The Hindenburg Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,66

planning to shoot up random crew members—or maybe he had just one in mind… maybe a prisoner who had fled his custody, who could die and with his death seem to answer many, many questions… allowing the good colonel to go back to the fatherland, to his wife and his mission.”

Spehl’s hand clasped onto Erdmann’s shoulder. “What were you doing with that Luger in your pocket?”

Erdmann’s eyes and nostrils flared as the boy reached around. “Eric!”

“Give it here!”

And Spehl spun Erdmann to him, grabbing for the gun, trying to wrest it from the colonel’s fingers, the two men tottering on the narrow catwalk. The automatic in hand was high over Erdmann’s head now, as if he were trying to keep a toy from a child; and as Spehl wrestled Erdmann for it, Charteris made a hasty exit, running down the rubberized gangway toward the passenger quarters.

He was halfway to the doorway when he heard the gunshot.

FIFTEEN

HOW THE HINDENBURG ALIGHTED AT LAKEHURST, AND LESLIE CHARTERIS DEBARKED

CHARTERIS HAD A FRACTION-OF-A-SECOND GLIMPSE of the two men, as they stood frozen, like dance partners startled when the music stopped, the tiny black gun in Erdmann’s hand still held high as Spehl clutched the colonel’s arm and wrist, the gun up, angled toward the back of the ship, where the weapon had dispensed a wild bullet.

The sound of the gunshot had been a small pop—almost like a cap pistol—harmless sounding; but Erdmann’s bullet, a small silver pellet whose shape was not unlike the airship’s, had traveled down the hollow body of the dirigible and into a billowing hydrogen-filled gas cell, the center of which flared brilliantly, red and yellow and blue spreading out beneath the fabric like colorful spilled liquid, before the gas cell dissolved in crackling flame.

Then the whoom of detonation announced blossoms of orange fireballs that rolled inexorably, hungrily, down the length of the zeppelin, expanding as they came, scattering scraps of white-hot aluminum and raining down scorched fragments of fabric along the way.

Somewhere a voice screamed, “Stay down!” in German, and Spehl abandoned his dance partner, scrambling along the catwalk away from the oncoming conflagration, leaping for the nearest engine-gondola gangway, trying to shimmy out of the path of the surging fire.

Flushed with heat, as if some mammoth oven door had dropped open, Charteris ran, looking back as he did, not wanting to, but—like Lot’s wife—unable not to. And the last thing he saw, in the burning belly of the beast, was Erdmann consumed by the typhoon of flames, the sizzling saboteur turning black and orange, but the colonel did not scream, rather stood and stoically received the fiery fate he’d conceived.

Then the author bolted through the door, running pell-mell down the keel corridor, toward the stairs, knowing damn good and well that the flames, and time running out, were nipping at his heels.

In thirty-seven seconds, the Hindenburg would be, for all intents and purposes, as dead as Colonel Fritz Erdmann.

Moments before the first blast, Leonhard and Gertrude Adelt were standing with Hilda Friederich, leaning out over the slanting windows on the starboard promenade deck, by the lounge. It was drizzling again, flecks of rain glistening on the windows like tiny jewels. The airship had just swung sharply into the wind, and they were watching with no little interest from their balcony perch the show below: the ground crew—one hundred and fifty feet down—scurrying toward and beneath the ship, a mixture of American civilians and navy men, the latter easy to pick out in their white sailor caps and navy-blue coats. A pair of ropes that had been dropped from the bow and stern were latched onto by two columns of these men, who were tugging the ship toward the mooring mast.

Leonhard noted a remarkable stillness had settled over the deck—no motor drone could be detected, no one spoke, not a command, no cry or call, as if the collective ship were holding its breath.

And the ground crew had suddenly stopped scurrying, were instead looking up with wide eyes and open mouths. Some of them were pointing up—Leonhard could not know it, but the members of the ground crew had spotted the small mushroom-shaped puff of flame, high toward the back of the ship, forward of the upper vertical fin, where a tiny unseen bullet had burst through, disappearing into the mist.

Then a muffled, dull detonation broke the silence, seeming to Leonhard no louder than popping the cap of a beer bottle.

“What was that?” Gertrude asked him, clutching his arm.

Hilda’s hands came