Silver Tomb (The Lazarus Longman Chronicles Book 2) (16 page)

All these thoughts passed through his mind in the time it took for him to reach the point where momentum gave way to gravity and before he had completed his swing, he had made up his mind not to let go.

The dangling dog-on-a-rope grew larger as he hurtled towards it. He fired twice, missing wildly but drawing its attention. It twisted to face him. He stuck his feet out and rammed into it. It was like hitting an iron girder. His legs split and the torso of the thing hit him in the most painful area possible. He gasped in agony but wrapped his legs around his foe, determined not to let go.

Possibly confused by this tactic, the mummy tried to wriggle free, using its torso. Its claws were still tangled in the guy rope. Lazarus looked down. The green orb was inches from him. He had the target steady now. He pressed the muzzle of his pistol against it. The contact made an audible ‘clink’ of metal touching glass. He squeezed the trigger.

The bullet tore through the creature’s body. It hurled its head back in a spasmodic death throe. Lazarus knew enough not to hold on and released his leg grip. The monster, still tangled in the ropes, relaxed and hung slack, twisting in the wind.

Katarina held out her hand to Lazarus as he scrambled up to the top of the gondola. He grasped it and she hauled him towards her. “That was unbelievable,” she said.

“Well, I couldn’t very well leave you to take it on alone,” he said.

“Your patronizing never ceases to infuriate me, but still. That was unbelievable.” Her eyes were wide as if she was suddenly seeing him in an entirely new light.

“Come on, let’s bring this bird down. I’ve seen all the clouds I want to today.”

Unhindered, they hurried aft and found the point where the pipe led up into the balloon. It was made from Indian rubber and was very flexible. Lazarus drew the new Bowie knife he had purchased in Cairo and began to saw through it. Helium began to escape with a hissing sound. He continued cutting until the pipe was completely severed and trailed in the wind.

“We’d better get down below,” he told Katarina. “It will take a while for the balloon to start deflating, but when it does, we don’t want to be on deck when we start to descend. It may be a bumpy landing.”

Chapter Sixteen

In which solid ground is reached a little quicker than desired

They scrambled down the iron ladder once more and Lazarus shot out a window in the aft that led into the engine room. They clambered onto an iron catwalk that led around a cavernous room filled with pumps, banks of dials and gauges and four gigantic steam turbines fed by sixteen forced circulation boilers. Several wide-eyed engineers looked up at the intruders as if they had just swung in from the moon.

“Everybody stay put!” Lazarus commanded, his gun sweeping the room. “This airship is going down and there’s nothing any of you can do about it. I suggest you all make yourselves comfortable. It might get a little rough.”

“Get that door bolted!” said Katarina, indicating the wheel-lock door that led to the rest of the ship.

One of the engineers moved to close it and ducked out suddenly, slamming it behind him.

“Stop!” Katarina cried futilely and fired a round that struck the bulkhead above the door frame.

“Well, that will bring the contingent of soldiers to us even if our escaped engineer doesn’t,” said Lazarus, descending the metal stairs to ground level. “Keep them covered.” He went to bolt the door himself.

They rounded up the rest of the engineers and herded them between one of the turbines and the wall of the engine room. It wasn’t long before the hammering on the door started.

“We’ve got you cornered!” shouted a Southern voice. “There’s no way out of the engine room but dead if you don’t throw down your weapons and surrender.”

“We only have to wait it out,” said Katarina. “How long until the balloon starts to deflate?”

“That’s not the issue,” said Lazarus. Once we’ve landed, we will still have the same problem. Us in here and them out there. And that’s if they don’t cut through the door to get to us first.”

“Fair point. There’s too many of them out there for us to fight. But I have an idea.” She raised her voice, shouting through the metal to the soldiers beyond. “You fellows, we’re going to come out, but will send out all our hostages save one, first! Get ready to receive them. We’re going to open the door but no treachery or we’ll open fire and kill them all!”

“All right, Missy,” said the voice on the other side. “There’ll be no treachery on our side.”

“Pass me that canister of helium,” Katarina whispered to Lazarus, indicating a rack where several yellow oval-shaped canisters were held.

“What’s your plan?” he asked, prizing one loose and passing it to her.

“You open the door and I’ll hurl this through at them and fire at it. It will rupture and knock them clean off their feet, maybe even kill a couple. Then we make our run for it, shooting our way free. I want to get back up to the bridge and keep Lindholm under supervision until we land.”

It wasn’t a bad plan. Although helium was not flammable, a pressurized canister would certainly go off with a pop loud enough give those Confederates a scare. And that might be just what was needed to get out alive.

“Ready?” Katarina said, swinging the canister back and forth in preparation.

“Ready,” Lazarus confirmed and spun the wheel lock. He could hear the shuffle of boots as the soldiers in the corridor beyond took two steps back. He hurled the door open and Katarina tossed the canister like a bowling ball at the human pins before her. As it cart wheeled past him, Lazarus suddenly had a horrible thought. There had been no markings on the canister that he had seen. They had assumed that it was helium because they were in a helium balloon.

Katarina fired twice in quick succession, aiming for the canister which had yet to strike the floor.

“Katarina, wait!” Lazarus yelled. “Are you sure...”

Her second bullet hit the canister before he could finish his sentence and there was an almighty explosion that confirmed his fears. He swung the door closed again and grasped the wheel just as the force of the blast hit it. The thick metal door protected him from the flames but the force of the explosion hurled it open and sent him nearly the length of the engine room.

The corridor was bathed in flame. The wall of the gondola had been ruptured by the blast and the flames were being sucked out into the sky. The force of the explosion had jarred something loose from the balloon, for now the floor began to tilt alarmingly under their feet. People and canisters and equipment began to slide to one end of the room.
Were they falling?

“I owe you an apology, Lazarus,” said Katarina, clinging to his arm as he hung from a control bench with the other for dear life. “That wasn’t a helium canister. It was...”

“Oxygen. I know,” Lazarus replied through gritted teeth. Well, the plan had been successful in that it had most certainly taken care of the soldiers in the corridor. But the word ‘overkill’ did come to mind.

That the gondola was now swinging free from several of the cables that attached it to the balloon was apparent by the pitch of the room and the heap of squirming engineers Lazarus and Katarina landed in when the screaming muscles in Lazarus’s arm gave out.

The metal floor was un-scalable and they were forced to make themselves comfortable in the writhing mass of limbs that had broken their fall, groans of discomfort all around them.

Shadows of the clouds whirled past from the windows high above them and that told Lazarus that they were spinning wildly out of control. He wondered how fast they were descending. Katarina seemed to be thinking the same thing.

“The balloon must surely be running out of helium by now,” she said. “At least the explosion only broke a few of the guy lines. The remaining ones should ensure that the deflating balloon drops us fairly comfortably on a sand dune.”

As if she had jinxed the situation, there was a loud ‘twanging’ sound and the gondola suddenly dropped into free fall.

“Again, I apologies,” Katarina yelled over the wailing of the terrified engineers.

They must have been descending at a steady pace before the final guy lines snapped, for they hit the ground mere seconds later. It was anything but a soft landing. Lazarus, Katarina and the engineers were jumbled up and hurled down as if a god with a tennis racket had tossed them up into the air and performed a perfect smash to the applause of the crowd. A terrible grinding and tearing of metal filled the hull and would have made Lazarus cover his ears had his hands not been busy trying to keep somebody’s armpit out of his face.

Whatever the gondola had struck—sand dune, pyramid, who knew?—had held it fast for a moment and now it released its grip, letting the vast vessel sink slowly, but unstoppably backwards. They all cried out once more as the terrifying feeling of falling without knowing what was below them or how far away it was seized them. But the ever-shifting sands of the desert did not fail in their almost animated properties. The gondola settled as if a giant cushion had been wedged beneath it. They held their breaths as the sand held fast and the gondola ceased to move altogether.

The engineers let out a whoop of joy at being spared death, but Lazarus and Katarina wasted no breath on such luxury. They were finally back on the ground, and many yards of corridors and soldiers stood between them and Dr. Lindholm.

They began their ascent through the forty-five degree-tilted engine room to where the door hung limply open above them. Clutching control banks and scrambling over fallen detritus, they finally made it. Lazarus helped Katarina up through the doorway into the corridor beyond, satisfied that the company of soldiers that had occupied it not long ago were now long dispersed across the desert.

“Uh, Lazarus,” said Katarina as she poked her head into the corridor.

“What is it?” he asked, grasping the doorframe and hauling himself up to join her.

“Where’s the rest of the gondola?”

A few yards of the corridor remained, blackened and scorched by the exploded oxygen canister. Beyond that lay blue sky above them, framed by a jagged edge of wood paneling and metal.

“The gondola must have snapped entirely in half!” Lazarus exclaimed.

“Rent open by the explosion?”

“Can’t have. That canister wasn’t enough to rip open the whole ship. The gondola must have snapped in half when we struck the sand. I’ve heard of sinking battleships breaking in half when the sunken end starts to lift the other up into the air.”

They climbed further and peered out of what was left of the aft of the gondola. All around them was desert, painfully bright by the glare of the burning sun. Below them, at not too much of a distance lay the rest of the gondola, flat on the sand, its fore draped by the deflated balloon which lay spread over many hundreds of square feet. The sand between the two halves was strewn with wreckage and bodies tossed free from the gaping aperture where the vessel had snapped in two like a bundle of dry twigs.

They clambered down to the burning sand and picked their way through the detritus towards the other half of the gondola. They clambered into its broken end. The smoke-blackened corridor was horizontally level but pitched to one side as the vessel had rolled, making the long walk down its length a disorientating experience. What was stranger was the lack of light. The gas lamps were dead. The canopy of the balloon covered the majority of the shattered windows that could be glimpsed through the cabin doors hanging slack on their hinges.

They made their way to the bridge, stumbling and feeling their way through the darkness, tripping over the occasional dead body. They drew their pistols just in case some Confederate—or worse—was lurking in one of the map rooms or cabins to the side.

They found the bridge more or less as they had left it, with the bodies of the men they had shot tossed in new positions by the crash. The wind kept lifting the balloon up, bathing the bridge in occasional swathes of light, showing the gruesome scene in clearer detail. There was no sign of Lindholm.

Every single window pane had been smashed. Lazarus walked over to the bank of shattered glass and peered down past the nose of the gondola at the wreckage that had been tossed out onto the sand below. By the light occasionally let in by the lifting of the canopy, he saw the mangled remains of Dr. Rutherford Lindholm.

There was no doubt that he was dead. Aside from being hurled through the windows to land many feet below, his body was so lacerated by shards of glass that he couldn’t possibly be alive.

“I’m sorry, Katarina,” Lazarus said as they gazed down on the man’s remains. “It looks like you’ll be returning to Moscow with bad news once again.”

“I’d be more worried about what I was going to tell the British government if I were in your shoes, Longman,” she replied. “Look at this mess.”

Lazarus had to agree. His future didn’t look bright if he returned to England. Perhaps they would believe that he had been killed in the crash? Yes, it wouldn’t be too hard to fake his own death. The wreckage all about was fine proof. But the details could wait until he had returned to Cairo.
And to Eleanor
.

They didn’t bother to look for anybody who might be alive. It might have felt callous but for the realization that anybody or anything left on this airship would likely try to kill them.

They picked through storerooms and put together a collection of items that would ensure their survival on the long walk back to Cairo; water canteens, food, medical supplies, a compass, guns and ammunition. Lazarus tore loose some strips of the balloon to use as a cover during the hottest parts of the day, when they would dig a hollow in the sand and try to sleep like Bedouins.

Katarina fashioned some headdresses out of canvas which they tied on with electrical wire. Then, looking like a pair of futuristic Arabs, they set off east, where the tips of the pyramids, older than any country, would be the first sign that they were nearing civilization.

The news of the
CSS Scorpion II
’s crash reached Cairo well before they did. The police, the British authorities and the army were so busy mounting expeditions and enquiries, and the public so mesmerized by this new astounding event in the newspapers, that the emergence from the desert of two Europeans—a man and a woman—filthy, bizarrely garbed and heavily armed, was barely noticed.

They dispersed to their respective hotels and washed, ate ravenously and, in Lazarus’s case, knocked down several glasses of gin. He packed his things, placed his letter of resignation on top of his clothes in his portmanteau, paid his bill and departed for the Grand Continental where everybody he cared about in the world was currently residing.

The Arab in the tarboosh at reception blinked in surprise at him when he asked to call up to Eleanor’s room. “But Miss Rousseau has already departed,
effendi
,” was his reply.

“Departed? Is she out to dinner?”

“No,
effendi
. She has paid her bill and left Cairo as far as I believe.”

Lazarus refused to believe it and demanded to speak to the manager, who confirmed his employee’s statement, telling him that it was his understanding that Eleanor Rousseau had returned to France.

Lazarus whirled away from the reception desk, his head swimming.
This couldn’t be true!
He wanted to run up to her room and burst in on her so that they could both laugh at the joke. But deep down he knew she wasn’t there. Deep down he knew that he had been betrayed. But what he couldn’t understand was why.