“Major?”
“Once I set off the mines, I’ll head back to Panama City, keep up my cover for a week or two more, then fade away. I’m sure Sektion IIIb will have another assignment for me in short order.”
Talbot said, “I know I’m hitching a ride on the Cologne back to my boat tonight, but you’ll be busy, and I’d really like a tour. Working under that beast this past week has got me real curious about what makes it tick.”
“I can’t see why not,” Otto Dreissen said. “Captain Grosse?”
“Of course.” He gestured to the waiting steward.
“I’ll sit this one out,” the Major said. “I’ll get some sailors to get me back to shore in the gig. Good luck to us all.”
The steward moved from the back wall, where he’d been standing, and went to a side table, where he picked up the heavy brass lighter everyone had shared to fire up their cigars and pipes. He inspected it carefully to see there were no hot bits of flint inside the mechanism and then placed it in a metal box that he then locked with a key from a fob he kept in his pocket. Then he went around with a brass vase filled with water and made each man ceremoniously drop in his stogie or pipe waste, which hissed as the smoldering tobacco was extinguished. He shook the vase to make certain all trace of fire was doused.
This foul mixture was then dumped in a glass jar whose mouth was sealed with a screw-on lid.
Only when this bizarre ritual was completed did he pull open a door that sealed the Dagna’s smoking lounge. “One last thing, and this is not negotiable, Herr Talbot. There are no firearms allowed on the Cologne.” He held out a hand for the holstered Webley revolver.
Talbot thumbed open the leather safety strap and pulled the gun clear. He reversed it and set it in the German Captain’s palm.
Moments later, the men reached the main deck. The sun was high in a cloudless sky and made the sea’s gently dancing waves flash like mirrors. The heat was kept in check by a steady breeze coming across the decks from the east. Because the Dagna was a civilian vessel, her hull and upperworks were painted white, with an accent of deep maroon. She flew Germany’s civilian flag rather than the distinctive naval ensign. At present, the smoke that normally coiled from the single funnel aft of the wheelhouse was being diverted using a series of electric fans through special vents below the waterline. It looked like the stern of the ship was wreathed in misty tendrils from melting ice. The system was far from efficient, but it guaranteed no spark or ember ever reached the deck.
There were no open flames in the kitchen, everything was cooked using electric coils, and none of the sailors had any metal on their uniforms that could cause a spark. The ribbons adorning both Captains’ tunics were sewn-on cloth facsimiles of their real commendations.
The reason for all these precautions was the seven hundred thousand cubic feet of highly explosive hydrogen floating above the Dagna inside the gas cells of the mighty dirigible Cologne. The airship’s hull overshadowed its smaller support vessel as it floated above it with its nose locked to the mooring mast on the ship’s aft deck. That spindly structure resembled an oil derrick or a miniature Eiffel Tower and allowed the airship the freedom to pivot around as the winds changed direction. The Dagna’s fore deck was taken up with the boilers, pumps, and other apparatus for separating the fundamental elements of hydrogen and oxygen from seawater after the salt had been filtered out of it.
The Cologne was just over five hundred feet in length and almost fifty in diameter. She wasn’t perfectly cylindrical, the support girders between the multiple ring frames visibly stretching her waterproof skin so it looked like the hull was made of dozens of long panels. Clinging to her underbelly were two forty-foot gondolas. One, just aft of the nose, was for the command crew, including all bridge and radio room staff. The second could be configured either for passengers, to enjoy a sightseeing tour of the countryside, or as the payload bay for ninety hundred-pound bombs. The two gondolas were accessed from inside the hull by a long corridor lined with bunks for off-duty personnel on which to rest.
Power was supplied by four Essenwerks’s straight-six Cyclone engines, each producing two hundred forty horsepower. The motors were in separate pods attached to the hull and accessible during flight by the team of mechanics. They burned the revolutionary Blaugas rather than a liquid fuel like gasoline, saving the airship considerable weight. In normal flight, the Cologne cruised at forty-two knots but could accelerate up to fifty in an emergency. In all aspects, she was superior to Count Zeppelin’s namesake dirigibles. Rather than the multiple wing-like control surfaces that Zeppelins employed, the Cologne had a single cruciform tail for the elevators and rudders.
While the topside of the hull was doped silver to help reflect sunlight and prevent heat from expanding the hydrogen gas, her underside, for this mission, had been daubed in matte black, which made her, effectively, invisible from the ground at night.
She dwarfed all but the largest ocean liners, and the fact that she could fly at twice their speeds made her all the more impressive. The transatlantic flight to Panama proved the concept that regular air service was not impossible. The need to refuel
