fired ten more at a flicker of movement atop the ridge that stared down at them. Three riflemen leaped up and fired back. Bell triggered the Maxim, trying to hit them before the belt caught. Eight shots, ten shots, and this time the belt did not hang up on anything. The pounding machine gun had cleared the top of the ridge before he realized why. Edna Matters had jumped in beside him and was feeding the belt as smoothly as a veteran of the Zulu Wars.
“You could get killed doing this,” he said.
“Beats getting killed doing nothing.”
She stood up, thinking the fight was over. Feeding the belt into the gun had made her even more bulletproof than typing. She did not want to listen to the low voice in the back of her mind that nothing made anyone bulletproof except no bullets.
“Look out!”
Suddenly Isaac was roaring in her ear, “Down! Down! Get down!”
28
An immense boulder, triple the size of the others, flew at the auto.
Isaac shoved Edna down. It cleared their heads by inches and hit the guard wall that stood between the edge of the road and a sheer drop. It smashed through the wall, scattering stones, and tumbled into the ravine. Shouts of triumph from the top of the slope announced another rolling at them.
“IB was both right and wrong last night,” Edna Matters typed in the morning.
The air was bitter cold. A strong wind was blowing and the sky was full of dust clouds. Wish Clarke sat behind the Maxim gun. He was covering the ridge at the top of the slope. Isaac Bell was starting to climb it with field glasses around his neck and a revolver in his hand. He was hoping to spot Tiflis and a route on which they could make a run for the capital city.
Thanks to taking cover under an overhang of rock. WC and Envoy Stone and sister Nellie were not flattened by giant boulders. IB and I were also extremely lucky where we shivered all the long, cold night. But the last boulder that thundered down the hill before it was too dark for our enemies to aim another smashed us dead center.
We are down to two Peerlesses. We managed to rescue some of the water before the wreck fell into the ravine and was swept downstream in a furious torrent. But we could save none of the tinned food and none of the extra gasoline, which presents a serious difficulty as we very likely do not have enough gasoline left to reach Tiflis even though we believe it is close, just over the hills that we somehow got on the wrong side of when we got lost yesterday.