The Empire of Night

60

It came from above and from below. The light was muted — the bulbs and their fixtures double-contained in glass — but the hull was illuminated clear enough. Plenty clear enough for me to look far ahead along the walkway and see a figure coming this way.

I glanced back aft to see if I’d soon be surrounded.

No one in that direction.

Back to this figure, advancing rapidly now.

Lieutenant Schmidt. My canny rube.

I dropped the parachute to my side.

He was smiling. He was preparing to salute.

And then he wasn’t. He was looking at the parachute as he approached and he was recognizing it and then he was looking at the box in front of me.

He was maybe thirty feet away now.

He slowed.

It would have been impossible for him to figure out anything close to my plan. But he knew something odd was going on.

He was ten feet from me and he stopped.

I lifted up to full height to stand before him as a far superior officer.

He wavered.

I could have found these things here myself. However odd they were, if their presence in the middle of the walkway was sinister, then surely his first impulse would be that it had nothing to do with me. I was a very high ranking officer in the Deutsches Heer. I had found these suspicious things myself.

The Maybach pounded loudly on.

There was no need to speak to him anyway. I was righteous in my rank, in my place here on the LZ 78.

I motioned him closer.

I pointed at these things. The parachute. The box. The matches.

I cried above the engine roar, “See what I’ve found, Lieutenant. What do you make of it?”

He looked more closely at the box.

He began to bend toward it.

“Close enough!” I commanded.

He stopped himself. Stood upright.

My rank was prevailing.

He saluted. He waited.

I had no time for this.

The engines roared around us both.

There was nothing more to say anyway.

He could not be allowed to walk off now. He would, of course, speak of this to the executive officer or the commander. Even if he was not suspicious of Colonel Wolfinger, even if they were not either, even if, instead, they thought I’d shrewdly uncovered a plot, perhaps a further plot of the Englishman, they’d still send somebody up here to me.

I could not let that happen.

Lieutenant Schmidt would be dead in a few minutes anyway.

I drew my Luger.

I pointed it at him.

His face went blank. Of course he hadn’t suspected me. And he could not even begin to imagine what was happening now or why.

We looked at each other.

When he and his fellow crew members imagined their death in the night sky, what had been his choice? To burn or to jump?

His face was a rube’s face now. Not canny at all. Uncomprehending. No. Not a rube. Just an overgrown kid from some backwater Black Forest town who loved his telegraph and his airship.

I motioned him to move back a few steps.

The Luger was pointed at his chest.

He was starting to get it. He began to raise his hands.

I shook my head no.

He took a couple of steps back and I stopped him with a flip of a palm.

A quick ending for this boy now was surely better than an extended burning ten minutes from now. Or a leaping. That terrible, time-stretching fall to the earth.

I stepped over the box and drew near him.

His face showed no fear. It showed something far worse. Betrayal. A previously unimaginable betrayal.

Betrayed by a colonel in the German army.

Too bad he wouldn’t be able to put this worthwhile lesson to good use.

I wanted nothing more to do with his face. I motioned for him to turn around.

He obeyed.

He stood straight and still before me. His ears were splayed. I hadn’t noticed that before.

I lifted my pistol and pointed it at the back of his head.

The engines hammered on.

This wasn’t necessary.

It would be sufficient for him to sleep.

“I’m sorry about this,” I said. I said it aloud. But even I could not hear the words in the din of the Zeppelin’s engines.

I drew my right hand wide and focused on the center of his parietal bone and I swung hard and caught him there with the flat bulk near the Luger’s breech block and Lieutenant Schmidt fell sideways into the handrail and then collapsed onto the walkway, and he did not so much as twitch a finger.

Sleep on, young man. At least you’ve been spared a nasty choice.

Mine already having been made.

I holstered my Luger.

I turned and crouched before the tin box.

We’d be clear of Spich by now.

I took up the matches and laid them aside. I expected the cotton would burn slow and low. But I wanted the flame at that level for only a minute or two. I lifted the top layer and exposed the dynamite and the clock. I took the clock out and tossed it aside, leaving a hollow there. I spread the fibers, loosened them all around in the inner space. When the flame in the slower-burning, packed fibers reached this pocket of oxygen, the fire would flare up.

I laid the top layer back in place.

I rose and moved to the parachute and brought it back and knelt again before the tin box, on its aft side. I unfurled the external harness and placed it around my shoulders and cinched it at my waist. I laid the rucksack next to me.

I took up the matches.

The pound of the Maybach abruptly reshaped itself inside me. It became the sound of my heart. It became the coursing of my blood. It was music now. It was like the piano player whaling away in front of a motion picture screen where some terrible calamity was on its way.

I could smell fuel oil. I could smell hydrogen.

Why hadn’t I noticed them this strongly before?

Maybe I’d die for London after all.

Maybe all it took was the strike of this match.

I held it low, as near to the cotton as I could.

And I struck it.

It flared up and I thought it would keep flaring until all the air around me was afire.

But it didn’t.

I was still here.

The flame receded a little.

I lowered it to the cotton wool.

I touched the flame there.

And I flinched back and away.

The cotton flashed up instantly.

Too fast. No explosion but it was burning way too fast.

Then this flame receded as well. The fumes immediately around it were consumed.

The cotton was burning.

Very nicely.

Get the hell out.

I stood up. I lifted the rucksack. I turned. I strode off. Fast. But controlled. My knees were a little weak, a little reluctant to hold me up. But I moved. And I moved. And the light was before me.

And I stopped.

The goddamn gas bag.

I turned. I strode back to the box.

A faint wisp of a smell, like burning leaves.

The flame was spreading.

I looked up to the gas cells.

I drew my Luger and I looked forward. I felt a slight movement of air, from the hatch at the gondola ladder. I judged the flow of air and I looked up again. I made a guess at an angle to compensate and I chose a spot in the whale-gray flank of the gas cell above me. I lifted the Luger.

I readied myself once more to go up in flames with all these boys and their airship, and I fired once and again and again and the explosion waited inside there and I fired again and twice more and it was enough, a tight cluster of six shots into the gas cell, and I holstered the Luger and I turned and I ran, ran as fast as I could and still keep my footing on the planking beneath me and the deep hole of light was before me and growing larger and I ran and I reached the turn in the walkway and I took it and I went around to the long side of the hatch and I stepped over the railing and I looked down — though I dared not wait no matter how high I was — and an empty field was passing there, a good six hundred feet below, and I grabbed the loop at the top of the rucksack and I leaned and I hooked it and I leapt.

I fell and I fell and I fell with the air pounding at my eyes, I fell though a part of me was breathlessly inert, was not moving at all, was waiting for the saving clutch of the tether, waiting. And it came, a wrench at my shoulders and at my waist and a thumping compression of my chest. And the falling abruptly turned to floating.

I floated and I floated and I breathed and I looked down to the tops of my shoes and an empty field beyond, and I was hearing the piston drone of Zeppelin engines.

I lifted my face and lifted my hands to grasp the risers and I turned my head around and looked up.

All I could see was the shade-darkened inner canopy of white silk, my parachute billowing above me, and I could see the high, cloud-smeared sky beyond.

And almost at once the LZ 78 emerged from its silken eclipse. It was dark and vast and gliding away from me. Serene, I thought. Secure and serene and murderous, I thought. I’ve failed, I thought.

The sound of its engines Dopplered lower and began to fade as the Zeppelin sailed on, though it was still quite large against the late afternoon sky, the forward tapering of its colossal hull, the splay of its fins making it look like an aerial bomb of the gods, flung personally from Valhalla by Odin. I had, of course, been destined to fail.

And in the flank of the Zepp, at the very bottom, the sunlight flashed briefly.

No. I craned my head. Not the sun. It was a lollop of flame and now it was a rapid blooming, a golden rush from that spot and forward along the skin of the Zepp and then came a billow of flame breaking through the hull and swelling into the air and the front third of the Zeppelin reared up like a frightened horse, the ship cracking apart, and the flames soared gelatinous now, great thunder clouds of cumulus fire. And it was all strangely silent in this first surge of things, in the igniting of the hydrogen and the inward flash of the gas cells and even in the vast uplift of flame torching the sky, there was only silence. And I remembered I was falling.

I looked down and the ground was rushing at me and I thought to keep my legs loose, ready to flex and fall away, diverting the direct blow, like jumping from a porch, like a kid who’s used to jumping, and my legs jolted and instantly I diverted the fall to my left, hitting at calf and thigh and hip and side and I was down and I was all right, I could tell that my legs were okay, my body was okay, and silk was falling softly against me, clinging to me.

And now from on high came a clap of Odin’s thunder pounding into my head and rattling my bones and then a concatenation of thunderstrokes, smaller sounds but sharper, and then another larger boom that rolled over me, and I pulled the silk covers around me, a kid still, awakened in the night in a terrible storm, hiding in the covers, and I waited, and the sound rolled on and away, and then there was silence.

I sat up and pulled at the canopy, dragged at it, wrenched at its insistent hold, and finally it came free and I looked up.

The sky was filled with the black billowing of smoke and the blood-orange flare of falling fragments and the back quarter of the Zepp was buoyed still, briefly, though it was starting to burn, and then it plunged and disappeared behind a distant line of trees with an upswell of smoke.

I had seen enough.

I stood up.

I turned my back on all that.

The air smelled faintly of malt.

Nearby was a stack of barley straw bales.

Stockman’s bomb was dead.

But that was all I knew for sure.