I tried to ignore him.
I had my own agenda.
I took most careful note for myself of the eighty-gallon aluminum fuel tanks clustered like cave-growing mushrooms along the walkway, their flammable contents piped down to the Maybach engines below, kept away from any engine spark.
Behind these tanks would be a fine place to deposit my dispatch bag and its bomb.
We were in a dark stretch. The lieutenant kept his light forward. I could hear a faint ticking.
It was my own watch.
But I was very aware of the ticking I could not hear.
And now there was some daylight ahead, coming from the floor.
We approached, and the defile of the walkway opened up, the planking vectoring around an open keel hatch.
In the upspill of light I took my watch from my pocket and checked the time. Twenty-five minutes after four.
“We take on supplies here,” Lieutenant Schmidt said.
The hatch also had another function. This was clear to me. Directly over the opening was an array of iron hooks welded into a horizontal level of girders. The hooks were within easy reach, outward and upward, just above one’s head. This was where a man could hang the break-cord tether of his Paulus parachute and then leap through the hatch. The tether was attached to the top of the silk canopy of his chute, which was folded with its lines into the rucksack on his back, the top of which was closed by another break cord. His plunging body-weight reached the end of the tether, which grabbed at his parachute, which broke through the top of the rucksack and billowed open and snapped the tether. And the leaper was free and floating. He escaped. He did his duty as best he could and then he lived.
And yet all the men on LZ 78 had refused parachutes.
I could understand why.
They were brave and they were dedicated and they were professional. They were soldiers. To make their way here and do this thing successfully, they would have to abandon their ship early in its distress. Which they refused to do.
I was killing men like this.
But Albert was not a man like this.
He’d insisted on being one of them to share their glory, but he’d also insisted on a way to escape them if they were to die.
At last I realized it would be easy for me to kill Albert at the end of this night.
A bullet in his head.
Simple.
At my hip, the bomb ticked on.
I’d stopped to ponder all this.
The lieutenant drew near.
I was staring at the array of hooks.
“You know what that’s for?” he asked.
“I do,” I said.
“This is where they are supposed to be kept,” he said, and he flashed his light into a rack in the dimness beyond the hatch.
He snapped his head back.
He’d clearly expected the parachute storage rack to be empty, a testament to the crew’s scorn for any plan to abandon their ship.
But a single, rucksack-shaped bundle lay on one of the shelves.
Albert’s.
And then Lieutenant Schmidt surprised me a little. He was a shrewdly practical man, as guys stupidly mistaken for rubes often were.
“Someday,” he said. “They will make a parachute that needs no anchoring in the ship. It will be light and easily worn and you can simply jump. Even at the very last moment, when you have done all that you can do. You will jump from wherever you are and deploy your own canopy.”
Briefly — not as Klaus von Wolfinger, not as America’s secret service agent, not even as the Cobb who wrote news stories — but briefly, as one guy hearing another guy and knowing what he means, I thought to say to him, May you still be flying when they start issuing those.
But the words snagged on a goddamn irony in my head, and instead I said, “We should see the bomb rack. Time is growing short.”
“Sorry, sir,” Lieutenant Schmidt said, and he led me farther, to mid-ship and another open hatch, a large one, with the walkway skirting it.
Over this opening, however, the cross girders supported a tenement-garden-size release mechanism. The bombs bloomed in neat rows, fins unfurled, awaiting their headlong harvest.
Beneath them, crouched low and leaning head and shoulders over the hatch opening, was an officer in the uniform common to the command gondola.
Below him was the watch officer I’d displaced.
I did not hear the words they exchanged but the watch officer saw me in the shadows and nodded the crouching officer’s attention toward me. The man turned his head and leaped to his feet. He saluted.
I returned it.
“Sir,” he said. “Lieutenant Kreyder, bombing officer of LZ 78, awaits your command, sir.”
“At ease, Lieutenant,” I said.
“Thank you, sir,” he said, and he spread his legs a little and clasped his hands behind his back.
“That’s not enough at ease, Lieutenant,” I said. I was out of character now. Too soft. I was going a little out of my mind meeting and naming these men one by one.
“Sir,” he said. “It’s not often I have the honor of showing a colonel my little garden.”
He was repressing a smile. He was seeking my permission to laugh a little with me.
I wanted to tell him that he and I had the same image of his bombs.
I wanted to have a little laugh with him.
This was no way to fight a war. For either of us.
This all had to stop, this saluting and naming and talking together.
I had to think about the people in London who were, at this very moment, dressing for the theater. Not soldiers at all.
I knew I had to make quick work of this phony rationale for standing inside the LZ 78.
I had to plant my bomb and walk away as quickly now as possible.
56
So this officer pointed out Albert’s bomb, hanging with the others. It looked different from the rest only in subtle ways. The shape of its striking point, the angle of its fins, the sheen of its metal body.
I saw these things and I let them go.
The lieutenant spoke reassuringly on and on to this special colonel who was taking a special interest in this special bomb. “We will drop no others until that one has done its work,” he said. “We have studied the target area carefully, the navigation officer and the commander and I. We have flown over this district before. It is relatively well lit even when it is farther down our route. But tonight we will go straight there.”
I backed away. “That’s enough, Lieutenant. I am satisfied. Thank you.”
He was beginning to salute, but I turned away from him.
The rube was still near me.
I said to him, “I will examine the ship on my own for a while, as your commander mentioned.”
“Yes sir,” he said.
“You can return to your post now.”
His hand came forward. He was offering his tungsten flashlight.
I had my own in my pocket. But I needed to continue acting like Wolfinger, who would have made no such preparation.
The lieutenant said, “I know this ship like the back of my hand.”
The rube figured he’d read my thoughts in my brief moment of hesitation. Figured I’d give a damn about his finding his way in the dark.
I took his flashlight.
What matter did it make now if I dropped out of character to let this boy think Colonel Wolfinger would care about his welfare? So I said, “Thank you.”
He straightened and lifted his hand into a salute and he held it there.
I waved it off. “Go,” I said.
“Sir,” he said, and he vanished into the dark of the walkway.
I shifted the flashlight to my left hand and put my right hand beneath the dispatch case and cupped it and drew it against my hip.