Assegai

The Assegai’s total gas volume was 2.5 million cubic feet of hydrogen, but daily she would be obliged to valve off large volumes of this to compensate for the weight of fuel she was burning. Otherwise she would become so light that she would go into an uncontrolled rush to upper space, where her crew would perish from cold and lack of oxygen. The main tanks were filled to the brim with 549,850 pounds of fuel, 4680 pounds of oil and 25,000 pounds of water ballast. Her crew, of twenty-two men and one woman, and their severely restricted personal luggage weighed 3885 pounds. Theoretically, this allowed a useful cargo of 35,800 pounds to be taken on board. But in the end Graf Otto decided to abandon 7000 pounds of mortar bombs to make way for additional gold bullion. That would be the weight to swing the arms of the scale in their favour.

All the coin had been struck in eighteen-carat gold. There were almost equal amounts of authentic British sovereigns and Deutsches Reich ten-mark coins. The money was packed first into small canvas bags, which were placed in sturdy ammunition cases, the lids securely screwed down. The final tally was 220 cases. Each case packed with coin weighed 110 troy pounds. This was the usual pack carried by an African porter on safari. Historically gold was always valued in American dollars and it had been fixed at twenty-one dollars per fine ounce for decades. Graf Otto was quick with figures: the value of his cargo in round terms would be nine million dollars, which, despite the current chaos in the exchange markets caused by the outbreak of war, was the equivalent of two million pounds sterling.

‘That should be enough to keep the Boers smiling sweetly for a long time to come!’ He personally supervised the baggage-handlers as they packed the chests in neat rows down the length of the main salon of the Assegai and lashed each one to the ring bolts in the deck. On top he laid the cases of live ammunition and the crates of Maxim machine-guns.

By the time the last had been secured, there was little space for the crew to move around the airship and attend to their duties. In an attempt to alleviate the problem, Graf Otto ordered that the bulkheads between the cabins be taken out and the bunks removed. The crew would be forced to sleep on the wooden deck. He had the chart and radio rooms knocked down, then moved forward to the control gondola under the bows. Three latrines were stripped out to make extra space; only one remained to provide for the needs of twenty-three people. There was to be no differentiation between the men and the woman, the senior officers and the Lascar cook. The laundry was dispensed with and the galley halved in size. A small electric stove would be enough to heat soup and coffee and turn out a pot of porridge each morning, but there would be no other hot food. The milk would be powdered; sausage, cold meat and hard biscuit would make up any shortfall. He would allow no alcohol on board. It would be a bare-bones ship, stripped of all but the necessities.

The last di

Until she arrived the crew had not known she would be travelling with them. Her beauty and charm had made her a universal favourite, so they gave her a hearty welcome. He

Eva was touched and felt a pang of guilt that she had deceived him with her pretence of not understanding what had taken place during his meeting with the Boer general.

When Graf Otto called her, she went to join him at the head of the di

The plates were piled high with Bavarian delicacies. Only the liquor was stinted: Graf Otto wanted clear heads and eyes on board when they took to the skies. The toasts were drunk in a light pilsener, in which the presence of alcohol was barely detectable.

At 2100 hours precisely Graf Otto came to his feet. ‘Ah, so! My friends, it is time we were on our way to Africa.’ There was another burst of cheering, then the crew hurried aboard and stood to their action stations. The ship was weighed off carefully, then walked out to her mooring mast. Standing in his makeshift radio room Graf Otto made final contact with Berlin Central. He received the Kaiser’s personal good wishes and was told, ‘God speed’. He turned off the transmitter and gave the launch orders to Commodore Lutz. The Assegai slipped her nose cable, rose gently into the golden summer twilight and turned on to a heading of 155 degrees.

Over the past weeks they had pla

They had a strong following wind as they crossed the island of Sicily, which carried them swiftly to their landfall on a nameless, bleak stretch of the Libyan desert somewhere west of Benghazi. As the sun rose Eva stood at the forward observation windows of the saloon and watched their gigantic shadow flitting across the ridges and dunes of the rugged brown terrain below. Africa! she exulted silently. Wait for me, my love. I am coming back to you.

The heat came up at them, sunlight reflected by the rock, and powerful eddies swirled around the ship, like the currents of some great ocean. She was lighter now that her four great Meerbach engines had burned off six thousand pounds of fuel and oil, but the sun heated the hydrogen in its chambers, increasing their lift. Inexorably the airship began to rise, and Lutz was forced to valve off 230,000 cubic feet of gas, but still she continued to climb until at fifteen thousand feet the crew felt the enervating effects of oxygen starvation. At the same time the temperature climbed dramatically and was soon registering 52 degrees centigrade in the control room. The engines had to be shut down in rotation to allow them to cool and for fresh oil to be pumped through the systems.

They were now flying light with six degrees of down angle on the controls. The airspeed bled away from 100 knots to fifty-five and the Assegai was failing to respond adequately to the helm. Then the forward port engine surged and cut out. With this sudden loss of power the airship stalled and dropped from thirteen thousand to six thousand feet before she responded to her helm again and came back on even keel. It had been an alarming plunge and part of the main cargo had broken loose.

Even Graf Otto was shaken by the Assegai’s erratic behaviour in the superheated air and agreed without argument to Lutz’s suggestion that they should land and anchor the ship for the remainder of the day, to continue the journey in the evening. Lutz picked out an outcrop of black rock on the desert floor ahead that would afford an anchor point for the mooring cable and eased the ship downwards, valving off great quantities of hydrogen.

They were only fifty feet above the desert floor when a party of mounted men in flowing white burnous burst out from the rocks and galloped down a wadi towards them, brandishing curved short swords and firing up at the Assegai with long-barrelled jezails. A bullet smashed through the observation window beside Graf Otto and showered him with glass. He swore with a