Текст книги "The Striker"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Justin Scott
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

46

The White Ladycareened through a sharp bend in the river at mile marker 25 and pounded toward Pittsburgh belching black columns from her chimneys and churning a white wake behind her.

“She smells the barn!” said the Ohio River pilot – one of two Isaac Bell had hired in Cincinnati – along with a chief engineer famously reckless in the pursuit of hotter steam.

“Faster,” said Bell, and the pilot rang the engine room.

Forced draft furnace fans roared. Jim Higgins’s miners shoveled on the coal. And the engineer played fast and loose with his boiler levels, tempting eternal oblivion by pumping water on red-hot plates to jump the pressure.

At mile marker 10, Bell saw the horizon grow dark with city smoke. Thunderheads loomed. Bolts of lightning pierced them. Rain sizzled down and flattened the seething currents of the river in flood.

Soon the hills of Pittsburgh hunched into the dismal sky. Tall buildings emerged from the smoke. The White Ladysteamed out of the Ohio River and up the Monongahela, past the Point and under the bridges of the Golden Triangle. Fifty-five minutes after mile marker 10, by Isaac Bell’s watch, forty-four hours from Cincinnati, the immense steamboat backed her paddle blades.

Escape pipes blew off excess steam with a roar that drowned out the ringing of her bell, and she nosed to a landing at the foot of the Amalgamated coal miners’ tent city. Miners recruited as deckhands hoisted her boarding stage onto a temporary wharf that the strikers had improvised by raising one of the barges that the Defense Committee had sunk to fortify the point with a crenellated breakwater.

Coal miners, their wives and children, church ladies, reformers, and scribbling newspaper reporters stared. Isaac Bell stared back, as amazed. The last person he expected to walk up the stage lugging his long carpetbag was Aloysius Clarke, decked out in top hat and tails.

“Pretty steamboat, Isaac.”

“What are you doing out of the hospital?”

Wish dropped his bag with a clank and caught his breath. “Couldn’t miss the Duquesne Cotillion.”

“You came all the way to Pittsburgh for the ball?”

“Quite a shindig. Everybody who was anybody was there. I even met Colonel J. Philip Swigert of the Pennsylvania state militia. Talkative gent, particularly when he’s had a few.”

“Well done!” Bell reached to slap Wish on the shoulder in congratulations. Wish stayed him with a gesture. “Don’t tear the stitches.”

Bell pulled up short. “Are you O.K.?”

“Tip-top.”

“You don’t look tip-top– What did the colonel say?”

“You got here just in time,” Wish answered gravely. “State militia, and the Pinkertons, and the Coal and Iron Police, are marching aboard the Vulcan Kingthis morning. They’ll head downstream lickety-split. Reckon to round the Homestead Works two or three hours from now, depending how fast they load up. Then their cannon’ll blast an opening in these barges, and their whole gang will storm ashore.”

Bell called down to the miners tending the White Lady’s furnaces. “Get her coaled up and the boys fed. We’re going back to work.”

The appearance of Captain Jennings, master of the exploded Camilla, was even more unexpected, and Isaac Bell thought for an instant he was seeing a ghost. But the old pilot was no ghost, only a grieving father. “We swapped boats that night. They murdered my boy.”

“I am so sorry, Captain.”

“I’ll run your boat. I know this stretch of the Mon better than your fellers from Cincinnati.”

“She’s a lot bigger than Camilla.”

Jennings started up the stairs to the wheelhouse. “Boats are the same. Rivers ain’t.”

“Letter came for you,” said Wish, pulling an envelope from his vest. “Lady’s handwriting.”

He stepped aside to give Bell privacy to read it.

Bell tore it open. It was from Mary. But it contained only four lines.

My Dearest Isaac,

What I am going to do, I must do.

I hope with all my heart that we’ll be together one day in a better world.

He read it over and over. At length, Wish stepped closer to him. “You’re looking mighty low for a fellow about to fight a naval battle.”

Bell showed him Mary’s letter.

“Write her back.”

“I don’t know what to say. I don’t know where to send it.”

“Write it anyway. If you don’t, you’ll wish you had. You’ve got a moment right now before all hell breaks loose.”

Bell stood aside while the firemen wheelbarrowed coal and tried to pen an answer in his notebook. The words would not come. He stared at the crowded tent city. They’d flown a defiant red flag from the top of the tipple. But people were staring at the river, bracing for attack. He saw Archie Abbott, running down the slope, waving to get his attention, and, in that instant, he suddenly knew what to write.

Dear Mary,

When you hope we’ll be together in a better world, I hope you mean a changed world on Earth so we don’t have to wait until Heaven, which your words had the sound of. Wherever it is, it will be for me a better world with you by my side. If that’s not enough for you, then why don’t we do something here and now to fix it, together?

He paused, still grasping for clarity. Archie was almost to the stage and calling him. Bell touched his pen to the paper again.

What I’m trying to say is, come back.

All my love

“Isaac!” Archie bounded up the stage, out of breath. He spoke in a low and urgent voice. “The miners got a cannon.”

“What?”

“I heard that someone – presumably, our friend Mr. Clay – gave the strikers a cannon. I found it. They told me it’s a 1.65 Hotchkiss Mountain Gun. Fast-firing and accurate. Look up, right at the foot of the tipple. They just pulled the canvas off it.”

Bell focused his eyes on the distant emplacement. It was a wheel-mounted gun, and largely hidden behind stacked gunnysacks of coal and thick masonry at the base of the tipple.

He said, “The first shot the miners fire at the Vulcan Kingwill give the militia all the excuse they need to pounce ashore shooting – unless the miners get lucky and sink her with their first shot, which is highly unlikely. Even if they did, it would just prolong the inevitable and make it worse.”

“What are you going to do, Isaac?”

Bell called, “Hey, Wish, do you have a cigar?”

“Of course,” said Wish, tugging a Havana from his tailcoat. “What dapper bon vivant attends a ball without cigars?”

Bell clamped it between his teeth.

“Want a light?”

“Not yet. You got a sawed-off in your bag for Archie?”

Wish beckoned Archie and handed him the weapon. “Try and make sure no innocents are downwind.”

Archie said, “I thought apprentices aren’t allowed—”

“You’re temporarily promoted. Stick it under your coat. Don’t get close to me unless I yell for you.”

Bell strode down the boarding stage and hurried across the point to the powder shed the miners had erected far from the tents to store the fresh dynamite they’d managed to smuggle in at night. They were guarding it closely, recalling, no doubt, the accidental explosion that nearly sank the Sadieand half her barges. The Powder Committee remembered, too, the tall detective, who had recommended – at gunpoint – that the dynamite ride in its own barge apart from the people, and greeted him warmly.

“That’s a handsome steamboat you brought us, Mr. Bell. What can we do for you?”

“I need,” said Bell, “one stick of dynamite, a blasting cap, and a short safety fuse.”

“Want me to assemble it?”

“Appreciate it.”

He watched as the miner worked quickly but meticulously.

“How short a fuse do you want?”

“Give me ten seconds.”

The miner looked at him. “I hope you can run fast.”

“Fast enough.” Bell slipped the greasy red stick in his coat and gestured with his cigar. “Got a light?”

“Let’s move away from the powder shed.” The miner struck a match and shielded the flame from the wind and rain until Bell got the cigar lit and glowing.

“Thank you.”

“I’d recommend keeping the business end away from that fuse.”

Puffing on the cigar, trailing aromatic smoke, Isaac Bell walked up the slope to the gun emplacement. The Hotchkiss was oiled and well cared for, not a speck of rust on the wheels or the tube, and the men serving looked like they knew their business. They had seen White Ladyarrive and echoed the gratitude of the men at the powder shed.

Bell turned around as if to admire the steamer, which gleamed in the Pittsburgh murk as tall and long and white as the finest seaside resort. He puffed the red-hot coal at the front of his cigar, took the dynamite from his pocket, touched the cigar to the fuse, and puffed up a cloud of smoke to distract the gun crew as he faced the cannon and slid the cylinder of dynamite down the four-foot barrel.

“What did you—”

Hurrying down the hill at a fast lope, Bell called over his shoulder in a commanding voice, “Run for it! It’s dynamite. Archie!”

Fifty yards down, he looked back. The dynamite went off with a muffled peal. The gun jumped off its wheels, and the breech peeled open as if made of paper. The crew gathered around the shattered weapon. Angry men ran after Bell, shouting:

“What did you do to us?”

Bell kept walking fast, signaling Archie not to pull the shotgun until they really needed it.

“Why?”

“What did you do to us?”

“I’m hoping I saved your damned fool lives,” Bell said.

“How can we beat ’em? How can we win?”

The shouts died on their lips. All eyes flew to the top of the tipple. A lookout was bellowing through cupped hands:

“They’re coming! The black boat is coming.”

47

“Cast off!” Isaac Bell ordered.

He and Archie raced up the boarding stage. Bell gathered Mack and Wally on the wheelhouse stairs. “Somehow we have to keep them apart.”

The wheelhouse stood five decks above the river, and from it Bell could see much of the tent city sprawled on the Amalgamated point. On the other side of the barricades of heaped trolley cars, a rippling blue mass marked Pittsburgh police pacing in the rain.

“Itching for an opening,” muttered Mack Fulton. “Can’t wait to break heads.”

Captain Jennings stood with both hands on the six-foot-high brass-trimmed wheel, grim-faced and intent. At Bell’s command, he rang the engine room for Astern, turned his wheel slightly to swing the stern into the stream, and flanked the three-hundred-foot hull off the improvised wharf.

A Defense Committee detail, wielding axes, surged onto the barge they had raised to make a wharf and chopped holes in the bottom, resinking it into a protective wall of barges half sunken in the mud.

Bell said, “Put us between them and the point.”

Jennings angled the boat into the river and turned upstream. A tall Homestead Works blast furnace blocked the view beyond the next bend. For moments that seemed endless, they had the rain-spattered water to themselves.

“Did you write Mary?” Wish asked.

“I should have said it to her face– Here they come!”

Vulcan King’s tall chimneys showed first, swinging around the somber obstruction of the Homestead furnace. She was moving fast, flying with the current, and upon them before the White Ladywas halfway into the river. Suddenly, with no warning, the cannon on her bow boomed.

A shell screamed, skimming the river, and exploded on one of the barges blocking the bank. Timbers flew in the air.

Isaac Bell moved closer to Captain Jennings. “He’s got a cannon and we don’t. Can you ram him?”

“Saddlebag the murdering devils? You bet. Tell your boys down there to put on the blowers.”

Bell shouted the order into the engine room voice pipe.

Forced draft blowers roared in the chimneys, fanning the furnaces white-hot.

The Vulcan Kingfired again, and a second barge exploded. A third shot went high. It tore a swath through a line of tents, and the hillside seemed to quiver as hundreds of people ran, screaming.

“How can I help?” Bell asked Jennings.

“Tell me if he’s got himself a Mon pilot or a Cincinnati pilot.”

“I don’t know.”

“If he’s from Cincinnati, when he comes around that bend he just might put himself in the wrong place. There’s a crosscurrent when the river floods this high that’ll kick his stern and crowd him to the bank.”

The cannon boomed. A fourth shell blasted the barges. And Isaac Bell thought, I’m supposed to be stopping a war, not losing it.

* * *

Henry Clay was beside himself. Why weren’t the miners shooting back?

The Hotchkiss he gave them should be raking Vulcan King’s decks by now. Instead, militiamen were standing in the open, cheering each shot. And the company police and Pinkertons were clapping one another on the back like it was a baseball game.

A grinning Coal and Iron cop slapped Clay’s shoulder. “We’re winning.”

But Clay’s plan was to start a war – a shooting war on both sides – and keep it going, not win it. He grabbed an officer’s field glasses, ignoring his protests, and focused on the Hotchkiss. The cannon was there, shielded by coal bags at the foot of the tipple, but no one was manning it. And when he looked more closely, he saw the tube was perched at an odd angle. Something had happened to it, and that something was very likely named Isaac Bell.

“Give that back or I’ll have you up on charges,” shouted the officer. Clay, disguised in a private’s uniform, pushed through the cheering fools and headed for the main deck where the furnaces fired the boilers. His disguise included a khaki knapsack – a U.S. Army – issue Merriam Pack with an external frame supported by a belt. In it, he carried what at first glance appeared to be jagged chunks of coal but were actually dynamite sticks with detonators and one-inch fuses bundled in chamois leather dyed with lampblack.

Vulcan Kingwas a ten-boiler boat, and firemen were scrambling from one to the next, shoveling coal into wide-open furnaces. Someone saw Clay’s uniform and shouted, “How’s it going up there?”

“We’re winning!” said Clay, and when the fireman turned to scoop more coal, Clay lobbed one of his bombs into the furnace and ran as fast as he could to the back of the boat.

* * *

The Monongahela crosscurrent that Captain Jennings had hoped for caught the Vulcan King’s Cincinnati pilot unawares. Generated by the Amalgamated point of land deflecting extraordinarily high water, the current grabbed the steamboat’s stern and overwhelmed her thrashing paddles. Before her pilot could recover, the black boat’s bow was crowding the bank. Her hull thrust across the channel directly in the path of White Lady, which Isaac Bell had churning Full Aheadto ram.

Vulcan King’s cannon boomed.

It sounded immensely louder this time, thought Bell. Did they have a second cannon? Or had they finally unleashed the Gatling? But even as a wild shell soared over the barges and exploded in a kitchen tent, he saw it was the last shot the steamboat would ever fire at the strikers’ camp.

“Her boiler burst,” Captain Jennings shouted.

The steamboat’s chimneys leaned forward, tumbled off her hurricane deck, and crashed on her bow. Timbers followed. Glass and planking rained down. From her wheelhouse forward, her upper works were demolished.

“The murdering devils’ boiler burst!”

“It had help,” said Isaac Bell, who had seen it happen twice at Gleasonburg. “That was no accident.” But why would Henry Clay blow up his own boat?

“They got what they deserved!”

Captain Jennings rang for more steam.

The blowers roared.

“I’ll finish the sons of bitches.”

The shock of the explosion scattered burning furnace coal. The Vulcan King’s forward decks took fire from the shattered wheelhouse to the waterline. Militiamen in khaki stampeded from the flames. A man in the dark uniform of the Coal and Iron Police threw himself into the river. Strikebreakers dropped their pick handles and splashed in after him, calling for help.

“Stop!” said Isaac Bell. “Back your engines.”

48

“What are you doing, Isaac?” Wish, Wally, and Mack were at his side.

“Coming alongside to get those people off. Back your engines, Captain Jennings. Wheel hard over.”

“Not ’til I saddlebag the murderers.”

“Back them!”

“You can’t let ’em win.”

“Henry Clay doesn’t want to win. He wants mayhem. I won’t give it to him.”

Mack Fulton cocked his Smith & Wesson, told the pilot, “Boss man says back your engines.”

A single lever in the engine room engaged the reversing gears on both engines at once. Coupled to the same shaft as the stern wheel, when the engines stopped, the wheel stopped.

Escape pipes roared behind the wheelhouse.

Bell threw an arm around the grieving pilot’s shoulders. “Right now, they’re nothing more than scared fools. Like us– Hard over with your wheel, Captain. Bring us alongside. Let’s get those people off.”

Bell turned to his squad.

“Shoot anyone who tries to bring a weapon. Rifle, pistol, blackjack, or brass knuckles, shoot ’em. And watch for Clay. There’s more militia than anyone else, so he’ll probably be wearing a uniform.”

He led them down to the main deck. Captain Jennings circled to a position upstream from the Vulcan King, where he could use his paddles, rudders, and the hard-running Monongahela to maneuver beside the burning steamer.

Bell stationed Wally, Mack, and Archie where the boats would touch. Wish Clarke passed out shotguns and insisted on staying in the thick of it, claiming he would protect his hospital stitches with his sawed-off. Bell climbed one level to the boiler deck, where he could watch from above.

The fire was spreading, fed by dry wood and fresh paint, marching back from the Vulcan King’s bow, driving men toward the stern. In their chaotic, writhing mass, Bell saw that most wore khaki uniforms – short, four-button mud-colored sack coats, foraged caps on their heads, and cartridge boxes belted in back at the waist. Their weapons were a typically motley state militia collection of Spanish-American War black powder, single-shot .45–70 trapdoor rifles, improved Krag-Jørgensen magazine rifles, and even some 1895 Lee Navys – all with bayonets fixed. The Coal and Iron Police, easily identified by dark uniforms and shiny badges, had pistols and clubs. Known for brutality, they looked terrified, and many of the hard-eyed Pinkerton detectives had lost their bowlers in their panic.

The gap of water separating the boats narrowed.

The ex-prisoners drafted as strikebreakers clawed frantically to the rail.

Isaac Bell cupped his hands to shout, “Drop your weapons!”

Rifles and pick handles clattered to the deck.

Wish Clarke tipped his shotgun skyward and triggered a thunderous round.

“Drop ’em!”

Pistols and blackjacks carpeted the deck.

A Pinkerton scooped up a fallen Colt automatic and slipped it in his coat. Mack Fulton shot him without hesitating. As he fell, men turned out pockets to show they were empty.

The two hulls neared. Men poised to jump.

“Reach for the sky!” the Van Dorns bellowed. “Hands in the air.”

The flames bent toward them suddenly, driven by a shift in wind.

The hulls came together with a crash that nearly threw Bell from his perch on the boiler deck. Hundreds jumped, kicking and fighting to safety. Bell leaped onto a railing to see better. The Coal and Iron cops, the prisoners, and even the Pinkertons, had dissolved into a mob with a single mind – to get off the burning boat – and it was nearly impossible to distinguish individual features. Only the trained militia still held their hands in the air, trusting that if they followed orders, they would not be shot.

Henry Clay, Bell knew, was expert at melting into his surroundings, which was why Bell was positive Clay had disguised himself as a militiaman. But even they were so densely packed, as they crossed over, that every soldier in khaki looked the same. Desperate, Bell tried to concentrate on the bigger soldiers, those built more like Clay.

Here came one now, hands up to show they are empty, jumping onto White Lady, face inclined downward as he watched his footing. He was aboard in a flash, crowding into those ahead of him, stumbling forward when another behind him shoved his pack.

His pack.Instead of a cartridge box, he was wearing a khaki Merriam Pack big enough to hold a bomb.

“Stop that man!”

49

Wally Kisley lunged after Henry Clay.

Three men leaping madly from the flames trampled him.

Bell saw his checkerboard suit disappear in the scrum. He jumped from the rail to the deck and swung down to the main deck, landing on fallen men, kicking to his feet and running after Clay, who was racing toward the stern, straight-arming men out of his way. Suddenly, he cut across the open freight deck.

Bell veered after him.

Clay yanked a gun and fired three shots without breaking stride. Two fanned Bell’s face, the third drilled the brim of his hat, whirling it from his head. Bell stopped running and took careful aim with his Colt Army and triggered it just as Clay turned to fire again. He cried out as Bell’s shot, intended for his head, creased his hand instead when he raised his gun. The gun went flying. But the wound did not slow him as he leaped up the boiler deck stairs, slinging the Merriam Pack off his shoulders and clutching it by the straps.

Bell knew he was heading for the furnaces, intending to bomb a boiler.

He spotted him from the top of the stairs and again took careful aim.

The Colt roared. The shot staggered Clay. His arm dropped straight to his side, and the pack slipped from his hand. But he kept moving, ever swift and indestructible. He scooped up the fallen bag with his other hand and darted toward the nearest furnace. Bell took aim again. Firemen, panicked by gunshots and ricocheting lead, scattered for cover, blocking Bell’s shot. Henry Clay ran past the open furnace and tossed the pack underhand with a softball pitcher’s smooth delivery.

Bell saw a cloud of sparks as it landed in the shimmering bed of cherry red coals. In the half second he took to reach the firebox door, the canvas was burning brightly. He had to pull it out before the fire burned though the canvas and ignited the fuse.

Bell grabbed a fireman’s rake, reached into the blaze, caught the strap, and yanked. The strap burned through, and it broke. He thrust the rake again, caught the wooden frame, which was drenched in flame, and pulled it out. The pack fell, smoldering, at his feet. “Pull the fuse,” he shouted to the nearest coal miner and tore after Henry Clay, who was racing sternward on the freight deck.

Clay ran out of space where the boiler deck overlooked the White Lady’s fifty-foot stern wheel. Bell caught up. The wheel was throwing spray as paddle blade after paddle blade climbed out of the water behind the boat, circled through the air, and plunged down to push again. Henry Clay turned with a smile on his face and a derringer in his unwounded hand and fired. The bullet seared the heel of Bell’s hand. His thumb and fingers convulsed. His gun fell to the deck and bounced into the narrow slot between the back of the boat and the stern wheel.

Clay’s smile broadened in triumph. “I’ve waited a long time for this.”

He squeezed the trigger. Isaac Bell was already swinging, hoping that the only thing that would slow down the rogue detective would be talking too much. Before the slug had emerged from the barrel, Isaac Bell’s left fist smashed Clay’s jaw.

The shot missed.

Bell feinted with his wounded right hand, punched Clay with another powerful left. It staggered Clay, and he reeled backwards to the edge of the stern.

“Give it up,” said Bell. “It’s over.”

Clay looked at him incredulously. “It’s never over.”

He flew at Bell, cocking his left hand in a powerful fist. He tried to raise the right Bell had wounded and could not. An angry light filled his amber eyes, and he glared at his arm as if it were a traitor.

“I’m taking you in,” said Bell. “We’ll recommend mercy if you reveal who paid for this. Who’s the boss?”

“It’s never over,” Henry Clay repeated. He swung his good arm. Bell took the punch, rolled with it, and counterpunched, rocking Clay back on his heels.

“You can’t fight me with one arm. Give it up.”

“It’s never over,” Clay said again. But even as he spoke, he turned away.

Bell suddenly realized that Clay was so desperate to escape that he would risk certain death by trying to dive into the narrow strait of water between the White Lady’s stern and her churning wheel. Without Henry Clay, he had no case against the man backing him, no way to discover the identity of the true murderer, the real provocateur.

Bell lunged for him, and as fast as Henry Clay was, Isaac Bell was faster. He seized Clay’s militia tunic in his right hand and started to drag him from the edge. But this time, the young detective was the fighter betrayed by a wound. The bullet that had disarmed him had robbed his hand of too much strength. Thumb and fingers feathered apart. Clay tore loose and dived into the seething water.

Isaac Bell watched the wheel wash spewed by the slashing paddle blades. But Henry Clay’s body never broke the surface of that endless rolling wave behind the boat.