Flight from Berlin Read Online Free Page A

Germany of decent, kind people who stand like rocks against the flow of the times.
    In the navigation room next to the bridge, Eckener motioned for him to sit at the chart table. A golden light burnished the dials and switches of the radio instruments. The old man’s face seemed rejuvenated in the sunset. At sixty-eight he had the appearance of a man years younger, though his hair and goatee beard were white. His face was large, jowly, and intelligent, with flinty blue eyes, one of which, disconcertingly, was higher than the other.
    ‘Let’s have a schnapps,’ he said, unlocking a drawer and taking out a bottle and two glasses. ‘I sometimes permitted the night watch a nip on board the Graf at the end of the shift. It gets very cold over the Atlantic in spring.’ They toasted each other in silence, and knocked it back. ‘And now, my dear Richard, I have something for you.’ He opened a cupboard beneath the table to reveal a small safe. ‘I keep a precious relic in this chest, but by rights it belongs to you.’ He turned the dial slowly. ‘The combination is five-ten-nineteen-thirty.’
    Denham was puzzling over why the doctor should give away the numbers to his private safe, when it struck him. They made the date of his father’s death. Eckener removed a small felt bag and handed it over with what seemed to Denham a look of earnest pity. He opened it and a pocket watch fell into his hand.
    ‘I’ve been waiting for a chance to give it to you in person,’ Eckener said.
    For a fleeting moment he had a sense that his father was present in the room, as though he’d slipped in through some fissure in time. The watch lay cool in his palm. He turned it over and saw in tiny engraved italics the words:
For Arthur Denham—On his retirement—Royal Airship Works—Cardington
    An overpowering sense of love and loss welled inside him. His eyes filled, and hot tears rolled freely down his cheeks. Eckener put his arm around Denham’s shoulders.
    ‘You were young to lose your father.’
    ‘Not that young. I am forty next year.’
    Denham fell silent for a while, staring at the watch as he turned it over in his hand.
    ‘I thought there was nothing . . .’
    ‘It was found near the site,’ Eckener said. ‘Somehow it must have been thrown clear.’
    Later, as they walked back across the Zeppelin field in the gloaming, Denham turned to look again at the Hindenburg . Dully it reflected the purple light.

Chapter Three
    E leanor, paddling her legs as hard as she could, strained against the rope that attached her waist to the side of the tiny swimming pool on deck. But it was no use. As the ship pitched and rolled, she found herself flailing in two feet of water at one end of the pool, with six feet at the other end, before it all slopped back the other way. She stood up and undid the rope.
    ‘Another twenty minutes, please.’ The women’s swimming coach was pacing the edge of the pool.
    ‘I can’t train like this.’
    ‘It’s the only pool we’ve got for the next few days.’
    ‘Yeah, with water straight from the goddamned icebergs.’
    ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
    ‘For a shower,’ Eleanor said, plucking up a towel. ‘And a cigarette.’
    She headed along the deck, leaving a trail of wet footprints. A fresh wind had been blowing all afternoon, whipping spray from the crests of the waves high into the air. Patchworks of cloud skittered overhead, breaking now and then to admit flashes of hot sunshine that coloured the ocean a deep verdant green. The ship was making slow progress as it seesawed through the weight of wind and water.
    As she turned the corner towards the stairs that led back to D deck— smack— her shoulder collided with a strapping blond running laps.
    ‘Hey, mister,’ she said, clutching her shoulder. ‘Oh. Sorry, Helen.’
    ‘No problem, sis,’ the woman growled and continued her lolloping stride.
    Her guess was that poor Helen Stephens, the hundred-metre champion from