Текст книги "The Bootlegger"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Justin Scott
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

BOOK TWO
HIJACK

15

A patched sail of faded canvas looked common, thought Captain Novicki. Even innocent. And if you hoisted your sail on a slow-moving, old-fashioned, cat-rigged workboat and sat a white-whiskered Barnacle Bill smoking his pipe at the tiller, you’d be damned-near invisible. At least to anyone searching for the get-rich-quick boys.

Or so Novicki hoped as he steered his catboat across Great South Bay. A stiff wind raised a fierce chop studded with whitecaps. The old mariner sailed blithely through it, out the narrow Fire Island Inlet and into the Atlantic Ocean.

Eight miles out in international waters he found a row of wooden schooners and rusty tramp freighters anchored to the shallow bottom and pitching on the swells. Their hulls and rigging were hung with billboards advertising authentic Scotch whisky, English gin, and French champagne. Captain Novicki tied up at the schooner he had contracted to deliver for and handed over mail and gifts of fresh fruit and vegetables to the captain and his family and soda pop for the kids. The oldest child climbed the mast with binoculars to watch for the Coast Guard while the family helped load as many cases as Novicki’s boat would hold.

He was not the only upright citizen taxiing booze to shore. It was evident from the private yachts and motorboats sailing up and down Rum Row, bargaining with the ships selling liquor. But neither they nor any rum-running taxi that night had a more valuable cargo – the finest single-malt Scotch whisky of such a dark color and pungent smoky aroma that it could be stretched five-to-one with grain alcohol and still sold as the real McCoy.

The schooner captain and his wife appeared anxious. Novicki asked what was bothering them.

“There was another hijacking last night. At least we think there was. The boat never came back, and he was in fine shape when he headed in. I’d keep a weather eye, if I were you.”

“Nobody’ll bother a little old catboat.”

“She ain’t that little, and she’s beamy as a barge,” said the schooner captain. “Any gangster who knows his business will see you squeezed in a hundred cases.”

Novicki had timed it so he could run for the coast after dark. Eight miles off and ten miles upwind of Fire Island Inlet, he had an easy sail on following seas. He covered two miles in thirty minutes, ears cocked for the sound of engines. A couple of taxis roared past at five times his speed.

Suddenly, he heard the distinctive rumble of tripled-up gasoline motors. He hurried to the mast and dropped the sail and got the canvas on deck seconds before a Coast Guard cutter swept the water with its searchlight. It moved on eventually. He raised his sail and kept listening.

He was almost back to the inlet when he sensed as much as heard distant thunder.

He gauged his position to be too far off to hear the surf on the beach. Nor was it a storm. The sky was clearing and stars were already burning through the haze. He reached over the side and dipped his pipe into the water, dousing the red glow.

The thunder moved closer.

Fire raced over the waves, a bank of dense flame that unveiled in its down glow the profile of a long black boat.

* * *

Novicki tied his tiller and hurried forward to drop the sail again. But this time he was too late. The black boat had a searchlight that was bigger than the Coast Guard’s. The white-hot beam swept the sea, skipping from wave top to wave top, and suddenly blazed on the sail like a hundred suns. Blinded and confused, the old man stumbled to his tiller as if he could somehow steer his way out of this mess.

A machine gun roared. The barrel spit fire almost as bright as the black boat’s exhaust, and almost as loud. Bullets pierced Novicki’s decks and sent splinters into his face. The storm of lead blasting the wood, shredding the sail, and screaming past his ears was paralyzing. His hand locked on the tiller. The thundering engines quieted, throttled down, as the boat drew near. But the gun kept firing staccato bursts and the bullets kept flying. In between the bursts he heard men yelling. In all the noise and confusion it took him a moment to realize they weren’t Americans. They were speaking a foreign language. He couldn’t hear much over the gun, but it might be Russian, a language he had encountered occasionally at sea.

The oddity had the wholly unexpected effect of clearing his head. He couldn’t understand their meaning, but whatever language they were shouting, it sure wouldn’t translate as “Cease fire!” Confident that the sea held no worse dangers, the old mariner filled his lungs and rolled over the side and into the water.

It was startling cold, cold enough to almost stop the heart. He was dragged under by the weight of his coat, which he had buttoned against the chilly night air. He did not fight it but let it take him deep, away from the riot overhead. The water muffled the thunder of the black boat’s engines and the roar of the machine gun. But he heard the purposeful thrashing of many propellers.

He was running out of air. He ripped at the buttons and got out of his coat and swam at an angle to the surface, trying to move as far as he could from the boats. He broke surface at last, gulped air, and looked around. The hijackers were thirty feet away, swarming over his boat, busy loading his booze into theirs. They had switched off the searchlight and were working by flashlight. He swam farther away so they wouldn’t see him and dog-paddled, teeth chattering, to stay afloat. As soon as they finished, they attacked the catboat’s bilges with axes, chopping holes in the bottom. She started to settle, pulled under by the weight of her centerboard.

The black boat engaged its engines and thundered into the night.

* * *

An armored car painted with skulls and crossbones led a gang of anti-Communists into a Berlin alley. They were police-trained and armed with pistols and rubber truncheons. The men trapped inside the Communist bomb factory panicked. The Reds had one gun among them, a rusted revolver. The consignment of brand-new Ortgies 7.65 pistols that the Central Committee had promised had not materialized. Anny, the girl who cooked for them, turned in terror to Pauline Grandzau.

Pauline took her hand.

The bomb factory was hidden in a ground-floor tenement flat in the Wedding working-class district of narrow streets and crooked alleys. If anyone could help her find the truth about Johann Kozlov, it was this girl Pauline had followed here. Anny was a passionate believer in the workers’ cause and a reluctant convert to violent revolution, which she called a historic necessity.

Though highly intelligent, she seemed utterly unaware that the security police had been watching her. She would be locked in a cell if they hadn’t hoped she would lead them to the Comintern agent, Valtin, who had approached Johann Kozlov. At this crucial moment, Pauline surmised, they had lost track of her and had no idea that their unwitting Judas goat was moments from being badly injured or killed.

The door shook as the anti-Communists hammered on it with truncheons and gun butts. The bombmakers threw their shoulders against the door to hold it shut.

“Help me pull up the rug,” Pauline told Anny.

The bombmakers had apparently grown up in neighborhoods less poor than this one and none of them even suspected there was a trapdoor under the filthy carpet. It opened over a wet earthen cellar. The cellar had been dug decades ago by country peasants when they moved to the city in the forlorn hope of storing vegetables grown in tenement shadows.

“How did you know?” Anny whispered.

“When I was a girl, I lived in Wedding with my mother.”

If the root cellar was like others Pauline had seen, it would have another door that opened outside into what she hoped would be an interior yard with a fence they could squeeze through and run. It did. Holding Anny’s hand tightly, she emerged under a sliver of gray sky spitting rain.

Buildings walled them in on all four sides. Only one had a door.

“What of the others?” asked Anny.

“They’ll follow, if they have any sense,”

But before the bomb builders could escape through the cellar, an explosion shook the ground. A cloud of dust burst from the cellar door. Pauline felt the earth tremble under her feet as the entire front of the crumbling tenement collapsed. Brick and timber buried the anti-Communists and their armored car in the alley and the bomb-makers in their flat.

* * *

Isaac Bell asked Captain Novicki, “What happened to your face, Dave?”

“Just some splinters.”

“Looks like a treeful.”

“Listen, Isaac. I have a confession to make.”

“What did you do?”

“I got caught running rum.”

Bell gave him a brisk once-over. His cheeks above his beard and his forehead were speckled with cuts, and he had one of those new Band-Aids stuck on his ear. He was lucky he hadn’t lost an eye. Otherwise, he looked his usual rugged self, a feisty old man who did not think he was old. “Caught running rum? Or hijacked?”

“Hijacked.”

“Where’d it happen?”

“They were waiting a half mile off Fire Island Inlet. Shot up my boat and stole the… cargo. Then chopped holes in the bottom to sink her.”

“Sounds like you’re lucky you’re alive.”

“Darned lucky. Thankfully, I don’t have to tell Joe right away. Bad enough admitting to you that I broke the law.”

“I’m not a cop,” said Bell. “And I’m not a priest.”

“You’re a Van Dorn, that’s worse. Joe sets high standards. It would be easier telling a cop or a priest. This is just embarrassing as hell. But I’m telling you for a reason.”

“What else happened?”

“I saw the black boat everyone’s talking about.”

Bell’s eyes lit up. “Describe it!”

The old sea captain, not surprisingly, was an excellent witness. He had observed closely and recalled details. He estimated that the boat was sixty or seventy feet long. “Narrow beam. She rides very low in the water, but she’ll be seakindly with that flared bow. Three Libertys in the motor box. And there was room in the box for an extra standing by in case one stopped running. Forward cockpit, room for four or five men. She looks small because she’s built so fine, but she is one big boat. I’ll bet she’ll carry a thousand cases.”

“Guns?”

“Oh yes. Sounded like the Lewis the Navy had on the subchasers. And a mammoth searchlight. Big as a destroyer’s.”

“Armor?”

Novicki shrugged his brawny shoulders. “I don’t know, I wasn’t shooting back.”

“How fast is she? Joe thought she turned fifty knots.”

“Those Libertys roared like she could.”

“It sounds very much like what Joe described. How’d you happen to survive?”

“Took my chances in the drink.”

“You swam ashore?” Bell asked, astonished. The seawater was cold and rough and Novicki had to be pushing seventy.

“No. I clambered aboard my boat, stuffed canvas in the holes they chopped, and bailed like mad until we drifted onto the beach. The Inlet Coast Guard Station lent a hand. Lucky the thieves took every last bag of booze, so I wasn’t breaking any laws.”

“Close call all around,” said Bell.

The old man hung his head. “I feel like a damned fool. I was out of a job. Broke. Fellow offered me money to make the taxi run. Sounded like easy money.”

“How many runs did you do?”

“It was my first.”

“Want some advice?”

“Yeah, I know. Don’t do it again.”

“Running rum will get you killed. The smuggling business is changing, fast – gangsters are taking over.”

“Based on last night,” Novicki said wryly, “I can’t argue with that.”

Bell said, “Maybe Barnacle Bill should go back to sea.”

“Isaac, I’d love to. Damned few windjammers left since the war sunk so many. No one’s going to put a man my age in charge of a steamer.”

“I’ll bet I can put you on a windjammer,” said Bell. “I talked to fellows in the Bahamas liquor business – I’m working every angle in this case – and they operate on the ‘lawful’ side, shipping Scotch and gin from Britain and rum from Hispaniola to Nassau. It’s a legal, aboveboard enterprise – at least until the rumrunners take it from Nassau. How would you feel if I could wrangle you a job sailing a rum schooner from the Caribbean up to The Bahamas?”

“If they’d hire an old man.”

“They’ll hire any qualified master who’s still breathing. Few young captains can be trusted with a sailing ship. And seafaring geezers are in short supply, what with so many captains taking up the booze business. What do you say?”

“I’d be mighty grateful.”

Isaac Bell thrust out his hand. “Put her there. We’ll shake on it. And don’t worry, Joe won’t hear about this from me.”

“I’ll tell him myself as soon as he’s up to hearing it. I won’t lie to a friend. But, Isaac, there’s one more thing I should tell you.”

Bell smiled. “I hope you haven’t rifled the poor box.”

“Didn’t burn down any churches either,” Novicki smiled back. “I don’t know what it means. I thought I heard the hijackers shouting in Russian.”

“ Russian?Are you sure?”

“The Lewis gun was going to beat the band, but I’ve sailed with Russians – right good seamen when sober – and I swear they could have been yelling Russian. Sure as heck weren’t English.”

Isaac Bell dampened his excitement at this news. He did not want to encourage Novicki to embellish beyond what he believed. “There are many foreign sailors on Rum Row. Could they have been sailors up from the Caribbean?”

“No, I’d recognize the Caribbean dialect.”

“There’s a slew of Italian gangsters in the booze line. Maybe it was a ship from Italy?”

“No, they weren’t Eye-talian. Coulda been German, but the more I think on it, I heard Russian. Or Polish, I suppose. Except Russian doesn’t make sense. I mean, I could imagine Russians anchoring on Rum Row to sell the stuff, I suppose, but not running it to the beach. That’s for local fellows who know the water.”

“I’m glad you came to me, Dave.”

“Might this help you nail the thugs who shot Joe?”

“It could,” said Bell. Considering, he thought to himself, that a German-Russian rumrunner had been shot, in the grisly Cheka way, with a bullet that could have been propelled by Russian smokeless powder. “Go say good-bye to Joe and Dorothy and pack your sea chest.”

“I hate leaving them.”

“They’ll get by. I’m here, Dorothy’s strong, and, with any luck, Joe will continue improving.”

“If he doesn’t get another infection.”

“You being here can’t stop an infection,” Bell said firmly. He reached for his wallet. “Buy a train ticket to Miami. I’ll have a wire about the ship waiting for you at the station. Depending on where the ship is, you’ll have to take a steamer either to Nassau or down to Jamaica or Hispaniola.”

“I can’t take your money.”

Bell was not surprised by Novicki’s reluctance and had prepared for it. He extended a thick wad of bills. “It’s not my money, it’s Van Dorn money. And I’m hiring you to send me a report on the Nassau-to-Miami rum-running before you ship out for the Caribbean.”

Novicki set a stubborn jaw.

“It’s not charity,” Bell insisted firmly. “I’m convinced that the illegal booze business is about to become a national criminal enterprise. If I’m right, then the smuggling and bootlegging at entry points like Detroit and Florida are going to attract the same criminals who are getting rich in New York. I’ve already put a top man in Detroit. The fact that you are going to Miami means that you can help me out down there.”

“I’ll get myself down there on my own.”

Bell grabbed his hand and pressed the money into it. “I need you there right away. You’re alert and observant, Dave. I need all the help you can give me.”

He walked Captain Novicki out the door and hurried back to the bull pen, where he leveled an imperious finger at three bespectacled detectives. Dressed in vests, bow ties, and banded shirtsleeves, they looked less like private investigators than hard-eyed, humorless bookkeepers.

Adler, Kliegman, and Marcum gathered around his desk.

“The high-powered armored rum boat that machine-gunned the Boss is prowling the coast again,” Bell said. “Grady Forrer will pinpoint the location of boatyards in Long Island, New York, and New Jersey that are capable of building such a vessel. You gents will canvas them to find out which one launched her. Pretend that your bootlegger boss is offering top dollar to buy one like it – only faster. Telephone me the instant you find one and I’ll be there with the money.”

Something else that the cool-headed old geezer told him about the black boat had lodged in the back of Bell’s mind. Despite ducking bullets and swimming for his life, Dave Novicki had recalled in fine detail a long rank of three engines spitting fire from a motor box near the stern. He had speculated that the box had room for a fourth engine. That the fourth was not spitting fire indicated either that it had broken down or, as likely, was a replacement standing by in case one of the three regulars stopped running.

No one knew better than an airplane pilot that Libertys broke down often. A big selling point when he bought his Loening Air Yacht had been the design that perched the motor high atop the wing, which provided for quick removal and replacement of the entire unit. He had not signed on the dotted line until Loening Aeronautical threw in a spare motor and a crate of valves.

“McKinney!”

“Right here, Mr. Bell.”

“Do any of your Washington friends work for the War Department’s director of sales?”

“They’ll know someone who does.”

“Find a War Department man who can tell us who buys war surplus Liberty motors and spare parts.”

“I don’t mean to outguess you, Mr. Bell, but at last count the government had thirteen thousandLiberty motors on hand.”

“That’s why bootleggers buy them. They’re fast, cheap, and plentiful. Tell your man to concentrate on motor and spare parts purchases within a hundred miles of New York.”

The detectives scattered.

Bell sent a transatlantic cable to Pauline Grandzau.

MORE RUSSIANS.

WHAT OF KOZLOV?

* * *

Pauline Grandzau shook the Communist girl Anny awake when the Hamburg train slowed to stop at a small-town station ten miles before the northern port city. They got off the train and walked from the town into the forest where Anny’s friend, Valtin, was leading a Hundertschaftencompany of a hundred Communist fighters in maneuvers in preparation to lead an uprising in Hamburg.

“Is Valtin your friend or boyfriend?” Pauline asked.

“We don’t do it that way. If a girl likes a boy, she says, ‘Come with me.’ And if he wants to, he comes. But that doesn’t mean you have to be with him every day.”

“What if you do want to be with him every day?”

“You can. But if another girl says, ‘Come with me,’ you would be wrong to try to stop him. The revolution has no room for jealousy.”

Pauline Grandzau found that utopian fantasy even harder to believe when Anny pointed out the tall, handsome, dark-haired Valtin. Even seen at a distance through the trees, he looked like a man who could provoke an array of jealousies with a smile.

At the moment, he was concentrating mightily on drilling a hundred tough-looking merchant seamen armed with ancient czarist army rifles, a variety of pistols, including a handful of new Ortgies, some powerful World War stick grenades, and numerous old-fashioned Kugel grenades. Of the hundred, she noticed on closer inspection, at least twenty were younger men, carrying knives and clubs.

They were rehearsing signals for assault and retreat as they advanced and fell back along forest paths that represented city streets and gathered around trees that stood for tenement buildings and factories. A huge heap of fallen trees and limbs became a street barricade.

Valtin ordered a break. The men sprawled on the forest floor and shared cigarettes. Valtin sauntered over and kissed Anny on the mouth without taking his eyes off Pauline. “Who are you?”

“This is Pauline,” said Anny. “She saved me from the Bürgerwehr.”

“How?”

Anny explained how she’d been trapped in the bomb factory. Pauline said, “All I did was find a way out.”

“Why were you there?”

“She is looking for someone named Kozlov.”

“Johann Kozlov,” said Pauline. “I had hoped one of the bomb builders knew him, but the Bürgerwehr attacked before I could ask.”

“Why do you ask about Kozlov?”

Pauline had rehearsed her answer. “My brother is in prison in America. Kozlov tried to get out of being deported by testifying against Fritz. I want Kozlov to retract his false statements.”

“Why would he?”

“To free a wrongly accused honest man.”

“Are you out of your mind? Kozlov is a revolutionary. He can’t operate by ‘honest man’ morals.”

Valtin was not aware that Johann Kozlov had been killed in America. Pauline thought that odd if Kozlov had been his recruit. Of course, Valtin had been hiding and preparing for the assault on Hamburg and cut off from regular intelligence. But it struck her that Valtin hadn’t necessarily recruited Kozlov to the Comintern. What if Kozlov was already a Comintern agent and Valtin had been sent either to test his loyalty since his arrest in America or to give him instructions from Moscow?

Valtin was eyeing her suspiciously. “Who are you? What do you do? How do you make your living?”

“I am a librarian.”

“Where?”

“Berlin.” She gave him a card.

“Prussian State Library,” he read aloud. “You have degrees. You are a specialist. Where did you grow up?”

She told him her mother’s last address in Wedding. He raised his eyebrows. “You’ve come a long way.”

“Education elevates.”

“You do not speak with the accent of a Berlin street urchin.”

Pauline said, “I was ambitious to leave all that behind.”

“Not very far behind in a Wedding bomb factory. And now you’re standing in a Red encampment.”

“I go where I must to help my brother. I ask you again, where should I look for Kozlov?”

“Berlin. He was a street fighter in the uprising.”

“Who were his comrades?”

“He fought beside Zolner,” Valtin answered offhandedly as if Zolner was a name she should know. A hero and a famous leader. Ex-commander Richter would know the name. From Hamburg she could telephone Richter and ask what the police knew about Zolner.

“Do you know where Zolner is now?”

“I am hoping the Central Committee will dispatch Zolner to lead the fight in Hamburg. Why don’t you come with us?” He spoke offhandedly again, but it was clearly a challenge. Or a test.

“What is Zolner’s first name?”

“Why don’t you ask him in Hamburg?”

It was dark when the Hundertschaftenbegan marching along a railroad track toward Hamburg and she was alone with Anny. The women’s job was to carry first-aid kits at the back of the line.

“What is Zolner’s first name?”

“I don’t know,” Anny whispered back. “They say he once danced in the ballet.”