“Don’t touch anything,” the captain warned the Staten Islanders as they trooped warily aboard. He did not want to tow Donald Darbee’s scow, which was moored nearby, but Bell insisted and slipped him twenty dollars “for your crew.”
“Never thought I’d be on one of these,” muttered old Darbee as they churned away from the pier.
A water cop muttered back, “Except in handcuffs.”
Bell said to Archie and Harry, “If there’s no submarine in the Kill Van Kull, we’re going to end up in a cross fire.”
“You really think we’re going to find one, Isaac?”
“I believe they think they saw a submarine. And a submarine would make those torpedoes a much deadlier affair than a surface torpedo boat. Nonetheless, I will believe a submarine when I see one.”
The Harbor Squad launch plowed across the Upper Bay, threading a swift course through ferries, tugs, barges, and oceangoing schooners and steamers. A thunderous whistle announced the New York arrival of an Atlantic liner passing through the Verrazano Narrows. Tugboats meeting her piped replies. A steady stream of car floats carried freight trains between New Jersey, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the East River.
The police boat steered into the crooked channel of water between Staten Island and New Jersey known as the Kill Van Kull. Bell estimated it was a thousand feet wide, about the same as the narrow arm of the Carquinez Strait where he had captured Louis Loh swimming from Mare Island. To his left rose the hills of Staten Island. The city of Bayonne spread to his right. Docks, warehouses, boatyards, and residences lined the banks. Four miles down the waterway, Richards and Gordon said, “There she is!”
The car float stood by itself, tied to the shore beside the flat green back lawn of a large frame house in a district of similar dwellings. It was an old New Jersey Central barge of the three-track type, short and wide, with a boxcar on the nearside tracks and a tall gondola on the inside. The middle track appeared to be empty, though the men on the police launch could not see the space between the two cars.
“What submarine?” asked the Harbor Squad captain.
“Under it,” growled Donald Darbee. “They cut a well in the middle of the barge for the conning turret.”
“You saw that?”
“No. But how else could they get in and out?”
The launch captain glowered at Isaac Bell. “Mr. Bell, I predict that my boss is going to be talking to your boss, and neither of us is going to be very happy about it.”
“Let’s get closer,” said Bell.
“There isn’t enough water there for a Holland submarine.”
“It’s plenty deep,” Donald Darbee retorted quietly. “The tide scours the bank on this side.”
The helmsman called for Dead Slow, and drew within fifty feet.
The Van Dorns, the scowmen, and the harbor police peered into the murky water. The launch drifted closer to the car float.
“Lot of mud stirred up,” Darbee muttered worriedly.
“Our propeller’s stirring it,” said the captain. “Told you it’s too shallow.” To the helmsman he barked, “Back off before we run aground.”
Darbee said, “There’s thirty feet of water here if there’s an inch.” “Then what’s causing that mud?”
“That’s what I’m wondering.”
“So am I,” said Isaac Bell, peering into the water. Bubbles were rising from the murk and hissing on the surface.
52
BACK AWAY!” ISAAC BELL SHOUTED. “BACK! FULL ASTERN.”
The helmsman and the engineer had quick reflexes. They reversed the engine in an instant. The propeller churned backward. Smoke and steam shot from the short stack. The boat stopped. But before it could gather way in reverse, a gray malevolent form rose swiftly under it.
“Grab ahold!”
Bell saw a pipe emerge just ahead of the launch—the periscope, a tube of angled mirrors, the submarine’s eye. A squat round turret broke the surface, the conning tower, rimmed with handrails. Then a mighty blow from underneath smashed into the bottom of the police launch and pushed its forty-foot hull out of the water. Its keel shattered with a loud crack of splitting wood, and still the police boat rose, lifted by a powerful steel hull that broke the surface like a maddened sperm whale.
The police launch fell onto its side, spilling Van Dorns, cops, and scowmen into the Kill.
Bell jumped onto the steel hull and waded through waist-deep water to the conning tower. He grabbed the handrails that surrounded the hatch on top and reached for a wheel that would open the hatch.
“Look out, Isaac!” Archie Abbott yelled. “He’s going under!”
Ignoring Archie and the water that was suddenly climbing up his chest, Bell threw his weight on the wheel. For a second, it wouldn’t budge. Then he thought he felt it move. Salt water rushed over his shoulders, his mouth, his nose, his eyes. Suddenly the submarine was surging ahead. He held the wheel as long as he could, still struggling to open it, but the force of the rushing water ripped it from his hands. The hull raced under him, and he realized, too late, that the propeller driving it was about to cut him to pieces.
He pushed off desperately with both boots and swam with all his strength. The water rushing past the hull sucked him back. He felt the hull sliding under him. Something hit him hard. It threw him aside and drove him deep. A powerful thrust of turbulence tumbled him deeper. Slammed about in the submarine’s propeller wash, he realized that he had been struck by cowling that protected the propeller and, in this instance, protected him, too, from the thrashing blades.
He fought to the surface, saw the conning turret racing up the Kill Van Kull, and swam after it. Behind him, Archie was helping Harry Warren climb onto the muddy bank, Richards and Gordon and the engineer were holding ropes dangling from the barge, and the police captain clung to his overturned launch. “Telephone for help!” the captain yelled, and two cops staggered toward the frame house.
Donald Darbee was climbing onto his oyster scow, which had broken free of the sinking launch.
“Uncle Donny!” Bell shouted over his shoulder as he swam after the submarine. “Pick me up.”
Darbee’s gasoline motor clattered, spewing blue smoke.
The submarine kept submerging. The top of the turret and the periscope tube were all that remained above the surface. The handrails around it, the periscope, and the hatch wheel Bell had tried to open left a wake up the channel, splashing like a mobile f ountain.
Darbee’s scow came alongside, and Bell climbed on, rolling over the low gunnel onto the flat deck. “After him!”
Darbee shoved his throttle forward. The motor got louder, the wooden boat trembled, and the old man muttered, “What do we do with him when we catch him?”
Bell heard gunfire crackling behind him. The cops running to the frame house to telephone for help dove behind shrubs. Pistol fire raked the lawn from every window in the house.
“Counterfeiters live there,” Uncle Darbee explained.
“Faster!” said Bell.
He jumped onto the square forward deck.
“Get me alongside of the turret.”
The mostly submerged Holland was headed toward the Upper Bay at six knots. Darbee fiddled with his motor. The noise deepened to an insistent growl, and the oyster scow doubled her speed. It halved the distance to the splashing handrails, halved it again, and pulled past the backwash of the submarine’s enormous propeller. Bell braced to jump to the conning tower. The wooden boat surged alongside. He could sense more than actually see the steel hull beneath the surface. He braced to jump, targeting the periscope tube, gambling that the thin tube was strong enough to hold him until he got a grip on the rails.
The Holland submarine disappeared.
One moment, the turret was just ahead of him. The next, it was gone, deep in the water. Bell could see trailing bubbles and the ripples from the propeller, but there was nothing to jump onto anymore, no turret, no rails, no periscope.
“Slow down,” Bell called to Darb
ee. “Follow his wake.”
Darbee throttled back to match the submarine’s six-knot speed.
Bell stood on the foredeck, watching the rhythmic swirls of propeller wash and signaling the old man when to nudge his tiller to the left or right. How the underwater ship was navigating its course was a mystery that was solved after they had gone half a mile. Shortly before the submarine reached the next bend in the channel, its periscope suddenly emerged from the water, and the submarine changed course.
The spy had plotted their route out of the Kill Van Kull by noting the time that would elapse between each turn. Bell signaled a similar change and the oyster scow turned with it. The periscope stayed above water. It swiveled around until its glass eye was facing him.
“Stop engine!” Bell shouted.
The oyster boat’s speed dropped as it drifted on momentum. Bell watched for signs that the Holland would back up or even turn around to ram them. But it held its course and pulled ahead of the scow, still showing its periscope.
“Darbee, did the test Holland you watched have a torpedo tube in back?”
“No,” Darbee answered to Bell’s relief, until he added, “I heard talk they might add one.”
“I can’t imagine he’d waste an entire torpedo on us.”
“Suppose not.”
“Speed up. Get closer.”
Ahead, the Kill took a sharp turn. The periscope swiveled around, and the unseen helmsman steered through it. Bell signaled for the oyster boat to accelerate. He drew within twenty yards of the stubby tube and the swirling propeller wash. But the water ahead was turning choppy as the Kill spread into the Upper Bay.
Staten Island and Bayonne fell behind. A chilly breeze cut through Bell’s wet clothes, and waves began curling over the periscope. Enormous bubbles burst on the surface, and he realized that the Holland was forcing air out of its floatation tanks and admitting water to descend deeper. The periscope dropped from sight. The windswept waves of the Upper Bay obliterated the swirling wake.
“He’s gone,” said Darbee.
Bell searched hopelessly. Three miles across the bay sprawled the dockyards of Brooklyn and beyond them low green hills. To his left, four or five miles to the northwest, Bell saw the tall buildings of lower Manhattan and the elegantly draped cables of the Brooklyn Bridge spanning the East River.
“Do you know where Catherine Slip is?”
Darbee swung his tiller. “What do you want there?”
“Dyname,” Bell answered. The fastest ship in New York, equipped with a telephone and a radio telegraph, and commanded by a high-ranking naval hero who could move quickly to rally the Navy against the spy’s submarine and radio the New Hampshire to rig torpedo nets before entering the port.
Darbee gave him a canvas pea jacket that smelled of mold. Bell stripped off his wet coat and shirt, dried out his Browning, and poured water out of his boots. The overpowered oyster scow covered the five miles to the Brooklyn Bridge in twenty minutes. But as they passed under the bridge, Bell’s heart sank. The battleship New Hampshire had already landed. It was moored to the pier closest to the way that held Hull 44. If 44 was O’Shay’s target, they were a pair of sitting ducks. Explosions on the floating ship would set the entire navy yard afire.
TO ISAAC BELL’S RELIEF, Dyname was at Catherine Slip.
He jumped from the oyster scow onto the nearest ladder, climbed onto the pier, crossed her gangway, and shoved through the door to Dyname’s main cabin. Captain Falconer was seated on the green leather banquette flanked by two of his yacht’s crewmen.
“Falconer. They’ve got a submarine.”
“So I am told,” said the Hero of Santiago with a grim nod at three Riker & Riker Protection Service gunmen who were covering the cabin with pistols and a sawed-off shotgun. Bell recognized the bodyguard, Plimpton, who had accompanied Herr Riker on the 20th Century Limited. Plimpton said, “You’re all wet, Mr. Bell, and you’ve lost your hat.”
53
HELLO, PLIMPTON.”
“Hands up.”
“Where’s O’Shay?”
“In the air!”
“Tell your boss that I owe him for an excellent emerald and I’m looking forward to paying him in person.”
“Now!”
“Do it, Bell,” Falconer said. “They’ve already shot my lieutenant and my engineer.”
Isaac Bell raised his hands, having stalled long enough to rate the opposition. Plimpton held a semiautomatic German Navy Luger like he knew his business. But the pretty-boy bruisers flanking him were out of their league. The elder, gingerly toting a sawed-off 20-gauge Remington, might pass for a small-town bank guard. The younger gripped his revolver like a bouncer in a YMCA. They were not on Falconer’s yacht due to a well-thought-out plan, Bell surmised. Something had gone wrong.
What had drawn them at the last moment to Dyname? Escape on the fastest ship in the harbor after O’Shay unleashed his torpedoes? But Dyname hadn’t the range to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Surely O’Shay had intended to take a liner to Europe, traveling with Katherine Dee under assumed names, or had booked secret passage on a freighter.
She was what went wrong, Bell realized. Katherine was wounded.
“Is the girl aboard?” he asked Falconer.
“She needs a doctor!” the boy with the shotgun blurted.
“Shut up, Bruce!” Plimpton growled.
“I’m aboard,” said Katherine Dee. She staggered up the companionway from Falconer’s private cabin. Disheveled, pale, and feverish, she looked like a child shaken from a deep sleep. Except for the hatred on her face. “Thanks to you,” she said bitterly to Bell. “You’re ruining everything.” She had held tight to her pistol when he had shot her in Barlowe’s jewelry shop. She raised it with a trembling hand and aimed it at him.
“Miss Dee!” said Bruce. “You shouldn’t be on your feet.”
“She needs a doctor,” said Bell.
“That’s what I’ve been saying. Mr. Plimpton, she’s got to have a doctor.”
“Shut up, Bruce,” said Plimpton. “She’ll have a doctor as soon as we get out of this mess.”
Hands in the air, boxed in by O’Shay’s gunmen, the tall detective searched her eyes, seeking some advantage, even as he braced for the bullet. He saw no mercy, no hesitation, only the deep, deep weariness of a person with a mortal wound. But she intended to kill him before she died. As she had killed Grover Lakewood and Father Jack and who knew how many others for Eyes O’Shay. How long before she passed out? Where, he wondered, was her “streak of God”?
“Did you know,” he asked, “that Father Jack prayed for you?”
“A lot of good his prayers did. It was Brian O’Shay who saved me.”
“What did Brian save you for? To hurl Grover Lakewood to his death? To shoot the priest?”
“Just like you shot me.”
“No,” said Bell. “I shot you to save the woman I love.”
“I love Brian. I will do anything for him.”
Bell recalled the words of train conductor Dilber on the 20th Century Limited. “Riker and his ward are completely on the up-and-up. Always separate staterooms.”
And O’Shay himself, speaking as Riker, had said, “The girl brings light into my life where there was darkness.”
“And what will Brian be for you?”
“He saved me.”
“Fifteen years ago. What will he do for the rest of your life, Katherine? Keep you pure?”
Her hand shook violently. “You—” Her breath came hoarsely.
“You kill to please him, and he keeps you pure? Is that how it works? Father Jack was right to pray for you.”
“Why?” she wailed.
“He knew in his heart, in his soul, that Brian O’Shay couldn’t save you.”
“And God could?”
“So the priest believed. With all his heart.”
Katherine lowered the gun. Her eyes rolled back in her head. The gun slipped from her fingers, and she folded to the deck as if she wer
e a puppet whose strings had been cut.
“Plimpton, damn you!” Bruce shouted. “She’ll die without a doctor.” He gestured emphatically with his pistol.
Like a viper striking reflexively at movement, Plimpton shot Bruce between the eyes and whirled back to the blur of motion that was Isaac Bell. The bodyguard had committed a fatal error.
Bell fired his Browning twice. Plimpton first, then the remaining gunman. As the gunman pitched forward, his shotgun went off, the report deafening in the confined space of the yacht’s cabin. A swath of pellets tore under the banquette into the legs of Lowell Falconer and his crew.
Bell was wrapping a tourniquet above Falconer’s knee when Donald Darbee stuck a cautious head in the door. “Thought you’d want to know, Mr. Bell, the Holland is passing under the Brooklyn Bridge.”
54
SURFACE!” SHOUTED DICK CONDON, THE FIRST MATE WHOM Eyes O’Shay had put in command of his Holland submarine after he murdered Captain Hatch.
“No!” O’Shay countermanded the order. “Stay down. They’ll see us.”
“The tide is killing us,” the frightened Irish rebel shouted back. “The current is running four knots. We only make six knots on electric! We have to surface to use the gasoline engine.”
O’Shay gripped Condon’s shoulder. The panic in the man’s voice was scaring the men who were operating the ballasting and trimming tanks and preparing to fire the torpedo, which was precisely why he had decided to sail with the submarine. Someone had to keep a clear head. “Six? Four? Who cares? We’re two knots faster.”
“No, Mr. O’Shay. Only directly into the tide. When I turn broadside to line up a torpedo, we’ll be swept away.”
“Try it!” O’Shay demanded. “Take the chance.”
Dick Condon switched the vertical rudder to hand control from the less fine compressed-air steering and moved it cautiously. The deck tilted under their feet. Then the East River caught the hundred-foot submarine with the fury of a shark tearing into a weak swimmer. The men in the small dark space smashed into pipes, conduits, valves, and air hoses as the boat was tumbled.