The Titanic Secret Page 29

  Bell holstered his weapon.

  “How’d they find us, Mr. Bell?” Alvin Coulter asked.

  Bell could safely remove Coulter from his list of suspects. He could have said nothing about knowing how to drive the locomotive and potentially strand them at the yard or, had he been the saboteur, he could have jammed up the controls once he was in the cab. The fact they were under way and almost clear of the freight depot meant he wasn’t Jake Hobart’s murderer. The same logic didn’t hold true for young John Caldwell. Volunteering to shovel coal put him in a better position to help the French agents than had he remained with the ore. He was glad Vern Hall was the second stoker because he was one less unknown variable.

  “I’m not sure,” Bell lied.

  He believed that the night the saboteur had informed the French the miners had been picked up from the beach by an Icelandic whaling ship, Bell recalled mentioning in the mess, before he’d been informed of the nature of Jake Hobart’s death, that they were heading to Aberdeen. That information had obviously been passed on as a contingency in case the Lorient failed to detain the Hvalur Batur.

  After learning that one of the men was a murderer and had secretly used the radio, Bell should have changed the destination. Once again, he’d underestimated his opponent. So far, the cost of his mistake hadn’t been high, but, given the stakes, he expected that to change at any moment.

  He said, “If I were to guess, I’d say the French ship that attacked us in the ice floe got word back to the Société des Mines before we sank them that we were steaming to Aberdeen. When they couldn’t reach the Lorient after a day or so, Gly and Massard crossed the Channel with a bunch of their heavies to meet us.”

  Alvin and the other two seemed satisfied with Bell’s answer, and none saw the glaring hole in his hypothesis and asked the logical follow-up question of how the crew of the Lorient could possibly guess the whaler’s destination.

  Bell leaned out of the cab’s open side just before they cleared the freight depot’s perimeter fence. He looked back along the length of the train. It appeared that the gate he’d wedged closed was now open. It didn’t really matter. They were accelerating smoothly and soon would be on the main line to Glasgow at a comfortable forty miles per hour.

  “What about an oncoming train?” John Caldwell asked. His baby face was already streaked with sweat and coal dust from his labors shoveling. Tom Price sat on a spare stool ready to spell Caldwell when his strength waned.

  Bell pointed to the telegraph lines. “They’ll cable ahead and make sure the line’s clear. At some point, they might try to stop us with a barricade, but not for a while. I doubt anyone’s ever stolen an English train before, so they’ll take time to get organized.”

  “Can we get all the way to the south coast?” Coulter asked.

  “No,” Bell said emphatically. “Glasgow’s a big city with a lot of train traffic. If we go that far, they’ll shunt us onto a dead-end spur. We need to leave the train before then.”

  They soon left the lights of Aberdeen as the tracks took them along the coast. The sparsely populated farmland was as dark as the ocean surging off to the left side. Thankfully, the moon was high and full, bathing the landscape in a silvery aura that made the fields glow but turned shadows stark and impenetrable.

  Bell believed that Gly and Massard’s next move was to race to Glasgow ahead of the train and steal the crates during the inevitable confusion of a mass arrest for—he considered the proper charge—grand theft railroad.

  To counter the move, Bell had to get the men and ore off the train sooner and find a bigger, more powerful truck. He needed to telephone the Van Dorn office in London. He knew Joel Wallace was on his way north with additional men but hoped the local station chief had left someone behind to man the phones. Bell needed to know what ship Wallace had booked passage back to the States. He assumed they would sail out of Southampton, yet any number of other ports were possible.

  Johnny Caldwell finally stepped back from heaving shovelfuls of coal into the hungry firebox, and Vern Hall, perhaps the most recovered of the sickly men, took his place. Caldwell crossed to the open window to let the chilled April air dry some of the sweat from his face and hair. No sooner had he draped himself over the sill, he came upright as if yanked by wires.

  “Mr. Bell!” he shouted over the roar of the fire and the clang of the locomotive’s steel wheels. “You need to see this.”

  Bell had to dance around Vernon Hall to reach the teenage Caldwell. Dread was like a stone in his stomach.

  On the track running parallel to theirs, a small shunting locomotive was racing along the length of the train pushing a flatbed car. At the front of the car was a hand-operated crane used in repairing damaged sections of the rails. Suspended from its hook, and bobbling because of the speed, was a fifteen-foot length of track. Several of Massard’s men were crouching behind the crane as cover from Bell’s pistol. They were waiting to get into position to swing the boom in front of the stolen train and release the cable. If the locomotive didn’t immediately derail and plow into the earth, at the very least the rail would act as a massive brake and the train would grind to a halt.

  Massard was there to oversee them and he had his shotgun cradled in his arms. The man was no more than fifty feet back and he spotted Bell immediately. He fired both barrels from the hip and this time the pellets spread wide because he’d unscrewed the barrel chokes. Bell wasn’t hit, but the hard patter of shot hitting steel so close was unnerving.

  At the relative speeds the trains were moving, the little engine, with its single car, would be ahead of the larger freight in mere minutes. Bell had to act fast or they were all dead men.

  In the seconds it took the Frenchman to break open the expensive weapon, replace the two spent shells, and snap it closed again, Bell had jumped past Tom Price and climbed atop the coal tender behind the locomotive. From the cab’s aft bulkhead, he’d grabbed a heavy-duty bolt cutter. He was familiar enough with English trains to know its purpose.

  “Pour it on with everything you’ve got,” he shouted to Alvin Coulter, and continued down toward the back of the tender.

  He kept low on the opposite side of the train away from the second set of parallel tracks where Massard couldn’t see him. Though lighter and faster than the freight locomotive, the shunting engine Massard had commandeered had a critical disadvantage. It didn’t carry a tremendous amount of coal or water, as it was designed to never leave the cargo depot and its immediate area. Massard had a finite window in which to implement his plan to derail Bell and the Coloradans or he would literally run out of steam.

  If Bell could increase the speed enough, eventually Massard would be forced to abandon his attack.

  Bell was safe on top of the tender, but once he reached its end, and the gap between it and the boxcar carrying the men and ore, Massard might be able to get off a shot. Slowly he crawled across the tender’s roof in order to get a fix on the other train. Massard had no way of communicating with his man in the shunting locomotive, holding its engineer captive, so they couldn’t work out the timing. And yet the front bumpers on the flatbed railcar were aligned with the gap between the tender and the boxcar—exactly where they needed to be for Massard to be able to cut Bell to ribbons.

  Bell couldn’t afford to wait and let them get farther ahead. He slithered back and then crept toward the locomotive for a bit before turning once more to face the back of the car. He jumped to his feet and ran in a stooped position, trying to minimize himself as much as possible. The heavy bolt cutter made the maneuver awkward.

  Massard saw him and wheeled to fire. Bell leapt the gap between the tender and the two-foot-taller boxcar. A shard from a splintered bit of birdshot tore a groove in the nape of his neck and burned as though a red-hot poker were laid against his skin. He sprawled across the roof in a disjointed pile yet stayed down so Massard couldn’t see him.

  Bell h
eard the boxcar’s sliding door roll open beneath him and tried to shout a warning, but it was drowned out by another blast from the shotgun. This one had been more carefully aimed, and the scream of a mortally wounded man keened above the wind whistling past Bell’s ears. The door rolled shut immediately. Massard fed another pair of shells into the gun and fired again, but the shot wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate the railcar’s metal side.

  Bell stayed on his belly as he crawled aft. The quest to strip Bednaya Mountain of its byzanium ore and return it to the United States had taken its second life.

  32

  Yves Massard was still in a position to fire at Bell if he tried to uncouple the car he was splayed across. He needed to get farther down the train. He crawled for most of the way and then leapt up to jump the gap to the next carriage. Like most British trains, the ends of the cars had a set of steel bumper bars for three link chains to be attached. A turnbuckle system kept the cars locked together, so that as the train sped up or slowed, the slack in the chains wouldn’t cause the cars to slam together. At times, being a passenger on English railroads was rougher than riding a bucking horse.

  Glancing over at the shunting engine, Bell saw Foster Gly in the open cab. He didn’t appear to have a weapon, but he towered over the engineer, as well as another of his own men. When Gly saw Bell, he moved so that the train’s driver was between them in case Bell decided to open fire.

  Bell thought Gly needn’t have bothered. It was too tricky of a shot to waste one of his few remaining bullets on. He climbed down the ladder bolted to the rear of the goods wagon.

  The faint chirp of a whistle caught his attention. It wasn’t a blast from one of the locomotive’s horns but instead a single puff through the sort of whistle a policeman typically carried on a lanyard around his neck. Keeping the bolt cutter in hand, Bell climbed up the front of the next car and looked over its tarry top. Two men were running at him from the rear of the train. The more distant one was dressed in a blue serge uniform. He had the whistle to his mouth and a wooden baton in his left hand. The closer man Bell recognized from the fight on the dock back in Aberdeen. He’d been the smug hoodlum who’d taken a swing with the baseball-style bat, though he didn’t appear to have it now.

  Bell wondered how the man had managed to board the freight train and then he recalled the pedestrian bridges over the tracks back in the yard. A leap from one of them to the train wasn’t much more than stepping down from a carriage. Alerted by the unusual appearance of a shunting engine out on the main tracks, the guard back in the caboose must have come out on the roof to patrol the train. Seeing the French agent, he’d blown his whistle and no doubt saved Bell from certain death when his focus was on separating the cars.

  The Frenchman stopped and turned to look back, his shoulders hunched against the wind generated by the train’s headlong rush through the night. His greatcoat flapped around his form like a luffing sail so that in the moonlight he looked like a demon. He spread his arms in a placating gesture, and the guard came toward him until they were mere feet apart. The distance was too great and the wind too loud for Bell to hear what was said, but the exchange lasted mere seconds. The agent had whipped a knife from a scabbard up his sleeve and plunged it into the poor guard’s belly, turning and twisting the blade to do maximum damage as the guard fell into him.

  The man might not have died instantly, but his fate was sealed. The Frenchman let him fall from his arms onto the roof. He turned back to Bell and kept coming, his face now a mask of savagery and bloodlust.

  Bell didn’t have time for this. Every second’s delay meant Massard and Gly were that much closer to getting ahead of the train and dropping the section of rail across the track. He pulled out his .45.

  “Ha!” the Frenchman said derisively. “I saw you at the dock. You did not use your gun. I think you are out of bullets.”

  “And you’d be wrong.” Bell gut-shot the agent in the same spot the agent had just stabbed the guard. The man’s eyes goggled in surprise, confusion, and ultimately pain. He fell just a few paces from what became his last victim.

  Bell raced back down the ladder, stepped over the coupling to get himself back onto the ore car, and went to work with the bolt cutter. One part of the handle was a tool that could be worked into the turnbuckle to release its tension even when the train was moving. An expert trainman could have done it in his sleep, but the cars were in motion, swaying just enough to make inserting the awkward handle all the more difficult. Bell felt more time slip away. He looked to his right. He was abreast of the shunting engine’s cab again. Gly wasn’t there. He was on its roof instead.

  Without need of a running leap, the Scotsman launched himself from the cab and soared through the space between the trains. Bell looked around the boxcar’s forward edge to see Gly had crashed into the side of the next freight car high enough on its side to grasp the railing that ran along its roof. It was a superhuman effort and yet he wasted almost no time catching his breath. By the time Bell had his pistol out again, Gly had climbed up and slithered from view.

  Bell stabbed at the turnbuckle again and this time managed to find his target. He rotated the apparatus and it released all at once. The other two lengths of chain came taut as they took up the full weight of the trailing boxcars.

  He reversed the bolt cutter and fitted its hinged jaws over the first of the chains. The force needed to bite through the hardened metal was mechanically augmented by the cutter’s design, but still Bell had to strain to shear the link through. He kept glancing up, expecting Gly to appear at any moment. He attacked the second chain, cinching the jaws around the link and muscling the tool’s arms closed.

  The knife came from above, thrown with tremendous force and near-deadly accuracy. The only thing that saved Bell’s life when the weapon hit his neck was that it wasn’t designed to be a throwing knife. It hit him handle first, and while painful, it wasn’t the fatal blow Gly expected. The knife clattered down past Bell’s boots and vanished on the railbed.

  Gly leapt after the knife before Bell had time to recover. He crashed on the detective’s back hard enough and at such an angle that it actually helped Bell snip through the remaining chain. The dozen trailing cars were now released. Unburdened by an additional two hundred tons of weight, Alvin Coulter should be able to keep the train ahead of Massard’s.

  There was no room for Bell to pull his weapon. And no time. He merely let himself fall over the bumper and let Gly’s momentum toss him over his shoulder and onto the ground. For such a large man, Gly had incredible reflexes. Just as he was about to tumble onto the ribbon of ballast stones between the tracks, he got a hand on the chain dangling from the receding railcar and was yanked clear. He fell so that only the heels of his shoes hit the ground, the rest of his weight being supported by the chain as he dangled beneath the slowing boxcar. He’d just barely kept himself from falling under its wheels and was now hidden from view under the car itself and safe from Bell’s now drawn automatic pistol.

  Bell watched the gap between him and Gly grow as the locomotive put on a burst of speed. He hoped distance would give him an angle under the boxcar’s leading edge. However, he quickly realized that by the time he would be able to see Gly, Gly would be too small of a target.

  He holstered his weapon and climbed atop the car carrying the miners and the crated ore. He had just gotten his footing when he felt the train dramatically slow, and he nearly toppled off the car. It appeared that Massard’s men had almost gotten into position to swing the crane boom over and drop the rail in front of the freight train when Bell had loosened the remainder of the cars and his locomotive began to outpace Massard’s.

  Now the train was slowing of its own accord, and soon Massard would have them trapped. And God only knew what would happen when the string of cars that Bell had just cut free slammed into the rear of this boxcar carrying such a destructive amount of kinetic force.

  And that’s when
Bell noticed broken Alvin Coulter lying in the gap between the two sets of tracks just before the train flashed past his inert body.

  33

  Bell let the wind carry away the oath he muttered. He was in motion even before the plan was fully formed. He dropped flat to the roof just above the sliding door. Massard was far enough ahead that he couldn’t get a good angle to fire back, so that wasn’t a concern.

  “Can you hear me?” he shouted. “It’s Bell. Open the door.”

  The door slid open smoothly. Looking up at him was big Charlie Widney. He said, “Tom Price is dead.”

  “We might all be too. Really soon. Give me that long flensing knife.”

  Just seconds later, the eight-foot-long pike-like weapon was thrust up into Bell’s hands. He said nothing further and ran for the coal tender. He leapt, landed in a forward roll, and came up with the long shaft of the knife still at port arms. He ran over, slid down the face of loose coal just behind the cab. Vern Hall and Johnny Caldwell were both sprawled on the floor, both bleeding from the skull, both as likely dead as not.

  Bell ignored them. He saw the throttle had been closed and immediately cranked it to full open. The engine responded like a horse on the final turn of the Belmont Stakes. The rocker arms attached to the wheels became gleaming blurs as a burst of steam pressure sent them shuttling back and forth. The acceleration was immediate.

  He looked ahead and saw Massard’s men had almost succeeded in cranking the crane over so that the end of its boom, and its dangerous payload, were almost directly in front of Bell’s train. The shunting engine was giving it everything it had, but it was no match for Bell’s more powerful locomotive. The front of their boiler smacked into the crane boom and swung it back so that it was pointing straight up the tracks once more. The section of rail swung like a pendulum. Bell kept low. Yves Massard must have realized his prize was again out of reach. He’d be desperate.