The Race ib-4

by Clive Cussler

  Isaac Bell dove straight at the shack, sheered away at the last moment to aim clear of his propeller, and emptied his Remington’s five-shot magazine so fast that the sound of the shots blended together in a roar like a cannon. Circling up and back, he saw that he had hit the gunmen to either side of Frost. He extracted the empty magazine, slipped a full one in its place, and dove again.

  Frost did not shoot at him. Bell wondered if he had hit Frost, too, and wounded him too badly to fight. But, no, Frost was running to the Thomas. He cranked the motor, jumped in, and drove onto the tracks. Then, to Bell’s puzzlement, he jumped from the auto and knelt briefly beside the rails.

  Frost jumped back on the Thomas and drove toward the hills.

  Less than ten seconds had expired since the shooting started. Detectives were still leaping from the hangar car. Bell banked hard to chase after the Thomas. But as the Eagle tipped on its side, Bell’s experience with Harry Frost’s relentless cruelty made him look carefully where Frost had knelt.

  He saw smoke, a thin white trail of smoke.

  Without hesitation, Isaac Bell rammed his blip switch, shoved his wheel forward, and dropped the Eagle toward the tracks. In the midst of the smoke, traveling along the rail, was a moving stud of red fire. Harry Frost had knelt on the rails and coolly lit a fuse – the fuse he had stolen from the Burbank maintenance shop along with detonators and dynamite.

  He had packed the trestle with explosives, Bell realized. The attack he had planned had been twofold: shoot Josephine out of the sky, and blow Preston Whiteway’s train to Kingdom Come – along with every Van Dorn riding on it.

  Bell forced the Eagle down and straddled the rails with the skids. He hit so hard, the machine bounced and tried to rise again. It would have been safer to pour on the power and take her up again, but there wasn’t a moment to lose. He drove the machine down hard and felt the skids shatter on the crossties. Splintering wood, shrieking metallic protest, the Eagle slid along the railroad tracks. Bell leaped and hit the ground running.

  The smoke was racing ahead of him, picking up speed as it closed with the trestle. Bell ran faster, gaining on it, and was within yards of stomping it out when it slipped over the lip of the gorge and under the trestle where he couldn’t reach.

  “Back your engine!” he shouted, running onto the trestle. “Back off the bridge.”

  There was no time for that. He saw the engineer gaping from his cab and his detectives running to help him, not realizing the danger. He saw Dashwood among them.

  “Dash!” he shouted. “There’s a detonator fuse under the tracks. Shoot it.”

  Bell climbed over the edge and down through the wooden timbers beneath the track. He saw the fuse strung timber to timber, burning brightly. Dash was quick – he, too, went over the side, scrambled among the timbers, and spotted the dot of fire fifty feet away. Clinging to a timber with one arm, the young detective drew his long-barreled Colt, took aim, and fired. The bullet threw splinters. The fuse kept burning. Dash fired again. The fuse leaped and jumped, and kept burning.

  Bell pulled himself along under the tracks, jumping from timber to timber. Ahead, in the shadow of the locomotive, he saw bundled dynamite – dozens and dozens of sticks, enough to destroy the trestle, the train, and everyone on it. Dash fired again. The fuse fire danced on.

  Isaac Bell leaped onto a horizontal cross timber, drew his Browning smoothly from his coat, and fired once.

  The dancing flame vanished. A wisp of smoke stood in its place, wavered in a puff of wind, then drifted away as if the fuse had been a candle snuffed out to end a pleasant evening.

  Bell scrambled back up on the tracks and ran to the train to issue orders.

  Josephine’s Van Dorn mechanicians were good men but city men, next to useless out of doors. “Crank Whiteway’s roadster,” he told them, “and run it down the ramp. Defuse the dynamite under the bridge. Then fix the skids so my machine can fly.

  “Dash! You cover the boys working on my machine. Shoot Frost in the head if the sidewinder doubles back.” He gestured Dash closer, and added under his breath, “Don’t let Celere near my machine. Oh, by the way, I know your mother gave you that Colt. But I would take it kindly if you would allow my gunsmith to fix you up with a proper Browning.

  “Texas Walt! You come with me!”

  Bell jumped behind the steering wheel of Preston Whiteway’s yellow Rolls-Royce. Walt Hatfield piled in next to him with a couple of lever-action Winchesters, and they drove off the trestle and raced up the railroad tracks toward the foothills of the Coast Range.

  After three miles of the grade steepening and scrub growth and clumps of low trees intruding on the grassland, they found the Thomas Flyer stopped in the middle of the tracks with two tires punctured by loose railroad spikes. Texas Walt spotted Frost’s trail, first from loose ballast where he had run down the railroad embankment, then from his trampling through the knee-high grass.

  Bell covered the thickets and rock outcroppings ahead with a Winchester while Hatfield loped from a scuff in the sand to a bent blade of grass to a broken twig. Bell himself was an experienced tracker, but Texas Walt could read the ground like the Comanches who had raised him.

  Above the hills, thunder muttered and lightning flickered inside the swelling storm clouds. The wind puffed cold in their faces, then hot.

  A blue jay bounced up from a thicket of evergreen oaks a half mile ahead.

  It was mighty long range for a rifle, but Bell snapped, “Down!”

  A shot echoed off the hills. Walt crumpled beside him.

  40

  BELL CUT TO THE RIGHT, seeking the shelter of a boulder. A.45-70 slug parted the air six inches from his cheek. Instead of diving for cover, he bounded past the boulder and into a narrow arroyo.

  He raced silently up the dry creek bed, one eye ahead, the other guiding his boots around anything that would make noise. The arroyo veered more to the right – farther from Frost – even as it climbed the steepening slope. Bell put on speed. He ran flat out for a full mile, climbing all the distance. When he finally stopped to catch his breath, it was where a ledge would allow him to survey the ground he had put behind him. Slithering flat on his belly, he edged forward until he could see the back of the thicket from which Frost had fired.

  Now half a mile below him, it covered nearly an acre of the hillside. Frost could be hidden anywhere inside it or he might have retreated up the slope and could now be more at Bell’s level. If he were smart, he would have withdrawn. But Bell was betting that Frost was making a big-game hunter’s mistake by staying still or moving only a short distance to lay another ambush for his quarry. Most animals ran when hunted. Some, like panther and elephant, might occasionally charge. Very few slipped past to attack from behind.

  Bell chose the route for his attack down a shallow arroyo and past a thicket. He eased back from the ledge to stay out of sight and started down. He was silent and he was quick, loath to give Frost time to reconsider his position. When the arroyo grew too shallow to hide him, he crawled to the nearest thicket and kept going.

  The leaden arch of sky was pierced suddenly by jagged lightning.

  Drops of rain scattered the dust.

  Again the wind rattled the hard-leafed chaparral, first hot, then cold.

  Suddenly he skidded off balance. He kicked a rock, which rolled noisily downhill.

  A shot cracked, the bullet kicking dust fifteen feet below him. Bell instantly grabbed another rock and threw it far to his right. It landed with a clatter that drew more fire. Let Frost wonder which rock had been accidentally dislodged and which thrown. Bell started down again. The location from where Frost had fired his rifle was almost exactly where Bell had guessed. He was staying put in the thicket, which was now less than three hundred yards below him. But now Frost knew to look behind him.

  Without warning, he exploded into action, shoving out of the dense undergrowth running for the cover of a depression in the land that looked to Bell like the mouth of a small canyon. Fr
ost was limping, as Tom Griggs had speculated, but still covering ground at a startling speed for a man his size. Bell snapped a shot at him that missed. He levered a fresh round into the Winchester and stood erect to deliberately line up a second shot, leading the running man and calculating the effect of the rising wind over the two hundred yards that separated them. His rifle spoke.

  Frost flung his arms high. His Marlin went flying. The distance was too long to hear him yell, but Bell thought he had hurt him badly until he saw Frost scoop his fallen rifle off the ground and disappear into the canyon.

  Isaac Bell ran down the slope, bounding from hummock to hummock, leaping brush and boulders. He lost his footing, pitched to the ground, rolled on his shoulder, and sprang to his feet again, still running and clutching his Winchester.

  He sensed more than saw a flicker of movement at the mouth of the canyon and dove headlong to the ground. A pistol slug whistled through the air he had just vacated. He tucked the Winchester tight to his chest, rolled, and this time when he sprang to his feet he came up firing, levering slug after slug into the breech, spraying a deadly fusillade that sent Frost in retreat.

  For some reason, Frost wasn’t using his Marlin. Bell guessed that his Winchester shot that had set it flying had damaged it, in which case Frost was down to sidearms. He burst into the canyon, which was no wider than a town house but appeared to bore deeply into the hillside. Thick brush clogged the mouth. Bell pushed through thorny chaparral. Pistol shots booming close at hand revealed Frost, crouching and firing his snub-nosed Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver with which he had almost killed Archie Abbott. The range was too long for the sawed-off barrel. The manstoppers flew wildly, scattering splinters of wood.

  Bell tried to fire back. His Winchester was empty.

  Frost charged, plowing through the brush like a buffalo, triggering his heavy pistol as he halved the range and burst from the thicket. It was Bell’s first close look at him. One eye was cloudy, the socket scarred where Bell’s Remington rifle shots had hurled stone chips in his face at the Chicago armory. The ear Bell had winged was a ragged appendage. The jaw Archie had broken was misshapen. But his good eye burned hot as a gasoline fire, and he ran with the unstoppable gait of a locomotive.

  Bell dropped to one knee, pulled his throwing knife from his boot, and flung it hard. It slid between the bones of Frost’s forearm, and the deadly Webley-Fosbery fell from his convulsing fingers. Before it hit the ground, Frost pulled out a pocket pistol with his left hand.

  Bell drew his Browning and triggered it twice. Their weapons echoed in unison. Frost’s vest deflected both of Bell’s bullets. One of Frost’s shots fanned Bell’s cheek, the other plucked his sleeve. Frost’s pocket pistol jammed, and he drew his own Browning, a far deadlier threat than the pistol. Bell ran straight at him and shot the Browning out of Frost’s hand. Frost threw a roundhouse left, spraying Bell with blood from his skewered forearm.

  Bell deflected some of the impact with his shoulder. But the giant’s punch rocked him to the core, knocked him halfway to his knees. White flashes stormed before his eyes. His hands felt heavy as lead. He sensed a second pile-driver punch coming at him, rolled with it, and hurled his own punch, aiming for the jawbone that Archie had broken.

  His tightly clenched fist connected, staggering the giant and drawing a grunt of pain. But Frost whirled around and backhanded him with a blow that knocked the detective to the ground. Frost picked up his ruined rifle and raised it to the sky like a long steel club. Isaac Bell whipped his derringer from his hat.

  “Drop it!” he said. “You’re a dead man.”

  Frost swung the rifle.

  Bell squeezed the trigger.

  A blaze of light and an explosion fifty times louder than a pistol shot sent the rifle pinwheeling forty feet. Frost was smashed flat on the ground. Six feet away, Isaac Bell remained on his feet, ears ringing, staring down at his fallen adversary in astonishment. The smell of burning flesh hung in the air. Frost’s face was black, his beard burned, his shirt and trousers smoldering, the soles blown off his boots.

  Life was leaking from Frost’s eyes. He sucked air through his charred lips. But his voice was still strong, harsh and thick with scorn. “You didn’t get me. Lightning bolt hit my rifle.”

  “I had you dead to rights,” answered Bell. “The lightning just happened to get you first.”

  Frost croaked bitter laughter.

  “Is that why Van Dorns never give up? You got weather gods on your side?”

  Isaac Bell gazed down triumphantly at the dying criminal. “I didn’t need weather gods,” he said quietly. “I had Wally Laughlin on my side.”

  “Who the hell is Wally Laughlin?”

  “He was a newsboy. You murdered him and two of his friends when you dynamited the Dearborn Street news depot.”

  “Newsboy?. . Oh yeah, I remember.” He shuddered with pain and forced out another jibe. “I’ll hear about it in Hell. How old was he?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Twelve?” Frost lay back. His voice grew weak. “Twelve was my grand year. I’d been a little runt getting used by every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Then all of a sudden I started growing and growing, and everything went my way. Won my first fight. Got my first gang. Killed my first man – twenty years old, he was, full grown.”

  A hideous parody of a smile twisted Frost’s burnt lips.

  “Poor little Wally,” he muttered sarcastically. “Who knows what the little bastard could have made of himself.”

  “He made a memory of himself,” said Isaac Bell.

  “How’d he do that?”

  “He had a kind soul.”

  BELL STOOD UP and gathered his weapons.

  Harry Frost called after him. Suddenly there was fear in his voice. “Are you leaving me here to die alone?”

  “You’ve left crowds to die alone.”

  “What if I told you something you don’t know about Marco Celere?”

  Bell said, “Marco Celere showed up in Yuma three days ago, fit as a fiddle. You ran from the only murder you didn’t commit.”

  Frost levered himself up on one elbow and shot back, “I know that.”

  Intrigued, Bell knelt beside the dying man, watching his hands for a hidden knife or another pocket pistol stashed in his smoldering garments. “How?”

  “Marco Celere showed up at Belmont Park six weeks ago.”

  “Celere gave me the impression he was in Canada six weeks ago.”

  “He was right in the middle of the race,” Frost crowed. “Prancing around the infield like he owned it. You damned Van Dorns never knew.”

  “Platov!” said Bell. “Of course!” Marco Celere was the saboteur, though proving it in a court of law would be next to impossible.

  “A little late on that one, Mr. Detective,” Frost sneered.

  “How did you happen to see him?”

  “He spotted me one night I was trying to get near Josephine’s machine. Walked up to me, big as life, and offered a deal.”

  “I’d have thought you’d kill him on sight,” said Bell.

  “You know that sawed-off coach gun the Italians call a lupa? He had it pointed at my head. Both hammers on full cock.”

  “What deal?”

  “Should I give you a gift for little Wally?” Frost asked mockingly. “Information you can use to get Celere? You think if I do you a favor, they’ll be nice to me in Hell?”

  “I don’t see you getting a better chance than this one. What was the deal?”

  “If I held off killing Josephine until after she won the race, then Marco would take me to a place where I could hide out in luxury for the rest of my life.”

  “Where would this paradise be?” Bell asked skeptically.

  “North Africa. Libya. The Turkish colonies that Italy is going to win in North Africa. He said we’d be safe as houses and live like kings.”

  “Sounds like con-man palaver.”

  “No. Celere knows his business. I’ve been over there, I seen it wi
th my own eyes. The Ottomans – the Turks – they’re on their last leg and Italy’s so poor and crowded, they’re itching to grab their colonies. So Celere’s setting himself up to be the Italian Army’s gold-haired boy by supplying aerial war machines. He’ll be the national hero when Italy beats Turkey with his machine-gun aeroplanes and bomb carriers. But he knows he’s got to prove himself. They’ll only buy his machines if Josephine wins the race.”

  “Why didn’t you take him up on it?”

  Rage stiffened Frost’s ravaged face. “I told you, I’m not a chump. If he was so fixed there in North Africa that he could protect me, then he’d hold the key to my cell. I might as well be back in the orphanage.”

  “Why didn’t he blow your head off with his lupa?”

  “Celere’s like a juggler, always tossing a bunch of balls in the air. He bet on you protecting her and hoped I would change my mind-and that I would kill Whiteway when the time came.”

  “What time came?”

  “The wedding. He knew Whiteway was angling for Josephine. Marco figured I’d be so mad, I’d kill Whiteway, and Josephine would inherit the money and marry him. And if later I killed her, too, he’d get it all.”

  Frost’s one good eye sought Bell’s two. “Marco started this. He’s the one who turned her head. So I reckoned the juggler seeing all his balls come crashing down was my sweetest revenge.”

  “Another reason to kill her?” asked Bell.

  “Marco knew the Stevens biplane would never make it. He needed Josephine to prove that his flying machines can be fighting machines.”

  Bell shook his head. “All she wants is to fly.”

  “I gave her the chance, she turned it against me. She deserves to be killed,” Frost whispered.

  “You’re dying with hatred on your lips.”