THE AMERICAN

7:15 p.m.—ten minutes until the explosion

The landing signal sounds with a raucous blast. A minute, maybe two, he’s been staring at the closed door, recalculating. He could kill the guard outside. It wouldn’t be difficult. But the likelihood of being seen or caught is high. And he’s only one man among a crew of more than sixty. Count in the male passengers—he’s not worried about the females—and the odds are ninety to one. Even he can’t beat that.

Damn it.

There is a moment when the American is certain he has failed. It is such a new sensation that he cannot properly name the emotion that assaults him. Disappointment? No, that’s not strong enough. Anger? No. Not that either. He settles on grief because this emotion, this feeling, this assault on his senses is the same thing he felt the day his brother died in that hospital in Coventry.

His brother. He will not miss the chance to avenge his brother.

The American is pointing the revolver at the cabin door, in the approximate location he guesses the guard’s right kidney to be, when another option occurs to him.

The steak knife.

He presses hard on one of the foam-board walls to test this new possibility.

It could work.

He locks the door.

The ship is descending and there is no time to second-guess himself, so he slips into action. The American pulls the steak knife from where he left it beneath his mattress, then he shimmies beneath the berth, his stomach pressed to the floor and his arms stretched out in front of him. He sets the knifepoint against wall and pushes with a quick thrust. The blade slides easily through the foam, down to the hilt. The American begins to saw a straight, deep line through the wall he shares with Heinrich Kubis. Once punctured, the foam board cuts easily. He tears a strip of fabric away. Shoves it aside, and continues to carve an opening in the wall.

Within a minute he has cut a square two feet wide—as much as he can remove between the duralumin posts that frame the walls. It will have to be enough. He goes to work on the foam board on the steward’s side of the room, cutting more quickly now, motivated. The sawing, ripping sound is loud to his ears, but Ziegler outside does not cry out in alarm or attempt to enter.

The American does not wait. He is through the hole and out from under the bed and standing in the middle of Heinrich Kubis’s room in a matter of seconds. The knife goes into his pocket, and he dusts the foam particles from his clothing. Takes a deep breath. Steps into the antechamber. Opens the door. Scans the hallway.

The officer assigned to watch his room grumbles in German, hidden around the corner. Stomping his feet impatiently. Irritated at having to babysit.

The American leaves him without another thought. He’s at the gangway stairs and around the corner in three seconds. He passes someone in the keel corridor but doesn’t pause to acknowledge them. The security door is fifty feet ahead. He walks faster.

Forty feet.

Thirty feet.

Twenty.

Ten.

He leans his shoulder against the door and pushes into the great, yawing body cavity of the Hindenburg.

There is no roar of engines, only the distant, echoing voices of men as they shout orders back and forth, orchestrating the intimate dance of water ballasts and gas valves and rudder fins. He sees men dotted around the structure at their stations and begins to run toward the crew quarters near the cargo hold, his feet pounding the keel catwalk. The noise, loud and rumbling, draws shouts from above, but he does not look up to see who might be watching him from above on the axial catwalk. He does not stop. He rushes forward, determined.

He finds Ludwig Knorr standing on the catwalk between the crew quarters and the cargo hold, looking up. His hands are on his hips and his chin is turned so high the American can see the tendons in his neck stretch tight. Knorr stares at the hydrogen cell directly above them with such intent that he does not even register the American’s presence. And now he understands why. There is a hole in the gasbag—perhaps the size of a melon—and the material around it is fluttering as the hydrogen escapes. There is a slight whining sound, like air being let out of a balloon. One of the duralumin girders holding the gas cell in place has snapped, and a narrow rod of metal has punctured the cell.

Ludwig Knorr is trembling.

The American pulls the pistol from his waistband and points it directly at the chief rigger. Only when he cocks the hammer does Knorr turn around and look at him. The American has thought of this moment for almost twenty years. He has planned for it. Dreamed of it. But he underestimated the feeling of total satisfaction he would experience as realization flickers in Knorr’s eyes.

The rigger’s voice is hoarse with panic. “What are you doing, Herr Douglas?”

“I really wish people would stop calling me that. It’s not my name.” The American is deeply satisfied by the look of profound confusion on Knorr’s face. “Edward Douglas is dead, has been since the morning we departed Frankfurt. I took his papers. I took his ticket. And I took his spot on this flight. His body will never be found. My employers made sure of that.”

Knorr says nothing, merely stares at him in horror.

“If it makes you feel better, I didn’t enjoy killing him. He was a good man. I liked working with him.”

The American has drawn a paycheck from the McCann Erickson company for well over a year, but that isn’t who he works for. Not really. He doesn’t bother explaining this to Ludwig Knorr, however.

The rigger returns his gaze to the gun. He speaks slowly. “Why are you doing this?”

“Revenge.”

“I have done nothing to you.”

“I didn’t expect you to remember. It was eighteen years ago. And you were little more than a boy, just like my brother. And it was a war. Some would even call your actions heroic.” The American steadies his hand. “No. I didn’t expect you to remember. But I do. That’s enough.”

Hydrogen does not have an odor. It is colorless and tasteless. And the American cannot feel it entering his lungs, filling the little pockets and membranes with each rise and fall of his chest. It spreads around him like an invisible, deadly fog. He does not care.

Ludwig Knorr raises his hands, palms out, in surrender. His eyes flicker from the American to the hole in the gas cell. “Please don’t,” he says. “You will kill us all.”

“I wonder, did you think of death when you dropped bombs on that hospital in Coventry? Did you care that men were dying below? That those who survived the actual blast were left to rot beneath the rubble for days?”

He can see it on Knorr’s face. Panic. Desperation. Bewilderment. The poor bastard doesn’t remember that flight over England. He has probably never thought of it again. To the American this is unforgivable. He has killed many men in his life, but he always looked at them when he did so, and he never forgot them afterward. Never. Not the first one decades ago and not Edward Douglas three days ago. He lives with the memory of each frightened face. Their fear and confusion is a burden he must carry.

“If you kill a man you should remember it,” the American says.

“Are you even paying attention?” Knorr waves at the gas cell. He’s no longer a soldier. He’s only a man. And he is deranged with fear, screaming. “If you fire that thing you will kill everyone on this ship!”

“If that’s what it takes.”

The American doesn’t realize how committed he is until the words are out of his mouth. There are two reasons he came on board this airship: to avenge his brother’s death and to destroy the Hindenburg. Nazi Germany cannot be the world’s aviation leader. Not if he has the ability to stop them. The world’s largest, most luxuriant, most technologically advanced aircraft is emblazoned with swastikas and funded by Adolf Hitler? This is untenable.

Yes, he would have preferred his original plan. He would have preferred to burn the airship once it was moored at Lakehurst. But the landing is twelve hours late and he has no choice now. The collateral damage will be higher than expected, but not total. There is a chance that some will survive. But not him. No. For him this ends today. It ends right now.

The American pulls the trigger.

The last thing he sees is the muzzle flash. A long strip of flame—pure, clean, white, and searing hot—that shoots from the end of the pistol and then ignites the air itself. The combustion is almost beautiful. And then he is blind. He breathes once—a single gasp of surprise—and his lungs are filled with liquid flame.

He feels nothing else. Hears nothing else. Sees nothing else. The American is simply consumed.

The slug tears from the muzzle. It is a molten, flaming chunk of lead, a comet streaking through this small, gas-filled universe, its tail growing larger and more destructive as it goes. The fireball builds and then roars upward through the gas cells, igniting everything in its path.

Outside, a single member of the ground crew sees a glimpse of flame licking the great silver spine of the airship. A phosphorescent blue blaze known as Saint Elmo’s fire. This is the last visible trace of the bullet as it rips from the Hindenburg’s body, its ascent slowing, and then stopping altogether. The bullet falls unseen. It lands in the grass unnoticed. It will never be found.

Because now every horror-stricken eye has turned to the great burning airship.