Finally, I heard his voice, weak though it was, saying, ‘Watson, promise me one thing.’
‘What is that, Holmes?’
‘Swear to me that once we’ve set foot on land you’ll shoot me through the head if ever I show the slighest inclination to board a flying vehicle again. I don’t think there’s much danger of that, but even if His Majesty himself should plead with me to get into an aeroplane, or anything that flies, dirigible, balloon, anything, you will mercifully tender euthanasia of some sort. Promise me.’
I thought I was safe in promising. For one thing, I felt almost as strongly as he did about it.
At that moment, the door to our cabin opened, and our attendant, Ivan, appeared with a small electric lamp in his hand. He exchanged some excited words in Russian with Holmes and then left, leaving the lamp behind. Holmes crawled down from the bunk, saying, ‘We’ve orders to abandon ship, Watson. We’ve been blown far south of Cairo and will be out of petrol in half an hour. We’ll have to jump then, like it or not. Ivan says that the colonel has looked for a safe landing place, but he can’t even see the ground. The air’s filled with sand; visibility is nil; the sand is getting into the bearings of the engines and pitting the windshields. So, my dear old friend, we must don the parachutes.’
My heart warmed at being addressed so fondly, though my emotion was somewhat tempered in the next few minutes while we were assisting each other in strapping on the equipment. Holmes said, ‘You have an abominable effluvia about you, Watson,’ and I replied, testily, I must admit, ‘You stink like the W.C. in an East End pub yourself, my dear Holmes. Besides, any odour emanating from me has originated from, or in, you. Surely you are aware of that.’
Holmes muttered something about the direction upwards, and I was about to ask him to clarify his comment when Ivan appeared again. This time he carried weapons which he distributed among the three of us. I was handed a cavalry sabre, a stiletto, a knout (which I discarded), and a revolver of some unknown make but of .50 calibre. Holmes was given a cutlass, a carbine, a belt full of ammunition, and a coil of rope at one end of which were grapping hooks. Ivan kept for himself another cutlass, two hand grenades dangling by their pins from his belt, and a dagger in his teeth.
We walked (rolled, rather) to the door, where three others stood, also fully, perhaps even over-, armed. There was a window further forward, and so Holmes and I went to it after a while to observe the storm. We could see little except clouds of dust for a few minutes and then the dust was suddenly gone. A heavy rain succeeded it, though the wind buffeted us as strongly as before. There was also much lightning, some of it exploding loudly close by.
A moment later Ivan joined us, pulling at Holmes’ arm and shouting something in Russian. Holmes answered him and turning to me said, ‘Kentov has sighted a Zeppelin!’
‘Great Scott!’ I cried. ‘Surely it must be the one sent to pick up Von Bork! It, too, has been caught by the storm!’
‘An elementary deduction,’ Holmes said. But he seemed pleased about something. I surmised that he was happy because Von Bork had either missed the airship or, if he was in it, was in as perilous a plight as we. I failed to see any humour in the situation.
Holmes lost his grin several minutes later when we were informed that we were going to attack the Zeppelin.
‘In this storm?’ I said. ‘Why, the colonel can’t even keep us at the same altitude or attitude from one second to the next.’
‘The man’s a maniac!’ Holmes shouted.
Just how mad, we were shortly to discover. Presently the great airship hove into view, painted silver above and black below to conceal it from search lights, the large designation on its side painted out, the control car in front, its pusher propellor spinning, the propellors on the front and rear of the two midships and one aft engine-gondolas spinning, the whole looking quite monstrous and sinister and yet beautiful.
The airship was bobbing and rolling and yawing like a toy boat afloat on a Scottish salmon stream. Its crew had to be airsick and they had to have their hands full just to keep from being pitched out of their vessel. This was heartening to some degree, since none of us on the aeroplane, except possibly Kentov, were in any state remotely resembling good health or aggression.
Ivan mumbled something, and Holmes said, ‘He says that if the storm keeps up the airship will soon break up. Let us hope that it does and so spares us aerial combat.’
But the Zeppelin, though it did seem to be somewhat out of line, its frame slightly twisted, held together. Meanwhile, our four-engined colossus, so small compared to the airship, swept around to the vessel’s stern. It was a ragged approach what with the constantly buffeting blasts, but the wonder was that it was accomplished at all.
‘What’s the fool doing?’ Holmes said, and he spoke again to Ivan. Lightning rolled up the heavens then, and I saw that his face was a ghastly blue-grey.
‘This yank is madder than the other!’ he said. ‘He’s going to try to land on top of the Zeppelin!’
‘How could he do that?’ I gasped.
‘How would I know what techniques he’ll use, you dunce!’ he shouted. ‘Who cares? Whatver he does, the plane will fall off the ship, probably breaks its wings, and we’ll fall to our deaths!’
‘We can jump now!’ I shouted.
‘What? Desert?’ he cried. ‘Watson, we are British!’
‘It was only a suggestion,’ I said. ‘Forgive me. Of course, we will stick it out. No Slav is going to say that we English lack courage.’
Ivan spoke again, and Holmes relayed his intelligence. ‘He says that the colonel, who is probably the greatest flier in the world, even if he is a Yank, will come up over the stern of the Zeppelin and stall it just above the top machine-gun platform. As soon as the plane stops, we are to open the door and leap out. If we miss our footing or fall down, we can always use the parachutes. Kentov insisted on bringing them along over the protests of the Imperial
Russian General Staff—they should live so long. We will go down the ladder from the platform and board the ship. Kentov’s final words, his last orders before we leave the plane are . . .’
He hesitated, and I said, ‘Yes, Holmes?’
‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’
‘Good heavens!’ I said. ‘How barbaric!’
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘But one has to excuse him. He is obviously not sane.’
V
Following orders communicated through Obrenov, we lay down on the deck and grabbed whatever was solid and anchored in a world soon to become all too fluid and foundationless. The plane dived and we slid forward and then it rose sharply upward and we slid backward and then its nose suddenly lifted up, the roaring of the four engines becoming much more highly pitched, and suddenly we were pressed against the floor. And then the pressure was gone.
Slowly, but far too swiftly for me, the deck tilted to the left. This was in accordance with Kentov’s plans. He has stalled the craft with its longitudinal axis, or centre-line, a little to the left of the airship’s centre-line. Its weight would thus cause the airship on whose back it rode to roll to the left.
For a second, I did not realize what was happening. To be quite frank, I was scared out of my wits, numb with terror. I would never allow Holmes to see this, and so I overcame my frozen state, though not the stiffness and slowness due to my age and recent hardships. I got up and stumbled out through the door, the parachute banging the upper parts of the back of my thighs and feeling as if it were made of lead, and sprawled out onto the small part of the platform left to me. I grabbed for the lowest end of an upright pipe forming the enclosure about the platform. The hatch had already been opened and Kentov was inside the airship. I could hear the booming of several guns. It was comparatively silent now, since Kentov had cut the engines just before the stalling. Nevertheless, one could hear the creaking of the girders of the ship’s structure as it bent under the varying pressures. My ears hurt abominably because the airship was dropping swiftly under the weight of the gian
t aeroplane. The aeroplane was also making its own unmistakable noises, groaning, as its structure bent, tearing the fabric of the ship’s covering as it slipped more and more to the left, then there was a loud ripping, and the ship beneath me rolled swiftly back, relieved of the enormous weight of the aeroplane. At the same time the Zeppelin soared aloft, and the two motions, the rolling and the levitation, almost tore me loose from my hold.
When the dirigible had ceased its major oscillations, the Russians rose and one by one disappeared into the well. Holmes and I worked our way across, passed the pedestals of the two quilt-swathed eight-millimetre Maxim machine guns, and descended the ladder. Just before I was all the way into the hatch, I looked across the back of the great beast that we were invading. I would have been shocked if I had not been so numb. The wheels and the ski undercarriage of the plane had ripped open a great wound along the thin skin of the vessel. Encountering the duralumin girders and rings of the framework, it had tom some apart and then its landing gear had itself been ripped off. The propellors, though no longer turning, had also done extensive damage. I wondered if the framework of the ship, the skeleton of the beast, as it were, might not have suffered so great a blow it would collapse and carry all of us down to our death.
I also had a second’s admiration for the skull, no, the genius, of the pilot who had landed us.
And then I descended into the vast complex spiderweb of the ship’s hull with its rings and girders and bulging hydrogen-filled gas cells and ballast sacks of water. I emerged at the keel of the ship, on the foot-wide catwalk that ran the length of the ship between triangular girders. It had been a nightmare before then; after that it became a nightmare having a nightmare. I remember dodging along, clinging to girders, swinging out and climbing around to avoid the fire of the German sailors in the bow. I remember Lieutenant Obrenov falling with fatal bullet wounds after sticking two Germans with his sabre (there was no room to swing it and so use the edge as regulations required).
I remember others falling, some managing to retain their grip and so avoiding the fall through the fabric of the cover and into the abyss below. I remember Holmes hiding behind a gas cell and firing away at the Germans who were afraid of firing back and perhaps setting the hydrogen aflame.
Most of all I remember the slouch-hatted cloaked form of Kentov leaping about, swinging from girders and brace wires, bouncing from a beam onto a great gas cell and back again, flitting like a phantom of the opera through the maze, firing two huge .45 automatic pistols (not at the same time, of course, otherwise he would have lost his grip). German after German cried out or fled while the maniac cackled with a blood-chilling laugh between the booming of the huge guns. But though he was worth a squadron in himself, his men died one by one. And so the inevitable hapened.
Perhaps it was a ricocheting bullet or perhaps he slipped. I do not know. All of a sudden he was falling off a girder, through a web of wires, miraculously missing them, falling backward, now in each hand a thundering flame-spitting .45, killing two sailors as he fell, laughing loudly even as he broke through the thin fabric and disappeared into the dark rain over Africa.
Since he was wearing a parachute, he may have survived. I never heard of him again, though.
Presently the Germans approached cautiously, having heard Holmes and me call out that we surrendered. (We were out of ammunition and too nerveless even to lift a sabre.) We stood on the catwalk with our hands up, two tired beaten old men. Yet it was our finest hour. Nothing could ever rob us of the pleasure of seeing Von Bork’s face when he recognised us. If the shock had been slightly more intense, he would have dropped dead from a heart attack.
VI
A few minutes later, we had climbed down the ladder from the hull to the control gondola under the fore part of the airship. Behind us, raving, restrained by a petty officer and the executive officer, Oberleutnant zur See Heinrich Tring, came Von Bork. He had ordered us thrown overboard then and there, but Tring, a decent fellow, had refused to obey his orders. We were introduced to the commander, Kapitanleutnant Victor Reich. He was also a decent fellow, openly admiring our feat of landing and boarding his ship even though it and his crew had suffered terribly. He rejected Von Bork’s suggestion that we should be shot as spies since we were in civilian clothes and on a Russian warcraft. He knew of us, of course, and he would have nothing to do with a summary execution of the great Holmes and his colleague. After hearing our story, he made sure of our comfort. However, he refused to let Holmes smoke, cast his tobacco overboard then and there, in fact, and this made Holmes suffer. He had gone through so much that he desperately needed a pipeful of shag.
‘It is fortunate that the storm is breaking up,’ Reich said in excellent English. ‘Otherwise, the ship would soon break up. Three of our motors are not operating. The clutch to the port motor has overheated, the water in the radiator of a motor in the starboard mid-car has boiled out, and something struck the propellor of the control car and shattered it. We are so far south that even if we could operate at one hundred percent efficiency, we would be out of petrol somewhere over Egypt on the return trip. Moreover, the controls to the elevators have been damaged. All we can do at present is drift with the wind and hope for the best.’
The days and nights that followed were full of suffering and anxiety. Seven of the crew had been killed during the fight, leaving only six to man the vessel. This alone was enough to make a voyage back to Turkey or Palestine impossible. Reich told us that he had received a radio message ordering him to get to the German forces in East Africa under Von Lettow-Vorbeck. There he was to burn the Zeppelin and join the forces. This, of course, was not all the message. Surely something must have been said about getting Von Bork to Germany, since he had the formula for mutating and culturing the ‘sauerkraut bacilli.’ I wondered then why the formula was not sent via radio to the German-Turkish base, but I found out later that no one aboard understood the formula well enough to transmit it.
When we were alone in the port mid-gondola, where we were kept during part of the voyage, Holmes commented on what he called the ‘SB.’
‘We must get possession of the formula, Watson,’ he said. ‘I did not tell you, but before you arrived at Mycroft’s office I was informed that the SB is a two-edged weapon. It can be mutated to eat other foods. Imagine what would happen to our food supply, not to mention the blow to our morale, if the SB were changed to eat boiled meat? Or cabbage? Or potatoes?’
‘Great Scott!’ I said, and then, in a whisper, ‘It could be worse, Holmes, far worse. What if the Germans dropped an SB over England which devoured stout and ale? Or think of how the spirits of our valiant Scots would sink if their whisky supply vanished before their eyes?’
Von Bork had been impressed into airship service but, being as untrained as we, was not of much use. Also, his injured left eye handicapped him as much as our age did us. It was very bloodshot and failed to coordinate with its partner. My professional opinion was that it was totally without sight. The other eye was healthy enough. It glared every time it lighted upon us. Its fires reflected the raging hatred in his heart, the lust to murder us.
However, the airship was in such straits that no one had much time or inclination to think about anything except survival. Some of the motors were still operating, thus enabling some kind of control. As long as we went south, with the wind behind us, we made headway. But due to the jammed elevators, the nose of the ship was downward and the tail was up. It flew at roughtly five degrees to the horizontal for some time. Reich put everybody to work, including us, since we had volunteered, at carrying indispensable equipment to the rear to help weigh it down. Anything that was dispensable, and there was not much, went overboard. In addition, much water ballast in the front was discharged.
Below us the sands of Sudan reeled by while the sun flamed in a cloudless blue. Its fiery breath heated the hydrogen in the cells, and great amounts hissed out from the automatic valves. The hot wind blew into the hull through the great hole made
by the aeroplane when it had stalled into a landing on its top. The heat, of course, made the hydrogen expand, thus causing the ship to rise despite the loss of gas from the valves. At night, the air cooled very swiftly, and the ship dropped swiftly, too swiftly for the peace of mind of its passengers. During the day the updrafts of heat from the sands made the vessel buck and kick. All of us aboard got sick during these times.
By working like Herculeses despite all handicaps, the crew managed to get all the motors going again. On the fifth day, the elevator controls were fixed. Her hull was still twisted, and this, with the huge gap in the surface covering, made her aerodynamically unstable. At least, that was how Reich explained it to us. He, by the way, was not at all reticent in telling us about the vessel itself though he would not tell us our exact location. Perhaps this was because he wanted to make sure that we would not somehow get to the radio and send a message to the British in East Africa.
The flat desert gave way to rugged mountains. More ballast was dropped, and the vessel just barely avoided scraping some of the peaks. Night came with its cooling effects, and the ship dropped. The mountains were lower at this point, fortunately for us.
Two days later, as we lay sweltering on the catwalk that ran along the keel, Holmes said, ‘I estimate that we are now somewhere over British East Africa, somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Victoria. It is evident that we will never get to Mahenge or indeed anywhere in German East Africa. The ship has lost too much hydrogen. I have overhead some guarded comments to this effect by Reich and Tring. They think we’ll crash sometime tonight. Instead of seeking out the nearest British authorities and surrendering, as anyone with good sense would, they are determined to cross our territory to German territory. Do you know how many miles of veldt and jungle and swamp swarming with lions, rhinoceri, vipers, savages, malaria, dengue, and God knows what else we will have to walk? Attempt to walk, rather?’
The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes II Page 11