The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (46 page)

“Here we are,” the colonel said.

He stopped at the foot of a rope ladder leading to the forward compartment of the gondola.

He motioned for me to go up. “I’ll leave you here. They don’t want extra weight. They’re expecting you.”

We snapped off a simultaneous salute to each other.

He said, “When you’ve finished, would you care to join me at my office to watch the launch?”

“Of course, Colonel,” I said.

And I went up the ladder into the major’s command area.

The place felt unfinished, with the web of aluminum braces visible overhead and along stretches of the lower walls. The focal working parts were prominent panels under the windows at the front and along the sides, holding gauges and instruments for heading and for incline, for altitude and for speed, for hydrogen pressure and for fuel level, and standing before the panels were wheels and levers for rudder and elevator and ballast.

The place bustled with half a dozen men in leather jackets and heavy scarves doing their pre-flight checks. In the midst of them was Dettmer with a clipboard in his hand, speaking intensely with one of his officers.

I waited.

I was prepared to insert myself into his awareness. But I felt the need to seem casual about all this, to plausibly portray a benign observer. I had a few minutes of margin. Ideally I’d plant the bomb somewhat nearer its detonation to minimize the possibility of its being discovered in time to disarm it.

Another officer approached the two men, and his arrival drew Dettmer’s eyes up and over to me. Immediately he excused himself and stepped my way.

He saluted.

“No need for that, Major,” I said. “This is your domain.”

His chest lifted and he smiled, grateful for the sign of respect.

I wished I could order him to use the parachute they’d put on board for Stockman, if something were to happen.

But he was a dead man.

All these men around me—I’d roughly parsed them as executive officer and helmsman, navigation officer and chief engineer and telegraph operator—these were all dedicated professional soldiers in obedient service to their country, and all of them were dead men if I did my obedient service to my own country and to my country’s ally. As was the watch officer a dead man, whom Dettmer now temporarily nodded off the ship to execute his duties with the ground crew. I was there to compensate for his weight.

“How long do I have on board?” I asked.

Dettmer looked at his clipboard. He looked at his own watch, which he drew from his tunic pocket on a dull gold chain. “Half an hour certainly. Perhaps more. We can wait till the weighing off to reboard the watch officer.”

I said, “My official duty is to check on our special bomb. But I’d like to see some of the ship.”

Dettmer nodded and went immediately thoughtful. I presumed he was trying to think of someone to spare as my guide.

“I know your men are busy,” I said. “After being led to the bomb rack for inspection, I’d need only a little orientation from someone. You wouldn’t mind my respectfully and carefully looking around on my own, would you?”

“No sir,” he said. “Of course not.”

He summoned one of the other officers nearby.

He introduced Lieutenant Schmidt, his telegraph operator, a lanky young man with hollowed cheeks and calloused hands, the perfect image of a rube off a farm in southern Illinois, down where you couldn’t tell the difference between Illinois and Kentucky.

“This way, sir,” he said.

He stepped to the aluminum ladder in the middle of the floor and I followed.

We climbed through the gondola roof and into the open air for a few steps, the smell of hydrogen suddenly strong around us, and then into the hull.

We emerged on the wood slat floor of the keel walkway. It stretched the length of the airship within a tight A-frame of aluminum girders, but this end of the ship was in darkness at the moment, with only swatches of self-luminous paint defining the path. The lieutenant switched on a tungsten flashlight.

“We won’t have light in here till we are under way,” he said. “The generator.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You would be astonished,” he said, “how carefully insulated all the electrical devices are.”

He led on, heading aft. He shined his light here and there, identifying whatever his beam fell upon, trying to be a proper tour guide: the vast flanks of the gas cells, covered in goldbeater’s skin to prevent leaks; the wiring and the cables, for rudder controls and engine telegraph and speaking tubes; the containers for ballast, full of water laced with alcohol to keep it from freezing at ten thousand feet. He even pointed out the tools and spare parts and the rigging ropes. He loved his airship, this apparent rube of a Lieutenant Schmidt, who was not such a rube after all. He had a mechanical turn of mind.

I tried to ignore him.

I had my own agenda.

I took most careful note for myself of the eighty-gallon aluminum fuel tanks clustered like cave-growing mushrooms along the walkway, their flammable contents piped down to the Maybach engines below, kept away from any engine spark.

Behind these tanks would be a fine place to deposit my dispatch bag and its bomb.

We were in a dark stretch. The lieutenant kept his light forward. I could hear a faint ticking.

It was my own watch.

But I was very aware of the ticking I could not hear.

And now there was some daylight ahead, coming from the floor.

We approached, and the defile of the walkway opened up, the planking vectoring around an open keel hatch.

In the upspill of light I took my watch from my pocket and checked the time. Twenty-five minutes after four.

“We take on supplies here,” Lieutenant Schmidt said.

The hatch also had another function. This was clear to me. Directly over the opening was an array of iron hooks welded into a horizontal level of girders. The hooks were within easy reach, outward and upward, just above one’s head. This was where a man could hang the break-cord tether of his Paulus parachute and then leap through the hatch. The tether was attached to the top of the silk canopy of his chute, which was folded with its lines into the rucksack on his back, the top of which was closed by another break cord. His plunging body-weight reached the end of the tether, which grabbed at his parachute, which broke through the top of the rucksack and billowed open and snapped the tether. And the leaper was free and floating. He escaped. He did his duty as best he could and then he lived.

And yet all the men on LZ 78 had refused parachutes.

I could understand why.

They were brave and they were dedicated and they were professional. They were soldiers. To make their way here and do this thing successfully, they would have to abandon their ship early in its distress. Which they refused to do.

I was killing men like this.

But Albert was not a man like this.

He’d insisted on being one of them to share their glory, but he’d also insisted on a way to escape them if they were to die.

At last I realized it would be easy for me to kill Albert at the end of this night.

A bullet in his head.

Simple.

At my hip, the bomb ticked on.

I’d stopped to ponder all this.

The lieutenant drew near.

I was staring at the array of hooks.

“You know what that’s for?” he asked.

“I do,” I said.

“This is where they are supposed to be kept,” he said, and he flashed his light into a rack in the dimness beyond the hatch.

He snapped his head back.

He’d clearly expected the parachute storage rack to be empty, a testament to the crew’s scorn for any plan to abandon their ship.

But a single, rucksack-shaped bundle lay on one of the shelves.

Albert’s.

And then Lieutenant Schmidt surprised me a little. He was a shrewdly practical man, as guys stupidly mistaken for rubes often were.

“Someday,” he said. “They will make a parachute that needs no anchoring in the ship. It will be light and easily worn and you can simply jump. Even at the very last moment, when you have done all that you can do. You will jump from wherever you are and deploy your own canopy.”

Briefly—not as Klaus von Wolfinger, not as America’s secret service agent, not even as the Cobb who wrote news stories—but briefly, as one guy hearing another guy and knowing what he means, I thought to say to him,
May you still be flying when they start issuing those.

But the words snagged on a goddamn irony in my head, and instead I said, “We should see the bomb rack. Time is growing short.”

“Sorry, sir,” Lieutenant Schmidt said, and he led me farther, to mid-ship and another open hatch, a large one, with the walkway skirting it.

Over this opening, however, the cross girders supported a tenement-garden-size release mechanism. The bombs bloomed in neat rows, fins unfurled, awaiting their headlong harvest.

Beneath them, crouched low and leaning head and shoulders over the hatch opening, was an officer in the uniform common to the command gondola.

Below him was the watch officer I’d displaced.

I did not hear the words they exchanged but the watch officer saw me in the shadows and nodded the crouching officer’s attention toward me. The man turned his head and leaped to his feet. He saluted.

I returned it.

“Sir,” he said. “Lieutenant Kreyder, bombing officer of LZ 78, awaits your command, sir.”

“At ease, Lieutenant,” I said.

“Thank you, sir,” he said, and he spread his legs a little and clasped his hands behind his back.

“That’s not enough at ease, Lieutenant,” I said. I was out of character now. Too soft. I was going a little out of my mind meeting and naming these men one by one.

“Sir,” he said. “It’s not often I have the honor of showing a colonel my little garden.”

He was repressing a smile. He was seeking my permission to laugh a little with me.

I wanted to tell him that he and I had the same image of his bombs.

I wanted to have a little laugh with him.

This was no way to fight a war. For either of us.

This all had to stop, this saluting and naming and talking together.

I had to think about the people in London who were, at this very moment, dressing for the theater. Not soldiers at all.

I knew I had to make quick work of this phony rationale for standing inside the LZ 78.

I had to plant my bomb and walk away as quickly now as possible.

56

So this officer pointed out Albert’s bomb, hanging with the others. It looked different from the rest only in subtle ways. The shape of its striking point, the angle of its fins, the sheen of its metal body.

I saw these things and I let them go.

The lieutenant spoke reassuringly on and on to this special colonel who was taking a special interest in this special bomb. “We will drop no others until that one has done its work,” he said. “We have studied the target area carefully, the navigation officer and the commander and I. We have flown over this district before. It is relatively well lit even when it is farther down our route. But tonight we will go straight there.”

I backed away. “That’s enough, Lieutenant. I am satisfied. Thank you.”

He was beginning to salute, but I turned away from him.

The rube was still near me.

I said to him, “I will examine the ship on my own for a while, as your commander mentioned.”

“Yes sir,” he said.

“You can return to your post now.”

His hand came forward. He was offering his tungsten flashlight.

I had my own in my pocket. But I needed to continue acting like Wolfinger, who would have made no such preparation.

The lieutenant said, “I know this ship like the back of my hand.”

The rube figured he’d read my thoughts in my brief moment of hesitation. Figured I’d give a damn about his finding his way in the dark.

I took his flashlight.

What matter did it make now if I dropped out of character to let this boy think Colonel Wolfinger would care about his welfare? So I said, “Thank you.”

He straightened and lifted his hand into a salute and he held it there.

I waved it off. “Go,” I said.

“Sir,” he said, and he vanished into the dark of the walkway.

I shifted the flashlight to my left hand and put my right hand beneath the dispatch case and cupped it and drew it against my hip.

I gave the lieutenant time to distance himself from me along the walkway.

I switched the flashlight on, and I headed forward. My destination was the mushroom garden of fuel tanks feeding the engine at the rear of the command gondola.

But moving through the dark I could not stop thinking about these good Germans all around me.