The Airshipmen: A Novel Based on a True Story. A Tale of Love, Betrayal & Political Intrigue.

by David Dennington

  “That was the elevator cable,” Irwin said calmly.

  “What’s happened to it?” Thomson asked, his eyes finally registering fear.

  “It snapped under the strain of full elevators.”

  More unnerving noises followed, slowly at first—creaking, groaning, popping, snapping—sounds all too familiar to Lou. He could only think of Charlotte. The image of her when he’d last seen her standing on the front step in the moonlight filled his mind. A Greek goddess. He was brought back by Irwin.

  “Now you’re listening to the sounds of her back breaking,” Irwin said, matter-of-factly. “Add an extra bay! Loosen the harnesses. Huh!”

  Richmond jumped down into the control car in a state of panic.

  “Ease off power! Some girders are buckling,” he shouted.

  “It’s worse than that!” Lou shouted, pointing out of the windows toward the bow. Through lightning flashes, they saw the hull slowly sagging. When they turned to look at the stern, the same thing was happening—she’d gone limp from head to tail.

  “Oh, no. She’s done for!” Richmond cried.

  “Her back’s broken,” Irwin said.

  Thomson was speechless. He thought of Marthe—and all his carefully laid plans.

  “Prepare for crash landing! Dump all ballast at the bow,” Irwin ordered. “I’m gonna try and put her down.”

  Lou blew down the speaking tube. Someone answered. It wasn’t Church.

  “Where’s Sam? Find him and tell him to dump the emergency ballast. Right now!”

  “Bring her head to wind!” Irwin ordered.

  The rudder coxswain swung the wheel, bringing her bow into the wind to slow her down.

  “Signal all engines to SLOW,” Irwin shouted.

  Lou rang all telegraph bells, relaying the order to the cars.

  “Dump all fuel!”

  Steff grabbed the emergency fuel tank cutters, emptying many of the diesel tanks instantaneously.

  “Lou, go and wake Disley. Tell him to be ready to pull all breakers as soon as we’re on the ground. Find Hunt. Tell him to warn all hands. Steff, go and warn Atherstone and the passengers.”

  “Can I send Potter? I’ll stay with you, sir,” Lou asked.

  “No! Get out of this control car. Everyone above decks!” Irwin ordered, grabbing the rudder wheel from the coxswain and pushing him toward the stairs. The two coxswains rushed upstairs. Lou and Steff hesitated. Potter stopped at the chartroom railing above, to wait for Lou.

  “Go! All of you! That’s an order!”

  Before following Steff upstairs, Lou turned to Irwin, making eye contact.

  “Good luck, sir,” he said. Irwin nodded. But Thomson wouldn’t budge. He stared straight ahead through the window into the blackness of Therain Wood.

  Irwin glared at Thomson. “And you! This is the most dangerous place on the ship—you’ll have a chance upstairs.” Thomson and Irwin faced each other, neither backing down.

  Lou rushed upstairs to the chartroom where Potter was waiting.

  “I’m gonna stick with you, Lou,” Potter shouted.

  “Come on then.”

  As the ship dived, Binks was thrown backwards against the engine.

  “Oh, bloody hell!”

  “Don’t panic, Joe. It’s only the storm. She’s done this ’undreds of times,” Bell said.

  But then, stampeding feet and yelling above their heads increased Binks’s fear.

  “Something’s very wrong, Ginger, I just know it. I’m really scared,” Binks whimpered.

  The ship leveled out again and as it did so, they felt the harmonic vibration and then the creaking and groaning as her keel compressed and other parts were pulled apart. The telegraph bell rang. They watched the indicator move to SLOW.

  Bell grabbed the throttle lever and eased the power.

  “Oh, no! What now?” Binks groaned.

  Steff had already set off for the passenger cabins, having roused Atherstone. Lou rushed to the switch room, Potter on his heels. Lou burst in, finding Disley asleep on a cot, his chess set in disarray on the floor next to a blood-soaked shoe. Lou leaned over and shook him.

  “Dizzy, wake up! We’re making a crash landing. Be ready to pull the breakers as soon as we’re down.”

  Disley leapt out of bed in a daze. Lou turned and ran off to the crew’s quarters, Potter close behind. There, he found Hunt, who’d already begun rousing the sleeping crewmen.

  “I took riggers to the bow, but it was hopeless. She’s done!” Hunt said.

  “Yeah, the skipper’s putting her down, Sky. You felt it go, didn’t you?”

  Hunt nodded.

  “We gotta warn all hands,” Lou said.

  Hunt hollered at the sleeping crewmen. “We’re down, lads. Come on, shake a leg!” He turned back to Lou. “The bags are full of holes again and the valves have been puffing their guts out. We could never ’av made it anyway,” Hunt said.

  Crewmen began sitting up bleary-eyed. Lou looked in cabins adjacent to the crew’s quarters and roused the men inside. He rushed into Pierre’s cabin. Pierre was snoring in his bunk, his hairpiece lying on the table beside him.

  “Get up, Pierre. The captain’s putting the ship down—try and save yourself. Run to the stern!” Pierre became wide awake immediately, springing bolt upright like a jack-in-the-box, shielding his balding head from Lou’s eyes. He cried out in anguish, eyes wide with terror.

  “Oh, no. God no! Save me, Commander, please save me!”

  Lou suddenly remembered Leech in the smoking room and rushed off in that direction. Potter was slower off the mark this time. The ship dived a second time as Lou dashed down the corridor, his momentum increased by the ship’s acute nose-down angle. He grabbed the railing and hung on, glancing back to see what had happened to Potter. Potter was twenty yards behind, also clinging to a railing, unable to move. Lou felt the bow gently touch the ground and heard the unnerving squeaking, squealing sound of the nosecone scraping the earth down to bedrock. It put his teeth on edge.

  The floor fell away beneath Lou’s feet, and then leveled out. The ship settled, while continuing to move forward. The hull shuddered and shook violently, as though in an earthquake, grating and juddering over the rocky ground, before telescoping into itself. The sound was deafening and the vibration rattled every tooth in his head.

  We’re down now, all right!

  Just after the lights went out, massive explosions erupted at the bow and behind Lou (where Potter had been), knocking him to the floor. Stunned, momentarily blinded and almost deaf, he struggled to his feet, grabbing the railing again. He hung on, looking desperately for Potter, trying to see through the wall of fire. His face and body were seared by the heat and much of his hair burned away. His uniform smoldered, scorching his back, chest and legs. For a few seconds, a gap appeared in the curtain of fire and smoke. Potter was gone. At that moment, he realized how much Potter meant to him and how much Potter depended on him.

  I must go back and find him.

  Lou let go of the railing, which had blistered his palms and fingers, and started back toward the inferno. A hand roughly grabbed his shoulder, pulling him back.

  “No, sir. This way!” a voice shouted behind him.

  Leech had emerged from the smoking room.

  “I’ve got to find Potter!” Lou cried.

  “He’s got to be dead. He couldn’ve survived that.”

  “I can’t just leave him.”

  “No! You’re coming with me.”

  Potter filled Lou’s mind—aboard R38 and at their wedding at St. Cuthbert’s. Overcome by a sense of profound loss, he began to weep. He felt himself gripped in a bear hug from behind and dragged down the corridor. All the while, above the roaring fire and rolling thunder, he heard piercing screams that made his blood curdle. Lou was too weak and in too much pain to fight. Moments later, they were in the smoking room, lit by flames from outside. Utter chaos reigned. Most furniture had slid against the bow-end wall. The remaining chairs lay on
their sides with the drinks trolley, from which glasses and bottles had been flung like missiles. Leech grabbed a soda siphon and sprayed Lou’s smoldering clothes. Then he slammed the two doors shut, leaving them in pitch darkness. Once inside, the rumbling inferno surrounded them. Lou’s heart pounded and unbearable panic rose in his chest and throat. The moment he’d dreaded all these years had come.

  Moments earlier, Thomson had stepped up beside Irwin at the wheel, reconciled to his fate. “The fault is all mine. I stand beside you, Captain Irwin,” he said. Nothing but bitter regret filled Thomson’s heart.

  Was all this for Marthe? Never will I see her again—not in this lifetime.

  He looked at Irwin and saw terrible sadness in his face.

  He’s thinking of his wife. What have I done! Dear God, forgive me.

  Irwin turned to him, and as if reading his mind, nodded his forgiveness. They shook hands. Thomson stared at the ground coming up to meet them. The bow gently kissed the earth and the ship balanced on its nose for an eternity, ploughing a deep furrow into the woods.

  Perhaps we can survive this. Maybe God will allow us live, after all.

  The hull settled slowly down—so very, very slowly, moving forward at a snail’s pace. Everything unfolded in milliseconds with astonishing clarity. The forward port engine propeller made contact with the ground, causing the car to be twisted round on its supports and driven up into the hull. Its exhaust pipe was glowing red and shooting a spray of beautiful sparks, like the sparklers he’d had as a child in India during the Diwali Festival of the darkest night. The massive explosion that followed at the bow blew out the control car windows, the shards ripping flesh from their faces and bodies. The flares Lou and Johnston had left on the windowsill dropped to the floor.

  The gigantic bulk gradually sank on top of the control car, pushing it into the sodden ground. Irwin went down with a moan and Thomson fell backwards to the floor beside him. He held up his arms to protect his bleeding head and face, but the structure came down upon them and the flares burst into vivid white flame as the ballast water mains over their heads ruptured with a great whoosh.

  In that instant, Thomson’s life played out before him. He heard his own first cries as he left his mother’s womb in Nasik …every word he’d ever uttered and every word spoken to him …his early childhood in India and then England …growing up with his siblings …Cheltenham School …the Royal Military Academy …the Army …the Retreat from Mons …Ypres …the girl in the carriage on Rue de Rivoli …meeting Marthe at Cotroceni Palace …his sorry attempts in her boudoir …having dinner and blowing up oil wells with her husband, George …Palestine ….Versailles …campaigning for a Labour seat and failing …riding the Flying Scotsman …meeting MacDonald at Lossiemouth …battling Lord Scunthorpe in the Lords …witnessing the launching of R101 …his meetings with Colmore and Richmond …all his bullying …and all his arrogance. It all took less than a second before his chest was crushed under the collapsing structure. He gave himself up to the blinding white light.

  In engine car No.5, during these last moments, Binks’s terror had increased. Their car vibrated with the urgent, pounding feet of crewmen above.

  “Oh, blimey, now what?” Binks sobbed.

  Both men were thrown backwards a second time as the ship dived again. Hunt’s voice above them in the crew’s quarters reached them loud and clear.

  “Oh, no, that’s Mr. Hunt. We’ve had it now!” Binks cried.

  Though it might have meant certain death, Rabouille stood rooted to the spot, paralyzed with fear. The monster moved toward him against the wind, balanced on its nose, carving its deep furrow and clearing a wide swath through the trees. The smell of diesel, spilling from the ship’s belly, overpowered him and he was enveloped in a cloud of fuel and water vapor. With relief, he realized the ship was going to miss him—just barely, having turned away during the last moments. He could now only see the starboard green navigation light. It settled to the ground like a beached whale, still moving, the hull telescoping in on itself for a hundred feet. Sparks flew as the structure and the propellers tore at flints in the rocky earth. In horror, he watched the massive bulk settle onto the control car, squashing it like a tin can, along with the two doomed men he’d seen inside.

  As with Thomson, Rabouille experienced events in slow motion. Engine No.2 hit the dirt, its propellers still turning, forcing the car upward into the envelope. The ship was ripped apart, the flaming cover torn to shreds. Broken guy-wires and cables whipped and lashed about. Sparks showered in all directions, from severed wiring torn from electrical devices and from smashed light bulbs. All went dark for some seconds after she’d come to rest and then a deafening explosion shook the ground and knocked him down. He sat clinging to the rabbit like a child with a stuffed toy, as flames burst hundreds of feet into the air, lighting up the French countryside for miles.

  Rabouille wept uncontrollably as he watched screaming figures perform a terrible, macabre dance of death inside the inferno. The heat scorched his face. He choked on the smoke and acrid fumes of burning diesel, oil, carpet, wood and canvas. Brilliant white columns with golden heads withered away to ash, along with the poor creatures trapped within.

  He tried to block out their screams, sticking his fingers in his ears, letting go of the terrified animal. He cried out in horror and his rabbit hopped lopsidedly away, leaving him alone. The ship’s cover blazed from stem to stern, revealing the grand lounge and dining room, fine furniture and upholstery gutted with vivid intensity. Curtains to the passenger cabins were aflame, along with bedding and bodies, giving off suffocating, black smoke and the odor of burning flesh. High on the stern, the scorched red and blue ensign fluttered defiantly in the howling wind.

  Rabouille watched a flaming super-human struggle out of the blazing structure, jump down and run toward him, falling at his feet, screaming in agony. He heard the poor wretch cry out a woman’s name as he fell: “Florry!”

  Rabouille leapt to his feet and dashed through the forest like a madman chased by the devil, wet branches tearing and lashing his face. He ran out into the tussocked field, tripping and stumbling among the wildly bleating, clanking sheep and crossed the Meru Road. He didn’t stop until he reached the cottage, where he barricaded the door and fell down on his knees beside the bed. He prayed he’d forget the horror of this night. He crossed himself and climbed into bed, pulling the covers over his head, listening to the rolling thunder dying away over the ridge. There, he remained for the next three days, his bed becoming like him, grubby and smelling of diesel fuel and acrid smoke.

  Binks stared out of the window of the car from the center of the inferno. No sooner were they hearing the commotion above their heads and the signal given to SLOW, than the ship became a blazing wreck on the muddy, wooded plateau. For them, there was no jarring crash as the ship came to ground. All they witnessed was the rapidly disappearing cover devoured by fire and the vast skeleton exposed in blinding light. Blistering hot walls turned their cocoon into an oven. Flames licked their feet and legs through holes in the floor.

  “Safety first. What a bloody joke!” Bell shouted.

  “Sweet Mother of Jesus, save us,” Binks cried.

  “We’ve got to get out. This petrol tank’s gonna blow any second.”

  Binks suddenly remembered the old gypsy.

  “Hey, hold on a sec, Ginger. Trust me on this,” Binks shouted, putting both his hands on Bell’s chest. Bell frowned at Binks, but didn’t move. A few moments later and without warning, one of the ballast tanks above ruptured, sending a torrent of water cascading over them and the car. The flames were doused and the car cooled momentarily. The two men picked up their wet coats and threw them over their heads.

  “Come on Joe, let’s get out of here.”

  “Thank you, dear merciful Lord God in Heaven!” Binks exclaimed. “Through fire, rain and fog she said! Yes! Yes! The old witch was right.”

  They climbed out onto the car’s entry platform into the intens
e heat and blinding fire and jumped. They fell down on their hands and knees into the mud, then dashed, slipping and sliding through smoke and steam to a safe distance. They collapsed on the ground, burned, but alive.

  “I owe you one, Joe. Thank you for being late, mate!” Bell croaked. “But how did you know water would come down on us like that, eh?”

  Binks smiled. “ ’Ee who ’esitates ain’t always lost, is ’ee!”

  Lou’s worst claustrophobic nightmares had materialized. In this tomb, at the center of hell, in total darkness, they’d surely be cooked alive. His fear was increased when the rumbling floor above collapsed. They were knocked down as the ceiling fell, leaving them four feet of headroom. Aside from his phobias, Lou was in a bad state. Burns to his body and face stung with salty sweat. What was left of his hair smelled singed.

  “This ain’t no way to die, is it, sir?” Leech said.

  “We’ve got to get out,” Lou yelled.

  “I’ll try the door.” Leech crawled to the first door. The frame and structure of the opening were askew. The door wouldn’t budge. He found the drinks trolley, ripped off the cigar lighter and lit the space with the flame.

  “Cigar, anyone?” Leech said, holding up the cigar box.

  “Nice, Harry,” Lou croaked.

  Leech stuffed two cigars in his inside pocket.

  “We’ve got to break through this wall,” he said.

  In insufferable heat, they crawled on their hands and knees through broken glass around the sheet metal-lined walls. Lou heard Leech pulling on a settee screwed to the wall on the starboard side. He scrambled across the floor to help him and they yanked it free.

  “I need a knife,” Leech said.

  Lou reached gingerly inside his pocket and pulled out his old R38 switchblade. He opened it and passed it to Leech. Lou held up the flaming lighter while Leech went to work on the hot wall. He was able to pry away the sheeting at one of the seams, exposing asbestos boards behind it. He frantically beat the asbestos with his fists and stomped it with his heels until it cracked and fell to pieces. After more furious moments of clawing and pulling, he’d made a hole big enough for them to pull themselves through. Leech went first. As Lou struggled out, he ripped a deep gash in his left arm on the jagged metal sheeting.