I looked away.
We were up a good three hundred, four hundred feet. I remembered newsreel clips of parachutes being tested off the London Bridge and the Eiffel Tower, so I figured I needed about six hundred feet minimum to jump.
I inched along. And I turned the corner into the walkway.
I climbed, the spill of the light of the hatch fading behind me. I switched on the flashlight, and up ahead I saw the silver flank of the nearest fuel tank. I approached and flashed the beam into the deepest shadows beyond.
The parachute was there. I would carry it forward with me. The ticking would really begin after the fire was lit. I’d need to have this thing attached to me when I struck the match.
I needed an extra hand. I extinguished the flashlight.
I bent to the parachute, drew it out. I wrapped my right arm around it and held the rail with my other hand. The next milepost was based on sound anyway.
I climbed onward.
The hammering approached, the piston roar of the Maybach. I moved into the very center of it.
The walkway was elevated a foot or so from the aluminum skin of the keel, and the fuel tanks were welded to the keel and set about the same distance off the walkway edge. I lifted the parachute over the railing and wedged it between two tanks for now, and I moved forward one fuel tank.
I turned and faced aft and sat down on the walkway, bracing myself with a foot against the near edge of the next tank.
The engines were hammering through me not just as sound but as a bone-deep vibration, from where I sat, from where the bottom of my foot pressed against the side of the fuel tank.
But I was thinking just fine. I was thinking clearly.
If the army played a few minutes to the locals before heading out to do its business — and the German imperial propaganda machine was already as well oiled and powerful as the Maybach engine I was sitting over — then perhaps we’d level off soon and give the people a good look at the new Zepp in flight and feed their war fervor. This was the newest model, after all. Lately delivered.
I had to make a tough choice. Sit and see if my guess about our location and heading was right and risk a more remote blast if I was wrong or work in this tilt-floored Coney Island Pavilion ride and risk fumbling the tin box and letting it tumble down the walkway.
I drew the box from my case.
I opened the lid but kept the box in my lap for now, my flexed legs holding it more or less level.
I found my matches and pulled them from my pocket. I laid them on the cotton wool.
Where would I set the box so that it wouldn’t slide while the cotton burned?
And what about the parachute? Trying to put the harness on and carry the chute rucksack down this incline and hook it properly for a launch would be a terrible challenge at this angle.
I had to roll the dice.
I had to wait.
And I did.
I sat for a few moments and a few moments more and I thought that the angle was softening a little, but then perhaps not.
And then yes.
And we began to turn again.
Another portside turn.
If we’d passed over Spich, as I’d thought, and then over the Alten Forst, we’d now be turning north again, finding our bearing toward England, and in lovely, level flight we’d pass once more over the good citizens of Spich, who’d been alerted by our first passage and now were crowded into the streets to wave and cheer and throw their hats in the air. Gott strafe England.
I had no intention of blowing up the LZ 78 and its payload directly over Spich.
But it was a small town.
We’d cross it quickly.
And the upward angle was declining.
I felt I was right.
I waited.
We were leveling.
I waited.
And now we were level.
I rose up. I placed the tin box on the walkway and I stepped aft to the parachute and unwedged and withdrew it from its place against the fuel tank.
I turned back and flashed my beam to the box sitting open there on the walkway, matches on top of cotton wool. I approached it, the parachute cradled in my right arm.
And the lights came on.
60
It came from above and from below. The light was muted — the bulbs and their fixtures double-contained in glass — but the hull was illuminated clear enough. Plenty clear enough for me to look far ahead along the walkway and see a figure coming this way.
I glanced back aft to see if I’d soon be surrounded.
No one in that direction.
Back to this figure, advancing rapidly now.
Lieutenant Schmidt. My canny rube.
I dropped the parachute to my side.
He was smiling. He was preparing to salute.
And then he wasn’t. He was looking at the parachute as he approached and he was recognizing it and then he was looking at the box in front of me.
He was maybe thirty feet away now.
He slowed.
It would have been impossible for him to figure out anything close to my plan. But he knew something odd was going on.
He was ten feet from me and he stopped.
I lifted up to full height to stand before him as a far superior officer.
He wavered.
I could have found these things here myself. However odd they were, if their presence in the middle of the walkway was sinister, then surely his first impulse would be that it had nothing to do with me. I was a very high ranking officer in the Deutsches Heer. I had found these suspicious things myself.
The Maybach pounded loudly on.
There was no need to speak to him anyway. I was righteous in my rank, in my place here on the LZ 78.
I motioned him closer.
I pointed at these things. The parachute. The box. The matches.
I cried above the engine roar, “See what I’ve found, Lieutenant. What do you make of it?”
He looked more closely at the box.
He began to bend toward it.
“Close enough!” I commanded.
He stopped himself. Stood upright.
My rank was prevailing.
He saluted. He waited.
I had no time for this.
The engines roared around us both.
There was nothing more to say anyway.
He could not be allowed to walk off now. He would, of course, speak of this to the executive officer or the commander. Even if he was not suspicious of Colonel Wolfinger, even if they were not either, even if, instead, they thought I’d shrewdly uncovered a plot, perhaps a further plot of the Englishman, they’d still send somebody up here to me.
I could not let that happen.
Lieutenant Schmidt would be dead in a few minutes anyway.
I drew my Luger.
I pointed it at him.
His face went blank. Of course he hadn’t suspected me. And he could not even begin to imagine what was happening now or why.
We looked at each other.
When he and his fellow crew members imagined their death in the night sky, what had been his choice? To burn or to jump?
His face was a rube’s face now. Not canny at all. Uncomprehending. No. Not a rube. Just an overgrown kid from some backwater Black Forest town who loved his telegraph and his airship.
I motioned him to move back a few steps.
The Luger was pointed at his chest.
He was starting to get it. He began to raise his hands.
I shook my head no.
He took a couple of steps back and I stopped him with a flip of a palm.
A quick ending for this boy now was surely better than an extended burning ten minutes from now. Or a leaping. That terrible, time-stretching fall to the earth.