Talbot was also stripped of his Webley, but he had a two-shot derringer backup in his front pocket. And there were plenty of guns at the camp, should they need them.
The three men stared out an open window as the Cologne floated over the jungle. The air up there was cool and pleasant, and the Zeppelin was cruising slow enough that the wind barely ruffled their clothes. For the first time Court Talbot could remember in all his years in Panama, he wasn’t fending off clouds of insects.
Like some dramatic stage effect, the jungle was suddenly awash in silvery light. The Captain had timed their arrival to coincide with the rising of the moon over the Atlantic horizon. The foliage below remained a monochromatic black, but very quickly they could see where the jungle gave way to the glittering lake.
The giant airship turned northward as it crossed above the lake. The countless islands dotting its surface were easily spotted in the moonlight. They remained dark drops of matte black on the water’s shining surface. Thirty minutes of slow cruising later, Captain Grosse maneuvered the dirigible above the narrow inlet that had once been a valley. Hydrogen vented with a sibilant hiss to bring them lower over the water yet still high enough to clear the few remaining isles.
An electric light shot up from the darkness below. The airship was almost directly above Talbot’s workboat and the dock and camp his men had made for themselves. They’d heard the airship’s engines and were guiding her to their exact location. More lifting gas was vented until the huge craft drifted lower still until it entirely filled the sky for the men down on the lake. Mooring lines tumbled from the dirigible’s bow. When they’d been tied off by Talbot’s crew, the light blinked several times, a prearranged signal.
“Ready for the ride of your life?” one of the hoist men asked, his English only lightly accented.
Judging distance at night was notoriously difficult, but Talbot didn’t think they were below three hundred feet. “I suppose.”
As the safety harness was double-checked, the second lift operator opened the floor panel. The opening was the size of a large area rug, and the darkness seemed to rise up through it from below. The airmen called it die Tür des Teufels, “the Devil’s Door.”
The hook was snapped onto the metal ring that was part of Talbot’s harness. The operator flashed him a thumbs-up, and when Talbot returned the gesture, the cable drum rotated backward to lift him off his feet. For a moment, he swung like a pendulum over the abyss, and then he was falling out the bottom of the airship and through the humid night air. He remembered to flip on his flashlight to signal the winch operator. The trip took only a few minutes. As he neared the ground, he began clicking his light on and off. The operator slowed his descent so that he slipped though the jungle’s topmost branches with barely a leaf’s rustle.
Talbot felt hands reaching for him as he came to the dock. It was Raul. Talbot killed the light to stop more cable from falling down around his feet. Apart from their looks, Raul wasn’t much like his dead brother, Rinaldo. He didn’t take any pleasure from life. Even before Rinaldo’s murder, he rarely laughed or let himself have any fun. Talbot and Rinaldo spent countless hours drinking and carousing, stuffing as much joy and debauchery into every day they lived. Not so Raul. And he’d grown even more withdrawn following his brother’s death. He’d only agreed to fill in as a member of Talbot’s crew because of the promise he’d exact his revenge on Isaac Bell.
He’d desperately wanted to drive the truck that slammed into Bell’s vehicle at the edge of the Culebra Cut. When Bell had driven to Gamboa, Raul had been behind the wheel, lying in ambush and ready to strike. But dumb luck saved Bell on that leg of his journey. Rather than a lone vehicle, on the road from Panama City, an entire convoy had approached his position. He’d scrambled to roll the log off the road and watched, crouched in the grass, as Bell trundled past, having somehow integrated his tanker truck into a convoy of cargo haulers.
Raul was forced to return to Gamboa at the tail end of the convoy and sneak aboard the workboat while Talbot kept Bell distracted. Another member of Talbot’s band of cutthroats had gone out to finish the job during Raul’s interrogation and buried the evidence under the avalanche. The Panamanian was actually relieved when word got out that Bell had survived. It gave him the chance to make the death far slower and more painful.
The machete he carried was made from a truck’s worn leaf spring, sharpened to a razor’s edge on a grinding wheel. Its weight made it the ideal blade for hacking through thick jungle. He was eager to see what it could do to a human limb.
A sudden gust of wind made the Cologne spin and strain against her mooring ropes. The ropes snapped branches high overhead as the airship twisted around. A spray of leaves and twigs rained down from above. The big Essenwerks engines changed pitch as Captain Grosse backed the hovering airship against the wind so once again it was directly over the boat and adjacent dock. The gust intensified into a steady four knots from the east.
The dock they’d constructed over the water was a simple affair, with a split-log frame lashed to the trunks of trees that had
