“Counterfeiters live there,” Uncle Darbee explained.
“Faster!” said Bell.
He jumped onto the square forward deck.
“Get me alongside of the turret.”
The mostly submerged Holland was headed toward the Upper Bay at six knots. Darbee fiddled with his motor. The noise deepened to an insistent growl, and the oyster scow doubled her speed. It halved the distance to the splashing handrails, halved it again, and pulled past the backwash of the submarine’s enormous propeller. Bell braced to jump to the conning tower. The wooden boat surged alongside. He could sense more than actually see the steel hull beneath the surface. He braced to jump, targeting the periscope tube, gambling that the thin tube was strong enough to hold him until he got a grip on the rails.
The Holland submarine disappeared.
One moment, the turret was just ahead of him. The next, it was gone, deep in the water. Bell could see trailing bubbles and the ripples from the propeller, but there was nothing to jump onto anymore, no turret, no rails, no periscope.
“Slow down,” Bell called to Darbee. “Follow his wake.”
Darbee throttled back to match the submarine’s six-knot speed.
Bell stood on the foredeck, watching the rhythmic swirls of propeller wash and signaling the old man when to nudge his tiller to the left or right. How the underwater ship was navigating its course was a mystery that was solved after they had gone half a mile. Shortly before the submarine reached the next bend in the channel, its periscope suddenly emerged from the water, and the submarine changed course.
The spy had plotted their route out of the Kill Van Kull by noting the time that would elapse between each turn. Bell signaled a similar change and the oyster scow turned with it. The periscope stayed above water. It swiveled around until its glass eye was facing him.
“Stop engine!” Bell shouted.
The oyster boat’s speed dropped as it drifted on momentum. Bell watched for signs that the Holland would back up or even turn around to ram them. But it held its course and pulled ahead of the scow, still showing its periscope.
“Darbee, did the test Holland you watched have a torpedo tube in back?”
“No,” Darbee answered to Bell’s relief, until he added, “I heard talk they might add one.”
“I can’t imagine he’d waste an entire torpedo on us.”
“Suppose not.”
“Speed up. Get closer.”
Ahead, the Kill took a sharp turn. The periscope swiveled around, and the unseen helmsman steered through it. Bell signaled for the oyster boat to accelerate. He drew within twenty yards of the stubby tube and the swirling propeller wash. But the water ahead was turning choppy as the Kill spread into the Upper Bay.
Staten Island and Bayonne fell behind. A chilly breeze cut through Bell’s wet clothes, and waves began curling over the periscope. Enormous bubbles burst on the surface, and he realized that the Holland was forcing air out of its floatation tanks and admitting water to descend deeper. The periscope dropped from sight. The windswept waves of the Upper Bay obliterated the swirling wake.
“He’s gone,” said Darbee.
Bell searched hopelessly. Three miles across the bay sprawled the dockyards of Brooklyn and beyond them low green hills. To his left, four or five miles to the northwest, Bell saw the tall buildings of lower Manhattan and the elegantly draped cables of the Brooklyn Bridge spanning the East River.
“Do you know where Catherine Slip is?”
Darbee swung his tiller. “What do you want there?”
“Dyname,” Bell answered. The fastest ship in New York, equipped with a telephone and a radio telegraph, and commanded by a high-ranking naval hero who could move quickly to rally the Navy against the spy’s submarine and radio the New Hampshire to rig torpedo nets before entering the port.
Darbee gave him a canvas pea jacket that smelled of mold. Bell stripped off his wet coat and shirt, dried out his Browning, and poured water out of his boots. The overpowered oyster scow covered the five miles to the Brooklyn Bridge in twenty minutes. But as they passed under the bridge, Bell’s heart sank. The battleship New Hampshire had already landed. It was moored to the pier closest to the way that held Hull 44. If 44 was O’Shay’s target, they were a pair of sitting ducks. Explosions on the floating ship would set the entire navy yard afire.
TO ISAAC BELL’S RELIEF, Dyname was at Catherine Slip.
He jumped from the oyster scow onto the nearest ladder, climbed onto the pier, crossed her gangway, and shoved through the door to Dyname’s main cabin. Captain Falconer was seated on the green leather banquette flanked by two of his yacht’s crewmen.
“Falconer. They’ve got a submarine.”
“So I am told,” said the Hero of Santiago with a grim nod at three Riker & Riker Protection Service gunmen who were covering the cabin with pistols and a sawed-off shotgun. Bell recognized the bodyguard, Plimpton, who had accompanied Herr Riker on the 20th Century Limited. Plimpton said, “You’re all wet, Mr. Bell, and you’ve lost your hat.”
53
HELLO, PLIMPTON.”
“Hands up.”
“Where’s O’Shay?”
“In the air!”
“Tell your boss that I owe him for an excellent emerald and I’m looking forward to paying him in person.”
“Now!”
“Do it, Bell,” Falconer said. “They’ve already shot my lieutenant and my engineer.”
Isaac Bell raised his hands, having stalled long enough to rate the opposition. Plimpton held a semiautomatic German Navy Luger like he knew his business. But the pretty-boy bruisers flanking him were out of their league. The elder, gingerly toting a sawed-off 20-gauge Remington, might pass for a small-town bank guard. The younger gripped his revolver like a bouncer in a YMCA. They were not on Falconer’s yacht due to a well-thought-out plan, Bell surmised. Something had gone wrong.
What had drawn them at the last moment to Dyname? Escape on the fastest ship in the harbor after O’Shay unleashed his torpedoes? But Dyname hadn’t the range to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Surely O’Shay had intended to take a liner to Europe, traveling with Katherine Dee under assumed names, or had booked secret passage on a freighter.
She was what went wrong, Bell realized. Katherine was wounded.
“Is the girl aboard?” he asked Falconer.
“She needs a doctor!” the boy with the shotgun blurted.
“Shut up, Bruce!” Plimpton growled.
“I’m aboard,” said Katherine Dee. She staggered up the companionway from Falconer’s private cabin. Disheveled, pale, and feverish, she looked like a child shaken from a deep sleep. Except for the hatred on her face. “Thanks to you,” she said bitterly to Bell. “You’re ruining everything.” She had held tight to her pistol when he had shot her in Barlowe’s jewelry shop. She raised it with a trembling hand and aimed it at him.
“Miss Dee!” said Bruce. “You shouldn’t be on your feet.”
“She needs a doctor,” said Bell.
“That’s what I’ve been saying. Mr. Plimpton, she’s got to have a doctor.”
“Shut up, Bruce,” said Plimpton. “She’ll have a doctor as soon as we get out of this mess.”
Hands in the air, boxed in by O’Shay’s gunmen, the tall detective searched her eyes, seeking some advantage, even as he braced for the bullet. He saw no mercy, no hesitation, only the deep, deep weariness of a person with a mortal wound. But she intended to kill him before she died. As she had killed Grover Lakewood and Father Jack and who knew how many others for Eyes O’Shay. How long before she passed out? Where, he wondered, was her “streak of God”?
“Did you know,” he asked, “that Father Jack prayed for you?”
“A lot of good his prayers did. It was Brian O’Shay who saved me.”
“What did Brian save you for? To hurl Grover Lakewood to his death? To shoot the priest?”
“Just like you shot me.”
“No,” said Bell. “I shot you to save the w
oman I love.”
“I love Brian. I will do anything for him.”
Bell recalled the words of train conductor Dilber on the 20th Century Limited. “Riker and his ward are completely on the up-and-up. Always separate staterooms.”
And O’Shay himself, speaking as Riker, had said, “The girl brings light into my life where there was darkness.”
“And what will Brian be for you?”
“He saved me.”
“Fifteen years ago. What will he do for the rest of your life, Katherine? Keep you pure?”
Her hand shook violently. “You-” Her breath came hoarsely.
“You kill to please him, and he keeps you pure? Is that how it works? Father Jack was right to pray for you.”
“Why?” she wailed.
“He knew in his heart, in his soul, that Brian O’Shay couldn’t save you.”
“And God could?”
“So the priest believed. With all his heart.”
Katherine lowered the gun. Her eyes rolled back in her head. The gun slipped from her fingers, and she folded to the deck as if she were a puppet whose strings had been cut.
“Plimpton, damn you!” Bruce shouted. “She’ll die without a doctor.” He gestured emphatically with his pistol.
Like a viper striking reflexively at movement, Plimpton shot Bruce between the eyes and whirled back to the blur of motion that was Isaac Bell. The bodyguard had committed a fatal error.
Bell fired his Browning twice. Plimpton first, then the remaining gunman. As the gunman pitched forward, his shotgun went off, the report deafening in the confined space of the yacht’s cabin. A swath of pellets tore under the banquette into the legs of Lowell Falconer and his crew.
Bell was wrapping a tourniquet above Falconer’s knee when Donald Darbee stuck a cautious head in the door. “Thought you’d want to know, Mr. Bell, the Holland is passing under the Brooklyn Bridge.”
54
SURFACE!” SHOUTED DICK CONDON, THE FIRST MATE WHOM Eyes O’Shay had put in command of his Holland submarine after he murdered Captain Hatch.
“No!” O’Shay countermanded the order. “Stay down. They’ll see us.”
“The tide is killing us,” the frightened Irish rebel shouted back. “The current is running four knots. We only make six knots on electric! We have to surface to use the gasoline engine.”
O’Shay gripped Condon’s shoulder. The panic in the man’s voice was scaring the men who were operating the ballasting and trimming tanks and preparing to fire the torpedo, which was precisely why he had decided to sail with the submarine. Someone had to keep a clear head. “Six? Four? Who cares? We’re two knots faster.”
“No, Mr. O’Shay. Only directly into the tide. When I turn broadside to line up a torpedo, we’ll be swept away.”
“Try it!” O’Shay demanded. “Take the chance.”
Dick Condon switched the vertical rudder to hand control from the less fine compressed-air steering and moved it cautiously. The deck tilted under their feet. Then the East River caught the hundred-foot submarine with the fury of a shark tearing into a weak swimmer. The men in the small dark space smashed into pipes, conduits, valves, and air hoses as the boat was tumbled.
“Surface!” Condon’s voice rose to a scream.
“No.”
“I must put the conning tower in the air, sir. It doesn’t matter, Mr. O’Shay,” he pleaded. “We can shoot better on the surface. The first torpedo is already loaded. We can fire, submerge, let the current sweep us down again while we reload, and return to the surface. You’ll get what you want, sir. And if anyone sees us, they’ll see it’s a British ship. Just like we want. Please, sir. You must listen to reason or all is lost.”
O’Shay shoved him from the periscope and looked for himself.
The river surface was wild, an ever-moving crazy quilt of tumbling waves. Spray obscured the glass. Just as it cleared, a wave curled over it, blacking it out. The boat lurched violently. Suddenly the periscope stood free of the jumbled water, and O’Shay saw that they were nearly abreast of the navy yard.
The New Hampshire was just where he wanted it. He could not have positioned the long white hull better himself. But the submarine was slipping backward even though the propeller was thrashing and the electric motor smelled like it was burning up.
“All right,” O’Shay conceded. “Attack on the surface.”
“Reduce to half speed!” Condon ordered. The motor stopped straining, and the boat stopped shaking. He watched through the periscope, controlling their drift with skillful twists of the horizontal and vertical rudders. “Prepare to surface.”
“What’s that noise?”
The Royal Navy veterans exchanged puzzled glances.
“Is something wrong with the motor?” asked O’Shay.
“No, no, no. It’s in the water.”
The crew stood still, ears cocked to a strange, high-pitched whine that grew louder and shriller by the second.
“A ship?”
Condon spun the periscope, searching the river. The engineer voiced what his shipmates were thinking.
“It doesn’t sound like any ship I ever heard.”
“Down!” Condon shouted. “Take her down.”
“WHERE DID HE GO?” Lowell Falconer gasped. To Isaac Bell’s astonishment, the bloodied Navy captain had dragged himself topside, where Bell was driving Dyname toward the Brooklyn Bridge at thirty knots.
“Dead ahead,” said Isaac Bell. He had one hand on the steam lever, the other gripped the helm. “Is that tourniquet doing its job?” he asked, not taking his eyes from the river.
“I’d be dead if it weren’t,” Falconer snapped through gritted teeth. He was white from loss of blood, and Bell doubted he would be conscious much longer. The effort to climb the few steps to the bridge must have been herculean. “Who’s in the engine room?” Falconer asked.
“Uncle Darbee claims he was coal stoker on the Staten Island Ferry, and assistant engineer when the regular fellow got drunk.”
“Dyname burns oil.”
“He figured that out when he couldn’t find a shovel. We’ve got plenty of steam.”
“I don’t see the Holland.”
“It’s gone up and down. I saw the periscope a moment ago. There!”
The stubby conning tower broke the surface. The hull itself emerged briefly and rolled back under.
“Tide’s battering him,” muttered Falconer. “It’s ebbing under a full moon.”
“Good,” said Bell. “We need all the help we can get.”
Dyname streaked through the patch of roiled water. The submarine was nowhere to be seen. Falconer tugged at Bell’s sleeve, whispering urgently, “He’s some sort of A-Class Royal Navy Holland-triple our tonnage. Look out, if he surfaces. He’ll be faster on his main engine.” With that warning, the captain slid unconscious to the deck. Bell throttled back and turned the speeding yacht around until it was pointing upstream again. He was several hundred yards beyond the Brooklyn Bridge now, scanning the water in the failing light.
A ferryboat pulled abruptly from its Pine Street Pier, cut off a big Bronx-bound Pennsylvania Railroad ferry, and raced up the East River. Their wakes combined to render vast stretches of water too choppy for Bell to distinguish the periscope from breaking seas. He drove into the chop and circled. Suddenly he saw it far ahead. It had trailed behind the ferries, masked by them, and was pulling abreast of the navy yard.
The Holland submarine burst from the water, revealing her conning tower and the full hundred feet of her hull. Blue smoke spewed. Gasoline exhaust, Bell realized, from her powerful main engine. On the surface now, she was a full-fledged torpedo boat, quick and nimble.
But vulnerable.
Bell shoved the steam lever forward, seizing this precious chance to ram her. But even as the steel yacht gathered speed, the long Holland heeled into a tight turn and pointed straight at Dyname. Her bow reared. Bell saw the dark maw of an open bow tube. From it leaped a Mark 14 Wheeler torpedo.
55
THE TORPEDO SUBMERGED.
Isaac Bell could only guess whether to steer left or right. He could not see the torpedo bearing down on him underwater. Nor whether it was veering left or right. Whatever wake it trailed was erased by the heavy chop. Dyname was one hundred feet long and ten feet wide. The instant he turned, he would present a bigger target broadside. If he guessed wrong, the TNT warhead would blow the yacht to pieces. O’Shay would submerge to reload at leisure and continue his attack.
Bell steered straight ahead.
The Holland saw him coming. It began to submerge. But it was descending too slowly to escape the knife-thin steel hull bearing down on it at nearly forty knots. It turned abruptly to the right, Isaac Bell’s left. He still could not see the torpedo’s wake, nor any trail of bubbles. “Hang on, Uncle Danny!” he shouted down the voice pipe, and turned left to ram.
A flash of light and an explosion behind him told Bell he had guessed correctly. Had he not counterpunched, the torpedo would have sunk him. Instead, it had detonated against an impervious stone pier of the Brooklyn Bridge, and he was close enough to the Holland to see its rivets. He braced for the impact by pressing hard against the helm the second before she hit the submarine just behind its conning tower. At the speed Dyname was traveling, Bell expected to shear through the Holland and cut it in half. But he had miscalculated. With her sharp bow lifting from the water as her nine propellers churned, the yacht rode up onto the Holland’s hull, perched across it, then slid off with screech of tearing steel and shearing rivets.
Dyname’s propellers were still spinning, and they pushed the yacht hundreds of yards from the collision before he could stop them. The Holland had vanished, submerged or sunk, he could not tell. Then Uncle Donny poked his head up to report, “Water’s coming in.”
“Can you give me steam?”
“Not for long,” the old man answered. Bell circled the site of the collision. He could feel the water weighing down Dyname’s hull.
Seven minutes after the Holland submerged, it reappeared a short distance away.
The Spy Page 35