The Race ib-4

by Clive Cussler

  When the wind gusted from behind, she smelled gasoline. She looked for the source and saw it dripping from the fuel tank. Harry’s bullet had punctured it.

  Which would happen first? she wondered coolly. Would the gasoline all leak out and stop her motor before she could alight on Harry’s lawn? Or would sparks from the engine and chains ignite the gasoline? Fire was deadly on a flying machine. The varnish of nitrate fabric dope that stiffened and sealed the cotton canvas covering her wings was as flammable as flash powder.

  The only field nearer was the meadow. But if she alighted there, Harry would kill her. She had no choice. She had to land the machine at the camp, if she had enough gasoline to reach it.

  “Come on, Elsie. Take us home.”

  The forest inched slowly beneath her. Updrafts buffeted her wings and rolled the airship. Unable to warp them to counteract, she tried to keep the machine on an even keel using her elevators and rudder.

  At last she saw the lake beside Harry’s camp.

  Just as she got close enough to see the main house and the dairy barns, her motor sputtered on the last fumes of gasoline. The propellers stopped turning. The pusher biplane went silent but for the wind whispering through the wire stays.

  She had to volplane – to glide – all the way to the lawn.

  But the propellers, which had been pushing her, were dragging in the air. They held her back, reducing her speed. In moments she would be gliding too slowly to stay aloft.

  She reached behind her and jerked the cable that opened the engine’s compression valve so the pistons would move freely and allow the propellers to spin. The difference was immediate. The aeroplane felt lighter, more like a glider.

  Now she could see the dairy pasture. Speckled with cows and crisscrossed with fences, it offered no room to come down safely. There was the house, an elaborate log mansion, and behind it the sloping lawn of mowed grass from which she had earlier taken to the air. But first she had to clear the house, and she was dropping fast. She threaded a path between the tall chimneys, skimmed the roof, and then coaxed the rudder to turn into the wind, taking great care not to slide into a spin.

  Eight feet above the grass, she saw that she was moving too fast. Air squeezed between the wings and the ground had the effect of holding her up. The biplane was refusing to stop flying. Ahead loomed a wall of trees.

  The gasoline that had soaked into the varnished canvas ignited in a sheet of orange flame.

  Trailing fire, unable to slant her wings sharply to slow enough to touch her wheels to the grass, Josephine reached back and jerked the compression cable. Closing the valve locked the eight-foot propellers. They grabbed the air like two fists, and her wheels and skids banged hard on the grass.

  The burning biplane slid for fifty yards. As it slowed, the fire spread, scattering flame. When she felt it singe the back of her helmet, Josephine jumped. She hit the ground and threw herself flat to let the machine roll past, then she sprang to her feet and ran for her life as flames engulfed it.

  Harry’s butler came running. He was trailed by the gardener, the cook, and Harry’s bodyguards.

  “Mrs. Frost! Are you all right?”

  Josephine’s eyes locked on the pillar of flame and smoke. Marco’s beautiful machine was burning like a funeral pyre. Poor Marco. The steadiness that had gotten her through the ordeal was dissolving, and she felt her lips quiver. The fire looked like it was underwater. She realized that she was shaking and crying, and that tears were filling her eyes. She couldn’t tell if she was crying for Marco or herself.

  “Mrs. Frost!” the butler repeated. “Are you all right?”

  It was the closest by far she had ever come to getting killed in an aeroplane.

  She tried to pull her handkerchief from her sleeve. She couldn’t get it out. She had to take her glove off. When she did, she saw her skin was dead white, as if her blood had gone into hiding. Everything was different. She now knew what it felt like to be afraid.

  “Mrs. Frost?”

  They were all staring at her. Like she had cheated death or was standing among them like a ghost.

  “I’m O.K.”

  “May I do anything to help, Mrs. Frost?”

  Her brain was whirling. She had to do something. She pressed her handkerchief to her face. A thousand men and women had learned to fly since Wilbur Wright won the Michelin Cup in France, and until this moment Josephine Josephs Frost had never doubted that she could drive an aeroplane just as fast and as far as any of them. Now every time she climbed onto a flying machine she would have to be brave. Well, it still beat being stuck on the ground.

  She mopped her cheeks and blew her nose.

  “Yes,” she said. “Drive into town, please, and tell Constable Hodge that Mr. Frost just shot Mr. Celere.”

  The butler gasped, “What?”

  She glanced at him sharply. How surprised could he be that her violent husband had killed someone? Again.

  “Are you quite sure of that, Mrs. Frost?”

  “Am I quite sure?” she echoed. “Yes, I saw it happen with my own eyes.”

  The butler’s dubious expression was a chilling reminder that it was Harry who paid his salary, Harry who paid for everything, and Mrs. Frost was now a woman alone with no one to count on but herself.

  The bodyguards didn’t look surprised. Their long faces said, There goes our meal ticket. The butler, too, was already getting over it, asking as routinely as if she had just ordered a glass of iced tea, “Will there be anything else, Mrs. Frost?”

  “Please do what I asked,” she said in a voice with a slight tremor as she stared at the fire. “Tell the constable my husband killed Mr. Celere.”

  “Yes, madam,” he replied in a blank tone.

  Josephine turned her back on the fire. Her hazel eyes were wont to shift toward green or gray. She did not have to look in a mirror to know that right now they reflected a colorless fear. She was alone and she was vulnerable. With Marco Celere dead and her husband an insane killer, she had no one to turn to. Then the thought of Preston Whiteway flowed into her mind.

  Yes, that’s who would protect her.

  “One more thing,” she said to the butler as he started to walk away. “Send a telegram to Mr. Preston Whiteway at the San Francisco Inquirer. Say that I will visit him next week.”

  2

  “Hoopla!”

  ISAAC BELL, CHIEF INVESTIGATOR of the Van Dorn Detective Agency, thundered up San Francisco’s Market Street in a fire-engine red gasoline-powered Locomobile racer with its exhaust cutout wide open for maximum power. Bell was a tall man of thirty with a thick mustache that glowed as golden as his precisely groomed blond hair. He wore an immaculate white suit and a low-crowned white hat with a wide brim. His frame was whipcord lean.

  As he drove, his boots, well-kept and freshly polished, rarely touched the brake, an infamously ineffective Locomobile accessory. His long hands and fingers moved nimbly between throttle and shifter. His eyes, ordinarily a compelling violet shade of blue, were dark with concentration. A no-nonsense expression and a determined set of his jaw were tempered by a grin of pure pleasure as he raced the auto at breakneck speed, overtaking trolleys, trucks, horse carts, motorcycles, and slow automobiles.

  In the red-leather passenger seat to Bell’s left sat the boss, Joseph Van Dorn.

  The burly, red-whiskered founder of the nationwide detective agency was a brave man feared across the continent as the scourge of criminals. But he turned pale as Bell aimed the big machine at the dwindling space between a coal wagon and a Buick motortruck stacked to the rails with tins of kerosene and naphtha.

  “We’re actually on time,” Van Dorn remarked. “Even a little early.”

  Isaac Bell did not appear to hear him.

  With relief, Van Dorn saw their destination looming over its shorter neighbors: Preston Whiteway’s twelve-story San Francisco Inquirer building, headquarters of the flamboyant publisher’s newspaper empire.

  “Will you look at that!” Van Dor
n shouted over the roar of the motor.

  An enormous yellow advertising banner draped the top floor proclaiming in yard-high letters that Whiteway’s newspapers were sponsoring the

  WHITEWAY ATLANTIC-TO-PACIFIC CROSS-COUNTRY AIR RACE

  The Whiteway Cup and $50,000

  To be awarded to the

  First Flier

  To Cross America in Fifty Days

  “It’s a magnificent challenge,” Bell shouted back without taking his eyes from the crowded street.

  Isaac Bell was fascinated by flying machines. He had been following their rapid development avidly, with the object of buying a top flier himself. There had been scores of improved aerial inventions in the past two years, each producing faster and stronger aeroplanes: the Wright Flyer III, the June Bug, the bamboo-framed Silver Dart, the enormous French Voisins and Antoinettes powered by V-8 racing-boat engines, Santos Dumont’s petite Demoiselle, the cross – English Channel Blériot, the rugged Curtiss Pusher, the Wright Signal Corps machine, the Farman III, and the Celere wire-braced monoplane.

  If anyone could actually navigate a flying machine all the way across the United States of America – a very big if-the Whiteway Cup would be won in equal parts by the nerve and skill of the airmen and by how ingeniously the inventors increased the power of their engines and improved systems of shaping their wings to make the airships turn more agilely and climb faster. The winner would have to average eighty miles a day, nearly two hours in the air, every day. Each day lost to wind, storm, fog, accidents, and repairs would increase dramatically those hours aloft.

  “Whiteway’s newspapers claim that the cup is made of solid gold,” Van Dorn laughed. “Say,” he joked, “maybe that’s what he wants to see us about – afraid some crook will steal it.”

  “Last year his papers claimed that Japan would sink the Great White Fleet,” Bell said drily. “Somehow they made it home safe to Hampton Roads. There’s Whiteway now!”

  The fair-haired publisher was steering a yellow Rolls-Royce roadster toward the only parking space left in front of his building.

  “Looks like Whiteway has it,” said Van Dorn.

  Bell pressed hard on his accelerator. The big red Locomobile surged ahead of the yellow Rolls-Royce. Bell stomped the anemic brakes, shifted down, and swerved on smoking tires into the parking space.

  “Hey!” Whiteway shook a fist. “That’s my space.” He was a big man, a former college football star running to fat. An arrogant cock to his head boasted that he was still handsome, deserved whatever he wanted, and was strong enough to insist on it.

  Isaac Bell bounded from his auto to extend a powerful hand with a friendly smile.

  “Oh, it’s you, Bell. That’s my space!”

  “Hello, Preston, it’s been a while. When I told Marion we’d be calling on you, she asked me to send her regards.”

  Whiteway’s scowl faded at the mention of Isaac Bell’s fiancée, Marion Morgan, a beautiful woman in the moving-picture line. Marion had worked with Whiteway, directing his Picture World scheme, which was enjoying great success exhibiting films of news events in vaudeville theaters and nickelodeons.

  “Tell Marion that I’m counting on her to shoot great movies of my air race.”

  “I’m sure she can’t wait. This is Joseph Van Dorn.”

  The newspaper magnate and the founder of the nation’s premier detective agency sized each other up while shaking hands. Van Dorn pointed skyward. “We were just admiring your banner. Ought to be quite an affair.”

  “That’s why I called for you. Come up to my office.”

  A detail of uniformed doormen were saluting as if an admiral had arrived in a dreadnought. Whiteway snapped his fingers. Two men ran to park the yellow Rolls-Royce.

  Whiteway received more salutes in the lobby.

  A gilded elevator cage carried them to the top floor, where a mob of editors and secretaries were gathered in the foyer with pencils and notepads at the ready. Whiteway barked orders, scattering some on urgent missions. Others raced after him, scribbling rapidly, as the publisher dictated the end of the afternoon edition’s editorial that he had started before lunch.

  “‘The Inquirer decries the deplorable state of American aviation. Europeans have staked a claim in the sky while we molder on the earth, left behind in the dust of innovation. But the Inquirer never merely decries, the Inquirer acts! We invite every red-blooded American aviator and aviatrix to carry our banner skyward in the Great Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race to fly across America in fifty days!’ Print it!

  “And now. .” He whipped a newspaper clipping from his coat and read aloud, “‘The brave pilot dipped his planes to salute the spectators before his horizontal rudder and spinning airscrew lofted the aeronaut’s heavier-than-air flying machine to the heavens.’ Who wrote this?”

  “I did, sir.”

  “You’re fired!”

  Thugs from the circulation department escorted the unfortunate to the stairs. Whiteway crumpled the clipping in his plump fist and glowered at his terrified employees.

  “The Inquirer speaks to the average man, not the technical man. Write these words down: In the pages of the Inquirer, ‘flying machines’ and ‘aeroplanes’ are ‘driven’ or ‘navigated’ or ‘flown’ by ‘drivers,’ ‘birdmen,’ ‘aviators,’ and ‘aviatrixes.’ Not ‘pilots,’ who dock the Lusitania, nor ‘aeronauts,’ who sound like Greeks. You and I may know that ‘planes’ are components of wings and that ‘horizontal rudders’ are elevators. The average man wants his wings to be wings, his rudders to turn, and his elevators to ascend. He wants his airscrews to be ‘propellers.’ He is well aware that if flying machines are not heavier than air, they are balloons. And soon he will want that back East and European affectation ‘aeroplane’ to be an ‘airplane.’ Get to work!”

  Isaac Bell reckoned that Whiteway’s private office made Joseph Van Dorn’s mighty “throne room” in Washington, D.C., look modest.

  The publisher sat behind his desk and announced, “Gentlemen, you are the first to know that I have decided to sponsor my own personal entry in the Great Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race for the Whiteway Cup and the fifty-thousand-dollar prize.”

  He paused dramatically.

  “Her name – yes, you heard me right, gentlemen-her name is Josephine Josephs.”

  Isaac Bell and Joseph Van Dorn exchanged a glance that Whiteway misinterpreted as astonished rather than confirmation of a foregone conclusion.

  “I know what you’re thinking, gentlemen: I’m either a brave man backing a girl or I’m a fool. Neither! I say. There is no reason why a girl can’t win the cross-country aerial race. It takes more nerve than brawn to drive a flying machine, and this little girl has nerve enough for a regiment.”

  Isaac Bell asked, “Are you referring to Josephine Josephs Frost?”

  “We will not be using her husband’s name,” Whiteway replied curtly. “The reason for this will shock you to the core.”

  “Josephine Josephs Frost?” asked Van Dorn. “The young bride whose husband took potshots at her flying machine last fall in upper New York State?”

  “Where did you hear that?” Whiteway bristled. “I kept it out of the papers.”

  “In our business,” Van Dorn replied mildly, “we tend to hear before you do.”

  Bell asked, “Why did you keep it out of the papers?”

  “Because my publicists are booming Josephine to build interest in the race. They are promoting her with a new song that I commissioned entitled ‘Come, Josephine in My Flying Machine.’ They’ll plaster her picture on sheet music, Edison cylinders, piano rolls, magazines, and posters to keep people excited about the outcome.”

  “I’d have thought they’d be excited anyway.”

  “If you don’t lead the public, they get bored,” Whiteway replied scornfully. “In fact, the best thing that could happen to keep people excited about the race will be if half the male contestants smash to the ground before Chicago
.”

  Bell and Van Dorn exchanged another look, and Van Dorn said, disapprovingly, “We presume that you utter that statement in confidence.”

  “A natural winnowing of the field will turn it into a contest that pits only the best airmen against plucky tomboy Josephine,” Whiteway explained without apology. “Newspaper readers root for the underdog. Come with me! You’ll see what I’m talking about.”

  Trailed by an ever-expanding entourage of editors, writers, lawyers, and managers, Preston Whiteway led the detectives down two floors to the art department, a lofty room lit by north windows and crammed with artists hunched over drawing boards, illustrating the day’s events.

  Bell counted twenty men crowding in after the publisher, some with pencils and pens in hand, all with panic in their eyes. The artists ducked their heads and drew faster. Whiteway snapped his fingers. Two ran to him, bearing mock-ups of sheet music covers.

  “What have you got?”

  They held up a sketch of a girl on a flying machine soaring over a field of cows. “‘The Flying Farm Girl.’”

  “No!”

  Abashed, they held up a second drawing. This depicted a girl in overalls with her hair stuffed under what looked to Bell like a taxi driver’s cap. “‘The Aerial Tomboy.’”

  “No! God in Heaven, no. What do you men do down here for your salaries?”

  “But Mr. Whiteway, you said readers like farm girls and tomboys.”

  “I said, ‘She’s a girl!’ Newspaper readers like girls. Draw her prettier! Josephine is beautiful.”

  Isaac Bell took pity on the artists, who looked ready to jump out the window, and interjected, “Why don’t you make her look like a fellow’s sweetheart?”

  “I’ve got it!” yelled Whiteway. He spread his arms and stared bug-eyed at the ceiling, as if he could see through it all the way to the sun.

  “‘America’s Sweetheart of the Air.’”

  The artists’ eyes widened. They looked carefully at the writers and editors and managers, who looked carefully at Whiteway.