The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (47 page)

And I thought of my own good German. Jeremy Miller. No. Erich Müller.
Müller
was the German. I was lucky to have him on my side.

My side. But I was American. And I was killing the men on this airship in defense of England. For Jeremy. Who was not a German, in reality. Jeremy the Englishman, he said. Jeremy the Brit.

I heard his own words:
There are no pro-Brits in Germany
. The Germans in this country who were
his
allies, and therefore my allies, those Germans might wish to defeat the Kaiser and his generals and their way of governing; they might wish for a better Germany, a democratic Germany, a bona fide republic. But they were
not
pro-Brit.

And there was Jeremy’s mother. His own mother. She loved her Kaiser, who took them to war against the Brits. The Kaiser who hailed the sinking of their great passenger ship in the North Atlantic. Who justified a thousand dead civilian Brits. She was certainly not pro-Brit. Not like her son.

And I saw that little echo of his boxer’s move in my mind. The head feint.

What was the punch his old reflex made him dodge? A question from the innkeeper.
Did he find the telegram she’d slipped under his door.

Sure
, he said. And to me:
These were the groups we worked with inside Germany. The
Republikaner
. We were obligated to stay in touch with them.

I remembered his back turning away with the
Republikan
at the garage where we fueled up the Torpedo. Their intense conversation. Backs turned.

We were
obligated
to them?

Having to provide a little easily censored information to a tractable collaborator would elicit a
shrug
. Not a feint. It was the question itself, spoken in my presence, that elicited the feint.

And he’d slipped one other punch.

Did they know the special nature of Albert’s bomb?
I’d asked.

And he did his little head feint to me.
Not at all
, he’d said.

I stopped now.

I switched off my flashlight.

I stood in the dark.

He’d gone out of his way to make sure I didn’t open the bomb.

He gave me good reasons.

But he said it and he knew I understood those good reasons and yet he said it again by stressing its delicacy, and again, by regretting our need to trust the device at all.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

I knelt down on the walkway.

I would be careful. Just in case I was presently being a fool, I would handle my box of chocolates carefully and look carefully. But I would look.

I could not hold the light and do what I had to do, at least for the first part. I needed both hands.

I remained in the dark.

I pressed the lieutenant’s flashlight into my tunic pocket next to my own.

I pulled the strap over my head and set the dispatch case easily, easily down before me. I opened the weather flap. I put my hands inside and pulled at the tin box. It did not yield.

I turned the case sideways and held it gently between my knees.

I squeezed the case just a little and pulled at the tin and it rose slightly and I squeezed a little harder and pulled and again and again, and doing this inch by inch I finally was holding the bomb invisibly in the dark before me.

I rotated it so that it was level.

I grasped it tightly with my right hand.

With my left hand I moved the dispatch case from between my knees and placed it to the side.

I dipped into my tunic pocket and withdrew one of the flashlights. My own, I thought.

I switched it on and held its beam on the tin box.
Stollwerck Chocolade.

I used the light to guide the box to the planking of the walkway before me.

I could work with one hand now.

I put my thumb in the small lip at the center of the lid. I lifted. The lid rose. It was hinged on the opposite side and I opened it all the way back and let it go.

The white beam from the tungsten bulb showed a faint yellow tinge upon the white of the cotton wool.

He had indeed packed it tightly. I had to be very careful now. If he was, in fact, the Jeremy Miller I’d come to rely on, I had to take heed of his warning. I did not want to disturb the bomb.

I needed two hands again.

The hinges were holding the top of the tin box parallel with the floor. I laid my flashlight there, its beam shining back toward me.

I hesitated now.

And listened.

I could hear a clear ticking from within the box.

All right.

I leaned forward, turned my head to listen at the surface.

The ticking was coming from the left side.

I sat back up.

I looked at the dense surface of purified raw cotton. I tried to visualize the arrangement within. The stick of dynamite would be nearly as long as the longest dimension of the box. The clock was small. A travel clock. I figured the dynamite was laid in close to one of the long sides.

The safest way not to disturb the connection from explosive to clock was not to pull the packed fibers apart. I’d go in at the very edge and try to lift up the covering layer as a unit.

The stick of dynamite could be laid out at either edge. I chose the bottom edge, as it now sat before me.

I ran four fingers gently in, pressing against the side wall of the box. And then I touched the curve of the dynamite stick.

I backed my hand up a bit, found the lower edge of cotton wool, ran my fingers underneath. And I pulled.

The top layer of cotton wool began to rise up, mostly as a unit. I brought my other hand into play, gathering and recompressing and lifting back the clinging batches of wool fibers.

And then the business contents of the tin box were exposed.

Darkly, at the moment.

The lifted layer of cotton wool was blocking the beam of light.

I held up the cotton wool with one hand now, as if it were a second lid.

I took up the flashlight with my other hand and shined it into the tin box.

The clock was there. Ticking away. The stick of dynamite was there.

The wires from clock to dynamite were missing.

The two objects lay in the tin box utterly separate.

I flipped the flashlight beam toward the bottom edge of the layer of cotton wool, my mind lunging forward to figure out how to reattach the wires, how to make this work.

But there were no wires. No wires at all.

I flipped the beam back to the dynamite.

The blasting cap was also missing.

Jeremy’s exact words about the bomb slithered through me:
I wish we didn’t have to trust it.

After the bomb I planted failed to explode and the Zeppelin flew on successfully to London, he wanted me to blame the device.

But it was him. Erich Müller.

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.