The Titanic Secret Page 26
Fyrie’s attention never left the French ship. They knew the prey was behind them because they had increased speed, if the expanding plume of smoke belching from her stack was any indication. He was judging angles and relative speeds, committing to one final gamble. Because if the Lorient managed to turn in time, their range meant the pilothouse could be scythed off the Hvalur with just a couple well-placed shots and the fight would be over.
Several minutes elapsed. Bell struggled not to ask the captain if they were going to make it.
The two ships kept accelerating down the gap between the miles-long icebergs. As night approached, the air temperature between the bergs dropped and yet another fog began to coil off the surface of the sea. It wasn’t thick enough to be dangerous, but the effect was eerie.
The French were a half mile ahead and approaching the point where the berg on the left ended in a tall, spiked peak resembling a miniature Matterhorn. The Lorient began to turn to starboard to swing around and race back at the whaler before she broke free of the gap herself.
The captain’s hands remained loose and relaxed on the wheel, his eyes squinting just a fraction. The engine’s thrum was like a heartbeat, rhythmic and powerful. Aft, her wake was a creaming white line that spread in a V and lapped at the base of the icebergs.
“Well?” Bell asked when he could stand it no more.
“She’s faster than I thought. They might get a shot off, but not two.”
Cutting as tight an arc as she could manage, the French vessel continued to turn while the Hvalur Batur charged down the gap at her best possible speed.
“You’d best get into position, Mr. Bell. Good luck.”
Bell had donned a coat and had the equipment he needed. “To us all, Captain.”
He went down the stairs and out onto the deck via one of the hatches. The wind slammed into him, forcing him to take a few staggering steps before gaining solid footing. The ship was cutting through the sea at better than fifteen knots. The fog was clammy and diaphanous, and Bell felt disoriented by it and the sight of the massive walls of ice streaming past him as they raced after the French warship. The icebergs felt close enough to touch.
He found cover at the stern rail behind one of a pair of winches used to haul in the carcasses of the massive whales the ship so doggedly hunted. He could look ahead and see the enemy had almost completed the turn. The ship had looped wide to port in order to come around parallel to the larger of the two bergs. Had she not been able to turn so tightly, she would have slammed bow first into the wall of ice. As it was, the Lorient came dangerously close to sideswiping the iceberg and that would have torn her hull open like she was made of paper. Bell could only wish to be that lucky.
The French steamer completed its turn and was barely a thousand feet from them and charging hard under a pall of coal smoke. The two vessels were now coming at each other like jousting knights racing down the lists. Only one of the knights sported a lance, in the guise of a five-inch gun. The other appeared defenseless.
Bell watched a silent gout of white smoke explode from the cannon. The sound of the blast took a moment to reach him, but the scream of shot was near instantaneous. The shell struck one of the tall derricks on the aft deck, severing the steel column halfway up. The crane crashed down in a tangle of lines and pulleys and ruined metal, forcing Bell to hurl himself over the winch capstan to avoid being crushed. He immediately had to leap back as the mass of debris didn’t settle on deck but rather was dragged over the side of the ship by its own weight. It vanished into the foggy wisps and inky sea as surely as if it had been swallowed.
On the bridge, Fyrie spun the wheel to get them out of the direct line of fire and called for full reverse on the telegraph to slow the headlong rush toward the French.
Another blast from the cannon sent a projectile flashing past them. It hit the berg off the starboard side. Bell was showered with bits of ice and snow but was otherwise unharmed. He crouched. The two ships were about to come abreast of each other with little more than fifty feet separating the hulls. The enemy machine gunner was about to enjoy the best hunting of his military career.
From his concealed position, Bell could see the gunner, who was wearing a long khaki greatcoat and a fur hat. He stood behind a pintle-mounted Hotchkiss M1909, fitted with a small armor shield. Bell recognized the weapon by its distinctive brass feeding strip inserted on the right side of the receiver. As the gun was fired, the strip slid through the mechanism until it fell out as the last round left the barrel. Each strip held thirty 8-millimeter bullets, and the gun could fire at nearly six hundred rounds per minute.
At this range, the majority of the bullets would rip right through the wheelhouse’s thin steel skin.
“Arrêtez-vous!” someone called out from the other ship but gave no time to have his demand heeded before the gunner racked back on the Hotchkiss’s charging handle.
Bell rose up from his hiding place. The ships were side by side, passing each other at a combined speed of twenty knots, but there was more than enough time for the gunner to wreak such devastation that the Icelandic whaler would be all but dead in the water. The gunner didn’t see him. He was crouched behind his weapon, sighting in to unleash a barrage on the superstructure.
Arn had to be watching all of this from where he was hiding, and Bell knew the man would instinctively react because his captain was in danger. Bell would have done the same. But the plan called for the harpooner to remain unseen until Bell engaged the machine gunner. If Arn made his move too soon, then he and the rest of the crew were going to die.
Shouting at the top of his lungs, his voice echoing off the towering ice massif in front of him and sounding like the banshee wail from mythology, Bell took aim with his .45 and started firing.
The machine gunner too opened up with quick, controlled bursts that reverberated like an autocannon, the plink of lead against steel lost in the din of exploding powder and dropping brass. Bell kept firing with one hand, holding steady, until a few rounds hit close enough to the French sailor to draw his attention. The sailor stopped firing at the pilothouse and swung the heavy machine gun around to direct his aim toward the armed threat at the whaling ship’s stern.
Bell saw the muzzle coming toward him and still he kept pulling the trigger. He dropped the box magazine from the .45’s grip when the last round was still in the chamber so he wouldn’t lose time pulling his aim off target to recock the pistol. The French gun was almost on him. Bell had played it out as long as he could, but his definition of bravery wasn’t being the target of an automatic weapon. He managed firing one more round, and was about to drop behind the capstan, when the French gunner suddenly ducked low behind his little armor shield. That last bullet had hit close enough to make him seek cover. Bell tightened his grip, rummaging in a pocket for his last magazine, while he fired shot after shot.
Unseen on the bow, and totally ignored, thanks to Bell’s efforts, Arn Bjørnson tossed aside the stained canvas sheet he’d hidden himself under and rose up behind the big harpoon cannon. Had he moved a single second sooner, the French gunner would have seen him and he would have been cut down as easily as his crewmate Petr. The harpoon cannon had been primed and loaded. All he need do was grab the trigger grip and muscle the barrel into position. He’d done this a thousand times on targets not much smaller than the French ship. And, for the first time, he’d take some satisfaction in the hunt.
The harpoons were fired using an explosive charge in a breach chamber much like a conventional cannon. Only, these projectiles were heavily barbed and tipped with an explosive to kill their quarry as mercifully as possible. Prior to the engagement, and at Isaac Bell’s urging, he’d double-loaded the harpoon with a second grenade. And now he swung the cannon over and down until the Lorient’s lower hull showed in the aiming reticle. Aft of him, the French shooter had paused, and he could hear the steady crack, crack, crack of the American’s handgun.
Arn pulled the trigger, and the big cannon thundered. Unburdened by the rope it normally trailed behind it, the harpoon flew straight and true and struck the French ship just above the waterline at just about where Bjørnson had estimated the engine room would be. It hit with a heavy clang, and half of the three-foot projectile buried itself in the steel side of the ship, meaning both grenades were inside the hull when they exploded.
The blast sent a shock wave racing across the waters almost faster than the eye could track, and the Hvalur Batur began to heel onto her port side even as fire and smoke erupted from the French vessel in a vision straight out of hell. The explosion tore a hole in her side big enough to drive an automobile through. Water began sluicing down the rupture in an unending surge. It took just seconds to fill the spaces below engineering and climb high enough to envelop the boiler.
The thermal shock of ice water quenching the red-hot firebox and massive steam tanks blew the aft section of the ship into oblivion. Bell had sought cover behind the windlass as soon as he heard Arn fire the cannon but still cringed, as if to make himself even smaller, as the concussion and spray of shrapnel rolled across the whaler. He chanced looking up to see the bow of the Société’s warship slow to a stop and then get pulled under the waves in a sucking maelstrom of bubbles and debris.
Already weakened by the warming spring temperatures, the iceberg looming over the Icelandic whaler shuddered at the reverberating onslaught of such a nearby explosion. Chunks weighing many times that of the ship dropped off the sheer face of the berg. The ship itself was just out of range, but the swells created when they collapsed into the sea would have swamped them had the captain not spun the whaler to take them on the rear quarter rather than broadside.
Afterward, nothing of the Lorient remained on the surface of the sea but a few bits of flotsam and some smoldering wreckage no larger than steamer trunks. It was all that marked the grave of the men sent to murder the Coloradans.
Suspended above the awful destruction, the discharged cloud of superheated steam from the boilers had transformed from gas to solid in the shape of shimmering particles of ice that filled the air as enchantingly as fairy dust.
The Hvalur Batur bobbed like a child’s toy in a bathtub, and Bell was forced to totter drunkenly back to the bridge. He lurched up the stairs, dread rising in his chest at what he’d find when he reached the bridge. He knew Fyrie was alive—he’d steered them out of harm’s way following the icy avalanche—but that didn’t mean he’d survived the autofire unscathed.
“Ragnar. It’s Bell,” he called halfway up the steps. “Are you okay?”
He reached the bridge. The portside wall was peppered with a dozen holes, and the window glass in the bridge wing door was missing. Arctic air whistled through the holes and gusted through where the glass was missing. What little decorative woodwork the bridge had possessed was now so many splintered shards. Fyrie himself stood among the destruction without any outward sign of being attacked. He turned to Bell with a slight shrug as if to convey a recognition of the absurdity this trip had become.
“Upon further consideration, Mr. Bell,” he said at last, “I believe it would have been in our best interest to remain in the custody of the Norwegian authorities back in Sandefjord.”
Bell saw out on the prow that Arn Bjørnson had finished securing the harpoon cannon and was making his way back from the pulpit. “And I wouldn’t blame you for that assessment one bit,” he said.
They shared the laugh of men who’d cheated death by the narrowest of margins. But then both remembered that one of the crew had paid for the escape with his life, and the laughter died on their lips.
Like a harbinger of ill omens, the chief engineer climbed up from the main deck a few minutes later. He had some crewmen with him, who got busy patching holes and boarding up the window.
“How does she look, Ivar?”
“We might make Aberdeen, Captain, but I don’t see the old girl steaming back to Reykjavik without a long overhaul in dry dock. The hull plates are buckled a lot worse than I first thought. I had to reset my plug, thanks to you running about like a madman, and I realized the damage is bad. The keel itself might even be compromised. I’ve got a few new leaks on the boiler system from blown fittings. That will keep us slow enough to protect the plug since I have enough steam pressure for ten knots.”
“Anything else?”
“All the arresting gear in the mechanical room is so much charred junk now. None of it’s salvageable. We lost the aft deck main derrick. It’s just gone. And you can see what a mess they made of the bridge. Radio’s shot dead, charts are ruined. Only a few panes of glass remaining.”
Fyrie moved the handle of the engine telegraph. It flopped uselessly, obviously ruined by the Hotchkiss. “And this.”
Bell was shocked and saddened. He had no idea these men had lost so much. They’d lost everything, in fact.
Rather than giving in to gloom, Fyrie said rather agreeably, “It’s a good thing this tub’s insured for double her value and that we were able to convert our whale oil to gold kroner before the Norwegians threw us into impound.” He looked to Bell. “I guess this is when we shift away from whaling. Like we talked that night when we first hit the pack ice.”
“Double insurance?” Bell asked.
“The man from Lloyd’s insisted two years ago when we sailed to Antarctica. They never figured we’d survive to collect it if we had a claim. They also never reduced the coverage once we got back, and I wasn’t going to remind them of their mistake. We’ll put a little aside for Petr’s parents, since he wasn’t married, and the rest should set us up nicely with a couple of trawlers. And an idea I have for a fish-processing ship at sea.”
“Or . . .” Ivar said with a raised eyebrow as though he had a better idea.
“Forget it, old friend. We’re not going to dredge the coast of Africa looking for diamonds. We’re sailors of the blue water, not coastal flat wallowers playing in the mud.”
28
It was a three-and-a-half-day journey from where they sank the French vessel to the Port of Aberdeen on Scotland’s northeast coast. Bell wasn’t concerned that the saboteur would strike again. He’d gambled that his allies were close enough to see the smoke from the fire he’d set below the harpoon gun and that they’d reach the whaler before flames consumed the ship. With the Lorient destroyed, the man had no means of escape until they reached land, so Bell was sure the Société des Mines’s agent would play nice until then.
With the ice far behind them and the weather pleasant enough, for the far North Atlantic, Bell had more time to resolve which of the Coloradans was his man. He had to be honest and say that little distinguished the remaining eight miners from one another apart from a few superficial attributes like size and build.
At the best of times, they were mostly taciturn and unsmiling. None were married or had children, and, apart from Brewster, none were educated beyond a functional level of literacy and some math. They knew little, other than mining for gold and silver, but all agreed that signing on to Brewster’s crazy scheme would net them more money than they ever could among the slag heaps and mine shafts of their native Rocky Mountains.
Add the horrific experiences on Novaya Zemlya, the acute food poisoning they’d all suffered, and it made for this truly sullen group.
Bell observed and interacted, asked questions and doled out answers, but as they entered their last night before reaching port, he admitted defeat. He was no closer to identifying the perpetrator than when he started. His frustration was like ash on his tongue. He could have forgiven himself had his adversary been a trained operative, an agent provocateur of some sort who’d been schooled in the arts of espionage, but that wasn’t the case. He’d been foiled by a rough-hewn laborer with no tradecraft or experience.
He called a meeting of all the miners prior to dinner in the mess. Fifteen minutes before addressing
the men, he stopped at Joshua Brewster’s cabin to outline his plans. Brewster hadn’t left his room much except to take a little food around noon each day. He had always been a slightly built man, but his countenance now was that of a skeleton. All spare flesh had been melted off his frame. His cheeks were sunken and cadaverous, and the bones of his hands looked like they were about to erupt from under his skin. His eyes were haunted by demons that drew closer and closer each day.
Bell felt certain that if Brewster’s health didn’t turn the corner soon, he’d be dead in a fortnight.
“What is it?” he rasped when Bell entered his cabin. The room smelled of unwashed clothing and fever.
“I’ve decided to leave you all in Aberdeen, as I’d first suggested.”
The haunted look turned instantly to one of rage. “Like hell you will.”
“Be reasonable, Brewster. We land in Scotland tomorrow, and I haven’t been able to determine which one of your men is a murderer and saboteur. I can only safely eliminate you and Vern Hall from my suspects list because of your cabin location.”
“You’re the detective. Figure it out. I am not letting the byzanium out of my sight until I hand it over to Colonel Patmore in Washington, D.C. Vern’ll demand coming along too. Hell, they all will.” His defiance softened, and he spoke candidly, raw emotion barely in check. “You don’t understand what it means to us. We left our hearts and souls back in that mine. It broke us, Mr. Bell. I can admit that to you. It broke every man jack of us. Delivering the ore is going to be our final act. Our reward. Knowing it’s in safe hands means more to me than whatever miserable time I have left on earth.”
Bell took a breath. Foster Gly and Yves Massard were doubtless expecting their agents on the Lorient to have successfully hijacked the precious ore and be on the way to Paris, so there was little chance of violent reception in England, yet Bell wasn’t taking any chances. He wanted armed guards to accompany the byzanium until it set sail for the States. It would have been better if he could go straight to the authorities and request help, but of course that was impossible.