The wind, which had blown from the south and then gradually east, backed suddenly north. Bell pictured the storm whirling, its counterclockwise winds moving sharply to the east as if it had crossed their wake and was heading toward Bermuda.
This was good news if it was traveling away from them rather than overtaking them but bad news if the powerful north wind set up counter- and crosscurrents. Worse, it suggested a storm that was growing in diameter, flinging ever-more-powerful winds hundreds of miles from its eye.
“Getting bad,” Tobin said quietly when they exchanged tricks at the wheel.
“She’s a big boat,” said Bell.
Ed’s lopsided, scarred face formed a tired grin. “I never met a captain who didn’t love his vessel.”
They were twenty-three hours beyond The Bahamas when the western horizon, which looked darker than a coal mine, began to cast an intermittent glow. Bell steered toward it and in a few miles it appeared to be the pulsing beam of a distant lighthouse.
“Cape Hatteras?”
Pauline pored over the chart, careful not to tear the wet paper.
“How is it blinking?” she asked.
Bell timed the flashes. “Fifteen seconds.”
“Cape Hatteras flashes every seven and a half seconds.”
“What flashes fifteen?”
“Cape May, New Jersey?”
“We could not have gotten that far north already.”
“To the south of Hatteras is Cape Lookout. Fifteen seconds.”
“Ed, check the sailing directions. How bright is that light?”
“In these clouds? Less than twelve.”
“Too close.”
Bell powered away from the coast and steered east of north. Three hours later, they spotted the seven-and-a-half-second flash of Cape Hatteras.
“I read that Hatteras is called the Graveyard of the Atlantic,” said Asa Somers. “Ships run aground by the thousands.”
Pauline said, “Thank you for that information.”
One of the Liberty motors coughed and quit.
Moments later, the second fell silent.
40
THE BOAT LOST WAY in an instant and turned her flank to the seas, which rolled her mercilessly.
Tobin and Somers ripped the shrouds off the reserve motors, and Isaac Bell pulled his chokes and hit the starters. One ground with the anemic wheeze of a weak battery. The other churned its motor over and over, but it wouldn’t fire.
The stern drifted around into the wind. A gust filled the cockpit tarp, lifted it like a kite, and blew it off. Rain and spray drenched the cockpit. Bell tried the starter again, hoping there was enough juice left in the battery. The motor fired, coughed, died, and caught again, cylinder by cylinder, until it was hitting on all twelve. As the propeller dug in and the cruiser got under way again, he steered back on their northerly course. Pauline and Somers dragged the tarp back over the cockpit and tied it down. Tobin jumped electricity to the dead battery with Mueller clips. Bell coaxed a second engine to life.
He was concerned that the heavy spray would drown them, so he engaged the mufflers, shunting the exhaust into underwater ports and effectively sealing the manifolds from the vertical pipes. But protection was bought at the cost of power, and their speed dropped. With the engines muted, they could hear the full roar of wind and tumbling seas, which grew louder as the day wore on.
Pauline took the helm, with Asa watching over her. Bell and Tobin went to work on the engines that had quit. Water in the gas seemed to be the cause. Spray could have entered as they pumped from the barrels purchased at Harbour Island. Or one of the barrels could have been contaminated. They jettisoned the contents of the day tank that fed those engines and pumped in fresh gas from their main tanks.
Both engines started. They shut them down again and shrouded their pipes to keep them in reserve. Bell feared they’d be needed soon enough. The two engines currently pushing the boat were exhausting blue smoke, and their valves were clattering like a bowling alley. They clattered through the night, and when one of the engines began to sound as if it were approaching the end, Bell switched them both off after starting the reserves.
Bell was on watch hours past dawn the next morning, driving through heavy squalls, with Pauline huddled against him fast asleep and Tobin and Asa sleeping under the foredeck, when he heard a rumble like thunder. A flash to his left could be the lightning that caused it. Fifteen seconds later, it flashed again, and then again in another fifteen, and he saw a white flashing pinprick of light.
Cape May Light could be seen up to twenty-four nautical miles. But not in these conditions. To see the light from the low boat through the wind-whipped rain, they had to be almost on top of it. What he had thought was thunder might be surf pounding land. Then he saw enormous waves breaking on a sandbar. He could feel them gathering behind him, lifting the boat to drive them onto the beach. He swung the wheel, hit his throttles, and fled the shore.
Fighting to maintain twenty knots, he ran east for an hour, then swung north again. Two hours passed. Tobin was at the helm. Bell saw a steady white light that did not blink.
“Absecon Light,” Pauline read.
“Atlantic City,” said Tobin. “Getting close, Mr. Bell. Barnegat next.”
Asa Somers spotted the red-and-white painted Barnegat Lighthouse itself, and again the cruiser peeled away from the shore. Two hours later, limping on one engine, holding the other that was still running in reserve, they saw the squalls race away and suddenly found themselves in sunlight on a patch of riled blue sea completely surrounded by heavy banks of cloud.
“What is going on?” asked Tobin, turning on his heel. “It’s like a miniature eye of a miniature hurricane.”
“Any idea where we are?” asked Bell.
“None.”
Pauline dragged her heavy canvas bag out of the foredeck cubby and handed it to Tobin.
“What’s this?”
“What you forgot to pack. A sextant and a Nautical Almanac. It’s noon. I recall Isaac knows how to use it. He can shoot the sun and tell us where we are.”
Bell said, “You drive, Ed. Keep her as steady as you can. On the jump. This won’t last.”
Indeed, the cloud banks were closing quickly around the strange clear patch. Bell swung the sextant to the sky and lowered the mirrored image of the sun to the horizon. From the scale, he called the angle to Pauline. She noted the time and ran her finger down the columns pertaining to the Greenwich mean angle. Asa held the chart.
“Approximately twenty miles from New York,” said Pauline. “Steer three hundred ten degrees to Ambrose Light.”
“Who taught you how to do that?” Tobin asked her.
“The captain of the Aquitania.”
Clouds and mist closed in abruptly. The visibility dropped to a quarter mile, then increased, then dropped again as squalls blew through fitfully. With twelve miles to go, they spotted a dismasted schooner. The storm-battered ship was tossing at anchor while its crew cut away ruined rigging. A bedsheet flapped from its bowsprit. An advertisement was painted on it in red:
CC
$55 CASE
“Rum Row,” said Isaac Bell.
• • •
THEY SPED PAST island schooners and rusty steamers battened down for the storm.
“Look at that,” said Asa. “There’s some lunatic driving a taxi.”
“The price of booze goes up in bad weather,” Tobin explained. “They’ll get rich if they don’t drown.”
A fresh squall hit, riding a cold wind, and they were suddenly alone again on a seemingly empty sea. The squalls passed, and they could see for two or three miles that they were still alone except for a single big ship on a course similar to theirs, angling toward New York. They overtook it quickly.
“That’s her,” said Pauline.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. I saw her in Bremerhaven.”
41
THE TANKER Sandra T. Congdon had a tall funne
l in back, a sturdy white wheelhouse forward of center, and a straight bow.
“What’s that on the bow?”
“A three-inch gun,” said Pauline. “Left over from the war.”
Bell studied it in the binoculars. “Not that left over. They’ve got a heap of ammunition all ready to shoot. Pity the Harbor Squad that runs into them. Ed, keep us behind their house.”
Tobin altered course, as they caught up with the tanker, so that its wheelhouse blocked the deck gun’s line of fire.
“What are those guys on top doing?” asked Asa.
Bell focused his glasses on a wood-and-canvas flying bridge constructed on top of the wheelhouse.
“Unlimbering a Lewis gun,” he said. “Get your heads down.”
Machine-gun bullets screeched overhead and frothed the water. Tobin cut in the reserve engine and hit his throttles. A minute later, they were a half mile behind the tanker, beyond effective range of its machine gun.
Isaac Bell broke into an icy smile.
“Look who’s here . . . I’ll take the helm, Ed.”
Black Bird slid out from behind the tanker and sped at them, hurling spray.
Bell fired orders. “Pauline, down! Asa, foredeck gun! Tobin, stern!”
The two boats raced at each other at a combined velocity of one hundred miles an hour. Ed Tobin fired a long burst from the forward Lewis gun. Black Bird shot back. But a black boat proved a much better target than one painted as gray as rain.
Geysers of bullet-pocked water splashed around Marion.
Lead banged into Black Bird’s armor and crazed her windshield. Her gunner was blown from his weapon and pinwheeled backwards into the sea.
Another leaped to his place.
Less than fifty yards separated the speeding boats, and the new gunner could not have missed even if the Van Dorn boat had been invisible. Bell felt the slugs rattling off the armor plate. The man fired again. Bullets cut the air inches above his head. The boats hurtled past each other, missing by inches.
Asa Somers triggered the stern Lewis, raking Black Bird’s cockpit. All three men in it fell to the sole. Only one regained his feet: Marat Zolner.
Bell saw him twirl his helm and ram his throttles in a single swift motion. But nothing happened. The black boat did not answer her helm. Nor did she speed away, but fell back in the seas, barely drifting ahead.
“Good shooting, Asa!”
The young apprentice had blasted Zolner’s controls to pieces.
Zolner jumped from the cockpit to the Lewis gun, ripped off the ammunition drum, and banged a full one into place. He tracked the Van Dorn boat, which was circling for the kill, and fired a burst.
Isaac Bell saw what appeared to be tracer bullets, trailing blue smoke. But when Zolner got the range, which he did on his third burst, raking Marion just ahead of the engines, smoke curled from the bullet holes. Marat Zolner was firing World War balloon-busting incendiary ammunition. Each phosphorus bullet laced the Van Dorn hull with flame, and the boat was suddenly on fire.
Pauline Grandzau dived for the nearest extinguisher, ripped it from its clamp, pumped up pressure, and sprayed pyrene on the flames. She sprayed until the brass container was empty and scrambled across the deck for another.
“Help her, Asa!” Bell shouted. “Ed, put out the fire! I’ll get Zolner.”
Bell stood up so he could see over the bullet-scarred windshield.
He steered into a tight turn that careened the boat half on her side. When he was facing Black Bird, he shoved his throttles wide open. Blue smoke streaked. Zolner had reloaded with incendiaries.
Bell zigzagged, rapid turns hard left, hard right. He cut the distance from two hundred yards to one hundred, to fifty. Marat Zolner stopped firing, his face a startled mask of disbelief at the sight of the burning cruiser flying at him.
“Ramming!” Bell warned his people. “Hold tight!”
Bell aimed for the softest target just ahead of the engines. The Van Dorn boat struck Black Bird dead center and cut the Comintern boat in half. Bell saw Zolner thrown from the Lewis gun into the water. Then he was past, drawing back his throttles.
He saw Marat Zolner swimming hard toward the tanker.
“Ed! Asa! Pick him up, right side.”
Marion swooped alongside Zolner.
Tobin leaned over to grab him.
“Look out, Ed!”
Bell saw Zolner turn over onto his back to deliver a vicious thrust with a short dagger. The blade plunged into Tobin’s forearm. Blood fountained. The detective swung his fist and pitched forward and started to slide over the gunnel. Asa Somers grabbed him, hauled him back into the boat, and wrapped his belt around Tobin’s arm.
A Lewis gun opened up with a rapid Boom! Boom! Boom! Ricochets shrieked, splinters flew. The Sandra T. Congdon was raking them with machine-gun fire from the flying bridge.
Bell poured on the gas and peeled away. Zolner kept swimming toward the tanker. Bell ventured closer, but the gunner laid down deadly fire from the vantage of his high mount. Another rain squall tore between them. Bell drove into it, using it as cover to get closer. But when the rain lifted, the machine gun started churning bullets, even as a lifeboat approached Zolner. Any hope Bell had that the man was injured was dashed when the Comintern agent scrambled aboard like a monkey.
The rain fell hard. The tanker disappeared. Thick mist gathered.
“We’ll never him see in this,” gasped Tobin as Somers fought to stop the bleeding. “Where’s he going?”
“Where he’s been going all along,” said Isaac Bell. “Wall Street.”
Yuri Antipov had bombed a symbol of capitalism. Marat Zolner would burn its heart out with an alcohol-fueled fireball. And the Comintern would welcome the hero who incinerated New York’s Financial District the length of Wall Street from the East River to Trinity Church.
Bell stepped on the starter. The third engine fired back to life.
The battered Marion roared for New York Harbor at fifty knots.
She carried them between the arms of Sandy Hook and Rockaway Beach and up the Lower Bay in ten minutes, through the Narrows and across the Upper Bay in another seven. The third motor died at the Battery. The second in the East River under the Brooklyn Bridge.
Peering through a scrim of sheet rain, Bell spotted the tall hangars of the Loening factory and, just past it, the 31st Street Air Service Terminal. His last engine coughed, running out of gas. Fifty yards from the dock, it died. In the sudden silence, Bell disengaged the propeller to reduce drag, and she drifted close enough for Asa to loop a line around a bollard.
Bell pulled the Thompson submachine gun from a locker. “Pauline, get Ed to Bellevue. Asa, grab that box.”
“Where’d you get hand grenades?”
“Miami River. Come on!”
They ran to the Loening factory on the river’s edge. The mechanics had floated the Flying Yachts into the hangars, out of the wind. Bell climbed onto his and threw off the lines. “On the jump, boys. Open those doors and start my engine.”
“You can’t take off in this weather!” the foreman shouted.
“My mother died when I was a boy. I’ve gotten by without one since. Start my engine!”
42
BELL BATTLED HIGH WAVES taking off from the East River and ferocious gusts in the air as his flying boat climbed toward the Williamsburg Bridge. He steered between its towers, whose tops were lost in cloud, and aimed for the lowest dip in its suspension cables. He cleared them by inches. The horizon vanished in the rain.
He kept track of the horizon with a new Sperry instrument that combined a turn indicator and an inclinometer. But it was no help avoiding the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, much less the skyscrapers of Wall Street, and he flew blind, relying on his compass, Tank watch, and memory.
Asa Somers couldn’t stop grinning. He had never been in an airplane before.
When the Flying Yacht finally broke from the murk that enshrouded the port, Bell saw that he had already flown past the
Narrows. The Lower Bay spread below him, dotted with ships. He ignored the vessels he saw at anchor. They were riding out the storm, huddled along the Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Jersey shores. Marat Zolner’s tanker would be moving, steaming up the Ambrose Channel on a relentless course toward Manhattan Island.
Bell flew the length of the channel. It was empty of ships. Had he guessed wrong? Had Zolner simply turned around and fled to Europe? When he saw Ambrose Lightship tossed violently on the storm-churned ocean, he circled back. But in the entire outer harbor he saw only one moving vessel braving the storm. Nearing the Narrows, it was, incredibly, a little rumrunner stacked with crates of whisky and sheeted in spray as it pitched and rolled.
Asa tapped Bell’s arm. He was scanning the water ahead through the binoculars. Above the Narrows, already into the Upper Bay, less than six miles from the Battery at the tip of Manhattan, a tanker was plowing toward the city. The Flying Yacht raced after it, and Bell soon recognized the Sandra T. Congdon by the tall funnel soaring from the back of her hull, her sturdy wheelhouse forward of center, her straight bow, and her graceful fantail stern. The cannon on her foredeck cinched it. Closer, he saw her crew frantically rowing away in the lifeboat. She was, indeed, a floating firebomb.
“Asa. Lash those grenades together in bundles of four.”
“Are we going to bomb him?”
“You are going to bomb those cannon shells on the foredeck. I’m going to fly the plane. See that knob on the end of the stick? That’s the detonator. Pull that knob when I tell you and drop it over the side fast as you can.”
He banked into a tight circle, straightened up behind the ship, and descended. The flying boat caught up quickly. Asa stood up in the cockpit so he could reach over the side windows. Bell soared fifty feet above the stack and over the wheelhouse, his Blériot wheel in constant motion as he tried to counteract the buffeting wind.
“Now!”
Thirty feet over the foredeck, they couldn’t miss. The bundled stick grenades landed on the cannon. They bounced onto the stacked cannon shells. But before they detonated, they skittered away and exploded with a harmless flash on the steel deck.
The Bootlegger Page 30