He had his map at the ready inside his jacket pocket.
An hour and a half into his flight, Bell finally spotted a landmark he’d memorized earlier, a particularly steep-sided island rising from the lake. This was the well-documented mountaintop on the topographical map, and he’d impressed himself that he’d flown straight for it relying on dead reckoning alone. There were other islands around it, as Bell knew there would be.
The area he wanted was still about ten miles away, up a long, narrow inlet that had once been a valley. He carefully scanned the water below for any sign of Court Talbot’s boat and his crew of mercenaries. He also watched the horizon for the cigar-shaped airship. It appeared he had the sky to himself.
He flew on for a few more minutes until he found his first target. This was the less likely of the two spots he and Townsend had determined. The valley seemed tight, though the hills weren’t as high as at the second location. Seeing the inlet, versus studying it on a map, Bell came to the quick conclusion that the site wasn’t suitable at all. It was far too narrow for an airship to operate in with any margin for error. Taking one of those behemoth flying machines into the guts of the valley was tantamount to suicide.
Bell decided to skip it and continue on to the primary location.
The flight time was only another ten minutes, and he dropped altitude as he approached the second flooded valley. The hills were tall enough to hide an airship yet far enough apart that the ship had maneuvering room between their gentle slopes. One remained poking up in the middle of the inundated valley as an island, which could screen him from view of anyone farther up its reach. It would be a perfect place to stash the plane, so he dropped more altitude and prepared to land.
Taking off and flying an aircraft was never the difficult part of the sport, it was the landing. The pilot had to time altitude, speed, and throttle control to the second. Make a mistake, and you overfly the field or, far more common, you crash to the ground. Sometimes you walk away and sometimes that’s where you die. Bell knew the risks and was as comfortable landing in an open field as a paved runway. But he’d never landed on the water before.
In principle, it should be the same as at a proper airport but there were differences. The valley was so narrow that Bell couldn’t orient the plane enough to land into the wind, he’d need to crab it in against the crosswind. And there was a bit of a chop to the water. He had to time touchdown on the back of any wave rather than the front.
He reviewed everything in his mind before dumping more altitude and lining up the nose with the island. When he entered the valley’s throat with hills rising up off both wings, the crosswind intensified, forcing Bell to put more and more pressure on the rudder bar. He eased back farther on the throttle, drifting the biplane closer and closer to the surface. He knew he couldn’t land if the nose was pointed too far into the wind because the float wouldn’t slice into the water but instead crash across it.
He sank lower still, the lake flashing just a couple feet below him. Just as he was about to land, he released pressure on the rudder, the plane swung sharply, then he touched down with the float pointing in the direction of travel exactly. It was a perfect water landing in tricky circumstances. Speed bled off so quickly, he had to goose the throttle a little to taxi close enough to the island so he could unload the canoe and tow it under cover.
34
Over the past week, Cologne’s crew had become experts at night operations above Lake Gatun. The ship soared over the coastline well north of the dam that held back the waters. There was no beach, just mangroves and jungle, and not a soul for miles around. They were at seven thousand feet in a moonless sky and completely invisible. From the ground, it would look like stars were winking out momentarily when the airship blocked their light with its enormous body, then the twinkles would return as the dirigible glided serenely past. The engines were throttled back to a low rpm. Their sound was no more than a hum to any animals below who happened to hear it.
The jungle was dark and featureless, yet somehow a malevolence reached up from its depths. This was no place for man and yet man had come to tame the land and cut a channel through it between the two seas. The tropical forest had fought the incursion with heat and rain and storms and disease. As Court Talbot looked down from his lofty perch high above the canopy, he felt a superstitious dread that the jungle had not given up the fight.
The Captain had forbidden him from the control gondola for the voyage, explaining that he’d be in the way of normal flight operations. He was to remain in the rear cargo hold for the duration, wedged in between the two enormous underwater mines. With him were two airmen, one who had a bandaged hand. Talbot guessed it was from an accident aboard the ship and had no idea that it was Marion Bell’s handiwork.
Talbot was also stripped of his Webley, but he had a two-shot derringer backup in his front pocket. And there were plenty of guns at the camp, should they need them.
The three men stared out an open window as the Cologne floated over the jungle. The air up there was cool and pleasant, and the Zeppelin was cruising slow enough that the wind barely ruffled their clothes. For the first time Court Talbot could remember in all his years in Panama, he wasn’t fending off clouds of insects.
Like some dramatic stage effect, the jungle was suddenly awash in silvery light. The Captain had timed their arrival to coincide with the rising of the moon over the Atlantic horizon. The foliage below remained a monochromatic black, but very quickly they could see where the jungle gave way to the glittering lake.
The giant airship turned northward as it crossed above the lake. The countless islands dotting its surface were easily spotted in the moonlight. They remained dark drops of matte black on the water’s shining surface. Thirty minutes of slow cruising later, Captain Grosse maneuvered the dirigible above the narrow inlet that had once been a valley. Hydrogen vented with a sibilant hiss to bring them lower over the water yet still high enough to clear the few remaining isles.
An electric light shot up from the darkness below. The airship was almost directly above Talbot’s workboat and the dock and camp his men had made for themselves. They’d heard the airship’s engines and were guiding her to their exact location. More lifting gas was vented until the huge craft drifted lower still until it entirely filled the sky for the men down on the lake. Mooring lines tumbled from the dirigible’s bow. When they’d been tied off by Talbot’s crew, the light blinked several times, a prearranged signal.
“Ready for the ride of your life?” one of the hoist men asked, his English only lightly accented.
Judging distance at night was notoriously difficult, but Talbot didn’t think they were below three hundred feet. “I suppose.”
As the safety harness was double-checked, the second lift operator opened the floor panel. The opening was the size of a large area rug, and the darkness seemed to rise up through it from below. The airmen called it die Tür des Teufels, “the Devil’s Door.”
The hook was snapped onto the metal ring that was part of Talbot’s harness. The operator flashed him a thumbs-up, and when Talbot returned the gesture, the cable drum rotated backward to lift him off his feet. For a moment, he swung like a pendulum over the abyss, and then he was falling out the bottom of the airship and through the humid night air. He remembered to flip on his flashlight to signal the winch operator. The trip took only a few minutes. As he neared the ground, he began clicking his light on and off. The operator slowed his descent so that he slipped though the jungle’s topmost branches with barely a leaf’s rustle.
Talbot felt hands reaching for him as he came to the dock. It was Raul. Talbot killed the light to stop more cable from falling down around his feet. Apart from their looks, Raul wasn’t much like his dead brother, Rinaldo. He didn’t take any pleasure from life. Even before Rinaldo’s murder, he rarely laughed or let himself have any fun. Talbot and Rinaldo spent countless hours drinking and carousing, stuffing as
much joy and debauchery into every day they lived. Not so Raul. And he’d grown even more withdrawn following his brother’s death. He’d only agreed to fill in as a member of Talbot’s crew because of the promise he’d exact his revenge on Isaac Bell.
He’d desperately wanted to drive the truck that slammed into Bell’s vehicle at the edge of the Culebra Cut. When Bell had driven to Gamboa, Raul had been behind the wheel, lying in ambush and ready to strike. But dumb luck saved Bell on that leg of his journey. Rather than a lone vehicle, on the road from Panama City, an entire convoy had approached his position. He’d scrambled to roll the log off the road and watched, crouched in the grass, as Bell trundled past, having somehow integrated his tanker truck into a convoy of cargo haulers.
Raul was forced to return to Gamboa at the tail end of the convoy and sneak aboard the workboat while Talbot kept Bell distracted. Another member of Talbot’s band of cutthroats had gone out to finish the job during Raul’s interrogation and buried the evidence under the avalanche. The Panamanian was actually relieved when word got out that Bell had survived. It gave him the chance to make the death far slower and more painful.
The machete he carried was made from a truck’s worn leaf spring, sharpened to a razor’s edge on a grinding wheel. Its weight made it the ideal blade for hacking through thick jungle. He was eager to see what it could do to a human limb.
A sudden gust of wind made the Cologne spin and strain against her mooring ropes. The ropes snapped branches high overhead as the airship twisted around. A spray of leaves and twigs rained down from above. The big Essenwerks engines changed pitch as Captain Grosse backed the hovering airship against the wind so once again it was directly over the boat and adjacent dock. The gust intensified into a steady four knots from the east.
The dock they’d constructed over the water was a simple affair, with a split-log frame lashed to the trunks of trees that had been drowned when the valley flooded. The frame was decked with rough-sawn planks. These men came from fishing villages, mostly, and knew how to use the jungle to their advantage. The dock was as sturdy as the main wharf in Panama City.
Up the hill from the dock, the men had cleared underbrush to make a camp, with enough room to make a fire and hang their hammocks. It was far more comfortable than sleeping aboard the workboat. They’d brought a slew of mismatched chairs and rigged up an oiled-canvas tarpaulin to keep out the rain. Someone had even fashioned a crude sign and nailed it to a tree. The six men who made up Talbot’s crew had named the camp the Vipers’ Den, in honor of their recent exploits.
“Look sharp, everyone. We’re bringing down two of the bombs,” Court Talbot called out. “Tonight’s the last of it. We set the final charges, and the Red Vipers disappear for good.”
None of the men gave any real indication that they’d paid any attention until Talbot added, “Oh, and you all receive your pay in good gold coins.”
That brought a lustful cheer from their throats and turned their eyes bright with greed.
Raul Morales gave Talbot a cancerous look. Talbot held up a reassuring hand. “You get your brother’s full cut and my guarantee that Bell won’t leave Panama for as long as it takes for the Germans to get to Jamaica. They kidnapped his wife.”
A burst of light from above was the signal that the sailors on the Cologne had positioned the first of the one-ton mines over the bomb bay door and were ready to lower it. Talbot flicked his light twice to tell them they were ready. A few moments later, the mine materialized, out of the dark, over the men’s heads, two lengths of rope dangling from it like a jellyfish’s tentacles. When it was low enough, men reached up to grasp the ropes and heave so that the deadly package swung enough for it to touch down on the edge of the dock. The wood creaked under the burden but held fast. One of Talbot’s people climbed on top of the square explosive device to unhook the cable so the second one could be placed on the boat.
The men had done this so many times by now that the job had become second nature.
The wind picked up a little more speed, prompting an increase in power to the four Essenwerks motors. The propellers’ steady drone changed to a higher pitch, which forced the men working under her floating bulk to raise their voices to be heard.
Once his man was clear of the heavy steel hook, Talbot used his flashlight to signal the German flight engineers to retract the wire and send down the next bomb. The hook quickly vanished into the night. He called over to Raul and handed him a key dangling on a leather thong he kept hung around his neck. “Do me a favor and get me a spare pistol from camp. The Germans wouldn’t let me keep my Webley. As if I’d fire it inside a tube more volatile than a stick of dynamite.”
Raul didn’t reply, but he flicked on his own light and crossed the deck to take the short trail up to their camp.
At first, Raul Morales didn’t understand what he was seeing. The moon was hidden behind some clouds, so the light was just about nonexistent, but it looked like a figure moving around the camp. It made no sense because everyone was either on the dock or the workboat. He slowed his approach, crouching low. His machete was in his hand without him realizing he’d drawn it.
He and Rinaldo had grown up around violence. Their father used the machete as a teaching tool, going so far as to cut off a finger of one son’s hand when he’d taken a canoe out without permission. Raul had killed his first man when he was barely into his twenties. The man had been poaching the family’s fish traps, and Raul had felt the punishment fit the crime when he’d harpooned the thief in the chest with an iron lance. Rinaldo had always been the flashier one, the dreamer and schemer. Raul had been content to stay in their old village as long as those around him knew not to cross him.
The few who tried did not live to regret their decisions.
He was ten feet from the figure when he realized that the intruder was systematically searching the camp. There was nothing to find, a few boxes with food and cooking utensils, spare clothes, fishing gear, and a sixty-pound lockbox where Talbot kept their wages and a spare pistol. He didn’t want to leave the box aboard the workboat in case they were caught planting the bombs and had to abandon it.
Just as he threw on a burst of speed to catch the intruder unawares, the clouds parted and the moon’s glow played across the man’s profile for a moment, before he turned back to his clandestine search. Raul went from calculating hunter to berserk savage in an instant.
It was him. Bell. The man who’d murdered his brother.
He abandoned his flashlight and ran at Bell as silently and as intently as a big jungle cat whose prey has no idea it’s about to die. Bell finally sensed the onrushing attacker and turned to meet the man. He barely recognized Raul Morales because his face was twisted into a mask of uncontrolled rage. The whites of his eyes shone all the way around the irises, and his mouth was open in a silent scream full of hate.
Bell had been watching the camp since early afternoon. Rowing in from where he’d stashed the seaplane had been easy enough, though he did cross paths with an anaconda that swam past him and saw a number of crocodiles sunning themselves on the shore and a couple using the power of their mighty tails to swim. None thought enough of the canoe to investigate, which they could have torn apart with ease.
Locating the camp had been easy, for the men had been grilling some poor creature they had shot out of the trees, and the woodsmoke and smell of cooking meat had carried far down the flooded valley. Bell had pulled to shore a good quarter mile from Talbot’s men and went in on foot, moving at a snail’s pace so as not to give away his presence. He’d watched them share their meal, noting it was a small forest pig they’d killed. Afterward, one man stayed awake to clean and oil his rifle while the others had rolled into their hammocks for an afternoon siesta.
Bell kept an eye on the sentry, fearing he would patrol the boat. But he didn’t. As soon as his weapon was reassembled, he pulled his hat over his eyes and fell asleep on the low camp c
hair.
These men were thirty miles from the nearest town, nestled in some of the densest jungle on the planet, so it came as no surprise they hadn’t worried about an ambush. The isolation made them feel comfortable.
Too comfortable, Bell thought.
He left them to their naps and crawled over to the dock. There he found a cache of five-gallon metal cans. Most were empty, but the smell of the gasoline they’d contained tainted the air. Bell filled three of the containers with river water and screwed on their caps. He swapped out these with three of the neatly lined-up cans still filled with gas in case anyone took inventory. Two of these he set aside and the other he carried onto the workboat. He gained access to the engine compartment from a hatch under the crew’s quarters.
It took just a few minutes to plant his makeshift bomb. He cut a narrow strip of cloth from the hem of his shirt and soaked it in gasoline. He then used it as a wick, from the motor’s open ignition point down to the gas can he’d been able to conceal in the bilge space under the engine’s mounting bracket. The space was dark, and even with a flashlight it would be difficult to see his booby trap. And the compartment reeked so strongly of fuel already, he wasn’t concerned that the smell would betray the open can of gas.
He crawled out and closed the hatch. He stayed low and peered over the workboat’s gunwales to see if anyone at the camp had gotten up. He saw no movement, so he legged over the gunwale and made his way off the dock, picking up the two fuel cans he’d set aside for himself. He returned to his canoe and stashed the thirty-pounders in the footwell.
It would be awkward paddling back to the plane but essential if he was going to follow the Essenwerks airship. He recalled seeing the cans on Talbot’s boat the day he interviewed Raul pretending to be Rinaldo and had factored their presence into his plan. He returned and found a spot close enough to the camp and dock to hopefully glean some information as to their actual intentions.
The Saboteurs Page 30