Their rate of descent had slowed, but not stopped.
“Okay, everyone’s baggage must go,” the man announced, as he tried to grab Fritz’s suitcase.
“I’m afraid this one isn’t going anywhere,” Fritz said. His stern voice giving no doubt about his seriousness.
“Don’t be daft, old man, we’re going to crash. Your luggage isn’t worth it,” the man said as he began to tug at the suitcase.
“I told you, this one isn’t going anywhere.” It was the comfort and authority with which Fritz spoke, as he pulled his Luger pistol out and aimed it at the other man, which made him appear so frightening.
“Are you nuts?” The engineer asked.
“Yes.” Fritz looked at the engineer through his horrified eyes, “You have no idea what terrible thing I’ve done.” He continued to point his pistol at the engineer, motioning to him to throw another passenger’s luggage out the window. “You’d better throw out their luggage, and do it quickly or else we might indeed crash.”
The man shook his head in dismay, but said nothing.
He then began to pull at a large wooden trunk, belonging to one of the other passengers.
“If he gets to keep his stuff, why can’t we?” The trunk owner asked, looking at his wife for reassurance.
“Because, he has the gun,” The engineer said, smiling impatiently. “Now let me throw this thing overboard.”
He tried to lift it by himself, but couldn’t.
Frustrated, he removed a small knife from his belt that he normally used to cut tangled mooring lines, and stuck it into the locking mechanism.
The trunk sprang open, revealing more than a hundred gold bars, each bearing the emblem of its wealthy owners: a G and O joined by an infinity symbol.
“No, you can’t throw this away! It’s everything we have — our entire life savings. How else will we start anew?” The woman, he noted, had broken her sensibilities at the possibility of seeing her fortune nearly lost to the ground below.
Her husband then placed his foot on the base of the trunk and said, “I’m afraid this isn’t going to be thrown out.”
“Oh yeah?” The engineer asked. He now had the look of a crazy man, staring blankly, like someone who’d been pushed past breaking point and snapped. He reached down and picked up one of the gold ingots. “Watch this!” he said, tossing the brick bar out the window.
For a couple of seconds, it seemed as though all activity inside the gondola ceased.
Fritz watched, his pistol still pointed at the others, the rich passengers, he decided, had finally lost their aristocratic cool composure, and the only man who was working to keep the ship airborne looked as though he’d finally given up caring about the fate of any one of them.
It was going to become violent in here.
At that moment, Peter’s voice could be heard over the intercom pipe, “Franck, get back up here, we’re going down and I need your help.”
Peter looked at Franck as he came through the door. His face was flushed and his nostrils flared dangerously. He must have had trouble removing the passenger’s luggage, he guessed.
He then took another look at his altimeter, which indicated that their rate of descent had decreased to 100 feet per minute.
“It’s no use. We’re going down. Can you see anything below?”
The landscape looked harsh and lethal to the airship. The rocky outcrops on the mountain would slice her wide open at the speed at which they were descending and they needed to maintain that speed to retain some lift. With the exception of the rocks, this entire side of the mountain was covered in densely packed pine forest.
“Over there, how about that open place?” Franck was the first to spot it.
“Where?”
Franck pointed to a spot. It was a large field or clearing, covered in white snow.
“I see it. That’ll do nicely.”
Three minutes later, the Magdalena hit the snow-covered ground hard. Bouncing and shuddering, she slid for a long while along the icy ground, finally coming to rest. The altimeter indicated that they were at an altitude of 7000 feet. They were incredibly high up the mountain to have been lucky enough to find such a clearing.
“Christ almighty!” Peter panted, excited and out of breath. “That was close, but we made it!”
He then looked over at his co-pilot. A loud sound — a crack like that of distant thunder — could be heard… and felt. The airship lurched.
“What in the hell was that?”
Franck opened his mouth to respond, but Peter never heard his reply. They were both dead before they even knew what happened.
In the once luxurious passenger lounge, Professor Fritz Ribbentrop calmly looked out the window.
He, of all the passengers on board, realized exactly where they were.
It was a reasonable mistake for the pilot to land here. If he hadn’t grown up climbing these mountains as a boy, Fritz might have made the same mistake, in their shoes. He didn’t blame them for it.
With the composure of a man who had accepted his fate, Fritz then made sure that his single suitcase was still securely locked and carefully handcuffed to his wrist.
Maybe it is for the best that it never reached its destination?
A weight had been lifted from his chest, as though the stress of the past few weeks had finally been lifted from him.
It was the last thought he ever had as he clutched the single suitcase tightly to his chest.
Chapter One
Sam Reilly took the helm of his custom built fiberglass 68 foot ketch, Second Chance.
At six foot exactly, he was only slightly taller than the average man, but his arms and shoulders were wide from years of physical labor, and his legs were strong as tree stumps, giving him a solid, yet wiry appearance.
Physically, he was the product of hard labor, which the sea demanded of him.
He had pensive, dark blue eyes, and the sort of cheeky smile that says, I can have it all. If life had taught him anything, it was that he of all people, could. His gaze showed determination, and the calluses on his hands displayed the tenacity required to make things happen. He was amiable by nature, but he suffered from a general distrust of his fellow man. Sam felt at his most calm when he was on his own.
Today was one of those days.
The weather was warm and there was a moderate northerly wind of 15–20 knots. To every weekend sailor on the harbor, it looked like a great day for a sail. For a person like himself, who’d built his life on the sea, he intuitively sensed the disaster ahead.
He knew it with the certainty of a chess player, who had seen his own demise in forty or more moves ahead; there was going to be trouble at sea. Sam knew it by the calm air, the pale blue sky, the unusually large swell that didn’t quite match the local weather conditions, and, like anyone with enough experience in a given field, he just knew it instinctively. His subconscious mind had picked up all the telltale signs and had given him the outcome; there was going to be one hell of a storm.
Sam had just completed his first year at the international sea salvage company, Deep Sea Expeditions. He’d promised himself that he’d never enter the business after what had happened to his brother, Danny. But some things are just meant to be, and try as he might to avoid it, he eventually realized that he must return to the world that he grew up in — the one in which he truly belonged — the sea.
It was the first time he’d taken leave since he started working for Deep Sea Expeditions. Two weeks was all the time he had, unless something came up. Auspiciously, he’d noted that Cyclone Petersham, which was about to slam into the northern Queensland coast of Australia and the tropics, was moving south. If his predictions were correct, which they almost certainly would be, the storm would collide with the terrible low, now forming off the coast of South Australia.