The Race ib-4

by Clive Cussler

  “Indoors makes it easier to guard,” said Bell.

  When he did inspect it, he discovered it was indeed a wise choice, with enormous rail yards for the support trains and wedding guests’ specials, and easily dismantled corrals to make airfield space for the flying machines.

  AFTER A THOUSAND-MILE RUN from Chicago on awful roads, Harry Frost’s sixty-horsepower, four-cylinder Model 35 Thomas Flyer touring car was caked in mud, gray with dust, and festooned with towropes and chains, extra gas and oil cans, and repeatedly patched spare tires. But it was running like a top, and Frost felt a kind of freedom he never experienced on a railroad, even steaming on his own special. Like Josephine used to prattle on about flying in the air-on the air, she called it, insisting that air was almost solid – in or on, a man could auto anywhere he pleased.

  Thirty miles from Fort Worth, a meatpacking city that was smudging the sky with smoke, Frost ordered a halt on a low rise. He scanned the scrub-strewn prairie with powerful German field glasses he had bought for African safaris. A mile off was the railroad. A freight car sat all by itself on a remote siding that had once served a town since wiped from the map by a tornado.

  “Go!”

  Mike Stotts, Frost’s mechanician, cranked the Thomas’s motor. Three hours later, twenty-five miles on, they stopped again. Frost sent Stotts ahead on a bicycle, which they had stolen in Wichita Falls, to scout the territory and establish contact with Frost’s men in Fort Worth.

  “You want I should go with him?” asked Dave Mayhew, Frost’s telegrapher.

  “You stay here.” He could always get another mechanician, but a telegrapher who was also handy with firearms was a rare animal. Stotts was back sooner than Frost had expected. “What’s going on?”

  “Picket line. They’ve got men on horses patrolling.”

  “You sure they weren’t ranch hands?”

  “I didn’t see any cows.”

  “What about in the city?”

  “Police everywhere. Half the men I saw were wearing deputy stars. And a fair portion of those who weren’t looked like detectives.”

  “Did you see any rail dicks?”

  “About a hundred.”

  Frost ruminated in silence. Clearly, Isaac Bell was operating under the assumption that the Colt machine guns stolen from Fort Riley were in his possession.

  There were other ways to skin a cat. Frost sent Mayhew up a pole to wire a Texas amp; Pacific Railway dispatcher in his employ, then headed west, skirting Fort Worth.

  After dark, the Thomas Flyer climbed the embankment onto the railroad, straddled the tracks, and continued west. Frost ordered the mechanician to watch behind them for locomotive headlamps. He and the telegrapher watched ahead. Five times in the night, they pulled off the tracks to let a train pass.

  HALFWAY TO ABILENE late the next day, Harry Frost watched through his field glasses as a large chuck wagon, drawn by six powerful mules, stopped next to a freight car parked on a remote Texas amp; Pacific Railway siding. The siding served an enormous ranch ten miles away that was owned by a Wall Street investment combine in which Frost held a controlling interest. Six gunmen dressed like cowboys were riding with the wagon. They dismounted, unlocked a padlock, slid open the boxcar door, and wrestled heavy crates stenciled HOLIAN PLOW WORKS SANDY HOOK CONN into the wagon.

  Frost raked the endless empty miles of brush and grass with the field glasses, checking as he had repeatedly that there was no one in sight to interfere. Prairie speckled with brown clumps of mesquite grass rolled to the horizon. Clouds, or perhaps low hills, rose in the west. He spied, eight or ten miles north, a single spindly structure that could be either a windmill to pump water or a derrick to drill for oil. The tracks gleamed in a straight line east and west, edged by a ragged ribbon of telegraph wire strung along weathered poles.

  They finished loading the chuck wagon. It trundled west on the rutted dirt track that paralleled the railroad, guarded by the men on horses. The Thomas caught up two miles from the siding. Up close, the appearance of the horsemen would cause any peace officer worth his salt to draw his guns for they looked less like cowboys than bank robbers. Their hands lacked the calluses and scars of range work. They wore six-guns in double holsters low on the hips and packed Winchester rifles in saddle scabbards. Surveying the three men in the Thomas, the hard-bitten gang turned expectantly to a tall man in their midst. Harry Frost had already spotted him as the leader with whom he had communicated through an intermediary he trusted from the old days.

  Frost asked, “Which of you was in the Spanish War?”

  Four men in campaign hats nodded.

  “Did you fire the Colt?”

  They nodded again, eyes still shifting toward their leader.

  “Follow me. There’s a creek bed where we can mount the guns.”

  No one moved.

  “Herbert?” Frost said amiably. “My fellows in Chicago tell me you’re one tough outlaw. Can’t help but notice that everyone’s looking at you like you’re about to impart some wisdom. What’s on your mind?”

  Herbert answered by drawling, “We was debatin’ why instead of shootin’ at flyin’ machines we oughtn’t to take your money now, and your auto, and your machine guns, and if you don’t give us no trouble, allow you all to hop a freight back to Chicago – you bein’ only three, us bein’ six.”

  Gripping the stock in one powerful hand, Harry Frost raised a sawed-off double-barreled ten-gauge from between his boots.

  The outlaw looked fearlessly down the twin muzzles. “Ah don’t cotton to a man drawin’ a bead on me. Particularly with a coach gun.”

  “I’m not drawing a bead on you, Mr. Herbert,” Harry Frost replied. “I’m blowing your head off.” He jerked both triggers. The shotgun thundered like a cannon, and a swath of double-ought buckshot threw Herbert out of his saddle.

  There was no echo on the open range, just a single blast of thunder and the neighing of frightened horses. When the dead man’s gang got their mounts under control, Stotts and Mayhew were pointing revolvers in both hands, and Harry Frost himself had reloaded. His face was red with righteous anger.

  “Who else?”

  They uncrated the guns, mounts, ammunition boxes, and landing carriages in the meager shade of the scrub brush and low trees that grew beside the creek. They disassembled and cleaned the guns and mounted them on the two-wheeled landing carriages. The weapons weighed nearly four hundred pounds, including the ammunition boxes. Cursing the weight, they rolled them up and down the dry creek bed, which was deep and narrow as a military slit trench. Positioned two hundred yards apart and elevated on their carriages, the Colts commanded the railroad tracks that the aeroplanes would follow to Abilene.

  To ensure the guns were in working order, they fed the canvas cartridge belts into the breeches and fired fifty rounds from each, killing some cows grazing half a mile away.

  Harry Frost handed Stotts his hunting knife. “Go slice off some supper. Better cut enough for breakfast. We’ll be here awhile.”

  He ordered Mayhew to climb a pole and tap into the wires.

  The telegrapher strung wire down to the ground, connected it to a key, sat propped against the pole with the key in his lap, and translated the messages that railroad dispatchers were transmitting between their distant stations. Several times, he warned that a train was coming. They hid under the trestle that spanned the creek bed until the train had thundered overhead. Most of the telegraph traffic was about shunting extra trains – rich men’s specials and newspapers’ charters – into Fort Worth for the big wedding.

  33

  ISAAC BELL WAS SURPRISED when Preston Whiteway asked him to be his best man until he realized that the only people the newspaper magnate ever spent time with were people who worked for him, and the high-handed manner in which he treated employees guaranteed they would never be friends.

  “I would be honored,” Bell said, glad to stand near Josephine to protect her personally if Harry Frost somehow pulled a fast one and breached th
e outer defense lines. He was not as pleased when Josephine asked Marion to be her maid of honor. It put his fiancée directly in the line of fire, but Marion made it clear there was no saying no to such a request from Josephine, who was thousands of miles from her family and the only woman in the race.

  In answer to Joseph Van Dorn’s queries from Washington about “wedding hoopla,” Isaac Bell wired back:

  PRESTON PREEMINENT PROMOTER.

  Hundreds of invited guests and hordes of spectators converged on Fort Worth in automobiles, buckboard wagons, carriages, and on horseback. Packed trains steamed in from Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The Northern Texas Traction Company ran extra trolleys from Dallas. A company of state militia was called up to control the crowds and protect the flying machines. Additional companies were under orders at Tyler and Texarkana. Marion Morgan’s camera operators were trampled by legions of newspaper sketch artists and photographers until Whiteway himself stepped in to remind them that, as owner of Picture World, he would not take kindly to his cameras being jostled.

  The ceremony itself was delayed by every hitch imaginable.

  The North Side Coliseum, which Whiteway had furnished with church pews and an altar shipped in from St. Louis, had been designed more for the movement of cattle than people, so it took a very long time to get everyone seated. Then summer thunderheads blackened the western sky, and every mechanician and birdman in the race, including the bride, ran out to the field to tie down their machines and shroud wings and fuselages with canvas.

  Thunder shook the coliseum. Fierce winds swept in from the prairie. Steve Stevens’s biplane tore its anchors. The bride, though widely known to despise the obese cotton farmer, led another charge outdoors to save his machine. They got it nailed down, but not before torrential rain struck.

  Josephine was dried off by her ladies-in-waiting – a rough-and-tumble crowd of Fort Worth society matrons who had volunteered to fill in for the famous aviatrix’s faraway family. The Bishop of San Francisco’s stand-in – the Right Reverend himself pleaded prior responsibilities raising funds to erect a cathedral on earthquake-ravished Nob Hill – had just reassembled the flock in front of the temporarily consecrated altar when the floor was set to shaking by a colossal jet-black 2-8-2 Mikado locomotive rumbling into the yard. With deep fireboxes, superheated boilers, and eight drive wheels, the powerful Mikados usually sped immense strings of boxcars at sixty miles per hour. This one towed a single long black private car, which it parked beside a cattle chute that led directly into the building.

  “Good God,” whispered Preston Whiteway, “it’s Mother.”

  From the private car, swathed head to toe in black silk and crowned with raven feathers, stalked the Widow Whiteway.

  The newspaper publisher turned beseechingly to the Van Dorn Agency’s chief investigator. “I thought she was in France,” he whispered. “Bell, you’re best man. It’s your job to do something. Please.”

  The tall, golden-haired detective squared his shoulders and strode to the cattle chute. Scion of an ancient Boston banking family, polished at boarding school and educated at Yale, Isaac Bell was steeped in the tradition of best men saving the day, whether by locating lost rings or defusing inebriated former fiancées, but this was as far beyond his ken, as if he were a Texas cowhand asked to rope a rhinoceros.

  He offered his hand and a princely bow.

  “At last,” he greeted the groom’s uninvited mother, “the ceremony can begin.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Isaac Bell, Preston’s best man and a devoted reader of your columns in the Sunday supplements.”

  “If you’ve read them, you know I cannot abide divorce.”

  “Neither can Josephine. Were her unfortunate marriage not properly annulled, she would never marry again. Here she is now.” Josephine was hurrying from the altar with an open smile.

  Mrs. Whiteway muttered, “She’s braver than my son. Look at him, afraid of his own mother.”

  “He’s mortified, madam. He thought you were in France.”

  “He hoped I was in France. What do think of this girl, Mr. Bell?”

  “I admire her pluck.”

  Josephine approached, eyes warm, extending both hands. “I’m so glad you made it, Mrs. Whiteway. My own mother couldn’t, and I felt all alone until now.”

  Mrs. Whiteway looked Josephine up and down. “Aren’t you the plain Jane?” she announced. “Pretty enough, but no beauty, thank goodness. Beauty spoils a woman, turns her head. . Who is that woman in maid-of-honor costume directing those men to point moving-picture cameras at me?”

  “My fiancée,” said Bell, who had already stepped out of the line of focus, “Miss Marion Morgan.”

  “Well, there may be exceptions to what I said about beautiful women,” Mrs. Whiteway harrumphed. “Young lady, do you love my son?”

  The aviatrix looked her in the eye. “I like him.”

  “Why?”

  “He gets things done.”

  “That is the one good trait he inherited from my husband.” She took Josephine’s hand and said, “Let’s get on with this,” and walked her back to the altar.

  Mrs. Whiteway was settled in the front pew, and the bishop’s stand-in was repeating for the third time “We are gathered here today. .” when through the skylight above Josephine and Preston the heavens suddenly glowed a steely green.

  “Twisters!” cried the Texas plains dwellers who knew that weirdly tinted sky could only mean tornadoes.

  Fort Worthians fled to storm cellars, inviting as many guests as they could squeeze in. Visitors who had steamed in on special trains retired to their dubious shelters. Those without cellars or trains found saloons.

  The tornados roamed the rangeland until long after dark, roaring like runaway freights, hurling cattle and bunkhouses to the skies. They spared the city, but it was past midnight before a grateful congregation finally smelled the wedding feast cooking and at last heard the words “I now pronounce you man and wife.”

  Preston Whiteway, flushed from reciprocating multiple toasts to the bridegroom, planted a kiss on Josephine’s lips. Maid of Honor Marion Morgan assured all who asked that, from her close vantage, she had observed that Josephine returned it gamely.

  A roar of “Let’s eat” drove hundreds to the tables.

  Whiteway raised his glass high. “A toast to my beautiful bride, America’s Sweetheart of the Air. May she fly ever higher and faster in my arms and-”

  However Whiteway intended to continue his toast was drowned out by the distinctive grinding clatter of two pump-driven, eight-cylinder Antoinette motors clawing Steve Stevens’s overburdened biplane into the night air.

  JOSEPHINE JUMPED from the bridal party’s table and ran full tilt through a canvas flap that covered a cattle chute leading to the flying field. Spitting fire from both motors, Stevens’s machine cleared a fence and Mrs. Whiteway’s locomotive, headed straight at a line of telegraph wires, cleared them by inches, lurched over a barn, and disappeared into the night.

  Marco Celere was standing with the chocks he had pulled from its wheels at his feet, waving good-bye with his Platov’s slide rule and his red-banded straw boater.

  “I told you I’d think of something for your wedding night.”

  “Where’s he going?”

  “Abilene.”

  “That sneaky, fat. .”

  “I convinced him to go ahead so we’d have time to work on the motors.”

  “How can he see where he’s flying?”

  “Stars and moon on shiny tracks.”

  Josephine yelled for her mechanicians to pour gas and oil into her flying machine and spin it over. Marco raced after her as she ran to it, dragging her wedding dress like a cloud of white smoke. He pulled the canvas off the monoplane’s wings while she knelt by tent pegs to release the tie-downs.

  “I have to warn you. .” he whispered urgently.

  “What?” She loosened a taut-line hitch, tugged the rope off the st
rut, and knelt to loosen another.

  “If something were to happen to ‘Dmitri Platov,’ don’t worry.”

  “What do you mean?. . Hurry it up! ” she shouted to her detective-mechanicians, who were tipping cans of gas and oil into the tanks. “What are you talking about? You’re Dmitri Platov.”

  “‘Dmitri Platov’ is being watched by Bell’s detectives. He may have to suddenly disappear.”

  Josephine untied the last tie-down, jumped up on the soapbox, and scrambled onto her machine, desperate to get up in the air. The train of her wedding dress tangled in a stay. “Knife!” she yelled to a detective-mechanician, who flicked open a sharpened blade and slashed the train off her dress.

  “Keep it out of the propeller!” she ordered, and the mechanician dragged it away. Marco was still standing on the soapbox, his whiskered face inches from hers. “What about you?” she asked.

  “I’ll be back. Don’t worry.”

  She plunged her control post forward and pulled it back and tilted it sideways, checking that her elevator, rudder, and alettoni moved properly. “O.K., I won’t. Get out of my way. . Contact!”

  She raced off the ground ten minutes behind Stevens.

  Isaac Bell was already circling the field, having instructed Andy Moser to keep the motor warm and gas and castor oil topped off. From high in the air, he saw the North Side Coliseum, and all of Fort Worth, as a dull glow lost in the infinite sea of darkness that was the night-blackened Texas rangeland.

  Josephine raced west, following the railroad tracks by the light of the moon.

  The tall detective was right behind her, tracking the aviatrix by the pinprick of fire that marked her Antoinette’s exhaust. For the first ten miles, he kept slowing his engine so as not to overtake her. But when the glow of Fort Worth had completely disappeared, and the ground was as dark behind as it was ahead, he fixed his eyes on the double line of moonlit steel, took his finger off the blip switch, and let the Eagle fly.