“That’s too big a deal to keep secret. You’re obviously a wealthy man, but no individual is rich enough to launch his own dreadnought. Where do you get your funds for Hull 44? Surely someone high up must know.”
Captain Falconer answered obliquely. “Eleven years ago I had the privilege of advising an Assistant Secretary of the Navy.”
“Bully!” Bell smiled his understanding. That explained Lowell Falconer’s independence. Today, that Assistant Secretary of the Navy was none other than the nation’s fiercest champion of a strong Navy—President Theodore Roosevelt.
“The President believes that our Navy should be footloose. Let the Army defend ports and harbors—we’ll even build them the guns. But the Navy must fight at sea.”
“From what I’ve seen of the Navy,” said Bell, “first you will have to fight the Navy. And to win that fight you would have to be as clever as Machiavelli.”
“Oh, but I am,” Falconer smiled. “Though I prefer the word ‘devious’ to clever.”
“Are you still a serving officer?”
“I am, officially, Special Inspector of Target Practice.”
“A wonderfully vague title,” Bell remarked.
“I know how to outfox bureaucrats,” Falconer shot back. “I know my way around Congress,” he continued with a cynical smile and raised his maimed hand for Bell to see. “What politician dares deny a war hero?”
Then he explained in detail how he had planted a cadre of l ike-minded younger officers in the key bureaus of Ordnance and Construction. Together, they were angling to overhaul the entire dreadnought-building system.
“Are we as far behind as Alasdair MacDonald claimed?”
“Yes. We launch Michigan next month, but she’s no prize. Delaware, North Dakota, Utah, Florida, Arkansas, and Wyoming, first-class dreadnoughts, are stuck on the drawing boards. But that’s not entirely a bad thing. Advancements in naval warfare pile up so quickly that the later we launch our battleships, the more modern they will be. We’ve already learned the shortcomings of the Great White Fleet, long before it reaches San Francisco. First thing we’ll fix when they sail home is to paint them gray so enemy gunners can’t spot them so easily.
“Paint will be the easy part. Before we can turn our new knowledge into fighting ships, we have to convince the Navy Board of Construction and Congress. The Navy Board of Construction hates change, and Congress hates expense.”
Falconer nodded at the Reuterdahl. “My friend Henry’s got his tail in a crack. The Navy invited him along to paint pictures of the Great White Fleet. They did not expect him to also fire off articles to McClure’s Magazine informing the world of its shortcomings. Henry will be lucky to find his way home on a tramp steamer. But Henry’s right, and I’m right: It’s O.K. to learn by experience. O.K. to learn by failure, even. But it is not O.K. not to improve. That is why I build in secret.”
“You’ve told me why. You’ve not told me what.”
“Don’t be impatient, Mr. Bell.”
“A man was murdered,” Isaac Bell replied grimly. “I am not patient when men are murdered.”
“You just said men.” Captain Falconer stopped bantering and demanded, “Are suggesting that Langner was murdered, too?”
“I rate his murder increasingly likely.”
“What about Grover Lakewood?”
“Van Dorn operatives in Westchester are looking into his death.
And in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, we are investigating the accident that killed Chad Gordon. Now, are you going to tell me about Hull 44?”
“Let’s get topside. You’ll see what I mean.”
Dyname had continued to increase her speed. There was still no trembling from the engines, despite a powerful drone of rushing sea and wind. The steward and a sailor appeared with seaboots and oil-skins. “You’ll want these on, sir. She’s no yacht, once she gets moving. More like a torpedo boat.”
“Torpedo boat, hell,” muttered the sailor. “She’s a submarine.”
Falconer handed Bell a pair of goggles with smoked glass so dark it seemed opaque and looped another pair over his own head.
“What’s this for?”
“You’ll be glad you have them when you need them,” the captain answered enigmatically. “All set? Let’s get up to the bridge while we can.” The seaman and steward wrestled the door open, and they stepped on deck.
The slipstream hit like a punch in the face.
Bell pushed forward on the narrow side deck less than five feet above the rushing water. “She must be doing thirty knots.”
“Still loafing along,” Falconer yelled over the roar. “We’ll get moving once we pass Sandy Hook.”
Bell glanced back. Fire was flickering from the smoke funnel, and the wake was so frothed that it glowed in the dark. They climbed onto the open bridge, where thick slabs of glass screened the helmsman, who was clinging to a small spoked wheel. Captain Falconer shouldered him aside.
Ahead in the dark, an intermittent white light blinked every fifteen seconds.
“Sandy Hook Lightship,” said Captain Falconer. “Last year we’ll see it. They’re moving the light to mark the new Ambrose Channel.”
Dyname bore down on the fifteen-second blinker. In its back glow, Bell glimpsed the white-lettered “Sandy Hook” and “No. 51” on the side of the black vessel as it fell rapidly behind them.
“Hang on!” said Captain Falconer.
He laid the hand with the missing fingers on a tall lever. “Bowden cable connection direct to the turbines. Same as flexible-cable brakes for bicycles. I can increase steam from the helm without ringing the engine room. Like the throttle on your auto.”
“Alasdair’s idea?” asked Bell.
“No, this is mine. You’re about to feel Alasdair’s.”
14
BELL GRIPPED A HANDHOLD AS DYNAME’S BOW LIFTED from the water. The drone of sea and wind grew explosive. Spray battered the glass screen. Captain Falconer switched on a searchlight mounted in front, and the reason for her knife-shaped narrowness was immediately apparent. The light revealed eight-foot seas sweeping under them at fifty knots. A hull of any other shape would have smashed against the water so hard it would wreck itself.
“Did you ever drive anything this fast?” Falconer shouted.
“Only my Locomobile.”
“Care to try her?” Falconer asked casually.
Isaac Bell grabbed the helm.
“Steer around the bigger seas,” Falconer recommended. “If you bury the bow, those nine propellers will drive us straight to the bottom.”
The helm was remarkably responsive, Bell thought, capable of whisking the hundred-foot yacht left and right with a twitch of the spokes. He dodged big seas repeatedly, getting a feel for how she handled. In half an hour they were more than twenty-five miles from land.
Bell saw a flicker of light in the distance. A deep rumbling noise began rolling in the night.
“Are those guns?”
“Twelves,” said Falconer. “See the flash?”
Orange-and-red flames lanced the dark ahead.
“Those higher-pitched sounds are 6s and 8s. We’re inside the Sandy Hook Atlantic Test Range.”
“Inside? While they’re shooting?”
“While the cat’s away the mice will play. The senior captains are circumnavigating the world with the Fleet. My boys are right there, learning their trade.”
Powerful beams of light bristled into the sky.
“Searchlight exercise,” said Falconer. “Battleships hunting destroyers, destroyers hunting battleships.”
Sweeping sky and water, the searchlights suddenly converged on a battleship, previously invisible in the dark, and lit bright as noon a low-slung white hull hurling spray.
“Look! That’s just what I’ve been telling you about. That’s New Hampshire. She wasn’t yet commissioned when the Fleet sailed. Just finished her shakedown. Watch what happens to her foredeck.”
The searchlights showed seas breaking over the
battleship’s bow and deluging her forward guns.
“Decks awash in light seas! Guns underwater! Told you paint will be the easy part. We need higher freeboard and flared bows. Our newest capital ship has a ram bow, for God’s sake, like we’re going to war with Phoenicians!”
Bell saw a wave strike her anchor billboard and scatter in blinding clouds.
“Now, watch her on the roll. See that armor belt rising? . . . Now, watch it disappear as she rolls back and submerges it. If we don’t extend our armor to protect the ships’ undersides when they roll, the enemy will draft small boys to sink them with peashooters.”
A searchlight swung their way, probing the dark like an angry white finger.
“Goggles!”
Bell covered his eyes with the black goggles just in time. An instant later the light that caught Dyname would have blinded him. Through the blackened glass he could see clear as day.
“Searchlights are as powerful as big guns,” Falconer shouted.
“They’ll completely disorient every man on the bridge and blind the spotters.”
“Why are they aiming at us?”
“It’s a game we play. They try to catch me. Good practice. Though once they get your range it’s impossible to shake them loose.”
“Oh, really? Hang on, Captain!”
Bell yanked back on the throttle. Dyname stopped as if she had hit a wall. The searchlight beam soared ahead in the direction they had been steaming. Bell spun the helm with both hands. The light was coming back for him. He nudged the throttle lever as he steered the yacht at a right angle, waited for the propellers to bite, then rammed it forward.
Fire belched from the stack. Dyname took off like an Independence Day rocket, and the searchlight beam skittered away in the wrong direction.
“O.K., Captain. You’ve told me why and you’ve shown me why. But you still haven’t shown me what.”
“I’ll lay a course for the Brooklyn Navy Yard.”
A NEW DAY WAS LIGHTING the tops of the Brooklyn Bridge towers as Dyname sliced into the East River. Bell was still at the helm, and he steered under the bridge and bore right, toward the navy yard. From the water he could see numerous ships under construction on the ways and in the dry docks. Falconer pointed to the northernmost way, which was isolated from the others. He called down the voice pipe to the engine room to disengage the propellers. The tide was slack. Dyname drifted on her momentum to the foot of the way, where its rails angled into the water. Above her soared a gigantic skeletal frame partially sheathed in steel plate.
“Hull 44, Mr. Bell.”
Isaac Bell drank in the noble sight. Even with her frames awaiting more armor, there was a majesty to her flaring bow, an eagerness to join the water, and a promise of power as yet unleashed.
“Keep in mind she doesn’t even officially exist yet.”
“How can you hide a six-hundred-foot ship?”
“It resembles a hull that Congress authorized,” Captain Falconer answered with an almost imperceptible wink. “But, in fact, from her keel to the top of her cage mast she will be chockful of brand-new ideas. She will have all the latest in turbines, guns, torpedo protection, fire control. But most important, she is uniquely designed to continue improving by swapping new innovations for old. Hull 44 is far more than one ship. She’s the model for entire classes to be built, and the inspiration for ever-more-innovative, ever-more-powerful super-dreadnoughts.”
Falconer paused dramatically. Then he intoned in a hard, grim voice, “And that is why Hull 44 is targeted by foreign spies.”
Isaac Bell raked Captain Falconer with a cold eye.
“Are you surprised?” he asked curtly.
Isaac Bell had had it with Falconer’s attempts to lead him in circles. As inspiring a sight as the great ship was, and as much as he had relished driving a fifty-knot race yacht he would have better spent the night combing Hell’s Kitchen for the man who murdered Alasdair MacDonald.
Falconer backed off when he heard Bell’s cold retort.
“Of course everyone spies,” the captain admitted. “Every nation with a naval shipyard or a treasury to buy a warship spies. How far ahead are their friends and enemies in guns, armor, and propulsion? What new next invention will make our dreadnought vulnerable? Whose gun is longer range? Whose torpedo goes farther? Whose engines are faster, whose armor stronger?”
“Vital questions,” Bell concurred. “And it is normal—even for nations at peace—to seek the answers.”
“But it is not normal,” Falconer shot back. “And certainly not right for nations at peace to commit sabotage.”
“Hold your horses! Sabotage? There’s no evidence of sabotage in these murders—no destruction, with the possible exception of the foundry accident in Bethlehem.”
“Oh, there is destruction, all right. Terrible destruction. I said sabotage and I meant sabotage.”
“Why would a spy kill when killing is sure to draw attention to his spying?”
“They fooled me, too,” said Captain Falconer. “I feared that Artie Langner had accepted bribes and killed himself out of guilt. Then I thought, What awful luck that poor young Grover Lakewood fell on his head. But when they killed Alasdair MacDonald, I knew it had to be sabotage. And didn’t he, too? Didn’t he whisper, ‘Hull 44’?”
“As I told you,” Bell admitted.
“Don’t you see, Bell? They’re sabotaging Hull 44 by murdering minds. They’re attacking the minds that imagine the vital guts of that warship—guns, armor, propulsion. Look past the steel and armor plate. Hull 44 is no more than the minds of the men still working on it and the minds of those who died. When saboteurs kill our minds, they kill unborn thoughts and new ideas. When they kill our minds, they sabotage our ships.”
“I understand,” Bell nodded thoughtfully. “They sabotage our ships not yet launched.”
“Or even dreamed of!”
“Which enemy do you suspect?”
“The Empire of Japan.”
Bell recalled immediately that old John Eddison had claimed to have seen a Japanese intruder in the Washington Navy Yard. But he asked, “Why the Japanese?”
“I know the Japs,” Falconer answered. “I know them well. I served as an official observer aboard Admiral Togo’s flagship Mikasa when he destroyed the Russian Fleet at the battle of Tsushima—the most decisive naval battle since Nelson beat the French at Trafalgar. His ships were tip-top, his crews trained like machines. I like the Japs, and I certainly admire them. But they are ambitious. Mark my words, we will fight them for the Pacific.”
Bell said, “The murderers who attacked Alasdair MacDonald were armed with Butterflymessers manufactured by Bontgen and Sabin of Solingen, Germany. Isn’t Germany a leading contender in the dreadnaught race?”
“Germany is haunted by the British Navy. They’ll fight tooth and claw for the North Sea, and Britain will never let them near the Atlantic. The Pacific is our ocean. The Japanese want it, too. They are designing ships for distant service across the wide Pacific, just as we are. The day will come when we’ll fight them from California to Tokyo. For all we know, the Japs will attack this summer when the Great White Fleet approaches their islands.”
“I’ve seen the headlines,” Bell said with a wry smile. “In the same newspapers that inflamed the war with Spain.”
“Spain was a cakewalk!” Falconer retorted. “A stumbling relic of the Old World. The Japs are new—like us. They’ve already laid down Satsuma, the biggest dreadnought in the world. They’re building their own Brown-Curtis turbines. They’re buying the latest Holland submarines from Electric Boat.”
“Nonetheless, early in an investigation it pays to keep an open mind. The saboteurs could serve any nation in the dreadnought race.”
“Investigation is not my department, Mr. Bell. All I know is that Hull 44 needs a man with gumption to protect her.”
“Surely the Navy is investigating—”
Falconer interrupted with a sarcastic snort. “The Navy is still i
nvestigating reports that the battleship Maine sank in Havana Harbor in 1898.”
“Then the Secret Service—”
“The Secret Service has its hands full protecting the currency and President Roosevelt from fiends like the one who shot McKinley. And the Justice Department will take years to launch any sort of national bureau of investigation. Our ship cannot wait! Dammit, Bell, Hull 44 demands an outfit that’s got steam up and is itching to cast off.”
By now Bell knew that the Special Inspector of Target Practice was manipulative, if not underhanded, and devious by his own admission. But he was a true believer. “As an evangelist,” Bell told him, “the Hero of Santiago would give Billy Sunday a run for his money.”
“Guilty,” Falconer admitted with a practiced smile. “Do you suppose Joe Van Dorn would allow you to take the job?”
Isaac Bell fixed his gaze on the bones of Hull 44 rising on the ways. As he did, a yard whistle started the workday with a deepthroated bellow. Steam cranes chanted full-throttle. Hundreds, then thousands, of men swarmed onto the a-building ship. Within minutes, red-hot rivets were soaring like fireflies between “passer boys” and “holders-on,” and soon she echoed the din of hammers. These sights and sounds thrust Bell’s memory back to Alasdair MacDonald mourning his dead friend, Chad Gordon. “Horrible. Six lads roasted alive—Chad and all the hands working beside him.”
As if a shooting star had swept the last strands of darkness from the morning sky, Isaac Bell saw the mighty dreadnought for what she could be—a lofty vision of living men and a monument to the innocent dead.
“I would be amazed if Joe Van Dorn didn’t order me to take the job. And if he doesn’t, I’ll do it myself.”
The Spy Page 10