The Titanic Secret Read online

  He could just imagine the diplomatic implications of American miners transporting illegally obtained Russian minerals that they’d stolen from the French company that hired them in the first place. And then he considered that they arrived on a ship that had been snatched out of impound due to a dispute between Iceland and Norway. He wasn’t sure if there was enough of them to go around for all interested parties getting the proverbial pound of flesh. It was best to keep everything in-house, so to speak.

  His plan was to hold the ore on the ship until he could cable Joel Wallace at the Van Dorn office in London. It was a small operation, but Wallace would have locals he could hire, men he trusted with odd jobs. He would order Wallace and a few English cohorts to travel up to Aberdeen and rendezvous in the harbor. Then they, with maybe Brewster and Hall, would escort the byzanium by rail to Southampton.

  Bell hadn’t yet made arrangements to ship the ore back to the States, but that was an easy enough task. Freighters and liners crisscrossed the Atlantic with the frequency of New York taxis cutting through Central Park. He lamented the loss of the wireless set, as some of these details could have been handled while they were still at sea. For his part, Bell had a promise to keep, so he already had tickets for the trip home.

  He was certain Brewster wasn’t the murderer, and neither was Vernon Hall. Other than the fact both men should be in a hospital and not traveling the length of the British Isles, there was no real downside to them coming along again. If they were healthy enough, the two could even accompany the crates of ore on the journey back to America if they didn’t entrust them to a freight forwarder, as was the custom with such cargo.

  His decision wasn’t a difficult one. “Fine. You and Vernon can come with us. I get it, I understand the sacrifice your men made. But one of the others didn’t bust his gut in that mine—for glory or whatever you promised to pay him. He was there to collect whatever the French promised him too. And it’s clear he’ll stop at nothing to get what he wants. So the rest of your men remain in Aberdeen. Agreed?”

  Brewster stroked the bridge of his nose with a bony finger in a nervous gesture. “They won’t like it none.”

  “I don’t care. They stay behind or you all stay behind. Those are the choices.”

  “What do I tell them?”

  “Nothing!” Bell snapped with more ire than he’d intended. “We don’t tip our hand until the last second. When we dock, I’ll have Captain Fyrie make up some story about a quarantine—no one leaves the ship. Only when my people arrive from London do we transfer the ore crates to a truck and eventually the railroad. If we can, we’ll sneak off the ship at night, and they’ll be none the wiser. If not, I’ll tell your men there isn’t enough room to transport them. It doesn’t matter, so long as they remain here. I’m sure Fyrie and his crew can keep them until our train’s out of the station.”

  “It ain’t right, leaving them behind like that. Not after what they’ve sacrificed.”

  Bell was unmoved. He said, “Ask Jake Hobart what he thinks.”

  * * *

  —

  Bell spent the last evening at sea with Ragnar Fyrie in his cabin playing chess on a metal board with wooden pieces embedded with magnets in their bases so that no matter how rough the sea, they remained in position. He’d gone over his plan with the whaling captain and had even written out what he wanted sent by telegraph to the Van Dorn office in London. Fyrie had no problem with keeping the miners aboard with a deception and said he’d have one of his men slip away to deliver the telegraph dispatch.

  “There is one thing I would ask in return,” Fyrie said without taking his eyes off the board on his desk.

  Bell, always reluctant to agree to terms before hearing them, asked, “What would that be?”

  “I’ve seen you writing in a journal. I assume it’s for an official report you will turn over to your employer.”

  “Mostly, it’s my personal observations, but some of it will make it into Joseph Van Dorn’s hands if for no other reason than reimbursement of money I’ve spent on this mission. It is not an inconsiderable sum.”

  “I believe you would call that an understatement.”

  “And then some.”

  “I would ask, Isaac, that you do not mention me, my crew, or this ship in your report. I’ve seen Brewster scribbling in a diary too, and I ask that you review it and make certain he doesn’t describe his time aboard the Hvalur Batur either.”

  “I believe I know the reason why, but would you mind telling me?”

  “We sank a French ship. It doesn’t matter that they fired first. We put them on the bottom with significant loss of life. There will be repercussions. I don’t know what the spy managed to convey that night on the radio, but I doubt it was detailed enough to name the ship or crew. There is no need to identify this ship in anything official if the spy failed to identify it himself. Our anonymity remains intact.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “I can see reasons to mention us but plenty of reasons not to. I’m sure there’s a Lloyd’s office in Aberdeen or even Edinburgh. I’ll have Ivar fetch their agent to the ship so we can make plans to have her scrapped. It’s a clean slate after that.”

  Bell nodded. “Perfectly reasonable, especially considering the cost you and your crew have paid on this journey. I’ll edit my report to my Army liaison and Old Man Van Dorn. Whatever story I fashion, I will make sure that Joshua Brewster’s diary jibes with it. Fair enough?”

  Fyrie was visibly relieved. “An outfit like the Société des Mines has a long memory. And an even longer reach. I wish to avoid both, thank you.”

  “Least I can do.” Bell made his move on the chessboard. “Check. Mate in three.”

  Fyrie saw his king was trapped with no means of escape. He ceremoniously tipped it over. “I am glad this is our last night at sea,” he said with a wry smile as he deposited the pieces in a chamois pouch. “I grow tired of losing to you.”

  “Chess is a lot like what I must do to earn my living—think two and three steps ahead of my adversary.”

  29

  Aberdeen was one of the busiest commercial fishing ports in Great Britain, and no matter how often they increased the size of the anchorage at Victoria Dock or Albert Basin, there never seemed to be enough room for all the ships and boats. A smoky pall hung over the city because the normal sea breeze that blew pollution away from its center had stalled. The smell from the town’s paper mills was as ripe as sewage, and the normally bright gray granite of the city’s main buildings looked funereal under streaks of soot and ash.

  Bell was accustomed to London reeking and being dim from coal smoke and factory pollution, but a coastal town like this usually enjoyed a more agreeable atmosphere. He supposed that after he’d been sailing the pristine Arctic, any sign of man’s intrusion in the natural world was bound to be a shock. That thought made him grin—at himself. He’d been aboard so long, he no longer noticed the whale oil stench that permeated every inch of the ship and every fiber of his wardrobe.

  The Hvalur Batur was forced to lay at anchor beyond the breakwater and out of the way of the flow of traffic coming down the River Dee. Following a visit from a harbormaster to confer with Captain Fyrie, the chief engineer had managed to leave with Bell when he did without the miners becoming aware. He had several telegrams to send on behalf of Isaac Bell and orders to get word to the Lloyd’s representative that a claim was going to be put in for the whaler.

  It wasn’t until after nightfall that a different harbormaster approached in a motor launch to tell them that berthing had been arranged. Fyrie was allowed to take his ship in without need of a professional pilot. He’d left it to Bell to tell the miners that the ship was under a quarantine temporarily due to a consumption scare.

  “I don’t care if the docks are teeming with diseased leprechauns,” Walter Schmidt griped. “I’ve had enough of this.”

&n
bsp; Schmidt was descended from German immigrants, so his speech was accented with his native tongue. He was a general laborer, and while not particularly big, he had unimaginable stamina. Everyone agreed he’d worked harder than anyone at the mine. Also, at night he would sit in the mess and entertain the men with a handheld concertina. He sang such haunting songs that it didn’t matter if the words were in German, the sense of love and loss rang clear.

  “I know how you must feel,” Bell said placatingly. “I want off too, and I wasn’t stuck in Russia for four months. But it’s out of my hands. The Scottish authorities aren’t going to release any foreign crews or passengers without a quarantine and a follow-up health check. This is nonnegotiable, you might as well relax. Captain Fyrie is arranging to have some fresh food brought down, so at least we have that. Okay?”

  Warner O’Deming was the smallest of the men. He was Irish-born, with a lilting voice and puckish demeanor, and it was usually up to him to find the humor in any situation. The men called him Warry. “Fresh Scottish food means haggis straight from the slaughterhouse. No thanks to ya, if ya please. I’ll take soup made with Tom Price’s boot before ya feed me that tripe.”

  They all laughed at the comment because among a great unwashed mob of men, Tom Price’s foot odor stood out as particularly vile.

  “In fact,” the little Irishman continued, “I’d knowingly eat the poisoned grub the French gave us than choke down what the Scots consider food. Fer the love of all that’s holy, they make sausages in squares like a bleeding packing crate lid. And they’re not half as tasty.”

  This got a fresh burst of laughter. Bell could see the men were relieved just to have made it as far as port. They wanted the odyssey to be over, surely, but a few days longer really made little difference. They were safe, and, in their minds, they’d soon be under way again with the ore they’d plundered from the depths of Bednaya Mountain.

  Bell took a mental snapshot of the moment, the pinpricks of harbor lights piercing the darkness that showed in the mess room’s single porthole, the dull sheen of old kitchen equipment in the scullery seen through a pass-through opening, the wooden table with its indecipherable jumble of carved initials and phrases. Paint was peeling from spots on the metal walls, and the linoleum tiles on the deck were worn through to bare metal in all the high-traffic lanes. The light was low and kind to the eight miners there who’d cheated death to pull off something extraordinary. As they laughed at Warry’s witticisms, they looked healthier than when they’d boarded the ship. They were ill, for certain, but in Bell’s estimation each looked like he had a little more glow to the cheeks, a little brighter spark in the eyes.

  All except Joshua Hayes Brewster. No merriment reached past the protective veil he’d pulled over himself. He sat, unmoving and glum. And then Bell recalled that this snapshot wasn’t at all what it seemed. One of the laughing men was a betrayer and murderer on a par with Judas Iscariot.

  The image he’d just tried to capture took on much darker overtones. In truth, he’d rather leave them all behind once fellow Van Dorn agent Joel Wallace arrived, but at least he wouldn’t have to watch his back around Brewster and Hall when they went south with him.

  He heard his name being shouted from down the hall outside the mess. “Bell? Damnit, man, where are you?”

  “In the mess, chief,” he yelled back, recognizing Ivar Ivarsson’s voice. He assumed the urgency was related to a message from the London office. Perhaps Wallace was indisposed for some reason.

  “There’s trouble,” the man said as he burst into the mess.

  Bell was on instant alert. He got to his feet. “What sort of trouble?”

  “There’s men harassing the drivers of the food delivery wagon just down the quay.”

  “What men?”

  “I couldn’t tell,” he said. “Just men. But given the trouble you’ve caused us since Sandefjord, I can’t imagine their intentions are to our benefit.”

  Bell looked across the table at Brewster. There was such fatalism in his tired eyes. He recognized the situation as surely as Bell did. Bell pulled the .45 from the kidney holster at his back and racked the slide with a mechanical finality that cut the last of the laughter.

  “Be ready,” he said to Brewster, but the others took it to mean them as well.

  He ran out of the mess, down the short hallway, and raced up the stairs to the bridge. Bell needed the height advantage to get a better overview of what might be coming their way. He thrust all speculation aside. Now wasn’t the time to worry about who or how someone might be coming after them. The important thing was to be ready to respond. The wheelhouse was dark and abandoned. He stepped quietly out onto the bridge wing to survey his surroundings.

  Under the glare of dozens of lights, the dock was littered with all kinds of equipment—bundles of coiled-up net, buoys and floats, all manner of crates and boxes, and barrels by the dozen, as well as carriages uncoupled from their horses. There was also a pair of open-bed trucks—what the English were calling lorries, after the verb “lurry,” which meant “to haul.”

  To the stern and the bow of the whaler were local fishing boats tied up for the night. A few fishermen appeared to be doing maintenance on a net beside one of the nearby boats, while the remainder were quiet. There was enough light from the lamps dotting the pier to see an approaching wagon drawn by two exhausted-looking horses. At the back of the carriage was a dark wooden box stenciled with lettering. The horses’ shod feet rang rhythmically against the concrete, adding a complementary beat to the lap of the waves and the ringing of rigging slapping masts.

  There was nothing unusual about the two men sitting at the head of the wagon. The driver was hunched over the reins, sporting a rough jacket and a cloth tam-o’-shanter on his head. His mate was dressed similarly. The pair looked legitimate, and their plodding pace had the air of bored workers going about business as unhurriedly as possible. Whoever Ivar had seen bothering the drivers must have backed off.

  Bell relaxed. He was being paranoid, and Ivar was jumping at shadows. What he’d seen was probably a dispute between local drivers—a union beef, most likely. These men were working extra hours to accommodate the Hvalur’s crew, after all. He silently decocked his .45, resafetied it, and slid it into the holster at the base of his spine. Below, he heard a hatch open, and Captain Fyrie and Arn speaking quietly in Icelandic as they prepared to meet the grocer’s dray.

  When the wagon drew closer, almost abreast of the whaling ship, Bell noticed the horses’ ears. Both animals were on alert, their pinnas swiveling left and right. A million years of being prey gave horses heightened senses, and these two were definitely spooked. Bell looked closer and saw the driver’s hands on the reins were stiff with tension. He was holding back the draft animals with considerable effort.

  What Bell was seeing could have a hundred explanations, or none at all, and should have made him pause to see how events unfolded over the next few seconds. That would have been what most people would have done—hesitate for another moment or two. Bell didn’t. He acted on pure instinct.

  He grabbed his pistol again, racking the slide even as he brought it to bear, and fired one round into the strip of water between the pier and the whaling ship. Down on the dock, the old horses whinnied in fright, and the driver had to redouble his effort to keep them from bolting. The man unleashed a string of Scots-accented oaths that could be heard over the frightened animals and echoing shot. Bell knew the voice immediately. And the blood in his veins went icy as the picture below became clear.

  Foster Gly was driving the team, while next to him, dressed as a regular deliveryman’s assistant, was Yves Massard. The five fishermen, who Bell had noted a minute earlier, had been watching the approaching wagon much too keenly than just out of mere curiosity. They dropped all pretense of repairing the net and started rushing toward the ship. It was a full-on assault, but Bell had disrupted the timing. Gly should have bee
n leading the charge, yet he was still trying to rein in the team of draft horses. Massard struggled to maintain his seat as the wagon skidded around a pyramid of wooden crates. The horses’ flanks were slick with the sweat of fright, while their eyes were white and their tongues lolled grotesquely.

  The “fishermen” were quickly pulling weapons from belts and behind backs. Bell saw the glint of knives and the silhouette of clubs not unlike baseball bats. One pistol shot reverberating across the harbor was unlikely to bring police attention, as the sound could be discounted as any number of things, but a sustained barrage from the .45 would have brought the bobbies coming at a run. Bell holstered his pistol and ran for the catwalk leading to the harpoon cannon, where there was a set of metal stairs back down to the main deck.

  He could only hope the miners heard the gun’s crack and were coming to meet the charge.

  Gly was fifty yards down the dock by the time he’d muscled the horses to a stop. Bell ignored him and Massard and concentrated on the five men rushing the whaler. They came fast and silent. They appeared to be disciplined fighters and held weapons with easy familiarity. They had just about reached the gangplank when a roar erupted from inside the ship and out spilled a ravaging army of Colorado hard-rock miners bent on protecting a stake. They brandished clubs and cleavers and the awful-looking bladed pikes used to flense blubber from a whale’s carcass. They came like berserkers lost in the lust of blood and violence.

  The five men Gly had either brought from France or hired locally didn’t stand a chance. They had just started up the gangplank when the counterattack was launched. The confines of the narrow ramp were too tight to turn quickly, so they were forced to fight it out against a horde nearly twice in number. The miners went at them without mercy, blades sinking deeply into flesh, bones cracking under the swings of men whose bodies, though racked with pain and afflicted by weakness, were still honed by lifetimes of crushing labor.