The Empire of Night

55

I leaned into the Torpedo and lifted the dispatch case from the floor of the tonneau. I stepped out, holding it close. I opened the passenger door and laid it gently on the seat.

Inside the case was the ticking of the clock, but I could not hear it. The ticking was muffled into silence by the cotton wool and the tin.

I looked at my Waltham.

It was five minutes to four.

The matter of Stockman and my mother had taken too much time.

I started the engine and drove away fast.

At the air base I was tempted, because of the time, to drive up to the place where the colonel’s driver had parked this morning. But if something went wrong, if the bomb went off with the Zepp still on the ground — by a delayed takeoff perhaps — I wanted the car in a place away, a place I could run to and not have to throttle and spark and crank while phosgene rolled immediately over me.

So I stopped in a stand of birch trees near the entrance to the air base grounds, just off the road to Uckendorf. There was no security out here and the camouflaged Torpedo was inconspicuous among the trees.

I hung the bag over my shoulder and walked away from the Torpedo, taking my watch out to see the time and hearing it tick — the Waltham had a loud tick, muffled by my watch pocket but audible in the open air — and I thought of the ticking in the bag, and it was five minutes past four o’clock.

I hustled on, wanting to jog the half mile to the hangar area, but slowing myself to a brisk walk for the sake of the bomb under my arm, its delicate wired connections. I reached the administrative building in a little less than ten minutes.

Ziegler was in his outer office, on his feet, and he spun to me, strode to me at once. “Good,” he said. “Come.”

I followed him out of the administrative building and into the hangar through the same side door we’d used this morning.

LZ 78 loomed instantly above me. And against me, its gray vastness feeling like a palpable weight upon my eyes, my face, my chest. It staggered me, made me work hard to steady myself on my feet. It made the thing hanging from my shoulder feel dangerous only to myself.

“The commander is forward,” Ziegler said.

I dragged my body away, moved my legs, followed Ziegler along the length of the ship, the upwind doors wide open now, the sky going pale white from a thin spew of clouds, a breeze funneling into the hangar and into my face.

The breeze made me think: The Torpedo was well away from here, but it was downwind. Gas released in the launching zone would roll my way. I would have to run fast, if it came to that. I would have to start the car fast.

But if the flight went off on time, I would surely have time to get away.

Where exactly would LZ 78 be at seven minutes past five?

“Colonel,” I said, “are we still on schedule for a five o’clock launch?”

“From what I gather,” he said.

“Good,” I said.

All along the airship’s length there was the bustle of ground crew, in gray shirt sleeves and soft caps, unfurling the handling lines.

The lines were slack. The hangar ballast was still on board.

We reached the control cabin, a long, boat-shaped, enclosed gondola suspended a man’s body-length beneath the great gas-packed hull. An exposed aluminum ladder went up from the gondola and into the keel walkway.

“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.