“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.
THE NAVIGATOR
Max Zabel sighs with relief—the hardest part of landing is over—and then he feels an almost imperceptible shudder. It is different from the normal shifts and tugs that accompany landing. The convulsion in the floor beneath him is not right. It is not normal. Something has gone very wrong.
Max looks up. He’s not certain anyone else has felt it. But the expressions on his fellow crewmen’s faces show that they have, in fact, noticed the tremor. There is a pause. A shudder. Then a singular, unending vibration that he can feel first in the soles of his feet and then throughout his entire body. The control car shakes with it. Rattles. Hums. Glass convulses in its frame. There’s a buzzing, spinning ghost of a noise at first that morphs into something far more terrifying within seconds. The palms of Max’s hands tingle with the reverberation as he presses them into the windowsill. And then he hears the thing he doesn’t realize he has been waiting for: a muffled explosion.
THE JOURNALIST
The ground is so close Gertrud can almost touch it. Sixty feet below and a startling green from the May rain. Leonhard grabs her hand and squeezes it reassuringly as they lean over the observation windows in the starboard lounge.
“Almost there,” he whispers, and she lets out a long, calming breath. Her desire to be on the ground once again is profound, almost reckless.
The ground crew runs onto the field below them to grab the landing lines, and she can feel a slight tug as the ship goes taut. The ground begins to rise, faster now. And it is then that she turns to her husband with relief and gratitude. She is confused for one second when he does not return the smile but rather straightens and then steps away from the window, pulling her with him.
Gertrud is about to ask what is wrong, but the ship has gone unnaturally quiet, as though holding its breath. She can sense the terror coiling in her husband’s body. It’s written there in his eyes, and when his hand tightens on her she feels the dread herself.
It’s a moment, nothing more, that they stand there frozen. But it’s enough.
There is a dull report behind them, no louder than the sound of a beer bottle being opened or a paper bag behind popped. The noise comes from behind, somewhere in the bowels of the ship.
And then chaos.
THE STEWARDESS