The Saboteurs

by Clive Cussler

  She recognized her words. “So long as you’re not at the wrong place at the wrong time. What happens now?”

  “Don’t forget this is my second time in this predicament. As more gas escapes through what must be by now multiple tears in the envelope, we’ll drift back to earth like a couple aeronauts in a balloon. The gas seems to be venting at a slow enough pace to make our journey leisurely and hopefully coming to a soft end.”

  “How far out to sea were we?”

  “Not sure, thirty or so miles if I’d have to guess.”

  “Can we drift that far?”

  “World record was just broken last year. They went for over twelve hundred miles.”

  “Please tell me it was in a leaky torn-up airship?”

  “Special-built balloon, sorry to say.”

  “Like I said, cockeyed,” Marion said in a teasing pout. “Next time whisk me away in one of those or don’t bother coming for me at all.”

  Bell couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of their situation and his beloved’s ability to make light of it so easily. Having come so close to death, most people would have broken down in tears, but not his Marion. She was probably already trying to work out how to film such an escape as this for her next motion picture.

  The hatch was only ten feet above where they clung to the superstructure. Bell mapped out a climbing route and used handholds or the circular cutouts in individual support beams to clamber up to it. He forced open the hatch. Because they were drifting with the wind, he was met by an absolute silence, as profound as an empty cathedral. He studied the horizon but saw nothing. The nose rotated ever so slowly, eventually giving him a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama. There was no indication of land or distant lights. He wasn’t even sure if they were heading toward shore.

  He climbed back to his perch next to Marion. They talked about their adventures since they’d parted at the dock near Panama City. She was jealous of his flight. She would have loved to have gone along and filmed the canal from the air.

  Every half hour, by Bell’s wristwatch, he climbed up to see if any landmarks were visible and every time he climbed back to report they still had the world all to themselves. He estimated they were at an altitude of three thousand feet and knew the air would be uncomfortably cold if they weren’t in the tropics.

  As the rising sun rouged the eastern sky Bell caught sight of land, or more accurately the creaming crests of waves breaking onto a beach. He shouted triumphantly.

  “Land?” Marion yelled up to him.

  “I see a beach. We’re too high, though. I think we’re going to drift right past, and then it’s nothing but jungle for fifty miles until we reach the Pacific.”

  “We could try for the transcontinental balloon record,” Marion suggested, half joking.

  “Now who’s cockeyed?”

  The stairwell and hallway connecting the entry hatch to the gondolas had a solid metal decking but the walls and ceiling were nothing more than thin cotton cloth stretched between structural columns and spars. Bell cut through a wall with his boot knife to expose the shiny outer skin of the enormous hydrogen sack. In a million places it bulged through the mesh netting designed to keep it in place. Because they had sunk even lower into the atmosphere, the pressure against the giant bladder was building faster than it could vent. Bell didn’t know how long it could go before it burst and he feared it popping like a child’s rubber balloon when he pressed into it with his knife.

  The blade sliced cleanly and he felt a rush of invisible hydrogen blow past his arm out the open hatch above his head. He cut more and more holes, reaching as far as he could without actually climbing out onto the bag. When he felt himself getting woozy from breathing more hydrogen than clean air, he ducked down below the cloud of leaking gas and breathed deeply to clear his lungs and mind.

  Having filled his lungs to capacity, he climbed through the hissing gas cloud to poke his head out the hatch to determine if they were sinking at the proper angle. It took a few seconds to estimate they would land in the shallows just behind the breaking waves. Perfect.

  He rejoined his wife inside the hull. “We should climb down as low as possible so we can jump into the water before this thing hits. It likely won’t explode, but it weighs a ton, and I have no idea which way it’s going to tumble.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Just take your time and move slowly.”

  “Right.”

  As careful as possible, the pair made their way down to the scarred area where the airship had torn itself in two. A slip now would be fatal. There was nothing at the end of the corridor except a hole that looked down to the sea from a thousand feet up. They moved like mountaineers, always making sure they had contact with both hands and a foot, or both feet and a hand. Or, as sailors always say, “One hand for yourself, one for the ship.”

  Closer to the bottom, the destruction was extreme, with torn metal struts wrenched out of position, cables and wires dangling, and the airship’s ripped outer skin flapping in the gentle air currents wafting through the improvised balloon.

  The walls of the hallway had been torn away too, so the entire fifty-foot-diameter support ring was visible. It was held together by dozens of girders and braces, looking like a veritable forest of burnished aluminum, suspended high above the Caribbean. Below hung torn longitudinal beams that would have linked the ring to the next ring. The whole structure was very unstable, trembling like it was rubber. Some beams bent like tree branches as the ring twisted and warped. Overhead, the gas bag was a huge, almost translucent sphere held captive by its spiderweb of netting.

  A few feet below Bell, Marion stepped out onto one of the thicker beams to make room for him when he reached the bottom. An arm suddenly crossed her throat and choked off her startled scream.

  “I told you there was no place you could go,” Otto Dreissen shouted up to Bell as he wrenched Marion off her perch and dangled her over the edge of the thousand-foot drop.

  37

  Isaac,” she said, gasping, her eyes wide with terror.

  Bell didn’t hesitate or even consider that, if he missed, he would fall past the pair below him and plummet to his death. He leapt down and landed on a girder about seven feet from where Dreissen held his wife’s life in his hands. He landed on the narrow beam and teetered for a moment before finding his center of gravity. He stood and whipped his pistol from its holster.

  “Shoot me and she dies too,” Dreissen said.

  “Drop her and you die,” Bell countered. “We’re at an impasse.”

  “Not quite. My advantage ends when we near the ground, which makes this one quick negotiation. Your life for hers, Bell. Jump or I drop her.”

  “And die before she hits the water? Is it worth it?”

  “You go or she goes, Bell. Now.”

  “Sorry, Marion.”

  “What?”

  Bell fired and hit Dreissen in the shoulder. He reeled back, releasing Marion. Rather than fall straight down, Marion spun in midair and dropped only a few feet before stopping short. She hadn’t been idle while Dreissen held her hostage. There had been a bunch of wires at her feet still attached to the airship’s frame. In full view of her husband, Marion had twisted her feet into the tangled rat’s nest of wires. When he dropped her, she’d merely tumbled headfirst and now dangled by her ankles.

  Dreissen leapt away, clutching his shoulder yet moving from beam to beam with the agility of a mountain goat. Bell ignored him. Holstering his pistol, he raced to the spot where Marion had vanished. He’d seen what she was doing, understood the risk she was taking, and didn’t know if her plan had worked. He dropped flat and looked over the beam and saw the soles of her shoes just a few inches from his face. He started to reach for an ankle and haul her aboard when suddenly some of the connectors securing the wires to the ship popped free, and she dropped a few more inches.


  She screamed his name. He could see the wires digging into her flesh as the weight of her body caused them to tighten. The bundle quivered with the strain, and she started to slip more. He reached down farther, got his hand around her ankle again, and lifted her as high as he could. Marion was able to reach for a beam and twist herself around enough to transfer her weight from her husband’s arm to the strut.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “That was a crazy risk.”

  She quickly started to untangle the snarl of wires so she could stand. “I didn’t see any other way out of it. Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Where’s Dreissen?”

  Bell looked around. He didn’t see him. There were dozens of girders that the German could hide behind. He could have reached one and climbed it like a ladder. Bell checked for a trail of blood but saw no spatters. He looked down at the ocean scrolling by beneath them. They had only another hundred feet to go, and he could tell by the water’s change in color that the seafloor was shelving up to the beach. “Don’t know, don’t care.”

  Marion got the last of the wires from around her ankles and stood, making sure she held on to a beam for support. She had a good head for heights, but having struts only inches wide to walk on would make anyone feel acrophobic.

  He kept watching the ocean, waiting for their makeshift flying machine to drift low enough for them to jump. He heard something rattle high above them and thought that Dreissen might be trying to climb out through the entrance hatch for some reason.

  He looked back at the water. The color was shifting from blue to turquoise, and the beach was only a few hundred yards away.

  “Ready?” he asked and took Marion’s hand.

  “Always ready to take the plunge with you.”

  They leapt together and fell the fifteen or so feet to the sea, plunging deep into the tropical water. Marion came up first and had wiped and cleared her eyes by the time Isaac surfaced at her side. He gave her a quick kiss and looked up.

  The loss of their roughly three hundred pounds combined gave the remaining gas bag less weight to keep aloft, allowing the nose to begin rising again, and as the dirigible came to the beach, it encountered warmer air that hadn’t yet been cooled by the Caribbean and it began to rise higher still.

  “Isaac, what if he gets away?”

  Treading water, Bell pulled his pistol. He tried to keep as steady as possible, though it was next to impossible. Then again, at this range, and with such a large target, he couldn’t miss.

  The first four shots didn’t have the desired effect, the fifth hit an aluminum girder at the right angle, liquefying a tiny amount of the metal. It dripped onto the hole in the gas bag and ignited its fabric with just the tiniest of flames. The little dollop of fire was almost snuffed out by the wind, but then it caught, steadied, and grew. Hydrogen began to gush from the smoldering hole and at first just about overwhelmed the fire. Then it reached the combustible ratio with the air.

  All at once, the last of the Cologne’s hydrogen erupted in a towering midair explosion that looked as though the sun was rising in both the east and the west. Flames in shades of yellow and orange and magenta swirled and spun high into the sky as the airship’s envelope and the gas cell were consumed and metal framework began to soften. It sounded like they were standing inside a tornado.

  Bell and Marion ducked under the waves as a wall of pressure and heat raced out from the epicenter of the blast. From below the surface, the explosion looked like the Portals of Hell had opened above. They resurfaced in time to see the skeleton of the nose crash into the jungle just beyond the beach and collapse like its rigid struts were nothing more than putty.

  The pair swam for shore, where the fronds of some palm trees had caught fire as the remnants of the wrecked dirigible smoldered.

  They dragged themselves above the tide line and let themselves fall into the sugary sand. Bell immediately rolled up onto one elbow so he could look at his beautiful wife. “I believe you made mention of Dreissen escaping. Do you think that a man who threatened your life should expect his to last?”

  “Not even for a second.” She caressed his cheek and gave him a flirty little smile. “You know, we should get out of these wet things. Give them a chance to dry in the sun.”

  Instead of readily agreeing, which he always did, Bell stood and held out a hand to pull her to her feet. “I would absolutely love to, but we have to find a way back to Colón and warn Goethals. We have only two days.”

  “But everything you said about knowing Tats Macalister isn’t who he claimed to be?”

  “I knew who he wasn’t, I didn’t know who he was. I never told anyone about him. I didn’t understand Viboras Rojas’s plan or his role in it until I saw they were smuggling explosives. Teddy Roosevelt is about to sail into a trap.”

  38

  The pair began walking up the beach. Bell knew the direction to take. What he didn’t know was how far it would be. They had landed east of Colón, but he had no idea how distant. And factoring in their drifting flight further complicated things. At best it was twenty miles, at worst fifty. At least there was a nice sandy beach to walk on. Usually, the jungle came right down to the ocean in dense mangrove swamps filled with crocodiles and teeming with malaria-laden mosquitoes.

  And they weren’t going to starve. When each wave receded, tiny bivalves blew telltale bubbles from beneath the wet sand. Isaac and Marion plucked them with ease and slurped them straight from the shells as if oysters at a fine restaurant. The juices saved them from the risk of having to drink any water from the countless streams feeding into the Caribbean.

  Three hours after the crash, luck smiled upon the couple in the form of a native longboat being paddled by six men. The boat was just beyond the breakers, and the men stopped rowing when they spotted and heard Bell and Marion waving and hollering to them. They spoke amongst themselves for a moment, then waved the duo over.

  “There are no cannibals here, right?” Marion asked as they walked over.

  “If there are, we’re not going to enjoy dinner,” Bell remarked, and they waded out to the bobbing craft.

  The men were shirtless and shoeless and wore skirts of grass around their waists. Their wrists were adorned with bracelets made of leather and glass beads and bits of animal bone. They were Kuna Indians, one of several indigenous tribes that inhabited the isthmus of Panama. Their double-ended canoe was a massive tree that had been hollowed out. Bell guessed it would have taken years to fashion the boat and assumed they were used for many generations. At their feet were baskets filled with fruit and dried fish. A collapsible rack for drying fish was stowed aboard, as well as a seine net of woven braided twine.

  Marion asked if any of the natives spoke Spanish. The navigator sitting at the back of the boat rattled off several long sentences, and Marion tried her hardest to understand, but there wasn’t a Spanish word anywhere in his speech.

  “¿Tu no hablas español?” Bell asked, one of the few things he’d learned to say since arriving.

  The navigator grinned. “Si, no hablo español. Mi padre lo habla.”

  “I think I get it,” Marion said. “He doesn’t speak Spanish, but his father does. “¿Tu padre habla español?”

  The man grinned again and nodded vigorously. “Mi padre lo hablo.”

  They made room for the couple, and as soon as they were settled, the men spun in their seats and began paddling again.

  “No,” Marion protested and pointed behind them. “We want to go that way.”

  “Colón,” Bell said. “We want to go to Colón. Do you know it? Big city.”

  “Isaac, what are we to do?”

  The navigator tapped Bell’s shoulder and pointed ahead. “Mi padre.”

  Oh, I get it, Bell said to himself, then spoke to Marion. “They’re taking us to see his father. Their village must be past where we crashed. If we’re going to
get their cooperation, we need to be able to communicate. Let’s go along for the ride.”

  The men were small in stature and slenderly built, but a lifetime of paddling had given them surprising strength. And their teamwork meant not an ounce of energy was wasted. The boat covered the three hours of walking Bell and Marion had put in in just two, and they kept on for another two hours before the men turned toward the shore where a narrow valley ran into the ocean. A cluster of huts had been built on its western side along a small river that ran from the highlands. Behind the village lay several acres of cleared and cultivated land. Smoke from cooking fires hung over the village, and when the longboat got close enough, children could be heard playing close by.

  Bell hopped out of the boat with the other men to help guide it through the surf and pull it up onto dry sand.

  Most of the villagers stopped what they were doing and came to see the newcomers in a bubbling, smiling mob. They were not so cut off from civilization that they hadn’t seen white people before, but it was an oddity, especially because both Bell and his wife had blond hair. The younger women and girls, in colorful dresses made by them, ran their fingers through Marion’s tresses and tittered like little birds.

  The pair was eventually led to the center of the village and given water from a gourd. By this point, both were thirsty enough not to care about purity, but it appeared clean and fresh, and so they drank their fill and then each ate a barely ripe plantain. The children lingered, but the men and women went back to their tasks. An old man came out of one of the huts. His hair was coarse and white, and his mouth contained only a couple teeth. When the blanket wrapped around his shoulders slipped, they saw each of his ribs and the bony sternum where they connected in the center of his chest.

  Marion greeted him in Spanish, speaking slowly and loudly, assuming his hearing was poor. The man replied in his native dialect, smiling and drooling just a little.