“Clip on.”
Dodge took his turn securing the static-line ripcord to a wire suspended above the door, and knew that he had passed a point of no return. He tried to empty his mind of all thoughts, putting himself on autopilot as Frey counted down. When the army officer finally shouted: “Go!” and he saw Hurricane step through the open hatch, he lurched into motion right behind the big man.
The drop took his breath away, but the hard part was already behind him. He fell for only an instant before the static line pulled open the soft-packed parachute. The canopy filled with air and he felt himself yanked back from the fall with a bone-jarring snap.
He could just make out the dome of Hurricane’s chute right below and only about a hundred feet away. Nora was somewhere above him, lost from view. Below his dangling feet, he saw only blackness.
With the initial ordeal of jumping from the plane behind him, he felt strangely euphoric. He had done something that went against every instinct, and pushing through that wall of fear and doubt had filled him with a sublime confidence. He knew it wouldn’t last however. In just a few more seconds, he would have to think about surviving the landing.
To the extent possible, the jump had been timed to compensate for wind conditions and the natural tendency of a parachutist to drift. Majestic was so massive — nearly the length of three football fields, and easily as wide as one — it made for an excellent landing zone, but anything could happen between the door of the plane and touchdown. It was possible to steer the chute a little by tugging on the lines and altering the flow of air through the holes in the circular silk canopy, but there were no guarantees.
There was just enough starlight filtering down from the sky for Dodge to make out the darker shape of Majestic against the earth tones of the valley floor. Judging the distance was almost impossible, but with each passing second, the oblong shape grew larger.
Then he glimpsed something unexpected. Right in the middle of the black area, he saw what looked like a light-colored cross. It’s an airplane, he realized immediately. But what’s it doing riding piggy-back?
They had considered attempting to land a small aircraft atop the dirigible, but rejected that idea because there was no way of knowing if the ship’s structure could withstand the weight of an airplane. And then of course there was the fact that the upper section was bristling with gun turrets.
The mystery of the plane got shoved aside as Dodge realized he was only a few seconds away from landing, and starting to drift toward the starboard side of the airship. He tugged on one of his lines, steering back toward the center, and then the black surface of Majestic’s topside was everywhere he looked. He flexed his knees… and slammed down onto the airship.
The jolt of the impact sent him sprawling, but he remembered the advice Frey had drummed into him before leaving: “Gather up the parachute quickly before a gust of wind catches it and drags you off to who knows where.”
Shrugging off the pain that was shooting in pulses from his feet to his hips, he started hauling in the lines until he had an armful of silk. Only then did he look around to see how the others had fared.
When he caught sight of Nora, about fifty yards away, and closer to Majestic’s bow, he breathed a sigh of relief. Had she, or any of them, missed the airship, the most likely outcome would simply have been an inconvenient visit down to the valley floor, but it would have made accomplishing their goal that much harder. Hurricane had also made it down without any trouble, and was already moving to join him.
“Did you see that plane?” the big man asked.
Dodge nodded. “What do you suppose it’s doing there?”
“I reckon we should take a look.”
As they trekked across the broad surface, Dodge found it hard to believe he was walking on the exterior of an aircraft. It didn’t feel that much different from being on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, and compared to the parachute jump, the experience didn’t seem the least bit unnerving. He was a little apprehensive about the proximity of the machine gun turrets, but a quick check revealed that they were all empty. He thought that perhaps Majestic didn’t have crew to spare for a state of constant vigilance, but Hurricane’s next observation made him wonder if there wasn’t a very different explanation.
“It’s a glider.” Hurricane put a hand on the drooping tip of the long wing and pushed experimentally. The entire airframe shifted, seemingly with very little effort required. “Wood frame, covered in cloth.”
Dodge moved in closer and saw a side door hanging open. The plane was empty.
“I think it crash landed here,” Nora said. She pointed to a swath of damage to Majestic’s array of photovoltaic cells, directly behind the glider’s tail section. “But why/”
Hurricane stuck his head into the craft’s exterior. “Looks big enough to hold maybe half a dozen men. You know, there’s been talk about using gliders to drop troops behind enemy lines. Safer than a parachute drop and you can move a lot more equipment. I think somebody else had the notion to crash Von Heissel’s party.” He winked at Nora. “Pun intended, of course.”
“Who? Did the army take us seriously after all?”
“I don’t think the military has actually developed the glider program yet. Your guess about who’s behind this is as good as mine.”
“If someone’s trying to raid Majestic,” Dodge said, “then Doc and the others might be in even more danger than we thought.”
Hurricane nodded grimly, then drew a pistol from the flap-holster on his hip. It was a Colt M-1911A — Frey had supplied one to each of them — but in Hurley’s grip, it looked like a toy. “Guess we’d better get moving.”
Baron Otto Von Heissel stood at the railing alongside the resonance wave projector, gazing down onto the valley floor. The circular depression the machine had earlier cut was now illuminated by spotlights, shining from Majestic’s underbelly. He checked his watch again, then turned to his companion and smiled. “Time to change the world.”
The device began humming, bombarding the ground with invisible vibrations. The light revealed the almost instantaneous effects; the ground began to shimmer as the tiny particles turned to quicksand. Von Heissel’s gaze however was now fixed only on his timepiece, watching as is ticked away the seconds.
“Stand by for release,” he called out. “Ten seconds… five, four, three, two, one, now!”
A faint tremor passed through the deck as a crewman in an adjacent bay released the hook holding the payload in place. The baron looked down just in time to see an oblong gray object plummet into the swirling earth, where it vanished like a rock dropped into the ocean. Almost exactly two seconds later, the depression bulged upward as seven hundred and fifty pounds of the high explosive compound amatol detonated almost two hundred feet below the surface.
As the earth settled, Von Heissel gave the order to shut down the resonance machine, and then noted the time. He could almost visualize the seismic waves spreading out from the point of the detonation, rippling through the earth’s crust and mantle. In less than two hours’ time, those waves would reverberate through the entire planet. Given the tremendous mass of the earth, this single explosion would be no more significant than a mosquito biting an elephant. It might not register on even the most sensitive graphs. Nevertheless, in slightly more than one hundred minutes, at the very moment when the energy returned to the source, the process would be repeated and the resulting wave would be twice as strong.