The Doc Justice Files - Thunder From a Clear Sky part 4
by Direwolf

Chapter 4- The Shadow of Olympus

The slipstream tore at Justin's face. He squinted into the wind and sat lower in the cockpit but it didn't help much. It was a tight fit as it was. He could tell Go-on was having the same sort of problem and dealing with it as best he could since neither of them were exactly dressed for flying. That was one problem with open cockpits, they offered an unobstructed field of view but left you exposed to the elements. At least the air was still reasonably warm.

He and Go-on were headed west towards the deep droning roar that he could hear even over the sound of the radial engine powering the fighter plane. Whatever the Olympus was, Justin suspected it was very big. There was something looming out of the darkness ahead.

"Silver Eagle flight, please identify yourself and state your reasons for early return."

The voice startled him enough that Justin twitched the control stick. The plane dipped alarmingly before he recovered. A quick glance to the side showed him that Go-on was equally surprised.

"The radios", he realized, "Someone on the Olympus must be calling us."

He gestured to Go-on that he would answer while he thought quickly.

"Olympus control, this is Silver Eagle flight, Adams here. We have a medical emergency. A rattlesnake near the train bit Jones. His leg's swelling pretty badly so Captain Sanderson said we should get him back. I'm escorting him back in case there are any problems."

Then Justin waited anxiously to see if his simple ruse worked. He realized that if it didn't his first warning was apt to be machine gun fire from the dark object up ahead. It was a calculated risk and one he had to take. Not responding would have told them something was wrong. He was counting on the roar of the wind in the open cockpit to disguise his voice and he'd heard the name Adams when the guard took Go-on and Lucas from the platform. Jones was an invention but the best he could come up with on the fly. Now, if only they didn't have some sort of code word.

"Copy that, Lieutenant Adams. Did you say Johannes was bitten by a snake?"

Justin took a shaky breath in relief. It had worked. "Yes, control. It doesn't look too bad so we thought he was safe to fly. I'm escorting him."

"You are cleared for approach. Wind is nominal from the southwest and should not affect your landing. We'll have a medical team on the deck when you land. Semper Imperium."

"Semper Imperium," Justin answered, and then took a more careful look around. He and Go-on were not alone in the sky.

The first thing he noticed was another pair of fighter craft that had approached to within a few hundred yards of Go-on and himself, and then he saw something ahead. He nearly jerked the stick up, afraid he was going to ram the flying craft, and then he realized it was still more than a half-mile away. The sheer size of the leviathan had deceived him.

"My God, that's huge," he hissed, squinting into the wind.

And it seemed to grow larger with each passing moment. As it loomed closer, his eyes began to discern the awesome details.

It was more than just an airship, it was four of them, each the size of the huge crafts the Germans had built during the Great War. The four ships were flying in what looked to be a tight rectangle, the nose of one ship nearly touching its partner while a distance of only a couple of hundred feet separated the pairs. Then Justin saw the truth. All four ships were linked together by a web of flexible gantries and rope ladders, making one immense aircraft larger than a battleship. And there was more. As he got closer and the running lights of the immense craft swam into focus, Justin saw there was a metal framework suspended from beneath the zeppelins. Aircraft like the one he was now flying were parked along the framework.

"It's a flying aerodrome!"

Everything snapped into place. Justin realized why the solders of the Imperium had hijacked the train. They wanted the supplies, as well as the mining equipment. He suspected they were trying to locate a source of helium gas deep within the earth; the only sources of helium were wells in the Southwest United States. To obtain the lifting power to float the huge ship and all the attached structures and smaller planes, they had to be relying on hydrogen, which could be extracted from water using electricity. But it was hellishly explosive, and definitely not the sort of thing you wanted on a military vessel.

"We could shoot it down," Justin through, "Go-on and I are in armed planes."

But then he saw the flaw in that plan. Any attack they made would draw an instant response from the fighter planes circling the huge airship like patrolling sharks. They had to get on board and deal with things there.

As they got closer, Justin spotted a pattern of lights on the gantry below the airships. They formed a long arrow, pointing from the back of the ship towards the front.

"A landing guide," he realized, "it's to prevent returning pilots from getting confused. That way, the ship can turn into the wind to aid take offs."

He circled his arm in the air to get Go-on's attention, then made a sweeping motion with his palm to symbolize landing. After that, he balled his fist and pantomimed punching something. Go-on shot him a quick thumbs up. They banked over the top of the huge air ship, spotting the eagle emblem on the sides of the gondolas along with a Roman numeral on each hull, one through four, and turned towards the back of the ship. The wash of the massive engines on the sides of the airships buffeted them for a few moments before they dropped into the calm air below. The lighter arrow showed the way.

It would be tight, but Justin realized they had to land side by side. That way, whatever came next, they would at least have each other for back up. He wrapped both hands around the control stick and pointed the nose along the arrow. Go-on was right beside him.

Lucas kept the car traveling at a steady thirty miles an hour, the highest he was willing to trust on the road at night. He wanted to go faster, to tear back to the highway as fast as he could in the hopes finding a state trooper who might be able to call for reinforcements. But that was more likely to blow a tire than get him there any sooner. And actually, what he really wanted to do was turn the car around and find some way to help Justin and Gawaine out in what he felt sure would become a pitched battle between the two men and the solders of the Imperium.

Despite the political rhetoric that they had heard while hiding under the train platform, Lucas realized just what the Imperium was. It was a group of fascists, in their way no different than the men he remembered from his youth that stalked the Louisiana nights dressed in white sheets. The Imperium was all about power, who had it and who got to keep it. Maybe the rank and file like the men who flew the planes or gunned down the townspeople didn't know it, maybe they even believed they were trying to save this nation, but Lucas was sure that the people who sat on the top knew just what really mattered was power and were dedicated to keeping it to themselves.

And men like that wouldn't have the slightest compunction about shooting either Justin or Go-on. They might get in the way of the grab for power.

"And if anything happens to either of them when I wasn't there to help..." Lucas muttered. Then he saw a flash of unexpected movement in the rearview mirror of the big car.

At first he thought it had to some sort of debris thrown up by the car. Then he instinctively realized that the situation was far more deadly and reacted without thinking. The car swerved to the right, jumping the ditch alongside the road and tearing through the few rusted strands of barbwire. At first, he was sure the wheels would bog down in the loose soil. Then he felt them grab the hard pan below the wind-blown sand and the car surged forward. From above and behind came the hammering chatter of machine gun fire. Bullets chewed down the road through the plume of dust billowing behind the speeding car. The fire tracked off the road, veering towards him. But it overshot and Lucas got a chillingly clear look at the undercarriage of the plane as it skimmed overhead.

"This does not look good," he muttered as the car bounced over the uneven ground.

In the cockpit of his fighter plane, Sanderson spit a curse as he overshot the fleeing car. Something must have alerted the driver to the presence of the hunting aircraft behind him. His thumb released the trigger and the guns stopped firing as Sanderson pulled up and banked left to come around for a second pass. Missing the car had been annoying but the Imperium pilot had no doubt what the outcome of this skirmish was going to be.

As he homed back in on the target, Sanderson triggered a quick burst of fire from his guns, noting where the bullets impacted the ground in spurts of dust. The moonlight could make distances deceptive and he needed to keep track of his distance from the ground as well as his strafing angle. He realized that tracers in the guns would make this a lot easier but none of the Olympus's fighter craft carried such rounds. Using incendiary ammunition around a ship full of hydrogen was judged too great a risk. All it would take was one accident while loading the guns to bring the great ship down. That was one reason the mining equipment was so important. They needed that helium.

"One lone car isn't going to stop us," Sanderson vowed as he skimmed over the desert. The car was zigzagging back and forth. Either the driver was trying to make himself a harder target or was having trouble controlling the vehicle on the loose ground. Sanderson decided it didn't matter. There was no way he was going to miss a second time. His thumb poised over the trigger, he bore in.

Then the car did something quite unexpected. It swerved into a right angle turn back towards the roadway, throwing up a thick cloud of dust in the process to cover his escape. Sanderson fired into the cloud but he was shooting blind. He sped by over the billowing cloud and glanced back. The car bounced on the road and accelerated.

"Damn, he's good," Sanderson muttered in grudging admiration. "But not good enough!"

Lucas's head hit the roof of the car with enough force to make him see stars as the car lurched back onto the roadway. The wicked snarl of the plane engine faded as the aircraft overshot, giving Lucas a few moments to recover. The pilot of the plane knew his business, Lucas realized he was fast running out of tricks. Very soon, the game of cat and mouse would end with the flying cat chewing the ground-bound mouse apart with lead teeth. It was time for the mouse to try something crazy.

"All or nothing," Lucas snarled. He'd never been a gambling man but times like these called for a risk. The one thing he had going for him was that he was sure the pilot would be completely surprised. There was no way he'd guess anyone would try something this crazy.

Lucas accelerated down the road as fast as he dared. Crashing the car himself would just be doing the pilot's job for him and Lucas had no intention of doing that. Right now, he wanted to make the pilot think he had panicked and was just making a run for it. And by the look of things in the rear view mirror, it was working. All the dust was actually helping him track the plane. It was low enough that he could see the swirling pattern it made as it flew through the cloud.

"He's taking the bait," Lucas hissed, and then regretted the turn of a phrase. Too often while fishing as a child, he'd lost his bait to an alligator gar or even a ‘gator itself. And no matter what happened, things never went well for the bait. "No time for that now...."

The plane was closing fast. Lucas knew he was running out of time. He rolled down the window, then slammed on the brakes, spun the wheel and grabbed for the hand brake. The car slowed, slewed side to side for moment, and then completed a hundred and eighty degree turn, the classic bootlegger's reverse that had helped many a rumrunner away from a roadblock. Then Lucas floored the accelerator. The car shot towards the plane. With his left hand, Lucas reached under the dashboard.

The attack and subsequent gun battle on the San Francisco waterfront had proved to Lucas that Doctor Collins was vulnerable whenever he was in a car. There wasn't a lot that Lucas could do about it; Justin wasn't interested in buying an armored car. But the least he could do was make sure they had a bit more firepower. On his own decision, Lucas had installed a pair of clips under the dash to hold a weapon. He reached for it now, drawing out a sawed off double-barreled twelve gauge shotgun.

The plane and car were closing the distance between them very quickly. With only one hand to steady the wheel, Lucas fought the road, trying to stay on a steady course. He saw the six flares of stuttering light as the machine guns opened fire. There were a few deep, metallic notes, like a hammer on steel as a few bullets found their target. One punched a hole through the roof of the car only inches from Lucas' head. But he'd been right. By changing directions and driving at the plane, he'd thrown off the pilot's aim. The man had overshot his target by a few critical feet.

Lucas stuck the gun out the window and pointed it at the nose of the plane. He waited a moment to let the distance close as much as he dared, then squeezed down on both triggers.

"Damn it, not again!" Sanderson raged in frustration as the car sped at him. He triggered his guns in a long rolling burst. A few sparks as the first couple of rounds found their target was the only reward and again, the car was under the range of his guns, safe for the moment.

"That's it! No third strike." He eased back on the stick, planning on trying a quick, sideslip turn that should let him come up on the elusive car from behind again. Then he realized that there was something sticking out of the driver's side window.

"What the..." he managed before Lucas fired.

The double-barreled shotgun was loaded with oversized pellets, ones that Lucas thought would be able to go through the side of a car. Only through the massive strength of his hand and arm was he able to make the shot controlled, and even then the gun was nearly torn from his grip by the savage recoil. But he held on, and his shot went true. Both swarms of pellets whipped into the oncoming plane's spinning propeller.

The seasoned oak blades that had been cut, shaped, and polished to precise specifications chipped and splintered from the impacts. Then the massive centripetal force tore the wood into a spray of fragments that blew back in a cloud. Some got sucked into the engine, killing the plane's power, others hit the cockpit. The plane went out of control. Dazed by the sudden attack, Sanderson never recovered in the few seconds it took his plane to hit the desert floor. One wing snapped off as the hulk skidded over the dry ground as blue aviation gas spattered from the ruptured wing tanks. Then a steel landing struck a flint cobble. The resulting spark ignited the gas and the wreckage erupted in ball of fire. It kept tumbling, trailing flames, smoke and dust until it smashed into a low hill and broke into a swarm of burning pieces.

Lucas stopped the car. With his hand still numbed from the wrenching force of the shot, he carefully reloaded the gun with spare shells from the glove compartment then got out of the car. He was about five miles from Scorched Stone Flats and the burning wreckage cast a hellish glow across the desert. The flickering firelight brought the grim lines on his dark brown face as he looked at his fallen adversary. It was a safe bet that no one was walking away from that landing.

"Looks like the bait got itself the ‘gator this time."

He looked up as a shadow crossed the face of the moon. A titanic airship larger than anything he had ever seen had cruised into sight, heading for the ravaged town.

"Since when have whales taken up flying?" Lucas mused. He had no doubts that the flying leviathan was where Justin and Go-on were headed and it was a safe bet that when they got there, real trouble was going to erupt. Lucas had to balance that with Justin's instructions that he go for help.

"Well, I think the plan's about to change, Boss," Lucas said. "If I know you two, the devil's going to start up a dance tune soon enough and I might yet be able to lend a hand."

Lucas walked back and opened up the car's truck. Clipped into the top, above the line of sight was another shotgun, this one a pump action weapon with a long, accurate barrel. The range might not be as good as a rifle, but it had plenty of stopping power. Lucas worked the slide, ejecting all five shot-filled shells before reloading with heavy slugs. All the while, he watched the huge shape of the Olympus glide slowly through the air.

To be continued...