There!
Another farmhouse appeared at the edge of the forest. Even from this height Bowie could see the place was run-down. The shingle roof sagged in the middle like the swayback of an old horse, while the porch seemed in danger of collapse. Yet there was light in the windows, and a trail of smoke caught the breeze at the top of the chimney and smeared across the landscape. The nearby barn appeared much newer.
The flight path would take the Hindenburg right along the edge of a cleared field a quarter mile south of the farmyard. With luck the farmer would find the safe before whatever crop he grew overwhelmed the pasture.
Chester had to do nothing more than let go of the safe. It fell through the angled window with a crash that was quickly swallowed by the roar of wind whipping into the airship. Bowie hadn’t been prepared for the blast of rain-soaked air. He staggered back from the rail, then whirled away, running back up to his cabin just as the door to the crew’s mess opened. He was trailed by angry German voices but no one had seen what he’d done.
Unfortunately, Chester Bowie also couldn’t see the safe plummet to the ground. A hundred feet before it plowed into the sandy soil, the note he had so laboriously tied to the handle was stripped away. It stayed aloft in the stormy air for nearly an hour and by then it was shredded to confetti and spread across two counties.
Rain cut forking trails along the gum rubber poncho as drops pooled and poured across the fabric. For nearly eighteen hours the lone figure had remained hidden under its folds, unmoving and nearly unblinking. From his perch atop a hangar he had an unobstructed view of the landing field a half mile away and the metal framework of the mooring mast. From here it looked remarkably like a miniature Eiffel Tower.
His target was twelve hours late, a bit of irony since his hurried orders had forced him to rush into position.
Moving so as not to change the outline of the weatherproof poncho, he brought his rifle up to his eye. The scope was a trophy he’d taken from a sniper during the Great War. He’d adapted it to every rifle he’d ever used. He stared through the optics, centering the crosshairs on the milling throng of the landing crew. They’d just returned to the field after a brief downpour. He estimated there were more than two hundred of them, but such a number was needed to manhandle the giant airship in the face of even a gentle breeze. He let the reticle linger on individuals for a moment before moving on. He spotted the airfield’s commander, Charles Rosendahl. The man next to him had to be Willy von Meister, the Zeppelin Company’s American representative. Despite the occasional gusts, the sniper could have dropped either man with a shot through whichever eye he chose. A ways off were a radio journalist and a cameraman, both of them checking equipment as everyone waited for the Hindenburg’s late arrival.
He was about to lower the heavy rifle when everyone on the ground turned at once, raising an arm skyward in what almost resembled the Nazi salute. The sniper shifted a fraction. Out of the pewter sky came the Hindenburg.
Distance could not diminish the size of the airship. It was absolutely enormous, a defiant symbol of a resurgent Germany. She was sleek, like a torpedo, with stabilizers and rudders larger than the wings of a bomber. At its widest the zeppelin was one hundred and thirty-five feet in diameter, and inside her rigid frame of duralumin struts were gas cells containing seven million cubic feet of explosive hydrogen. Two-story-tall swastikas adorned her rudders and pale smoke trailed from her four diesel engines.
As the airship approached it grew in size, blotting out a larger and larger slab of the sky. Her skin was doped a reflective silver that managed to glisten even in the stormy weather. The Hindenburg passed directly over the naval air station at about six hundred and fifty feet. The sniper watched passengers inside the accommodation section of the ship leaning out the windows and trying to shout to family on the ground. It took fifteen minutes for the leviathan to circle back around for her final approach from the west. A quarter mile from the mooring mast the engines suddenly screamed at full reverse power to slow the airship, and moments later three tumbling avalanches of ballast water spilled from beneath the hull to correct a slight weight imbalance.
Someone in the hangar below had rigged a speaker so the sniper could hear what the radio announcer was saying as the airship made its final approach. The voice was high-pitched and excited.
“Well here it comes, ladies and gentlemen, we’re out now, outside of the hangar, and what a great sight it is, a truly one, it’s a marvelous sight. It’s coming down out of the sky pointed towards us and towards the mooring mast.”
The gunman pulled his rifle — a.375 Nitro Express more befitting an African big game hunt than a sniper — to his shoulder and waited. The first of the heavy mooring lines was dropped from the bow. He scoped the windows one more time. Then came the second mooring rope as ground workers began to haul the ship to the mast. They looked like ants trying to drag a reluctant elephant.
“It’s practically standing still now,” the announcer said, growing more animated as he described the scene. “They’ve dropped ropes out of the nose of the ship and it’s been taken ahold of down on the field by a number of men….”
By moving the rifle barrel an inch the sniper found his target.
“It’s starting to rain again. The rain has slacked up a little bit….”
The bullets in the rifle were of his own manufacture. He’d had only a day and a night to construct them and had only fired two as a test at a deserted gravel pit. Both had worked as he’d designed, but he still felt apprehension that they would fail to do the job he’d been assigned.
Herb Morrison’s voice on the speaker was reaching a fevered pitch as he described the landing. “…the back motors of the ship are just holding it, just enough to keep it from…”
The rifle cracked. The recoil was a brutal punch to the shoulder. At two thousand feet per second the bullet took one point two seconds to reach its target. In that sliver of time a coating around the special slug burned away, revealing a white-hot cinder of burning magnesium. Unlike a tracer round, which burned all along its trajectory, the incendiary core of this round only showed in the last instant before it hit.
Hydrogen needs air to burn. A random spark could not have ignited it within the airship’s enormous gasbags. Only when hydrogen was released to mix in the atmosphere could something like this round cause an explosion. But the bullet wasn’t meant to ignite the gas. At least not directly.
The sniper had fired along the spine of the Hindenburg. The intense heat of the bullet scored the zeppelin’s doped skin as it traveled down the length of the airship. By the time it reached the tail fin, it had lost enough velocity to hit the dirigible and lodge into the duralumin frame. Just as the magnesium burned itself out, the waterproof paint, a combination of nitrocellulose and aluminum powder, began to smolder. The doping agent on the cotton canvas skin was in fact a highly combustible mixture commonly used as fuel in solid rockets. The smoldering turned into open flame that burned through the skin and sent flaming bits of cloth onto a gasbag. The fire quickly holed the bag and allowed a gush of hydrogen to escape into the growing inferno.