A few feet below Bell, Marion stepped out onto one of the thicker beams to make room for him when he reached the bottom. An arm suddenly crossed her throat and choked off her startled scream.
“I told you there was no place you could go,” Otto Dreissen shouted up to Bell as he wrenched Marion off her perch and dangled her over the edge of the thousand-foot drop.
37
Isaac,” she said, gasping, her eyes wide with terror.
Bell didn’t hesitate or even consider that, if he missed, he would fall past the pair below him and plummet to his death. He leapt down and landed on a girder about seven feet from where Dreissen held his wife’s life in his hands. He landed on the narrow beam and teetered for a moment before finding his center of gravity. He stood and whipped his pistol from its holster.
“Shoot me and she dies too,” Dreissen said.
“Drop her and you die,” Bell countered. “We’re at an impasse.”
“Not quite. My advantage ends when we near the ground, which makes this one quick negotiation. Your life for hers, Bell. Jump or I drop her.”
“And die before she hits the water? Is it worth it?”
“You go or she goes, Bell. Now.”
“Sorry, Marion.”
“What?”
Bell fired and hit Dreissen in the shoulder. He reeled back, releasing Marion. Rather than fall straight down, Marion spun in midair and dropped only a few feet before stopping short. She hadn’t been idle while Dreissen held her hostage. There had been a bunch of wires at her feet still attached to the airship’s frame. In full view of her husband, Marion had twisted her feet into the tangled rat’s nest of wires. When he dropped her, she’d merely tumbled headfirst and now dangled by her ankles.
Dreissen leapt away, clutching his shoulder yet moving from beam to beam with the agility of a mountain goat. Bell ignored him. Holstering his pistol, he raced to the spot where Marion had vanished. He’d seen what she was doing, understood the risk she was taking, and didn’t know if her plan had worked. He dropped flat and looked over the beam and saw the soles of her shoes just a few inches from his face. He started to reach for an ankle and haul her aboard when suddenly some of the connectors securing the wires to the ship popped free, and she dropped a few more inches.
She screamed his name. He could see the wires digging into her flesh as the weight of her body caused them to tighten. The bundle quivered with the strain, and she started to slip more. He reached down farther, got his hand around her ankle again, and lifted her as high as he could. Marion was able to reach for a beam and twist herself around enough to transfer her weight from her husband’s arm to the strut.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “That was a crazy risk.”
She quickly started to untangle the snarl of wires so she could stand. “I didn’t see any other way out of it. Did you?”
“No.”
“Where’s Dreissen?”
Bell looked around. He didn’t see him. There were dozens of girders that the German could hide behind. He could have reached one and climbed it like a ladder. Bell checked for a trail of blood but saw no spatters. He looked down at the ocean scrolling by beneath them. They had only another hundred feet to go, and he could tell by the water’s change in color that the seafloor was shelving up to the beach. “Don’t know, don’t care.”
Marion got the last of the wires from around her ankles and stood, making sure she held on to a beam for support. She had a good head for heights, but having struts only inches wide to walk on would make anyone feel acrophobic.
He kept watching the ocean, waiting for their makeshift flying machine to drift low enough for them to jump. He heard something rattle high above them and thought that Dreissen might be trying to climb out through the entrance hatch for some reason.
He looked back at the water. The color was shifting from blue to turquoise, and the beach was only a few hundred yards away.
“Ready?” he asked and took Marion’s hand.
“Always ready to take the plunge with you.”
They leapt together and fell the fifteen or so feet to the sea, plunging deep into the tropical water. Marion came up first and had wiped and cleared her eyes by the time Isaac surfaced at her side. He gave her a quick kiss and looked up.
The loss of their roughly three hundred pounds combined gave the remaining gas bag less weight to keep aloft, allowing the nose to begin rising again, and as the dirigible came to the beach, it encountered warmer air that hadn’t yet been cooled by the Caribbean and it began to rise higher still.
“Isaac, what if he gets away?”
Treading water, Bell pulled his pistol. He tried to keep as steady as possible, though it was next to impossible. Then again, at this range, and with such a large target, he couldn’t miss.
The first four shots didn’t have the desired effect, the fifth hit an aluminum girder at the right angle, liquefying a tiny amount of the metal. It dripped onto the hole in the gas bag and ignited its fabric with just the tiniest of flames. The little dollop of fire was almost snuffed out by the
