Christopher Cartwright
The Last Airship
This one's for my wife, Maricris, who is the best thing that's ever happened to me.
Prologue
It was exactly twenty three days since Germany had invaded Poland, setting into motion the largest war the world had ever seen.
Peter Greenstein looked up at the giant in the clearing. Like a dark cloud in the night sky, she created an ominous silhouette above the opening in the already obscured forest of the moonless night. He had waited almost two weeks for the arrival of the dark moon. It had very nearly been too long, and might have easily cost all of them their lives.
She was a magnificent ship, exquisite to her core.
He had her built exclusively for use by the wealthiest people of her time. The Magdalena stood thirty feet high and one hundred eighty-five feet in length, only slightly shorter in length than a transatlantic Zeppelin. Her lines were more sleek and her propellers proportionately larger, making her the fastest airship ever built.
He was proud of her.
She was the greatest achievement of his fifty two years of life.
Unlike the Zeppelin, which was designed and built for the masses, the Magdalena was built for the few. From the outside, she looked like a race car, built for speed. Inside, her opulence flowed from every point, like a stately cruise liner. The luxury of her coach house had tried in every way to meet the expectations of those privileged few who would ever travel inside her, in absolute comfort.
Peter’s heart sank when he thought about the reason she flew tonight.
When he commissioned her four years ago, he never dreamed that she would be used for such a purpose. Tears welled up in his eyes as he considered how few lives she would save.
Why should I save only the rich? He knew the answer. Because I can’t save them all and I’m going to need their wealth to start a new life.
Tonight, her luxurious coach house would carry just two families, and an old friend of his, a professor from the University of Berlin, who would be travelling by himself. Peter would pilot her along with his chief engineer, Franck Ehrlich. There would be no other crew tonight, no exquisite culinary delights would be served, the guests would have to help themselves to their drinks, and no entertainment would be provided.
All told, it amounted to just eleven people on board, and the guilt of his failure flowed through him. Peter promised himself that he would try to make another trip back, that as a single man without a family he had an obligation to do so much more for these people.
But, after all, he was just one man, how could he possibly save millions?
The people aboard her tonight were some of the richest in all Europe. Old money. The sort of wealth that takes more than a generation to build.
He watched as the Rosenbergs arrived.
They were the first, and it gave him hope as each one of them quietly made their way up through the forest and into the gondola.
Peter recalled the story of how their great ancestor, Timothy Rosenberg, opened the first Rosenberg Bank in Germany in 1775, after receiving the advice of a bright young banker by the name of Mayer Amschel Rothschild.
Rosenberg specialized in difficult finances; lending when and where others would not. Higher risks with higher possible gains were a gamble that paid off well for him. Once established, the bank expanded. Although now a legitimate bank with more than forty shopfronts, rumors of its underlying ties to criminal organizations had never ceased. The Rosenberg Vault was a privately owned bank with the reputation of trading in suspicious circles. Although Rosenberg had never been convicted of running a criminal enterprise, his funding of certain syndicates, terrorist organizations and violent wars was well and widely known.
All four passengers appeared sullen as they took their seats.
It was hard to imagine that such a powerful family could be cowed by a regime that was in its infancy. Only Sarah, at age six, the youngest amongst them, had the strength to offer a polite smile.
“Thank you, sir.”
“You’re most welcome aboard, Sarah. All of your family is,” he said as he smiled kindly at the child.
Her older brother, Werner, walked dutifully behind her without saying a word. His arms struggled under the weight of the wooden trunk he carried, the burden of which he shared with his father, Hank. Hank was sweating, despite the snow outside. He looked pale. The stress looked as though it might cause him to suffer a heart attack at any moment.
Peter could only imagine what such a family would choose to take with them on this journey, which had such limited space available.
Mary was the last of the Rosenbergs to board the ship.
She wore an expression of superior disdain for the others on board. He wondered how much of it was the result of a lifetime spent at the top of the pecking order, or if she wore that look today in order to conceal her own terror at the night ahead. Wearing a thick fur coat, the only item of jewelry in plain view was a large blue diamond amulet, worn above the curve of her breasts.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he recalled the name of that famous stone.
Then, there were the Goldschmidts.
Margaret Goldschmidt was married and had two sons. In 1927, her uncle, Ernest Oppenheimer, a German immigrant to Britain who had earlier founded the mining giant, Anglo American, along with American financier, J.P. Morgan, took over De Beers. Peter remembered the controversy over the diamond conglomerate. It was a ruthless syndicate, one in which the value of its diamonds were set at artificially high prices. Oppenheimer built and consolidated the company's global monopoly over the diamond industry. De Beers became a cartel of companies that dominated the diamond market, its mining operations, retail shops, diamond trading, and industrial diamond manufacturing sectors. De Beers was currently active in every category of industrial diamond mining: open-pit, underground, large-scale alluvial and coastal mining, and there were whispers that they were even experimenting in deep sea mining for the future.
Peter also remembered that Margaret had married Karl Goldschmidt, whose family was in the gold bullion trade. He had no idea which family made the other richer, but together, their family had grown in both wealth and power. It was because of that wealth that they had survived this long. Peter had no idea of the extent of their fortune, except to say that it couldn’t be spent in any one person’s lifetime.
The simple fact that Margaret Goldschmidt was here tonight was proof of her vast fortune.
“Is this thing ready to go?”
He could tell that Margaret hadn’t even considered whether or not there would be others joining her. Her family had taken a massive risk by getting out of Munich tonight, and it appeared that all she could think of was why they weren’t already off the ground.
“Soon. We’re still waiting on one man.”
“Really?” She did nothing to hide the fear on her face and then said, “Aren’t we an obvious target sitting here like this?”
Peter dismissed the urge to inform her that he himself had returned to Germany tonight, and that he had waited nearly two hours for his guests to arrive so that he could save their rich, entitled lives.
“I must beg your patience for just a little while longer, and then we’ll be airborne.”
Karl, her husband, then shook his hand as he walked through the door to the gondola. “We appreciate your help, Mr. Greenstein, really we do. Our friends and neighbors, the Hasek family, was taken yesterday. They had planned to leave tonight also. We’re all a bit shaken up,” he said, as an explanation for why his wife was behaving so badly.