"Abandoned," Eddie pronounced. Given the broken axle and the goods strewn around the wagon, Noelle thought that as redundant a statement as she'd ever heard.
She didn't tease Eddie about it, though. She knew he'd really said it just to steel himself for the inevitable. They'd have to continue the pursuit into the forest.
Feeling more than a little nervous, she studied the terrain ahead of them. The Fichtelgebirge was not only a low range of mountains, it was an old one. Erosion had worn its peaks down to round forms, with not much rock showing. As a barrier to travel it wasn't remotely comparable to the Rocky Mountains, much less the Sierra Nevadas. It was more like the sort of terrain in most of Appalachia that Indians and early white settlers had never had too much trouble passing through.
But as ambush country, it did just fine, thank you.
Hearing a familiar and quite unexpected sound, she twisted in her saddle and looked up behind her.
Eddie had already spotted it. "Look!" he shouted, pointing toward the oncoming aircraft. "The Air Force has arrived!"
Her sense of relief was brief. She couldn't really see what good a warplane would be in the situation. There couldn't be more than one plane available. In fact, she'd thought the air force had all of their few craft stationed in Magdeburg or points north. Jesse Wood must have detached one of them to Grantville when he got news of the defection.
One plane would be almost useless trying to spot a small party in the forest, and even if it did spot the defectors it couldn't maintain the patrol for very long before it had to go back to refuel. By the time it returned, they'd have vanished again.
As the plane got closer, what little sense of relief remained went away altogether.
"That's not a warplane," she said. "It's got to be one of the Kelly's."
Eddie squinted at the oncoming aircraft. "You are sure? I didn't think any of theirs were operational yet."
Noelle shook her head. "Define 'operational.' Nobody ever said Bob Kelly didn't know how to build airplanes. The problem is he doesn't know when to quit. At any given time, he's got at least one plane able to fly-until he starts tinkering with it again."
The aircraft was heading straight for them, no longer more than a hundred yards off the ground. By now it was quite close enough to recognize the details of its construction. The USE's air force had a grand total of two-count 'em, two-models of aircraft. The Belles and the Gustavs. Even someone like Noelle, who'd never been able to distinguish one model of automobile from another unless she could see the logo or it was something obvious like a VW bug, could tell the difference between either one of them and the oncoming plane.
"No, it's one of the Kelly's. Couldn't tell you which model, except it'll have a name like 'Fearless' or 'Invincible' or something equally bombastic, but it's one of theirs."
Eddie was still squinting at it. "You're positive?"
"Yes, I'm posi-"
"The reason I ask," he interrupted, pointing his finger at the plane, "is because it's carrying bombs."
"Huh?" Noelle squinted herself. Her eyesight wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as Eddie's. Still, now that she looked for it-the plane was close, and coming pretty fast-she could see two objects suspended underneath the fuselage.
Those did look like bombs, sure enough.
And now that she thought about it, the oncoming plane's trajectory…
"Let's get out of here!" she yelled. "They're going to bomb us!"
Chapter 9. The Bomb
"Bombs away!" shouted Lannie. Way too soon, in Denise's judgment.
Fortunately, Keenan objected. "Hey, make up your mind! You said only one-"
"Drop it!" Denise hollered, when she gauged the time was right. Lannie might have buck fever, but she didn't. Not with Buster for a dad, teaching her to hunt.
"It's off!" said Keenan.
By now, the plane had swept by, over the wagon and the two enemy cavalrymen guarding it.
Well, one cavalryman, anyway. The other one might have been a civilian. They'd been moving too fast for Denise to get a good look at them.
Lannie brought the plane around. As soon as they could see the effect of the bomb, he shouted gleefully. "Yeeee-haaaaa! Dead nuts, guys!"
Sure enough, the wagon had been hit by the bomb. If not directly, close enough. Denise wasn't sure, from the quick glimpse she'd gotten as they went over it, but she thought the wagon had already been busted. It had seemed to be tilted over to one side, as if a wheel or an axle had broken, and she thought some of its cargo was on the ground.
Now, though, it was in pieces. And something was burning.
One of the cavalrymen was down, too. His horse was thrashing on the ground, and the rider was lying nearby. Dead, wounded, unconscious, it was impossible to tell. The other cavalryman-well, maybe cavalryman-was dismounting to tend to his partner.
Denise frowned. There was something about the way that second cavalryman moved…
"Fly back around," she commanded.
Keenan, even from his poor vantage point in the cramped bombadier's seat in the back, with its little windows, had been able to see the results too. "Jeez, Denise. I don't know as we gotta be bloodthirsty about this."
"Fly back around!" she snapped. "I just want to get a better look. And slow down, Lannie."
"Don't want to stall it out," he warned.
"Yeah, fine. So don't stall it out. Slow down and get lower."
"Backseat driver," he muttered. But he did as commanded.
"Wait," said Janos, holding out a hand. They were now sheltered beneath a large tree, not more than two hundred yards from what was left of the wagon. As soon as Janos had spotted the plane, he'd led them under the branches. Hopefully, they'd be out of sight.
"What a piece of luck," said Gage. "They bombed their own people."
Janos wasn't surprised, really. He knew from experience how easy it was for soldiers to kill and wound their own, in combat. In some battles, in bad weather or rough terrain, as many as a third of the casualties were caused by the soldiers' own comrades.
He'd never thought about it before, but he could see where that danger would be even worse with aircraft involved. At the speed and height it had maintained when it carried out the attack, the plane's operators couldn't have seen any details of their "enemy."
"What should we do?" asked Gardiner.
"Wait," Janos repeated. "The plane is coming back around. It we move out from under the tree, they might spot us."
That was the obvious reason not to move, and he left it at that. Still more, he wanted to see what would happen next.
Gardiner put up a mild objection. "That bomb was loud, when it went off. The garrison might come to investigate."
His tone was doubtful, though. Janos thought there was hardly any chance the explosion would alert the soldiers at Hof. Hof was miles away and while the sound might have carried the distance, it would have been indistinct. Thunder, perhaps. Of course, if the USE warplane kept dropping bombs, the situation would probably change. People would investigate an ongoing disturbance, where they would usually shrug off a single instance.
But Janos knew the plane couldn't be carrying very many bombs. By now, months after the Baltic War, Austria had very good intelligence on the capabilities of the up-time aircraft, and Janos had read all of the reports. Even the best of the enemy's warplanes, the one they called the "Gustav," was severely limited in its ordnance.
And this was no Gustav. Janos had seen one of them, on the ground at the Grantville airfield. Nor was it one of the other type of warplane, the one they called the "Belle." He'd seen those on several occasions, both on the ground and in the air.
Drugeth didn't know which type of airplane this was, but it couldn't have capabilities that were any better. In fact, if he was right in his guess about the object he could see under the craft's body, it had only had two bombs to begin with. He'd seen the bomb they'd dropped, although he hadn't spotted where it came from. But he was pretty sure it must have been the companion of the object he could see now.