too. “How do I tell the few-hour bombs from the ones that go for days ’fore they catch on fire?”
Tom Kennedy’s smile got broader. He clapped Cincinnatus on the back. “You’re a good fellow, you know that? Here, I’ll show you.” He held out one of the lead tubes. “The time it’s set for is stamped right here, you see. This one’s a six-hour delay.” He held up a warning forefinger. “That’s not perfect, mind you. It might be four hours, and it might be eight. But it won’t be two hours, and it won’t be two days, either.”
“I got you,” Cincinnatus said. It was a good system. It would do damage. It would also get traced back to him, sure as the sun would set tonight and come up again tomorrow.
Conroy and Kennedy had a rucksack ready for him to carry home. It contained lead tubes inset with copper disks of varying thickness, a glass jar full of oily-looking sulfuric acid, and another jar that held a powdery, yellowish substance, presumably picric acid. It also had a couple of dozen wax stoppers, a spoon, and a couple of glass funnels. “You don’t want to get this stuff, either kind, on your skin, or let the one go through the funnel that’s held the other,” Conroy said. If the storekeeper was warning him, Cincinnatus figured he was dealing with nasty stuff indeed.
The rucksack was small, but surprisingly heavy-lead was like that. Cincinnatus felt almost as if he’d lugged a crate of ammunition home with him. When he got back to the house, Elizabeth’s eyebrows shot up at the burden he brought in. “You don’t want to know,” he told her, and she didn’t ask any more questions. She’d learned you were liable to be better off without some answers than with them.
That evening, working in the sink after Elizabeth had gone to bed, Cincinnatus carefully made up three firebombs, one with a one-day disk, one with a two-day disk, and one with a fourteen-day disk, the longest in the whole set of tubes the men from the Confederate underground had given him. He accidentally spilled a drop of sulfuric acid on the galvanized iron. It steamed and bubbled and was doing its best to eat its way right through the sink till he poured lots of water on it. Afterwards, he eyed the discolored spot with considerable respect.
He didn’t like having the bombs in his pocket when he went to work the next morning. If a stopper came loose, he figured he’d like it even less. Nodding in a friendly way to Lieutenant Straubing came hard.
Along with the other drivers, he rattled south, and stopped to drop his cargo-small-arms ammunition, from what was stenciled on the crates-a little past one in the afternoon. While laborers unloaded the trucks, he ate his lunch and wandered around. Planting a couple of bombs was as easy as Kennedy and Conroy had said it would be.
Night had fallen by the time he got back to Covington. “See you tomorrow, Cincinnatus,” Lieutenant Straubing called, and waved.
“Yes, suh.” Cincinnatus waved back. He walked home. No signal for him in Conroy’s front window today-the Confederate underground had got what it wanted from him. The general store was quiet and dark, closed for the day. He ducked into the alley behind the place to make sure nothing was wrong, then went on home.
He made up a couple of more bombs that evening, and planted them the next day. That evening, Conroy waved to him as he walked past-word of the first fire he’d set must have already got back to the storekeeper.
Twelve days later, Conroy’s store burned to the ground.
Jonathan Moss’ thumb stabbed the firing button. The tracers his machine gun spat helped him guide the line of fire across the fuselage of the British biplane whose pilot hadn’t spied him coming till too late. The flier slumped over his controls, dead or unconscious. His aeroplane spun down, down, down. Moss followed it down, on the off chance the limey was shamming. He wasn’t. The aeroplane crashed into the battered ground of no-man’s-land and began to burn.
Moss pulled up sharply. Down there in the trenches, men in khaki were blazing away at him. He didn’t take them for granted, not any more. They’d brought him down once. He wanted to give them as little chance of doing it again as he could.
A couple of bullets punched through the fabric covering his single-decker’s wings. The sound brought remembered fear, in a way it hadn’t when the Englishman put some rounds through there. No aeroplane had ever knocked him out of the sky, which meant he could make himself believe no aeroplane
Small arms still aimed his way. Looking back in the rearview mirror mounted on the edge of the cockpit, he saw muzzle flashes bright as the sun. But his altimeter was winding steadily. By the time he passed twenty-five hundred feet, which didn’t take long, he was pretty safe.
Up above him, Dud Dudley waggled his wings in a victory salute. Moss waved back to the flight leader. His buddies had covered for him while he flew down to confirm his kill of the British biplane. He waved again.
Looking around for more opponents, he found none. Dudley waggled his wings again, and pointed back toward the aerodrome. Moss checked his fuel gauge. He had less gas left than he’d thought. He didn’t argue or try to pretend he hadn’t seen, but took his place in the flight above, behind, and to the left of Dudley.
One after another, the four Martin single-deckers bounced to a stop on the rutted grass of the airstrip outside Cambridge, Ontario. Groundcrew men came trotting up, not only to see to the aeroplanes but also to pick up the word on what had happened in the war in the air. “Johnny got one,” Tom Innis said, slapping Moss on the back hard enough to stagger him. Innis’ grin was wide and fierce and full of sharp teeth, as if he were more wolf than man.
“That’s bully, Lieutenant!” The groundcrew men crowded around him. One of them pressed a cigar into a pocket of his flying suit. “Knock ’em all down, sir.” “The more you sting, the fewer they’ve got left.”
Eventually, the fliers detached themselves and headed for Captain Pruitt’s office to make their official report. “That was really fine shooting, sir,” Phil Eaker said. He was skinny and blond and unlikely to be as young as he looked. Nobody, Moss thought from the height of his mid-twenties, was likely to be as young as Phil Eaker looked. He also hadn’t had enough flying time to harden him yet. That would come-if he lived.
“I dove on him out of the sun,” Moss said, shrugging. He could smell the leftover fear in his sweat now that the slipstream wasn’t blowing it away. “If he doesn’t know you’re there, that’s the easiest way to do the job. He only got off a few rounds at me.”
When the war broke out, he’d thought of himself as a knight of the air. Nothing left him happier now than a kill where the foe didn’t have much chance to kill him. He suspected knights in shining armor hadn’t cried in their beer when they were able to bash out a Saracen’s brains from behind, either.
Hardshell Pruitt looked up from the papers on his desk when Dudley and the men of his flight ducked into his tent. The squadron commander pulled out a binder, dipped his pen into a bottle of ink, and said, “Tell me, gentlemen. Try to give me the abridged version. I spend so much time filling out forms”-he waved at the documents over which he’d been laboring-“I haven’t been getting the flight time I need.”
“Yes, sir,” Dudley said. Concisely and accurately, he reported on the flight. The most significant item was Moss’ downing the British flying scout. Moss told a good deal of that tale himself.
“Well done,” Captain Pruitt said when he’d finished. “Let me just see something here.” He shuffled through some manila folders, opened one, read what was in it, and grunted. Then he said, “Very good, Moss. You’re dismissed. I have some matters I need to take up with your pals here. You may see them again, or I may decide to ship them all out for courts-martial.”
“I’m sure they all deserve it, sir,” Moss said cheerfully, which got him ripe raspberries from the other men in the flight. He ignored them, making his way back to his own tent. When he peeled off his flight suit, he realized how grimy and sweaty he was. The aerodrome had rigged up a makeshift showerbath from an old fuel drum set on a wooden platform. The day held a promise of summer. He didn’t even ask to have any hot water added to what was in there. He just grabbed some soap and scrubbed till he was clean.
Dudley, Innis, and Eaker still hadn’t returned from Captain Pruitt’s office by the time Moss got back to his tent. He scratched his freshly washed head. Maybe Hardshell hadn’t been joking, and they really were in Dutch.
He smoked the cigar the groundcrew man had given him, stretched out on his cot, and dozed for half an hour. His tentmates weren’t back when he woke up. He muttered under his breath. What the devil had they done? Why the devil hadn’t they let him do some of it, too?
He got up, went outside, and looked around. No sign of them. Hardly any sign of anybody, when you got down
