The Empire of Night

57

I sat back on my heels.

I wanted to figure him out.

But I didn’t have time.

I was down to my last fifteen minutes or so before I’d have to get off the Zepp.

I had no bomb.

I thought: I’m sitting inside one. I was surrounded by two million cubic feet of explosively flammable hydrogen.

But how could I both detonate it and escape it? Especially since the explosion would also instantly release a tempest of poison gas.

Was I ready to die for tonight’s theater crowd in London?

A reflex voice in me cried yes. Faintly though, coming through a welter in my head. I knew the answer would be louder and clearer if it was Broadway. If it was my own country. Or if my mother was playing Hamlet at the Duke of York’s.

But I had to believe that even tonight I’d be dying for more. I’d die for a chance at exposing and discrediting poison aerial attacks themselves.

Seemed like a good cause.

But no. I wasn’t ready for that. Not the dying part. I had to work hard now to try to have it both ways.

Which made me think of Albert’s plan.

His parachute.

I had a way to survive if I could figure out how to blow up the LZ 78 while it was in the air.

But the how had to include a long enough fuse.

First things first.

A few hours before takeoff, Dettmer had a man subtracted from his ship. For this, he’d be thinking to take things on board — compensating ballast — not off. Maybe that’s why the parachute was still sitting there. But I couldn’t depend on it remaining. I needed to secure the parachute.

I stood up and closed the lid on the tin box and picked it up with me. As if it were still useful. Without something to serve as a blasting cap, the dynamite wouldn’t blow. Not till the airship did. Still, by reflex, I kept the box. I had few enough resources. It was all I had. Something might come to mind.

I opened the dispatch case and slid it back in.

I shined my light and strode forward.

At least for now I could get around the ship without anyone’s close scrutiny. A Zeppelin had a crew of about twenty. At least half of them were mechanics. They were all with the engines. More than half the rest were presently in the command gondola. Everybody on board had a focused task. That would probably last till the ship was airborne.

A footlight shone ahead.

The hatch was still open.

I arrived.

No one was around.

I took the parachute from the shelf. It was heavy, a good thirty pounds. I put it under my arm.

I skirted the hatch on the walkway and walked forward, keenly aware of the distance I was covering, my distance from the parachute launching hooks and the hatch.

I was instinctively heading for the place I’d targeted when I still thought I had a time bomb: the run of tanks piping fuel forward and downward to the engine compartment of the command gondola.

That was still a volatile spot.

And it was only about a third-base-to-home sprint to the hatch.

I arrived at the fuel tanks and shined my light on them.

I lifted the light to the bloated clouds of hydrogen bags hovering overhead.

I looked back toward the hatch, a distant glow.

And back to the bags.

Gas.

A flame burning low and gas leaking in. The pace of the gas could provide its own fuse.

I had my Luger. For a quick, tight cluster of shots high up in one of the bags above me.

I had matches.

I needed something to burn slow and low.

I didn’t know if my gasp made me clutch the tin box tight against me or if clutching it made me gasp. But I knew there was something inside. Sweetly, it was a thing Erich Müller never thought to render useless.

Cotton wool.

Cotton wool burned slow. Especially compacted tightly.

Of course, the first stroke of a match might ignite the fumes that already scented the air.

Or the contrary problem might assert itself. Cotton wool could burn itself out.

It was all timing. Timing. And I had no idea what the timing might be.

But the ticking in my watch pocket was the only time that counted now and it was reminding me that I needed to act.

I struck out forward along the walkway, moving as fast as I could into the dark with the beam of tungsten before me.

I had to get back to Dettmer and ask permission to stay aboard. He would surely let me fly with them tonight. After all, he’d been prepared for an Englishman to do so. Instead, he’d have a chance to impress the Foreign Office.

He’d want me to watch the takeoff of his airship with him. But I needed to get off his bridge and go to work as soon as possible afterward. For my larger aspiration in this mission, vivid, unmanageable word had to get out. The ball of fire should be seen at Spich, at least distantly. The Zepp and its phosgene had to fall on German soil.

I’d pull the trigger on the LZ 78 soon after takeoff. But long enough after to put jumpable distance between that hatch and the ground.

And then there was the scene from limbo being played out at the Hotel Alten-Forst.

I stopped abruptly, even though I needed to rush. This was a complication that only now reminded me of itself.

Who was Jeremy? What was his intention? He was sitting in Room 200 with a pistol on Stockman and my mother. Or at least he was when I left him. The two men could have been working together. Or they had lately begun to do so. They certainly had the same immediate objective: the gas bombing of London.

But I knew the truth wasn’t simple.

And whatever it was made no difference to my actions in the next half hour or so.

I moved on.

Another hole of light in the floor was growing bright up ahead.

And then I was down the ladder and through the roof of the command gondola.

I landed and found Major Dettmer handing off his clipboard to his executive officer. The cast on the bridge was a little different now. The navigator and the telegraph lieutenant were off to their posts. The helmsman was at the rudder wheel and a junior officer was at the elevator control.

The executive officer crossed before me, caught a glimpse of me, and paused to salute.

“No saluting,” I said. I would put them at their oblivious ease around me. “I am a fly on the wall.”

But I realized I’d just translated an American idiom into German. It sounded odd in my mouth even as I spoke it. “As they say in America,” I quickly added.

The executive officer laughed.

“The place is full of flies,” I said.

He laughed again and Dettmer did too, having drawn near.

“They are all rubes in America, I think,” Dettmer said. Not an exact equivalent of “rube” in German, but close enough.

The executive officer continued on his way and I turned to face Dettmer. “Major,” I said, “may I ask a favor? Not only for myself personally, though it would certainly be that as well, but as a favor to the Foreign Office. We have removed the English amateur from your midst. Please allow me to take his place. Berlin has telegraphed me to ask for a firsthand report on the work the airships do. Particularly, of course, on the night when you deliver this important package.”

As I expected, Dettmer snapped to. He would have saluted, but I lifted my own palm quickly to stop him. He stayed his hand and said, “Of course, sir. I’d be honored.”

I offered him my own hand to shake, and he took it with warmth.

Behind me the executive officer shouted an order to someone below. “Prepare airship march.”

I said, “I will freely explore the ship in flight, if I may have your permission. I want to experience everything. Your Lieutenant Schmidt gave me an excellent tour. And your Lieutenant Kreyder wishes to share more of his important procedures with me.”

“As you wish, Colonel,” Dettmer said. “As you wish. You’ll forgive me if I am preoccupied for the next hour or so.”

“Of course,” I said.

Dettmer’s eyes shifted over my left shoulder.

I looked.

His executive officer was crossing back our way.

“Captain,” Dettmer said to him. “The colonel will fly with us tonight. At weigh off, release the extra ballast. And bring the extra cold gear. Only the takeoff necessities for now.”

“Yes sir,” the captain said, slipping away.

Dettmer looked back to me. “We’d brought these things for the other man. The overalls and the fur coat and the felt overshoes and so forth, the extreme cold weather things, these can wait until we are at a higher altitude. Your flying jacket will immediately make you one of us.”

He laughed at this thought.

Courteous words from Wolfinger came to my mind. A comradely laugh even formed in my throat, ready to employ. I could make myself say or do none of it.

I was getting too close to these boys once again.

Dettmer paid no attention to my unresponsiveness.

He said, “The woolen underclothes you should take time now to put on. To sweat with the rest of us.”

He laughed again, a softer one, this one while searching my face, suddenly afraid he was getting too familiar.

I could manage nothing but blankness for him.

He cut off his laugh.

This was Klaus von Wolfinger’s likely response anyway. So be it.

The executive officer arrived with two contrasting articles of clothing folded one on top of the other, one rough-ribbed wool and one soft-cured leather.

Dettmer said, “You will need to put on the woolen underclothes at once, Colonel. There is privacy in the keel. In the crew space aft.”

I was glad to have a chance to get away to myself.

I began to reach for the clothes.

Dettmer intervened. He said, “But first, please allow me.” He took the leather flying jacket from the captain.

He held it up and spread it open for me.

He said, “You’ll need to remove your pistol, Colonel.”

I hesitated. As myself, and as Wolfinger.

Dettmer picked up on the hesitation. He said, quite respectfully, almost gently, “For the jacket. Of course you will retain your weapon. Though we ourselves carry none, for safety’s sake.”

“I promise not to discharge it, Major,” I said.

He nodded to me.

I undid my pistol belt and laid it at my feet with the dispatch case.

“Thank you, sir,” he said.

The air was cleared.

He lifted the coat a little.

This was a ritual I dreaded now. The bond of a uniform. The bond of personality, of camaraderie. I dared not bond with these men.

I had to focus.

These men were the enemy tonight.

They were the instruments of mass murder.

I made myself smile. I turned my back to him. I slipped the dispatch case off my shoulder and laid it on the floor at my feet.

Dettmer put the jacket on me.

I felt it like a second skin.

That was the danger.

And my mother slipped into my head. The mother she had always been, training her son the way she always had. In and around theaters. This was not a skin upon me. It was a costume. I was playing a role. I was an actor. I was a spy.

I shot my cuffs.

I began to button the jacket. With each button, a flourish of the hand.

I did not even need to turn to Dettmer for this. The gesture was for me. Working on my character.

My qualms were quickly dissipating.

I stopped buttoning about halfway.

Dettmer said, “There. You are now senior officer on the LZ 78.”

I turned to him. I doled out one more faint smile. The smile of a superior officer pleased with his inferior for recognizing the appropriate protocol in an unusual circumstance.

He saluted. He held it.

I saluted him.

“You notice that the fit of your jacket is good,” Dettmer said.

It was, indeed. Nearly perfect. “I do,” I said.

“We’d heard that the Englishman was a larger man.”

Albert was certainly larger than me. I had a flash of that first sight of him outside his castle, towering over my mother, leaning down to buss her on the cheek.

Even more dangerous than to think on these Germans at this moment was to think on my mother.

“We did not expect the jacket to fit him so well,” Dettmer said.

He let that settle in for a moment.

They’d arranged for him never to be one of them. His uniform would not fit.

And then Major Dettmer actually worked up the courage to give Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger a small, conspiratorial wink.

Wolfinger chose to overlook Dettmer’s transgression. I said, with a large dose of duty and only a faint, condescending hint of faux camaraderie, “Things are as they should be.”