The Striker ib-6

by Clive Cussler

  “I’ve been surprised only once in my life and it wasn’t on silk sheets.”

  “Where was that?”

  “On a freight train. Go to hell, Congdon.”

  Congdon, visibly surprised, fumbled around his desk and laid a hand on the bronze statuette of his naked wife. “But you just said you were hoping—”

  “I was hoping you would say something that would give me enough courage, or enough hatred, to shoot you. And you did, thank you.” She took Henry Clay’s revolver from her bag and braced it on The Kiss.

  The veins in the back of Congdon’s hand bulged as he gripped his statuette with sudden intensity. “Did the yacht do it?”

  She tried to answer but couldn’t. Finally, she whispered, “I guess we all have our limits.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I cannot kill another human being, even the worst one in the world.” She lowered the gun. “I can’t do it.”

  “I can,” he said, and slammed the statuette down and jumped back — just in case a twenty-foot separation was not enough — and watched from afar.

  Steam roared. Hot, needle-sharp jets spewed down from the ceiling and up from the floor and enveloped Mary Higgins in a scalding white cloud. She screamed only once. Congdon was surprised. He had expected it to take longer with a strong young woman. But she had died in a flash. So much for pain, he thought. She had died in the space of a single breath. Probably never knew what hit her.

  He edged back to his desk and lifted the lever gingerly. It was actually cool to the touch, so tightly focused were the jets. The steam stopped gushing. The windows were fogged, and he felt dampness on his cheeks and saw a layer of dew on his polished desk. But the cloud that had enveloped Mary and The Kiss had already dissipated. Congdon wished he had planned ahead. He usually did; he could usually imagine consequences. But he had not thought to keep a sheet nearby — something, anything, to throw over the corpse.

  46

  The White Lady careened 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 Lady steamed 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 King this 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 King will 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 Sadie and 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 Lady arrive 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 Lady was 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 King fired 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 King was 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 Ahead to 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.”