The Race ib-4

by Clive Cussler

  ISAAC BELL WAS DEEPLY RELIEVED to find Texas Walt, sitting in the rain, holding his head.

  “Feels like John Philip Sousa’s playing a steam calliope where my brain used to be.”

  Bell walked him to the Rolls-Royce and drove it to the trestle, Walt cussing a blue streak at every bump. The mechanicians had repaired the Eagle’s undercarriage. Bell made Walt comfortable on the train. Then he took to the air and headed for Fresno, the last overnight stop before San Francisco. Josephine’s yellow machine and Joe Mudd’s red tractor biplane were tied down fifty yards apart on a muddy fairground. Joe Mudd leaned on crutches, joking with the mechanicians working on his undercarriage.

  “Hard landing?” Bell asked.

  Mudd shrugged. “Just a busted leg. Machine’s O.K. Mostly.”

  “Where’s Josephine?”

  “She and Whiteway are at the fairground hotel. I’d steer clear, if I were you.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Stormy weather.”

  Bell beckoned Josephine’s detective-mechanicians, who were ferrying tools and parts for Marco Celere, who was shaking his head over her motor. “Keep a sharp eye on Celere. Do not let him near Joe Mudd’s machine.”

  “What if he makes a run for it?” asked Dashwood.

  “He won’t. Celere’s not going anywhere as long as there’s any chance Josephine will win the race.”

  He went to the fairground hotel. Preston Whiteway had rented the top floor of the two-story structure. Bell quickened his pace up the stairs when he heard the publisher shouting at the top of his lungs. He knocked loudly and entered. Whiteway was standing over Josephine, who was curled in a tight ball in a parlor chair, staring at the carpet.

  Whiteway saw Bell, and instead of asking what had happened with Harry Frost he shouted, “You talk sense to her! Maybe she’ll listen to you!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “My wife refuses to finish the race.”

  “Why?”

  “She won’t tell me. Maybe she’ll tell you. Where the hell’s my train?”

  “Just pulled in.”

  “I’ll be in San Francisco for the end of the race.”

  “Where is Marion?”

  “Gone ahead with her cameras,” Whiteway answered. He lowered his voice to a hoarse stage whisper that Josephine could have heard in the next county and pleaded, “See if you can talk sense into her – she’s throwing away the chance of a lifetime.”

  Bell replied with a silent nod.

  As Whiteway backed out of the room, he appeared to see Bell for the first time. “You look like you’ve been wrestling grizzly bears.”

  “You should have seen the other guy.”

  “Help yourself to the whiskey.”

  “I intend to,” said Isaac Bell.

  41

  “WANT SOME?” Bell asked Josephine.

  “No.”

  Bell filled a short glass, tossed it back neat, filled it again, and sipped. “Josephine, what did you say when Marco asked you to come with him to North Africa?”

  She looked up from the carpet, eyes wide. “How did you know that?”

  “He made Harry Frost the same offer.”

  “Harry? Why?”

  “Marco wanted Frost to kill your new husband.”

  Josephine’s eyes went dead. “Marco’s worse than Harry,” she whispered.

  “I’d say they were neck and neck. What was your answer, Josephine?”

  “I told him no.”

  Bell watched her closely as he said, “I’ll bet Marco thinks you’ll change your mind when you’re a rich widow.”

  “Never. . Is Preston in danger?”

  “Harry Frost is dead.”

  “Thank God. . Do you think Marco has the guts to kill Preston without Harry’s help?”

  Instead of answering that question, Isaac Bell said, “I know why you’re quitting the race.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “You’re quitting because Marco Celere, disguised as Dmitri Platov, sabotaged the best of the other machines.”

  She looked away. “I wondered,” she whispered. “I didn’t just wonder, I suspected. But I didn’t stop him. Losing the race will be my punishment. I have been terrible.”

  “Because you didn’t stop him or because you went along with Marco’s plan to frame Harry for murder?”

  “Did Harry tell you that, too?”

  Bell smiled. “No, I stumbled on that on my own.”

  “Looking back, I know it was an evil plan. I knew it then but Harry deserved to be locked up again.”

  “Why did you let Marco talk you into marrying Whiteway?”

  “I was too tired to argue. I just wanted to win the race-”

  “Perhaps you thought that if one marriage could be annulled, so could another?”

  “Sure, if we had no honeymoon. And I swear, Isaac, I had no idea Marco planned to kill Preston. Poor Preston, he’s just so. . Poor Preston, he is such a fool, Isaac, he really loves me.”

  Bell gave her a gently teasing smile. “Maybe Preston thinks that when you fall in with the wrong men and don’t see what they’re doing, that you’re not so terrible – just single-mindedly myopic in your determination to fly? Maybe that’s why he can’t believe you won’t finish the race.”

  “I do not deserve to win. . Are you going to arrest Marco?”

  “I can’t, yet. I don’t have enough proof to make a case in court. Besides, I want him free to work on your machine in case you change your mind.”

  “I won’t. The winner should win fair and square.”

  “You and Joe Mudd are neck and neck. It would be good for the winner, and good for aviation, if you raced right down to the wire. Whatever you’ve done wrong, it doesn’t change the fact that you’ve driven a flying machine across the continent. Why don’t you sleep on it? Meantime, I’ll let Marco work on the machine overnight.”

  EPILOGUE

  “oh! say! let us fly, dear”

  MARCO CELERE SAW a way out of his predicament. Rather than wait helplessly for Josephine to change her mind, and fearing she would not, he placed a long-distance call from the hotel telephone. Preston Whiteway snatched up his telephone like a man who had been waiting all night for news from Fresno. “Will she fly?”

  “This is Marco Celere, inventor of your aeroplane and chief mechanician.”

  “Oh. . Well? Will she fly?”

  “I understand,” Celere answered suavely, “that Mr. Bell is discussing it with her over breakfast. There’s time still – there’s a low fog on the field the sun hasn’t burned off yet. But I have a suggestion. If Josephine cannot win the Whiteway Cup, surely her flying machine can.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “If she doesn’t agree to finish the race, I will fly the last leg from Fresno and win the race for her.”

  “Against the rules. One driver, one machine, all the way.”

  “We are men of the world, Mr. Whiteway. They are your rules. The Whiteway Cup is your race. Surely you can change your own rules.”

  “Mr. Celere you may know something about building flying machines, but you don’t know the first thing about newspaper readers. They’ll buy any lie you print – unless it’s a lie about something you’ve already convinced them to love. They love Josephine. They want her to win. They don’t give a hang about your flying machine.”

  “But it would be so good for aviation-” Celere pleaded.

  “And even better for you. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  The telephone banged dead in Celere’s ear.

  Celere listened outside the hotel dining room. He heard Bell speaking urgently. Then he heard Josephine say loudly and clearly, “No.”

  Celere hurried out on the field to his monoplane. The fog was still heavy, and he could barely see Joe Mudd’s and Isaac Bell’s machines. Josephine’s Van Dorn mechanicians were watching him suspiciously even though he had been guiding their efforts since Yuma, Arizona.

  “We should s
tart the motor,” he said.

  “Why? She’s not going anywhere.”

  “Mr. Bell is very persuasive. He still may convince Josephine to change her mind. Let us fill her tanks, spin her motor, and make it warm for her.” They exchanged glances. Celere said, “I don’t see Joe’s Mudd’s mechanicians hanging about this morning. They’ll be ready to go when the fog lifts. Shouldn’t we be? Just in case?”

  That got them going. It was after all a race, and though they were better detectives than mechanicians, they had been competing daily for forty-eight days and four thousand miles.

  “Start fueling. I will be right back.”

  He went to the tiny stateroom they had given him on the train and returned carrying a yard-long, six-inch-wide corrugated paper tube sealed at either end and shoved it into the driving nacelle.

  “What’s that?” asked a detective.

  “San Francisco Inquirer flag, which Josephine is supposed to wave when she lands at the Presidio. What is wrong with motor?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I do not like the sound.”

  “Sounds fine to me.”

  Celere looked the detective-mechanician in the eye. Then he flashed his most winning smile. “Let us make a deal, you and me, sir. I will not arrest criminals. You will not tell me that a flying-machine motor sounds like it will not suddenly stop in the sky.”

  “Sorry, Celere. You’re right. What do you hear?”

  “Bring me soapbox.” He climbed on the box and into the nacelle and played with the throttle, revving and slowing the Antoinette. He cocked his ear, shaking his head in puzzlement. “Pull chocks. Let’s taxi her around a little.”

  “Careful you don’t run into anything. Can’t see fifty feet.”

  The mechanicians pulled the wooden blocks that were holding the wheels in place.

  Celere revved the motor. “You hear? You hear?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Listen. . Here, I make go faster.”

  He opened the throttle all the way. The Antoinette’s crisp burble increased to a roar. He turned the rudder, shaped the wings, raced fifty yards along the grass, and soared into the fog.

  BELL ORDERED his Eagle made ready to fly, but there was no following Celere in the fog because no one knew which way he had gone. He had to wait until some railroad dispatcher wired a report that he had been spotted. Nearly an hour later, Isaac Bell received a telephone call from the railroad detectives Tom Griggs and Ed Bottomley.

  “Are you sure you got Harry Frost?”

  “I laid him personally on a slab of ice in the Fresno police station.”

  “Yeah, well, we just had our second dynamite robbery in two days. Fellow walked into our Merced shop with a coach gun, terrorized the poor old clerk into loading two hundred pounds of dynamite, detonators, and ice tongs on a track inspector’s handcar, and pumped off. We found the handcar three miles down the line next to an empty hayfield. Not a trace of the fellow or the dynamite or the ice tongs.”

  “Ice tongs?” Bell echoed, mystified. “What else did he take?”

  “Isn’t two hundred pounds of dynamite enough?”

  “What else?”

  “Hold on!. . Hey, Tom, Mr. Bell wants to know did he take anything else. . Oh yeah. Tom says he took a flashlight and some electric cable.”

  “What kind of detonators? Fulminate of mercury?”

  “Electric.”

  “Did you find any truck or wagon tracks?”

  “That’s the funny thing. The only wheel tracks were out in the middle of the field. Nothing by the road except footprints. Strange, don’t you think?”

  “Not if he came and left on a flying machine!”

  “Oh. Never thought of that. . You still there, Mr. Bell?”

  Isaac Bell was running to his American Eagle. “Spin her over!”

  The Gnome’s urgent Blat! Blat! Blat! caused Joe Mudd to turn aside and let Bell take off ahead of the Liberator. Bell picked up the Southern Pacific tracks and headed north toward San Francisco. He had less than two hundred miles in which to catch up with Marco Celere.

  The stolen electric detonators, the flashlight, and the electric cable were the clues that told Bell exactly what Marco Celere intended to do. He had stolen the ingredients to make an aerial bomb with an electric detonator. Fulminate of mercury detonators that exploded on contact would be deadly on a flying machine that bounced as it took off from the ground and was battered sharply by air currents in the sky. Any sudden motion would make them detonate the dynamite and the flying machine with it.

  But an electric detonator could be controlled by a simple switch between the flashlight batteries and the detonators. As long as the switch was off, the dynamite was safe. Switch it on, and the dynamite would explode.

  Celere would have fashioned it to be moved into the on position after it was dropped – then only when it fell on its target. He would have installed two switches, one to make the bomb ready at the moment he was ready to drop, the second that would cause the explosion on impact.

  Bell could not imagine why Celere had taken ice tongs.

  But the rest was clear. Whiteway had refused to let him demonstrate that his machine could win the race, even without Josephine, leaving Celere with no way to prove to the Italian Army that his aeroplane could be a war machine.

  Dropping two hundred pounds of dynamite would prove its military value with a bang heard around the world. As to what he would drop his bomb on, the answer was obvious. A con man like Celere was essentially the same as a boomer like Preston Whiteway. Both had an instinct for how to get the most publicity. Few buildings in San Francisco were as tall, and none more famous, than the San Francisco Inquirer Building. A flying machine destroying it would be a shot heard by every army general in the world.

  And if Whiteway were to die in his penthouse office atop the San Francisco Inquirer Building, so much the better: the wealthy Widow Josephine would be available, Celere would think. Bell knew she would never fall for him again, but Celere didn’t. By the Italian’s reckoning, he would kill two birds with one bomb, Bell thought grimly: demonstrate the power of his warplane and marry a wealthy widow.

  It was good flying weather. The wind had dropped. The sky was clear, the air cool enough to cool the motor and rich enough to make it run at top power. The Gnome rotary would give him the speed to overtake Celere. But when he finally saw the break in the hills that the rail line followed toward Oakland and then the blue bays of Oakland and San Francisco, he still had not caught up. Celere might have smashed along the way, in water or woods, where Bell hadn’t seen him. It was possible. The machines were tired.

  Then, abruptly and with a sinking heart, Isaac Bell saw the yellow speck that told him Celere was crossing the bay and closing in on the city. He was flying lower than Bell, perhaps dragged down by the weight of the explosives or perhaps descending to make it easier to hit his target. But it gave Bell a slim advantage, and he took it, pushing his control post forward and diving to increase speed.

  Ahead, the Oakland Mole jutted far into San Francisco Bay. It was the pier that carried trains to the ocean freighters and city ferries, and, as he flew the length, he saw parked on it the famous dark green Southern Pacific special owned by the president of the line, Osgood Hennessy. Archie and Lillian had arrived with Danielle Di Vecchio.

  He was catching up.

  He was well over the water while Celere hadn’t yet crossed to the shore.

  Bell pulled his rifle up from the nacelle and clipped it into the swivel. High-power Remington slugs crackling past Celere’s head ought to concentrate his mind more on escaping than dropping a bomb, which would be a cumbersome exercise with lead howling by.

  But when Bell located the monoplane in his powerful field glasses, he got a shock.

  Now he knew why Celere had stolen the ice tongs. He had forgotten that whatever his failings, Celere was a darned clever machinist. There would be nothing cumbersome about dropping the dynamite, no clumsy hoi
sting it over the side of the machine.

  All four boxes of dynamite were dangling below the monoplane, directly under Celere, where the two hundred pounds would be well balanced, and they were hanging from the ice tongs. Bell saw a rope running from the ice-tong handle up the side of the aeroplane into the steering nacelle where Celere sat.

  To drop the dynamite, all he had to do was arm the electric detonator switch and tug the rope.

  Bell dropped his glasses and took aim with the Remington auto rifle. The range was still too great. But now Celere was crossing the forest of sailing masts that marked the waterfront. He was mere minutes from Whiteway’s Market Street headquarters. Bell steepened his dive and picked up a little more speed. It made the difference: now he, too, was crossing the waterfront, and Celere was in rifle range. But he was flying above Bell now because the dive had taken him so low, he was nearly scraping building tops.

  Ahead was the Inquirer Building, taller than all around it, with the yellow race banner on top. Bell tweaked his elevator, rose slightly, and found Celere’s machine in his rifle sight. Just as Bell was about to pull the trigger, he saw something glitter on the outdoor terrace of Whiteway’s penthouse office. Bell whipped his field glasses to his eyes.

  Immediately ahead of Celere’s dynamite-laden monoplane, smack in his line of fire, operators where cranking moving-picture cameras. Directing them was a tall blond woman in a white shirtwaist with her hair swept up so she could inspect what they saw through their lenses. Marion had chosen to shoot the finish from the dramatic setting of the roof where the aviators would circle before landing at the Presidio.

  Bell banked hard right to change his field of fire. Celere was flying straight at the building. He was less than one hundred feet higher, and closing fast, when Bell saw him reach for the rope.

  Bell had no clear shot at Celere without endangering Marion.

  But if he didn’t shoot, Celere would drop his bomb.

  Bell whipped his machine hard left. The wings rattled, and the stays groaned. The motor screamed as the propeller hacked the shifting air. He soared away from Celere’s course to shift the angle so he could fire. The range increased radically. He had one second to fire. The gun kicked. Marco Celere ducked his head and looked around wildly, eyes locking in astonishment on Bell’s Eagle racing back at him.