Havoc

May 1937

Alone in his cabin for the past three days, the madman rocked gently on his narrow bunk, his eyes fixed on the dull sheen of his personal safe while fever sent alternating currents of heat and cold through his body. He was unaware of the great ship’s passage across the Atlantic, the rhythm of her four engines turning the large propellers, the spectacular service offered by the crew, or even the cycles of day and night. It took all his mental ability just to keep his focus on the small safe.

Since leaving Europe, he’d ventured from his cabin only late at night to use one of the communal washrooms. Even on these furtive forays he’d hurry back to his room if he heard other passengers stirring or crewmembers attending their duties. On the first night of the trip and during the following day, a steward would knock on his door, inquiring about his needs, asking if he wanted tea, a cocktail, or perhaps some soda crackers to settle his stomach if the ship’s motion was making him ill. The passenger had refused everything, struggling to maintain a patina of civility. But when the waiter returned to ask if the passenger wanted dinner brought to him on the second night, the man in cabin 8a flew into a rage, cursing the hapless steward in a mix of English, Greek, and an African dialect he’d picked up in the preceding months.

As the third day slid toward an overcast evening, what little control he’d had over his mind slipped further. He didn’t care. He was almost home. Hours now, not days or weeks. He’d beat them all. Him. Alone.

His was an inside cabin and lacked a window. A lamp was bolted above the tiny desk, and lights in decorative sconces shone down on the bunk beds. Everything was made of polished aluminum, with holes punched through the metal to give the space a futuristic appearance, as if he were on a rocket ship out of Verne or Wells. The safe had been manhandled into the cabin’s only empty corner by a steward who’d waited a beat too long for a tip the passenger couldn’t afford. While the ship was at only half capacity on its seasonal maiden trip, the tickets were some of the most expensive ever for a transatlantic voyage.

Had he not felt the press of time or been certain that those chasing him were closing in, he would have found a cheaper way back to the United States. But then maybe taking this ship had been the most brilliant coup of all. The people trying to catch him would never suspect he would use their own flagship on the last leg of his journey home.

He reached across to touch the safe, feel its cool outline under his shaking fingers, content in the knowledge that a life’s ambition was locked within. He shivered, from fever or exhilaration he neither knew nor cared. Bolted to the wall across the cabin was a small mirror. He looked at himself, avoiding his eyes, for he was not ready to face what lurked behind them. His hair was long and unkempt, shot with gray that had not been there two months ago. Clumps of it had fallen out in the past few weeks, and as he ran his hand across his scalp he could feel fine strands pull free and snag in the serrations at the end of his cracked fingernails. The skin on his face hung in folds as though it had been fitted for a larger skull. His beard had once been a thing of pride, a distinctive trademark of well-manicured whiskers. Now it resembled the down of a molting chick.

He bared his teeth at the mirror, more grimace than smile. His gums were raw and red. He assumed they bled because he hadn’t eaten a proper meal since leaving his New Jersey home.

His body too had paid a heavy price. While he had never been a robust man, he had lost so much weight he could feel the sharp ends of his bones poke against his skin every time he moved. His hands shook constantly and his head swayed as if it had become a burden to the atrophied muscles of his neck.

The excited voice of a young girl pierced the thin cabin door. “Hurry, Walter. We are approaching New York City. I want a good place on the observation deck.”

About time, the man thought. He checked his watch. It was three in the afternoon. They should have arrived nine hours ago.

Against his better judgment, he decided to venture from his cabin. He needed to confirm with his own eyes that he was almost home. Then he would return to his tiny cabin and wait for the ship to dock.

He staggered to the door. In the narrow hallway, a girl of maybe twelve waited for her brother to finish lacing his shoes. She gasped when she saw him, an involuntary gesture that filled her lungs and drained the blood from her face. Without turning her startled eyes from him, she reached for her brother’s shoulder and yanked him away. His protests died on his lips when he spotted the deranged passenger. They ran around the corner in the direction of the promenade deck, the girl’s skirt flaring above her coltish knees.

The innocent encounter made the passenger’s stomach give a wet lurch of protest. Acid scalded the back of his throat. He thrust his nausea aside and closed his cabin door to make his way down the starboard-side staircase. A few idle crewmen and a lone passenger were pressed against the observation window on B deck. Behind them was the crew’s toilet, and just as he reached the window a ship’s officer stepped from within followed by an unsettling stench. It smelled no worse, or perhaps even a bit better, than the passenger himself. He hadn’t washed his clothes or his body since before fleeing Cairo.

Placing his hands on the sill, he could feel the mild trembling of the engines through the metal. He pressed his face close to the glass and watched as Manhattan’s impressive skyline emerged from behind dark storm clouds.

The shipping line prided itself on their perfect safety record, and as he watched the city come into focus, he allowed a ghost of a smile to pull at the corners of his mouth. As promised, the voyage from Germany had been uneventful and soon the flagship of the Deutsche Zeppelin Reederei would float gently to her mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey.

A hole in the overcast opened, allowing bright sunlight to form a corona around the giant airship Hindenburg. Her shadow spread like a stain across the artificial canyons of midtown, darkening all but the towering Empire State Building. The colossal zeppelin, larger than most ocean liners and four times as fast, had made the crossing in a little over three days, her four Mercedes diesels pushing the 804-foot behemoth through the sky at a surprisingly smooth eighty knots.

The passenger caught a glimpse of people atop the Empire State Building’s observation deck waving at the great airship, and for a giddy moment he felt the urge to wave back, an impulse that made him believe that perhaps he could once again connect with humanity after his ordeal.

Instead he turned on his heel and rushed back to his cabin, his breath coming in chopping gulps until he assured himself that the safe was still locked. His body was bathed in an oily sheen of sour sweat. He took his seat on the bunk and began to rock again.

He planned on remaining like that as the airship powered down Long Island Sound, as her captain, Max Pruss, sought a window in the stormy weather to bring his charge to the naval station at Lakehurst. Yet just before five someone knocked on his door. He didn’t recognize the knock. The stewards had been timid about interrupting him, respectful, if a little puzzled by his appearance and attitude. This was the knock of authority, a single hard rap that brought a fresh wave of sweat from his pores.

“What do you want?” His voice was hoarse from lack of use.

“Herr Bowie, my name is Gunther Bauer. I am a ship’s officer. May I have a word?”

Chester Bowie’s eyes darted around his tiny cabin. He knew he was cornered, but he could not help but search for a way out. He’d almost made it. A few more hours and he’d be safely on the ground and away from these Nazis, but somehow they’d learned his identity. Not that they wanted him. He was no longer of consequence. It was what was inside the safe that drove them.

He had come too far to see it end now. Only one course was open to him and he felt nothing but mild irritation at what he had to do.

“Of course,” Chester said. “One moment.”

“The officers and crew are worried that you might have a negative impression of our company,” Bauer said from the other side of the closed door, his English passable but stiff, his tone mild. Chester wasn’t fooled. “I have some gifts,” the German continued, “pens and stationery for you as souvenirs of your flight.”

“Just leave them,” Bowie said as he made ready, knowing the next words and the next few seconds were critical.

“I would prefer to give them to you personal—”

That was all he needed to hear. They wanted into his cabin to steal the safe. Even as the last word hung unfinished in the air, Chester Bowie used what little strength the fever had left him to wrench open the sliding door and grab the German by the lapels of his black uniform jacket. He ignored the flurry of papers that spilled from Bauer’s hands, and the sheaf of pens that fell to the deck, and yanked the officer into the cabin.

Bauer’s only attempt at defense was a startled grunt. Bowie smashed him into the little ladder that allowed access to the upper bunk bed. And as the officer began to fall Bowie leapt on his back. He jammed his knee into the hollow at the base of Bauer’s head. When they hit the deck their combined weight snapped the German’s fourth and fifth cervical vertebra hard enough to sever the spinal cord. Bauer went limp and his body settled, expelling his final breath.

Bowie closed the door. They would never let him off the zeppelin. Even though he’d lost them when he fled Africa, he should have known they’d somehow pick up his trail again. He’d been so clever by traveling right into the heart of the beast and taking their own ship home. No one could have foreseen him doing that. But somehow they had. They were unholy. Like all-seeing Gorgons who knew the routes of man.

The body took up nearly the entire floor. Chester had to step over it to grab a notebook he’d left on the writing desk. He picked up one of the pens Bauer had dropped. He had no idea how long it would be before the captain sent someone else to get the safe. No, Chester realized, next time there would be many of them, too many of them.

He wrote quickly, the pen racing across pages as if it knew what had to be written and only needed Bowie to hold nib to paper. He watched his hand flowing back and forth, not fully conscious of the words it was writing. In fifteen minutes he’d filled eight pages with tight script he could barely read. No one came, so he filled another ten, fleshing out his story as best he could remember it. He was sure this would be his last will and testament, all that remained of a life’s obsession — these words and the sample in the safe. But it was enough. He had tread in the footsteps of emperors. How many men could say they’d achieved that?

When he felt his hand had written enough, he dialed the safe’s combination and stuffed the pages inside, taking what he knew would be his last look at the sample he’d brought back from Africa. It resembled a cannonball, a perfectly round sphere he’d crafted with the help of a blacksmith in Khartoum. He closed the safe and wrote a name along with a cryptic message on the stiff cover of his notebook. He tore the remaining blank pages from the book’s spiral binding, and using the lace from his left boot he threaded the spiral and note to the safe’s handle. There was nothing else he could do but pray that whoever found the safe would deliver it to the addressee.

There was no need to write where the man lived. Everyone knew how to find him.

Chester Bowie rolled the corpse of Gunther Bauer under the bottom bunk, trying hard not to notice how the head flexed unnaturally on the broken stalk of his neck. Then he began to shove the safe from its corner, straining at first but seized with such desperation he quickly skidded it across the carpet. He opened the cabin door, peered up and down the hallway, and then shoved the hundred-pound safe toward the stairwell to B deck.

So far no one had spotted him, but downstairs he knew passengers and crew would be watching the New Jersey coastline scroll below the observation windows.

“May I help you with that, sir?”

Bowie froze. The voice came from behind him and he recognized it. From where? His mind raced. Cairo? Khartoum? Somewhere in the jungle? He whirled, ready to fight. Standing before him was the earnest young steward he’d yelled at on the second day of the crossing.

Werner Franz did everything in his power not to recoil when he saw the crazed look in Bowie’s eyes, the feral countenance of a cornered rat. While only fourteen, Werner considered himself an experienced airshipman and no lunatic passenger would crack his veneer of professionalism. “May I help you with that?”

“Yeah, er, yes, thank you,” Chester stammered. Surely this mere boy wasn’t the second wave of Nazis sent to steal the safe. The captain would send mechanics and other officers, big men who’d beat him and hide the safe until tonight’s return flight to Frankfurt.

“I overheard the captain,” Werner said earnestly as he began pulling at the safe. “The weather’s cleared enough for us to make a run for Lakehurst. With luck we’ll land a bit after seven. I guess you want to be the first off the ship, Herr Bowie?”

“Er, yes, that’s right. I have people waiting for me.”

“May I ask what is in the safe? The other stewards think you carry gemstones to a New York jeweler.”

“I, ah, no. These are, ah, papers for, ah, an important scientist.” Jesus! Why had he said that? The boy could just look at the note tied to the handle to see who the safe was intended for. He should have gone with the story the steward had given him.

“I see.” Clearly Werner Franz didn’t believe him, and for that Chester was thankful. He’d traveled five thousand miles and almost given away his secret in the final minutes.

Together they dragged the safe down the stairway, its weight making the light aluminum steps vibrate with every tread they descended.

“We will leave it out of the way,” Werner said and dragged the safe into the observation room. “Crewmen need to lower the retractable gangways when we land, and we can’t have them tripping over your safe.”

“This is fine,” Chester said, panting from the exertion. His face had blanched under his tropical tan and his legs trembled.

“I will help you with your safe when we land,” Werner offered.

Bowie said nothing and waved the boy away so he could sit back against the railing protecting the outwardly angled observation windows. In a moment his heart had slowed.

The airship was flying due south and it seemed that every passenger and crewman not on duty crowded the port windows. The starboard observation room was thankfully empty. Without wasting any more time, Chester braced his still-shaky legs and lifted the safe from the floor. Muscles in his back strained under the load and he heard more than felt some tear. Yet he did not drop his burden. He lifted it higher, pressing it against the wall for leverage until he had it balanced atop the railing.

Below the zeppelin, the ground was an endless sea of pine trees and sand broken only occasionally by lonely rutted roads. They crossed over a stretch of cultivated land with a farmhouse situated along the perimeter. The barn was dilapidated and the tractors and machinery looked like toys.

The windows in the opulent promenade on A deck could open but those on B deck were fixed in place. Chester leaned across the railing, his hands tight around the teetering safe, and waited for the right moment. The Hindenburg cruised at a thousand feet as she plowed through the overcast sky. Beyond the protective bulk of the airship’s hull, rain fell in gusting curtains. Now that Bowie was ready, the airship continued over desolate stretches of pine. From above, the canopy of trees was an impenetrable mass. His whole body shook with frustration. At any moment a passenger or crewman would come by and his plan would be ruined. From above on the A deck promenade he heard someone play a few notes on the lightweight Bluthner baby grand piano.

There!

Another farmhouse appeared at the edge of the forest. Even from this height Bowie could see the place was run-down. The shingle roof sagged in the middle like the swayback of an old horse, while the porch seemed in danger of collapse. Yet there was light in the windows, and a trail of smoke caught the breeze at the top of the chimney and smeared across the landscape. The nearby barn appeared much newer.

The flight path would take the Hindenburg right along the edge of a cleared field a quarter mile south of the farmyard. With luck the farmer would find the safe before whatever crop he grew overwhelmed the pasture.

Chester had to do nothing more than let go of the safe. It fell through the angled window with a crash that was quickly swallowed by the roar of wind whipping into the airship. Bowie hadn’t been prepared for the blast of rain-soaked air. He staggered back from the rail, then whirled away, running back up to his cabin just as the door to the crew’s mess opened. He was trailed by angry German voices but no one had seen what he’d done.

Unfortunately, Chester Bowie also couldn’t see the safe plummet to the ground. A hundred feet before it plowed into the sandy soil, the note he had so laboriously tied to the handle was stripped away. It stayed aloft in the stormy air for nearly an hour and by then it was shredded to confetti and spread across two counties.

Rain cut forking trails along the gum rubber poncho as drops pooled and poured across the fabric. For nearly eighteen hours the lone figure had remained hidden under its folds, unmoving and nearly unblinking. From his perch atop a hangar he had an unobstructed view of the landing field a half mile away and the metal framework of the mooring mast. From here it looked remarkably like a miniature Eiffel Tower.

His target was twelve hours late, a bit of irony since his hurried orders had forced him to rush into position.

Moving so as not to change the outline of the weatherproof poncho, he brought his rifle up to his eye. The scope was a trophy he’d taken from a sniper during the Great War. He’d adapted it to every rifle he’d ever used. He stared through the optics, centering the crosshairs on the milling throng of the landing crew. They’d just returned to the field after a brief downpour. He estimated there were more than two hundred of them, but such a number was needed to manhandle the giant airship in the face of even a gentle breeze. He let the reticle linger on individuals for a moment before moving on. He spotted the airfield’s commander, Charles Rosendahl. The man next to him had to be Willy von Meister, the Zeppelin Company’s American representative. Despite the occasional gusts, the sniper could have dropped either man with a shot through whichever eye he chose. A ways off were a radio journalist and a cameraman, both of them checking equipment as everyone waited for the Hindenburg’s late arrival.

He was about to lower the heavy rifle when everyone on the ground turned at once, raising an arm skyward in what almost resembled the Nazi salute. The sniper shifted a fraction. Out of the pewter sky came the Hindenburg.

Distance could not diminish the size of the airship. It was absolutely enormous, a defiant symbol of a resurgent Germany. She was sleek, like a torpedo, with stabilizers and rudders larger than the wings of a bomber. At its widest the zeppelin was one hundred and thirty-five feet in diameter, and inside her rigid frame of duralumin struts were gas cells containing seven million cubic feet of explosive hydrogen. Two-story-tall swastikas adorned her rudders and pale smoke trailed from her four diesel engines.

As the airship approached it grew in size, blotting out a larger and larger slab of the sky. Her skin was doped a reflective silver that managed to glisten even in the stormy weather. The Hindenburg passed directly over the naval air station at about six hundred and fifty feet. The sniper watched passengers inside the accommodation section of the ship leaning out the windows and trying to shout to family on the ground. It took fifteen minutes for the leviathan to circle back around for her final approach from the west. A quarter mile from the mooring mast the engines suddenly screamed at full reverse power to slow the airship, and moments later three tumbling avalanches of ballast water spilled from beneath the hull to correct a slight weight imbalance.

Someone in the hangar below had rigged a speaker so the sniper could hear what the radio announcer was saying as the airship made its final approach. The voice was high-pitched and excited.

“Well here it comes, ladies and gentlemen, we’re out now, outside of the hangar, and what a great sight it is, a truly one, it’s a marvelous sight. It’s coming down out of the sky pointed towards us and towards the mooring mast.”

The gunman pulled his rifle — a.375 Nitro Express more befitting an African big game hunt than a sniper — to his shoulder and waited. The first of the heavy mooring lines was dropped from the bow. He scoped the windows one more time. Then came the second mooring rope as ground workers began to haul the ship to the mast. They looked like ants trying to drag a reluctant elephant.

“It’s practically standing still now,” the announcer said, growing more animated as he described the scene. “They’ve dropped ropes out of the nose of the ship and it’s been taken ahold of down on the field by a number of men….”

By moving the rifle barrel an inch the sniper found his target.

“It’s starting to rain again. The rain has slacked up a little bit….”

The bullets in the rifle were of his own manufacture. He’d had only a day and a night to construct them and had only fired two as a test at a deserted gravel pit. Both had worked as he’d designed, but he still felt apprehension that they would fail to do the job he’d been assigned.

Herb Morrison’s voice on the speaker was reaching a fevered pitch as he described the landing. “…the back motors of the ship are just holding it, just enough to keep it from…”

The rifle cracked. The recoil was a brutal punch to the shoulder. At two thousand feet per second the bullet took one point two seconds to reach its target. In that sliver of time a coating around the special slug burned away, revealing a white-hot cinder of burning magnesium. Unlike a tracer round, which burned all along its trajectory, the incendiary core of this round only showed in the last instant before it hit.

Hydrogen needs air to burn. A random spark could not have ignited it within the airship’s enormous gasbags. Only when hydrogen was released to mix in the atmosphere could something like this round cause an explosion. But the bullet wasn’t meant to ignite the gas. At least not directly.

The sniper had fired along the spine of the Hindenburg. The intense heat of the bullet scored the zeppelin’s doped skin as it traveled down the length of the airship. By the time it reached the tail fin, it had lost enough velocity to hit the dirigible and lodge into the duralumin frame. Just as the magnesium burned itself out, the waterproof paint, a combination of nitrocellulose and aluminum powder, began to smolder. The doping agent on the cotton canvas skin was in fact a highly combustible mixture commonly used as fuel in solid rockets. The smoldering turned into open flame that burned through the skin and sent flaming bits of cloth onto a gasbag. The fire quickly holed the bag and allowed a gush of hydrogen to escape into the growing inferno.

Herb Morrison’s voice turned into a horrified shriek. “…it burst into flame! It burst into flame and it’s falling, it’s fire, watch it, watch it, get out of the way!”

The sky seemed to go black, as if all the light at the airfield had been sucked into the explosion above the airship. The stately approach of the Hindenburg turned into frantic seconds as time telescoped.

“…it’s fire and it’s rising,” Morrison cried. “It’s rising terrible, oh my God, what do I see? It’s burning, bursting into flame and it’s falling on the mooring mast and all the folks agree this is terrible. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world. The flames are rising, oh, four or five hundred feet into the sky.”

For seconds the ship hung in the air as the intense heat warped and melted her skeleton. Her outer skin rippled with the concussion, then burned away. The roar of burning gas and the intense heat was like standing at the open door of a blast furnace. She fell stern first, panicked ground workers racing from under her bulk. One of them wasn’t fast enough and was engulfed in wreckage as the zeppelin crashed to the earth.

Inside his cabin on A deck Chester Bowie felt the ship lurch as her stern lost buoyancy. He heard screams from the observation lounge and the sound of tumbling furniture as the airship dropped from the sky. The ceiling above suddenly flashed red-orange as the hydrogen exploded above him. The ship dropped further, the thunder of burning gas overriding the terrible screams of twisting metal as her frame collapsed. He remained on his bed.

At first he thought he’d just smile at the irony of it all, but he found himself laughing instead. He knew this was no accident. The Germans were willing to sacrifice their own dirigible to deny the United States gaining possession of what he’d found. They’d chased him halfway around the globe, sabotaged the Hindenburg to stop him, and still he was one step ahead. Chester opened his mouth wider, laughing even harder, maniacal now. It was just too funny.

The heat hit him then, a solid wall preceding another gush of flame. He died in an instant, hearing his own laughter above the sound of the fire that consumed him.

The sniper watched for a second longer as the great airship plummeted, its back broken when the bow slammed into the ground. Smoke and flame licked the heavens as the carcass melted, its skeleton bowing under the thermal onslaught and then collapsing into a pile of melted girders and burning flesh.

“It’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. The smoke and it’s flame now and the frame is crashing, not quite to the mooring mast…” Morrison’s voice became a strident, evocative sob that still echoes today. “Oh, the humanity…”