Page 47 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
Bell and Holmes exchanged another look. This time there was noboyish smile, but the acceptance of the grim reality that the betrayal Bell anticipated had arrived. Holmes’s look also conveyed that he hoped Bell had more than just good predictive skills and actually had a plan to take control of the situation.
Georgi jammed the gun’s barrel into Bell’s neck. His finger was on the trigger. “Turn now!”
With no other choice, the two flyers banked the aircraft to starboard, not knowing that they were experiencing history’s first hijacking.
25
Of the many miscalculations Bellhad made on this mission, the one he feared would get him killed now was how slowly the big Zeppelin-Staaken bomber could climb. The higher they flew, the thinner the air became, and the less lift the monstrous wings provided. Eventually they would hit her absolute ceiling of around fourteen thousand feet. Bell’s quick mental calculation based on their current altitude and rate of climb told him it would take nearly three hours.
The very thought of a nervous twentysomething with poor trigger discipline holding a pistol pointed at his head for that much time was a recipe for disaster. Still, Bell needed as much altitude as they could manage for his plan to work.
On they droned over Belgium, climbing at a slowing pace with each mile they put behind them. Georgi no longer pressed the gun to Bell’s neck, but it was never more than a foot or two away, andthe young partisan’s finger never lost its tight curl around the trigger, an obvious sign the weapon was in a novice’s hand.
The juddering altimeter needle finally pointed to an altitude of three thousand meters, or close enough to ten thousand feet, that any delay on Bell’s part was him merely stalling. Moving a hand at an infinitely slow pace so as not to draw Georgi’s attention, Bell eventually hooked a finger under his lap belt’s metal buckle. There was no need to worry that unbuckling it would alert their captor, but Bell kept himself buckled in when he reached over to point at one of the gauges on the central part of the cockpit’s dashboard. He sensed Georgi lean forward to see what had caught Bell’s eye.
Bell tapped Holmes’s leg and the cockpit seemed to explode.
The Brit had been expecting the signal and was ready to put everything he had into nose-diving the giant bomber. He pressed hard on the wheel, using all of the muscles in his back, chest, and arms, and the response was sharper than he’d expected. It was as though the plane no longer wanted to be in the air. The nose dropped while the engines continued to roar, and for the next few seconds the plane was falling faster than its passengers, and so they experienced complete weightlessness.
Holmes was still strapped in, so he remained in his seat. Georgi wasn’t prepared at all. He had only a tenuous grip on the back of Bell’s seat. He was lifted off his feet and started drifting aft, his hands flailing uselessly. The big Zeppelin-Staaken did nothing very quickly, so the young partisan was moving almost gently, like a leaf caught in an updraft, and had plenty of time to brace himself before he hit the double row of cylindrical metal gas tanks.
Bell anticipated his moves even as the barn door–sized elevators tipped the plane into a dive. He’d experienced weightlessness beforewhile flying, and he knew what to expect. He launched himself out of his chair as soon as he saw Georgi floating away, the gun no longer pointed at his head. He used a piece of the cabin’s tubular frame as a handhold to hurl himself at their hijacker. With no gravity acting on his body, he flew like a missile and had aimed himself perfectly.
He slammed into Georgi just as they reached the gas tanks with an impact that caused the younger man’s breath to explode from his body. The blow also broke a couple of ribs. Somehow, he managed to keep control of the pistol. Bell was a little staggered by the violence of the impact himself and was a fraction late in blocking the revolver from coming around. He deflected Georgi’s arm at the last second.
The gun went off with a sharp painful bark. The bullet struck one of the tanks a glancing blow that sent it ricocheting through the plane’s canvas skin and off one of the engines.
Bell clamped a hand around Georgi’s wrist as he tried to aim it at him once again. It was a test of strength that the younger man should have lost in moments, but he was driven by a fervid belief in this mission and fought with strength he didn’t know he possessed. Even with Georgi hyperventilating to reinflate his lungs, it was all Bell could do to maintain a stalemate. They were like two evenly matched arm wrestlers. They each fought with both hands and neither could find an advantage.
Rather than maintain the fight until one of them tired, Bell took his left hand off Georgi’s arm and jabbed his knuckles into the man’s ribs, twisting them in against the broken bones. Georgi screamed in pain and Bell pressed his advantage, bending the man’s wrist sharply and looping a finger over his trigger finger. The sound of the gun going off was muted by their bodies pressed so closely together.
Bell felt a searing pain when the muzzle flash burned a patch of skin on his stomach. It was nothing compared to the damage the small-caliber bullet did to Georgi. The round tore through diaphragm and lung and cut a pencil-thin tunnel through his heart, stopping it immediately. The roar of pain at the jab to the ribs died on Georgi’s lips as a new sensation short-circuited his nervous system. His gaze turned to Bell as if there were an explanation to be found in the American’s cold blue eyes.
Bell didn’t wait to see him take his last breath because, as they were fighting, he became aware of the banshee-like shriek of wind over the wings and through all the plane’s supporting guy wires.
The bomber was shuddering and shaking and seemed to want to tear itself apart. A new sound joined the unholy chorus as bits of canvas covering the wings began to tear away. A tension wire snapped and fouled one of the pusher props for a moment. Bell let Georgi collapse to the deck and crawled his way toward the cockpit, using whatever protrusion was available for foot and handholds. With the plane still in a dive, it was like climbing with a hundred-pound sack on his back. He finally made it to his seat and flipped himself into it.
Holmes had already cut the engines back to idle and was pulling on the stick even harder than he’d slammed it earlier to drop them out of the sky. Bell added his strength to the controls, pulling until his neck corded up and sweat burst from every pore.
The altimeter needle spun passed a thousand meters in a blur like a compass sitting too close to a magnet. Their rate of descent didn’t appear to be slowing for several long moments. But then, ever so slowly, their efforts began to pay off. Their strength moved the elevators against the slipstream enough to start to bring the nose out of its screaming dive.
At five hundred meters, the plane was nearly out of its dive. Airspeed had bled off some and it became easier for them to wrestle the bomber onto an even keel.
They finally leveled out at three hundred meters, or about a thousand feet. It sounded like a healthy cushion, but to Bell and Holmes it felt as though the bomber’s belly was about to scrape the earth. The two pilots shared a look of relief haloed by incredulity that the big plane hadn’t lost a wing and augered into the ground in a crumbled heap.
Holmes fed more power to the motors and they started the laborious climb all over again. He banked the plane to take them back over the front lines and into Allied territory.
“Why not carry on to Holland?” Bell shouted over the riotous din filling the cabin. “We’re closer.”
“I can’t imagine the Dutch being too keen on a British officer flying a stolen German plane into their neutral territory,” Holmes shouted back. “Safer to get as much altitude as we can and head home.”
Bell couldn’t argue with his logic. He changed topics. “I believe the bombs we’re carrying are dummies. I tapped one during our walk-around and it rang hollow.”
“That explains why this old girl is lighter on the controls than I expected. She’d be a right pig with a couple thousand kilos of bombs under her belly.”
Bell didn’t ask the logical follow-up question because Holmes wouldn’t know the answer, either. If they weren’t going to bomb a German-controlled rail depot in Belgium, what was their mission? The answer wouldn’t come to him, no matter how he tried to glean any meaning from what he knew of Rath and his merry band of cutthroats. Why fly to Holland? They weren’t going to bomb it, that was for sure, so there was something else.
Did Georgi have a specific mission he’d been ordered to carry out?
