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"They were not there when I checked the crate two days ago," said Gottschalk firmly. "Someone in your crew had tampered with it."
"You're unduly concerned. What crew member would have any interest in an old artifact that must weigh at least two tons? Besides, who else but you has the key to the padlocks?"
Gottschalk dropped to his knees and jerked one of the locks. The shackle came off in his hand.
Instead of steel, it was carved from wood. He looked frightened now. As if hypnotized, he slowly rose, looked wildly about the cargo compartment, and uttered one word.
"Zanona."
It was as if he triggered a nightmare. The next sixty seconds were locked in horror. The murder of the consul general happened so quickly that Church could only stand frozen in shock, his mind uncomprehending of what his eyes witnessed.
A figure leaped from the shadows onto the top of the crate. He was dressed in the uniform of a Navy seaman, but there was no denying the racial characteristics of his coarse, straight black hair, the prominent cheekbones, the unusually dark, expressionless eyes.
Without uttering a sound, the South American Indian plunged a spearlike shaft through Gottschalk's chest until the barbed point protruded nearly a foot beyond the shoulder blades. The consul general did not immediately fall. He slowly turned his head and stared at Church, his eyes wide and devoid of recognition. He tried to say something, but no words came out, only a sickening, gurgling kind of cough that turned his lips and chin red. As he began to sag the Indian put a foot on his chest and yanked out the spear.
Church had never seen the assassin before. The Indian was not one of the Cyclops' crew and could only be a stowaway. There was no malevolence in the brown face, no anger or hate, only an inscrutable expression of total blankness. He grasped the spear almost negligently and silently jumped from the crate.
Church braced himself for the onslaught. He deftly sidestepped the spear's thrust and hurled the flashlight at the Indian's face. There was a soft thud as the metal tube smashed into the right jaw, breaking the bone and loosening several teeth. Then he lashed out with his fist and struck the Indian's throat. The spear dropped onto the deck and Church snatched up the wooden shaft and lifted it above his head.
Suddenly, the world inside the cargo compartment went mad and Church found himself fighting to keep his balance as the deck canted nearly sixty degrees. He somehow kept his footing, running downhill with gravity until he reached the slanting forward bulkhead. The Indian's inert body rolled after him, coming to rest at his feet. Then he watched in helpless terror as the crate, unbound by its locks, hurtled across the deck, crushing the Indian and pinning Church's legs against the steel wall. The impact caused the lid to twist half off the crate, revealing the contents.
Church dazedly stared inside. The incredible sight that met his eyes under the flickering overhead lights was the final image burned into his mind during the fractional seconds that separated him from death.
In the wheelhouse, Captain Worley was witnessing an even more awesome sight. It was as though the Cyclops had abruptly dropped into a fathomless hole. Her bow pitched sharply into an immense trough and her stern rose steeply into the air until her propellers came clear of the water. Through the gloom ahead, the Cyclops' steaming lights reflected on a seething black wall that rose up and blotted out the stars.
Deep in the bowels of the cargo holds came a dreadful rumbling that felt and sounded like an earthquake, causing the entire ship to shudder from stem to stern. Worley never had time to voice the alarm that flashed through his mind. The shorings had given way and the shifting manganese ore increased the Cyclops' downward momentum.
The helmsman stared out the bridge port in mute astonishment as the towering column, the height of a ten-story building, roared toward them with the speed of an avalanche. The top half crested and curled under. A million tons of water crashed savagely into the forward part of the ship, completely inundating the bow and superstructure. The doors to the bridge wings shattered and water shot into the wheelhouse.
Worley gripped the counter railing, his paralyzed mind unable to visualize the inevitable.
The wave swept over the ship. The entire bow section twisted away as steel beams snapped and the keel buckled. The heavy riveted hull plates were ripped away as if they were paper. The Cyclops plunged deeper under the immense pressure of the wave. Her propellers bit the water again and helped impel her into the waiting depths. The Cyclops could not come back.
She kept on going, down, down, until her shattered hull and the people it imprisoned fell against the restless sands of the sea floor below, leaving only a flight of bewildered seagulls to mark her fateful passage.
THE PROSPERTEER
October 10, 1989
Key West, Florida
The blimp Hung motionless in the tropical air, poised and tranquil, like a fish suspended in an aquarium. Her bow nudged against a yellow mooring mast as she balanced daintily on a single landing wheel. She was a tired-looking old airship-- her once silver skin had wrinkled and turned white and was spotted by numerous patches. The gondola, the control car that hung beneath her belly, wore an antique boat-like look, and its glass windows were yellowed with age. Only her two 200-horsepower Wright Whirlwind engines appeared new, having been carefully restored to pristine condition.
Unlike her younger sister ships that plied the skies above football stadiums, her gas-tight envelope was made from aluminum with riveted seams instead of rubber-coated polyester and was supported by twelve circular frames like the back of a fish. Her cigar shape was 149 feet in length and held 200,000
cubic feet of helium, and if no headwinds attacked her rotund nose, she could barrel through the clouds at sixty-two miles an hour. Her original designation was ZMC-2, Zeppelin Metal Clad Number Two, and she had been constructed in Detroit and turned over to the United States Navy in 1929. Unlike most airships with four massive stabilizing fins, she sported eight small fins on her tapered tail. Very advanced for her era, she had given solid and dependable service until 1942, when she was dismantled and forgotten.
For forty-seven years the ZMC-2 languished in an abandoned hangar along the runway of a deserted naval air station near Key West, Florida. Then in 1988, the property was sold by the government to a financial conglomerate headed by a wealthy publisher, Raymond LeBaron, who intended to develop it as a resort.
Shortly after arriving from his corporate headquarters in Chicago to inspect the newly purchased naval base, LeBaron stumbled onto the dusty and corroded remains of the ZMC-2 and became intrigued.
Charging it off to promotion, he had the old lighter-than-air craft reassembled and the engines rebuilt, calling her the Prosperteer after the business magazine that was the base of his financial empire, and emblazoning the name in huge red letters on the side of the envelope.
LeBaron learned to fly the Prosperteer, mastering the fickle moods of the craft and the constant adjustments required to maintain steady flight under the capricious nature of the wind. There was no autopilot to relieve the chore of dipping the bow against a sudden gust and lifting it when the breeze slackened. The near-neutral buoyancy varied greatly with the atmosphere. Residue from a light rain could add hundreds of pounds to the blimp's vast skin, decreasing her ability to lift, while dry air blowing down from the northwest forced the pilot to fight the craft's insistence on rising to an undesired altitude.
LeBaron reveled
