The Race ib-4

by Clive Cussler

  BOOK FOUR

  “in the air she goes! there she goes!”

  34

  HARRY FROST THOUGHT he heard something coming from the east. He saw no glow of a locomotive headlamp. But he knelt anyway and pressed his good ear to the cold steel rail to confirm that it was not a train. The track transmitted no tuning-fork vibration.

  Dave Mayhew hunched over his telegraph key. It was he, eavesdropping on the railroad dispatchers, who had suddenly reported the startling news that several flying machines had ascended from Fort Worth in the dark. The blushing bride Josephine’s was among them.

  “This time,” Harry Frost vowed in grave tones that chilled the hard-bitten Mayhew to the bone, “I’ll give her a wedding night she will never forget.”

  He had been watching the eastern sky for nearly an hour, hoping to see her machine silhouetted against first light. So far, nothing. Still dark as a coal mine. Now he was sure he heard a motor.

  He turned left and called into the dark, “Hear me?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Frost.”

  He turned right and shouted again.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Frost.”

  “Get ready!”

  He waited for a return shout, “Ready!” turned to his right, shouted again, “Get ready!” and heard, “Ready!” back.

  Sound carried in the cold night air. He heard the distinctive metallic snick when, to either side of him, the machine gunners levered open their Colts’ action to chamber their first rounds.

  There were three men on each gun, knee-deep in rainwater left by the evening storms: a gunner, a feeder to the gunner’s left guiding the canvas belt of cartridges, and a spotter with field glasses. Frost kept Mike Stotts standing by to run with orders if they couldn’t hear him.

  The noise grew louder, the sound of a straining machine. Then Frost distinguished the clatter of not one but two motors. They must be flying very close to each other, he thought. Too close. Something was wrong. Suddenly he realized that he was hearing two poorly synchronized engines driving Steve Stevens’s biplane. Stevens was in the lead.

  “Hold your fire! It’s not her. Hold your fire!”

  The biplane passed over, motors loud and ragged, flying low so the driver could see the rails. Josephine would have to fly low, too, making her an easy target.

  Ten minutes elapsed before Frost heard another machine. Once again, he saw no locomotive light. Definitely an aeroplane. Was it Josephine? Or was it Isaac Bell? It was coming fast. He had seconds to make up his mind. Bell usually flew behind her.

  “Ready!”

  “Ready, Mr. Frost.”

  “Ready, Mr. Frost.”

  The gunner to his left yelled excitedly, “Here she comes!”

  “Wait!. . Wait!”

  “Here she comes, boys!” cried the men on his right.

  “Wait!”

  Suddenly Frost heard the distinctive hollow-sounding blatting exhaust of a rotary motor.

  “It’s a Gnome! It’s not her. It’s a Gnome! He’s ahead of her. Hold your fire! Hold your fire! ”

  He was too late. The excited gunners drowned him out with long bursts of automatic fire, feeding the ammunition belts as fast as the guns could fire. Spitting brass cartridges and empty cloth, the weapons spewed four hundred rounds a minute at the approaching machine.

  ISAAC BELL LOCATED both machine guns by their muzzle flashes, two hundred yards apart to the north and south of the tracks. There was no way the gunners could see him, blinded by those flashes. But they were shooting accurately anyway, aiming at the sound of his motor, firing thunderously, stopping to listen, firing again.

  Flying lead crackled as it passed close to the Eagle’s king posts.

  Bell blipped the motor off, glided silently, then blipped it on again. The guns caught up and resumed firing. Heavy slugs shook struts behind him. The rudder took several hits, and he felt them kick his wheel post.

  Bell turned the Eagle around and flew back up the tracks in the direction from which he had come. Facing east, back toward Fort Worth, he saw the gray glow of first light. His keen eyes detected a dot several miles distant. Josephine was coming at sixty miles at hour. He had two minutes to disable the machine guns before she ran into the clouds of lead they were shooting into the sky. But armed with a single Remington rifle, he was badly outgunned. His only hope was to sow confusion.

  He blipped his motor off again, banked, and glided silently to the right. He blipped on. The south gun chattered, tracing the noise of his motor but revealing its position. Bell steered for the flashes, swooped low, and fired his rifle. He blipped off the motor and glided over the machine gun. Well past it, he blipped the Gnome again, roared around, and headed back, flying in line with the guns on a course perpendicular to the tracks.

  Both guns, the closer south gun and the north gun on the far side of the tracks, opened a deadly sheet of fire. Bell swooped low over the nearer. By its muzzle flashes, he could see three men had the gun mounted on a light landing carriage, which they wheeled skillfully as he passed to rake him from behind.

  Bell dropped under the stream of bullets, so low he could see flashes on the tracks. Harry Frost was firing a shotgun at the Gnome’s brightly flaming exhaust. Bell dropped almost to the ground, practically parted Frost’s hair with his skids, and fired his rifle at the north machine gunners, drawing their attention and causing them to wheel their gun and fire at him continuously. Had they held the trigger any longer, the air-cooled Colt would have burned up. As it was he could see the barrel glowing red-hot. But they stopped firing abruptly and scattered for their lives as their emplacement was hit by a burst from the south gunners, whom Bell had tricked into strafing their opposite position while trying to rake him from behind.

  A second later, the south gun exploded when the last bullets from the northern emplacement they put out of action ignited their ammunition boxes.

  Bell slammed the Eagle in another tight turn and fired his last shots from the Remington at the shotgun flashes. He stood little chance of hitting Frost in the dim light from his racing machine but hoped that Remington.35 slugs shrieking near Frost’s head would make the murderer dive for cover.

  Frost didn’t budge.

  He stood erect, firing repeatedly, until his shotgun was empty.

  Then he jumped from the tracks into the creek bed and ran with astonishing agility the hundred yards to the machine gun whose gunners had fled. As Josephine flashed by low overhead, Frost spun the heavy weapon’s carriage and fired a long burst after her. Bell drove his machine straight at him. The Remington was empty. He drew his pistol and fired as fast as he could pull the trigger. Bracketed by flying lead, Harry Frost fired back until the ammunition belt, with no one to guide it into the breech, jammed.

  Bell saw Josephine’s machine dip a wing. It dropped toward the ground, skimming the tracks, and Bell feared that she was wounded or her controls so badly damaged that she would slam a wing into the ground and cartwheel to oblivion. Heart in his throat, he watched with terrible anticipation that turned to astonished relief as the Celere monoplane lifted its wing, straightened up, and wobbled into the sky.

  ISAAC BELL STUCK CLOSE to Josephine all the way to Abilene, where the tracks of the Abilene amp; Northern Railway, the Abilene amp; Southern, and the Santa Fe crossed the Texas amp; Pacific. She landed clumsily, skidding half around in front of the freight station. Bell alighted nearby.

  He found her slumped over her controls, clutching her arm. A machine-gun slug had grazed her, tearing the skin and furrowing flesh. Her wedding dress was streaked with blood and engine grease. Her lips were trembling. “I nearly lost control.”

  “I am so sorry. I should have stopped him.”

  “I told you he’s animal sly. Nobody can stop him.”

  Bell tied a handkerchief around the wound, which was still oozing blood. Small boys had come running, trailed by old men with long Civil War beards. Men and boys gaped at the yellow machines side by side in the dust.

  “Run, you bo
ys,” Bell shouted, “bring a doctor!”

  Josephine straightened up but did not try to climb down from her machine. Her entire body seemed rigid with the sustained effort to keep flying. She was pale and looked utterly exhausted. Bell threw an arm around her shoulders.

  “It’s all right to cry,” he said gently. “I won’t tell anybody.”

  “My machine’s O.K.,” she answered, her voice small and distant. “But he ruined my wedding dress. Why am I crying? I don’t even care about this silly dress. Wait a minute!” She looked around, suddenly frantic. “Where’s Steve Stevens?”

  The doctor came running with his medical bag.

  “Did you see a white biplane with a big fat driver?” Josephine demanded.

  “Just left, ma’am, headed for Odessa. Said he’s hoping to make El Paso in a couple of days. Now, let’s help you off this machine.”

  “I need oil and gasoline.”

  “You need a proper bandage, carbolic acid, and a week in bed, little lady.”

  “Watch me,” said Josephine. She raised her bloody arm and opened her fingers. “I can move my hand, do you see?”

  “I see that the bone is not broken,” said the doctor. “But you have had terrible shock to your system.”

  Isaac Bell observed the determined set to her jaw and the sudden fierce gleam in her eye. He beckoned the boys and tossed each a five-dollar gold piece. “Rustle up oil and gasoline for Josephine’s flying machine. Gasoline and castor oil for mine. On the jump!”

  “She can’t operate a flying machine in her condition,” the doctor protested.

  “Patch her up!” Bell told the doctor.

  “Do you seriously believe that she’s flying to El Paso in her condition?”

  “No,” said Isaac Bell. “She’s flying to San Francisco.”

  35

  TWO DAYS LATER, Josephine circled El Paso’s business district while Isaac Bell swept field glasses across the rooftops in search of Harry Frost with a rifle. Her Celere monoplane had taken the lead on the run today from Pecos, as it had the day before from Midland to Pecos.

  The ground below was seething with ten thousand El Paso Texans who had turned out to greet the aviatrix, primed for her arrival by newspaper headlines blaring:

  HERE COMES THE BRIDE!

  They crammed the business district to watch from streets, city squares, windows, and sixth-story roofs. Mindful of the mobs they encountered in Fort Worth, Bell had demanded that Whiteway move the actual alighting spot to a more easily guarded rail yard beside the Rio Grande. Looking at the mad scene below, he was glad he had.

  Josephine was still giving them a show when Steve Stevens’s big white biplane appeared in the east with Joe Mudd’s red Liberator laboring after it. She circled once more for the crowd, embellished the maneuver with a string of steep spiral dips that set them ooohhhing and aaahhhing, and descended to the rail yard.

  Bell landed beside her.

  The air racers had battled strong headwinds all day, and their support trains had already arrived. The crews were celebrating. With the state of Texas behind them now, the finish line seemed almost in sight. South, across the river, exotic Mexico shimmered in the hot sun. But it was the west that gripped their interest – the New Mexico Territory, the Arizona Territory, and finally California at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

  They weren’t there yet, Bell knew, his eye captured by a series of blue mountain ranges that pointed toward the Continental Divide. To clear even the low end of the Rockies, the machines would have to climb higher than four thousand feet.

  He found telegrams waiting. One lifted his spirits mightily. Archie was recovered enough to risk traveling west with Lillian on Osgood Hennessy’s special train to see the end of the race. Bell wired back that they should light a fire under the lawyers angling to free Danielle Di Vecchio from the asylum and bring her with them so she could see her father’s machine had flown across the continent while guarding the race – provided, of course, Bell thought, knocking ruefully on wood, that he didn’t smash it to pieces or get shot out of the sky by Harry Frost.

  Less happy news was contained in a long telegram from Research:

  PLATOV UNMET UNSEEN UNKNOWN,

  Grady Forrer had begun, confessing his failure to turn up anything about the Russian inventor Dmitri Platov beyond the reports from Belmont Park. The head of the Van Dorn Research Department added an intriguing slant that deepened the mystery:

  THERMO ENGINE DEMONSTRATED AT PARIS INTERNATIONAL AERONAUTICAL SALON BY AUSTRALIAN INVENTOR/SHEEP DROVER ROB CONNOLLY.

  NOT PLATOV.

  AUSTRALIAN SOLD ENGINE AND WENT HOME.

  CURRENTLY INCOMMUNICADO OUTBACK.

  THERMO ENGINE BUYER UNKNOWN.

  ??? POSSIBLY PLATOV???

  Isaac Bell went looking for Dmitri Platov.

  He found James Dashwood, whom he had assigned to watch the Russian, staring at the back of Steve Stevens’s support train. A perplexed expression clouded his face, and he ducked his head in embarrassment when he saw the chief investigator striding purposefully straight at him.

  “I surmise,” Isaac Bell said sternly, “that you lost Platov.”

  “Not only Platov. His entire shop car disappeared.”

  It had been the last car on Stevens’s special. Now it was gone.

  “It didn’t steam off on its own.”

  “No, sir. The boys told me when they woke up this morning, it was uncoupled and gone.”

  Bell surveyed the siding on which the Stevens special sat. The rails pitched slightly downhill. Uncoupled, Platov’s car would have rolled away. “Can’t have gotten far.”

  But a switch was open at the back end of the yard, connecting the support train siding to a feeder line that disappeared among a cluster of factories and warehouses along the river.

  “Go get a handcar, James.”

  Dashwood returned, pumping a lightweight track inspector’s handcar. Bell jumped on, and they started down the factory siding. Bell lent this strength to the slim Dashwood’s effort, and they were soon rolling at nearly twenty miles per hour. Rounding a bend, they saw smoke ahead, the source hidden by clapboard-sided warehouses. Around the next twist in the rail, they saw oily smoke rising into the clear blue sky.

  “Faster!”

  They raced between a leatherworks and an odoriferous slaughterhouse, and saw that the smoke was billowing from Platov’s shop car, which had stopped against the bumper that blocked the end of the rails. Flames were spouting from its windows, doors, and roof hatch. In the seconds it took Bell and Dashwood to reach it, the entire car was completely engulfed.

  “Poor Mr. Platov,” Dashwood cried. “All his tools. . God, I hope he’s not inside.”

  “Poor Mr. Platov,” Bell repeated grimly. A shop car filled with tanks of oil and gasoline burned hot and fast.

  “Lucky the car wasn’t coupled to Mr. Stevens’s special,” said Dashwood.

  “Very lucky,” Bell agreed.

  “What is that smell?”

  “Some poor devil roasting, I’m afraid.”

  “Mr. Platov?”

  “Who else?” asked Bell.

  Horse-drawn fire engines came bouncing over the tracks. The firemen unrolled hoses to the river and engaged their steam pump. Powerful streams of water bored into the flames but to little effect. The fire quickly consumed the wooden sides and roof and floor of the rail car until there was nothing left but a mound of ash heaped between the steel trucks and iron wheels. When it was out, the fireman found the shriveled remains of a human body, its boots and clothes burned to a crisp.

  Bell poked among the wet ashes.

  Something gleaming caught his eye. He picked up a one-inch square of glass framed with brass. It was still warm. He turned it over his fingers. The brass had grooves on two edges. He showed it to Dashwood. “Faber-Castell engineering slide rule. . or what’s left of it.”

  “Here comes Steve Stevens.”

  The fast-flying cotton farmer waddled up, planted his h
ands on his hips, and glowered at the ashes.

  “If this don’t beat all! Ah got a socialist red unionist creepin’ up on me. Every sentimental fool in the country is rootin’ for Josephine just ’cause she’s a gal. And now my high-paid mechanician goes and barbecues hisself. Who the heck is goin’ to keep my poor machine runnin’?”

  Bell suggested, “Why don’t you ask the mechanicians Dmitri helped?”

  “That’s the dumbest idea Ah ever heard. Even if that damn-fool Russian couldn’t synchronize my motors, nobody else knows how to fix my flying machine like him. Poor old machine might as well have burned up with him. He knew it inside and out. Without him, Ah’ll be lucky to make it across the New Mexico Territory.”

  “It’s not a dumb idea,” said Josephine. Bell had noticed her glide up silently behind them on a bicycle she had borrowed somewhere. Stevens had not.

  The startled fat man whirled around. “Where the heck did you come from? How long have you been listenin’?”

  “Since you said they’re rooting for me because I’m a girl.”

  “Well, darn it, it’s true, and you know it’s true.”

  Josephine stared into the smoldering ruins of Platov’s shop car. “But Isaac is right. With Dmitri. . gone. . you need help.”

  “Ah’ll get on fine. Don’t count me out ’cause I lost one mechanician.”

  Josephine shook her head. “Mr. Stevens, I have ears. I hear those motors chewing your machine to bits every time you take to the air. Do you want me to have a look at them?”

  “Well, Ah’m not sure-”

  Bell interrupted. “I’ll ask Andy Moser if he would look them over with Josephine.”

  “In case you think I’m going to sabotage your machine when you’re not looking,” Josephine grinned at Stevens.

  “Ah didn’t say that.”

  “You were thinking it. Let me and Andy lend you a hand.” Her grin got wider, and she teased, “Isaac will tell Andy to watch me like a hawk, so I don’t ‘accidentally’ bust anything.”