To his left, Cromwell was frantically moving controls and switches, to cut off fuel and power to the shattered right engine. "We've got a fire of our own," he said grimly. He reached to the panel and pulled another handle.
"Watch the right engine," he ordered.
White mist engulfed the engine briefly, streaming back through the wreckage, and was flung away by the wind.
"Fire extinguisher," Cromwell said. "Did it work?"
"No more fire," Indy told him. The shriek of wind was overwhelming. Cromwell was pulling back on the yoke, easing the Ford from its crazy dive. He maintained their descent, but under control this time, able to bank the airplane better, to see the airship.
"Take a look, lad," he said, quietly this time.
Flame billowed from the flanks of the airship. "What's happening?" Indy asked. "That thing is filled with helium and helium doesn't burn—"
"Right," Cromwell told him. "But it's also got a devil of a load of fuel for those jet engines. That magnesium, once it's ignited, will keep right on burning through the metal structure, and that means the fire worked its way down to the fuel tanks and ate right through the metal. That fire is their fuel.
I'd say we've done a day's good work, be cause—"
There was no need to say more. A savage glare appeared along the sides and belly of the airship. Indy understood now that blazing magnesium had breached the fuel tanks. Fuel spilled outward, ignited violently, and sent flames hurtling through the fuel storage area. The huge airship wallowed like a stricken whale, dying before their eyes as explosions wracked the structure. Debris and bodies spilled outward.
Indy stared as crewmen, arms and legs flailing helplessly, began the long fall toward the earth.
Another blast, a great gout of flame, and the zeppelin buckled amidships, its back broken. The flames continued to spread, and two huge masses tumbled downward, twisting and turning in seeming agony as they dropped to final destruction.
"You need me up here right now?" Indy asked Cromwell.
"Not now. We're below twenty thousand, and I'll keep her going down like an elevator until we're at fourteen. Then we can all take off these miserable oxy systems and breathe like normal people again."
Indy climbed from the cockpit. Back in the cabin he moved immediately to the side of Foulois. Chino was cradling the unmoving Frenchman in his huge arms.
Foulois's oxygen mask was gone from his face, telling Indy what he feared most of all.
Indy met Chino's eyes. They didn't need words to say that Rene Foulois was dead.
Gale sat to one side, quietly. Indy saw she had been crying. Now she was numb, inside and out. Rene Foulois was gone, and they had been on the thin edge of death themselves. Gale had frostbite on her face; she suffered her own pain. Finally she looked up.
"Did we . . . " Her voice faltered.
"We did," Indy said quietly as he could and still be heard over the roar of engines and wind.
"Masks off now," Cromwell announced from the cockpit. They turned their valves to the off position and removed masks and goggles. Indy unsnapped the heavy mouth cover. It was already much warmer at their lower altitude. He helped Gale with her face protection and goggles and removed her oxygen mask. Her lips were still trembling. He looked sternly at her.
"Put your goggles back on," he ordered. "The wind is wild through the bullet holes in the cockpit. Now, get up there."
Her eyes went wide. "I . . . I can't. I—"
"Yes, you can. And you will. You're a pilot! Will needs help up front. We're coming down with two engines and the right wing chewed up, and we've got a busted airplane on our hands. So get up there and fly."
For a long moment she stared at Indy. She rose slowly, stood before him.
"You know something, Professor Jones?
I think I love you."
She brushed her lips against his, and was gone.
Indy leaned against the cabin wall. He looked sadly at Foulois.
"He was a very good man," Indy said. "An ace in the war against the Germans. Strange for him to die here, like this."
"Not so strange," said Jose Syme Chino. "All things have their special time.
This also was a war. A battle between good and evil. As are all great struggles.
This man,
who had wings, there is a special place for his kind with the Great Spirits."
Indy nodded slowly as they continued their return to earth.
"Amen," he said.
THE END
Afterword
OF COURSE IT'S REAL!
Recently—the summer of 1991—I was a guest speaker at the Institute of Advanced Learning in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the subject that raised the greatest interest and brought in a standingroomonly crowd was, not unexpectedly, a serious study of UFO's. During the questionandanswer period which gave the audience free rein to ask anything they wanted to ask, and likely never before had the opportunity to get an answer, I was asked the inevitable question. Had I ever seen a UFO? And if I had, what did it look like and what did it do?
I admit to tweaking my audience. Like most people I've seen UFO's through a lifetime, but in this instance I am being very specific. In other words, I had seen at different times something in the sky I could not identify: a flash of light, a colorful ray, a physical object too distant to make out any details. The object I saw was simply impossible to identify.
Hardly very exciting.
So I told my audience about an absolutely incredible sighting of many years past, a sighting in broad daylight, under perfect visual conditions, with thunder rolling like the end of the world from the heavens.
"It was a vessel utterly alien to me," I related. "It was absolutely incredible.
Nearly a thousand feet long! It sailed across the earth maybe fifteen hundred, perhaps two thousand feet high. It was so huge it partially blocked out the sun. Its deep groaning roar sent birds fleeing and animals dashing for safety. It was silvery, splendid, magnificent as it passed over, and I watched it until it vanished beyond the horizon."
Well, not many people believed me. In fact, I doubt if anybody in that crowd believed a word of what I'd told them. I asked for a show of hands from anyone who believed that what I'd told them was absolutely, unquestionably real.
Not one hand went up. I'd struck out. Zero belief. Then I dropped my "belief bomb."
"I don't know why you find what I just described to you as too fantastic to believe. What I was seeing was also witnessed by millions of other people. I was standing beneath the USS Akron, sister ship to the equally huge USS
Macon, the two enormous dirigibles of the United States Navy that were in service in the early 1930's. And, of course, never having seen such a sight before, or having known of these two massive sky vessels, the ship blocking out the sun was alien to me!"
Even if it was some sixty years ago.
It was another wonderful moment of fact being stranger than fiction. And remembering that moment, and others like it—such as those times when I flew a jet fighter in pursuit of other objects in the sky that I never caught up with and never did identify—helped me decide that in INDIANA JONES AND THE SKY PIRATES, everything that seems exotic, wonderful, marvelous— and impossible—is all based on hard, provable, reality.