They would head due west for the next thousand kilometers, until he reached the Baltic Sea around midnight. Somewhere north of Kaliningrad, they would turn southwest and overfly Gdansk en route to Berlin. Karpov would seal his fame as the man who boldly overflew the heart of the German Reich. At midnight he ordered the course change and altered speed ahead two thirds. It was another 500 kilometers to Berlin, and he wanted to approach the city in darkness, but time his arrival there at dawn. He retired for a good night’s rest, leaving orders that the ship was to be alert and ready to man air defense stations at sunrise.
The sun rose on a clear morning at a little after 08:30 that day, and the airship was approaching the city as planned, cruising at an altitude of 12,000 meters, which Karpov deemed safe enough. It was a dizzying height for that day, but he was soon to find that the Germans were not pleased to have his airship over their city.
A flight of three Bf-109s had been scrambled to investigate the unusual sighting. The first German Zeppelins had a service ceiling of about 6,000 feet, and this was soon doubled to 13,000 feet by 1916. They had also produced a rigid airship design known as the Hohe Bergsteiger, or “Height Climbers,” to operate above 20,000 feet, but even at that height conditions were so harsh that they saw little service. Oil lines could clog up, windows would crack with the bitter cold, radiators would freeze, and the crew would battle dizziness, oxygen deprivation and bone chilling temperatures.
Karpov knew all this when he inserted himself into the design process for Tunguska, using the knowledge he had access to in his service jacket computer to correct all these deficiencies. Now he was able to achieve altitudes twice that of the best German Height Climbers, and so he knew he could not be opposed by any remaining German airships here either. But three Bf-109s were rising that morning, intent on investigating this impudent intruder that had been spotted by a flight of German bombers just after dawn.
Karpov had mounted the best cameras he could find for high altitude photography, and he had his camera crews busy with that job in a lower gondola pod when the fighters were first seen.
“Enemy aircraft reported by the Topaz crews, sir. Number four operator has what looks to be three contacts climbing on our position.”
“Action stations,” said Karpov calmly. “We are a neutral country, and our insignia is plainly visible. Let’s see what they do here.”
Bogrov had some misgivings about that, and this whole operation seemed very risky to him. His eye strayed to his altitude gauge, noting they were level at 12,000 meters. He doubted the planes would get this high, but he was wrong. The Bf-109 was one of Germany’s highest flying fighters at that time, and the German planes were straining to get near the intruding airship, which loomed ever larger as they climbed.
The planes were among the fastest and best of the early fighting, with more aerial kills logged than any other fighter during the war. But this was a tall order. As Willy Beyer led his flight higher, he could feel his engine straining to make the altitude. As they approached he could see the insignia on the tail of the massive airship, though he did not know what it was. His only thought was that it looked to be Russian, and he reported as much on radio. The orders soon came back to fire warning shots across the bow of the airship. Still a couple thousand feet below his target, he nonetheless maneuvered his plane and fired a burst from his twin 13mm MG 131 machine guns, and this was followed by warning in German on the radio.
Karpov was not happy. These planes had climbed higher than he expected, and so he immediately gave Bogrov an order to gain another thousand meters in altitude. Even as he did so he stood his air defense crews up on the three lower gondolas, and soon they were training their twin machineguns and tracking the swift fighters as best they could. He found a German speaker and sent out a message that they were from the Free Siberian State, warning the Germans that any further hostility would be answered.
Willy Beyer had a good laugh at that. He reported that the Zeppelins were Siberians, and seemed to be intent on overflying the city. His ground control was adamant, order the Zeppelin off, or drive it off if it failed to comply. This was a war zone. He swung around, his plane a bit listless at the altitude, and saw that he could no longer climb. Amazingly, the Zeppelin was receding above him, slowly rising through a thin, wispy cloud. He had never heard of a Zeppelin that could fly at such altitudes.
Following his orders he decided to issue one further demand to turn north at once, and was able to point his nose upward to fire yet another warning shot, which streaked in hot yellow tracers well below the main gondola.
