Herb Morrison’s voice turned into a horrified shriek. “…it burst into flame! It burst into flame and it’s falling, it’s fire, watch it, watch it, get out of the way!”
The sky seemed to go black, as if all the light at the airfield had been sucked into the explosion above the airship. The stately approach of the Hindenburg turned into frantic seconds as time telescoped.
“…it’s fire and it’s rising,” Morrison cried. “It’s rising terrible, oh my God, what do I see? It’s burning, bursting into flame and it’s falling on the mooring mast and all the folks agree this is terrible. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world. The flames are rising, oh, four or five hundred feet into the sky.”
For seconds the ship hung in the air as the intense heat warped and melted her skeleton. Her outer skin rippled with the concussion, then burned away. The roar of burning gas and the intense heat was like standing at the open door of a blast furnace. She fell stern first, panicked ground workers racing from under her bulk. One of them wasn’t fast enough and was engulfed in wreckage as the zeppelin crashed to the earth.
Inside his cabin on A deck Chester Bowie felt the ship lurch as her stern lost buoyancy. He heard screams from the observation lounge and the sound of tumbling furniture as the airship dropped from the sky. The ceiling above suddenly flashed red-orange as the hydrogen exploded above him. The ship dropped further, the thunder of burning gas overriding the terrible screams of twisting metal as her frame collapsed. He remained on his bed.
At first he thought he’d just smile at the irony of it all, but he found himself laughing instead. He knew this was no accident. The Germans were willing to sacrifice their own dirigible to deny the United States gaining possession of what he’d found. They’d chased him halfway around the globe, sabotaged the Hindenburg to stop him, and still he was one step ahead. Chester opened his mouth wider, laughing even harder, maniacal now. It was just too funny.
The heat hit him then, a solid wall preceding another gush of flame. He died in an instant, hearing his own laughter above the sound of the fire that consumed him.
The sniper watched for a second longer as the great airship plummeted, its back broken when the bow slammed into the ground. Smoke and flame licked the heavens as the carcass melted, its skeleton bowing under the thermal onslaught and then collapsing into a pile of melted girders and burning flesh.
“It’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. The smoke and it’s flame now and the frame is crashing, not quite to the mooring mast…” Morrison’s voice became a strident, evocative sob that still echoes today. “Oh, the humanity…”
Central African Republic
Present Day
Cali woke to the mindless frenzy of gunfire.
With her hotel windows open, the sound seemed amplified. She tensed, waiting for return fire from the jungle that would surely come. Instead she heard the steady beat of a heavy rain and then a burst of drunken laughter. The local troops sent to oversee the evacuation of Kivu had been drinking steadily since their arrival. The lone officer sent to control them seemed to be the worst offender. Not even the six Belgian peacekeepers the UN had dispatched bothered to keep the soldiers from the booze or from smoking the potent marijuana called bhang.
Cali remained on the floor where she’d slept. She’d learned her first hour here that the piebald rug was home to far fewer insects than the bed. Mashed breasts were preferable to being eaten alive by fleas and God knew what else. There had been no water in the hotel when she’d arrived late yesterday so she smelled of sweat, dirt, and DEET. A rotten night’s sleep had done nothing to relieve her aching body following the torturous drive from the capital, Bangui. She rolled onto her back. She’d slept in shorts and a sports bra with her boots lightly laced. Her tongue was cemented to the top of her mouth, and when she finally got it unstuck she found her teeth sticky.
Dawn was slowly creeping over the town. With the approaching sun the canopy of trees outside her room resolved themselves in shades of gray and silver. Mindful that light might attract a burst of gunfire from the drunken soldiers, Cali left her flashlight next to her bedding, slid her arms into a bush shirt, and cautiously went to the window.
The town clung on the muddy banks of the Chinko River, a tributary of the Ubangi, which eventually flowed into the mighty Congo. Kivu had grown around colonial French plantations that had long since been reclaimed by the forest. While mostly built of round mud huts thatched with reeds, Kivu boasted a cluster of concrete buildings arranged around a central square; one was an abandoned government office that now housed the soldiers, and another was her hotel, optimistically named the Ritz, a two-story structure that was riddled with bullet holes after decades of civil war. A quarter mile upriver lay a dirt airstrip that was still serviceable.
Kivu was a tiny island surrounded by a forest sea, an impenetrable expanse of trees and swamp that rivaled the Amazon. There was no electricity now that the owner of the general store had fled with his family and the town’s only generator, no sewer or running water, and the only ready communications with the outside was the satellite phone in her rucksack. Kivu had changed little in a hundred years and it was unlikely to change much in the next century. If it survived the week.
Two weeks earlier, reports had filtered in to the capital that a group of rebels had crossed the border from Sudan and were making their way south in an effort to isolate the eastern third of the country. It was now believed that the vanguard of Caribe Dayce’s Army of Popular Revolution was a mere four days from Kivu. From here it was only thirty more miles to the Ubangi River and the border with the Congo. The government of the Central African Republic planned to make their stand there, outside the town of Rafai; however few believed the CAR’s meager forces would prevent Rafai from falling to Dayce. Any people still in the region afterward would find themselves under the authority of a rebel who found inspiration in Idi Amin and Osama bin Laden.
Cali muttered an oath under her breath.
The Central African Republic was one of the few nations that even the poorest of third world countries could look to and feel proud of their own success. Most mid-sized American companies had more revenue than the CAR. The average person made less than a dollar a day. There were few natural resources, little infrastructure, and absolutely no hope. Why someone would take the time to carve out a piece for himself defied logic. Caribe Dayce would soon make himself the ruler of a few thousand square miles of nothing.
The rain slashed through a thin fog that oozed up from the river, obscuring shapes and making the first stirrings of the townspeople look like ghosts meandering back to their graves. A driver from a relief organization opened the door to his big Volvo truck and fired the engine. The first load of refugees for the day would be on their way out in a half hour or so.
With luck Cali would make it the last miles up to where the Scilla River emptied into the Chinko this morning, check her theory, and be back on the road to Bangui by noon.
She turned from the window, first buttoning her shirt, then using a rubber band she kept on her wrist to tame her red hair into a ponytail. A baseball cap hid the rest of the snarls and tangles. She brushed her teeth with bottled water and spit in the sink anchored to the wall outside the toilet cubicle. She teetered over the seat rather than let her skin touch the filthy commode. She didn’t want to waste her precious water supply so she made do with a towelette from a foil packet to clean the sleep from her face. Using a hand mirror, she applied spf 30 lipstick. Although her hair was a deep shade of red — thank you, Clairol — she still had the pale complexion of a carrottop, with a generous dappling of freckles to match.