Young Sherlock Holmes_ Red Leech - Andrew Lane [101]
He had thought to pick up a leather water bottle from the stables before he left, and he stopped briefly to refill it and to let his horse drink its fill.
Judging by the sun it was now mid-afternoon, and judging by the map in his mind he was getting close to where the Army Corps of Engineers was setting up its camp. They would almost certainly post sentries, and he didn’t want to run into any of them. Chances were they would shoot first and ask questions afterwards.
Rather than keep skirting the foothills, Sherlock pulled his horse’s head around and headed up into the hills. If he was right, if he was where he thought he was, then he could get a good view down on to the camp from somewhere up there.
It took him another couple of hours of climbing up shallow slopes and crossing rocky patches before his horse came around the edge of a steeper section of hillside and Sherlock found himself gazing down on what it was he had come looking for.
Leaving his horse out of sight he crept forward, moving on hands and knees, until he could lie in the shelter of a large rock and stare down on the plain below.
The sun was dipping towards the horizon now, and the scene was partly illuminated by its red rays and partly by scattered campfires. By that mixed light he could see the Army Corps of Engineers’ camp spread out beneath him: a series of tents grouped in the centre surrounded by a cleared area of ground. Perhaps a hundred men were moving purposefully back and forth. On one side of the camp the horses had been corralled together in a makeshift stockade. On the other were the balloons.
The sight took Sherlock’s breath away. There were perhaps ten or twelve of the things spread across an area the size of a rugby pitch. Some of them looked like massive versions of the kind of baggy jellyfish that Sherlock remembered seeing from trips to the coast when he was younger, while others had been fully inflated into glossy spheres which gleamed in the waning light of the sun. Ropes and swathes of the same material – varnished silk, Sherlock recalled from his meeting with the Graf von Zeppelin on the SS Scotia – attached them to baskets beneath, and they were being inflated by pipes that led away from them to carts filled with gleaming copper tanks. The tanks were producing hydrogen, Sherlock remembered, from a combination of sulphuric acid and iron filings.
Thinking of the Graf von Zeppelin, Sherlock scanned the camp looking for his upright, Germanic figure. He had come across to America to talk about the military applications of balloons. It would be unusual if he wasn’t here.
The figures moving around were too small for Sherlock to make out faces, but he thought he saw a bearded man in a different uniform from the rest standing near the balloons, watching with fascination as they were being filled.
The campfires were being kept well away from the balloons, Sherlock noticed. That was a good idea – hydrogen was highly inflammable, he remembered from school. On the other hand, hundreds of metal spheres that looked like cannonballs but were almost certainly explosive devices were piled up near them. And in an hour or two, if the wind was still in the right direction, the balloons would be released, each with its own aeronaut, and they would drift silently across the desolate landscape towards the place where Duke Balthassar’s Army was encamped. And then there would be death and devastation on a scale that made Sherlock feel sick.
He had to stop it. He had to. He’d seen too much death in his life already. If he could stop people from dying then he would.
Hydrogen. Inflammable. The answer was there, but how was he going to do anything about it? If he tried to sneak down and set fire to the balloons then he would be caught and probably shot as a Confederate