Page 49 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
“What’s going on?”
“There’s a bomb attached to the undercarriage.”
26
Leaving Liam Holmes with astunned look on his face, Bell ran from the cockpit and raced aft to the starboard side-exit door. As soon as he got it ajar, the wind took it and slammed it back against the plane’s fuselage. The pod holding the two engines was only a few feet away, looking like a monstrous oil tank on thin legs with thrashing propellers on either end.
Despite his surprise, Holmes had followed Bell’s orders. The Zeppelin-Staaken had slowed noticeably and the bellow coming from the tandem motors had diminished. Still, the wind was a force to be reckoned with. Bell dropped to his belly and started sliding out into the slipstream, his hair and then his clothing flapping furiously in the gale. There were plenty of guy wires and bracing spars between the two wings for him to maintain a firm grip at all times, but one slip out here would mean a minutes-long plummet to the unyielding earth below.
Thinking through each move before he executed it, Bell crawledout until he was directly behind the tractor-style propeller pulling the plane through the air. The noise and back draft physically shook his body as he found places to brace his feet. A mistake here would be just as fatal, but mercifully shorter. The pusher prop beat the air directly behind him, and if he lost his grip he’d go through it like a tree limb through a wood chipper.
He slowly bent over the wing’s leading edge, mindful of the whirling prop two feet from the back of his head. He saw the bomb straight away, as he knew he would. It hadn’t been there when he and Holmes had done their visual inspection. It was a package about the size of a loaf of bread and was attached to the main landing gear’s support strut. He clung to the wing with one hand, his feet hooked around two spars. He reached out with his other hand, stretching so that more of his body was being pummeled by the wind. At the full of his stretch his fingers closed around the bomb. It was tied to the metal strut with some cord that allowed him to slide it closer to his torso. Once he had it at the top of the strut, just behind the wing’s lead edge, he managed to slide a little farther back and use just his feet to hold himself against the deafening wind. Now he could use both hands. It took him only a few seconds to untie the thin rope.
He simply let it go and the device vanished into the burgeoning dawn. For about three seconds.
The bomb was designed to sheer off the plane’s wing and so wasn’t particularly large, but it detonated in a bloom of fire and smoke close enough for the pressure wave to lift the big bomber like a kite in a gust. Bell was nearly thrown into the leading propeller when one of his feet slipped, but managed to avoid the spinning disc by digging in hard with his other leg.
Once he got his other foot hooked around the spar once again, hepulled himself back toward the middle of the wing and retraced his path to the aircraft’s door. He couldn’t close it against the slipstream, so the noise and gusts of wind blowing into the cabin were one more in a long list of annoyances.
“We were that close?” Holmes said when Bell took his place in the right-hand seat.
“It went off about two seconds after I untied it from the landing gear,” Bell replied.
“How did you know?”
“The asbestos in the outer case was meant to protect the inner case and the documents from fire. The only way Rath would think fire would be such a hazard is if he planned on us crashing and the plane’s fuel igniting. No matter what happened to the plane, or us for that matter, the documents would be found by the crash investigators and quickly find their way up the chain of command.”
“This was a suicide mission for Georgi?”
“That’s why he was such a nervous wreck,” Bell answered. “Rath needed a man on board so we didn’t just steal his plane for a joyride back to our side of the lines. Georgi pulled the short straw and was a dead man walking when he boarded the plane.”
“A true fanatic.”
“People generally only sacrifice themselves for religion, family, or politics. My money is on the latter. Rath and his men don’t want to bring about peace. I think they’re anarchists who thrive in the chaos of war and want to see all of Europe burned to the ground, Holland included.”
“Do you think the discovery of these battle plans are enough to get the Dutch to declare war on Germany preventively?”
“I know next to nothing about Holland, so I can’t say. But Karl Rath risked his life and the lives of his men to rescue us so we couldfly this mission. And he sent Georgi on a suicide run to make sure we didn’t double-cross them. You don’t make those kinds of sacrifices unless you believe in your ultimate success.”
It was an opinion Holmes found himself agreeing with and so he said nothing more on the topic. Instead he asked, “How did you know where the bomb was?”
“Oh, that. Remember just before takeoff, the mechanic who snuck us onto the base took a long time pulling the wheel chocks? He knows pilots always do a preflight walk-around. He needed to wait until after we did our inspection to secure the bomb to the plane. That was his only opportunity.”
Holmes looked at him with a mix of admiration and suspicion. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m the lead detective for one of the largest private detective agencies in the United States, the Van Dorn Agency. We even have a small branch in London,” Bell said, and then added the grim news he’d also realized moments earlier. “I don’t believe Rath is going to let your men live. With us dead from a crash in a neighborhood outside of Amsterdam, he doesn’t need them for anything. They’re a liability. I am sorry.”
Holmes clearly hadn’t considered that and the horror of it cast a shadow behind his eyes. He and the others had been strangers until just a short while ago, but they were all part of the Flying Corps and shared a bond not bound by the duration of their acquaintance. Their loss was a lance to the heart, and yet he couldn’t let it pierce through to his soul. His was a grim business and he knew the risks. He shook his head as though to slough off the melancholy and clear his mind for the task at hand.
“Bloody war,” he said just loud enough for Bell to hear.
Not long after, they spotted the muddy mire that was the WesternFront, a loathsome stain on an otherwise beautiful countryside. What they hadn’t spotted were any German patrols. They were north of the armies skirmishing around Arras before the main battle got underway and so air cover appeared to be nonexistent.
They had managed to claw their way to eleven thousand feet. It was bitterly cold and both men felt like a horse sat on their chest and prevented them from completely filling their lungs with the thin, oxygen-poor air. They droned on over the battle-scarred land, just able to make out lines of trenches amid the churned soil. It took only a few minutes to cross from the German-occupied side of the line to the Allied portion, and while it was a relief to be almost home, the danger of being attacked actually increased, since they were clearly flying a German bomber.
“Stay high or go low?” Holmes asked.
Bell considered the question and finally said, “Not too many pilots loiter above this altitude, so the chances are we won’t be jumped. Best stay up here until we spot an airdrome. The danger comes when we try to land.”
