The Last Airship

by Christopher Cartwright

She remembered reading about it in a book.

  “It was called the Rosenberg Diamond,” Sam told her.

  “That’s right. I remember reading about it one of my father’s books which was about some of the greatest treasures ever lost without a trace.”

  Her eyes continued to scan the gondola.

  Each skeleton was strapped into its seat, as though they were expecting a bumpy ride. The rest of the room looked as though it had been ransacked. The once majestic interior looked barren. She guessed that it wasn’t the passage of time which had destroyed her, but something else entirely – it appeared to her as though someone had deliberately removed all of the fine things that once adorned the place.

  As her eyes continued to glance around the room and take in the entire scene, she began to worry that they were not the first ones to discover the dirigible. It was obvious to her that fixtures had been ripped from the walls, and everything that hadn’t been bolted to the floor had been removed.

  “I wonder what went wrong,” Sam said aloud. There was a sadness in his voice.

  Sam had said the precise thing that she was thinking.

  “They must have thought they’d made it. They were so close. Looking at them now, it seems as though none of them even realized they were about to die.”

  “Look at this,” Sam said, pointing at the ugly, brown wooden box, which sat amidst the seated skeletons.

  It was one of the very few items still remaining inside the gondola, which had not been bolted down.

  “What do you think’s inside it?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s pretty heavy. Anything lighter would have washed away when the gondola was submerged.” Aliana watched silently as Sam struggled to open the lid, until he asked her, “Can you help me with this?”

  She came up alongside him and helped him pull the lid open. The box was made of some sort of solid hardwood, but the water had caused the wood to expand, locking it closed, permanently.

  Together, they managed to pry it open, using one of the oars from the rowboat outside.

  “Wow,” Sam said, his eyes wide, “is that why your father wanted me dead?”

  *

  Inside, Sam saw that there were more than a hundred gold bars, each one bearing the letters G&O, artistically embossed in the center.

  “Wow, that’s a lot of gold!” Aliana said, pretending not to hear what he had just said.

  “Enough to kill for?”

  “What? Of course, any number of treasure hunters would kill to get their dirty hands on this,” Aliana acknowledged. She appeared genuine, but the faintest of quivers to her bottom lip, reaffirmed her involvement.

  Sam decided that now was not the time to corner her on it.

  “Yes, well, I imagine that they were trying to get as much of their fortune out of the country as possible.”

  He’d seen a lot of wealth in his lifetime, but he’d never set his eyes upon so much solid gold in one place, at one time.

  Their luster gave them a uniquely strong allure, which surprised him.

  “There’s another box over here,” Aliana said.

  It was smaller, and easier to break open, but no less filled with gold. Inside it were German gold coins and a small bag of precious gems, including diamonds, sapphires, rubies and emeralds.

  “No wonder someone wants me dead,” Sam murmured, as he ran his fingers through the cache of precious gemstones. He raised his eyes to Aliana, and said, “There’s a fortune in treasure here – certainly enough to kill for.”

  “You still don’t know what this is really about, do you?” Aliana asked.

  “It’s what everything is about – Money, Power and Greed.”

  “No, it’s about something even worse than that,” there was spite in her response.

  It gave him pause.

  Sam had expected her to be more contrite, instead, she was almost attacking him.

  “Then what it is it?” Sam’s voice was stern with her, for the first time since they’d started this journey. Aliana had obviously known much more about it than she’d ever expressed to him.

  Aliana didn’t speak a word.

  The guilty expression on her face was, in itself, enough of an answer.

  Sam ignored her. He had other priorities right now. He would deal with her later. He walked slightly further ahead and found a single small suitcase with a chain on one end. It terminated in a handcuff which was attached to what would have been the wrist of one of the skeletons. Unlike the others, this small case was entirely metallic.

  He started to pull at it, but it was completely intact and strong as the day it had been built.

  “Don’t touch that suitcase!” At her strident tone of voice, Sam turned to look at Aliana’s face. There was recognition in it.

  “Why, what’s in it?”

  “That one must be destroyed. It is of paramount importance that we destroy it!” There was true panic in her voice.

  “Okay, tell me why?”

  “My father told me about a virus that my grandfather was commissioned to create for Adolf Hitler. It was supposedly more lethal than anything else ever created. If Germany had succeeded in harnessing its power, the allied forces would have never had a chance to win the war. Like the Japanese after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Allied forces would have had no other option but to unconditionally surrender, and Nazis Fascism would have succeeded.

  A sudden realization hit Sam like a thunderbolt.

  He had just discovered the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

  “Are you telling me that the hunt for the last airship was never about the gold?”

  *

  John Wolfgang knew the second he’d ended the phone call with Blake Simmonds that the man had been keeping something from him. Simmonds was as ruthless as he was calm. His voice hadn’t changed a bit when he mentioned that Carl was dead.

  There was something else that Simmonds was withholding, John was certain of it. He knew people, especially some very deceitful people, and Blake was the worst amongst the lot of them. At least a thief could be relied upon to steal. Even terrorists believed in something with certainty, but Blake worked on an entirely different set of values, which Wolfgang couldn’t even begin to understand.

  And how can you trust a person you don’t understand?

  John replayed the conversation in his mind. There was something about the way that Blake seemed so overly focused about where he’d just been, almost as if he were worried about his location…

  Did he know something about the Magdalena?

  Then it hit him like a bomb.

  Carl wasn’t trying to kill Sam Reilly - he was trying to protect him – but from what?

  The answer presented itself to him, simply.

  From discovering the location of the Magdalena!

  Holy shit! That snobby English bastard knows exactly where it is – and yet still he tries to chase me up for his boss! He’s known all along where she is, and that means that he doesn’t want his boss to find her either!

  John picked up his phone, and punched in the phone number that he never wanted to call.

  “Yes,” said the man, in his dark, cold voice.

  “I have it. I need you to send the team in,” John paused for a moment, and then said, “I’ll text you the GPS coordinates for the location where I’ll meet them. You’ll need to have them there within the hour to secure the location.”

  John gave serious consideration to telling the man that Blake Simmonds had been a traitor all along, but thought better of the idea.

  Some hands are best played close to the vest.

  *

  After Sam had finished explaining to Aliana how he had come to hear of the existence of the Magdalena, and what really happened to cause him to sink, Aliana became even more confused and angry than she ever thought possible.

  “I refuse to believe that my father had anything to do with this! I mean, he has spent his life trying to make up for what his grandfather did during th
e Holocaust.”

  “Then who else would have been trying to kill me from aboard a ship, with a helicopter bearing the name Wolfgang Corporation?”

  That question, she was unable answer.

  “I have no idea, Sam, but you have to believe me when I tell you that my father wasn’t responsible for that. Can you believe me?”

  “I do understand that you believe it to be the truth.”

  It was a diplomatic answer, but she could tell from the expression on his face, that he didn’t believe it.

  “How can you say that? Don’t you trust me?”

  “No. I don’t,” Sam told her, plainly. Even before he spoke, his eyes had given her his answer. And what made it worse, she knew that he had reason not to trust her.

  Those words hurt her even more than acknowledging the fact that, deep down, she believed that her own father had been keeping dark secrets from her.

  She started to speak, but couldn’t get the words out.

  Then, she made another attempt, “Why not?” She wanted to sound both strong and defiant, but her weak tone of voice betrayed her greatest misgivings.

  How much could he possibly know?

  “There was a moment… after I fell, when I saw something in your expression. It was only there for a second at most, but I’ve seen betrayal before, and I know how to spot it when it rears its ugly head. You wanted to leave me there. You considered whether or not you might be able to outrun me if you left me and continued up the Via Farrata alone.”

  “No, you don’t understand…” Aliana tried to explain, but Sam cut her off short.

  “I’m not done. It was only when you saw the other man, Carl, coming down the Via Farrata, that you changed your mind. Almost as if you were frightened, with a glimmer of uncertainty, about just who your enemies were on the mountain, and among them, who you could possibly trust. It was then that you grasped at your only hope, and sided with me.”

  “It was nothing like that, Sam… you don’t understand at all.” Aliana tried to offer him an explanation faster than her mind was capable of forming one. “Many years ago, when I was only a child, my father was so poor that we were on the cusp of starvation. The Berlin Wall had just come down, and my father was approached by a man who offered him financial backing to create his pharmaceutical company. That company was how he went on to become rich, and powerful. It eventually earned him a Nobel Prize. That man asked my father for only one thing in return for his backing – that my father find the final resting place of the Magdalena, and once she was found, to give him control of the deadly virus she carried on board.”

  “So, your father sold out the rest of humanity for gold?” Sam replied, in disgust.

  “He was desperate, Sam. We all were desperate, and he truly believed that it never would be discovered. Then, when I saw him last week, he told me that the same man, who he hadn’t heard from in twenty years, had contacted him with new information, which would help narrow the location of the Magdalena.”

  “Which was...” Sam asked.

  “You.”

  Realization could be seen in Sam’s eyes, as he came to grips with her role in it all.

  “My father was obliged to repay his long-standing obligation to this man by offering him something that he never thought he could.”

  “The destruction of mankind?”

  “Exactly. He wouldn’t tell me what his plan was, but he did tell me that there were a number of treasure hunters after it, and that they were all closing in on it like a pack of hungry wolves. He said that he had a team of people searching, but had already learned that there were others who had come close to finding it. He told me that we needed to be the first to locate it, and that the cost of another person discovering it first would be catastrophic. He also told me that on that very same day, he had heard about a man from Australia who had come here armed with secret information, and that was who he perceived to be his greatest threat. I put two and two together and knew what I had to do. With your knowledge of underwater recovery, you would be the most well equipped to find her at the bottom of one of these lakes.”

  “And so you tried to kill me?” Sam’s face looked more hurt than angry.

  “No, of course not! I never could have done that. How can you say such a terrible thing? All I wanted was to discover what you knew.”

  “So, your father put you up to this. You only came to me for the knowledge. The kiss, the intimacy, all of that was just an act?”

  She slapped him hard.

  “No, the intimacy was real, Sam. My father had told me to discover what you knew, and that…”Aliana’s eyes stared at the twinkle of the glowworms in the cavern’s ceiling, but her mind was a thousand miles away, “he would take care of you, once I had the information. But, you’re real, Sam. It may have been my intention to become close to you for the sake of gaining information, but since then, we’ve both become close. You are the most amazing man I’ve ever met, and for what it’s worth, I love you.”

  “If you didn’t try to kill me on the mountain before, and it wasn’t your father, then who did?”

  “The man’s name was Carl.”

  “Yes, but why? I mean, what did he expect to achieve out of killing me?”

  “That, I don’t know. Can you believe me that I had nothing to do with it?”

  She couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  “I have no idea what to believe right now,” Sam told her, and then smiled at her reassuringly. “How about we first destroy this damned virus, and then start over again with a clean slate?”

  “Okay, so now I know why you’re here, and you know a bit more about my family history. I hate to point this out, but all of it is going to be academic if we don’t find a way out of here in the next few days.”

  She watched as Sam whistled to himself while staring at the Magdalena, as though, having now found what he’d been searching for, escaping to the surface was the last thing on his mind.

  “Are you even listening to me?”

  “What?” He feigned a small show of surprise. “I’m sorry, what did you want to know?”

  “I said, ‘we’re going to die down here, if we don’t figure out how to reach the surface in the next few days.”’

  He didn’t look worried at all, and just continued admiring the bulk of the airship’s hull.

  “You’re as crazy as my father, Sam! You’re completely obsessed and seem unable to focus on what’s most important!” She stared at him and noticed that his countenance hadn’t changed a bit. The entire time they’d been talking, he hadn’t taken his eyes off the outer hull of the Magdalena. Irritated, she asked, “What the hell are you looking at?”

  “The Magdalena, of course.”

  “And what are you thinking?”

  “She’s in remarkably good condition, don’t you think?”

  His insouciance was starting to really piss her off.

  “Yes, and I’m sure she’d look lovely in a museum one day, our bones inside, if you don’t stop staring at her and start to consider how we might escape!”

  “I’m not trying to figure out how we can escape, Aliana.”

  “You’re not? Then what are you trying to do?”

  “I’m wondering if we were to re-gas her canopy, and repair her engines, if we could fly her out of here.”

  “You can’t possibly be serious?”

  “Oh, but I am, completely.”

  “But we don’t even know how to get out of here, let alone the Magdalena,” she protested.

  “No, that I worked out before we went to sleep last night.”

  *

  Sam waded into the deeper section of the lake, where the mouth of the cave was most likely situated. He knew that he didn’t have much time.

  The water was cold, lethally cold.

  He’d just finished explaining to Aliana his theory on how the Magdalena came to be trapped inside the mountain, and it was now time to put that theory into practice. He was confident there was no other conceivable
way that she might possibly have ended up stranded here.

  When he and Tom had compared historical photos of Lake Solitude against current satellite photos, and current pictures taken from the western side of the lake, it was clear that the water level was now a good twenty feet deeper than it had been back in 1939, and how a distinct section of the rocky mountain above it seemed to be missing.

  “If I’m right,” he said, before entering the frigid water, “the Magdalena clipped the top of that mountain, and then, losing altitude, her pilot, Peter Greenstein, looked for a place to land. Seeing that he was surrounded by steep, rocky mountaintops and 100 foot tall pine trees, the frozen surface of the lake in winter would have appeared to be a snow-covered field. In his predicament, the view would have been a godsend. There he brought down his wounded airship, only to discover that the ice beneath the snow was pretty thin. Then, the gondola must have crashed through the ice, and with the water temperature at well below freezing, everyone aboard must have died within seconds.”

  Sam had waited for Aliana to grasp what he had imagined, before continuing with his theory, “The Second World War continued on, and during the next summer, the lake would most likely have thawed and the Magdalena could have drifted into the large grotto, where she became stuck in the build-up of silt and limestone. Sometime during the war, this section of the mountain must have been destroyed, sending millions of tons of rock into the lake, artificially raising the water level as much as twenty feet and forever concealing the wreck of the Magdalena – until now.”

  “That’s a nice theory, but then, why didn’t your search of Lake Solitude discover anything?”

  “Because we weren’t looking in the right spot.”

  “What do you mean? You said you dived the lake, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but we were looking for signs of the lost airship on the lake bottom, we weren’t looking for a tunnel close to the surface.

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “Then I’m about to go for a very cold swim for nothing,” Sam said, his white teeth showing his comfort, despite the cold.

  That said, he dived his head under the frigid water and disappeared.

  The combination of the frigid water and Sam’s lack of a diving mask combined to make for very poor visibility. In the distance, he could just make out a faint glow, which, he decided, must be the outside world, but he had no way to judge the distance.