Page 45 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
“Looks good,” Holmes told him.
Rath said, “The river is just over that rise. Is easy to find from the air.”
“Better and better.”
They lit out once again and drove for a half hour. Bell took note that a barbed-wire fence had appeared on their right side, anchored by a forlorn guard tower. Moments later, they passed a cluster of buildings, some of them large enough to be hangars for multiple aircraft. This had to be the airfield. They continued on for a bit, Rathkeeping the truck at a slower pace. He turned off the road and they entered the restricted military installation through a cut section of fence. A soldier was there with a powerful flashlight. He hitched a ride on the truck’s running board while giving directions to Karl Rath.
They finally came to a stop. Bell felt the truck shift slightly when the soldier jumped free. A second later, Rath’s door squealed open. One of Rath’s men opened the tailgate and waited for Bell and Holmes to step down onto the cool grass field.
The two moved around to the other side of the Mercedes and stopped in utter astonishment at what basked in the truck’s headlamps. Even if they weren’t seasoned pilots who had a long-standing love affair with aircraft, the machine in front of them would still stir their blood. The Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI was a spectacular piece of engineering of such a staggering size it almost defied belief. With a total wingspan of one hundred and thirty-eight feet, each of the wings was the length of a tennis court. The bracing between the upper and lower wings was a complex network of struts and wires that kept them in place with at least ten feet between them. There were pods flanking the fuselage placed between the double-stacked wings. Each nacelle housed a pair of Maybach Mb six-cylinder engines with one propeller facing forward and the other prop aft. These nacelles were the size of automobiles. Like the main wings, the tail was also of a bi-wing configuration, with two separate vertical rudders.
The fuselage stretched seventy-two feet, about the length of two city buses. It was one of the first fully enclosed airplanes in the world. There was room in the cockpit for two pilots, a navigator, and a radio operator, but the interior was laid out so there was inflight access to the nose gunner’s position as well as the tail gunner’s compartment. She normally carried two flight engineers, who eachhad a place in the nacelles between the engines out on the wings and had access to additional machine guns on top of the pods.
When sitting idle, the plane rested on sixteen individual tires on four separate trucks. As she was a taildragger, the front tires needed for taking off were currently off the ground at head height, while the top of the cockpit was some fifteen feet in the air.
“What do you think?” Bell asked.
“She’s a monster all right, but the principles are all the same, right?”
“Are you asking or is that rhetorical?”
Holmes chuckled. “Not sure, actually.”
The German mechanic loyal to Karl Rath said something to Bell and Holmes. Since neither man spoke German, they looked to Rath to translate. “He says not to be intimidated, but also do not underestimate, either. She is big and heavy and needs two men to wrestle her around in the air.”
The German spoke some more. “He says on a long flight they have relief pilots on board to take over for when the first team become too tired. Your flight won’t be so long, but you will still feel the effects.”
“How is she to land?” Holmes asked.
The mechanic looked away for a second before replying. “She wants to float above the ground for a long time when you try to land. Be prepared for that.”
“Ground effects,” Bell said.
“I’ve experienced it a few times,” Holmes assured him. “If we bring her in hard and fast, who cares if we break an axle? It’s not like she’ll ever fly again.”
“Good point.”
“Come,” the German said in English. He led Bell and Holmes toa ladder leaning against the left wing’s leading edge. They climbed up, with Rath joining them to translate. Georgi stayed behind, flanked by Rath’s muscle.
The cockpit was like a cozy room ringed with large windows. The two pilots sat next to each other behind large control wheels rather than stick controls, as found in a fighter. A large compass was between the seats on the dash as well as clusters of instrument gauges.
There were two other seats farther aft, and beyond those were two rows of steel drums for the plane’s three thousand liters of gasoline.
The mechanic pointed to some controls and explained their purpose. Rath listened and then repeated it in English. “The plane is equipped with self-starters for the engines. You fire up the lead motor in each nacelle and use it to jump-start its partner. Other than that everything is standard, just big.”
“Okay, then,” Holmes said. “We should be about set. I just want to do a full walk-around.”
“There is no time,” Rath said. “You must arrive at sunup.”
“Sorry, mate. I don’t fly a kite I haven’t eyeballed for myself.”
“Same,” Bell said.
Rath’s anger was plain to see, but so, too, was the resolve of his two pilots. “Fine,” he said between gritted teeth.
Bell and Holmes spent ten minutes inspecting the exterior of the giant plane, making sure the control surfaces had free motion and there was no obvious damage to her canvas skin. Bell wrapped a knuckle against one of the bombs held in racks below her belly for luck. The final part of the tour was a look into the engine pods atop the wings. Rath stayed with them the whole time, as if his presence would hurry them along.
Frustrated to not have any time alone to strategize with the Englishman, Bell finally muttered, “There is anet tu Brutemoment coming. Let it happen, but when I touch your shank, make us an elevator to Hades.”
