The Titanic Secret Page 19

  “Their chief engineer and I have come up with a plan to get your ship clear of the harbor without raising suspicion.”

  “If only that were true,” Fyrie said with an overly dramatic sigh before turning very serious. “Did your plan factor in that the Hvalur Batur is guarded twenty-four hours a day, that her bunkers were emptied of all her coal, and there isn’t a tug within sixty miles that’s powerful enough to move her? Oh, and that she and her crew, including yours truly, are the subjects of intense international negotiations, with jail time, or at least a massive fine, as the inevitable outcome?”

  Bell took a slow, deliberate sip of beer. “Didn’t know about the guard, actually, but that’s an easy fix.”

  Fyrie paused, studying the detective for a moment, before laughing aloud. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “About this? Absolutely.”

  “Okay. Tell me your plan and I will consider your particular job.”

  That was as far as the conversation went. The bar door opened. Bell didn’t need to turn around to know the crew of the rival whaling boat had entered the room. He knew by how grim Fyrie’s crew started to look. As for the captain himself, it seemed the more men entered the bar, the more he reveled in the challenge.

  Bell didn’t need to understand the words that went back and forth between the opposing captains. He’d heard such confrontations many times before and there was little variation in the verbal lead-up to an all-out fight. So universal was the theme that it was almost a scripted set piece. The only thing he hadn’t expected was that the crew from the Norwegian whaler Isbjørn was led by a black-bearded captain who stood a solid six feet six inches.

  Bell had turned his chair halfway around when the last of the ten sailors entered the Lundehund so he could watch them while keeping an eye on how Fyrie was handling himself. It was the point in the verbal preliminaries when Fyrie got to his feet to signal that it was time they all went outside and settled the affair as immature adolescents pretending to be men that the other crew suddenly launched themselves in a surprise attack.

  The move was a total break in protocol. A popular waterfront bar should be given the reverence of holy ground when it came to a fight of this magnitude. A brawl between two or even four men was certainly allowed, but not a full-on rumble, and that disregard for the inviolability of the tavern’s sanctity kept Fyrie and his crew a fraction slow to respond.

  Bell hadn’t expected it either, yet that didn’t mean he didn’t react instantly and with forethought. He’d watched the big sailors enter the dim bar and fan out in a semicircle with the captain at the center. He’d noted who kept their hands in their pockets to disguise the fact they’d armed themselves with some manner of cosh or cudgel. He graded potential fighting abilities by how they held themselves—who was slouching, who favored a bad leg, who looked like he’d poured himself too many drams of liquid courage. He noted all these things on a subconscious level so that when they sprang into action, he’d already prioritized targets and was moving before Fyrie or his men could extricate themselves from behind the table where the Norwegian whalers had hoped to pin them.

  In one fluid motion, Bell grabbed the back of his chair and let his momentum lift it off the floor and swing it in a slashing arc. It was a solid piece of furniture, doubtless a veteran of its fair share of fights. It didn’t shatter upon impact with a sailor pulling a baton from the pocket of his peacoat. Instead, the chair legs cracked the man’s forearm at the wrist with sufficient enough force to break both radius and ulna. Bell released the chair and followed through by crashing the bottom of his boot into the outside of the man’s knee. The man crumpled immediately and instinctively tried to break his fall with his broken wrist. The strikes had been so quick that his brain hadn’t yet registered the injury. When the cracked bones took on the weight of his two-hundred-pound frame, the ends came apart like shattered crystal and his scream acted as a distraction for the next man Bell had targeted.

  This assailant wasn’t as large as his captain, but he had Bell by three inches and thirty pounds. None of that mattered. The sailor pivoted slightly to square himself with the Van Dorn detective and Bell took a fast step toward the man, coming inside what anyone would consider the fighting perimeter. The big Norwegian didn’t know how to react. In that moment’s hesitation, Bell grabbed the collar of his coat and pulled him forward just enough that his shoulders lost tension and his head dipped.

  Bell met the bridge of the sailor’s nose with the thickest part of his forehead in a butt that would do a bighorn sheep proud. The crunch of bone and cartilage was accompanied by fountaining blood.

  Twenty percent of the Isbjørn’s crew was out of commission even before the surprise attack reached its intended target. The four sailors to the right of the captain, and the captain himself, grabbed the thick pine table and put their weight into it, hoping to crush the crew of the Hvalur Batur against the wall. The three attackers on Bell’s side of the semicircle were shifting into defensive stances, seeing they were now less of a threat and more like the threatened.

  Captain Fyrie and his crew had just enough time to set themselves up for the charge and meet brute strength with brute strength, and rather than have the sharp edge of the table crush them into the wall, they managed to hold their ground and then spin the table enough to throw the five men opposite them off balance. The Icelanders scrambled up over the table, kicking aside spilled pitchers and steins, and launched themselves bodily at the rival crew.

  The sneak attack turned into a melee of fists and elbows, wild swings, and precision jabs. Bell fitted the brass knuckles over the fingers of his right hand. Around him, the room turned into a kaleidoscope of violence. For every punch the detective took, he gave two right back. He saw Ragnar Fyrie caught in a crushing hold by the captain of the Isbjørn. His face was suffused with blood and his eyes goggled from their sockets.

  Bell didn’t have an angle to hit the attacker’s face and didn’t want to crack open his skull with the knuckle-dusters, so he threw five rapid, and incrementally deeper, punches into the Norwegian captain’s right kidney.

  The blows became so painful that the whaler had no choice but to release his hold on Fyrie. When he turned on Bell, the American dropped him with a haymaker he brought all the way up from his shin, a punch with enough force that the monster Norseman was lifted an inch off the floor before collapsing in an unconscious heap.

  That was the symbolic end to the fight, but the bartender had reached for the 12-gauge side-by-side kept for just such purposes under the bar and he fired both barrels as the Norwegian captain hit the filthy floor. The men left standing were raked with twin loads of coarse rock salt, a nonlethal way to drain the fight out of anyone taking a hit.

  Bell had his back turned to the blast yet felt the wasp-like sting of a salt fragment biting the back of his neck and others peppering his coat.

  In the deafening echo that followed the gunshots, men helped comrades to their feet. Patrons started righting overturned furniture, and, most important, the crew of the Isbjørn gathered the wounded and slunk from the bar. Two men were needed to drape the unconscious captain’s heavy arms over their shoulders and drag him out, while another shepherded the man with the shattered wrist.

  Before any protests were raised by the owner and staff, Bell peeled off enough krone notes to cover any damage and slapped them on the bar and then added to the pile, the universal gesture that the next round for everybody was on him. Just like that, all was forgotten.

  “You fight well.” Captain Fyrie saluted Bell with a fresh mug of lager.

  “In your school, was there a group of bullies who terrorized the other kids?”

  “Of course. You were one?”

  Bell shook his head at the memory. “No. I was the damned fool trying to defend the weaker students. Took my share of beatings before I got any good at defending myself.”

  Fyrie’s laughter
quickly faded. “I must tell you, my new friend, that I have considered every possible way of getting my ship out of the Norwegians’ grasp. The problem is, the thermal inertia of all that cold water in the boilers and how much energy we need to build up sufficient steam to run the engines. I’ve worked it out with my own engineer.” He nodded at a bespectacled man in his early fifties with a black eye and gold tooth. “Even installing a dozen bypasses and running at supercritical pressure, we still need several thousand gallons of water to clear the harbor. With our system, that will take nearly sixteen hours to bring it up to temperature.

  “Even if we had coal, which we don’t, we get boarded every morning for an inspection, so there isn’t enough time to fire her up. We thought about using kerosene, gasoline, even propane. They all take too much time or will give off enough exhaust to alert the harbor authorities.” He saw Bell was about to interject, and added, “There’s more than just the gangway guard to worry about. The harbormaster has a particular interest in our case as he will have first dibs to buy the Hvalur Batur.”

  “The engineer I worked with and I looked at all kinds of alternative fuels too,” Bell said, “and came to the same conclusion.”

  “What do you propose? Magic?”

  “To some, I’m sure it’ll seem like it.”

  19

  The Norwegian authorities had allowed the bulk of Ragnar Fyrie’s crew to return to Reykjavik because they were simple sailors doing what the captain had asked of them. The six who’d remained behind with him in Sandefjord were officers, senior engineers, and the principal harpooner. They were stakeholders in the Hvalur Batur who shared in her profits and were thus considered as culpable as Captain Fyrie.

  When it came to implementing Bell’s plan, the seven men and the captain worked with an efficiency born of sailors who’d risked their lives for one another so often that a fresh incident no longer required even a simple thanks. Orders need be given only once and were carried out in a timely fashion. None were questioned, no matter how arcane.

  Thirty disassembled whale oil barrels were pulled from stores and knocked together in record time. The barrels had been lowered to a waiting motor skiff through a hatch in the starboard hull so that the guard watching the whaler had no idea anything was afoot. They were then transported to the barn behind Bell’s hotel, where the owner was being paid to keep a fire lit under a two-hundred-gallon steel tank.

  Two men had been dispatched to the railroad machine shop near the station where Bell had, by prearrangement with a conductor on his train from Oslo, secured access to a pile of iron filings waste left over from routine brake cleaning. Another crew member had bought several twenty-kilogram bags of coarse salt from a commercial cannery and begun the laborious process of grinding it down to a fine powder.

  By five o’clock in the afternoon following the bar fight, everything was as ready as it could be. Night was falling in the northern latitudes, and the stars and moon were covered by a blanket of high clouds. The harbor itself remained glassy calm, the reflection of the town’s lights lancing across its surface in perfectly straight lines.

  Bell implemented the last part of the initial phase of the plan personally. At the base of the Hvalur Batur’s gangplank sat the little metal guard shack, with its blackened chimney poking through the roof and wisps of fragrant smoke blowing out across the water. The same guard was on duty, and his eyes lit up when Bell approached and pulled a bottle of clear liquid from inside his peacoat. The man quickly stepped out into the chilly night air.

  “This is to thank you,” the Van Dorn detective said, handing over the liquor.

  The guard smiled a little. “I hear you find Captain Fyrie and also captain of the Isbjørn. Ja?”

  “Any word how he’s doing?”

  “His mouth, ah, teeth. No, jaw. His jaw is closed for a month with wire.”

  “Wrong place, wrong time.” Bell shrugged.

  “Ach, the man is a raevhål. Um, a—”

  “No need to translate,” Bell assured him quickly. “Enjoy your drink. And thanks again.” He thrust his hands back into his pockets and ambled off down the street. When he looked back, he could see the guard retaking his seat in the shack and tilting the bottom of the bottle toward the ceiling.

  At its strongest, the native drink called akvavit is eighty proof. Bell had just handed over a bottle of West Virginia low-holler white lightning flavored with Georgia peaches. It was ninety-five percent alcohol. Three shots of that moonshine and the man would be incoherent and never know what hit him.

  When Bell returned twenty minutes later with the truck, the guard was facedown on the desk and the bottle was a third empty. He’d be out until dawn.

  In the back of the truck were six of the oaken barrels. Each weighed about three hundred pounds and was filled with water just a few degrees below boiling. They’d cooled some on their journey, and would keep doing so, but Bell’s plan needed to start with water well above the near-freezing temperatures of the harbor. The Icelandic sailors had little trouble wrestling the barrels off the back of the truck and rolling them up the gangplank.

  Once the first barrel was on deck, the chief engineer was waiting with a hose connected directly to the whaler’s boilers. Even as the second and third barrels were being manhandled up the plank, he was draining the first into the propulsion system. Bell had explained his concept by using electricity as an example.

  “A good electrician can bypass an active circuit if he’s careful enough. It saves time by not having to shut down the power. They call it hot-wiring. What we are going to do, essentially, is ‘hot-pipe’ your boilers, and the first step is to heat the water as much as we can off-site before I pull the next trick from up my sleeve.”

  When the last barrel was off the truck, but before it had been rolled up the ramp, Bell was behind the wheel of the Leyland driving back to the barn behind his hotel for the next load of preheated water. This was how he was getting past Captain Fyrie’s concern about thermal inertia. It took time. By outsourcing the first one hundred and fifty degrees to the boiler in the barn, they’d need far less energy, and time, to bring the mass of water in the engine’s tank to a full boil and produce enough pressure to energize the Hvalur Batur.

  By eleven o’clock, with no one the wiser that anything was taking place, they had four thousand gallons of preheated water in the whaler’s boilers. Once they got the water up to steam, the automatic introduction of additional cold water from the seawater inlets wouldn’t chill the system so much as to cause a drop in pressure. The boiler was said to be self-sustaining at this point.

  The trick now was to get the water to a high boil because they were racing the clock. Every minute in the icy tanks meant the water was losing another fraction of a degree of heat.

  “Okay,” Ragnar Fyrie said. They were in the Batur’s engine room. “You’ve taken us this far. Show the men what you demonstrated this morning.”

  Bell had done a small-scale demo for the captain and chief engineer in order to convince them his plan was viable. Now it was time to make it happen for real. He had worked it all out with the engineer back in New York and had conducted enough experiments to convince them both of the plan’s viability, but still so much rode in the balance for the next hour or two.

  “Right. Salt, iron, and magnesium mixed together do absolutely nothing. But mix them with water and you create an exothermic reaction.” His last words lost his audience, so he said, “The chemicals will produce heat. Lots and lots of heat.”

  He’d premeasured the chemicals and combined them in the proper ratio. The ship was running a diesel generator to produce heat so the men could live aboard throughout the cold winter, and the electricity it provided had been shunted to the boiler pumps so that about fifty gallons of water could be isolated in a separate tank but still be able to be added back to the steam loops when needed.

  Bell used a scoop to pour his chemical mix
ture through an opening at the top of the tank. The engineer, Ivar Ivarsson, was ready with a hastily made cap with a hose running from it. Inside the tank, the chemicals came in contact with the water and a fast chain reaction took place. Chemical bonds broke down and reformed, and in the end the water was superheated and a cloud of hydrogen gas was forced out through the hose. The tube ran down to the main firebox, where it was paired with a line from a natural gas tank. When the hydrogen reached the air, Ivar lit the natural gas. The blue flame, augmented by the highly flammable hydrogen, amplified the chemical reaction taking place inside the tank.

  Moments later, the muffled burble of the reaction inside the steel vessel waned. The engineer purged the tank and added fresh water that Bell quickly laced with the powdered mixture of salt, iron dust, and an oxide of magnesium. It too came within just a couple of degrees of boiling before the reaction abated. It took a couple of hours, and they lost heat in the process, but without producing any discernible exhaust Isaac Bell had been able to bring thousands of gallons of water aboard up to within just a few degrees of operational temperatures.

  “So now what?” Ivar asked, wiping grease from his hands on a wadded cotton cloth. “If the boiler was a woman, I’d say you have her attention. But she hasn’t said yes yet.”

  “Ultimate icebreaker,” Bell said, and opened the last of his trunks. This was a smaller one, and its insides had been triple-secured against any moisture getting in. “Captain, I advise you get to the bridge because we’re going to be up to operating temperatures and pressures in moments. Have men in place to cast off and your harpooner ready to snag our goodies on the way out.”

  “What’s in there?” Ivar asked suspiciously, pointing at the waxed paper bundle contained inside the trunk.

  “It’s called thermite. This particular version is made of powdered aluminum and some other chemicals. It’s a recent German discovery. When I dump this into the main tank, the reaction is going to be swift and violent. The heat will flash-boil enough water to bring your engines up to at least half speed. Also, it should be sustained for twenty minutes at least.”