The Titanic Secret Read online

  “What happened?” Bell wheezed. Someone handed him a canteen of water and he drank from it greedily.

  Bjørnson was also guzzling water from a canteen, so Lars answered, “The fairlead under the cannon was finally sealed. That room’s airtight so long as it and this hatch here are closed. The fire will put itself out. We can enter in twenty or so minutes with water hoses and cool everything so the fire does not re . . . ah . . .”

  “Reignite,” Bell offered. The men all had such a good command of English that he sometimes forgot it wasn’t their first language.

  “Ja.” Lars was unreeling a two-inch canvas hose from a wall-mounted firefighting station.

  Isaac hauled himself to his feet. He was unsteady for a moment but found his center. “You don’t need me, then. I’m going to see who the hell was taking potshots at us with a machine gun.”

  From the floor, Arn offered his hand to shake. Bell did. The two men nodded. No words were necessary.

  “Mr. Olufsen, I advise you round up all the miners and confine them to the mess until we get everything sorted out.”

  The man looked at him with incomprehension.

  “Don’t let on that we suspect, but this fire was likely deliberate.”

  At that, the man gaped.

  Bell took just a second to rush to his cabin. On his way, he passed weary miners and mariners, each seemingly paused midstride since no one ahead was asking for more sand. The bucket brigade had come to a halt.

  “We did it, men,” he told them as he passed, patting Tom Price on the shoulder in recognition. “We beat the fire.” The cheers were ragged, exhausted, but heartfelt.

  In his room he soaked a cloth in water left in the basin from that morning and wiped the worst of the smudges from his face. He stripped off his sweater to don his only spare. He still felt grimy, and his eyes would be red for hours. And his chest ached. But at least he could stand his own smell.

  “Report,” Captain Fyrie snapped from the helm as soon as Bell stepped onto the bridge. He hadn’t turned toward Bell but had detected him coming up the stairs in his peripheral vision.

  “We had the fire three-quarters out when the room was sealed. Arn’s waiting twenty minutes before moving in with the hoses. He seems confident. I’ve instructed Second Engineer Olufsen to keep all the miners in the mess for a while.”

  Bell studied the ship’s surroundings. The sky was streaked with purple clouds, the sea remained inky. A towering berg cut off his view starboard. The mass of ice stretched at least a mile, and ahead was another berg, only slightly smaller. Others sat stolidly to port and more loomed in their wake. Of the ship that had attacked earlier, he saw no trace. What dominated his attention, however, was the long, coiling finger of smoke that rose from the ship to a height of several thousand feet, proclaiming their location as surely as if they were an island marked on a nautical chart.

  “Who was it?”

  “No flag, but it’s got to be the French you warned me about. Hundred feet long. Painted dark gray. Looked like military surplus. Machine gunner was on a platform aft of the bridge. On her foredeck is a cannon turret. Don’t know if it works. Aft, she carried twin cranes with extended-length booms.”

  “How’d they find us so quickly?” Bell asked, more of himself than actually seeking an answer.

  Fyrie replied anyway. “I made a mistake. I expected them to remain east of us when I believed we were flanking them, but the French captain is smart. He came west immediately and set a picket for when we turned south along the Norway coast. I thought we were farther offshore than we are. I turned right into where he was waiting for us. The smoke pouring off our bow was all he needed to zero in.”

  “Damned bad luck, is all,” Bell said, trying to ease the captain’s guilt. “We’ll figure something out.”

  “Will we?” he shot back. “They’ve got a machine gun, Mr. Bell. Magnus saw the whole thing. That initial barrage we heard? It hit Petr first. He had just reached the pulpit. Magnus said he came apart like he was made of wet red straw. I managed to get some distance on them so Mags could finally seal the mechanical room, but if they find us again in all these bergs, I’m surrendering the minute he gets his sights on us.”

  Bell let a moment pass so Fyrie could get his temper under control.

  “They won’t leave any witnesses, Ragnar.” He deliberately used the captain’s Christian name. The man was reeling from the death of a crewman, the fact that a saboteur had tried to burn his ship, and that he was now being actively hunted, the irony of which couldn’t be lost on a man who himself hunted across all corners of the ocean. “I am sorry about your man. But the truth is, if we surrender, they get the ore without having to fight for it. It won’t change our fate.”

  “Are you saying we’re dead either way?”

  Bell shook his head, a devilish glint in his bright blue eyes. “I’m saying we take control of our fate. They picked the fight, Captain. I say we end it. And I know how.”

  26

  The explosion came a few moments later, while Bell was outlining his plan, and was followed almost immediately by the boom of the French ship’s bow cannon hurling a solid projectile over their heads. The shell had struck a hundred feet up the side of a large berg they had sought shelter in the lee of, and chunks of its ice, some the size of refrigerators and larger, were blown from the berg and crashed into the sea. Smaller bits raked the side of the Hvalur Batur like a fresh barrage from the machine gun.

  Before the echo had a chance to dissipate, as it rattled through the field of ice, the French fired again. This time, the shell landed lower, just above the smokestack, but also a good hundred feet behind them.

  Straight off the port beam, about a half mile distant, was another berg that resembled a flat-topped mesa from the American Southwest. Steaming around it, and headed right for them, was the French ship Lorient, its bow still obscured by white smoke from the brace of shots it had just fired.

  Captain Fyrie cursed and jerked the engine telegraph to emergency full power. Bell plucked the binoculars from their canvas sling and glassed the approaching ship. The Lorient was swinging to port in order to keep her bow pointed straight at the Hvalur, and Bell suspected he knew why. The whaler wasn’t quick or maneuverable, so coming up to speed took time. This allowed the prow of the French ship to track her progress across the face of the big berg as though it were the barrel of a shotgun swinging around at an escaping bird.

  “Captain,” Bell said urgently, “turn us toward them.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Just do it!”

  Fyrie swung the wheel, and the whaling ship drove her shoulder into the sea and she came about far sharper than she ever had in her career. She heeled over hard, forcing the men on the bridge to clutch handholds. The sound of something crashing to the deck below came up the stairway.

  An instant later, the French fired a third time. The shell crashed into the nearby berg exactly where the wheelhouse would have been had Bell not shouted a warning. More ice cascaded down into the sea.

  “Their turret doesn’t swivel,” Bell said. “They have to aim the cannon by turning the entire ship.”

  “How do we take advantage of that?” Fyrie asked, turning his ship once again so he could duck around the back of the berg and take refuge amid the enormous field of floating ice islands.

  “For one thing, don’t let him get directly behind us. We need to keep moving unpredictably. Zig when he zags.”

  Arn bellowed up the stairwell, “Captain, we need to vent the mechanical room.”

  “One moment.” Fyrie turned his attention to Bell. “You go out and open the fairlead plug. It twists a quarter turn into position, and it’s secured to the ship with a chain. Take gloves because it’s going to be hot. Same with the deck. Out and back as fast as you can.”

  “On it,” Bell replied. He found gloves on a shelf above some hangi
ng parkas. He pulled on the thickest pair, and a hooded anorak, before sliding open the bridge wing door.

  The temperature was tolerable, maybe a dozen degrees below freezing, but it was the wind rushing across the deck that numbed Bell’s face and made his eyes stream. Down below, below his waist, he could feel warmth radiating from the deck above the place the fire had raged. He raced along the raised catwalk connecting the bridge to the pulpit, where the harpoon cannon stood empty. Even at a fast jog, he could feel the hot metal through the soles of his boots. He saw the round plug used to cover the hole that the wire the harpoon was attached to, on its deadly arc, rise from within the ship.

  The plug had expanded due to the extreme heat, forcing him to use both hands to twist with all his strength. It finally loosened, and the pressure of overheated air down below blew the plug upward like a champagne cork. Bell fell to the deck, but then the heat meeting the seat of his pants forced him back to his feet in a comical bit of acrobatics.

  From the hole spewed a solid column of black smoke, followed by dense white steam, as the fire team belowdecks began to cool the metal machinery with the two-inch hose. In the pristine Arctic air, the smoke was a dark stain.

  Bell needed time. He needed time for the hull to cool, the smoke to dissipate, and for the captain of the Lorient to make a number of tactical mistakes. Otherwise, they were going to tear the Hvalur Batur apart, steal its cargo, and murder its crew. Luck, skill, and sheer audacity had worked so often for Bell in the past that sometimes he forgot fortune may favor the bold, but oftentimes it punished the unaware.

  He admitted, as he dashed back to the bridge, that he knew little of the ship’s capabilities, less of naval tactics, and nothing at all of the chances of pulling off his plan.

  Over the next hour, the two ships played a game of cat and mouse amid the towering ramparts of ice. When the French found the whaling ship in its sights, it fired off several shots, but the hastily aimed shells never came close. And then Captain Fyrie would hook them around another berg and make a quick retreat. The trick was to keep moving so the Lorient couldn’t come at them directly and bring her deck gun to bear. And for much of the day, that’s exactly what kept happening. Even if the French caught a glimpse of the whaling ship, it was at such an angle or distance that they couldn’t engage with the big cannon.

  Luck seemed to be on their side until it abandoned them without warning.

  The Hvalur was racing west, hoping to hook around the back of a berg, when suddenly the Lorient burst out behind them from around another drifting mass of ice. Her cannon fired, but before its thunder rolled across the Icelandic vessel its solid steel shell slammed into the rear of the pilothouse. It tore through the radio room, before screaming across the bridge and finally exploding out one of the windows overlooking the foredeck. The round landed unseen out past the bow.

  Inside the bridge, the kinetic energy shed by the five-inch shell as it transited the space had been transformed into heat and shock waves that assaulted the men’s senses like they’d been thrust inside a whirling kaleidoscope of light and sound and motion. A fire started growing in the radio room, and the temperature dropped fifty or more degrees as the cold Arctic air gusted through the broken window.

  Bell’s ears rang like church bells and his vision was blurry for many long seconds. His head felt as though it had been worked over with a pneumatic rock hammer. A little blood dripped from his forehead where a piece of shrapnel had embedded itself. He winced as he pulled the shard free of his flesh and tossed it aside in order to unclip a fire extinguisher from the wall and douse the burning books atop the shack’s desk. The radio set was a sparking ruin, which he soaked for good measure.

  Fyrie was trying to talk to him, but Bell couldn’t hear the words, only see his mouth moving soundlessly. He held up a hand to forestall any conversation and worked his jaw to equalize the pressure between his ears and sinuses. When things cleared up with what to him was an audible squeak, his head felt instantly better and his vision normalized. Fyrie’s voice was nothing more than a monotonous buzz for now, but it was an improvement.

  A second shot followed the first, but it went wide and streaked past the bridge wing like a meteor. A moment later, the French lost sight of their target as the Hvalur Batur motored around the trailing edge of another iceberg.

  After another few moments, Bell was finally able to hear Captain Fyrie lighting off a string of curses in English, Icelandic, a little French, and quite possibly Swahili. No sooner had he caught his breath than Chief Engineer Ivarsson climbed up the stairs from the main deck, his expression grim. He looked around at the destruction and nodded, accepting the mess as just one more thing gone wrong that day.

  “I’ll get some plywood from stores to cover the window, Captain,” he said when he had Fyrie’s attention. “But we’ve got a real problem. It’s cool enough to check the bilge below the mechanical room. Some plates are buckled and we’re taking on water.”

  He held up a quick hand to prevent the inevitable barrage of follow-up questions. “We’ve jammed the holes with oakum mats and caulked them in place as best we could. The pumps can stay ahead of the water, but we must reduce our speed by one quarter at least.”

  “The crew’s okay?” Fyrie asked.

  “Some smoke inhalation. Arn got the worst of it, but you know him. Indestructible.”

  “Send him up here,” Fyrie ordered. “Now that we know we can’t outrun the French, it’s time we put an end to this. Bell, are you sure about your plan?”

  “No, but it’s the best we have.”

  The captain bit at his lip in worry, not about himself but about his crew.

  Two crewmen arrived on the bridge with Arn, who’d changed out of his smoke-infused clothes but whose face remained streaked with soot. They fitted a sheet of plywood already cut to size over the broken window. The relief from the cold and wind was almost instantaneous. They also used a couple of magnets to secure some thick paper stock over the hole blown through the back of the radio room. Arn stoked the potbellied stove until it was almost glowing. When the work was done, Bell and Fyrie went over their plan and made certain the big harpooner understood the risks. If he was concerned, he gave no indication.

  Two tension-filled hours later, they were still working to get into the proper position. It was a game of chess, with each ship playing the role of queen, and the expanse of icebergs as the board determining which moves were possible. Twice the French ship had appeared from around a berg and opened fire with its cannon. They weren’t trying to sink the whaler—otherwise, they’d lose the prize—but the shots roared by the pilothouse close enough to burn off paint and singe the metal. The scream of their passage rattled the windows and left the men temporarily deafened.

  To make things worse, a fog had descended, lacy and a-swirl, deadening noise so that everything sounded muffled and oddly distant, the groaning of the ice became a haunting lament. The hunt was slow. Each time they thought they spotted the Lorient, it turned out to be a small berg. The occasional crash of ice cascading off the face of a taller berg sent jolts of adrenaline through Bell’s body. At one point, as the afternoon wore on, a big iceberg lost in the mist calved enough that its center of gravity shifted and it flipped entirely over in the water, splashing and thrashing like a drowning victim.

  The fact that they were being hunted in a ship that was taking on water without any visible means of defending itself made the experience just one degree more unnerving. But Captain Fyrie acquitted himself well, in Bell’s estimation. He was making the best of a horrendous situation and remaining in full command and calm, even when artillery shells were falling around his ship.

  During what seemed like a lull in the hunt, the sun suddenly burning through the fog and the air turning crystalline, Bell went below to check on the miners. They were growing resentful of being forced to stay in the mess. Bell explained that because of the pursuit by agents of th
e Société des Mines, staying in the dining area was for their own safety. As he talked, he couldn’t help but think one of them had deliberately set the fire without knowing how large the blaze could grow. He’d risked a conflagration that could have killed them all. That the arsonist was a native Coloradan, a man well known to the others, made his act of sabotage especially fiendish. He had no compunction about seeing his fellow miners dead so his French conspirators could take possession of the byzanium ore.

  Such reptilian disdain was chilling.

  27

  Bell felt a renewed tension as soon as he climbed back to the bridge. In the chasm between two towering icebergs ahead of them, the converted French warship was steaming away from the whaler. They’d surely spotted the quarry, but in the confines between the pair of bergs there wasn’t enough room in the sea to turn the ship and launch another attack.

  “This could be our chance,” Fyrie said.

  “Not if they reach the end of the bergs and come about,” Bell countered, putting the binoculars to his eyes. “We’ll be trapped like a rat in a sewer pipe.”

  “Then let’s hope Ivar’s plug holds.” The captain ratcheted the engine telegraph, asking for full power.

  Down in the engine room, Ivar Ivarsson and his men began adding their own labor to the automatic feeding system, shoveling bucket after bucket of crushed coal into the firebox so the heat swelled and the pressures rose. The ship’s acceleration wasn’t very dramatic, but it did come.