The New Adventures of Richard Knight Read online

  Heavy anchor chains suspended the simple cage-one of a dozen-over the sea. It swayed and rolled with the wind, creaking. Knight’s stomach did belly-flops at the sight of it. He contemplated resistance, but the presence of far too many weapons stayed his hand, not to mention the chains wrapped around his wrists. While he lived, there was hope. For him, if not for the passengers and crew of the Skanderbeg...unavoidably, his gaze fell on the burning ruin of the German airship as it settled on the surface of the sea. His jaw tightened and a sensation of sick helplessness struck him.

  There had been no reason for it. It had been as ruthless an action as any Knight had seen in his career, and he was determined not to see it repeated. Stewing, he stumbled. A palm caught him between the shoulder blades and he fell painfully to his knees.

  One of his captors yanked open a trapdoor set into the platform and another pulled a lever, retracting the cage. Knight’s queasy feeling came back. He’d been in tight spots before, but this was something else again.

  “You look a bit queasy, whoever you are,” Shax said. He’d kept a gun on Knight the entire time, and his eyes burned with something that might have been excitement. He was overseeing Knight’s imprisonment. Alone among them, he seemed pleased. “Heights not your sort of thing?” he asked.

  “I’ve seen higher,” Knight said.

  Shax laughed. “I’ll bet. That was a sneaky trick with Vual. Did you kill him?” When Knight didn’t answer, he went on. “I’m not mad you understand. I didn’t particularly like him. But you upset Bael and that’s not cricket. That crazy warlock is our meal ticket and when he’s upset, we wind up chasing phantom blimps and angels in bi-planes.”

  “Why wear the funny costumes? And those are fake names if I’ve ever heard them,” Knight tried, stalling for time.

  Shax chuckled bitterly. “I was in a Shanghai prison before Bael found me. If he wants me to wear a damn costume and change my name, who am I to say no?”

  Long pole-hooks were used to angle the cage up. Rough hands grabbed Knight. “In you go,” Shax said. Knight could hear the gloating joy in the man’s voice. Knight grunted as he was shoved through the trapdoor and into the cage. He struck the bars with bone-bruising force and scrambled around as the cage door slammed shut. “Enjoy the view,” Shax said as the hooks were pulled free. Knight felt a moment of nausea as he swung out over the sea. He slammed back and forth in the cage, unable to maintain his footing. The bottom of the cage was a gaping grate, with barely enough room for a two feet spread.

  He heard the clunk of the lever and then he was hurtling downwards. The world spun, worse than when he’d been on the line. He snatched for the bars, holding tight as the sea and the sky merged in his blurred vision. He crashed against one of the other cages and was greeted by the welcoming smile of a mouldering skeleton. It clattered as the cages struck, became tangled, and then parted with a shriek that set his teeth to itching. He whirled, his aching muscles striking metal as his cage rolled toward the others. For a moment, it seemed there were hundreds of them, a Chinese hell of upside down souls, screaming endlessly into the celestial sea.

  Instinct propelled the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands to the four corners of the cage. He closed his eyes and fought down the animal panic that had accompanied the fall. Thus he remained until the cage stopped spinning, and for a few minutes longer.

  Taking a breath, he opened his eyes. Rust and sea-air had weakened the bars, he noted immediately. He tensed and pushed and was rewarded with a creak of metal. The cage was being pulled in the wake of the airship and it hung at a slight angle. It was hard to breath, but Knight had climbed taller mountains and flown higher than most pilots. He knew better than most how to conserve oxygen. The cold was a different matter. It cut through him like a knife, eating its way into his brain. Activity was necessary to keep from winding up like the skeleton he’d seen. They wanted him alive, but not necessarily in one piece, obviously. Keeping his limbs braced, he looked up.

  At the top of the cage, where the chain hooked in, mould and rust collected in a rainbow of rot. Moving his hands up, he shoved gently at first, then more forcefully, careful not to use too much strength. One wrong move and his cage might hurtle down into the sea below.

  “And where would I be then, hunh?” he muttered. His keen eyes examined the chain. It was heavy, with thick links. Condensation formed on it and it looked unpleasantly slippery. Still, there was nothing for it.

  Knight had been in traps before. He knew that immediate escape was the best course. To wait was to risk running out of time. Granted, the risk of death in this attempt was higher than most, but equal parts adrenaline and rage lent him confidence.

  As he worked at the bars, he let his mind slip into a calm state. Facts assembled like troops in his head and he inspected them one by one. Fact: The airship was big, but outdated. Fact: From what he had seen, this bunch wouldn’t be missed if a round went into the hydrogen bag. Fact: Bael was crazier than an airfield tomcat.

  Taken together, the facts meant little. ‘I hunt thieves.’ That was what Bael had said. But for who did he-it-hunt them, and why? And what was this Grand Guignol? He looked up at the red underbelly of the vessel. He had faced masked menaces before...disguise was nothing out of the ordinary for the shadowy world of espionage, but this...this wasn’t play-acting, he feared. This was something else entirely. What had Shax called Bael...’the crazy warlock’? What did that mean?

  A bar popped and bent beneath his palm and he grunted in satisfaction. It had taken him close to an hour to work the bar free. The sun was a strip of blazing orange on the horizon. A second bar followed the first. He had his opening; now to take advantage of it before any more time was wasted. Pushing all thoughts of the nature of his captors aside, Knight began to lift himself carefully up through the broken bars toward the chain. They hadn’t taken his gloves, for which he was thankful.

  Stretching, he grabbed the curve of the closest chain link. Then, pausing only to whisper a silent prayer, he began to climb the chain.

  It rippled wildly beneath him, shaken by the wind, by the vibrations of the airship, and by his own movements. Gritting his teeth, he pulled himself up, inch by torturous inch, slippery link by slippery link. Several times, he almost slipped, but his reflexes saved him.

  In truth, the distance was not an impossible one, but the wild undulations of the chain made it difficult to make any headway. He paused for breath and to give his aching limbs a moment to relax and glared at the sky. He wondered if Doyle was up there somewhere, trailing behind them. He hoped so. If he could get to the control room-if he didn’t plummet to his doom-he would find out.

  “Of course,” he muttered, “Then there’s the little matter of me being stuck on this bird while Doyle takes pot-shots at it.” He grimaced. “You’re an idiot, Knight. You just had to see, didn’t you?”

  Suddenly, the chain began to move in his grip. It shot through his hands, ripping the gloves to shreds and he restrained a howl as he clung on. Someone was retracting the chain and hauling him up! Knight held on, knowing he was only going to get one shot at escaping, and it was going to have to be a good one.

  He slid down the chain toward the bars and planted his feet against the curve of the cage. Then he rode upwards, his muscles quivering in anticipation. The hole was just big enough; if he could angle it right...

  The gear squealed and howled and he bit his lip as his jawbone vibrated in his skull. Then the aperture to the platform was suddenly within spitting distance and Knight uncoiled like a spring, aiming for the opening like a human arrow. He shot through it, tackling a man and carrying him backwards. They rolled across the platform and the masked pirate shot over the side with a howl. Knight was on his feet a moment later, his fist cracking across the jaw of a second man. The pirate staggered back. Knight snatched the pistol out of the pirate’s belt and fired. The body tumbled through the aperture, hit the cage and vanished into the ocean of clouds below.

  He spun, covering the
ladder. No one else seemed to be there. They’d only sent two to collect him. He felt vaguely insulted, before putting it down to good luck. Swiftly, he climbed the ladder and hauled himself up into the airship. It was as stifling as ever. He set off quickly. He had to get to the control room.

  As he moved through the corridors, he often had to dart into open bulkheads and press himself flat against bends in the corridors as pirates went back and forth about their business. It likely took a lot of effort to keep a floating misery palace like this one in the air. Then, that might explain why neither the RAF nor any other air force had been able to track the pirates to their base. They simply didn’t have one!

  It was as ingenious as it was insane. He climbed a set of thin, spiral stairs. Parts of the ship looked like some horrible cathedral, while others looked like someone had crammed together the parts from different airships to approximate a working whole. Once again, he wondered about the red ship’s mad captain, Bael. What was that monster’s story?

  Strange chanting suddenly echoed through the corridor around him and he froze. It echoed through the speakers and around the bulkheads and set his hackles to bristling. The sound was wrong, somehow, like a church choir gone topsy-turvy. Knight, unable to resist, followed it down onto the next deck, where he caught sight of men going into what, on any other ship, would be the crew’s mess.

  Carefully, cautiously, Knight peered around the edge of the bulkhead. His breath caught in his throat as he saw Bael standing at a podium, his crooked shape leaning out over the kneeling ranks of his crew. Not all of them, but a good many.

  “God is dead!” Bael shrieked. “His corpse was seen to cast a shadow over the moon in 1789!” A glove curled into a fist with a pop of knucklebones. “He left the earth to Satan and man has become as a wolf! What was the Great War but wolf killing wolf? Satan pranced across the killing fields of Flanders and he brought to me his words!” Bael spun and spread his arms, indicating a great map stretched across the back wall of the room. With a start, Knight recognized it as a representation of the Atlantic air-traffic corridor-every route and destination marked and mapped.

  More than that though, mingled amongst the maps and photographs were scrawled coal sketches of mushrooms-or perhaps clouds-and belching ovens that sent a thrill of atavistic unease slithering through Knight’s brain. What was this?

  “The Prince of the Air is angry that man has dirtied the ground and now seeks to do the same to the sky! Thieves ride their chariots of steel and fire through Lucifer’s shadow, free from fear or punishment! And Satan said unto me, ‘Be my hand!’ He caressed me with flame from above and I was reborn, the instrument of his will! If man wishes to sail the skies, he must pay his toll! Nema!” Bael cried.

  “Nema,” the kneeling men murmured.

  “Nema,” someone behind Knight said. He froze, cursing himself for getting distracted. He turned. Shax stared at him over the barrel of an automatic. “That’s ‘amen’ backwards, by the by. So I said to myself, ‘Shax? If this man is half the man I think he is, he’ll get out of that cage easily enough’, and look at that-I was right. Bael will reward me well for this.”

  “Bully for you,” Knight said, turning slightly.

  “Yes, rather,” Shax said. “Should I shoot you here? Or should I troop you in there for the rest of the service?” Shax chuckled. “That’d get the old fruitcake frothing, sure enough. That’s why he sent men for you. Occasionally we snag a prisoner or two and the madman likes to read divinations in their guts. I tend to skip his little sermons if I can help it...not my sort of thing, you understand? I always say, ‘money is its own reward’, and that includes the afterlife.”

  “A sound philosophy,” Knight said, gauging the distance between them. Could he outrun the twitch of a trigger finger? There was only one way to find out. “You must be popular.”

  “Hardly,” Shax said, waving him away from the bulkhead. “It gets to you after a time. In a confined space like this, madness jumps bodies quicker than influenza. Half the crew are singing psalms to Old Scratch and the others are just mouthing the words,” Shax said. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve seen-”

  Knight lunged, his fingers twitching aside the barrel of the pistol as those of his other hand plunged into the eyeholes of Shax’s mask. The man gave a strangled grunt as Knight took tight hold of his mask and slung him off his feet and to the ground. The pistol spun out of Shax’s grip and Knight drove the heel of his boot into the small of Shax’s back. Shax yelped and tried to roll over and Knight fell on him like a ton of bricks, using all of his weight to knock the breath and the fight out of his opponent. He shot a quick glance toward the bulkhead, but Bael’s sermon was continuing unabated.

  “You should have shot before you spoke,” Knight said, grabbing Shax’s head in both hands and bouncing it off the floor. Adrenaline surging through him, he stood and snatched up the pistol, checked the clip, and dragged Shax to his feet. “Now, unless you want me to finish the job, you’ll keep talking, chum.”

  “W-what,” Shax said groggily.

  Knight shoved him forward. “Take me to the control room, now!”

  ***

  The control room sat toward the fore of the oversized gondola, as Knight had thought. Shax stopped in the corridor. “There’ll be men on duty. There are always people on duty,” he muttered.

  “When’s shift change?” Knight demanded. Shax didn’t reply and Knight jabbed him with the pistol. “When is it?” he repeated.

  “Every three hours,” Shax said grudgingly. “But if you shoot them-”

  “Let me worry about that,” Knight said. “Get the door open.”

  Shax hesitated, and then rapped on the door. A muffled voice asked a question. “It’s me, Shax. Bael sent me,” Shax said, leaning against the door. He was tense and trembling and Knight knew he was planning something. He found out what as the door opened and Shax threw himself through it and then tried to slam it in Knight’s face. “He’s got a gun! Sound the alarm!” he yelped.

  Knight snarled a curse and fired through the door. There was a scream as the thin metal ruptured and he kicked it open. Shax staggered back, clutching at himself. Knight fired again and Shax fell flat. The three crew members on duty stared at him in shock as he kicked the door shut. Then, as one, they rushed him.

  Knight caught the first one a blow across the temple with the hard weight of the pistol and then was swept back against the door by the second. Hands scrabbled for his throat and Knight jerked forward, ripping the man’s mask off and throwing him off balance. He brought both fists down on the back of the man’s neck, dropping him even as the third stepped back, going for the pistol holstered on his belt. Knight dove for his own weapon, dropped in the scuffle. He snatched it up and rolled up into a kneeling position, firing once. The pirate gasped and slumped back across his seat.

  Alarm claxons suddenly shrilled. Knight grinned fiercely. They’d either discovered his absence or someone had heard the shots. It didn’t matter. Regardless, it wouldn’t be long before they figured out where he’d gone. He rushed to the radio console and began flipping through the frequencies. There was one in particular he was looking for, one known only to he and Doyle. If the tough leatherneck were in pursuit, as he hoped, then he’d know Knight was onboard and alive.

  “Larry?” Knight spoke quickly, twisting the knob. Static answered him. “Damn it, Doyle, do you read me?” More static was his only reply. A grim thought fled across the surface of his mind...what if Doyle thought he was dead? If he’d seen the Skanderbeg go down, he might think Knight had been aboard. He hadn’t even thought about that earlier and now he cursed himself for it. If that were the case, Doyle could be anywhere by now.

  Abruptly, the radio barked and a hearty voice pierced the veil of static. “Dick? Is that you?”

  The obvious note of hope in Doyle’s words made Knight laugh out loud in relief. “Yes it’s me, Larry. Where are you?”

  “Back and up,” Doyle replied. “I saw th
at German bird go down and I don’t mind telling you that my gut went with it, Dick. I thought you were a goner for sure! I stayed long enough to get in contact with a couple of trawlers in the area and sent them to look for survivors. Then I followed that blasted red blister of a ship!”

  Knight smiled, imagining the fierce look he knew must be on the other man’s face right at that moment. “Guns blazing, eh?” he said.

  “I’ve popped a few balloons in my time, Dick,” Doyle said.

  “Right, well, let’s see if we can avoid popping this one while I’m on it, shall we?” Knight said, glancing toward the door.

  “And just how do you plan on doing that?” Doyle demanded.

  “Do you remember Locklear?” Knight said. He could hear the grating beneath his feet vibrating under the impact of many feet.

  “Who-wait-Ormer Locklear?” Doyle said. “That crazy so-and-so who used to walk on the wings of planes?”

  “Yeah, I ran into a mutual friend a while back in New York. He taught me a few of Locklear’s tricks,” Knight said brightly. “If you can keep her steady, I think I can get to the canopy of the Northrop. It’ll be close, but we’ve got to bring this bag down and I’d rather not do it with me on board.”

  “I’m all ears, Dick,” Doyle said. “How am I even going to find you?”

  “Simple,” Knight said. “I’m in the control room. So come and get me before they break the door down, hunh?”

  “What?” Doyle’s subsequent curses were lost in a burst of static.

  “Control room, fore part of the upper deck!” Knight yelled into the teeth of the static. The door rattled on its hinges. Knight put his back to the radio and readied himself. He heard the rumble of engines and a thin wasp-like whine as something blue and beautiful to his eyes dove out of the rising sun. The claxons onboard the red ship redoubled in intensity. Somebody had spotted the Northrop as it buzzed around the circumference of the airship.