The Race ib-4

by Clive Cussler

  ISAAC BELL SAID, “Eustace, I’ve been watching you and you don’t look happy. Are you homesick?”

  They were getting the machine ready to take off from Topeka, Kansas. The Chicago kid he had hired to help Andy Moser was pouring gasoline through layers of cheesecloth to strain out any water that may have contaminated the supply. It was a daily ritual performed before mixing in the castor oil that lubricated the Gnome engine.

  “No, sir, Mr. Bell,” Weed answered hastily. But judging by the expression knitting his brow and pursing his lips, Bell thought something was very much wrong.

  “Miss your girl?”

  “Yes, sir,” he blurted. “I sure do. But. . You know.”

  “I do know,” Bell said sincerely. “I’m often away from my fiancée. I’m lucky on this case, as she’s around filming the race for Mr. Whiteway, so I get to see her now and then. What’s your girl’s name?”

  “Daisy.”

  “Pretty name. What’s her last name?”

  “Ramsey.”

  “Daisy Ramsey. There’s a mouthful. . But wait. If you marry, she’ll be Daisy Weed.” Bell said it with a grin that coaxed a wan smile out of the boy.

  “Oh, yes. We kid about that.” The smile faded.

  Bell said, “If something is troubling you, son, is there anything I can do to help?”

  “No, thank you, sir, I’m O.K.”

  Eddie Edwards, the white-haired head of the Kansas City office, approached Bell, muttering, “We got trouble.”

  Bell hurried to the hangar car with him.

  Andy Moser, who had been working nearby, tightening the Eagle’s wing-stay turnbuckles, said, “You sure you’re O.K., Eustace? Mr. Bell seems concerned about you.”

  “His eyes go through you like iced lightning.”

  “He’s just looking out for you.”

  Eustace Weed prayed that Andy was right. Because what Isaac Bell had spotted on his face was his sudden horrified realization of what they would force him to do with the copper tube of water sealed with paraffin wax.

  He had been hoping that the criminals threatening Daisy had changed their minds. No one approached him in Peoria or Columbia, or Hannibal, Missouri, to tell him what to do with it. After Hannibal, where the race crossed the Mississippi River, he assumed it would happen in Kansas City. It was the only real city on the map since Chicago, and he had developed a picture in his mind of big-city saloonkeepers knowing one another but disdaining their counterparts in small towns. So he had dreaded Kansas City.

  But no one had approached him there, either, nor when the race pulled up on the far side of the Missouri River. There had even been a letter from Daisy waiting for him, and she sounded fine. This very morning, camped by the Kansas River outside Topeka, preparing Mr. Bell’s machine to head south and west over the empty plains toward Wichita, the terrified mechanician had begun to wonder, would the whole nightmare simply go away? Trouble was, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. And just now, while Mr. Bell watched him strain the gas before mixing the fuel, Eustace Weed suddenly knew that Harry Frost’s man would order him to drop the tube in Isaac Bell’s flying-machine fuel tank.

  He had figured out how that little copper tube would make Bell’s flying machine smash. It was as ingenious as it was horrific. The Eagle’s Gnome rotary engine was fuel lubricated. It had no oil reservoir, no crankcase, no pump to maintain oil pressure – in fact, no oil at all. The castor oil suspended in the gasoline did the job of oil, greasing the passage of the piston through each of the cylinders. It mixed in readily because castor oil dissolved in gasoline.

  Like paraffin. The paraffin wax that plugged the copper tube would also dissolve in gasoline. When the gas melted the plugs, in an hour or so, the water would leak out and contaminate the fuel. Two tablespoons of water in a flying-machine gas tank was more than enough to stop Isaac Bell’s engine dead. Were he flying high at the time, he might manage to volplane down safely. But if he was taking off, or attempting to alight, or making a tight turn low to the ground, he would smash.

  ISAAC BELL LISTENED WITH DEEP CONCERN, but not much surprise, as Eddie Edwards reported grim news he had just learned from a contact in the United States Army. Someone had executed a daring raid on the arsenal at Fort Riley, Kansas.

  “The Army’s hushed it up,” Eddie explained, “criminals busting into their arsenal not being the sort of event they want to read in the newspaper.”

  “What did they get?”

  “Two air-cooled, belt-fed Colt-Browning M1895 machine guns.”

  “Had to be Frost,” said Bell, picturing in his mind the four-hundred-and-fifty-rounds-per-minute weapons enveloping Josephine’s monoplane in blizzards of flying lead.

  “You gotta hand it to him, that man’s got nerve. Right under the nose of the U.S. Army.”

  “How’d he break in?” Bell asked.

  “The usual way. Bribed a quartermaster.”

  “I find it hard to imagine that even a quartermaster more larcenous than most his ilk would risk the Army not noticing missing machine guns.”

  “Frost tricked him into thinking he was stealing surplus uniforms. Said he was selling them in Mexico, or some cock-and-bull story the quartermaster believed. Or wanted to believe. A drinking man, needless to say. Anyhow, he got the surprise of his life when he woke up in the stockade. But by then the guns were long gone.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Three days ago.”

  Bell pulled the topographic map of Kansas down from the hangar-car ceiling. “Plenty of time for Frost to get between us and Wichita.”

  “That’s why I said we have trouble. Though I do wonder how he’ll fit two machine guns in a Thomas Flyer. Much less hide them. Takes three men to mount one of those guns. They weigh nearly four hundred pounds with their landing carriage.”

  “He’s strong enough to pick one up himself. Besides, he has two helpers in that Thomas.”

  Bell traced on the map the rail line they would follow to Wichita. Then he traced those converging at Junction City, the nearest town to Fort Riley. “He’ll move the guns by train, then freight wagon or motortruck.”

  “So he can attack anywhere between Kansas and California.”

  Bell had already concluded that. “We know by now that he doesn’t think small. He’ll hire more men for the second gun and spread them apart on either side of the railroad track we’re flying along. They’ll rake her coming and going from both sides.”

  Bell did some quick calculations in his head, and added darkly, “They’ll open up at a mile. If she somehow makes it past them, they’ll whirl the guns around and keep firing. As she’s coming down the line at sixty miles per hour, they will be able to fire accurately for two full minutes.”

  STEVE STEVENS SHOOK a copy of the Wichita Eagle under Preston Whiteway’s nose and roared indignantly, “They’re quoting your San Francisco Inquirer quoting me saying I’m glad that crazy Russian is helping that English feller because everyone’s in the race together, like we’re all one big family.”

  “Yes, I read that,” Whiteway said mildly. “It didn’t sound like you.”

  “Darned right, it don’t sound like me. Why’d you print it?”

  “If you read it carefully, you will see that my reporters quoted Mr. Platov, who quoted you saying that the Great Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race for the Whiteway Cup and fifty thousand dollars is for everyone, and we’re all one big family.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You might as well have. Everyone believes it now.”

  Stevens hopped angrily from foot to foot. His belly bounced, his jowls shook and turned red. “That crazy Russian put those words in my mouth. I didn’t say-”

  “What’s the trouble? Everyone thinks you’re a good man.”

  “I don’t give a hoot about being a good man. I want to win the race. And there’s Platov sashaying off to help Eddison-Highfalutin-Sydney-Whatever when my own machine is rattling to smithereens.”


  “You have my sympathy,” said Preston Whiteway, smiling at Stevens’s confirmation of happy rumors his spies had reported: the fast-flying farmer might not go the distance. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, sir, I want to see my own entry – which is not rattling to smithereens, thank you very much – take to the air in the capable hands of Josephine, America’s Sweetheart of the Air, who will win the race.”

  “Is that so? Well, let me tell you, Mr. Fancy-Pants Newspaperman, I hear tell folks is losing interest in your race now that we’re so far west there’s no one to watch it but jackrabbits, Indians, and coyotes.”

  Preston Whiteway arched a disdainful eyebrow at the rotund cotton farmer who was very rich but not as rich as he was. “Keep reading, Mr. Stevens. Events reported soon will surprise even you and keep ordinary folk on the edge of their seats.”

  ISAAC BELL FLICKED the blip switch on his control post to slow the Gnome. Andy Moser had tuned the motor so finely that he was unintentionally overtaking Josephine’s Celere monoplane while riding herd above and behind her. Ironically, as her Celere began to suffer the wear and tear of the long race, his American Eagle seemed to get stronger. Andy kept repeating that Danielle’s father “built ’em to last.”

  They were navigating by the railroad tracks.

  Two thousand feet below, Kansas’s winter wheat crop spread dark yellow to the horizons on either side of the rails. The flat, empty country was broken now and then by a lonely farmhouse, in a cluster of barns and silos, and the occasional ribbon of trees lining a creek or river. It was from one of those ribbons that Bell expected Frost would rake Josephine’s aeroplane with machine-gun fire, and he had persuaded her to fly a quarter mile to the right of the tracks, to increase the range, and to steer clear of clumps of trees. If Frost did attack, Bell instructed her to veer away while he would descend in steep spiral dips, firing his mounted rifle.

  They had just crossed a railroad junction helpfully marked with canvas arrows when Bell sensed motion behind him. He was not surprised to see Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s blue headless pusher overtaking them. The baronet’s new Curtiss motor just kept on getting faster. Andy Moser credited “the crazy Russian” with its performance. Bell was not so sure about that. A conversation with Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s regular mechanicians led him to believe that the six-cylinder engine was the real hero, being not only more powerful but smoother than the other flyers’ fours. They certainly were not inclined to credit the Russian volunteer with more than helping out.

  “The six might not be so smooth as your rotary Gnome, Mr. Bell,” they said, “but it’s considerably easier to keep tuned. Lucky for you you’ve got Andy Moser to keep it running.”

  The blue pusher sailed past Bell, and then Josephine, with a jaunty wave to each from the baronet. Bell saw Josephine reach up to fiddle with her gravity-feed gas tank. Her speed increased, but at the expense of gray smoke pouring from her motor. Eddison-Sydney-Martin continued to pull ahead, and was several hundred yards past her, when Bell saw something dark suddenly fly back in the Englishman’s wake.

  It looked like he had hit a bird.

  But when the Curtiss staggered in the air, Bell realized that the dark object falling behind Eddison-Sydney-Martin was not a bird but his propeller.

  Suddenly without power, forced to volplane, Eddison-Sydney-Martin tried to dip his elevator. But before the pusher could descend in a controlled glide, a piece flew from the tail. It was followed by another, and another, and Bell saw that the departing propeller had chopped parts of the tail as it flew away, still spinning like a buzz saw.

  The biplane’s elevator broke loose and trailed in blue shreds. The vertical tail with its rudder went next. A thousand feet above the ground, the baronet’s swift headless pusher fell like a stone.

  31

  “CAT RAN OUT OF LIVES.”

  “Don’t say that!” Josephine rounded on the mechanician who had muttered what they all feared. She ran to Abby, who was weeping. But when she tried to hold her, the baronet’s wife pulled back and held herself stiff as a marble statue.

  All Josephine could think of was Marco promising her, “You will win. I will see that you win. Don’t you worry. No one will stay ahead of you.”

  What had he done?

  They were gathered on the banks of a wide creek twenty miles southwest of Topeka, she and Isaac Bell, who had both alighted on a dirt road beside the tracks, and Abby and all the mechanicians, who had seen the smash from their support train. The blue pusher – what was left of it – was floating in the creek, caught on a snag halfway across.

  Had Marco sabotaged Abby’s husband’s machine so that she could win? There he was, in his crazy Russian disguise. She was the only one who knew who he really was and the only one who suspected he had done something terrible. But she was afraid to ask.

  I must, she thought. I have to ask him. And if it is true, then I have to admit everything, all the lies. She walked up to Marco. He was waving his Dmitri slide rule, and he looked as distraught as the others, but she realized with a terrible sense of lost trust that she could not be sure he wasn’t pretending. She said, in a low voice, “I have to talk to you.”

  “Oh, poor Josephine!” he cried in full Platov mode. “You are seeing all happening in front of eyes.”

  “I have to ask you.”

  “What?”

  Before she could speak, she heard a scream. Abby was screaming. Then, miraculously, a cheer from every throat. She whirled toward the creek. Everyone was looking downstream. Baronet Eddison-Sydney-Martin was limping unsteadily along the bank, soaking wet, covered in mud and fumbling with a cigarette he could not light.

  BELL TOLD ANDY MOSER that he was certain that he had seen Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s propeller fall off. “Is it common?”

  “It happens,” said Andy.

  “What would cause it?”

  “Lots of things. A crack in the hub.”

  “But he inspected the machine every time he flew. He walked around it and checked mounts and stays and everything. Just like all of us do. So did his mechanicians, just like you do for me.”

  “Could have hit a rock bouncing on the field.”

  “He would have noticed, felt it, heard it.”

  “He’d notice if it shattered the propeller,” said Andy. “But if a rock hit right on the hub at the same moment he had his hands full just getting her into the air and his motor was straining loudly, maybe he didn’t. Couple of months ago I heard about a propeller getting unstable because it was stored standing up. Moisture sunk into the bottom blade.”

  “His was brand-new and used nearly every day since he got it.”

  “Yeah, but you get these cracks.”

  “That’s why it was painted silver,” countered Bell, “so little cracks would show.” That was standard procedure on pushers. His own propeller was not because a silver propeller spinning in front of the driver would dazzle him.

  “I know, Mr. Bell. And obviously it wasn’t around long enough to rot, either.” Moser looked up at the tall detective. “If you’re asking me was it sabotage, I’d say it sure as heck could have been.”

  “How? If you wanted a fellow’s propeller to fly off, what would you do?”

  “Anything I could to throw it out of kilter. When the propeller is off balance, it vibrates. Vibrations will break it or rattle the hub loose, or even shake the motor right off its mounts.”

  “But you wouldn’t want it shaking that much because the fellow you’re trying kill would notice and stop his motor and volplane down as fast as he could.”

  “You’re right about that,” Andy said gravely. “The saboteur would have to really know his business.”

  But that, Isaac Bell had to admit, was true of every mechanician in the race, with the possible exceptions of Josephine’s disguised detectives. Another truth he could not ignore was that Preston Whiteway had gotten the wish he had so unabashedly hoped for back in San Francisco. He had had to wait long past Chicago and halfway across Kansas, but a “w
innowing of the field” had indeed turned the race into a contest that pitted the best airmen against plucky tomboy Josephine.

  Eddison-Sydney-Martin had probably been the best – and his winnowing by sabotage had hardly been natural. But steady Joe Mudd was proving himself to be no slouch, while the thoroughly unpleasant but undeniably courageous Steve Stevens was a fast flier who pushed ahead unintimidated by the vibrations endangering his machine.

  Bell had no way of knowing who the saboteur would try to attack next. In fact, the only thing that the tall detective knew absolutely for sure was that his first job was still what it had always been: keep Harry Frost from killing Josephine.

  BELL WONDERED WHETHER the machine-gun raid at Fort Riley could have been an elaborate feint by Harry Frost, a distraction to lull Josephine’s protectors into loosening the cordon they kept around her each night at the fairgrounds and rail yards. With that possibility in mind, Bell laid an ambush. He waited for dark – after sad good-byes with the Eddison-Sydney-Martins, whose support train steamed out of the tiny Morris County Fairgrounds rail yard back to Chicago – and climbed onto the roof of Josephine’s private car. For hours, he lay in wait, scanning the trains parked on the other side of Whiteway’s special and listening for the crunch of boots on gravel ballast.

  It was a hot night. Windows, skylights, and roof hatches were open. Murmured conversations and occasional bursts of laughter mingled with a quiet sighing of locomotives bedded down with banked fires producing just enough steam to power lights and warm water.

  Around midnight, he heard someone knock at Josephine’s rear vestibule. Whoever it was, he must have come through the train, as Bell had seen or heard no one on the ballast. Nonetheless, Bell drew his Browning and aimed it through an open roof hatch at the door. He heard Josephine call sleepily from her stateroom, “Who is it?”

  “Preston.”

  “Mr. Whiteway, it’s kind of late.”

  “I must speak with you, Josephine.”

  Josephine padded into the front parlor, wearing a simple dressing gown over cotton pajamas, and opened the door.