‘A rope must have snapped.’
Denham stepped to the window and saw immediately that something was wrong. The hangar building was illuminated with a rose-coloured light and the ground crew were running away, abandoning the ropes. He opened the window and leaned out as far as he could, looking towards the stern, and saw a carnation of bright flames blossoming beneath the fins. He pulled himself in faster than the colour could drain from his face.
‘The ship’s on fire.’
The officer on the rudder wheel let out an animal moan, and before Pruss could give another order the control car tilted steeply backwards to the sound of straining metal.
A s most of the passengers were on the starboard side facing the crowd come to welcome them, the lounge and reading room were almost deserted when Friedl, Hannah, and Eleanor got there.
Eleanor saw Miss Mather sitting alone at a banquette, reading a book. Before she could say a word to the woman the floor fell away and threw them violently onto their fronts. Tongues of dark red flame blew in through the rear bulkheads, caressing the ceiling.
From above came a roar like a giant blowtorch, as one gas cell ignited the next in a string of explosions. She heard the screams of people on the starboard side, and the thump, thump of bodies falling one over the other as the ship pitched steeply to stern, tipping with it a metal mangle of tables and chairs.
‘Get up,’ Eleanor shouted. Intense heat was scorching her hands and her head. ‘We have to jump.’
The earth was rising towards them. She knelt up and grabbed the sill. The window was jammed.
‘Help me, Friedl.’
Now the ship was quickly righting itself as it approached the ground. She saw Friedl’s jacket on fire, orange flames across his back. They each pushed, and the second time pushed together, and it opened. Hannah got Miss Mather to her feet. The woman was leaning against the bulkhead, trying to shield her face with an upturned coat collar.
‘Let’s go,’ Hannah shouted. The woman’s face was contorted, stiff with shock.
‘Lady, come on,’ Eleanor shouted, but Miss Mather was in a trance.
The ship smashed to the ground, its back broken, and almost pitched them headfirst through the windows.
‘C’mon outta there!’ a voice shouted.
A sailor in a white cap appeared in the window, his arms extended desperately. With Hannah’s help Eleanor lifted Miss Mather and shoved her through. Then Hannah jumped, and Eleanor was following when a rolling wall of black smoke engulfed her, choking her, coating her skin and hair.
The next thing she knew she was on her hands and knees on wet soil, coughing violently while the blaze raged above her.
‘Lady, run!’ said the sailor.
Behind her came the cries of people being burned alive. Everywhere, glowing balls of molten metal were hitting the ground. She got up and had a sense that Friedl was just ahead of her; then she saw him rolling on his back like a dog. When he turned over, his jacket was scorched through; glistening burns and mud covered his bare back.
‘Take my arm,’ she said to him.
She pulled him up and they ran together, feeling the heat become less intense behind them, the roar of the blaze breathing less fiercely. A light drizzle was falling. People were running out to meet her and the other survivors. One man’s clothes were completely burned away and his skin hung off him in drapes. A woman’s face and arms were charred black. She collapsed to her knees and fell forwards. Chunks of burned flesh lay in the sand, black and dark red. Two little boys, covered in blood and burns, walked hand in hand with their mother in complete silence.
‘Who’s got it?’ said Friedl.
‘What?’
‘The dossier. Who’s got the dossier?’
‘Hannah has it,’ Eleanor said, not at all sure that she did.
When they reached Hannah and Miss Mather a few feet ahead of them, safe in the arms of rescuers, there was nothing under Hannah’s arm.
‘Forget it,’ Hannah said. ‘It’s gone.’ Eleanor marvelled that there was scarcely a scratch on her.
‘No,’ said Friedl, and he turned and ran back towards the inferno.
‘Has anyone seen Mother and Father?’ Hannah said, starting to cry.
‘Friedl!’ Eleanor screamed. She started after him, but the sailor held her back. Much later she would remember that moment keenly. It seemed to happen in slow motion, his silhouette running into the glare of the fires, and she had failed to prevent him.
The Hindenburg, a blazing wreck of white-hot girders, looked like the fragments of a dragon’s egg. Smoke braided with flames belched out of its engines, strangely beautiful in the gathering darkness. The marvellous machine, Dr Eckener’s greatest achievement, had been destroyed in seconds. Incredible that she’d survived; that anyone had survived. She looked down at her filthy dress. She had a nasty burn down one arm, and her hair and eyebrows had been singed away in places, but she was otherwise all right.
But where was Richard?
Chapter Fifty-nine
The small Naval Air Station infirmary at Lakehurst was crowded with the injured and the dead. They lay on tables and stretchers in the corridors and in every room. Everything-air, clothing, hair, surfaces-was infused with the reek of charred flesh.
Eleanor refused morphine. When she did so, she was asked to sit and help swab a man’s burns with picric acid. He leaned forwards, his hands in his lap, his blackened head bowed. His back was a morass of burns from his head to his lower spine. When he said, ‘Thank you,’ she got up and knelt in front of him to look in his eyes. It was Captain Lehmann. Apart from his voice he was unrecognisable.
‘I’m not myself, am I?’ he said to her.
‘Nothing they can’t fix,’ she said, fighting the lump in her throat. ‘Was Richard with you?’
‘Yes,’ he said, nodding, as if remembering someone he hadn’t seen for years. ‘I lost him in the smoke.’ Eventually Lehmann was taken away, facedown on a stretcher, and Eleanor leaned her head back against the wall. A medic tended to her arm with a cool ointment and bandage. She was exhausted; her body was closing down.
When she awoke the infirmary was quiet. She stopped an orderly.
‘How many dead?’
‘Twenty-one so far,’ he said. ‘But several won’t make the night.’
She wondered whether she should ask for morphine after all before entering the morgue, but dismissed the idea.
It was dark outside and raining. A man’s voice was saying that the wreck was still burning on the landing field, lighting up the sky for miles around, a sight he’d never forget for as long as he lived. Slowly she walked to the morgue. The thought of being the one to find his body was too much to bear, and she began crying quietly. She realised then that she believed in her heart that he was dead. She felt no nerves, no yearning for certainty.
A marine guarded the door to the hangar.
‘I’d like to identify my fiance,’ she said.
Inside, the bodies were under blankets in a row on the floor. The space was huge and dim. Other people were there, too, looking for lost ones, holding their breath with horror and expectation as they raised each cover.
She heard Hannah before she saw her. The girl’s cry went up in the vast space and echoed around the walls like a spirit begging for oblivion. She and Jakob were crouching over a corpse with their arms around each other. Eleanor approached and saw Ilse’s face looking up at them from the floor, pale as moonlight. She learned later that Ilse had suffered a heart attack at Jakob’s side after jumping from the starboard windows.
