Max Collins - The Hindenburg Murders

The wild-eyed Spehl spoke for the first time, and his voice was shrill. “I did not kill Willy! And neither did Colonel Erdmann. It was an accident.”

“An accident,” Charteris said, almost tasting the word. “I believe I heard this song-and-dance before….”

Insistently Spehl went on: “Willy was angry with me, for getting him in trouble, when he found out the Luftwaffe agents were investigating; he knew the wound on his leg would give him away. He was going to give himself up and tell them what I’d asked him to do and…”

“You killed him.”

“No! We… we did struggle. We were talking in his gondola, screaming at each other over the engine, and when he went out to that little gangway between the gondola and the ship, to go tell on me, we struggled and… he just slipped. I swear to God and all that’s holy, he slipped!”

“I’m sorry, boys,” Charteris said, shaking his head. “I can’t come over to your side. You’re just too… untidy a bunch, much as I might sympathize with your goals. That jerry-rigged bomb of yours could go off while people are still on this ship, and you’re endangering untold numbers of American military and civilians at Lakehurst.”

Spehl shook his head, violently. “No! It’s set for eight o’clock. Everyone will be off the ship. Casualties will be minimal.”

“Don’t you think it’s rather bad taste,” Charteris said pointedly, “to fight a war on another country’s soil? German casualties are one thing: Americans are another.”

“Then you’ve made your decision?” Erdmann asked, raising the Luger so that it was trained upon the author’s heart.

“So what’s the plan, boys? Disappear into America? Wait… Eric, that’s your plan. But, you, Colonel, you want to go back to your pretty wife, in Germany, and continue fighting from within, don’t you? A noble enough goal… but Eric, here, kind of made a mess of it, with his extra killing, didn’t he?”

“Be quiet,” Erdmann said. “This is your last chance.”

“Eric,” Charteris said, “what do you want to bet that that automatic in the colonel’s pocket wasn’t meant for me? After all, Fritz didn’t know I was going to show up, did he?”

“Quiet,” Erdmann said, teeth clenched.

“Why was he packing the rod, do you suppose? Hmmm, Eric? Do you think he was 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.

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 up and covered her mouth, eyes wide, trembling all over. She was looking out and down.

Leonhard followed her gaze. The crew on the ground were suffused in a rosy glow, as if the sun were rising; the sandy ground itself was basking in the eerie twilight sunrise, spreading from the bow of the ship, banishing its usual blue shadow. And then the men down there were scurrying again-but in a different direction.

Running away from the ship in terror.

“Sweet Jesus,” the journalist told the two beauties. “We’re aflame.”

The second detonation was no mere echo: it overshadowed the first explosion with its force and terrible bellow, as if the airship itself were howling in anguish, and-though no one on the Hindenburg could see it-this explosion sent flames erupting through the skin atop the ship, telling everyone on the ground that the previous tiny burst of flame had been only a hint of what was to come.