The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

by Robert Olen Butler

  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.

  I gave the lieutenant time to distance himself from me along the walkway.

  I switched the flashlight on, and I headed forward. My destination was the mushroom garden of f
uel tanks feeding the engine at the rear of the command gondola.

  But moving through the dark I could not stop thinking about these good Germans all around me.

  And I thought of my own good German. Jeremy Miller. No. Erich Müller. Müller was the German. I was lucky to have him on my side.

  My side. But I was American. And I was killing the men on this airship in defense of England. For Jeremy. Who was not a German, in reality. Jeremy the Englishman, he said. Jeremy the Brit.

  I heard his own words: There are no pro-Brits in Germany. The Germans in this country who were his allies, and therefore my allies, those Germans might wish to defeat the Kaiser and his generals and their way of governing; they might wish for a better Germany, a democratic Germany, a bona fide republic. But they were not pro-Brit.

  And there was Jeremy’s mother. His own mother. She loved her Kaiser, who took them to war against the Brits. The Kaiser who hailed the sinking of their great passenger ship in the North Atlantic. Who justified a thousand dead civilian Brits. She was certainly not pro-Brit. Not like her son.

  And I saw that little echo of his boxer’s move in my mind. The head feint.

  What was the punch his old reflex made him dodge? A question from the innkeeper. Did he find the telegram she’d slipped under his door.

  Sure, he said. And to me: These were the groups we worked with inside Germany. The Republikaner. We were obligated to stay in touch with them.

  I remembered his back turning away with the Republikan at the garage where we fueled up the Torpedo. Their intense conversation. Backs turned.

  We were obligated to them?

  Having to provide a little easily censored information to a tractable collaborator would elicit a shrug. Not a feint. It was the question itself, spoken in my presence, that elicited the feint.

  And he’d slipped one other punch.

  Did they know the special nature of Albert’s bomb? I’d asked.

  And he did his little head feint to me. Not at all, he’d said.

  I stopped now.

  I switched off my flashlight.

  I stood in the dark.

  He’d gone out of his way to make sure I didn’t open the bomb.

  He gave me good reasons.

  But he said it and he knew I understood those good reasons and yet he said it again by stressing its delicacy, and again, by regretting our need to trust the device at all.

  The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

  I knelt down on the walkway.

  I would be careful. Just in case I was presently being a fool, I would handle my box of chocolates carefully and look carefully. But I would look.

  I could not hold the light and do what I had to do, at least for the first part. I needed both hands.

  I remained in the dark.

  I pressed the lieutenant’s flashlight into my tunic pocket next to my own.

  I pulled the strap over my head and set the dispatch case easily, easily down before me. I opened the weather flap. I put my hands inside and pulled at the tin box. It did not yield.

  I turned the case sideways and held it gently between my knees.

  I squeezed the case just a little and pulled at the tin and it rose slightly and I squeezed a little harder and pulled and again and again, and doing this inch by inch I finally was holding the bomb invisibly in the dark before me.

  I rotated it so that it was level.

  I grasped it tightly with my right hand.

  With my left hand I moved the dispatch case from between my knees and placed it to the side.

  I dipped into my tunic pocket and withdrew one of the flashlights. My own, I thought.

  I switched it on and held its beam on the tin box. Stollwerck Chocolade.

  I used the light to guide the box to the planking of the walkway before me.

  I could work with one hand now.

  I put my thumb in the small lip at the center of the lid. I lifted. The lid rose. It was hinged on the opposite side and I opened it all the way back and let it go.

  The white beam from the tungsten bulb showed a faint yellow tinge upon the white of the cotton wool.

  He had indeed packed it tightly. I had to be very careful now. If he was, in fact, the Jeremy Miller I’d come to rely on, I had to take heed of his warning. I did not want to disturb the bomb.

  I needed two hands again.

  The hinges were holding the top of the tin box parallel with the floor. I laid my flashlight there, its beam shining back toward me.

  I hesitated now.

  And listened.

  I could hear a clear ticking from within the box.

  All right.

  I leaned forward, turned my head to listen at the surface.

  The ticking was coming from the left side.

  I sat back up.

  I looked at the dense surface of purified raw cotton. I tried to visualize the arrangement within. The stick of dynamite would be nearly as long as the longest dimension of the box. The clock was small. A travel clock. I figured the dynamite was laid in close to one of the long sides.

  The safest way not to disturb the connection from explosive to clock was not to pull the packed fibers apart. I’d go in at the very edge and try to lift up the covering layer as a unit.

  The stick of dynamite could be laid out at either edge. I chose the bottom edge, as it now sat before me.

  I ran four fingers gently in, pressing against the side wall of the box. And then I touched the curve of the dynamite stick.

  I backed my hand up a bit, found the lower edge of cotton wool, ran my fingers underneath. And I pulled.

  The top layer of cotton wool began to rise up, mostly as a unit. I brought my other hand into play, gathering and recompressing and lifting back the clinging batches of wool fibers.

  And then the business contents of the tin box were exposed.

  Darkly, at the moment.

  The lifted layer of cotton wool was blocking the beam of light.

  I held up the cotton wool with one hand now, as if it were a second lid.

  I took up the flashlight with my other hand and shined it into the tin box.

  The clock was there. Ticking away. The stick of dynamite was there.

  The wires from clock to dynamite were missing.

  The two objects lay in the tin box utterly separate.

  I flipped the flashlight beam toward the bottom edge of the layer of cotton wool, my mind lunging forward to figure out how to reattach the wires, how to make this work.

  But there were no wires. No wires at all.

  I flipped the beam back to the dynamite.

  The blasting cap was also missing.

  Jeremy’s exact words about the bomb slithered through me: I wish we didn’t have to trust it.

  After the bomb I planted failed to explode and the Zeppelin flew on successfully to London, he wanted me to blame the device.

  But it was him. Erich Müller.

  57

  I sat back on my heels.

  I wanted to figure him out.

  But I didn’t have time.

  I was down to my last fifteen minutes or so before I’d have to get off the Zepp.

  I had no bomb.

  I thought: I’m sitting inside one. I was surrounded by two million cubic feet of explosively flammable hydrogen.

  But how could I both detonate it and escape it? Especially since the explosion would also instantly release a tempest of poison gas.

  Was I ready to die for tonight’s theater crowd in London?

  A reflex voice in me cried yes. Faintly though, coming through a welter in my head. I knew the answer would be louder and clearer if it was Broadway. If it was my own country. Or if my mother was playing Hamlet at the Duke of York’s.

  But I had to believe that even tonight I’d be dying for more. I’d die for a chance at exposing and discrediting poison aerial attacks themselves.

  Seemed like a good cause.

  But no. I wasn’t ready for that. Not the dying part.
I had to work hard now to try to have it both ways.

  Which made me think of Albert’s plan.

  His parachute.

  I had a way to survive if I could figure out how to blow up the LZ 78 while it was in the air.

  But the how had to include a long enough fuse.

  First things first.

  A few hours before takeoff, Dettmer had a man subtracted from his ship. For this, he’d be thinking to take things on board—compensating ballast—not off. Maybe that’s why the parachute was still sitting there. But I couldn’t depend on it remaining. I needed to secure the parachute.

  I stood up and closed the lid on the tin box and picked it up with me. As if it were still useful. Without something to serve as a blasting cap, the dynamite wouldn’t blow. Not till the airship did. Still, by reflex, I kept the box. I had few enough resources. It was all I had. Something might come to mind.

  I opened the dispatch case and slid it back in.

  I shined my light and strode forward.

  At least for now I could get around the ship without anyone’s close scrutiny. A Zeppelin had a crew of about twenty. At least half of them were mechanics. They were all with the engines. More than half the rest were presently in the command gondola. Everybody on board had a focused task. That would probably last till the ship was airborne.

  A footlight shone ahead.

  The hatch was still open.

  I arrived.

  No one was around.

  I took the parachute from the shelf. It was heavy, a good thirty pounds. I put it under my arm.

  I skirted the hatch on the walkway and walked forward, keenly aware of the distance I was covering, my distance from the parachute launching hooks and the hatch.

  I was instinctively heading for the place I’d targeted when I still thought I had a time bomb: the run of tanks piping fuel forward and downward to the engine compartment of the command gondola.

  That was still a volatile spot.

  And it was only about a third-base-to-home sprint to the hatch.

  I arrived at the fuel tanks and shined my light on them.

  I lifted the light to the bloated clouds of hydrogen bags hovering overhead.

  I looked back toward the hatch, a distant glow.

  And back to the bags.

  Gas.

  A flame burning low and gas leaking in. The pace of the gas could provide its own fuse.