Gruber bent over the pilot to peer through the windscreen and Drake did the same. A glance at the altimeter showed him that they were almost at twelve thousand metres, something like forty thousand feet, and he frowned; this high there was nothing at all to see apart from the bright blue sky. They were even far above the clouds. ‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’
Gruber glanced at the unfamiliar instrument on the panel. ‘We’re still quite far away, but you’ll see soon enough.’
He patted the pilot on the shoulder and when the man looked up at him he jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Out,’ he said in German. ‘I’ll take us in.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The pilot nervously fumbled with the quick release catch at his navel, then hurriedly stood, surrendering his seat to Gruber. The Prussian didn’t bother strapping himself in before trying the controls to get the feel of the aircraft, making it dip and weave gently. Once he was satisfied he glanced over his shoulder at Drake. ‘Why don’t you take the copilot’s controls?’
Even though Gruber hadn’t said anything directly to him, the copilot couldn’t get out of the cockpit fast enough.
Drake took his seat and did up the safety straps to Gruber’s amusement.
‘Don’t you trust me to get us down safely?’
‘I don’t trust anyone behind a stick except myself.’
‘Not even Gwen Stone?’
Drake avoided the question by tapping the unknown instrument with a fingertip. It comprised of two round electronic screens, side by side, a jagged and jumping waveform with a single spike on each. ‘What’s this for?’
‘That’s a radio direction finder. It shows us where Bertha is.’
‘She must be a very elusive woman if you need a tracking device to find her. What is she, your girlfriend?’
Gruber laughed. ‘She’s the closest thing I have to one and yes, she is extremely elusive. The best-kept secret in the world in fact.’
Drake waited, but when it was obvious the man wasn’t going to be any more forthcoming he gestured at the instrument. ‘How do I use this then?’
‘The screen on the left is direction, the one on the right is altitude. If the spikes are in the middle we’re on the correct course at the correct height. The closer we get to Bertha, the higher the spikes get, and when they reach the top of the display we’re there.’
Drake nodded. ‘Sounds easy enough.’
Gruber chuckled again. ‘I know! But apparently it takes three days to train our men to use it.’ He jerked his chin at the instrument. ‘Tell me what our status is.’
Drake peered at it, taking in the graduations along the x and y axes of the screens. ‘I’m assuming this is calibrated in metres...’ He looked sideways at Gruber, but when he didn’t reply he continued. ‘In which case we are on course, five hundred metres below and approximately ten kilometres from our target.’
Gruber gave the instrument a quick glance. ‘Looks about right, well done.’
As the waveforms crept higher and higher Drake looked from the instruments to the sky outside to Gruber, but the man said nothing, nor could he see anything.
It wasn’t until they had closed to less than five kilometres that Gruber finally turned to him and grinned. ‘There she is - Bertha, the Bertha Berg, named after the mother in law of the man who conceived of her.’
Drake leaned forward to squint through the windscreen. ‘I don’t...’
A flash of sunlight on metal drew his eye and he fell silent, his mouth going dry, as he finally saw their destination.
Bertha was painted a light blue that almost matched the sky, which was why it had taken so long for him to make her out.
She was the biggest airborne craft he had ever seen.
Five gigantic Zeppelin hulls had been needed to bear aloft an immense gondola, roughly the same shape as the Arturo, with angular sides, a vertical stern and a sharp prow, but far larger. Four immense fans protruded from the corners of her flat keel and were powering it along at a fair clip, but curiously there were no engines in evidence or any exhaust fumes to be seen.
The paintwork really did a remarkable job of camouflaging the aircraft and Drake could see how Gruber could claim that it was the best-kept secret in the world. Even the iron cross insignia of the Fliegertruppe, usually black, were merely outlines, picked out on the fins and sides in white, so as not to spoil the effect.
‘Bertha took three years to build at a top secret facility on the Rhine, near the Swiss border. She is almost six hundred metres long and just under five hundred wide, made almost entirely of Duralumin, and has a crew of five hundred. She never has to land and she hasn’t since she was launched - anything she needs is ferried to her by aircraft.’
There was a note of real pride in Gruber’s voice as he spoke about the airship which Drake could well understand; Bertha was an unparalleled feat of engineering and undoubtedly unique in the world.
‘How is she powered?’
‘Wind turbines generate electricity for the entire ship and the fans are run by the largest springs ever designed.’
Drake frowned. ‘But how do you wind them? Surely if you need steam engines to wind the springs you might as well just have those engines powering the fans.’
Gruber grinned at him. ‘Don’t worry; you’ll see for yourself soon enough.’
The Prussian swung them in a wide arc around the gondola to approach from the rear and for a moment Drake thought that they were going to land on top of it, as if it were an aircraft carrier, but then a bright line appeared near the top of the stern as an enormous hangar door opened, moving downwards. Drake winced as he saw it, thinking that it would take a piece of impressive piloting to get them inside safely, but he had misjudged the proportions and, as they neared it on final approach, he realised that the gap was far bigger than he’d thought. The landing deck inside Bertha was larger than some airfields that Drake had seen in fact, large enough to double as the hangar deck, and it was so long that there was no need for arrester hooks to stop the aircraft. Gruber didn’t even have to apply the brakes very hard; he merely kept rolling until he’d passed the line of aircraft parked beside the runway, including the transport that had been carrying Tanya and five Blutsaugers, before bringing the transport to a halt. He ignored the signals of a man trying to direct them to their parking place and stood, leaving the engines running. ‘Let’s leave this for the pilot to take care of.’
He led Drake to the still-sealed door at the rear of the aircraft where the steward was waiting for them. He had an oxygen mask in place over his face and was holding two more, along with their greatcoats.
Gruber shrugged into his long black coat and put on his mask, then waited impatiently for Drake to do the same.
Drake was glad to do so; the temperature had been dropping for a while and the air was becoming decidedly thin.
Gruber saw his discomfort and grinned through the glass faceplate of the mask. ‘We’ve been equalising pressure for the last couple of minutes. Unless you want to suffocate, I’d get that mask on quickly.’
Drake put on his coat, then pulled the mask on hurriedly. It had a hose attached to a small backpack which went over his shoulders. The steward showed him the controls, switching it on so that there was a steady flow of air, then turned to the outer door and waited, his eyes on a red light over the door. When it went green he turned the handle.
There was barely a hiss as the door opened and as soon as the steward had the steps in place Gruber bounced down them to the metal floor of the cavernous space.
A long line of men, standing smartly at attention, was waiting for them on the flight deck. Gruber’s pilots in their grey Fliegertruppe uniforms were at one end and there were a few soldiers of Die Reichsheer, the Prussian Imperial Army, in green, but the rest, the vast majority, were sailors wearing dark blue - it seemed that an airship fell under the purview of the Prussian Imperial Navy, Die Reichsflotte, rather than the air force. The leader of the men, a painfully thin man
with receding grey hair in a blue uniform dripping with gold, saluted, and for once Gruber returned the gesture properly and with respect.
‘Welcome back, Generalleutnant.’
‘Thank you, Admiral. How is the ship?’
While Gruber conversed with the naval officer, Drake took in his surroundings with interest.
Aside from the two transports and shiny new Blutsaugers, on which mechanics were still stencilling names and victory markings, there were two large cargo aircraft in the hangar, one of which was being unloaded by a line of soldiers in green army uniforms and the other preparing for takeoff. White lines on the otherwise unpainted metal floor marked the limits of the runway and taxiways and there were boxes sitting at regular intervals, showing where aircraft were meant to park, red ones for the Baron fighters and yellow ones for the larger aircraft.
Even as vast as it was, the hangar didn’t take up the entire deck and there were wide bulkhead doors leading off both flanks, the closest of which was open, giving him a view of workshop where a Blutsauger was under construction.
It was all extremely impressive, but what struck him most was the quiet. While there was obviously a fair amount of noise from the people and aircraft, there was no deep thrum from the engines like there had been on the Arturo and no ever-present vibration in the deck. If it weren’t for the masks that everyone was wearing, they could almost be on solid ground and the fact that he knew they weren’t just added to the sense of awe the giant airship had provoked in him.
He turned at a clang and saw that the hangar door they had come through had just closed. There was a loud hissing noise from all around and then less than half a minute later a klaxon sounded that had everyone removing their masks. Drake did the same and tested the air - it was dry and thin, like the air at about ten thousand feet, and there was a metallic smell to it, but it was perfectly breathable. He shook his head in wonder; he’d heard of scientists working on pressurising the cockpits of aircraft to remove the need for oxygen masks, but this was the technology taken to a whole other scale.
He was starting to feel rather dismayed; the more he learnt of the airship, the more he realised that the British were not only out-gunned and out-manned, but also lagging far behind when it came to the technology of war. He chuckled wryly to himself; just as well they made up for the deficit with good, old-fashioned pluck, stiff upper lip and brilliant pilots.
Friedrich, the steward, appeared as if from nowhere. He murmured an apology and took Drake’s breathing apparatus from him, disappearing into the aircraft with it. Drake wondered why the man had apologised, but then noticed that he was now the only person without one. Evidently he wasn’t going to need one wherever he was going - he just hoped they weren’t planning on opening the hangar doors again before he got there.
Shortly after, Gruber finished his conversation with the admiral and beckoned Drake over.
‘I’m afraid I have urgent business to attend to, but when that is concluded I’ll take you on a tour of the ship.’
He waved forward the guards from the transport and spoke to them in German. ‘Take him to station three.’ He glanced at the admiral with a smirk. ‘Let’s see if he’s still as confident and aristocratic after some time at the capstans.’
The admiral nodded then looked at Drake, giving him what on the surface was a polite and respectful nod. ‘Welcome aboard, Lord Drake. I hope you have a pleasant stay on board.’
‘Thank you, Admiral.’ Drake returned the nod, not betraying the fact that he had understood what Gruber had said or that he was worried about what he meant; capstans were used to raise anchors on sailing ships, but the airship couldn’t possibly need such a thing.
He hoped that his rusty German had provided an incorrect translation because the alternative, that it was a name they were putting to some kind of torture device, wasn’t one that he particularly wanted to contemplate.
Chapter 13
The guards took him through a thick door in the middle of the hangar and into a small connecting room, about five yards square, which was labelled “Pressure Chamber” in German. It was bare apart from a second door opposite the first, control panels by both doors and a few metal cabinets lining a wall to his right. As they went past the cabinets, Drake read the labels on them and found that they contained emergency supplies - breathing masks, firefighting equipment and, of all things, glidewings.
The door on the far side of the room took them directly into a stairwell, like the one in the Arturo which had gone from the depths of the ship all the way up to the hangar deck, and they started down.
Large blue numbers were painted on the walls next to the bulkhead doors on each floor, with what was on each of them stencilled in white underneath. As they descended and the numbers increased (the hangar had been on deck three), Drake read the words with interest, noting, among other things, that the pilots’ mess was on deck four and there were two decks, five and six, solely dedicated to accommodation. However, despite the marvellous work of the Prussian doctors, his knee was aching and his legs were shaking with exhaustion by the time they reached deck nine and he barely had the energy to lift his head from the floor to read “Navy Officers’ Mess”.
He stopped to catch his breath and leaned over the banister to look down, goggling when he saw that they were only slightly more than half way down. ‘Bloody hell isn’t there a lift?’
The guards shoved him back into movement, but they did it without rancour and just continued chatting, seemingly not at all worried about Drake trying to escape and he realised that, even if he did somehow manage to get away from them, he had absolutely nowhere to go. Stealing an aircraft was out of the question this time with no idea how to open the hangar doors.
Black spots were swimming in front of his eyes by the time they reached the correct floor, only a couple of flights from the bottom. There were white words on the wall next to the door under the large blue eighteen, but he didn’t have a chance to read them before the guards took him through and into a bare metal corridor that was so long that he couldn’t see the end of it. The corridor was empty at least as far as he could tell, except for two doors, about ten yards in, facing each other, one painted with a big red “4” and the other a “3”.
Behind door number 3 was a large guard room. It had bare metal walls like the corridor outside, but was comfortably appointed with a dining table that seated eight, a few sofas, and a bookshelf stuffed with books and magazines. A doorway to the side lead to an adjoining room which had beds in it and the sound of running water hinted at a shower somewhere nearby. The corridors and the stairwell had been cold and unheated, but here there was warm air coming out of an overhead vent, making the room wonderfully cosy.
‘Got another one for you.’
Three men in naval uniforms were playing cards at the table and they looked up at the soldier’s call. One of them threw down his cards and got to his feet, joking with the others about not looking, then led Drake and the guards over to a door at the back of the room, unclipping a bunch of keys from his belt as he went.
While he was waiting for the sailor to undo the locks, Drake amused himself with reading the signs on the control panel on the wall next to the door. It had controls and gauges for things like lights, heat, air and pressure, and at the bottom was a large red lever marked “release” with a keyhole next to it.
The sailor got the door open and he ushered Drake and his guards inside a pressure room like the one they had passed through to leave the hangar, complete with the same emergency supplies. When they were inside he closed the door, then moved across to another identical door and repeated the unlocking process. There were no controls here to occupy Drake’s attention so he just watched the man as he turned two large keys, spun a metal wheel, identical to the ones on the heavier bulkhead doors of the Arturo, then tugged on the door to swing it open.
At the guards’ prompting, Drake followed the man through onto a small balcony, which was already occupied by another couple of
sailors, and stumbled to a halt.
Ten yards below, in a room that was fully fifty yards square, more than a hundred men and women in red jumpsuits were pushing on poles that radiated like spokes from a giant metal cylinder, much like a capstan on a ship. They were dishevelled and ragged, their jumpsuits in varying degrees of grubbiness and disrepair, their hair and exposed skin filthy, the men invariably bearded. However, more than their appearance, it was the demeanour of the captives which shocked and disturbed Drake; barely anybody looked up at him as he leaned over the balcony and those that did, did so without much interest, their eyes empty.
The room stank, but not just of unwashed bodies and confined humanity - it stank of despair and of hopelessness.
He searched the sea of red for Tanya, hoping that she’d been sent to the same room as he, but the guards only allowed him a few seconds to stare at the scene below, as if to let the reality of his new circumstances sink in, before they pushed him to the side and down the stairs leading to the floor.
Two more sailors were on duty down below. They weren’t armed with guns, but instead wielded rattan canes. One of them greeted the soldiers with a laugh before leering at Drake, and pointed at one of the capstan bars with his cane. The soldiers shoved Drake into position, stripped him of his greatcoat, then left quickly, obviously not wanting to be there any longer than they had to.
Drake placed his hands on the thick wooden bar, but he still couldn’t quite believe that they were actually going to make him do it. The rules for the treatment of prisoners of war, set down by the third Geneva Convention, of which both Prussia and Britain had been signatories, forbade the compelling of officers to work. Quite apart from that, the Convention also made it very clear that no work was to be undertaken that was hazardous to the health of prisoners, regardless of their rank, yet here around him was evidence to the contrary in haggard faces and worn bodies.
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