Indy called out. He'd just seen the dark areas atop the dirigible becoming large enough to make out what they were.
Machinegun nests atop the airship! Tracers sparkled and danced in the sky as they seemed to float upward against the Ford. They felt bullets striking the airplane. The Ford shuddered and yawed to one side; Cromwell fought her back.
He squeezed a button on his control yoke. The Ford shook and rattled as the two forwardfiring machine guns hurled tracers at the airship. "That should throw them off!" Cromwell shouted.
The right engine exploded. The sudden violence hurled the propeller away from the engine, flinging it well off to the side. Cromwell shouted to Indy. "The left rudder pedal! Stand on it, laddie, stand on it!"
Indy pressed down with all his strength, both men pushing left rudder as hard as they could to keep the airplane diving straight. The top of the zeppelin filled the entire world, a monstrous thing beyond belief, machine guns sparkling as they continued to fire.
"The handle! Get ready!" Cromwell shouted.
Indy reached forward, ready for the call.
"NOW! PULL THE HANDLE!"
Indy yanked back, a sharp sudden motion. He looked past Cromwell at the left wing. In a sudden fury of activity, the nose cone blew away from the underwing canister, flame speared backwards as the rockets ignited, and three long tubes rushed forward from the airplane, trailing flame and smoke as they arrowed downward into the spine of the great ship before them.
Dark spots appeared on the shiny fabric, then the rockets were gone. "What the devil happened?" Indy shouted to Cromwell. "There wasn't any explosion!"
"There will be—" Cromwell cut himself short as he pulled back on the yoke.
"Ease off on that rudder pedal," he ordered. The Ford rolled to the right and the nose came around. They sped past the airship, a toy against a giant. As they flashed by, Indy saw a stab of flame appear along the flank of the zeppelin.
To his left, Cromwell was frantically moving controls and switches, to cut off fuel and power to the shattered right engine. "We've got a fire of our own," he said grimly. He reached to the panel and pulled another handle.
"Watch the right engine," he ordered.
White mist engulfed the engine briefly, streaming back through the wreckage, and was flung away by the wind.
"Fire extinguisher," Cromwell said. "Did it work?"
"No more fire," Indy told him. The shriek of wind was overwhelming. Cromwell was pulling back on the yoke, easing the Ford from its crazy dive. He maintained their descent, but under control this time, able to bank the airplane better, to see the airship.
"Take a look, lad," he said, quietly this time.
Flame billowed from the flanks of the airship. "What's happening?" Indy asked. "That thing is filled with helium and helium doesn't burn—"
"Right," Cromwell told him. "But it's also got a devil of a load of fuel for those jet engines. That magnesium, once it's ignited, will keep right on burning through the metal structure, and that means the fire worked its way down to the fuel tanks and ate right through the metal. That fire is their fuel.
I'd say we've done a day's good work, be cause—"
There was no need to say more. A savage glare appeared along the sides and belly of the airship. Indy understood now that blazing magnesium had breached the fuel tanks. Fuel spilled outward, ignited violently, and sent flames hurtling through the fuel storage area. The huge airship wallowed like a stricken whale, dying before their eyes as explosions wracked the structure. Debris and bodies spilled outward.
Indy stared as crewmen, arms and legs flailing helplessly, began the long fall toward the earth.
Another blast, a great gout of flame, and the zeppelin buckled amidships, its back broken. The flames continued to spread, and two huge masses tumbled downward, twisting and turning in seeming agony as they dropped to final destruction.
"You need me up here right now?" Indy asked Cromwell.
"Not now. We're below twenty thousand, and I'll keep her going down like an elevator until we're at fourteen. Then we can all take off these miserable oxy systems and breathe like normal people again."
Indy climbed from the cockpit. Back in the cabin he moved immediately to the side of Foulois. Chino was cradling the unmoving Frenchman in his huge arms.
Foulois's oxygen mask was gone from his face, telling Indy what he feared most of all.
Indy met Chino's eyes. They didn't need words to say that Rene Foulois was dead.
Gale sat to one side, quietly. Indy saw she had been crying. Now she was numb, inside and out. Rene Foulois was gone, and they had been on the thin edge of death themselves. Gale had frostbite on her face; she suffered her own pain. Finally she looked up.
"Did we . . . " Her voice faltered.
"We did," Indy said quietly as he could and still be heard over the roar of engines and wind.
"Masks off now," Cromwell announced from the cockpit. They turned their valves to the off position and removed masks and goggles. Indy unsnapped the heavy mouth cover. It was already much warmer at their lower altitude. He helped Gale with her face protection and goggles and removed her oxygen mask. Her lips were still trembling. He looked sternly at her.
"Put your goggles back on," he ordered. "The wind is wild through the bullet holes in the cockpit. Now, get up there."
Her eyes went wide. "I . . . I can't. I—"
"Yes, you can. And you will. You're a pilot! Will needs help up front. We're coming down with two engines and the right wing chewed up, and we've got a busted airplane on our hands. So get up there and fly."
For a long moment she stared at Indy. She rose slowly, stood before him.
"You know something, Professor Jones?
I think I love you."
She brushed her lips against his, and was gone.
Indy leaned against the cabin wall. He looked sadly at Foulois.
"He was a very good man," Indy said. "An ace in the war against the Germans. Strange for him to die here, like this."
"Not so strange," said Jose Syme Chino. "All things have their special time.
This also was a war. A battle between good and evil. As are all great struggles.
This man,
who had wings, there is a special place for his kind with the Great Spirits."
Indy nodded slowly as they continued their return to earth.
"Amen," he said.
THE END
Afterword
OF COURSE IT'S REAL!
Recently—the summer of 1991—I was a guest speaker at the Institute of Advanced Learning in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the subject that raised the greatest interest and brought in a standingroomonly crowd was, not unexpectedly, a serious study of UFO's. During the questionandanswer period which gave the audience free rein to ask anything they wanted to ask, and likely never before had the opportunity to get an answer, I was asked the inevitable question. Had I ever seen a UFO? And if I had, what did it look like and what did it do?
I admit to tweaking my audience. Like most people I've seen UFO's through a lifetime, but in this instance I am being very specific. In other words, I had seen at different times something in the sky I could not identify: a flash of light, a colorful ray, a physical object too distant to make out any details. The object I saw was simply impossible to identify.
Hardly very exciting.
So I told my audience about an absolutely incredible sighting of many years past, a sighting in broad daylight, under perfect visual conditions, with thunder rolling like the end of the world from the heavens.
"It was a vessel utterly alien to me," I related. "It was absolutely incredible.
Nearly a thousand feet long! It sailed across the earth maybe fifteen hundred, perhaps two thousand feet high. It was so huge it partially blocked out the sun. Its deep groaning roar sent birds fleeing and animals dashing for safety. It was silvery, splendid, magnificent as it passed over, and I watched it until it vanished beyond the horizon."
Well, n
ot many people believed me. In fact, I doubt if anybody in that crowd believed a word of what I'd told them. I asked for a show of hands from anyone who believed that what I'd told them was absolutely, unquestionably real.
Not one hand went up. I'd struck out. Zero belief. Then I dropped my "belief bomb."
"I don't know why you find what I just described to you as too fantastic to believe. What I was seeing was also witnessed by millions of other people. I was standing beneath the USS Akron, sister ship to the equally huge USS
Macon, the two enormous dirigibles of the United States Navy that were in service in the early 1930's. And, of course, never having seen such a sight before, or having known of these two massive sky vessels, the ship blocking out the sun was alien to me!"
Even if it was some sixty years ago.
It was another wonderful moment of fact being stranger than fiction. And remembering that moment, and others like it—such as those times when I flew a jet fighter in pursuit of other objects in the sky that I never caught up with and never did identify—helped me decide that in INDIANA JONES AND THE SKY PIRATES, everything that seems exotic, wonderful, marvelous— and impossible—is all based on hard, provable, reality.
Airships, the bloated, clumsy cigar-shapes put together from bedsheets, ropes, and clumsy rigging first carried men into the air more than a hundred years ago. Some maneuvered through the skies by men pedaling madly on bicycles that turned propellers instead of wheels. Others used dangerous engines powered with benzine, dangerous because they often burned and exploded in flight, ending promising careers with a fiery finality. Huge dirigibles, notably those from the Zeppelin works in Germany, performed from 1914 to 1918 with astonishing success. They bombed British cities, and in turn they were blasted from the skies by antiaircraft fire and fighter planes. The German L35 began a new era by carrying aloft an Albatross Dlll fighter plane, and releasing it for protection, like a swift hawk covering a giant plump chicken in the sky. Soon British dirigibles were carrying fighter planes, releasing them in flight and recovering them as well—the predecessors to the huge dirigible in our own story in this book. And nearly seventyfive years ago, Germany's L53 had already climbed to more than 21,000 feet above the earth.
After that war ended in 1918, dirigibles became ever larger, faster, more powerful, and amazingly reliable— again setting the stage for the mighty airship in our story. Even today, it is difficult to believe the splendid record of certain airships of past times, such as Germany's Graf Zeppelin, which in the time span of nine years flew a total of 17,179 hours in 590 separate flights! The famed Graf flew from Europe to America, to South America and the Middle East, crossed the Arctic on an exciting adventure for its passengers, and then flew around the world on a leisurely tour that even today seems like a dream. Before the Graf Zeppelin was retired after its nine years of service, it had taken aloft, in luxury and perfect safety, more than 34,000 people.
So what you have read in these pages about a great airship and the flying machines it carried, releasing and recovering them in flight, has a great "reality foundation" in aviation history.
BUT—JET ENGINES IN 1930?
If you search through your history books on aviation, or study thick encyclopedias, or wander through jet aviation exhibits in museums, you are certain to be informed that the first jet airplane took to the skies in August of 1939. This was a Heinkel He178 of Germany, and it represented a highwater mark in aviation progress.
But it wasn't the first jet flight—which established another foundation for our story. In fact, the He178 made its first flight nearly thirty years after the Frenchman, Henri Coanda, lunged into the skies from the airfield at IssylesMoulineaux in France. The year was 1910, and not only did Coanda make the first jet flight (short and disastrous though it was), but he also designed the jet engine for his own sleek biplane jet. Today, the second biplane jet Coanda built is still on display at a French aviation museum. The first machine of its type was publicly displayed in 1910 at the Salon Aeronautique in Paris.
This writer interviewed Henri Coanda at great length, and a marvelous time it was, being with one of the greatest aviation pioneers of history. Coanda began to develop his ideas for a jet engine in 1904, when he attended the French School of Advanced Aeronautic Study. From this learning period he designed and continued to improve on a jet engine he called the turbopropulsor. His friend, Clerget, built the engine from Coanda's design drawings, and it was installed in the sleek biplane, also of Coanda's design.
Since Coanda flew his jet in 1910, some twenty years before our story takes place, there was certainly plenty of time to develop the original crude jet engine into a powerful and reliable system for the flying discs that Indiana Jones had to face.
But why haven't we heard more of Coanda? Because while he managed to take off in his jet, his landing was a thundering crash. He was performing taxi tests. That is, running the Coanda Jet along the airport to test its power and its brakes, so the pilot would know what to expect before his first attempt to fly. To Coanda's surprise, his jet engine was far more powerful than he'd anticipated, and when he pushed his throttle forward, jet flames burst back from the engine, and it howled like a huge dragon. Before Coanda could stop his machine, it leaped into the sky. When Coanda looked up there was a wall in front of him. Desperately, he yanked off power and hauled back on the control stick, and the Coanda Jet fell off to one side and smashed into the ground. Coanda was thrown clear and was only bruised, but the airplane burned to a skeleton.
In our story we encountered Coanda developing his first jet engine and airplane in 1910, and we ran into him again during World War I when he developed a rocket gun for the French Army. He also applied for a patent (in 1914) for his jet engine. All this is factual history, and it establishes the basis for the jet engines in the flying discs.
In fact, Coanda was also responsible for several flying saucer designs which, when they were made public many years after he worked on those astonishing machines, were known as Lenticular Aerodynes. And they worked. So that if the reader assumes that even the flying saucers in our story are, or can be, real— you're right!
The jet engines in this book are based on Coanda's designs built and tested in 1910, and patented in France in 1914.
Had the French government, or individual investors, supported Coanda's work, then World War I, from 1914 to 1918, might well have been fought with jet fighters and bombers. But the immediate need for planes overshadowed what most Frenchmen had never even heard of, and government authorities looked with suspicion upon anything that revolutionary.
The Coanda engine, as it developed, would have been perfect for the giant dirigible and the flying discs in our story. It fired up like an ordinary combustion engine, but its power came from a rotary system operating at great speed within the engine. The spinning motion created a partial vacuum that drew in huge amounts of air. Then the engine compressed that air, mixed it with fuel, and lit the entire affair in the manner of a continuous explosion. This spun even more blades to increase the flow of air, the density of the fuelair mixture, the temperature within the engine, and the speed of hot gases hurled back from the engine. There you have it—not merely a workable jet engine, but one that increased its power and compression the faster it moved. And the faster it flew, the greater was its power, so that continuing to develop the Coanda engine gave us the perfect propulsion for the discs and the dirigible that so astonished everyone.
Of course there were still problems to overcome in balancing and controlling the flight direction of the discs, but from the same fertile mind of Henri Coanda came that solution. In his Coanda Effect, the Frenchman proved that by blowing a powerful jet along a flat surface (or engine vane), the flow of the jet will follow the flat surface, and even hug that surface as it begins to move into a circular shape. Coanda designed an Aerodyne machine that created through this effect a partial vacuum above a wing (or a disc in the form of an airfoil) shape. With normal pressure beneath the disc, there was
then created a tremendous lifting force. Coanda then designed his jet system into a perfect disc which gave him what he called ThreeDimensional Propulsion. As to balance, the air whirling at tremendous speed in circular motion around the rim of his disc turned the entire disc into a wonderful gyroscope. It always pointed, when flying, to true north. So when the disc maneuvered, it didn't bank and turn like an airplane, but moved in a "skidding motion" through the air. The pilot cockpit swiveled to keep the pilot pointed in whatever direction he desired, and by changing pressure along different parts of the edge of the flying disc, he was able to turn in whatever direction he chose. Result: a flying saucer. It took years for the Coanda Effect, and Coanda's unique jet engine design, to actually be built and test flown, but the Canadian government finally assembled the Aerodyne shape—and many years ago actually flew its own flying saucer.
Let's return, even if briefly, to the subject of UFO's as they have been reported for thousands of years. As we pointed out in the story—and every reference to historical sightings of strange and unidentified objects in the skies is absolutely true—the entire subject of the UFO has been an area of great controversy. The truth is that there's no question that strange objects hurtle through our skies. There have been many sightings by highly experienced observers, and, since 1947, UFO's have been captured on film, tracked by telescopes, followed on radar, and had close encounters with manned aircraft.
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