Havoc

Rain cut forking trails along the gum rubber poncho as drops pooled and poured across the fabric. For nearly eighteen hours the lone figure had remained hidden under its folds, unmoving and nearly unblinking. From his perch atop a hangar he had an unobstructed view of the landing field a half mile away and the metal framework of the mooring mast. From here it looked remarkably like a miniature Eiffel Tower.

His target was twelve hours late, a bit of irony since his hurried orders had forced him to rush into position.

Moving so as not to change the outline of the weatherproof poncho, he brought his rifle up to his eye. The scope was a trophy he’d taken from a sniper during the Great War. He’d adapted it to every rifle he’d ever used. He stared through the optics, centering the crosshairs on the milling throng of the landing crew. They’d just returned to the field after a brief downpour. He estimated there were more than two hundred of them, but such a number was needed to manhandle the giant airship in the face of even a gentle breeze. He let the reticle linger on individuals for a moment before moving on. He spotted the airfield’s commander, Charles Rosendahl. The man next to him had to be Willy von Meister, the Zeppelin Company’s American representative. Despite the occasional gusts, the sniper could have dropped either man with a shot through whichever eye he chose. A ways off were a radio journalist and a cameraman, both of them checking equipment as everyone waited for the Hindenburg’s late arrival.

He was about to lower the heavy rifle when everyone on the ground turned at once, raising an arm skyward in what almost resembled the Nazi salute. The sniper shifted a fraction. Out of the pewter sky came the Hindenburg.

Distance could not diminish the size of the airship. It was absolutely enormous, a defiant symbol of a resurgent Germany. She was sleek, like a torpedo, with stabilizers and rudders larger than the wings of a bomber. At its widest the zeppelin was one hundred and thirty-five feet in diameter, and inside her rigid frame of duralumin struts were gas cells containing seven million cubic feet of explosive hydrogen. Two-story-tall swastikas adorned her rudders and pale smoke trailed from her four diesel engines.

As the airship approached it grew in size, blotting out a larger and larger slab of the sky. Her skin was doped a reflective silver that managed to glisten even in the stormy weather. The Hindenburg passed directly over the naval air station at about six hundred and fifty feet. The sniper watched passengers inside the accommodation section of the ship leaning out the windows and trying to shout to family on the ground. It took fifteen minutes for the leviathan to circle back around for her final approach from the west. A quarter mile from the mooring mast the engines suddenly screamed at full reverse power to slow the airship, and moments later three tumbling avalanches of ballast water spilled from beneath the hull to correct a slight weight imbalance.

Someone in the hangar below had rigged a speaker so the sniper could hear what the radio announcer was saying as the airship made its final approach. The voice was high-pitched and excited.

“Well here it comes, ladies and gentlemen, we’re out now, outside of the hangar, and what a great sight it is, a truly one, it’s a marvelous sight. It’s coming down out of the sky pointed towards us and towards the mooring mast.”

The gunman pulled his rifle-a.375 Nitro Express more befitting an African big game hunt than a sniper-to his shoulder and waited. The first of the heavy mooring lines was dropped from the bow. He scoped the windows one more time. Then came the second mooring rope as ground workers began to haul the ship to the mast. They looked like ants trying to drag a reluctant elephant.

“It’s practically standing still now,” the announcer said, growing more animated as he described the scene. “They’ve dropped ropes out of the nose of the ship and it’s been taken ahold of down on the field by a number of men….”

By moving the rifle barrel an inch the sniper found his target.

“It’s starting to rain again. The rain has slacked up a little bit….”

The bullets in the rifle were of his own manufacture. He’d had only a day and a night to construct them and had only fired two as a test at a deserted gravel pit. Both had worked as he’d designed, but he still felt apprehension that they would fail to do the job he’d been assigned.

Herb Morrison’s voice on the speaker was reaching a fevered pitch as he described the landing. “…the back motors of the ship are just holding it, just enough to keep it from…”

The rifle cracked. The recoil was a brutal punch to the shoulder. At two thousand feet per second the bullet took one point two seconds to reach its target. In that sliver of time a coating around the special slug burned away, revealing a white-hot cinder of burning magnesium. Unlike a tracer round, which burned all along its trajectory, the incendiary core of this round only showed in the last instant before it hit.

Hydrogen needs air to burn. A random spark could not have ignited it within the airship’s enormous gasbags. Only when hydrogen was released to mix in the atmosphere could something like this round cause an explosion. But the bullet wasn’t meant to ignite the gas. At least not directly.

The sniper had fired along the spine of the Hindenburg. The intense heat of the bullet scored the zeppelin’s doped skin as it traveled down the length of the airship. By the time it reached the tail fin, it had lost enough velocity to hit the dirigible and lodge into the duralumin frame. Just as the magnesium burned itself out, the waterproof paint, a combination of nitrocellulose and aluminum powder, began to smolder. The doping agent on the cotton canvas skin was in fact a highly combustible mixture commonly used as fuel in solid rockets. The smoldering turned into open flame that burned through the skin and sent flaming bits of cloth onto a gasbag. The fire quickly holed the bag and allowed a gush of hydrogen to escape into the growing inferno.

Herb Morrison’s voice turned into a horrified shriek. “…it burst into flame! It burst into flame and it’s falling, it’s fire, watch it, watch it, get out of the way!”

The sky seemed to go black, as if all the light at the airfield had been sucked into the explosion above the airship. The stately approach of the Hindenburg turned into frantic seconds as time telescoped.

“…it’s fire and it’s rising,” Morrison cried. “It’s rising terrible, oh my God, what do I see? It’s burning, bursting into flame and it’s falling on the mooring mast and all the folks agree this is terrible. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world. The flames are rising, oh, four or five hundred feet into the sky.”

For seconds the ship hung in the air as the intense heat warped and melted her skeleton. Her outer skin rippled with the concussion, then burned away. The roar of burning gas and the intense heat was like standing at the open door of a blast furnace. She fell stern first, panicked ground workers racing from under her bulk. One of them wasn’t fast enough and was engulfed in wreckage as the zeppelin crashed to the earth.

Inside his cabin on A deck Chester Bowie felt the ship lurch as her stern lost buoyancy. He heard screams from the observation lounge and the sound of tumbling furniture as the airship dropped from the sky. The ceiling above suddenly flashed red-orange as the hydrogen exploded above him. The ship dropped further, the thunder of burning gas overriding the terrible screams of twisting metal as her frame collapsed. He remained on his bed.

At first he thought he’d just smile at the irony of it all, but he found himself laughing instead. He knew this was no accident. The Germans were willing to sacrifice their own dirigible to deny the United States gaining possession of what he’d found. They’d chased him halfway around the globe, sabotaged the Hindenburg to stop him, and still he was one step ahead. Chester opened his mouth wider, laughing even harder, maniacal now. It was just too funny.

The heat hit him then, a solid wall preceding another gush of flame. He died in an instant, hearing his own laughter above the sound of the fire that consumed him.

The sniper watched for a second longer as the great airship plummeted, its back broken when the bow slammed into the ground. Smoke and flame licked the heavens as the carcass melted, its skeleton bowing under the thermal onslaught and then collapsing into a pile of melted girders and burning flesh.

“It’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. The smoke and it’s flame now and the frame is crashing, not quite to the mooring mast…” Morrison’s voice became a strident, evocative sob that still echoes today. “Oh, the humanity…”

Central African Republic, Present Day