Wilbur Smith - Assegai

‘The little flower is worthy of that love,’ Lusima agreed.

‘Yet she has gone from me. And I despair that I will ever see her again.’

‘You must never despair, M’bogo. Without hope we are nothing.’

‘Mama, you spoke to us once of a great silver fish in the sky that brings fortune and love.’

‘I grow old, my son, and more often these days I speak great stupidity.’

‘Mama, that is the first and only stupidity I have ever heard you utter.’ Leon smiled at her, and she smiled back. ‘It comes to me that soon the fish you do not remember will take to the sky.’

‘All things are possible, but what do I know of fish?’

‘I thought in my own stupidity that, as my mother, you might be able to tell me how to catch this fish of fortune and love.’

She was silent for a long time and then she shook her head. ‘I know nothing about the catching of fish. You should ask a fisherman about that. Perhaps one of the fishermen of Lake Natron might teach you.’

He stared at her in astonishment, then slapped his forehead. ‘Fool!’ he said. ‘Oh, Mama, your son is a fool! Lake Natron! Of course! The fishing nets! That’s what you were trying to tell me!’

Leaving Loikot and Ishmael on the mountain, Leon and Manyoro hurried to Percy’s Camp. He wanted to keep the load on the plane for landing on the mountain to a minimum.

From Percy’s Camp they took off almost immediately for Lake Natron. This time Leon took no chances with another landing on soft ground: he put the Butterfly down safely on the firm surface of the soda pan. He and Manyoro bargained with the chieftain of the fishing village and finally bought four lengths of old, damaged netting from him, each roughly two hundred paces long. As they had not been used recently they were dust-dry, but even so, the weight taxed the power of the Butterfly ’s Meerbach engines. Leon had to make four separate flights to the makeshift landing strip on top of the mountain, carrying one net at a time, each landing a challenge to his skill as a pilot. He had to bring the Butterfly in fast to keep her just above stall speed and made a heavy touch-down that strained the landing gear to its limit.

By the afternoon of the second day they had all four nets laid out on the open ground. They sewed them together in pairs so that finally they had two separate nets, each about four hundred paces long.

There would be no opportunity for practice or experiment with packing and deploying the nets. They would go straight into action against the Assegai , and had only one chance of unfurling the nets successfully. Leon hoped that, with the first attack, he might be able to entangle the propellers of the airship’s two rear engines and slow her down to the extent that he had time to return to Lonsonyo landing strip and load the second length for another attack.

One of the many critical aspects of the scheme was to pack the net so that it would unfurl from the bomb bay and stream out behind the Butterfly in an orderly fashion. Then, once Leon had entangled the airship’s propellers in the mesh, he had to be able to release the net from its retaining hooks before the Butterfly became snarled up in it. He had to be able to break away cleanly. If he failed to get clear, his aircraft would be dragged along tail-first behind the stricken airship. Her wings and fuselage would be broken up by the unnatural forces brought to bear upon them. There were so many imponderables that it would all depend on guesswork, teamwork, quick reactions to any unexpected development and an inordinate amount of good old-fashioned luck.

By the evening of the fourth day the Butterfly stood at the head of the short strip of cleared ground with her nose pointed down the slope, the cliff face falling away abruptly at the end of the runway. Twenty porters waited in readiness to throw their combined weight behind her and give her a push start down the slope.

At dawn and dusk each day Loikot had stood on the heights of Lonsonyo and exchanged shouts with his chungaji companions across the length and breadth of Masailand. It seemed that the eyes of every morani in the territory were fastened on the northern sky: all hoped to be first to spot the approach of the silver fish monster.

Leon and his crew sat under a crudely thatched sun-shelter beside the fuselage of the Butterfly . When the call came they could be at their stations in the cockpit within seconds. There was nothing they could do now but wait.

It looked like a solid unbroken wall in the sky, stretching across the eastern horizon and reaching from the dun desert floor to the milky blue of the heavens. Eva was alone in the control gondola of the Assegai . The airship was on the ground, moored for the day, and she was standing her watch like any of the officers. Every other member of the crew was either off-duty and resting after the night flight or busy servicing and tuning the main engines. Graf Otto was in the nacelle that housed the forward port engine. Despite four hours of determined effort he and his men were still unable to restart it, and had realized the extent of the damage. They were stripping the crank case to get to the root of the problem.

Eva knew that sounding the alarm was not a decision that could be taken lightly. She hesitated a few minutes longer, but in the short time that the eastern horizon had been blotted out by the approaching yellow wall, the speed of its advance was startling. She could see that it was no longer solid but swirled and rolled upon itself, like a dense cloud of yellow smoke. Suddenly she knew what it was. She had read about it in books written by desert travellers. It was one of the most dangerous natural phenomena. She breathed the single word, ‘Khamsin!’ and darted across the bridge to the ship’s main telegraph. She yanked down the handle and the jangling of the emergency bells drowned every other sound.

From the main cabin, crew members stumbled from their mattresses, still more than half asleep, and stared out at the approaching sandstorm. Some were stunned into silence by its size and ferocity, while others jabbered at each other in panic and confusion.

Graf Otto came racing up the companion ladder from the gondola of the damaged engine. He stared at the storm for only a second before he took control. Within minutes two of the three serviceable engines were running, and he signalled the docking team to release the mooring cable from the bows.

The third engine in the forward port gondola was silent. The engineer there was still having difficulty starting her. ‘Take command, Lutz!’ he shouted. ‘I have to go down and get that engine running.’ He ran out on to the open catwalk and disappeared down the ladder to the engine nacelle.

Lutz ran to his control panel and opened all eight gas valves. Hydrogen rushed into the Assegai ’s gas chambers and she flung up her nose so violently that Eva and those men who had no handholds were thrown to the deck as she went into a nose-high climb with half a million cubic feet of buoyant gas hurtling her aloft.

The atmospheric pressure dropped so rapidly that the needle of the barometer spun giddily around the dial. Lutz, the ship’s commander, who was suffering from an infected sinus, squealed with pain and clutched at his ears. A thin trickle of blood ran down his cheek as an eardrum ruptured. He doubled over and fell to his knees. There was no other officer on the bridge who could take over from him, so Eva dragged herself to her feet and, pulling herself along the handrail, she reached Lutz before he lost consciousness with the pain. ‘What must I do?’ she screamed.

‘Vent!’ he moaned. ‘Blow the gas from all the chambers. Red handles!’ She reached up, took hold of them and forced them down with all her strength. She heard the escaping gas howling from the main vents above. The airship shuddered and bucked, but her uncontrolled climb steadied, and the needle on the barometer slowed its wild gyration.