The Ironclad Covenant (Sam Reilly Book 10)

by Christopher Cartwright

Sam smiled. “What do you think happened here, back in the twenties?”

  Tom looked around the grotto from the entrance at the mouth of the cavern, back to where the water disappeared underground. “My guess is someone must have known about this spot and realized that barrels of rum or other contraband could be dropped into this creek, where they would be pulled underground by the flow of water and the slightly warmer waters of the siphon would disperse at the bottom of Lake Superior.”

  “There the J.F. Johnson would have been waiting, ready to pick up the bobbing barrels and ship them onto receiving ports anywhere along the Great Lakes.”

  “So, what went wrong?” Tom asked.

  Sam thought back to the message they’d found inside the wheel house of the J.F. Johnson that terrified Senator Perry – STANFORD STOLE THE MESKWAKI GOLD SPRING. I CAN TOO. “Stanford stole the Meskwaki Gold Spring!”

  Tom shrugged. “Yeah, I was there. I read the note, too. But how?”

  “How would you shut down an operation like this and at the same time get rid of your old boss and any competition?”

  “Of course, he’s filled some of the barrels with dynamite on a long timer!”

  “Right! He then dumped the barrels, into the subterranean river, where they were carried into Lake Superior. There the J.F. Johnson loaded up her secret bilge compartments with what her captain assumed was rum. Somewhere, hidden among those were explosives.”

  Tom grinned. “Only Stanford made a mistake, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. Stanford miscalculated the fuse length. He assumed the J.F. Johnson would have pulled away from her anchor by the time the explosion occurred. Instead, the ship was still there, right above the mouth of the cavern. Which meant when it sank, the ship became wedged into the mouth of the cavern.”

  “Stanford, assuming that he now had control of the new operation, kept using the Meskwaki Gold Spring until he discovered his barrels were no longer coming through the other side.”

  “Decades went by until advances in SCUBA diving and closed-circuit rebreathers made it possible for the Meskwaki Gold Spring to be reopened. Only this time, Prohibition no longer existed, but drugs and weapons had become major business. A business that would make Senator Perry rich.”

  “There’s just one thing I don’t understand.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If Stanford didn’t make his fortune by stealing the Meskwaki Gold Spring, how did the Perry family rise to its current position of wealth and power?”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  It was silent on board the Annabelle May. The water along Lake Superior deceptively gentle. From the bridge of the pleasure cruiser, Virginia studied the radar screen. The dive boat still hadn’t returned, but neither had Sam or Tom. She felt tense and focused. With her senses heightened, everything from the splash of a gentle wave through to the intermittent, sibilant breeze made her rigid with fear.

  The satellite phone rang.

  Virginia answered it before the second ring. “Hello?”

  It was Elise, Sam’s computer expert and hacker. “Has Sam and Tom dived yet?”

  “Yeah, they put into the water about twenty minutes ago. Why?”

  “I think I have an idea what’s happening. During the 1920s when prohibition was in full force, a number of organized crime families made a fortune in the bootlegging business. Some of the most successful of these operators were from Moosejaw, Saskatchewan – along the Canadian border.”

  “Go on.”

  Elise said, “There were a number of mob families, but the most notorious of these was a man named Alphonse Gabriel Capone. Nicknamed, Scarface, for a three-inch scar across his face, which he received after making an indecent comment about a woman at a bar, whose brother then slashed him across the face. Scarface was an American mobster, crime boss, and businessman who attained notoriety during the Prohibition era as the co-founder and boss of the Chicago Outfit.”

  “You think Al Capone’s descendants are running another contraband business at a shipwreck in Lake Superior?” Virginia asked, her voice, incredulous.

  “No. Al Capone was finally indicted for tax evasion in June 5, 1931. At the time, he supposedly brought in rum to the tune of a hundred million dollars from Moosejaw, but to this day no one knows exactly what secret method his rumrunners used in doing so.”

  Virginia asked, “So what does any of this have to do with the wreckage of the J.F. Johnson?”

  “When Al Capone was indicted and his empire toppled, do you think bootlegging ended?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Right, neither did the supply of arms, illicit drugs, or other contraband.”

  Virginia smiled. “So, someone else picked up the mantle?”

  “Exactly,” Elise said. “I found a buried police document dating back to the thirties, which reveals a new family had taken over Al Capone’s supply chain, moving into illegal arms and drug sales after December 5, 1933 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that prohibition had been repealed with the 21st Amendment.”

  “Did they ever catch the new organized crime family?”

  “That’s just it. The document noted that evidence was hard to produce because the new family had such strong connections to the police and politicians. Unlike Al Capone who flaunted his new-found wealth, the new family predominantly lived normal lives. In the end, the internal police decision, signed off by FDR agreed not to pursue the new organized crime boss – quoting huge collateral damage of hunting local police and politicians.”

  “What happened to the family?”

  “It’s suspected the family eventually made their fortune and assimilated into legitimate businesses. You want to guess where Stanford Perry – Senator Arthur Perry’s father – used to work as a boilerman?”

  “On board the J.F. Johnson?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you don’t think it was a coincidence that Al Capone was indicted two weeks before the ship met its ignoble demise?”

  “What happened to Stanford after the shipwreck?”

  “No one really knows for sure. He started up a number of legitimate businesses, which all were highly successful, until he became a prominent and successful man in town. His son, Arthur, studied Law at Stanford university – I’m not sure if the choice of university was Stanford’s humor there, but afterward Arthur became a successful criminal lawyer who quickly earned himself a position as Minnesota’s District Attorney.”

  “He ruthlessly went after all other crime figures within the state, making room for his father’s original business to thrive!”

  “Yes. In doing so, Senator Arthur Perry never got his hands dirty. His record was crystal clean. He cleaned up any organized crime in the state, and got rich doing so.”

  Virginia thought back to the photograph of the note found inside the wheelhouse – the same one that Senator Arthur Perry thought would get him killed the day before he died of a heart attack. It read, STANFORD STOLE THE MESKWAKI GOLD SPRING. I CAN, TOO.

  She swore. “Whoever’s in the process of taking over the Perry family crime business knows the wreck of the J.F. Johnson is the secret to the Perry’s wealth.”

  Elise said, “I’ve gone over satellite images of the area for the past six months.”

  “And?”

  “Three weeks ago. The same time David Perry, the Senator’s son, went missing, a local dive operator’s boat started to make nightly visits to the shipwreck.”

  “Sam knows about the dive boat,” Virginia said. “He and Tom believed they would be back before the nightly divers arrived. If not, they hoped the divers would lead them to the J.F. Johnson’s secrets.”

  “When were they due back?”

  Virginia stared at the radar screen that showed nothing but empty water and swallowed. “An hour ago.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Sam carried his dive gear across the shallow stream to where a group of five small boulders, resting against one another, formed a natural pond of w
ater approximately three feet deep. He deflated the buoyancy wing, causing his dive gear to sink to the bottom. Tom passed him the backpack, containing the gas tanks and CO2 scrubber of his closed-circuit rebreather. Sam lowered it into the pond, where it, too, made its lonely voyage to the stream floor.

  Stepping back for a better view, Sam studied the creek with his flashlight – the bright light reflecting clearly off the smooth, still surface of the water. He looked across at Tom who was studying the area from the path that lined the bank of the creek.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s well hidden.”

  “Good.” Sam removed his shark stick, which was fundamentally a Remington shotgun with a single .50 caliber shot. “Let’s go see where we are and where our friend got to.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Sam followed the narrow track through to the end of the grotto, where it combined with the creek to form the mouth of the cavern. At the opening, the creek was less than a foot deep and the cave allowed a spacing of another two feet above it. Both Sam and Tom needed to slide through on their bellies to pass.

  Sam shimmied through the opening and stared with relief into the open night’s sky.

  The creek was fed by a large lake, approximately two miles in length by half a mile in width. The silhouette of long mountain ridges lay in the distance to the west. The sky was heavy with clouds, and mist swirled in the air above the water.

  He stood up and stretched his legs while Tom slipped through the small opening. Sam glanced at it and smiled. Without knowing the grotto was there, it would be easy to simply assume the creek flowed into a natural siphon, disappearing beneath the rocky shore. It’s amazing anyone knew about it.

  Wet and muddy, Tom pushed to his feet.

  “Tight fit?” Sam asked with a grin.

  “You bet.”

  They walked across the stony shore of the lake, heading toward a clearing near its edge which provided a good cover of brush, but a clear view of the water. The late afternoon was peaceful, the only sound was birds as they migrated toward their roosting positions for the end of the day.

  Sam stopped walking, struck by the beauty of the place. The opposite edge of the lake was bordered with a craggy overhanging cliff of about 300 feet which gave way to conifer forested sides on the rest of the shore. The water’s glassy surface reflected all the light and clouds of the late afternoon, yet was clear enough to reveal the river-stone bottom at the same time.

  “Stunning,” Sam observed.

  “Very,” Tom agreed.

  Sam and Tom freed themselves from their dry suits and flopped on to their backs in the thick, long grass. Tom’s face had deep red lines from his facemask, but was otherwise pale against the chill. They had been in the water for nearly two hours.

  “Any guesses where we are?” Tom asked, rubbing his eyes before looking up at the sky and foliage above their position.

  Sam took off his gloves and wiped the face of his digital tablet as it picked up the overlying satellites. He clicked the locate button and a map of their surroundings opened up.

  He handed Tom the tablet. “According to this, we’re looking at Marie Louise Lake, Ontario, Canada.”

  “That’s some aquifer!”

  “Yeah, not a bad dive after all – even if it’s going to get mighty cold soon.”

  Tom handed it back to him. “Looks like there’s a Ranger’s Station toward the northeastern edge of the lake. If we start walking, we should be there in an hour. Maybe we can get a message out to Virginia.”

  “Good idea.”

  Sam and Tom started to head into the thick pine forest, before they heard the familiar drone of a De Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver floatplane moments before they saw it crest the ridge of the eastern shore. Throttled back, intentionally losing altitude, the Beaver was making an approach to land on the glassy lake.

  Instinctively, Sam and Tom took cover against the trunk of a large tree. The plane could have been any number of commercial aircraft, ferrying in tourists or seasonal Rangers for the national parks. But there was something fundamentally disconcerting about a light aircraft landing on a small lake at night time.

  With visibility reduced, you could land on a log, a boat, or a sandbar. No commercial floatplane would risk that.

  The plane continued its descent; soon the yellow seaplane’s floats were carving the surface as it landed. Sam hoisted himself up into the branches of the great pine tree under which they stood, climbing up about forty feet to get a better look.

  On the opposite shore he watched as a small inflatable was rowed toward the airplane. The bush pilot stood on the pontoon and gave the diver a friendly wave. Once there, the man in the inflatable passed two large bags to the plane.

  The pilot was keeping the De Havilland’s motor running, ready for take-off. Both men were in a hurry. There was no chit-chat, the transfer took only minutes. Moments later, the floatplane was taking to the sky and banking toward the north, even before the launch made it back to the shore.

  “It’s a drop,” Sam said to Tom, as he started to climb down the tree.

  “For what?”

  “I'm guessing something illegal.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Or weapons.”

  “Now what?”

  Sam jumped down from the lowest branch of the pine. “Now we find that Ranger station and see if we can find something to eat. Then we wait for the diver to return through the Meskwaki Gold Spring.”

  “We don’t even know when the diver’s going to return.”

  “Sure we do.”

  Tom smiled. “We do?”

  “Yeah. He or she will need to wait until eight p.m. tomorrow. The same time the Superior Deep makes its nightly visit out to the wreck of the J.F. Johnson.”

  Chapter Forty

  Sam climbed the small ridge, heading northeast toward the Ranger’s station. He and Tom moved slower than they normally would. Compressed nitrogen, built up in the bloodstream from long submersion at depth, had that effect on the human body. Even young, fit people, like Sam and Tom, couldn’t forego the fatigue that followed such a prolonged, deep dive.

  Tendrils of fog brushed against his skin as the temperature plummeted. Sam was thankful of the warm underlay clothing he’d worn beneath his dry suit. Generally speaking, these garments appeared quirky, but they were hardly out of place among visitors to the popular camping region.

  It was nearly eleven p.m. by the time they reached the Ranger’s station. The place was one of those log huts built in the 1950s, when tourism in Thunder Bay was taking off. No lights were on, and for an instant Sam worried that the place was unmanned. A tiny wisp of smoke rising from a single chimney reassured him they were in luck.

  Before he or Tom reached the log cabin, the side door opened. A man in his late seventies, with thick gray hair that continued into a long beard down to his chest, stepped out with a lively gait and a gregarious smile. Sam’s first impression was that the gentleman belonged in an old gold rush era western movie.

  Sam hastily said, “I’m sorry to intrude this time of night.”

  The stranger grinned. “Doesn’t bother me any. I’m always happy to see people enjoying these parts of the wood. Travelers are always welcome. Besides, I am curious to know how you ended up here at this time of night with little in the way of equipment or supplies.”

  “There’s a long story about that,” Sam said. “I’m happy to tell it to you shortly, but first, is there any chance you have a working cell phone?”

  The man shook his head. “I’ve no need and no interest in those things.”

  “Do you know where I could find someone else who might have one?” Sam asked, his tone set in a mixture of sheepishness and urgency. “We weren’t planning on camping here at all tonight. We took our little motor boat out onto the lake and the engine gave out all the way down the southern end. We spent the better half of the afternoon paddling to shore and have hiked here in the dark. We didn’t have fla
shlights with us, so we ended up using our cell phones for flashlights, but now…”

  “They’ve gone flat and you need to let your wife know about why you’re not coming home for dinner?”

  Sam smiled. “My girlfriend actually, but I’m sure she’s worried sick.”

  “Look. There’s a satellite phone inside – meant to be used for emergencies, but you’re welcome to use it to let her know you’re all right.”

  “That would be great. Thanks.” He offered his hand. “My name’s Sam Reilly by the way, and this is Tom Bower.”

  The Ranger took it. His handshake was firm. “Pleased to meet you Mr. Reilly and Mr. Bower. Come inside, I’ll throw the pot of stew back on the fire and warm it up for you. That and fresh coffee—black is all I have.”

  “Thank you, that’s very kind,” Sam said.

  “My name’s Yago. I’ve been coming out to these woods a few weeks each summer since I was a boy and my father used to drag me out here for weeks on end.”

  Sam wondered if Yago was their new friend’s first or last name, but as the man intentionally omitted it, he decided to let the question slide. He met the Ranger’s eyes. “I bet you could tell some interesting stories about the area.”

  “That I can. That I can.” The Ranger reached into his backpack, which rested on the floor next to the entrance of the cabin, and retrieved the satellite phone. He handed it to Sam. “You know how to use it?”

  “Yes, sir I do.”

  “Good.” Yago turned to put more wood in the Franklin Stove. To Tom, he said, “Come warm yourself by the fire.”

  Sam set up the external antenna, stepped outside and waited for the phone to locate its satellites. He dialed Elise’s number by memory.

  Elise picked up on the first ring. “I see you found your way to Lake Marie Louise in Canada without getting yourselves killed.”

  Sam was about to ask how she knew where they were, and then smiled. “Glad our tracking system’s working.”

  “Did you work out who’s transferring the contraband across the border?”

  “Not yet, but I have some ideas. At least now we know how they’re shipping it. We’ll set up some surveillance and find out soon enough who’s behind this operation. They’ll also be responsible for murdering the Senator and his son, and kidnapping Virginia’s father.”