The Zeppelin Girl

By John Trethewey

While air accident expert Tim Kendall is being wrongly arrested in London for stealing his own car, in the scorching heat of the Pilbara, in the Australian outback, a prototype airship on a test flight, Zepp 1, is found parked in a remote region, intact, doors sealed, engines running and with no-one aboard. It is truly a Marie Celeste of the skies. Kendall is called from London to lead the investigation.
Within days of his arrival in Western Australia, a second airship, Zepp 2, piloted by Kendall and the airline CEO Rachel Mendelson, disappears overnight from the far-flung, primitive outpost of Kangalone River Junction and is found hundreds of miles away, parked next to Zepp 1, intact, engines running, and empty.
Kendall, Mendelson and the sole resident of Kangalone, Melissa Marconi, are stranded at River Junction. Without radio contact to the outside world, Kendalls investigation looks impossible. But the actions that he takes during their enforced stay will still be reverberating more than twenty years later.


By the same author:

A King among Pawns
The Price of Enlightenment
Helvetia, the Voyage of 100 Days
Voices from the Cosmos
Natavallia in the Maldives
The Human Barnacle
Last Train to Polmouth
The Water Mill
Albatross I: Tumbril in the Sky
Albatross II: Autodestruction

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jun 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524681647

John Trethewey

Born in 1950, the son of grammar school teachers, young John Trethewey promised himself that he would never follow that profession. Although determined to be a composer, he embarked on his first novel at the age of eighteen. Over the following forty years, he has produced ten novels, a five-act stage play, and several major works for orchestra. A gifted linguist, in 1973 he decided after all to take up teaching. He has taught in several schools, with the twenty years leading to his retirement as teacher and director of studies in a Swiss international school. With wide interests, he particularly admires the music of Berlioz, the performances of the late Sir Colin Davis, and the lyrics of singer Al Stewart. This novel, the last in the series The Baines Saga, finally reveals the cosmic element that has increasingly been prevalent in events throughout the saga. It is a powerful dénouement to a long saga.

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© 2017 John Trethewey. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 06/02/2017

ISBN: 978-1-5246-8160-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-8161-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-8164-7 (e)

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Contents

Zepp One

Pilbara, West Australia

Kendall

London, Uk

Port Hedland, Australia

Saturday Morning

Port Hedland, Australia

Saturday Afternoon

Maiden Flight

Zepp Two

The Orchard Of Eden

Kanga

Goats

Tuesday

Morning

Wednesday

Thursday

The Mole

The Birthday

Kangalone

Christmas Eve 1978

The Millennium

Pemberton

The Randolph

Christmas Day, 1999

Christmas At Kangalone

Christmas Night

Boxing Day

The Morning

Boxing Day

The Afternoon

New Year’s Eve

Revenge

ZEPP ONE

Pilbara, West Australia

Monday, November 6th 1978

On the flight deck, Joshua Mendelson ran a cursory glance over the controls and instrument displays in front of him. Five hours and 300 miles into the flight, he was satisfied with what he saw. The aircraft was cruising at a stately sixty miles per hour, its four electro-magnetic engines providing silent propulsion. The CAVU sky, bright sunlight and visibility and cloud ceiling unlimited, allowed Mendelson to see as far as the horizon in all directions.

He stood up from his pilot’s seat and walked several feet to the right to look down through the panoramic, tinted Perspex windows to the ground, five thousand feet below. Unlike the cramped flight deck of an airliner, this was the equivalent of the bridge on an ocean liner, a broad, curving duplex wrapped around and built into the nose of his aircraft. Indeed, this was the bridge of a ship, an airship. His airship, the prototype Zepp 1.

Several miles ahead and to the right the view was far from idyllic; he was looking at the ugly sprawl of his next waypoint, Pilbara 21, a copper mine around which a veritable township had sprung up to house a hundred miners and staff. It was a desolate collection of ramshackle huts and cabins grouped around streets of grit, planted in the Outback. With a cloud of red dust rising from the open-cast mine in the distance, P 21 was an extensive and unsightly blot on the Martian landscape of the Pilbara below. Joshua was glad it was not his destination, Kangalone River Junction; that lay much further ahead, truly a lone outpost.

He sat down in the Captain’s seat, activated the short wave radio. Donning a headset and a mike, he pressed the microphone switch.

‘Zulu-Echo-Papa-Papa-Oscar calling base. Do you read?’

A woman’s voice crackled in his earphones.

‘Read you five by five. Go.’

‘Position, four miles North of Papa-Bravo-Romeo 21. Next call will be overhead Papa-Bravo 27. ETA Kilo-Romeo-Juliet four hours from now.’

‘Roger.’ There was a pause and when the woman spoke again, her voice was anxious. ‘No anomalies?’

‘Negative. Plain sailing. It’s in the bag! I’ll overnight at Melissa’s, and call on departure in the morning.’

‘Roger.’ The woman was audibly relieved, the final airworthiness certificate now guaranteed. ‘Give my love to Melissa. Out.’

Fifty feet further back, in the Machine Room in the very belly of the airship, a swarthy, stocky man clad only in shorts and shirt also looked out of the window. It was time. Mario Ombrini, holding a scruffy collection of photocopied documents in one hand, set about switching off Generator 5 which supplied power to the bridge. This done, he now turned his attention to the complex panels of dials and switches on the remaining four generators, overriding the Control Room on the bridge.

For’ard on the flight deck, Joshua did not immediately notice that all his displays were reading zero, without power. When he eventually did, and before he could even consider what might be causing the malfunction, the aircraft started to lose way, slowing appreciably. He sat down, bereft of any check lists, because none had yet been drawn up for such an eventuality on a prototype. A complete power outage. But on five engines simultaneously? He stared blankly at the dead readouts on the displays before him.

Back in the Machine Room, Ombrini activated the pivot motors on propulsion units one and four, lifting the propellors from forward-facing to point skywards, acting now like rotors on a helicopter. Normally, the thrust from these would have lifted the airship. Ombrini pushed the reverse lever so that, instead, the propellors pulled air skywards. The airship gently started to descend, the engines countering the lift of the helium compartments.

Looking out of the window, he saw that Pilbara 21 was only two miles distant. With a last glance at the instruction sheets, he stopped the inner motors that were still providing forward thrust. The aircraft slowed and was soon stationary, sinking gently.

Ombrini crossed to the side door and opened it, to be met with a blast of hot air. The outside temperature was above 100° F. Looking down, he estimated the aircraft to be about 4,000 feet above the dry, dusty ground. The airship was slowly descending on an even keel and the whir of the propellers above his head was reassuring. Leaving the door open, he returned to the centre of the Machine Room and waited.

Up front on the bridge, Joshua was now thoroughly disquieted, unable to comprehend that his aircraft had taken on a life of its own. The power outage was not total, as he had thought. But why was the airship descending? Not once in twenty test flights had he encountered anything like this. Even the gyroscopic compass reading was fixed at North when he was indubitably heading South. He stood up and quickly climbed the spiral staircase into the upper deck of the Control Room in the nose of the airship, and entered the long corridor that led past the empty passenger accommodation and on to the Machine Room.

Fifteen minutes later, the airship made a stationary landing, coming gently to rest on the fixed undercarriage. As it sank the final ten feet, Ombrini jumped with perfect timing, rolled over twice on the hot earth and remained lying down as the airship slowed, held in position by gravity from below, and the helicopter rotors above, forcing it downwards. He looked around to get his bearings and, seeing a phalanx of men and a couple of jeeps heading towards him from Pilbara 21, quickly closed and sealed the Machine Room door then made off in the opposite direction.

Half an hour later, Ombrini surreptitiously approached from the rear of the group of perplexed miners clustering uselessly around the immobilised airship, its propellors still inexplicably turning, holding the huge craft firmly on the reddish soil. Ombrini mingled with the men and in seconds was no more than a face in the crowd.

As the sun was going down, Ombrini left the canteen and walked to the Despatcher’s Office. A thin, frail man, clearly unfit for physical activity on the opencast mine, looked up.

‘Kin I help yuh?’ Ombrini, merely an unknown face among a hundred, was brazen.

‘When’s the next convoy coming through? Northbound?’ The Despatcher consulted a wall chart.

‘Next is the Midnight Snail, in at eleven, leaves midnight.’ He looked at Ombrini. ‘But if yuh thinkin’ of doing an AMR, forget it! If yuh’re caught, they’ll fire yuh.’ Ombrini, who hadn’t a clue what an AMR was, and wasn’t even employed at Pilbara P 21, couldn’t have cared less. He shook his head.

‘No, no. Nothing like that.’ His accent was distinctly Italian. ‘In any case, I am out with the next change-over crew.’ The Despatcher looked relieved.

‘Good, ’cos the last guy who tried an Abandon Mine Runner was arrested. So, why d’yuh wanna know?’ Ombrini grinned secretively. He reached into his back hip pocket for a scruffy wallet.

‘Eez letter. Express, to my girl friend.’ He made as if to take out a photo, then carved an hour-glass shape in the air with his hands. ‘Eez molto sexy!’ The Despatcher turned his back, spoke over his shoulder.

‘Oh yeh? A chick’s a chick. Seen one, seen ’em all. Good luck tuh yuh. Try wagon three, offer twenty dollars. They’ll see it’s delivered. Or posted. If it needs a stamp, make it thirty.’ When he turned again, Ombrini had left, heading for the canteen.

The Midnight Snail convoy of nine heavily laden trucks, all belching black exhaust fumes, pulled in to the parking lot in front of the canteen at eleven o’clock. Ombrini was waiting, clutching not a letter but a cushion he had stolen. As soon as the drivers were all indoors, he walked in the darkness to the last truck, threw the cushion over the tailgate onto the heaped iron ore, then climbed in after it. He would be in Port Hedland in time for breakfast, job done.

KENDALL

London, UK

Thursday, November 9th 1978

It was midday when Timothy Kendall was finally released from Tottenham Court Road Police Station. With his car in the Metropolitan Police Car Pound, and likely to stay there for the foreseeable future, he was obliged to walk in pouring rain to Charing Cross Road underground station. As if that wasn’t enough, over an hour’s aggressive interrogation from a Soho bully-boy Detective whose investigational powers seemed limited to thumping the table and shouting: stop wasting my fucking time and tell me the fucking truth! I have better things to do than spend my day on a fucking poofter like you! had added to Kendall’s irritation. The last straw had been being released on £50.00 bail, charged with stealing his own car.

The long, stop-start train journey out to Uxbridge served to calm him, and when, on arrival, he crossed the road to Uxbridge Police Station, he was starting to see the funny side of things. Only it wasn’t funny to the Desk Sergeant.

‘I remember you,’ he said. ‘You were in here on Monday, reported your car stolen… I only remember because we’re entering it for the Guinness Book of Records. Stolen on Sunday, found by Brighton Police three days later, an all-time record! But…’ He turned and spoke into the duty room behind him. ‘Carter, wasn’t it you that called Mister Kendall about the car in Brighton?’

A tall, young Police Constable appeared in the doorway.

‘S’right. I rang Mister Kendall yesterday, said he could collect the car whenever, from Hove Police Pound. Didn’t he do it?’

‘I did collect it. And it really is one for the Guinness Book. Man arrested, interrogated for stealing his own car! Obviously the paperwork hasn’t caught up. Guinness? Daily Mail, more like!’

The Desk Sergeant suddenly looked serious.

‘We’d really rather you didn’t take up that line of action, sir.’ His voice tailed off when he saw that Kendall was smiling.

‘Of course not! Whoever stole my car took my new tax disc, and put in some other car’s out-of-date one, instead, God knows why. Pity Brighton Police didn’t notice. Bigger pity that the Met did. And anyway, why would I? Notice? But in my line of business, I need my car, I can be called out at any time, anywhere in the country. In the world, in fact. If I’m out on bail, and have to go abroad at short notice, how do I stand? Can I?’

It was evident that neither the Sergeant nor Carter knew the answer to that.

‘Of course, you’re AAIB, I remember. That’s why you live near Heathrow?’

Kendall nodded.

‘Let’s face that, if and when, sir. I’ll call Brighton right away, have them contact the Met, get it cleared up quickly.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Will there be anything else?’

Kendall pulled out his wallet and extricated the Post Office receipt for the road tax disc he had bought just two weeks previously.

‘I even showed them this, but they still wouldn’t believe me. If I get the car back, I mean when, do I have to pay this all over again? And I can’t even drive it without a disc…’

‘We’ll fix that, sir.’ The Sergeant was evidently trying to make amends for his Met colleagues’ heavy-handed tactics. He took the receipt. ‘Carter, take this to the Post Office, now, say the car’s been stolen, recovered without the disc. No, say disc destroyed. Get a replacement.’ He turned back to Kendall. ‘I’ll make sure the car’s returned to your home in… Iver, isn’t it? With the new disc.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘Shall I call you a taxi, sir?’

While Kendall was waiting for his taxi, the well-intentioned Desk Sergeant put his foot in it.

‘Of course,’ he said conversationally, ‘the West End boys cover all of Soho, as well. Have to handle some really tough characters in a day’s work.’

But Kendall was not yet ready to forgive the thuggish, foul-mouthed Plain Clothes creature.

‘Do I look the kind of person who parks outside the British Museum, spends two hours in there, and then crosses Tottenham Court Road to go trawling in the sex-shops of Soho?’

The Desk Sergeant coughed respectfully.

‘No, sir, of course not.’

Kendall had only just shut his front door when the telephone rang. He shrugged off his wet raincoat and threw it over a chair on the way to the ‘phone.

‘Kendall.’

‘Mister Kendall, AAIB, from Farnborough, I have a call for you. Putting you through now.’ Kendall waited. He knew what this portended, but never what, precisely, was coming. A new voice:

‘Tim? Felix. Another one for you. They need your expertise.’ The windows of Kendall’s apartment rattled fiercely as the afternoon Concorde flight to New York took off, even the two miles from Heathrow’s North runway insufficient to swallow the massive roar of the jets. Kendall waited until the aircraft was in the air and heading West, the windows still vibrating, before answering. He was not best pleased.

‘Felix! Why always me? Can’t someone else handle it, whatever it is? I’m just back from the Swiss Montgolfier job…’ Felix Morden interrupted him.

‘The only other guy qualified for this is the Yank, Poniewski, and he’s up in the wastes of Alaska.’ Kendall expressed surprise.

‘Alaska? What’s with Alaska? There’s been nothing on the news about any air accident…’

‘There wouldn’t be.’ Morden interrupted again. ‘He’s salmon fishing. And they need you.’

‘They? Who, they? Poniewski, or the salmon?’ Morden sensed that Kendall was joking, and was relieved. Kendall’s expertise was so rare as to be gold dust in the arid terrain of Air Accident Investigation.

‘It’s all a bit sketchy. The Aussies…’ Kendall’s heart sank, knowing what was coming. ‘… all I have is that some craft called Zepp 1 went down in the Pilbara, two days ago. Sixty hours ago, to be exact.’ Kendall cut in.

‘Felix, do the arithmetic, there’s a good chap! Two days is forty-eight hours…’

‘Time zones, Tim, time zones. Sixty hours on our clock, two days on their calendar. Anyway, they need you there. The Australian AIB are stymied. And the police equally.’

‘Police?’ Kendall’s voice was sharp. ‘Why police? Do they suspect foul play, a bomb…? Surely there’s debris, aircraft parts… something to give an idea whether it’s was a mid-air structural failure, or a crash? Aircraft type? A passenger list? Name of airline?’

‘Whoa! A crash, yes, of sorts. But no debris, no parts, no pax, no airline. The aircraft is a prototype, test flight solo. It’s intact, on the ground. It certainly impacted on landing, but not fatally. No, what’s bothering the AIB down-under is that the aircraft was empty. There was no-one aboard, although all the doors were locked… Yet it had travelled three hundred miles, on course, radio contact all the way. And there’s more. It’s a rigid dirigible, 150 feet I gather, final test flight. After impact, the descent propellors were still turning, and went on turning