The Titanic Secret Read online

  “Mr. Bjørnson, course correction, please.”

  “Captain.”

  “Take us north-northwest at three hundred degrees. Reduce speed to ten knots, and I’ll get Other Petr to act as an additional lookout.”

  “Yes, sir. Making my course three hundred degrees and reducing speed to ten knots.” Arn first worked the spoked wooden wheel until the Hvalur Batur’s prow was cutting through the waves on the proper course and then ratcheted the engine telegraph to reduce speed until it read ten knots on the retrofitted pitometer log gauge mounted on the wall next to the pendulum inclinometer that showed the ship’s roll. “Captain. Speed, ten knots. Course, three hundred degrees.”

  Fyrie regarded Isaac Bell. “There’s ice to the north of us. With some luck, we can hide among the hummocks and keep moving west.”

  “Outflanking the French ship?”

  “If she’s out here. Our radio doesn’t have a lot of range, but if they have a big enough antenna, they could still have heard a call.”

  “But knowing we’ve left Novaya Zemlya isn’t the same as knowing where we’re going to be,” Bell said.

  “Right. It’s a big ocean. We just need to keep all our passengers from knowing our direction and speed and then we should slip by their picket without them ever knowing it.”

  “Confine them to the cabins, you mean?”

  “I’ll get someone to black out the portholes outside the mess and paint over the small ones in each cabin. That way, they can roam a little bit but not try to get a fix on our position.”

  “Why not just take the crystal out of the radio?” Bell suggested. “They can’t help their allies if they can’t communicate.”

  With a chagrinned look on his face, Fyrie said, “I’m still getting used to even having a radio aboard my old Batur. I should have thought of that in the first place.”

  Bell shrugged good-naturedly. “My wife thinks I’m too clever by half. Anything else we can do?”

  “In a few minutes, the light will be strong enough to show our smoke trail. I’m going to have Ivar vent steam out an auxiliary exhaust mounted to the stack. It’s a terribly inefficient use of the engines, but the steam will help dissipate the black coal smoke faster and make us less visible against the ice fields. I can talk to Ivar over the voice tube, so please roust the two Petrs and have them come up here.”

  Bell left the bridge and strode back down to Brewster’s cabin. He opened the door without knocking. The miner was dressed and sitting on his bed, his elbows resting on his knees and his head hanging low. He’d been coughing, because there were spots of blood on the deck. Next to the splatters were bits of hair and beard that had fallen by themselves from his head and face and drifted down.

  “Mr. Brewster. It’s me again. Isaac Bell.”

  The man looked up. His face was as pale as a full moon, and the bags under his eyes were bruised the color of eggplants. “I know who you are, Mr. Bell. I’m forgetful, not stupid.”

  “Right. Tell me about Jake Hobart. Do you know who killed him?”

  “Whoever smuggled a radio onto the island with him,” Brewster replied.

  “A radio?”

  “Yeah. Smallish thing powered by a hand crank. I found it after Jake’s body was found. When we found him, see, he was out by the mound of tailings we’d already mined. It was after a bad storm, but that wouldn’t have bothered Jake. He was a bull of a man. Nothing could stand in his way, least of all a little bad weather.”

  “Who found him?”

  “Charlie Widney.”

  Bell pictured the man. He was a gentle giant with a prominent Adam’s apple and scars on his face from some childhood pox. He recalled that Widney’s job was master of the draft horses and mules used in the mine. Therefore, his presence at the tailings pile wasn’t an unusual event. “Go on.”

  “It was after we carried Jake back to the mine that I discovered he’d been stabbed in the ear. I hid that from the men and wondered why someone woulda killed him. Made sense that old Jake saw something someone else didn’t want him to see. Something near the tailings, since no one but Charlie could have moved Jake’s body alone and even then it would have been a struggle. You see, Jake liked to—”

  “Please stick to what’s relevant, Mr. Brewster.”

  “What? Oh, sure. Sorry. I ramble sometimes. What was I talking about?”

  “Charlie Widney discovering Jake Hobart’s body. You wondered why someone would have killed him and you surmised that Jake saw something the killer didn’t want him to see.”

  “What was it?” Brewster asked, as if this was now Bell’s tale to tell and not his own.

  For his part, Bell kept calm despite his raging sense of impatience. “You tell me. You mentioned a radio.”

  The man’s face lit up in recognition. “Right. The radio. I wondered what got Jake killed, you see. So I went back after we brought in his body and looked around some. And hidden in the pile of waste rock and debris I found a metal box. I vaguely recalled it from when we off-loaded the equipment and animals from the French ship, the Lorient, but had no idea who brought it or what was inside. And inside was a radio set and a small hand-cranked generator to provide electricity.”

  “You’re sure no one paid it special attention during your journey?”

  “Yes, damnit!” Brewster snarled, obviously upset at being second-guessed. “One of my men was dead, Bell. Murdered. I’ve racked my brain over this every day since.”

  “Sorry . . . What did you do?”

  “I didn’t want whoever was behind the murder to know I was onto ’em so I pulled the magnet from the little generator, and when I went back in the mine, and no one was paying me any attention, I heated it in the forge we’d fashioned to repair our tools and such. The heat demagnetized the metal, and I put it back just like I found it.”

  Bell was impressed. “He could turn the crank all day and not generate one volt of electricity.”

  Brewster grinned at his own cleverness. “Yup. I watched that spot as best I could over the next weeks but never saw anyone nosing around. I think he’d been spooked by having to kill Jake Hobart and decided it best to not radio his French buddies.”

  “Until tonight,” Bell said, for his benefit rather than Brewster’s. “If you think of anything else—and, I mean, anything no matter how trivial—you need to tell me straightaway. Okay?”

  “I will. I promise.” Now the man looked to be on the verge of tears. “I’m sorry I forgot to tell you this earlier. My mind plays tricks on me.”

  “With luck, it will turn out to be an omission without consequence.” Bell didn’t believe that even as he said it. He left Brewster to whatever thoughts rattled around in his increasingly distraught brain.

  Three days passed. Three days of monotony tainted by a nervous anticipation that kept the crew on edge. The ship handled well, and the pack ice was left behind, but they were discovering a great many small and midsized icebergs that had calved from east Greenland ice sheets or migrated from the west coast around Greenland’s southern tip and now drifted in the straits between Norway and the Svalbard archipelago.

  The miners spent most of their time in the mess or in the cabins. They weren’t allowed on the bridge, the captain citing safety concerns, although Bell was there as a regular fixture. No one seemed to care. Bell spent time with each of the men trying to learn what he could about them without seeming too nosy. If anyone did think his questions were becoming too personal, Bell would immediately back off, saying it was his nature and no offense was intended.

  He made certain that all the Coloradans knew he was treating each of them more or less the same so as to not arouse suspicion. He operated on the hope that the traitor in their midst didn’t know Bell had been alerted to his presence, but at the same time accepted the possibility the man knew the Van Dorn detective was already suspicious. It was a fine line he trod
but one on which he’d walked a thousand miles.

  The miners seemed to regain some vigor, if not their health. They all had various aches and pains and complaints, but none seemed to be getting worse, and those who could eat more solid food regained some strength.

  25

  It was just after dawn on the third day since someone had sent a radio call, and Bell was on the bridge about to go below to eat breakfast with the miners. He tried to dine with them as often as possible. If he wasn’t engaging with any of them, he was always watching, alert to any idiosyncrasies that might betray his quarry.

  Ragnar Fyrie was in the captain’s chair, a pair of binoculars to his eyes, watching a berg shaped like a lesser noble’s castle slide by a mile off the starboard side. Magnus was at the con, his mop of blond hair contained under a tight woolen cap. His attention was on the coffee he’d just spilled down the front of his cable-knit sweater, so Bell was the first to see it. There was an odd, undulating movement, unrelated to the ship’s roll, near the prow. Bell watched for a moment, unsure what he was seeing. But as soon as Magnus noted it, he gave a panicked cry.

  “Captain. Fire!”

  And then Bell realized that what he was seeing was smoke, boiling up from under the wicked-looking harpoon cannon.

  Fyrie dumped the binoculars into a canvas sling dangling from the wall and leapt for the stairs down to the main deck. He used his elbows to slide down the polished brass railings so that his feet never touched a tread. Bell followed as best he could, his feet slapping at the stairs in a vain attempt to keep up. He well knew that fire, more than any other danger, more than even sinking, is what a mariner feared most.

  One of the two crewmen named Petr was just coming from the galley with thermoses of freshly brewed coffee, and Fyrie almost bowled him over. “Get up to the cannon. The cover for the harpoon fairlead came off. Watch yourself. There’s fire in the mechanical room below the firing platform.” The man’s eyes went wide at the word fire, but he wordlessly rushed off.

  “Should have confined them,” Fyrie said tightly as he raced forward.

  Bell knew he meant the miners and knew he suspected the fire was deliberately set, an arson attack to slow their escape to Scotland. He stayed on the captain’s heels, wholeheartedly agreeing.

  They raced past the main deck cabins and into a mechanical space with even poorer lighting than the rest of the ship. Greasy machines hulked in the gloom, and the fishy stench of whale oil was overwhelming. They came to a forward bulkhead with a waist-high hatch rather than a traditional doorway. It was secured with dogging latch. Next to it were brackets holding three copper dry-chemical fire extinguishers. The copper was dull and pitted, but the mechanisms looked workable.

  “This is where the springs and tensioners are located for the harpoon line,” Fyrie explained, popping the safety ring off one of the extinguishers and handing it to Bell while keeping a second for himself. “There’s a lot of wheels and pulleys, and everything is coated in grease. If we can’t contain this quickly, we’re in trouble.”

  Bell nodded grimly.

  Fyrie ducked below the bottom edge of the hatch, Bell staying upright but well to the side. When the captain swung open the hatch, he’d braced himself for a rolling wave of fire to billow from the room as a new source of oxygen was introduced. Nothing so dramatic occurred, and both men chanced looking into the burning space.

  The room was rectangular and low-ceilinged and filled with machinery as complex as an industrial loom’s. The smoke was as dense as cotton and black, and it was drawn up through a hole in the ceiling as though by force of a powerful vacuum.

  “Petr hasn’t sealed the harpoon line fairlead,” Fyrie shouted, and he jumped into the room, holding the extinguisher low with its rubber nozzle held at chest height.

  Moving through the space required the skills of a contortionist, but Fyrie knew his ship so well he could maneuver by muscle memory alone. Bell needed to grab for handholds to keep his balance, which slowed him and left him smeared with grease up to the elbows.

  The fire finally caught a taste of the additional oxygen reaching it from the open hatch and grew like an overinflating balloon. Fyrie was forced to bend over backward until his shoulders were almost level with his hips as flames licked and rolled along the ceiling just above his face. He recovered and went to work with the extinguisher. He ignored the river of fire dancing along the ceiling and directed a stream of white powder at the base of the fire. The chemical blanketed burning ropes and globs of molten grease. Bell reached his side and added his extinguisher to the battle.

  With the fire intensifying, the heat inside the low chamber began to skyrocket. And still smoke was sucked up through the vent in the ceiling as though it had been designed as a chimney. The crewman Petr hadn’t yet done the simple task set to him.

  For a moment it seemed they would get the best of the fire with just the two extinguishers, but then it found some old oil-soaked oakum left in a basket. The oakum ignited with a searing whoosh that forced both men back and gave the blaze a fresh toehold amid the machinery. The flames swelled and seemed to grow more confident as they enveloped more of the space, like an animal probing its freedom after being penned.

  Bell and Fyrie exchanged a swift glance that affirmed for the detective what he sensed—the fire had just taken the upper hand and it was time to concentrate on saving their lives rather than the ship.

  “Captain,” a crewman behind them called out over the mounting roar of the flames.

  Fyrie turned to see Arn Bjørnson carrying two heavy metal pails through the tangled maze of ropes and wires and hydraulic pistons. He handed one to his captain as though it were empty, but in fact it was filled to the brim with clean white sand.

  Fyrie grabbed it from his hands and with a deft touch flung its contents in a sweeping arc that smothered everything beneath it in a perfectly placed half-inch layer. What flames it smothered it killed. Arn had set the second pail on the deck so he could go get more. The captain snatched it up and wafted another spray of sand into the fire.

  “Will there be enough?” Bell had to shout this to be heard.

  “We keep tons of sand aboard for just this reason,” Fyrie shouted back. “Don’t know if we have enough crew to get it to us before the fire’s too big.”

  Bell backed away from the captain. The man was trained for this kind of work. Bell was not. Instead, he met Arn halfway across the smoky room and took the two pails of sand Arn had returned with from him, adding himself as another link in a bucket brigade that stretched from here to a sand bunker located outside the main hold.

  Each bucket weighed forty pounds, and the thin metal handle dug into the meat of Bell’s fingers like a wire garrote, but he dutifully took them from the harpooner and rushed back to Fyrie’s side. The pain suffered by the men who’d worked to get those two buckets of sand was for nothing, because just as Bell was passing the first to Fyrie, the whaling ship hove hard to starboard. The deck canted so quickly that Bell lost his footing and dropped both buckets, and their contents spilled uselessly.

  Before either could react further, the unmistakable iron patter of machine gun bullets striking metal plating filled the chamber and drowned out the hellish din of fire. One round punched a hole through a thinner piece of plate and ricocheted between the two men.

  Bell spoke first. “You fight the ship, I’ll fight the fire. Go!”

  Fyrie needed no further encouragement. He raced from the room even as Arn struggled under the burden of two fresh pails. Bell took one from him, hunching down for fear of another raking attack by the unknown machine gunner, and tossed sand at the fire like it was a bucket of water. His technique lacked Ragnar Fyrie’s finesse. And did little to quell the flames.

  “No,” Arn said. “Like this.”

  He fanned the bucket sideways almost like he was swinging a baseball bat, and the arc of sand that spilled from it beat the fir
e back a few inches.

  Knowing the Icelander had practiced tossing buckets during countless drills, Bell knew he’d best serve the effort by becoming a mule. “You pour,” Bell shouted, “I’ll haul.”

  He left Arn’s side and raced over to the low hatchway. He was able to draw a few deep breaths of relatively fresh air. Lars Olufsen, the ship’s second engineer, rushed at him from down the hallway, lugging two buckets. Bell caught a glimpse of Vernon Hall turning back to descend the staircase from where he’d carried the pails up handed to him by some other crewman or miner. It seemed that everyone was in on the attempt to fight the blaze.

  Another burst of machine gun fire raked the ship’s prow, but it hit with less fervor, as if coming from a greater distance. No new holes appeared in the hull plates.

  Bell moved buckets as fast as they were brought to him, ignoring the strain on his shoulders, arms, and especially his hands, as well as the heat and the fact his lungs burned and his eyes streamed channels of tears through the soot caking his face. Each bucket he brought to Arn, Arn threw with the surety of a farmer sowing seeds on his land. He maximized the distribution, and thus the efforts of all the men, so that the fire was slowly being beaten back into the corner where it had been set.

  Then something curious happened. The noxious smoke that had been rushing up to and then out the ceiling vent as though being pulled by a bellows suddenly began to amass in a roiling billow that grew until it was soon invading every corner and niche within the chamber. Arn backed out swiftly, turning and pushing Bell ahead of him and leaving two buckets still filled with sand behind. They staggered out through the hatch opening, each falling to the deck at Lars Olufsen’s feet, their chests convulsing with great, racking coughs that were forcing up tarry balls of phlegm from deep inside. The second engineer slammed the hatch closed. The smoke rising from Arn’s and Bell’s clothes made them look like they’d just escaped the Underworld.