Текст книги "The Bootlegger"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Justin Scott
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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

“It rings a bell.”

“The Purples had one.”

29

The Van Dorns piled back in the Phaeton and kept hunting. They burst into two more unusually quiet bars. One was deserted. The other had a woman waiting anxiously for a husband who had yet to return from a whisky run. In neither did they find a shaft to a tunnel.

The first red streaks of dawn gleamed across the river. Bell called it a night.

“Beginning to think it isn’t here,” said Tobin.

Clayton and Ellis looked crestfallen. “Hope we didn’t give you a bum steer, Mr. Bell.”

“Grab some sleep, boys. We’ll try again tomorrow night.”

Clayton and Ellis went back to their hotel.

Bell and Tobin returned to Fort Van Dorn. Tobin climbed the stairs to the dormitory where Bell had ordered his detectives to sleep so he didn’t have to worry about them being ambushed in hotels. Bell checked the teleprinter. He found a wire from Grady Forrer.

POKING AROUND.

TELEPHONE SOONEST.

Bell boiled water and ground coffee beans while the operators put through the long-distance line. Submachine guns most likely meant Comintern. But why would the Comintern cut the price of booze?

The operator called back. “Ringing, sir.”

Grady answered with a wide-awake, “Isaac, you will love this.”

“What’s up?”

“But first, some background to put it in perspective. Before I walk you through ancient railroad history.”

Isaac Bell stifled a yawn and a groan. The night owl Grady was in one of his talkative moods. But the Van Dorn Research Department was arguably the detective agency’s greatest asset.

“Go right ahead. Take your time.”

“Thirty years ago, American railroads had pretty much overcome the insurmountable engineering challenges that used to impede construction. Advances in grading, bridge building, tunneling, and locomotive design meant they could build almost anywhere they pleased. The main obstacle to building new railroads was other railroads competing for the same markets. Do you understand?”

“No crystal was ever clearer, Grady.”

“You remember your old friend Osgood Hennessy?”

“Railroad tycoon,” said Bell, “who happens to be our mutual friend Archie Abbott’s father-in-law. Go on, please.”

“Thirty years ago, way back in 1891, Osgood Hennessy tried to organize another transcontinental railroad by connecting lines he owned east of Chicago to his Great Northern Railway west of Minneapolis. But rival railroads, which had corrupted even more Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota legislators, governors, and judges than Hennessy had, blocked him. He could neither lay new track between Chicago and Minneapolis nor gain a controlling interest of an existing line. But Old Man Hennessy, you may recall, was unstoppable.”

“Like a combination Brahma bull and Consolidated locomotive.”

“So Hennessy devised a scheme to connect Chicago to Minneapolis by a new route via Detroit.”

“Last time I looked at a map,” said Bell, “Detroit was eastof Chicago.”

“Bear with me, Isaac. Stranger railroads were built in the ’90s; all sorts of monkey tricks to sell stock. But this was a real one, if roundabout. Hennessy surveyed a line from Minneapolis to Duluth, then up the shore of Lake Superior to Port Arthur and onto the Canadian Pacific Railroad at Port Arthur and around the top of Superior and Lake Huron and down through Ontario to Windsor, where it would connect with the New York Central.”

“What would the New York Central get out of that arrangement? The Vanderbilts hated Hennessy.”

“They would get access to the tunnel to Detroit.”

“What tunnel?”

“The tunnel Hennessy was excavating under the Detroit River.”

“There’s only one rail tunnel under the Detroit River and it wasn’t built until 1910.”

“Hennessy started his twenty years earlier.”

“He did?”

“He laid a two-thousand-foot cast-iron tube, using the same Beach shield compressed-air method as they did for the Saint Clair Tunnel.”

“First? Ahead of the rest of the line?”

“First off, he commissioned a geological survey for the tunnel. Then he went straight to work on it. Probably wanted to be sure that he could build the hardest part of the line before he committed to the rest.”

Bell said, “I remember when he built the Cascades Cutoff. He bridged Cascade Canyon first, way ahead of the line. ‘Speed,’ he used to say. ‘It’s all about speed.’ Why doesn’t anybody know about this tunnel?”

“Hennessy had to keep it secret from his enemies or they’d have blocked him in the Michigan State House. He tunneled clandestinely – under the table, so to speak. Which was why he dug from the Canadian side… on Fighting Island.”

“Fighting Island?” Bell put down his coffee.

“The Canadians were glad to keep mum. The scheme would boost their railroads. Plus Hennessy bought the shield and all of his machinery and cast iron from the same Canadian factories that supplied the Saint Clair job.”

“Fighting Island to where?”

“Ecorse.”

“Grady, are you sure?”

“All the main lines pass close to Ecorse. Ecorse was the ideal place to connect.”

“So where is it?”

“Abandoned. The scheme collapsed and Hennessy cut his losses – stopped work just short of Ecorse.”

“Is it still there?”

“It must be. He’d have sealed it up, having paid for it, hoping to finish it sometime in the future. But it strikes me that if some smart bootlegger found out, he might have finished the last hundred feet or so and had himself a hooch tunnel from Fighting Island to Detroit.”

“So this would be a much bigger tunnel than something hacked out with shovel and pick.”

“Bigger? I’ll say. Hennessy’s section has room for a locomotive, tender, caboose, and twenty-five railcars.”

“Grady, you are a genius.”

Bell heard a sharp clang on the telephone line. Grady said, “I am raising a glass to that thought. Hope it helps.”

“Wait! Find me a map. Somewhere must be engineers’ plans and surveys.”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you? I put it on the night train. You’ll have it this morning.”

* * *

Bell hired a surveyor. The surveyor confirmed with his transit what already looked likely to the naked eye. The jumping-off point indicated on Osgood Hennessy’s original tunnel drawings was beneath a large wooden building under construction on Fighting Island directly across from Ecorse. Inquiries in Canada revealed it was to be a ferry terminal, which seemed odd for an island peopled by a handful of recluses. The mystery was cleared up when the Van Dorns discovered that the company building the terminal had also applied for building permits to erect a Ferris wheel and dance pavilion for a mid-river summer resort.

“Maybe,” said Bell.

Plotting where the tunnel would emerge in Ecorse would have been a simple matter of perching the surveyor on the half-built terminal and pointing his transit across the water at the compass angle projected on Hennessy’s map. But binoculars showed the building site was fenced off. Riflemen were guarding the high wooden wall, confirmation that the tunnel started under the terminal.

* * *

Bell presented his New York Yacht Club credentials to gain admission to the Detroit Yacht Club. He bought a river chart and rented two Gar Wood speedboats. He made one a guard boat, manned by Tobin, Clayton, and Ellis, heavily armed, and took the surveyor with him downstream in the other.

“You’ll have to be quick,” he told the surveyor. “We don’t want to be noticed by customs or hijackers.”

* * *

Nearing Ecorse, Bell throttled back and disengaged the propellers to let the boat drift on the current while the surveyor sighted the terminal. He was quick.

“X marks the spot, Mr. Bell. The original tunnel is directly under us now.”

Bell engaged the engines in reverse to hold the boat against the current. The surveyor whipped his transit one hundred eighty degrees to pinpoint where on the Ecorse waterfront the tunnel would emerge, provided the last section continued in a straight line.

“That red boathouse, Mr. Bell, if the extension is in-line with the original.”

Bell noted that the chart showed a water depth of thirty feet. He wondered how deeply the crown of the tunnel was buried under the river bottom. A way to attack Marat Zolner was taking shape in his mind. It was instigated by the bartender’s tale of his boss getting shot. Submachine guns almost certainly indicated the Comintern had a hand in it. And if they did, he was beginning to realize why they would cut the price of booze in half.

Bell headed downriver, waited for dusk, and went back to the spot between the ferry terminal and the red boathouse. Idling the engines to keep the boat in place, he checked their position relative to the two structures. Then he took compass bearings on a light atop the red boathouse and bearings on prominent lights up and down the river. Returning to this precise spot tomorrow night would be a simple matter of lining up the lights.

30

James Dashwood returned to Detroit with more bad news. He had come within sixty seconds of catching up with Fern Hawley – one minute too late to stop her chartered flying boat from taking off from Miami.

“Florida is a good place to hide if you’re as rich as she is. She could be in Palm Beach or the Florida Keys, or Havana, Cuba, or Bimini or Nassau or any other islands of The Bahamas. Or she could have rendezvoused with a yacht at sea. I put the word out to our various people and decided I’d be more useful back in Detroit.”

Bell said, “Maybe Nassau – where the booze tanker is headed. In which case, Pauline will deal with her.”

“Maybe I should go down and look out for Pauline?”

“Pauline looks out for herself. Do you remember the spy who was sabotaging the Navy’s battleships?”

Dashwood grinned. “I remember trying to convince his enormous bodyguard that I was an itinerant temperance orator, not a detective.”

Bell said, “Admiral Falconer showed me experiments in a test caisson where armor experts simulated torpedo attacks to measure the impact of explosions underwater. Torpedoes were coming into their own just as the science boys began to understand what made them so deadly.”

Blast energy from mines and torpedoes was terrifically amplified and concentrated underwater. By the middle of the war, depth charges were sinking submarines, which gave Bell an idea how to deal with the tunnel and everything in it.

“Round up four cases of dynamite.”

Bell wired Grady Forrer for more information from the geological survey that Osgood Hennessy had commissioned for his tunnel.

HOW DEEP TUNNEL?

WHAT IS BOTTOM MATERIAL?

Bell had decreed that gangland Detroit was too dangerous for even a fortified Van Dorn field office to employ apprentices, so he was forced to press tough Protective Services operatives into apprentice tasks. “Run to the library. Look in the 1891 issues of Harper’s Weeklyfor an article about the Saint Clair River Tunnel.”

“Library?”

“You can count on Harper’sfor a rundown on the big engineering feats. 1891. The librarian will help you find it.”

“When?”

“Now! On the jump!”

The broad-shouldered house dick lumbered off, scratching his head.

Grady wired back:

BOTTOM CONSISTS OF SAND, CLAY, BOULDERS, AND ROCK.

TUNNEL CROWN THREE FEET UNDER BOTTOM.

“Good!”

But when the Protective Services op returned with the Harper’sarticle about the St. Clair Tunnel, Bell ran into a snag he hadn’t considered. The cast-iron walls of the St. Clair Tunnel were two inches thick, which would make it immensely strong. Hennessy’s abandoned tunnel had been built of similar cast-iron segments.

Stymied, and hoping to see the problem from another, more productive angle, Bell put it to Dashwood in the starkest terms. “We can’t count on explosives breaching the main tunnel. They will easily destroy the connector. But if the connector collapses too far from the main tunnel, the debris will seal it before the water reaches the main tunnel. To guarantee breaching the main tunnel and destroying the Comintern’s stockpile, we have to explode the dynamite very near the joint where the tunnels connect.”

Dashwood asked, “Why don’t we just raid the tunnel? That will shut it.”

“It won’t stay shut long,” said Bell. “The cops and courts are for sale on both sides of the river. They’ll put pictures in the papers of a prosecutor swinging an ax at a case of whisky. But hush money will keep that booze safe where it is. Zolner and his partners will lay low ’til the politicians are done demanding another ‘drive’ against liquor, then back to business – unless we flood the tunnel and destroy the Comintern’s stockpile. I told Mr. Van Dorn, and I’ll tell you: I will not settle for bloodying his nose this time. I’m going to drive Marat Zolner out of Detroit.”

“Where do you think he’ll go?”

Bell answered, “Where do I think? Listen.”

He sat at the private-wire Morse key and tapped out a message to New York.

FORWARD FINAL PAYMENT LYNCH & HARDING MARINE.

DELIVER MARION EXPRESS CRUISER MIAMI.

“We have to stop him from setting up business the way he’s doing here in Detroit and back in New York.”

“What if he goes to The Bahamas?” Dashwood asked.

“He won’t. He has no reason to go to Nassau. Nassau is like Canada, a relatively safe base for legal liquor. Florida is lawless, an import-and-distribution center like Detroit and New York where he can fight to expand and take over.”

Bell gave Dashwood a cold smile and added, “If for some reason he does go to Nassau, Nassau is three hours from Miami by fast boat. And Marionis going to be one fast boat.”

* * *

He wired Grady again.

HOW FAR FROM SHORE DID HENNESSY TUNNEL STOP?

Grady telephoned long-distance.

“Too complicated for the wire. I found handwritten engineers’ notes on the survey that suggest they stopped excavating just where the bank began to slope upward.”

Bell spread open his Detroit River chart. “There’s a deep channel down the middle, nearer to Fighting Island, and then a narrower one, the Wyandotte Channel, that hugs the Ecorse shore.”

“They must have dredged it deeper since the survey. There’s no channel mentioned.”

“It hugs the shore,” said Bell. “The dredge would have struck the crown of the tunnel probably, so just beyond the current Wyandotte Channel is where they must have stopped.”

He improvised calipers with two fingers and compared the distance to the chart’s scale.

Grady said, “The other reason I telephoned…”

“What?” Bell was distracted. It wasn’t so much the headache – they were tapering off, and the plague of double vision had pretty much ended. He was puzzling some way to drop his improvised depth charge exactly one hundred feet offshore. “What did you say, Grady?”

“The Research Department is assembling a complete Prohibition file – an up-to-date encyclopedia of bootleggers, gangsters, rumrunners, et cetera, with curriculum vitae, photographs, fingerprints.”

“Good job. That’ll show the Justice Department what we can do.”

“I thought I’d pop down to The Bahamas. Get the latest on the Nassau import-export racket. What do you think?”

“I think you’d get in Pauline’s way.”

“Oh, that’s right, she’s down there,” Grady said innocently. “Is she all right on her own?”

“Pauline is quite all right on her own… Actually, you raise a good point. She could use a trustworthy runner. Tell you what, send young Somers to Nassau. I’ll cable Pauline.”

APPRENTICE ASA SOMERS COMING YOUR WAY.

GO-GETTER SAVED JVD BACON.

Then Bell called for the Protective Services op, whom he had sent earlier to the library.

“Go buy a rope.”

“How long?”

“One hundred four feet.”

“One hundred four?”

“The four’s for a loop. Watch carefully how they measure.”

* * *

Jack Payne, a Van Dorn detective on loan from the Cleveland field office, had been a combat engineer in the trenches during the war. Working in an empty backwater slip Bell located near the Detroit Yacht Club, Payne rigged the dynamite with waterproof fuses and detonators and screwed twenty pounds of old horseshoes to each of the forty-pound cases so they would sink fast.

After dark, they tied the cases into one heavy packet perched on the stern of one of the Gar Wood speedboats.

“Just to review your scheme, Mr. Bell,” said Detective Payne, “keep in mind that that shock wave will go upas well as down. The moment you drop these crates, jam your throttles and get away from there as fast as you can.”

* * *

“The Bureau chief found the tunnel,” reported Ellis and Clayton, arriving winded at Fort Van Dorn.

“Sorry, Mr. Bell. They’re dickering the cost of protection right now.”

Isaac Bell’s response was a fathomless smile.

“Tell me all about it.”

“They somehow connected with the mayor of the city of La Salle and—”

Bell cut him off. “I don’t care how. What can you tell me about the tunnel that you didn’t know before?”

“It’s got more booze in it than we thought. A lot more.”

“Guards?”

“Armies. Tons of them at the ferry terminal, tons in Ecorse. Every building around that boathouse is theirs. Including the second one we raided.”

“How many guards are in the tunnel?”

“They don’t let anyone in the tunnel.”

Isaac Bell said, “Good. I was a little concerned about not-so-innocent innocent bystanders.” He raised his voice so the others could hear. “O.K., gents, we’re doing it now.”

* * *

Isaac Bell let Ed Tobin drive the dynamite boat. In the dark, a son of Staten Island coal pirates would make a shrewder helmsman than a scion of Boston bankers. The black water seemed to swallow distance. Channel lights, shore lights, and boat lights could be confusing. And gauging position required a smuggler’s eye. Bell stood by their improvised depth charge with the hundred-four-foot rope coiled in his hands.

Shadowed by the guard boat, they raced down the Detroit River. As Ecorse came into view, Tobin lined up the boathouse, shore, and ferry terminal lights. He cut his throttles abruptly and swerved toward the row of boathouses that thrust out from the bank. Guards heard them coming and hurried out on their docks.

Twenty feet from the red boathouse dock, Tobin engaged his propellers in reverse, spun his helm, and raced his engines. The Gar Wood stopped abruptly, pivoted ninety degrees, and thundered backwards toward the dock pilings.

Isaac Bell jumped up on the stern and braced a boot on the dynamite. Ed switched his propellers forward again and rammed his throttles. The boat stopped six inches from a piling. Bell looped the rope around it and knotted the fastest bowline he had ever tied.

“Go!”

Ed Tobin eased forward, slowly paying out the rope. Bell let it slide loosely through his hands and watched for the bitter end. He heard men on the docks shouting for lights.

“Stop!” he called to Tobin.

They were precisely one hundred feet from the dock, over the joint between the two tunnels. Suddenly, searchlights glared down from boathouse roofs. Isaac Bell cut the ropes holding the dynamite. They started shooting.

Bell flicked a flame from an Austrian cigarette lighter made of a rifle cartridge that Pauline Grandzau had given him. Thompson submachine guns sprayed their once seen, never forgotten red flashes. Bullets whipped past, fanning his face and splintering the wooden crates. A bullet blew out the flame.

Bell heard the guard boat’s engines and the measured crack of a rifle as Dashwood coolly returned the submachine-gun fire. Bell flicked the lighter again and again, got it going, and touched the blue apex of the flame to the waterproof fuse. The fuse caught with a dazzling burst of sparks. He planted both feet and heaved his shoulder against the crates.

One hundred sixty pounds of dynamite slid off the back of the boat and sank like a stone.

“Go!” he shouted to Ed Tobin.

Ed Tobin rammed his throttles full ahead. The Gar Wood leaped forward. It had traveled barely fifty feet when the dynamite exploded with a muffled, violent thud. A geyser of water shot in the air beside the boat. A shock wave blasted after it, a tremendous eruption that splintered the hull and hurled the Van Dorn detectives into the river.

* * *

Inside the tunnel, a half-mile rail line had been converted to an immensely long warehouse. Two endless rows of twelve-bottle crates of whisky were stacked from the rails to the curving crown of the tunnel’s ceiling. Between the stacks, which stretched from Fighting Island almost to Ecorse, was a narrow corridor. It was twenty feet high but only three feet wide, barely wide enough for one man at time.

River water rammed into this corridor like a rectangular piston. The water filled the space between the crates on either side, the ceiling above, and the wooden railroad ties below. Marat Zolner and Abe Weintraub ran for their lives.

Weintraub was in the lead.

Zolner was catching up fast, his long legs propelling him twice the length of the shorter man’s steps. The lights – bare bulbs hanging overhead and powered by the dynamo on Fighting Island – flickered, and the animal fear that made him flee exploded into human terror. As horrific as the fate thundering after him was, it would be a million times worse in the dark.

A noise louder than the water chased them, the high-pitched clangor of breaking glass. The river was splintering crates and smashing bottles by the tens of thousands. The water stank of whisky.

Ahead, high in the flickering lights, Zolner saw the walls of crates begin to move. The river had overtaken and flanked them. Squeezed between the tunnel walls and the stacks, the water toppled the highest crates. They fell from both sides into the narrow corridor, strewn like boulders by a mountain landslide, and blocked the corridor. Weintraub scampered up the shifting pile of wood and glass like an ape, racing desperately for the top of the heap, where a sliver of light shone in the last three-foot-wide, two-foot-high opening.

Zolner scrambled after him. The river caught up. Water slammed into his back and hurled him toward the ceiling. Weintraub reached the opening and started to squirm through. Zolner was suddenly in water up to his neck. Weintraub’s thick torso was blocking the space. Zolner grabbed his foot. He braced his own feet on the tumbled stack, pulled with all his might, yanked the gangster out of the opening, and dived through it himself.

Weintraub tried to follow. He got stuck and let out a terrified roar: “Help me!”

He was stopping the water like a cork in a bottle, and if Zolner managed to pull him out, they would both drown. He ran to the shaft ladder, which was fixed to the cast-iron wall at the end of the tunnel. Mounting the iron rungs, he looked back.

The river smashed through the barrier. Abe Weintraub flew to the end of the tunnel, hurled on a crest of water and broken crates that dashed him against the cast-iron wall. The water rose to Zolner’s chest. He kicked loose from it and climbed up the shaft into the night. Across the river, he saw a motorboat’s searchlight probing the dark like a desperate finger.

* * *

“Isaac!”

“Mr. Bell!”

“Ed! Ed Tobin. Where are you?”

In the searchlight glare, the Van Dorns on the guard boat saw the shattered speedboat half sunk on its side. It was turning, slowly spinning, picking up speed, spinning faster and faster, as it was sucked into a huge whirlpool. A crater was spinning in the river, a gigantic hole left by a million tons of water plunging into the tunnel.

“Isaac!”

“Here!” Bell shouted. “Behind you!” The river current had helped him and Tobin swim away from the wreckage. Now the vortex was drawing them back.

The guard boat roared alongside them. Strong arms hauled them out of the water, drenched but unhurt, just as the last of the speedboat was sucked under.

Isaac Bell was grinning ear to ear.

“They’ll never invite me back to that yacht club.”