Текст книги "The Chase"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

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CALLED THE HALLMARK OF THE WEST, THE SAN FRANCISCO of 1906 was a maze of contradictions. One writer described the city as the Babylon of grandiloquence, the Paris of romance, and the Hong Kong of adventure. Another went so far as to portray it as the gateway to paradise.

It may have been dynamic and exciting, but, in truth, San Francisco was a sprawling, filthy, soot-ridden, foul-smelling, brawling, corrupt, vulgar city with less charm than London in the seventeen hundreds. It intermingled incredible wealth with sordid poverty. Coal smoke from steamboats, locomotives, foundries, house furnaces and stoves enveloped streets already blanketed by the dung of thousands of horses. There were no sewage-treatment plants to be found and the blackened skies reeked of foul odors.

Most all the houses were built of wood. From the nice homes on Telegraph Hill to the stylish mansions of Nob Hill to the shacks and hovels in the outlying districts, it was described by the city’s fire chief as a sea of tinderboxes waiting to be lit.

The image and the myth were to change dramatically within two and a half minutes.

At 5:12 A.M., on the morning of April 18th, the sun was beginning to lighten the eastern sky. The gas streetlights had been shut off and the cable cars began to clatter from their barns for their runs up and down the many hills of the city. Early workers began walking to their job as those who worked during the late-night hours headed home. Bakers were already at their ovens. Police on the early-morning shift still patrolled their beats, expecting another quiet day, as a light wind without the prevailing fog blew in from the west.

But at 5:12, the peaceful world of San Francisco and its surrounding towns was shattered by an ominous, rumbling roar that came from the depths of the earth a few miles under the sea beyond the Golden Gate.

Hell had come to San Francisco.

The foreshock shook the surrounding countryside and was felt throughout the Bay Area. Twenty-five seconds later, terrifying, undulating shock waves from the massive earthquake surged across the city like a monstrous hand sweeping stacks of books off a table.

The rock of the San Andreas Fault, whose walls had been grinding against each other for millions of years, abruptly split apart as the North American Plate under the land and the Pacific Plate beneath the sea unleashed their grip on each other and shifted in opposite directions, one to the north, the other to the south.

The unimaginable force raged toward the helpless city at seven thousand miles an hour in a disastrous spree that would leave monumental death and destruction in its wake.

The shock wave struck with savage swiftness. The pavement of the streets running east and west began to rise and crest before falling into troughs, as the quake rolled relentlessly forward and sent block upon block of tall buildings rocking and swaying like willow trees in a hurricane. Wood, mortar, and brick were never meant to withstand such an onslaught. One by one, the buildings began to crumble, their walls falling and avalanching into the streets under a cloud of dust and debris. Every window in the stores along the avenues burst and shattered onto the sidewalks in a shower of jagged shards.

Huge five-and ten-story buildings in the downtown business section toppled in a horrendous crash that sounded like a cannon barrage. Chasms opened and closed on the streets, some filling with groundwater and spilling into the gutters. The rails of streetcars and cable cars were twisted and bent like strands of spaghetti. The most violent shocks lasted for slightly more than a minute before diminishing, although smaller aftershocks continued off and on for several days.

When the full light of day showed through the chaos, all that was left of a major city of tall buildings, comprising a vast number of stores, offices, banks, theaters, hotels, restaurants, saloons and brothels, houses and apartments, was now a hundred square miles of jagged mounds of shattered masonry, splintered wood, and twisted iron. Though they’d looked substantial, most of the buildings were not reinforced and fell to pieces before the earthquake was thirty seconds old.

The city hall, the most impressive edifice west of Chicago, sat smashed and destroyed, its cast-iron columns lying shattered in the street. The Hall of Justice was a skeleton of mangled steel girders. The Academy of Sciences gone as though it had never stood. The post office was still standing but effectively demolished. The Majestic Theater would never stage a show again. Only the redoubtable six-story Wells Fargo Building had refused to tumble down despite a ravaged interior.

Thousands of chimneys had been first to fall. None was built with an earthquake in mind. Reaching through and high above the roofs, unable to bend and sway and with no support, they shuddered, then fractured and fell through houses and onto streets that were already clogged with debris. Later, it was determined that over a hundred people died from being crushed in their beds by falling chimneys.

Wooden two-and three-story homes leaned drunkenly in all directions, twisted on their foundations and tilted crazily in grotesque angles. Oddly, they stood intact but had shifted as much as twenty feet off their foundations, many across sidewalks and into the streets. Though their exterior walls were intact, their interiors were devastated, floors having collapsed, beams ruptured, the furniture and the inhabitants ending up crushed and buried in the basement. The cheaper houses in the poor part of town had collapsed in a pile of splintered beams and siding.

Those who had survived the earthquake were frozen in stunned shock, unable to speak or conversing in whispers. As the great clouds of dust began to settle, the cries of those who were injured or trapped under the fallen structures came as muffled wails. Even after the main force of the quake had passed, the earth still shuddered with aftershocks that continued to shake walls of brick onto the streets, causing their own tremors and strange rumbling sounds.

Few cities in the history of human civilizations had suffered as much devastating destruction as San Francisco. And yet it was only the opening act of an even-worse scene of disintegration that was yet to come.

THE SHOCK hurled the bed Isaac and Marion were occupying across her bedroom. The apartment house around them rumbled and shook in a series of convulsions. The noise was deafening as dishes crashed to the floor, bookcases collapsed and the books scattered, pictures were slung off the walls, and the upright piano rolled like a boulder down a mountain across the slanting floor only to fall into the street because the entire front wall of the apartment house had detached itself from the rest of the building and cascaded in a flood of rubble onto the street below.

Bell grabbed Marion by the arm and half carried, half dragged her through a hail of falling plaster to the doorway, where they stood for the next thirty seconds while the horrendous noise became even more deafening. The floor moved like a stormy sea beneath their feet. They had barely reached the temporary shelter of the doorway when the great chimney at the top of the roof toppled and fell crashing through the two apartments above and smashed through the floor not ten feet away from them.

Bell recognized the bedlam as an earthquake. He had endured one almost as bad as the one that destroyed San Francisco while traveling with his parents in China when he was a young boy. He looked down into the pale face of Marion, who looked up at him, dazed and paralyzed by shock. He smiled grimly, trying to give her courage, as the shock waves tore the floor in the parlor from its beams and sent it collapsing into the lower apartment. He could only wonder if the occupants had been killed or were somehow managing to survive.

For nearly a full minute, they kept on their feet, clutching the doorframe, as their world turned into a nightmarish hell that went far beyond imagination.

Then slowly the tremors died away and an eerie silence settled over the ruin of the apartment. The cloud of dust from the fallen plaster ceiling filled their nostrils and made it difficult to breathe. Only then did Bell realize that they were still on their feet, clutching the doorframe, with Marion wearing a flimsy nightgown and him in a nightshirt. He saw that her radiant long hair had turned white from the plaster’s fine powder that still floated in the air like a mist.

Bell gazed across the bedroom. It looked like the contents of a wastebasket that had been dumped on the floor. He put his arm around Marion’s waist and pulled her toward the closet, where their clothes still hung on hangers, free of the dust.

“Dress and be quick about it,” he said firmly. “The building isn’t stable and might collapse at any minute.”

“What happened?” she asked in utter confusion. “Was it an explosion?”

“No, I believe it was an earthquake.”

She stared through the wreck of her parlor and saw the ruined buildings on the other side of the street. “Good Lord!” she gasped. “The wall is gone.” Then she discovered that her piano was missing. “Oh, no, my grandmother’s piano. Where did it go?”

“I think what’s left of it is down on the street,” replied Bell sympathetically. “No more talk. Hurry and throw on some clothes. We’ve got to get out of here.”

She ran to the closet, her composure back on keel, and Bell could see that she was as tough as the bricks that had fallen around them. While he put on the suit he’d worn the night before, she slipped into a cotton blouse under a coarse woolen jacket and skirt for warmth against the cool breeze blowing in from the sea. She was not only beautiful, Bell thought, she was also a practical, thinking woman.

“What about my jewelry, my family photos, my valuables?” she asked. “Shouldn’t I take them with me?”

“We’ll come back for them later, when we see if the building is still standing.”

They dressed in less than two minutes, and he led her around the gaping hole in the floor made by the fallen chimney and past the overturned furniture to the front door of the apartment. Marion felt as if she were in another world, as she stared out into open air where the wall once stood and saw her neighbors beginning to wander bewildered out into the middle of the street.

The door was wedged tight. The earthquake had shifted the building and jammed the door against its frame. Bell knew better than to attack the door by charging against it with his shoulder. That was a fool’s play. He balanced on one leg and lashed out with the other. The door failed to show the least sign of give. He looked around the room and surprised Marion with his strength when he picked up the heavy sofa and shoved it against the door like a battering ram. On the third thrust, the door splintered and swung crazily open on one hinge.

Thankfully, the stairway was still standing, winding its way to the floor below. Bell and Marion made it past the main entrance and found a high mountain of debris piled outside the apartment house, thrown there when the front wall crashed and buried the street. The front section of the structure looked as if it had been sliced clean by a giant cleaver.

Marion stopped, her eyes welling with tears at the sight of her mother’s piano sitting smashed on the crest of the rubble. Bell spotted two men making their way down the street through the wreckage on a wagon drawn by two horses. He left Marion for a few moments, walked over and conversed with the two men as if striking a deal. They nodded and he came back.

“What was that about?” asked Marion.

“I offered to pay them five hundred dollars to take your mother’s piano to Cromwell’s warehouse by the railyard. When things get back to normal, I’ll see that it’s rebuilt.”

“Thank you, Isaac.” Marion stood on her toes as she kissed Bell on the cheek, stunned that a man could be so thoughtful about such a little thing in the midst of such disaster.

The army of people crowding the middle of the street was strangely subdued. There were no wails or cries, no hysteria. Everyone talked in whispers, glad they were alive, but not knowing what to do next or where to go or whether the earthquake would strike again. Many were still in their nightclothes. Mothers cuddled young children or clutched babies while men talked among themselves studying the damage to their homes.

A lull settled over the ruined city. The worst, everyone thought, had to be over. And yet the greatest tragedy was yet to come.

Bell and Marion walked to the intersection of Hyde and Lombard, seeing the cable car rails that now snaked like a meandering silver stream to the streets below Russian Hill. The cloud of dust hung tenaciously over the devastation, slowly dissipating as it was carried toward the east by the offshore breeze. From the docks protruding into the water around the Ferry Building west to Fillmore Street, and from the north bay far to the south, the once-great city was a vast sea of ruin and devastation.

Scores of hotels and lodging houses had collapsed, killing hundreds who had been sleeping soundly when the quake struck. The screams and cries of those trapped under the rubble and the badly injured carried up to the hill.

Hundreds of electrical poles had toppled, their high-tension wires snapping apart, whipping back and forth like desert sidewinders, sparks shooting from the tattered ends. At the same time, pipes carrying the city’s gas had split apart and now unleashed their deadly fumes. Tanks in the basements of manufacturing plants holding kerosene and fuel oil ran toward the fiery arcs thrown from the electrical wires where they met and burst in an explosion of orange flame. In destroyed houses, coals from the fallen chimneys ignited furniture and wooden frameworks.

Soon the wind helped merge the big and small fires into one massive holocaust. Within minutes, the city was blanketed by smoke from fires erupting across San Francisco that would take three days and hundreds of lives before they were contained. Many of the injured and trapped who could not be rescued in time would go unidentified, their bodies incinerated and turned to ashes by the intense heat.

“It’s going to get worse, much worse,” said Bell slowly. He turned to Marion. “I want you to go to Golden Gate Park; you’ll be safe there. I’ll come and find you later.”

“Where are you going?” she whispered, shuddering at the thought that she would be alone.

“To the Van Dorn office. The city is going to need every law enforcement agent available to help control the chaos.”

“Why can’t I stay here, near my apartment?”

He took another look at the growing conflagration. “It’s only a matter of a few hours before the fire reaches Russian Hill. You can’t stay here. Do you think you can make it on foot to the park?”

“I’ll make it,” she said, nodding gamely. Then she reached up and circled her arms around his neck. “I love you, Isaac Bell. I love you so much I hurt.”

He slipped his arms around her slim waist and kissed her. “I love you, too, Marion Morgan.” He hesitated before pushing her back. “Now, be a good girl and get a move on.”

“I’ll wait for you at the bridge over the pond.”

He held her hand a moment before turning away and moving through the mass of people who were crowded in the center of the street as far away as they could get from the buildings as a series of light aftershocks rippled through the city.

Bell took one of the long stairways leading from Russian Hill. It was split apart in several places but did not block his way down to Union Street. Then he cut over to Stockton and then to Market Street. The scene of destruction went far beyond anything his mind could have created.

There were no streetcars running, and all automobiles, many of them new models commandeered from dealer showrooms, as well as horse-drawn vehicles, were being pressed into service as ambulances to carry the injured to makeshift hospitals that were springing up in the city squares. The bodies of the dead, those who could be retrieved, were carried to warehouses that had been turned into temporary morgues.

The falling walls had not only crushed unlucky humans walking the sidewalks but also horses pulling the city’s huge fleet of freight wagons. They were felled by the dozens under tons of bricks. Bell saw a driver and horse that had been smashed to pulp by an electrical pole that had fallen on their milk wagon.

Reaching Market Street, Bell ducked into the remains of a still-standing doorway that was once the entrance into the Hearst Examiner Newspaper Building. He sought refuge as a herd of cattle appeared that had escaped their pen at the docks. Maddened by fright, they charged down the street and almost immediately vanished, swallowed up by one of the great chasms where the violent thrust of the earthquake had split the streets.

Bell could not believe how the great thoroughfare of the city, with its magnificent buildings, had changed from the evening before. Gone were the fleets of vehicles, the throngs of happy, contented people working or shopping in the heart of the city’s business district. Now the boulevard was scarcely recognizable. The tall buildings had crumbled to pieces, huge pillars with their decorative cornices and ornamentations had been wrenched from the façades of the structures and hurled to the sidewalk and street in jumbled fragments. The enormous office and store windows were shattered. Signs that once advertised the businesses occupying them lay scattered amid the wreckage.

As Bell made his way down through the destruction, he could see that the blocks to the south were becoming an ocean of flame. He knew it was only a matter of time before the big hotels, government buildings, tall office skyscrapers, the great department stores, and the theaters would be burned-out skeletons. There were far too few firemen and almost all of the underground water mains had been ruptured by the earthquake. Hundreds of the city’s fire hydrants and water taps trickled and then ran dry. The firemen, helpless in fighting the mushrooming fires, began a heroic struggle to repair the water lines.

After dodging the automobiles transporting the injured and making his way over the landslides of brick, Bell came within sight of the Call Building. At first, the twelve-story skyscraper looked in good shape, but as he walked closer he saw that the base of one side of the building had moved two feet over the sidewalk toward the street. Inside, he found that none of the elevators were working because the interior was twisted out of alignment. He made his way up the five flights of stairs to the Van Dorn office and stepped over the mounds of plaster that had fallen from the ceiling. Footprints in the plaster told him others had preceded him.

The furniture scattered about the office by the quake had been set upright where originally positioned.

Bell walked into the conference room and found four Van Dorn agents including Bronson, who rushed over and pumped his hand. “Am I ever glad to see you alive. I was afraid you might be lying under a ton of rubble.”

Bell managed a smile. “Marion’s house lost the front wall, but her apartment is a mess.” He paused and looked around room. Not seeing Curtis, he asked, “Have you heard from Art?”

The look on everyone’s face told Bell what he needed to know. “Art is missing, assumed to have been crushed under tons of brick as he made his way from the Palace Hotel to our office,” Bronson answered solemnly. “From what reports we’ve managed to gather, two of my agents are either injured or dead. We don’t know yet. Those you see here are the only ones who survived without injury.”

Bell’s chest felt as if a belt had been cinched around it and pulled tight. He had seen and known death, but to lose someone close was an enduring hurt. “Curtis dead,” Bell muttered. “He was a fine man, a good friend, and one of the best detectives I ever worked with.”

“I lost good men, too,” Bronson said slowly. “But now we must do what we can to ease the suffering.”

Bell looked at him. “What is your plan?”

“I met with the chief of police and offered Van Dorn’s services. Despite our differences in the past, he was only too glad to have our help. We’re going to do what we can to combat looting, apprehend looters stealing from the dead and their demolished homes and take them to the city jail. Thankfully, because it’s built like a fortress, it still stands.”

“I wish I could join you and the others, Horace, but I have another job.”

“Yes, I understand,” Bronson said quietly. “Jacob Cromwell.”

Bell nodded. “The earthquake and the bedlam left in its wake have given him the ideal opportunity to escape the country. I intend to stop him.”

Bronson held out his hand. “Good luck to you, Isaac.” He gestured around the room with one hand. “This building isn’t safe. And if it doesn’t fall down on its own, it will probably be consumed by the approaching fire. We’ll have to take our records and abandon it.”

“Where can I reach you?”

“We’re setting up a command center in the Customs House; it was only slightly damaged. The army units that are arriving to maintain order and help battle the fires are also setting up their headquarters there.”

“One of us has to report what has happened to Mr. Van Dorn.”

Bronson shook his head. “Not possible. All telegraph lines are down.”

Bell shook Bronson’s hand. “Good luck to you, too, Horace. I’ll be in contact as soon as I learn Cromwell’s whereabouts.”

Bronson smiled. “I bet nothing like this happens where you live in Chicago.”

Bell laughed. “Aren’t you forgetting the great Chicago fire of 1871? At least your calamity came from an act of God. Chicago’s came from a cow who kicked over a lantern.”

After saying his good-bye, Bell retraced his route down the twisted stairs to the devastation on Market Street. He quickly made his way over the rubble and past the crowds of people who had assembled to watch the fire that was now burning throughout Chinatown and relentlessly moving toward the city’s primary business district.

He reached the Palace Hotel, which had fared better than the Call Building. Standing just outside the entrance was a man Bell instantly recognized: Enrico Caruso, who had sung the role of Don José in Carmen the night before at the Grand Opera House, was waiting as his valet pulled his trunks out onto the sidewalk. He was dressed in a long, bulky fur coat over his pajamas and smoking a cigar. As Bell passed, he heard the great tenor muttering, “’Ell of a place, ’ell of a place. I never come back.”

The elevators were not running due to the lack of electricity, but the stairways were relatively clear of debris. After entering his room, Bell did not bother to pack his clothes. He saw no reason to burden himself with luggage. He threw only a few personal items in a small valise. Not planning on life-threatening danger in San Francisco, he had left his Colt .45 and the derringer in the room. The Colt went in the valise and the derringer back into its small holster inside his hat.

As he walked up Powell Street toward Cromwell’s mansion on Nob Hill, he saw a small group of men frantically struggling to lift a huge beam from a pile of rubble that had once been a hotel. One of them motioned to him and shouted, “Come give us a hand!”

The men were frantically working to free a woman pinned in the debris and the wreckage around it was burning fiercely. She was still dressed in her nightgown, and he saw that she had long auburn hair.

He gripped her hand for a moment and said softly, “Be brave. We’ll get you free.”

“My husband and my little girl—are they safe?”

Bell looked up into the somber faces of the rescuers. One of them slowly shook his head. “You’ll see them soon,” he said, feeling the intense heat of the fire closing in.

Bell lent his strength to the others and vainly tried to lift the beam that covered the woman’s legs. It was an exercise in futility. The beam weighed tons and could not be moved by six men. The woman was very courageous and watched the efforts in silence until the flames began scorching her nightgown.

“Please!” she begged. “Don’t let me burn!”

One of the men, a fireman, asked for her name and wrote it on a small piece of paper he had in his pocket. The rest of the men retreated from the intense heat and menacing flames, horrified at losing their battle to save the woman.

Her nightgown ignited and she began to scream. Without hesitation, Bell held up his derringer and shot her in the forehead between the eyes. Then, without a backward glance, he and the fireman ran for the street.

“You had to do it,” said the fireman, his hand on Bell’s shoulder. “Dying by fire is the worst death. You couldn’t let her suffer.”

“No, I couldn’t do that,” Bell said, his eyes rimmed with tears. “But it’s a terrible memory I’ll take to my grave.”