The Saboteurs

by Clive Cussler

  She dwarfed all but the largest ocean liners, and the fact that she could fly at twice their speeds made her all the more impressive. The transatlantic flight to Panama proved the concept that regular air service was not impossible. The need to refuel and top off the hydrogen bags during the crossing made a mid-Atlantic rendezvous with the Dagna a necessity, but in the future a landing field could be established on the Canary Islands as a permanent solution to that problem.

  Captain Grosse led them up the scissor stairs inside the mooring mast framework, returning salutes from two young airmen descending to the main deck. A third crew member guarded the entry hatch at the very front of the dirigible. He too saluted and let the party pass.

  Just inside the door was the mechanical lever to release the locking pin holding the airship to the mast. In front of them were stairs that descended gently and followed the curve of the airship’s bow section. From there, it was eighty feet back to an access ladder that rose to the control gondola. During normal operations at an airfield, the mooring mast was much lower, and the gondolas could be accessed at ground level via regular doors.

  The airship’s cockpit was a utilitarian space, with exposed wires and alloyed structural frameworks punched through with holes to reduce weight without sacrificing strength. The view outside was a two-hundred-and-eighty-degree panorama. There were two main control wheels, one for steering the ship left and right, the other to control altitude. Other controls mounted on panels were for ballast and venting hydrogen during flight. There were speaking tubes connected to the mechanics’ ready room to call for more or less airspeed. There was ample space for five, including a seat reserved for the Captain.

  A tight corridor ran aft from the cockpit along the gondola’s left side. It linked several curtained-off spaces. One was for the airship’s wireless set. It was little more than a cramped cubbyhole with room for a single man and his gear. There was a lavatory, which was merely a seat with a hole to the wide world below, and three private rooms with cots for the officers. Writing desks could be folded down from the wall in each cabin, and uniforms and other gear were stored in bins under the narrow bedsteads.

  Next came another short flight of stairs up into the hull of the airship, and a tunnel stretching back to the second gondola. There were a pair of ladders midway down the tunnel that gave access to the forward engine nacelles. At the end of the tunnel was yet another ladder. The rear gondola was larger than the control cabin and, for this trip, left almost completely empty except for a large winch and cable suspended over a door with long piano hinges in the cabin’s floor that could be opened. Next to it was the “cloud car.” The contraption resembled the cockpit of a wingless aircraft with a blunt yet still-aerodynamic nose and small fins at the rear.

  “What’s this?” Talbot asked. “Looks flimsy.”

  “It is far sturdier than it appears,” Captain Grosse said, displaying more than a little pride in the floating oddity. “It is an observation platform that we can lower from the ship. From it, a man with a compass, binoculars, and the speaking tube to the control gondola can act as navigator while the ship remains hidden in the clouds.”

  Left unsaid was the observer’s more militaristic role of bombardier when the airship turned into a weapon of war.

  “You Germans think of everything,” Talbot remarked. “When Otto told me his airship had a winch strong enough to lower the mines, I never thought to ask why. Darn clever, is what I thought.”

  “This is how we located the Spatminster without the ship spotting us. We remained in some high clouds while our observer below scanned the seas. We will need to leave it behind to accommodate the second mine.”

  “That brings up the question of the woman stashed in the chain locker.” This came from Captain Blucher, the Dagna’s commanding officer. “What is to be done with her?”

  The men all looked to Otto Dreissen. The industrialist remained silent for several seconds, his face a stony mask, his icy gray eyes unreadable.

  “I believe it is too late for her husband to stop us, at this point, so killing Mrs. Bell accomplishes nothing and serves to antagonize him further. She’s seen nothing but the inside of her blindfold and the inside of a metal storage locker. We will release her at our next port of call.”

  “That would be Kingston,” Captain Blucher said. “We need some supplies for the hydrogen generator. I believe there is an American Consul in the city.”

  Talbot said, “Which means Bell will head there from Panama to fetch her. But if something happens to her, I hope you go deep underground, Mr. Dreissen, because Isaac Bell is going to come after you like a just awoken grizzly bear.”

  33

  You’re sure you can fly this thing?” Sam Westbrook asked when the warehouse doors were fully opened and daylight shone on the wood and wire and canvas sculpture that was the Fowler-Gage biplane.

  “Oh, yeah,” Bell said with longing in his voice. He couldn’t wait to take it up.

  The fuselage and wings were yellow fabric over a wooden frame, and it looked far sturdier than some of the other planes Bell had flown. The eighty-horsepower Hall-Scott V8 motor was a veritable beast behind the big seven-foot propeller. The original landing gear had been replaced with a pontoon that jutted out ahead of the engine and prop. Two small outrigger floats were attached at the wingtips. The entire plane sat on a wheeled cart so it could be towed down to the water just east of the Authority’s administration building.

  R. G. Fowler was painted on the fuselage in large black letters.

  “And you get so much as one bug splatter on her, I’ll make sure that Mr. Fowler sues you into the poorhouse.” The speaker was none other than Jack Scully, the Authority’s chief mechanic.

  “Not to worry, I’ve got plenty of flight time under my belt.”

  Scully coughed from deep in his lungs and spat. “Can’t believe Goethals went along with this. If it weren’t for a shipping error, she’d be crated up and on her way back to the States with Mr. Fowler and his photographer, Ray Duhem. This is the first plane to fly coast-to-coast across an entire continent, you know.”

  “We’re aware of that, Mr. Scully,” Bell said with fraying patience.

  It had taken all his skill to get George Goethals to allow Bell to borrow the famous plane. Goethals had wanted to send ships out to find the dirigible’s support vessel, and Bell had to convince him it would take too much time. In the end, the Canal Administrator had conceded the point but got Bell to promise that he would only pinpoint the ship’s location so that an armada could then go after it.

  Bell had lied the whole time yet felt no guilt. He was going to rescue his wife and no scruples were going to get in his way.

  Scully obviously loved machines. He could fix any equipment the Canal Authority had, from the steam shovels and locomotives all the way down to the rotary fan that sat on the desk in his office. Because of this love, he’d spent a great deal of time with Robert Fowler, the plane’s owner and pilot, during the practice flights in preparation for the hop from Panama City on the Pacific Coast to Cristóbal on the Atlantic.

  He had arrived leading an old swaybacked horse by its reins. A quartet of five-gallon gas cans were hung from its leather cargo saddle. The animal seemed used to this work and stood quietly while the mechanic unloaded its burden.

  “Westbrook, make yourself useful,” Scully began. “There’s a hand pump on the bench over in the corner. Grab that, and there should also be a bunch of specialized wrenches in a cloth roll. I need them to tweak all these rigging wires. They’ve gone slack since Mr. Fowler took her across the isthmus.”

  “Got it.”

  “Bell, might as well get into the cockpit. That’s the fuel tank there on top of the upper wing.”

  Isaac noted that Robert Fowler was always prefaced “Mr.” but he was just “Bell.”

  The biplane’s open cockpit was little more than a pair of seats, one
in front of the other. The pilot sat behind the passenger, and the controls consisted of a foot bar to swivel the rudder and a stick for his right hand to control the elevators that controlled the aircraft’s pitch. The motor’s water-cooled radiator was directly in front of the passenger’s seat. Bell assumed the photographer had taken his shots out the side of the cockpit.

  Sam Westbrook gave the bundle of special wrenches to the mechanic for the exacting job of adjusting the tension of all the rigging wires, which, basically, held the plane together while it was in flight. He handed up the rubber hose connected to the hand pump. Bell unscrewed the filler cap to the teardrop-shaped fuel tank and inserted the hose. Sam unscrewed the cap of the first can, plunged the other end of the hose into its gas, and began to pump the mechanism midway between the two ends.

  “Sit yourself down,” Jack Scully said. “You get a lot more leverage that way.”

  Sam took his advice, and gasoline was quickly flowing up into the plane’s tank. While he siphoned all four cans into the plane, Scully walked around it and played the rigging wires like a professional harpist. He strummed each wire and listened to the twang it produced and tightened the turnbuckles until he heard the right note and pitch.

  He may not have liked Bell or the thought of this flight, but he paid the plane professional attention as someone who loved it. At least, that was Bell’s fervent wish. Though he knew how to pilot a plane, rigging one properly took experience he just didn’t have.

  Scully tinkered with the engine for another ten minutes after finishing with the wires. He added oil and checked over all the valves and made certain the radiator was topped off.

  Only when he was satisfied did they fire the motor. It lit on just the second crank and roared like a lion. Even with chocks holding the wheels of the trolley the plane was sitting on from moving, the plane itself felt like it wanted to take to the air. Bell couldn’t keep a smile from his face despite the significance of this flight.

  He choked the engine to silence, after a minute’s test, and the prop juddered to a stop.

  “Any chance I can talk you into taking me?” Sam asked as Bell jumped down from the cockpit. “Four eyes are better than two.”

  “I might as well be straight with you now,” Bell said when Jack Scully was out of earshot. He was hitching the trolley carrying the plane to the horse so it could tow it out to the water.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I lied back in Colonel Goethals’s office. It’s a big ocean out there. I don’t stand a chance in hell of finding that ship. Needle in a haystack would be a piece of cake by comparison.”

  “If not there, where are you going?”

  “That’s what I was doing all day in the map room. Old Jeremiah Townsend and I picked the two most likely spots Talbot would rendezvous with the airship. I can fly there in under two hours.”

  “And then what?”

  “Wait for the Zeppelin to show and follow it back to the ship.”

  “Clever, Mr. Bell. So why not take me?”

  Bell explained. “The more weight the plane carries, the more fuel she burns. I’m going to need every drop of gasoline if this is going to work.”

  Bell pointed to the one-man canoe he’d secured to the lower wing. “Plus, I’m bringing that.”

  “You never explained why.”

  “We identified two likely places. I have to assume Talbot loiters in the area while he’s waiting for the Zeppelin’s night flight. I can’t get too close in a noisy airplane. When I check out the valleys, I’ll land out of range and paddle in. If I find no evidence that Talbot’s around, I fly off to the other site and do the same thing. With luck, I’ll get an idea what they’re doing and then paddle back in time to follow the airship.”

  Sam nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “Just stand by the phone in your office. I’ll call as soon as I reach Cristóbal and give you the coordinates as best as I can figure.” Bell suddenly remembered something. He handed a note to Sam. “I need you to wire the Van Dorn office with these instructions.”

  Sam read the couple lines. “What’s ‘OTJ’?”

  “‘On the jump.’ Everyone at Van Dorn knows if I add those letters that it’s a priority job. If the response comes back in the affirmative, you have to prevent President Roosevelt from coming here, even if he is just staying in the Canal Zone.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Coincidences are the opportunist’s playground.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just send it. And mind what I said about Roosevelt.”

  Jack Scully finally stopped griping when Bell climbed back into the floating plane and announced he was ready. He wore a pair of motorcycle goggles Sam had borrowed from a company dispatch rider, and he’d worked a pair of Ohropax wax-and-cotton plugs into his ears. While the engine was loud, what he really needed was protection from the pressure of wind shooting into his ears at fifty miles per hour. He knew from experience that it grew painful after only a few minutes.

  The mechanic led the draft horse and its winged cargo across the parking lot and down the shallow embankment to the canal’s entrance channel. The day was virtually windless, the water was like glass. The horse had little trouble towing the biplane on its wheeled cart. Without hesitation, Scully entered the water, and the horse plodded along in his wake. The trolley was soon submerged, as the horse dragged it deeper, and all at once the airplane floated free.

  Scully turned around to lead the horse back to dry land. Sam took the reins, and Scully returned to the water once more to hand-start the Hall-Scott engine. This time, it fired on the first throw of the prop. Seaplanes don’t have brakes, and this one didn’t have an anchor, so as soon as the engine caught the Fowler-Gage started creeping forward. Jack Scully was forced to dive out of the way of the deadly prop. He came up, sputtering. Bell was already well past him by now, so the mechanic didn’t see the grin on his lips.

  With no wind to worry about, Bell opened the throttle to its stops, working the rudder bar with his feet to keep the plane headed in a straight line. He noted it was a little rougher than taking off from an airfield, and its speed built slower, but as he accelerated, the controls began to feel lighter in his hands. The wings were generating lift.

  Despite the canal’s calm surface, the ride grew rougher and rougher, and for a moment Bell thought the plane was going to tear itself apart. His hand was just reaching for the throttle to scrap the takeoff when the pontoon lifted clear, and things smoothed instantly. Bell pulled back ever so gently on the stick, and the biplane responded smartly. The nose came up, and he was climbing into the cloudless sky.

  He circled back when he reached about five hundred feet to throw a wave at the tiny figures standing at the water’s edge. Sam waved, and Bell threw him a salute. Bell felt no more remorse lying to Sam than when he’d lied to Goethals. It’s why he didn’t talk about his plan within earshot of Jack Scully. The gruff mechanic would have known right away Bell was pulling a fast one because the Fowler-Gage didn’t have anywhere near the range needed to go chasing after the airship.

  Bell looked for Scully and saw he was on foot and heading back to the garage with his horse walking with its head down behind him.

  Bell turned the aircraft to the northwest—a quirk of the canal is that one travels eastward to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific—and settled for an altitude of about a thousand feet. He could feel the drag the pontoon exerted on the airframe. The nose kept wanting to drop, and that meant he had to keep constant pressure on the stick in order to stay level.

  He was soon over the Culebra Cut. Steam and smoke rose from around the excavators, which still looked mammoth even from that altitude. He spotted a steam shovel that was sitting idle and knew it was the one destroyed in the accident.

  He got a better sense, from up above, how the sides of the canal were terraced like rice paddies in Asia. Also o
bvious were the massive landslides that continued to thwart the construction effort. Bell was put in mind of King Canute trying to hold back the tide.

  It was only from high up that he got a sense of the scale of the project. The cut stretched for some eight miles and sliced through the heart of the continental divide, laying mountains low as it went. The uncountable tons of rock pulled from it didn’t just leave a scar but also a testament to man’s vision, ingenuity, and tenacity.

  He flew over the earthen plug, which prevented the rising waters of Lake Gatun from inundating the work site and the town of Gamboa, and the mighty discharge of the Chagres River, its water the color of milky coffee as the spring floods had not yet abated.

  Without warning, the plane plummeted as though the air holding it aloft had dissipated. Bell swallowed the seed of panic and calmly let the nose drop to pick up airspeed. He descended far faster than he’d expected, but, at five hundred feet, he’d dropped below the odd pocket of extreme low pressure. He assumed it had something to do with the Chagres River and how its rapid current slowed when it entered the turgid lake.

  Moments later, he was back up to one thousand feet, and the plane was purring like a kitten. It was far superior to any of the aircraft he’d flown before, especially those with a pusher engine where the prop was behind the wings, as opposed to the tractor design of this one.

  Bell crossed over the broad expanse of Lake Gatun, the sun’s dancing reflection like a constant companion as he flew. There were no markers of any sort in this part of the country. Eventually, channel buoys would mark the shipping lanes, but for now there was nothing but rising water and impenetrable jungle. If Bell had to put down, he’d be hard-pressed to make it back to any sort of civilization. Had he drifted more easterly, he could have followed the side-by-side tracks of the Panama Railway and flown over some of the new bridges installed to raise the rails above the lake. However, his prize was farther west, where there was nothing.