Wilbur Smith - Assegai

Eva was touched and felt a pang of guilt that she had deceived him with her pretence of not understanding what had taken place during his meeting with the Boer general.

When Graf Otto called her, she went to join him at the head of the dinner table. He introduced her as the expedition’s mascot. The company clapped and cheered. They were happy and excited, eager to set off on a journey that they knew would be considered an epic of airship travel.

The plates were piled high with Bavarian delicacies. Only the liquor was stinted: Graf Otto wanted clear heads and eyes on board when they took to the skies. The toasts were drunk in a light pilsener, in which the presence of alcohol was barely detectable.

At 2100 hours precisely Graf Otto came to his feet. ‘Ah, so! My friends, it is time we were on our way to Africa.’ There was another burst of cheering, then the crew hurried aboard and stood to their action stations. The ship was weighed off carefully, then walked out to her mooring mast. Standing in his makeshift radio room Graf Otto made final contact with Berlin Central. He received the Kaiser’s personal good wishes and was told, ‘God speed’. He turned off the transmitter and gave the launch orders to Commodore Lutz. The Assegai slipped her nose cable, rose gently into the golden summer twilight and turned on to a heading of 155 degrees.

Over the past weeks they had planned the flight in detail so there was little need to discuss it now. Lutz knew precisely what Graf Otto required of him and his crew. Showing no lights they ascended to their maximum safe cruising altitude of ten thousand feet as they floated over the Bodensee and ran on due south to cross the Mediterranean coastline a little after midnight a few miles west of Savona. They went on southwards, keeping the lights of the Italian coastal towns in sight on their port side.

They had a strong following wind as they crossed the island of Sicily, which carried them swiftly to their landfall on a nameless, bleak stretch of the Libyan desert somewhere west of Benghazi. As the sun rose Eva stood at the forward observation windows of the saloon and watched their gigantic shadow flitting across the ridges and dunes of the rugged brown terrain below. Africa! she exulted silently. Wait for me, my love. I am coming back to you.

The heat came up at them, sunlight reflected by the rock, and powerful eddies swirled around the ship, like the currents of some great ocean. She was lighter now that her four great Meerbach engines had burned off six thousand pounds of fuel and oil, but the sun heated the hydrogen in its chambers, increasing their lift. Inexorably the airship began to rise, and Lutz was forced to valve off 230,000 cubic feet of gas, but still she continued to climb until at fifteen thousand feet the crew felt the enervating effects of oxygen starvation. At the same time the temperature climbed dramatically and was soon registering 52 degrees centigrade in the control room. The engines had to be shut down in rotation to allow them to cool and for fresh oil to be pumped through the systems.

They were now flying light with six degrees of down angle on the controls. The airspeed bled away from 100 knots to fifty-five and the Assegai was failing to respond adequately to the helm. Then the forward port engine surged and cut out. With this sudden loss of power the airship stalled and dropped from thirteen thousand to six thousand feet before she responded to her helm again and came back on even keel. It had been an alarming plunge and part of the main cargo had broken loose.

Even Graf Otto was shaken by the Assegai ’s erratic behaviour in the superheated air and agreed without argument to Lutz’s suggestion that they should land and anchor the ship for the remainder of the day, to continue the journey in the evening. Lutz picked out an outcrop of black rock on the desert floor ahead that would afford an anchor point for the mooring cable and eased the ship downwards, valving off great quantities of hydrogen.

They were only fifty feet above the desert floor when a party of mounted men in flowing white burnous burst out from the rocks and galloped down a wadi towards them, brandishing curved short swords and firing up at the Assegai with long-barrelled jezails. A bullet smashed through the observation window beside Graf Otto and showered him with glass. He swore with annoyance and stepped across to the Maxim machine-gun mounted at the front of the gondola.

He levered a round into the breech, then swung the gun downwards on its mounting. He fired a short burst and the leading rank of charging Arabs disintegrated. Three horses went down, taking their riders with them. He traversed the gun right and fired again. Four more horses dropped, kicking, into the sand and the survivors scattered. Eva counted the casualties. Seven men were down, but two horses lunged back on to their feet and galloped after the rest.

‘I don’t think they’ll be coming back,’ he said casually. ‘You can stand the watch down until eighteen hundred hours, Lutz. Then we’ll start the engines again to fly on in the cool of the night.’

The last cablegram that Mr Goolam Vilabjhi had received from his niece in Altnau contained only a single number group. When Leon decoded it he found it was the date that Eva had promised to send him: that on which the Assegai would commence its flight from Wieskirche. In her previous cables, she had given him the name that Graf Otto had chosen for his machine, with its design number. The Assegai was a Mark ZL71. She had already outlined the course he intended to follow on his flight to South Africa. From this Leon had calculated when the airship might arrive over the Great Rift. Now all he needed was a plan of action that offered even a remote chance of success in bringing the massive ship to earth, then capturing its crew and cargo. With Penrod gone and Frederick Snell able to block his efforts, Leon was on his own.

He had seen drawings of the type of airship he was up against. When Graf Otto had been evacuated from Nairobi to Germany after his mauling, he had left piles of books and magazines in his private quarters at Tandala Camp. They were mostly technical engineering publications and one contained a long, illustrated article on the construction and operation of a large dirigible. It had included numerous drawings of the various types, including the Mark ZL71. Now Leon retrieved it and studied it carefully.

Far from being of help or inspiration, he found the illustrations and descriptions thoroughly discouraging. The airship was so enormous and so well protected, it flew so fast and high, that there seemed no possible way to prevent it getting through. He tried to imagine a comparison for the little Butterfly and this behemoth of the skies: a field mouse alongside a black-maned lion, perhaps, or a termite beside a pangolin?

He cast his mind back to the prophecy that Lusima had made for them when first he had taken Eva to Lonsonyo Mountain to meet her. She had conjured up the image of a great silver fish obscured by smoke and flame. When he looked at the illustration, in Graf Otto’s book, of the airship with its mighty fish-tailed rudder and generally piscine shape, he had no doubt that this was what she had foreseen. He wondered if there was any more she could tell him, but that was unlikely: Lusima never enlarged on an original prediction. She gave you the kernel, and it was up to you to make of it what you could.

Leon was isolated and abandoned. He had lost Eva and he knew that there was only a remote chance that he would see her again. It was as though a vital part of his body had been cut away. Penrod was gone too. He never thought he would miss his uncle, but he felt the loss intensely. He needed help and advice, and there was only one person left in his life who might provide it.