As for the wheellock Janos carried—he had two of them, actually, one in each saddle holster—the weapons were quite good and he was quite good with them.
"Wait here," he repeated firmly. The last thing he wanted was someone like Barlow involved. Janos still hoped the problem could be handled without violence. Barlow was the sort of man who would lose control in a confrontation—and then miss what he shot at.
Gage and Gardiner were ready. Both of them, from their long stay in Grantville, with up-time firearms. The weapons called "pump-action shotguns," which were much favored by soldiers. They'd be loaded with solid slugs, not pellets.
"Let's go," he said.
"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.