The last cablegram that Mr Goolam Vilabjhi had received from his niece in Altnau contained only a single number group. When Leon decoded it he found it was the date that Eva had promised to send him: that on which the Assegai would commence its flight from Wieskirche. In her previous cables, she had given him the name that Graf Otto had chosen for his machine, with its design number. The Assegai was a Mark ZL71. She had already outlined the course he intended to follow on his flight to South Africa. From this Leon had calculated when the airship might arrive over the Great Rift. Now all he needed was a plan of action that offered even a remote chance of success in bringing the massive ship to earth, then capturing its crew and cargo. With Penrod gone and Frederick Snell able to block his efforts, Leon was on his own.
He had seen drawings of the type of airship he was up against. When Graf Otto had been evacuated from Nairobi to Germany after his mauling, he had left piles of books and magazines in his private quarters at Tandala Camp. They were mostly technical engineering publications and one contained a long, illustrated article on the construction and operation of a large dirigible. It had included numerous drawings of the various types, including the Mark ZL71. Now Leon retrieved it and studied it carefully.
Far from being of help or inspiration, he found the illustrations and descriptions thoroughly discouraging. The airship was so enormous and so well protected, it flew so fast and high, that there seemed no possible way to prevent it getting through. He tried to imagine a comparison for the little Butterfly and this behemoth of the skies: a field mouse alongside a black-maned lion, perhaps, or a termite beside a pangolin?
He cast his mind back to the prophecy that Lusima had made for them when first he had taken Eva to Lonsonyo Mountain to meet her. She had conjured up the image of a great silver fish obscured by smoke and flame. When he looked at the illustration, in Graf Otto’s book, of the airship with its mighty fish-tailed rudder and generally piscine shape, he had no doubt that this was what she had foreseen. He wondered if there was any more she could tell him, but that was unlikely: Lusima never enlarged on an original prediction. She gave you the kernel, and it was up to you to make of it what you could.
Leon was isolated and abandoned. He had lost Eva and he knew that there was only a remote chance that he would see her again. It was as though a vital part of his body had been cut away. Penrod was gone too. He never thought he would miss his uncle, but he felt the loss intensely. He needed help and advice, and there was only one person left in his life who might provide it.
He called for Manyoro, Loikot and Ishmael. ‘We’re going to Lonsonyo Mountain,’ he told them.
Within half an hour they were airborne and winging down the Rift Valley, headed for Percy’s Camp. When they landed he found it in disarray. Both Hennie du Rand and Max Rosenthal had been gone for some time and Leon had been so distracted by Eva that he had taken no interest in the day-to-day operation of the camp. He had left it to his untrained and unsupervised staff.
He was not seriously concerned by this state of affairs. The future was uncertain, and it was highly unlikely that there would be any hunting guests to entertain until the cessation of hostilities, and probably for many years after peace was restored. He lingered in camp just long enough to select the mounts and make up the packs before they rode out towards the great blue silhouette of the mountain on the western horizon. His spirits lifted with every mile that brought them closer to it.
They made camp that evening at the base of Lonsonyo, and he sat late beside the fading embers of the campfire, staring up at the dark massif against the starry splendour of the African night sky. He found himself studying the mountain in a way he never had before. For the first time he was seeing it as a potential battlefield over which his little Butterfly might soon be pitted against the menace of Graf Otto’s mighty Assegai.
It had worried him that he would have to wait until Loikot’s chungaji scouts spotted the airship’s approach, before he could take off to intercept it. He would be at an enormous disadvantage. The Assegai would be at her cruising altitude of ten thousand feet so he would have to climb up and over the massif of Lonsonyo Mountain under full power from all his engines to meet her, which meant burning most of her fuel reserves as he pushed the Butterfly to the limit of her operational ceiling. And if the winds, humidity and air temperature were in the Assegai’s favour she might sweep on over his head and be gone before Leon could coax the Butterfly high enough.
He felt discouraged and depressed by the prospect of such an abysmal defeat and stared up angrily at the mountain. At that moment a ripple of distant sheet lightning far down the Rift Valley near Lake Natron backlit the heights boldly. The massif seemed like the glacis of an enemy castle, a great obstacle he must overcome.
Then some odd trick of the light and the play of lightning changed his perspective. He started to his feet, knocking his coffee mug flying. ‘By God, what’s wrong with me?’ he shouted at the sky. ‘It’s been under my nose all along. Lonsonyo is not my obstacle but my springboard!’ Now the ideas poured over him, like water from a ruptured dam wall.
‘That open tableland in the rainforest that Eva and I discovered! I knew it was significant the moment I laid eyes on it. It’s a natural landing strip on the highest point of Lonsonyo. With fifty strong men to help I could clear the undergrowth in a couple of days, enough to be able to land her up there and get her off again. I won’t have to chase after the Assegai. I need only wait on the mountaintop and let her come to me. What is most important, I’ll be able to open the game with the advantage of height. I’ll be able to swoop down on her instead of climbing up laboriously to intercept her.’ He was so excited that he slept only a few hours, and was on the pathway to the summit long before sunrise the next morning.
Lusima Mama was waiting for them under a favourite tree beside the path. She greeted her sons and made them sit one on each side of her. ‘Your flower is not with you, M’bogo.’ It was a statement, not a question. ‘She has gone to that land far to the north.’
‘When will she return, Mama?’ Leon asked.
She smiled. ‘Do not seek to know that which is not for us to know. She will come in the fullness of days.’
Leon shrugged helplessly. ‘Then let us speak of that which is for us to know. I have a favour to ask of you, Mama.’
‘I have fifty men waiting for you near my hut. It is fortunate that the Mkuba Mkuba has already cleared much of the ground for you with his lightning bolt.’ She smiled slyly at him. ‘But you do not believe that, do you, my son?’
Lusima accompanied the expedition to the open tableland above the waterfall. She sat in the shade and watched her men labour. Leon soon understood why she had come: under her eye the team worked like a pack of demons and by noon on the second day he was able to pace out the extent of the ground they had opened up. At such high altitude the air was thin and he would have to maintain a high approach speed to avoid stalling his aircraft. It would be a near-run thing to get the Butterfly down on such a short runway. In fact, it would have been impossible if it were not for the slope and aspect of the ground. The landing strip was on the very edge of the cliffs. If he made his approach from the valley side, the strip would be at an uphill angle, and once he touched down, the slope would bring her to a rapid standstill. On the other hand, if he took off down the slope the Butterfly would accelerate and reach her flying speed equally swiftly. Then when he shot off the top of the cliff he could hold her nose down in a shallow dive and her airspeed would rocket up.
‘Interesting times ahead for all of us,’ he told himself. He had not yet considered the nub of the problem. If everything worked out as he hoped the Assegai would come down the Rift Valley from the north. She would not be flying higher than ten thousand feet above sea level: her crew would be in danger of oxygen starvation if she flew higher than that for any extended period.
There was no possibility that Graf Otto could bring the monster down the centre of the valley without being spotted by the network of bright-eyed chungaji. Leon would have ample warning of his approach, certainly enough time to get the Butterfly airborne and into her patrol station. ‘But what happens then?’ he asked himself. ‘A gunfight between the two of us?’
He laughed at that ludicrous notion. From the illustrations he had seen of the airship, the Assegai would be armed with at least three or four Maxim machine-guns, which would be served by trained German airmen from a stable firing platform. Taking them on from the Butterfly, with his two Masai armed with service rifles, would be a novel means of committing suicide.
He had been able to beg two hand grenades from Hugh Delamere, and had a vague idea of flying above the Assegai and dropping one on top of her great domed hull. There would be two and a half million cubic feet of highly explosive hydrogen in her hull and the resulting fireball would be spectacular. As the grenades had only a six-second delay after they connected with their target, though, the Butterfly would be near the centre of it.
‘There must be a better plan than frying myself,’ he murmured ruefully. ‘I just have to find it before I run out of time.’ According to Eva’s last cablegram from Switzerland, there were only five days to go before the Assegai was due to leave Wieskirche. ‘I haven’t even had a chance to test the feasibility of the new landing strip. We must go to Percy’s Camp tomorrow to fetch the Butterfly and bring her here.’
Leon decided to sleep that night at Lusima’s hut and head down the mountain at first light the next day. He and Lusima sat side by side at the fire, sharing a bowl of cassava porridge for dinner. She was in an expansive mood and Leon was encouraged by this to speak of Eva. He was trying to milk from Lusima any details or suggestions that might be of value in the endeavour that lay ahead. He could see by the wicked twinkle in her dark eyes that she knew exactly what he had in mind, but he persisted and framed his questions as subtly as he could. They spoke of Eva and he reiterated his love for her.
‘The little flower is worthy of that love,’ Lusima agreed.
‘Yet she has gone from me. And I despair that I will ever see her again.’
‘You must never despair, M’bogo. Without hope we are nothing.’
‘Mama, you spoke to us once of a great silver fish in the sky that brings fortune and love.’
‘I grow old, my son, and more often these days I speak great stupidity.’
‘Mama, that is the first and only stupidity I have ever heard you utter.’ Leon smiled at her, and she smiled back. ‘It comes to me that soon the fish you do not remember will take to the sky.’
‘All things are possible, but what do I know of fish?’
‘I thought in my own stupidity that, as my mother, you might be able to tell me how to catch this fish of fortune and love.’
She was silent for a long time and then she shook her head. ‘I know nothing about the catching of fish. You should ask a fisherman about that. Perhaps one of the fishermen of Lake Natron might teach you.’
He stared at her in astonishment, then slapped his forehead. ‘Fool!’ he said. ‘Oh, Mama, your son is a fool! Lake Natron! Of course! The fishing nets! That’s what you were trying to tell me!’
Leaving Loikot and Ishmael on the mountain, Leon and Manyoro hurried to Percy’s Camp. He wanted to keep the load on the plane for landing on the mountain to a minimum.
From Percy’s Camp they took off almost immediately for Lake Natron. This time Leon took no chances with another landing on soft ground: he put the Butterfly down safely on the firm surface of the soda pan. He and Manyoro bargained with the chieftain of the fishing village and finally bought four lengths of old, damaged netting from him, each roughly two hundred paces long. As they had not been used recently they were dust-dry, but even so, the weight taxed the power of the Butterfly’s Meerbach engines. Leon had to make four separate flights to the makeshift landing strip on top of the mountain, carrying one net at a time, each landing a challenge to his skill as a pilot. He had to bring the Butterfly in fast to keep her just above stall speed and made a heavy touch-down that strained the landing gear to its limit.
By the afternoon of the second day they had all four nets laid out on the open ground. They sewed them together in pairs so that finally they had two separate nets, each about four hundred paces long.
There would be no opportunity for practice or experiment with packing and deploying the nets. They would go straight into action against the Assegai, and had only one chance of unfurling the nets successfully. Leon hoped that, with the first attack, he might be able to entangle the propellers of the airship’s two rear engines and slow her down to the extent that he had time to return to Lonsonyo landing strip and load the second length for another attack.
One of the many critical aspects of the scheme was to pack the net so that it would unfurl from the bomb bay and stream out behind the Butterfly in an orderly fashion. Then, once Leon had entangled the airship’s propellers in the mesh, he had to be able to release the net from its retaining hooks before the Butterfly became snarled up in it. He had to be able to break away cleanly. If he failed to get clear, his aircraft would be dragged along tail-first behind the stricken airship. Her wings and fuselage would be broken up by the unnatural forces brought to bear upon them. There were so many imponderables that it would all depend on guesswork, teamwork, quick reactions to any unexpected development and an inordinate amount of good old-fashioned luck.
By the evening of the fourth day the Butterfly stood at the head of the short strip of cleared ground with her nose pointed down the slope, the cliff face falling away abruptly at the end of the runway. Twenty porters waited in readiness to throw their combined weight behind her and give her a push start down the slope.
At dawn and dusk each day Loikot had stood on the heights of Lonsonyo and exchanged shouts with his chungaji companions across the length and breadth of Masailand. It seemed that the eyes of every morani in the territory were fastened on the northern sky: all hoped to be first to spot the approach of the silver fish monster.
Leon and his crew sat under a crudely thatched sun-shelter beside the fuselage of the Butterfly. When the call came they could be at their stations in the cockpit within seconds. There was nothing they could do now but wait.