The Striker ib-6

by Clive Cussler

  Form A-14

  Private Wire Telegram Received

  Thibodeau & Marzen, Brokers

  Wheeling, West Virginia Office

  In the space after The following message received at Time: they had written “8:48 pm.”

  After By telegraph from: they had written “New York.”

  And, incredibly, after To: they had written “John Claggart” in letters big enough to advertise a circus.

  “Young man!”

  “Sir?”

  He beckoned him close and muttered grimly, “Inform your office that if fate ever drags me back to Wheeling not to use your standard form for my private wires but enter the cipher on a blank sheet with no names attached.”

  He had gone through this at every branch office, even Chicago, where they should know better. The only reason none of the morons had written “Judge James Congdon” after from was that no one knew that Congdon owned Thibodeau & Marzen.

  The message itself, written by hand, contained several strings of four-digit numbers. He read quickly, deciphering the figures in his head. Then he balled the paper in his fist.

  “Cast off!”

  He bolted up the boarding stage.

  “Any reply, sir?” called the junior broker.

  “Send immediately in cipher. ‘The Point. Nine hours.’”

  Judge Congdon was in a rage. His spies in Pittsburgh had seen the miners moving camp from the McKeesport trolley park. About to hurl the crumpled telegram into the water, Clay remembered the lesson he had just taught about privacy, smoothed the paper, folded it repeatedly, and slid it deep in an inside pocket reserved for business cards.

  “Cast off, I said! Take in the stage!”

  The firemen raced aboard. Deckhands threw off lines. The steam winch lifted the boarding stage from the wharf and swung it inboard, and the Vulcan King backed slowly into the river.

  Clay ran up the four flights of stairs to the pilothouse.

  “Go! What are you waiting for? Full speed!”

  The pilot was dithering with the engine room telegram. “Where?”

  “Pittsburgh!”

  “I don’t know if we took on enough fuel.”

  Clay crossed the lavish pilothouse in three strides and slammed both engine levers to Ahead Full.

  “Burn the furniture if you have to. Get us there.”

  It had taken a full day and a half to steam three hundred and eighty miles from Cincinnati. Ninety more to Pittsburgh. “What speed can you make?”

  The pilot wrestled the brass-bound wheel, and the steamboat surged from the bank. “River’s running hard, all this rain,” he said. “Nine knots.”

  Clay smoothed out the telegram and read it again. Foolishness. It hadn’t changed. How could it? He stuffed it back in his pocket.

  Ninety miles to Pittsburgh would take ten hours at nine knots. “Make it ten knots.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Lower the water in your boilers. Jump your pressure. You’ll get hot steam easier with little water.”

  “Blow up easier, too.”

  “Hot steam! Do what it takes. Ten knots!”

  Congdon had every right to rage. The strikers were moving in barges. Clay’s barges. God knows where they were going next, but it couldn’t be good. Had Mary Higgins changed her mind? Not likely. Not at all. No, this reeked of Isaac Bell.

  The steamboat had modern voice pipes. Clay shouted down for the boat’s carpenter, who came quickly, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

  “Mount the cannon.”

  “Now?”

  “And the Gatling.”

  * * *

  Mary Higgins knew that Isaac Bell was right. John Claggart — the man Isaac called Henry Clay — was no friend. Not to the strikers betrayed by slogans they had wanted to hear—Bum government and bloodsucking capitalists. Not to her, fooled so cunningly. What could be more seductive to a woman determined to build a new world than to hear anarchy dubbed a joke?

  But Claggart was not the enemy.

  Mary felt no comfort that she had suspected correctly from early on that another man was paying for the barges. She had not been surprised when Isaac told her that bank robbers were not stealing for the workers’ cause. She had never fully believed Claggart’s story. But she had hoped and acted like a drunkard — drunk on the cause, drunk on hope, drunk on passionate belief. Like any drunkard, blind to truth.

  She swore that she would never let hope and belief blind her again.

  Anger at Claggart was useless, worse than useless. Anger would derail her hunt for the man who paid Claggart. He was the enemy. He was the provocateur sowing violence to give the owners and the government the excuse to destroy the union. He was the enemy of justice served by equality.

  The furtive Claggart was not the enemy. A detective no less, and a shrewd one at that. Deadly, as Isaac said? No doubt deadly. She had seen what he was capable of. But never deadly to her. That she knew in her heart. He would never hurt her. He was not the enemy. He wanted to be her friend. She would let him be. A helpful friend who would lead her to the enemy.

  38

  When the fourth barge fleet steamed into the dark with two thousand striking miners, their wives, and their children, Isaac Bell stepped into the beam of towboat Sadie’s searchlight and signaled to Archie to land. Captain Jennings had claimed that Sadie was the oldest of the riverboats, a Civil War relic that had run the Confederate gauntlet at Vicksburg, and Archie reported, as he stepped from her low hull onto the planks the miners had laid to stabilize the bank, her pumps were running full blast to keep up with leaks in her bottom.

  “Don’t let anyone on that barge,” Bell told him, indicating the lead barge touching the shore farthest from the towboat. “I’m reserving it for the Defense Committee’s dynamite.”

  Bell ran through the dark and now deserted trolley park to the gates.

  Fortis, the head of the Defense Committee, was reeling with exhaustion. “I hope you’re ready for us. The jailbirds are fixing to bust in.”

  Bell looked through a crack in the gate. Twenty strikebreakers were carrying a battering ram fashioned from lengths of trolley track. Fifty, at least, were arrayed behind them, each with a pick handle. And the Pinkertons were dismounting from their streetcar and spreading out, taking up positions with their rifles.

  “Where are the Coal and Iron Police?”

  “Look at the roof.”

  Now Bell spotted them, dimly silhouetted against the McKeesport glow. They were crouching behind the ridgeline of the trolley barn roofs, rifle barrels leveled at the gates. “We,” he said, realizing as he spoke how totally he had cast his lot with the striking miners, “have to do something better than a running gun battle to cover our retreat.”

  Fortis’s answer was a stark reminder that Bell had entered a war that was already well under way. “We’ve arranged a reception for the battering ram that’ll buy us some time— Wait! Now what are they up to?”

  A trolley car glided from the mouth of one of the barns and stopped where a curve in the rails pointed it straight at the gate. If the rails continued to the gate, the car would have been an electrified battering ram, but the rails turned away. Puzzled, Bell looked more closely and suddenly realized that the front windows of the car had been removed. In their place, the strikebreakers had jury-rigged headlamps cannibalized from other cars.

  Bell turned his back on the gate just as all the headlamps lighted at once. The men who had their faces pressed to the cracks in the gate cried out, temporarily blinded. Bell snatched a rifle from the nearest miner, shut his left eye, slitted his right, scrambled to the top of the barricade, and fired repeatedly into the blazing-white glare. The rifle magazine held five bullets. When it was empty, two headlamps still glared. He whipped out his Colt Army, steadied the barrel on the top of the gate, and squeezed the trigger twice.

  The trolley yard was dark again. Shadows rose from the ground, and the strikebreakers who had dropped their battering ram when they ducked for cover
picked it up again.

  “Run!” Isaac Bell shouted. “Run!”

  They started toward the barges, twenty miners trundling wheelbarrows, ten firing wild shots behind them, as the strikebreakers charged the gate. Bell, taking up the rear, gun in hand, heard the battering ram thunder against the gate. Once. Twice. Running backwards, he waited for the third blow to burst the gate open.

  An orange flash lit the dark, followed by a loud explosion and the shouts of dismayed strikebreakers. When the fleeing miners cheered, Bell realized that the Defense Committee had mined the gate with dynamite, set off when the battering ram smashed into a detonator.

  “That’ll fix the sons of bitches!” Fortis yelled.

  And give the militia the excuse to attack, thought Bell.

  The towboat Sadie blew her whistle as the running men drew near. The Defense Committee fought to shove their wheelbarrows through the mud to the barges, from which came shouts of encouragement.

  Isaac ran ahead of them. “Stow all your dynamite in that lead barge, away from these people.”

  The wheels were sticking in the muddy bank, and that barge was distant.

  “Here’s fine,” yelled Fortis. “There’s room in this one. Dump it here, boys!”

  “Dynamite deteriorates in damp and becomes volatile,” Bell protested. “You’ve been carrying it in the rain.”

  “Are you telling a coal miner how to handle explosives?”

  Bell seized the older man’s arm in an iron grip. “Volatile means boom, it goes off by itself. Get it away from these people.”

  “I won’t abide some whippersnapper—”

  Isaac Bell held his Army high. “I’ll blow the head off the first man who puts dynamite anywhere but that front barge.”

  * * *

  Isaac Bell stood watch outside the pilothouse on towboat Sadie’s hurricane deck, wishing that the river fog was thicker. Sadie wheezed slowly past the Homestead Works, and the Amalgamated tipple rose against a sky that was turning bright.

  He heard shouts.

  Pursuit, he thought, looking for a fast police launch packed with riflemen. But the shouts were coming from the lead barge, where some miners had elected to ride with the dynamite, and it sounded like a drunken fight. Bell ran down to the main deck and onto the barges, intending to run to the front of the tow to break it up before they accidentally set off an explosion.

  A muffled boom told him he was too late.

  Smoke pillared from the lead barge. A geyser of water shot into the sky. It sounded to Bell as if a single stick of dynamite had blown a hole in her hull. Would the rest blow before the water rushing in smothered the detonators?

  The dynamite barge was sinking. Three men clambered off drunkenly onto the barge behind it. As the stricken dynamite barge sunk deeper, it pulled hard against the lines holding it to the other barges in the tow. All at once, they snapped, parting with a loud bang. The dynamite barge broke from the pack. The tow pushed it ahead as it sank, dashing it to pieces. The next barges ran over planks, timbers, and crates of dynamite. Bell waited, heart in his throat, for the rest of the dynamite to explode under the barges loaded with people. As each barge rumbled over the debris, bottom planks were staved, water rushed in, and the people in them tried frantically to plug the holes.

  Bell felt it crunch under the barge he was on. Then the towboat ran over it. Bell saw the pilot turning his wheel to force the tow out of the deep channel.

  “She’s sinking!” a deckhand howled. “Ripped her bottom out.”

  For a second, Bell stood frozen. I led these people into this, he thought. All their lives are in mortal danger. This was why Joseph Van Dorn had warned not to take sides. Two thousand were about to drown in the bitter-cold river, and what in the name of God could he do to save them?

  Bell ran back and leaped to the towboat’s main deck. Archie was peering down into the engine room. The water was knee-deep and rising. When it drowned the engine, the current would sweep the people past Amalgamated while the damaged barges sank.

  Bell jumped into the hold and waded toward a surge of current that marked the breach in the planks. The water clamped around his legs like ice. Archie peeled off his coat and threw it to Bell and ran, shouting he would get blankets. Bell waded to the breach, stomped Archie’s coat in it, pulled off his own and stuffed it in. His shirt went next. Archie returned with blankets, towels, and people’s precious coats.

  Isaac Bell stuffed garments and blankets into the broken seam.

  The leak slowed, but not enough. The water kept rising. He heard steam roar. The rising water had reached the furnace and was beginning to drench the fire. Steam pressure was dropping. The engine slowed. Just as the stern wheel stopped turning, Bell felt the hull grounding in the mud.

  Boots pounded on deck as men ran with ropes.

  “O.K., she’s on the bottom. She can’t sink any more. Save the blankets.”

  “You’ll need one more,” said Archie, throwing it to him. “The ladies have suffered enough. Spare them their hero in his altogether.”

  Bell slung the blanket around himself and climbed out of the hold. To his astonishment, in the time he was belowdecks, the sun had burned through the fog and was shining bright. Ashore, the gentle upward slope of the Amalgamated Terminal was dotted with white tents pitched by the people who had arrived on the first tows. He smelled bacon frying and coffee brewing. In the shadow of the coal tipple, small boys had started a pickup game of baseball.

  “Happy sight, Isaac. A safer place, and no one drowned.”

  “It would be a lot happier if they weren’t tearing up that rail line.”

  A thousand miners were uprooting track on which the coal trains entered the terminal. A thousand more were tumbling cars on their sides, blocking the trolley lines from the Golden Triangle.

  “They’re digging in,” said Archie. “You can’t blame them for keeping the Pinkertons out.”

  “And the cops,” said Bell, directing Archie’s attention to the downtown side of Amalgamated’s spit of land.

  A contingent of uniformed Pittsburgh police dismounted from a toast-rack trolley that had been stopped by a heap of crossties and a gap in the tracks. A second contingent was milling around blocked tracks on the Homestead side. Neither formed a line nor charged. On the river, a police steam launch flitted about agitatedly like a bird helpless to stop its nest from being invaded. The cops on land climbed back on their trolleys and rode away.

  As Isaac Bell watched the miners fortify the point, he had to concede Archie was right. This place they had retreated to was vulnerable until they barricaded the approaches. But it had the grim face of war.

  “At least,” he said, “the hotheads lost their dynamite. Maybe now both sides can settle down and horse-trade.”

  “What in heck is that?” said Archie. The tall redhead was staring at the river behind Bell, his expression a mix of puzzlement and awe. Bell turned to see.

  Chimneys billowing smoke, stern wheel pounding foam, an enormous steamboat rounded the point. It was immensely long, and tall, and black as coal.

  39

  “Is that a cannon on the foredeck?” asked Archie.

  Bell shielded his eyes with cupped hands and focused on the gun. “Two-inch Hotchkiss,” he said. “The Navy had them on a gunboat Wish and I boarded in New Orleans.”

  “Where the heck did they get it?”

  “More to the point,” said Bell, “who are they and what do they want?”

  “I can’t quite make out her nameboard.”

  “Vulcan King.”

  The black giant came closer.

  One after another, then by the hundreds, the women pitching tents and the men building barricades stopped what they were doing. Ten thousand stood stock-still, waiting for the black apparition to turn midriver and point its cannon at them. It steamed very slowly, its giant wheel barely stirring the river, closer and closer, at a pace no less menacing for its majesty.

  Directly opposite the point, it stopped, hol
ding against the current. Not a living figure showed on deck, not a deckhand, not a fireman. The boiler deck and engine doors were shut, the pilot invisible behind sun-glared glass. Ten thousand people held their breath. What, Isaac Bell asked himself again, have I led these people into?

  It blasted its whistle. Everyone jumped.

  Then it moved forward, slicing the current, up the river, swung around the bend of the Homestead Works, and disappeared.

  “Where’s it going?” asked Archie.

  “My guess is, to collect the Pinkertons,” said Bell. “We’ll have to find out. But if I’m right, then the miners hold this point of land, and the owners hold the river. And if that isn’t the beginning of a war, I don’t know what is.”

  * * *

  Dried off and clothes changed, Bell went looking for Camilla’s pilot.

  He found Captain Jennings and his son in a Smithfield Street saloon up the slope from where their boats were docked. The two pilots congratulated him on the strikers’ safe passage.

  “Did you see the Vulcan King?” Bell asked.

  “Hard to miss,” said the younger Jennings, and his father declared, “Who in hell would paint a steamboat black?”

  “Who owns her?”

  Both pilots shrugged. “Never seen her before. We was just asking ourselves, was we thrown off by the black? But even imagining her white, she does not look familiar.”

  “Where do you suppose it came from?”

  “She weren’t built in Pittsburgh or we’d know her for sure. That leaves Louisville or Cincinnati.”

  “Nowhere else?”

  “It took a heck of a yard to build a boat that size. Like I say, Louisville or Cincinnati. I’d say Cincinnati, wouldn’t you, Pa?”

  The older Jennings agreed. “One of the big old yards like Held & Court.”

  “They still in business, Pa?”

  “They’re the last that make ’em like that anymore.”

  “What do you think of that cannon?” asked Bell.