The Last Airship (23 page)

Then
it hit him like a bomb.

Carl
wasn’t trying to kill Sam Reilly - he was trying to protect him – but from
what?

The
answer presented itself to him, simply.

From
discovering the location of the Magdalena!

Holy
shit! That snobby English bastard knows exactly where it is – and yet still he
tries to chase me up for his boss! He’s known all along where she is, and that
means that he doesn’t want his boss to find her either!

John
picked up his phone, and punched in the phone number that he never wanted to
call.

“Yes,”
said the man, in his dark, cold voice.

“I
have it. I need you to send the team in,” John paused for a moment, and then
said, “I’ll text you the GPS coordinates for the location where I’ll meet them.
You’ll need to have them there within the hour to secure the location.”

John
gave serious consideration to telling the man that Blake Simmonds had been a
traitor all along, but thought better of the idea.

Some
hands are best played close to the vest.

*

After
Sam had finished explaining to Aliana how he had come to hear of the existence
of the Magdalena, and what really happened to cause him to sink, Aliana became
even more confused and angry than she ever thought possible.

“I
refuse to believe that my father had anything to do with this! I mean, he has
spent his life trying to make up for what his grandfather did during the
Holocaust.”

“Then
who else would have been trying to kill me from aboard a ship, with a helicopter
bearing the name Wolfgang Corporation?”

That
question, she was unable answer.

“I
have no idea, Sam, but you have to believe me when I tell you that my father
wasn’t responsible for that. Can you believe me?”

“I
do understand that you believe it to be the truth.”

It
was a diplomatic answer, but she could tell from the expression on his face,
that he didn’t believe it.

“How
can you say that? Don’t you trust me?”

“No.
I don’t,” Sam told her, plainly. Even before he spoke, his eyes had given her
his answer. And what made it worse, she knew that he had reason not to trust
her.

Those
words hurt her even more than acknowledging the fact that, deep down, she
believed that her own father had been keeping dark secrets from her.

She
started to speak, but couldn’t get the words out.

Then,
she made another attempt, “Why not?” She wanted to sound both strong and
defiant, but her weak tone of voice betrayed her greatest misgivings.

How
much could he possibly know?

“There
was a moment… after I fell, when I saw something in your expression. It was
only there for a second at most, but I’ve seen betrayal before, and I know how
to spot it when it rears its ugly head. You wanted to leave me there. You
considered whether or not you might be able to outrun me if you left me and continued
up the Via Farrata alone.”

“No,
you don’t understand…” Aliana tried to explain, but Sam cut her off short.

“I’m
not done. It was only when you saw the other man, Carl, coming down the Via
Farrata, that you changed your mind. Almost as if you were frightened, with a
glimmer of uncertainty, about just who your enemies were on the mountain, and
among them, who you could possibly trust. It was then that you grasped at your
only hope, and sided with me.”

“It
was nothing like that, Sam… you don’t understand at all.” Aliana tried to offer
him an explanation faster than her mind was capable of forming one. “Many years
ago, when I was only a child, my father was so poor that we were on the cusp of
starvation. The Berlin Wall had just come down, and my father was approached by
a man who offered him financial backing to create his pharmaceutical company.
That company was how he went on to become rich, and powerful. It eventually
earned him a Nobel Prize. That man asked my father for only one thing in return
for his backing – that my father find the final resting place of the Magdalena
,
and once she was found
,
to give him control of the deadly virus she
carried on board.”

“So,
your father sold out the rest of humanity for gold?” Sam replied, in disgust.

“He
was desperate, Sam. We all were desperate, and he truly believed that it never
would be discovered. Then, when I saw him last week
,
he told me that the
same man, who he hadn’t heard from in twenty years, had contacted him with new
information, which would help narrow the location of the Magdalena.”

“Which
was...” Sam asked.

“You.”

Realization
could be seen in Sam’s eyes, as he came to grips with her role in it all.

“My
father was obliged to repay his long-standing obligation to this man by
offering him something that he never thought he could.”

“The
destruction of mankind?”

“Exactly.
He wouldn’t tell me what his plan was, but he did tell me that there were a
number of treasure hunters after it, and that they were all closing in on it
like a pack of hungry wolves. He said that he had a team of people searching,
but had already learned that there were others who had come close to finding
it. He told me that we needed to be the first to locate it, and that the cost
of another person discovering it first would be catastrophic. He also told me
that on that very same day, he had heard about a man from Australia who had
come here armed with secret information, and that was  who he perceived to be
his greatest threat. I put two and two together and knew what I had to do. With
your knowledge of underwater recovery, you would be the most well equipped to
find her at the bottom of one of these lakes.”

“And
so you tried to kill me?” Sam’s face looked more hurt than angry.

“No,
of course not! I never could have done that. How can you say such a terrible
thing? All I wanted was to discover what you knew.”

“So,
your father put you up to this. You only came to me for the knowledge. The
kiss, the intimacy, all of that was just an act?”

She
slapped him hard.

“No,
the intimacy was real, Sam. My father had told me to discover what you knew,
and that…”Aliana’s eyes stared at the twinkle of the glowworms in the cavern’s
ceiling, but her mind was a thousand miles away, “he would take care of you,
once I had the information. But, you’re real, Sam. It may have been my
intention to become close to you for the sake of gaining information, but since
then, we’ve both become close. You are the most amazing man I’ve ever met, and
for what it’s worth, I love you.”

“If
you didn’t try to kill me on the mountain before, and it wasn’t your father,
then who did?”

“The
man’s name was Carl.”

“Yes,
but why? I mean, what did he expect to achieve out of killing me?”

“That,
I don’t know. Can you believe me that I had nothing to do with it?”

She
couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“I
have no idea what to believe right now,” Sam told her, and then smiled at her
reassuringly. “How about we first destroy this damned virus, and then start
over again with a clean slate?”

“Okay,
so now I know why you’re here, and you know a bit more about my family history.
I hate to point this out, but all of it is going to be academic if we don’t
find a way out of here in the next few days.”

She
watched as Sam whistled to himself while staring at the Magdalena, as though,
having now found what he’d been searching for, escaping to the surface was the
last thing on his mind.

“Are
you even listening to me?”

“What?”
He feigned a small show of surprise. “I’m sorry, what did you want to know?”

“I
said, ‘we’re going to die down here, if we don’t figure out how to reach the
surface in the next few days.”’

He
didn’t look worried at all, and just continued admiring the bulk of the
airship’s hull.

“You’re
as crazy as my father, Sam! You’re completely obsessed and seem unable to focus
on what’s most important!” She stared at him and noticed that his countenance
hadn’t changed a bit. The entire time they’d been talking, he hadn’t taken his
eyes off the outer hull of the Magdalena. Irritated, she asked, “What the hell are
you looking at?”

“The
Magdalena, of course.”

“And
what are you thinking?”

“She’s
in remarkably good condition, don’t you think?”

His
insouciance was starting to really piss her off.

“Yes,
and I’m sure she’d look lovely in a museum one day, our bones inside, if you
don’t stop staring at her and start to consider how we might escape!”

“I’m
not trying to figure out how we can escape, Aliana.”

“You’re
not? Then what are you trying to do?”

“I’m
wondering if we were to re-gas her canopy, and repair her engines, if we could
fly her out of here.”

“You
can’t possibly be serious?”

“Oh,
but I am, completely.”

“But
we don’t even know how to get out of here, let alone the Magdalena,” she
protested.

“No,
that I worked out before we went to sleep last night.”

*

Sam
waded into the deeper section of the lake, where the mouth of the cave was most
likely situated. He knew that he didn’t have much time.

The
water was cold, lethally cold.

He’d
just finished explaining to Aliana his theory on how the Magdalena came to be
trapped inside the mountain, and it was now time to put that theory into
practice. He was confident there was no other conceivable way that she might
possibly have ended up stranded here.

When
he and Tom had compared historical photos of Lake Solitude against current
satellite photos, and current pictures taken from the western side of the lake,
it was clear that the water level was now a good twenty feet deeper than it had
been back in 1939, and how a distinct section of the rocky mountain above it
seemed to be missing.

“If
I’m right,” he said, before entering the frigid water, “the Magdalena clipped
the top of that mountain, and then, losing altitude, her pilot, Peter
Greenstein, looked for a place to land. Seeing that he was surrounded by steep,
rocky mountaintops and 100 foot tall pine trees, the frozen surface of the lake
in winter would have appeared to be a snow-covered field. In his predicament, the
view would have been a godsend. There he brought down his wounded airship, only
to discover that the ice beneath the snow was pretty thin. Then, the gondola
must have crashed through the ice, and with the water temperature at well below
freezing, everyone aboard must have died within seconds.”

Sam
had waited for Aliana to grasp what he had imagined, before continuing with his
theory, “The Second World War continued on
,
and during the next summer,
the lake would most likely have thawed and the Magdalena could have drifted
into the large grotto
,
where she became stuck in the build-up of silt
and limestone. Sometime during the war, this section of the mountain must have
been destroyed, sending millions of tons of rock into the lake, artificially
raising the water level as much as twenty feet and forever concealing the wreck
of the Magdalena – until now.”

“That’s
a nice theory, but then, why didn’t your search of Lake Solitude discover
anything?”

“Because
we weren’t looking in the right spot.”

“What
do you mean? You said you dived the lake, didn’t you?”

“Yes,
but we were looking for signs of the lost airship on the lake bottom, we
weren’t looking for a tunnel close to the surface.

“What
if you’re wrong?”

“Then
I’m about to go for a very cold swim for nothing,” Sam said, his white teeth
showing his comfort, despite the cold.

That
said, he dived his head under the frigid water and disappeared.

The
combination of the frigid water and Sam’s lack of a diving mask combined to
make for very poor visibility. In the distance, he could just make out a faint
glow, which, he decided
,
must be the outside world, but he had no way to
judge the distance.

Sam
held his breath for just over a minute.

The
glow didn’t seem to change at all.

How
far had he gone? Could he make it to the end?

The
glow at the end of the tunnel could be as much as several hundred feet away. He
might make it, but he probably wouldn’t, and if he failed, what would happen to
Aliana?

No,
he decided, he’d better go back and rethink their escape.

Years
of diving had taught him not to be careless.

His
lungs burned as they fought the instinctive desire to take another deep breath
,
and his muscles ached both from the effects of the icy water and his lack
of oxygen. .