Even before the plane stopped rolling, Jael squirmed around in her seat. She groped for his shirtfront, eyes wide. “What is it we are doing? We should fly to it!”
“Not yet!” He had to shout to be heard over the thrum of the big propellers. He jumped out and grabbed her arm to half-help, half-haul her out. “They’ll stick around for a little bit. They’ve obviously got something in mind. No sense buzzing around and getting ourselves shot out of the air like that guy back there. First, we find Earl and figure out what they’re doing.”
And when and if Hitch went back up there, Jael was staying firmly on the ground—even if he did have to tie her up. No way he was going to risk her jumping out of the cockpit again.
“C’mon,” he said. “And keep low!”
He hustled her through the motorcars, running bent over. In the bleachers ahead, people were screaming, fleeing.
One grizzled farmer in overalls shook his fist. “The Huns! The blamed Huns are invadin’!”
Hitch scanned for Griff. He’d be in the thick of the melee somewhere, trying to keep order.
Instead, Hitch spotted Earl.
Earl wasn’t scrambling. He stood with his head hung back, staring straight up past the brim of his ball cap, open-mouthed. He was probably slavering over the kind of engine that could power those monster propellers.
Schturming kept right on dropping. By now, its sky-blue bottom was only a couple dozen feet off the ground. From this close, the thing looked like the hull of a pirate ship, planked and weathered—but without the barnacles. On the narrow end at the prow, two barn-sized doors split open and revealed a cavity with twenty or so men standing inside in ranks. Zlo, in his long coat and bowler hat, stood at the front. The eagle rode his shoulder.
Here it was then. Wouldn’t be any kind of a surprise if these guys pulled Tommy guns and started mowing everybody down.
The propellers cut out, and the whole ship bobbed. In the booming silence, the screams and the stamp of running feet suddenly sounded tinny and small.
At the near end of the bleachers, Hitch stopped short. He crouched in its shadow and pulled Jael down after him. Earl was still staring, so Hitch took advantage of the all-around shock to stick two fingers in his mouth and whistle, loud and sharp.
Earl twitched his head around.
The durn fool was going to get himself fried for sure. Hitch motioned him over.
Earl came running and ducked around the corner to join them. He skidded in the dust and sat down, his back to the bleachers. He looked at Jael. “Okay, sweetheart, so you’re not crazy.”
She stared past him. “The glavni, the Enforcement Brigada. To be able to do this, Zlo must have finished with killing them all!”
Up above, Zlo took a megaphone from his lieutenant in the red coat. “I give you greetings, Scottsbluff! You are wondering who I am and what I am wanting. So I will tell you. I am Rawliv Zlo. I am master of Schturming, and that makes me master of you. If you do not as I say, I will destroy your city, your farms. I will bring floods, and I will bring hail. And lightning. The storm you saw last time I was here? It is but nothing. Can you understand that?”
People stared and murmured. The screams became low-pitched wails.
A man with hulking shoulders—Campbell—pushed through to stand at the front. He looked grim. “What do you want?”
“I want what you call ransom. And, oh yes, I want my yakor.”
Hitch looked around at Jael.
She shook her head. “Then he does think I still have it.”
Oh, great. Hitch scowled. “What’s he going to do when he finds out it’s somewhere between here and Cheyenne?”
She knit her brows, staring up. “It is not maybe. The way it pulled from me—it caught on something. What if it is still there?”
“Small chance of that.” But still, he craned a look upwards.
She clenched her fists against her bent knees. “He is wanting it because if he has it, he can go to anywhere he wants. Do all things he wants. And things he wants are very bad.”
“Well, even if he does have it, he obviously doesn’t know it. And there is no guarantee it snagged on something up there. More than likely, it fell right to the ground.”
She shook her head. “Then he can make storms nowhere but in this place. He will not like that. He will do his threats.”
“Give to me yakor and eighty thousand dollars,” Zlo shouted.
Jael put a hand on Hitch’s shoulder and started to push herself up. “I should go—”
He grabbed her wrist and pulled her back down. “You can’t seriously still want to go back?”
“No. My people—maybe they are letting Zlo do this thing, or maybe they cannot stop him. If it is first, then they are betrayers. If it is other, I can only help them if I help all of you.”
“And you’re telling me Zlo is a man of honor?”
“Honor?”
“Is he the kind that keeps his word, that gives a Lincoln penny about whether anybody down here thinks he’s a good guy or not?”
She shook her head.
“I didn’t think so. So you stay put. If he finds out you don’t have that pendant, then he’s got no use for you. He’s likely to shove you right on out of there again. And this time you won’t be wearing a parachute.”
Her gaze flickered from him to Schturming, then to the people huddled in the grandstand. “But—”
“Look, I got enough on my mind right now. So just you promise me you’re not going to go turning yourself over. Trust me when I say that’s not going to do anybody any good. The man’s a pirate. He’s going to try to wring that money out of the folks down here whether you go up or not.” He rattled her arm. “Promise me.”
Her gaze came back. Her throat bobbed in a swallow. “I promise.”
The next trick would be keeping everybody else from figuring out who she was and forking her over to Zlo anyway. He huffed.
Earl thumbed Hitch in the ribs. “You better pay attention to this.”
One of Zlo’s men kicked a rope ladder out the door. It unfurled with a snap and swayed a foot or two above the ground.
“What happened?” Hitch asked.
“The sheriff’s going up to talk.”
“Oh, well, that’s swell.”
Griff pushed through the crowd behind Campbell and spoke to him for a second. Campbell waved him off, took hold of the ladder, and started hauling himself up. Hands on his hips, Griff stood watching. He looked as happy about the whole thing as Hitch felt.
Campbell would do his best to bring Zlo to his knees. He wouldn’t be satisfied with just getting the ship out of the county now. Zlo had challenged him, and like Campbell’d said, he didn’t take it lightly when folks threatened things he thought belonged to him. That meant, from this moment on, Campbell would be dead set on bringing down Schturming any way he could.
If Campbell figured things out, that probably didn’t mean anything good for Jael.
Hitch growled. There had to be another way around this. Something he could do. He was, after all, about the only person on the ground right now who knew what was really going on here.
He scanned the length of _Schturming_’s gas envelope, then squirmed around in the dust to face Earl. “I’m going back into the air.”
“What for?”
“To see if I can pop their bubble.” He pointed at Jael as he got up. “You stay here, you cotton?”
She frowned. “You are going to do what?”
He left without answering. As soon as the bleachers were between him and Schturming, he straightened and started jogging toward the Jenny.