Page 40 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)

L eaving Liam Holmes with a stunned 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 crawled out 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, he pulled 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 could fly 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 Western Front, 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.”

“I agree.”

Fifteen minutes later they both spotted an airfield at the same time.

The runway was clearly marked out with signal flags, and two large hangars had been erected along the flight line.

Near them were a clutch of smaller buildings.

Several planes were flying in a loose formation in the direction of the field following their morning patrol.

The planes looked like insects from their altitude.

“Here we go,” Holmes called and eased back on the throttle, at the same time putting the big plane into a circling dive.

It was just bad luck that the lead fighter heading in for a landing took one last look around the sky and spotted what he assumed was a German plane intent on bombing their airfield.

He put on speed, and the two planes lined up with him also aborted their landing and began a furious climb toward the bomber.

Bell and Holmes increased pressure on their respective wheels in order to steepen their dive and thus reduce their exposure. Holmes also gave the bomber a little more throttle, but not like their earlier near-suicidal dive.

The Allied fighters were climbing as hard as they could, approaching the plummeting German plane with the speed of a knight in a joust. They would only get one crack at using their machine guns before flashing past. By the time they got turned back around, the bomber would have had time to unleash its payload, by their reckoning.

Holmes and Bell watched the planes grow larger through the windscreen. They were rushing at each other at a nearly two-hundred-knot closure.

“Nieuports,” Holmes said when he recognized the model. “French kites. Very good.”

They waited as long as they dared as the range shrank at a frightening rate.

Just seconds before the lead plane opened fire with its Vickers machine gun, Holmes and Bell worked the wheel to slew the Zeppelin-Staaken out of the direct line of fire.

Their move made the pilot miss entirely and left him with no time to adjust his aim before the two aircraft rocketed past each other.

They successfully avoided the attack run by the second plane, but the third managed to pour a half dozen 7.

7-millimeter rounds into the bomber. Most of the bullets slammed into the starboard engine and lower wing.

Two shattered the windows on Bell’s side of the cockpit, but thankfully missed both men.

The lead starboard motor seized a moment later, as all its lubricant had drained away through a crack in the oil pan.

The asymmetry of the thrust made the plane crab through the sky as it continued its descent.

They countered this by each stomping on the rudder pedal in the opposite direction.

Holmes quickly reduced power from the port engines to compensate.

In just a couple of seconds they’d fully recovered the plane.

“Where are those Nieuports?” the Brit asked through bloodless lips.

Bell looked aft as best he could. “The lead plane is coming into a dive after us. I can’t see the other two.”

They remained tense as the altitude bled off.

It was a race to the ground. Bell kept trying to track the lead fighter, but the Nieuport had to be directly behind them and hidden.

The others had yet to show themselves again.

They swerved the giant bomber through the sky as they descended, trying to foul the pilot’s aim as his quicker and far more nimble fighter swooped down on them like a hawk.

Moments later they were too low for evasive maneuvers and were forced to hold her steady as they lined up on the runway.

They were less than thirty feet above the grass field when the trailing Nieuport had them in his sights and opened up with his Vickers.

It was like a buzz saw against a balsa-wood toy.

The Zeppelin-Staaken’s tail took the brunt of the stream of lead slugs that the pilot directed for maximum effect.

Wood and canvas and yards of control wiring came apart in a spectacular failure that saw nearly the entire assembly disintegrate.

The result was instantaneous. Without the double horizontal stabilizers countering the main wing’s natural rotation, the plane’s nose dipped.

There was nothing either pilot could do.

The front landing gear hit the ground hard enough to crack the axle.

That impact knocked the nose up once again and then the main gear struck the field.

Both men were slammed into their seats by the force and shaken like rag dolls as the plane barreled down the runway with zero control.

There was more torque being generated on the port side because both engines were still functioning and so the plane started a ground loop, turning in a long arc that nearly flipped it onto a wing tip.

The pressure against the landing gear drove the two sets of main tires to collapse.

The props still spinning flew apart when they came in contact with the ground, sending wood splinters the size of daggers through the cabin just aft of the two battered pilots.

The remaining engines ceased working and the wreckage came to an ignoble stop.

As much as Bell wanted to leap from his seat and get as far from the downed plane as he could in case there was a fire, he couldn’t bring himself to move for nearly a minute.

His spine felt like it had been wrung out like a wet rag and the base of his neck like he’d been hit with a tire iron.

He managed to look over at Liam Holmes. He was unconscious, blood oozing from his forehead where he’d cracked it against a window frame.

The sight of the unconscious pilot galvanized Bell into action. He shucked off his seat belt and knelt next to the Brit. As he got close, Holmes moaned and pulled himself upright.

“You okay?”

“I wish this was the worst hangover of my life,” he said. “It would feel better.”

“You’ll live,” Bell replied with a smile at Holmes’s very British humor.

He helped the man out of his seat and supported him by an arm as they shuffled out of the cockpit toward the still-open starboard door.

There was no smoke outside the aircraft, just a cloud of settling dust. In the distance uniformed men were running from the hangars toward the downed plane.

Bell gestured for Holmes to wait until he was on the ground in order to catch him.

Bell tossed down the incriminating briefcase and sat on the wing’s trailing edge. He slid aft until he tumbled off of it. He hit the ground after a five-foot fall and dropped to his knees as if in prostration.

When he looked up, it was into the glowing tawny eyes of a juvenile lion that was staring at him from no more than two feet away.