flying boat was in the air and climbing steadily. Von Moreau leveled off at seven hundred feet and swung into a turn that would keep the airplane at least one hundred miles off the coastline of South Africa. No one would expect a flying boat here at night, and certainly they would never expect a flying machine of any kind to be flying southward, a hundred miles out to sea from Cape Town. Only later would they begin the long journey eastward and then to the northeast.
Stumpf went forward to the flight deck. 'How is the fuel situation?' he half shouted to be heard above the engine thunder.
'Excellent!' von Moreau replied. 'Without full passengers and with no cargo, the extra tanks will give us a range of more than two thousand miles. We will meet the ship on time, but with plenty of reserve.'
Stumpf squeezed his friend's shoulder. 'Thank you. Now, I will get some sleep. Call me if anything unusual comes up.'
Seventeen hours later . . . 'The ship is approximately five miles ahead of us,'
copilot Franz Gottler said to Flugkapitan Erhard von Moreau. 'Bearing three five two degrees. I have already made contact and the ship is steering into the wind as our marker.'
Von Moreau nodded. He stifled a yawn, having been at the controls for most of the past twentyeight hours. Now he forced himself to again be alert, eased the Romar slightly left of his heading, and gently began to come back on the three engine throttles beneath his right hand. The huge flying boat began its descent, settled perfectly to the ocean where long gentle swells promised a good surface, and threw back a perfect bow wave and water plume as the hull went into the sea. Von Moreau taxied close to the merchant vessel, the airplane fended off from the ship by two lifeboats staffed with sailors working long rubbertipped poles. A hose snaked down and Romar crewmen quickly started refilling the tanks and the oil reservoirs. Other men passed along sealed containers of hot food and several kegs of dark beer. Finally a note was transferred to von Moreau from the ship's captain.
'Take off as soon as you are fueled and ready. The moment you are airborne we will file a position report as having recorded the passage overhead of Aero Lloyd Flight 977 on its scheduled commercial run from Lake Victoria, with your machine on time for its run. Congratulations on your visit to the south. All hell has broken loose down there among the dogs. Hals und Beinbruch!'
Von Moreau smiled. Break your neck and a leg. The captain must have been a pilot to know the final words of airmen just before they took off on their combat missions. He leaned from the cockpit window, saw the captain, and waved. Several minutes later they pushed back from the ship, taxied into takeoff position to accelerate into the wind, and thundered into the air toward the darkening sky. Now von Moreau went for greater altitude. The fewer people who had a close look at the Rohrbach as it closed the distance to Germany, the better. He climbed to fourteen thousand feet, near the limit for the heavy flying boat. He nodded to Gottler in the right seat. 'You fly. I will sleep for a while. Wake me for anything unusual.' 'Yes, sir.'
In moments von Moreau was fast asleep. The flying boat thundered northward.
Fourteen hours later, Flugkapitan Erhard von Moreau nodded in satisfaction and tapped the chart of the Mediterranean Sea on his lap. He glanced at his copilot.
'We are exactly on schedule,' he said with obvious pleasure. 'A remarkable flight!
Who would have imagined us crossing in the night over Uganda, up through the Sudan and across all of Libya, so smoothly, without a hitch to our progress.'
Gottler smiled in return. 'I see only water now, sir. What is our exact position?'
Von Moreau held up the chart. 'See here? The Libyan coast? When we crossed over El Agheila we were then over Golfo Di Sidra, that took us over the open stretch of the Mediterranean, and right now,' he tapped the chart, 'we are, urn, here. Thirtyfive degrees north latitude and eighteen degrees west longitude.
Sicily and Italy are dead ahead, and if we hold our present course we will fly over the Strait of Messina, here, then over Livorno and right on home.'
Von Moreau had held up the chart for his copilot to see more clearly. Now, his eyes still raised where he folded the chart, he saw clearly through the thick windshield. He lowered the chart slowly, staring into the sky, a look of amazement on his face.
'Franz! Look carefully. Almost dead ahead, thirty degrees above the horizon.' Sunlight reflected off something in the sky, a flash of light.
'Sir, it looks like . . . like a zeppelin! But it is huge!' Gottler strained to see. 'It is very high, Captain, and the reflection is so bright that I—'
'Hold our course and altitude,' von Moreau snapped. 'I'll use the glasses.'
He reached down to his right side, to the pouch holding his flight gear, and his hand brought forth powerful binoculars. He adjusted the focus and swore beneath his breath.
' M e i n G o t t . . . '
'Sir, what is it?' Gottler called to him.
'It has a torpedo shape. I judge it is at least fifteen hundred feet long, but . .
.' He was talking now as much to himself as to his copilot. 'But that would be at least twice as large, or larger, than the biggest zeppelin we have ever built! At first I thought maybe we were seeing the Graf Zeppelin. It has been crossing the Atlantic for more than two years now.'
'Captain, we're at fourteen thousand—'
'Yes, yes, I know. Whatever that thing is, it is at least at twice our altitude, and the zeppelins do not fly that high!
Besides—here,' he interrupted himself. 'I have the controls, Franz. You tell me what you see.'
Gottler held the binoculars to his eyes. 'It is as big as you say, sir. But . . .
that is not a fabric covering, like the Graf.
That vessel, sir, is metalcovered from stem to stern. And it is thick through the body.'
'What else!' von Moreau demanded, wanting desperately to either have confirmation of what he had already seen—or be told his eyes were playing tricks on him.
'Engines, sir. I mean,' Gottler stuttered with his disbelief, 'no engines. I see no signs of engines, and that's impossible. Look, it is tracking at an angle across our flight path. Even though it is much higher, it is flying an intercept course. But how . . . how can it do that without engines?' He lowered the glasses, and studied von Moreau.
'Sir, I don't understand—'
