The Titanic Secret

by Clive Cussler

  “Right, but you said half eleven. You’re early, mate. Hold on.” He pointed to one of the workers loitering in the bays, a young boy used as a runner. “Joey, do that thing I told you or I’ll tan ya hide. Right?”

  “Sure, Mr. Devlin. I’s on it.” The urchin scampered through a judas gate set inside one of the main doors.

  “Bell! Bell!” Brewster was still in the back of the second truck. “Vern’s awake.”

  “About time,” Bell muttered, and indicated to the garage owner he had to see to his people.

  The owner, George Devlin, made a harried, dismissive gesture and turned back to his subordinate, while Bell boosted himself on top of the truck’s rear tire to peer into its bed. “Welcome back,” he said.

  Hall was owl-eyed and disoriented. “Where are we?”

  “Birmingham. More than halfway between where we started and where we need to go.”

  “What happened?”

  “You need to tell us that,” Brewster said to his old friend. He gave Hall some tea from one of the thermos flasks. “You were in a nasty fight in the locomotive cab when we left Aberdeen.”

  “A fight?” Hall didn’t seem to recall.

  “Aye. You and Johnny and Alvin.”

  “Who were we fighting?”

  Bell knew it was common for people with head injuries to have short-term memory loss. He told Hall, “Each other, it would appear. Alvin Coulter was thrown from the train, and Johnny Caldwell died from a blow to the head.”

  “Oh, God. No.”

  “They’re all dead,” Warry said. “All of ’em but us three and Mr. Bell.”

  “What?” Hall moaned. “How is that possible? Tell me what happened. All of it.”

  “We don’t have time for that,” Bell said. “Being here is a hell of a risk, so the quicker we finish, the better.”

  He stepped back down from the truck, but kept close to it, while Devlin and his henchman ambled over. “It doesn’t matter that we’re early. You have what I need and I have two perfectly good trucks to trade. Let’s do this and we can be on our way.”

  Devlin scratched absently at the bald spot atop his bullet head. “My sources tell me the coal strike ends tomorrow. I have to sell my stockpiles before the price drops back to normal, so I need to keep my truck.”

  Bell felt rage boil to the surface.

  “And,” the gangster continued, “I have this other deal brewing.”

  “What other deal?” Bell growled.

  “Seems there’s a thousand-pound bounty on your heads, payable by an old son of Scotland named Foster Gly. Benny!”

  Devlin’s enforcer pulled a two-barreled derringer-style pistol from his jacket pocket and held it steady to Bell’s stomach. The gun was an antique, at least fifty years old, but it was no less deadly now than it had been in some riverboat gambler’s waistcoat or up his sleeve.

  A flash of silver. A jet of red and a high-pitched shriek. The derringer, along with the hand holding it, hit the concrete floor with a meaty smack. The enforcer grabbed at the gushing stump with his left hand so that blood spurted through his fingers. Joshua Hayes Brewster stood on the bed of the Leyland truck and swung a follow-through with the flensing knife they’d kept since the escape from the docks. The blade struck the gunman in the chest and sank almost to the handle. His chuffing screams of pain ceased in a wet wheeze.

  Bell recovered his wits and scooped up the fallen pistol by first shaking loose its grisly adjunct. The room had exploded in motion. Most of the mechanics and hangers-on scattered after witnessing the barbarity of Brewster’s assault. A couple of others, the largest of the men, were hired for their brawn, not their mechanical skills, and they came at the truck in an all-out attack. Bell cocked the pistol and let fly the ammo in one of the barrels. The weapon was woefully inaccurate, even for a marksman of Bell’s abilities, and the bullet grazed a thug’s shoulder so softly that he didn’t even flinch.

  A blackjack appeared in his hand even as he swung a heavy fist at Bell. The lead-filled satchel missed Bell’s head by a hair’s breadth. Bell weaved out from under the guard and fired off a straight right to the man’s nose that left the man’s knees wobbling. From the truck’s bed, Warry O’Deming finished the job with a tire iron to the crown of the man’s scalp.

  A mechanic with more bravery than sense threw a hammer at the little Irishman. It missed, and O’Deming leapt from the truck, screaming like a madman, the tire iron cocked and ready. The mechanic yelled and started running, with Warry gaining on him rapidly.

  Joshua Brewster had squared off with another guard, brandishing the flensing knife like a scythe and keeping the man well back. A guard tried to take Bell from behind in a hold around the shoulders, as if this were going to be a wrestling match rather than a rumble. Bell rammed down on the man’s instep with his boot. And when the tension went out of the hold, he snapped the attacker’s head back and broke his nose. The man released Bell to stanch the flow of blood and Bell unceremoniously kicked him at the juncture of his legs. As he went to the ground, another kick, this one to the face, took the last of the fight out of the man.

  In the opening seconds of the fight, George Devlin had rushed to his office and closed the door behind him. Bell saw him throw the lock and scramble for a telephone hanging on the wall opposite his desk. Devlin was calling in reinforcements in case the runner he’d sent earlier couldn’t find Gly’s agents. Bell raced across the garage for the glass-enclosed space. He torqued in midair so that he hit the mullioned panes with his back with his fingers laced behind his neck and his elbows clamped to his sides to protect them from the glass.

  He burst through the glass in a cascade of tinkling shards, landed on his side atop the gangster’s desk, and rolled to his feet, his right hand now extended so the pistol was pressed between the stunned Englishman’s eyes.

  Bell flicked his attention back to the garage floor. Brewster and O’Deming were in the thick of it and holding their own, but they were outnumbered three to one, and Bell knew Gly had people on the way. He needed more time, though.

  “Drop the phone,” he ordered the English mobster. Devlin complied, and Bell motioned him back to the shattered window. “Tell your people to stand down.”

  “You’re dead, Yank,” Devlin sneered. “Only you don’t know it yet.”

  “Harder men than you have died with that threat on their lips,” Bell said, watching the brawl and the cowering mechanics, including one near the rear bumper of his Leyland truck. He watched a moment longer. It was done.

  Bell returned his attention to the gangster, his eyes cold, and cocked the second of the derringer’s barrels. “Call them off now.”

  Devlin nodded so much that the pouch of fat below his chin squished against his chest. The mobster’s bellow echoed from every corner of his garage. “Enough, lads. Let it be.”

  The guy facing Brewster and his flensing knife seemed relieved by the truce, though the Coloradan looked ready to keep going. Warry O’Deming was bleeding from the arm, and his face was a mass of contusions, but at his feet was a bruiser twice his size who would need an eyepatch for the rest of his life.

  Bell forced Devlin to step through the shattered glass wall and remained behind him with just enough separation that the hood wasn’t tempted to try to disarm him. “Joshua, Warry, help shift Vern over to the black truck that’s parked behind the bus. It’s our ride.”

  Brewster saw the heavy-duty vehicle and understood Bell’s plan. “Clever man. Using a dump truck to haul rocks. No one’ll look at us twice.”

  “Right.”

  Once they helped Vern Hall shuffle over to their new truck and they had the engine cranked to life, Bell motioned with the pistol for a mechanic to open the main doors out to the street. Only when that was done did he begin backing up, never taking the handgun off George Devlin.

  Like when facing down a dangerous animal, Bell
put as much distance as he could between himself and the gangster before turning on his heel and running for the dump truck. He jumped up into the cab and had the chain drive rattling before Devlin could shout for his man to close the doors again.

  At that moment, another vehicle raced through the partially open doors, knocking the mechanic back against a bunch of barrels, upending one and sending its mixture of oil and gasoline sloshing across the floor. The newcomers had arrived in a four-seater Austin tourer with the top up. Through the big windscreen, Bell could see the front passenger was armed with a sawed-off shotgun. He was sure these were local thugs hired by George Devlin to help Gly secure the crates of ore.

  He gunned the dump truck’s engine but left it in low gear so it had maximum torque when its front fender staved in the Austin’s grille and ripped the engine right from its mounts. The front passenger was jerked so hard by the impact that the gun went off in his hands. The inside of the windscreen went instantly red, sparing Bell from seeing what horror the blast had done to the driver’s head.

  Bell kept the truck going until he’d rammed the Austin into a wall with enough force to collapse the frame and tear the fuel tank. Smoke belching from the engine compartment quickly turned into a whooshing conflagration that saw flames shooting to the iron rafters twenty feet overhead.

  Jamming the truck into reverse gear, Bell backed away from the flaming wreckage only to realize with mounting apprehension that the car was tangled up on the truck’s bumper and wouldn’t release. He mashed down on the gas, backing blindly in the cluttered garage and then throwing the wheel hard over. The centrifugal force of the maneuver ripped the wrecked Austin free and it slid like a burning meteor across the floor and into a group of rolling toolboxes and barrels. The oil-soaked scraps of cotton ticking that filled one of the barrels went up in another gout of smoky flame, while one of the four-hundred-pound metal boxes fell over on the man hiding behind it, breaking both his shoulders.

  Pandemonium erupted throughout the garage as the fires spread. The sludge that had dumped out when the Austin first arrived ignited and turned the building’s entrance into a sea of flame. Smoke condensed along the ceiling in ever-thickening clouds that were rapidly mushrooming down toward the floor.

  Bell’s eyes streamed tears. They had to get out.

  The main door was inaccessible behind a lake of fire, and the smaller one next to it, though large enough for the truck, was closed. It could be opened only by a person pulling on a chain that mechanically raised it along tracks that curved under the ceiling.

  Bell considered ramming the roller gate, but it was made of heavy-gauge steel and looked impervious. The other option was to drive through the flames, but Brewster and Hall were in the back and they would have been burned alive.

  He looked back across the garage. Through the deepening smoke, figures scurried in hopes of finding a spot where the flames weren’t growing higher and more fierce.

  There was no other way.

  Warry O’Deming opened his door and had to shout over the roaring chorus of the fire when he said, “I know what you did for the others, Mr. Bell. Just make sure I’m buried in a Catholic cemetery or my sainted mother will make heaven hell for me.”

  He ran across to the closed door, forcing himself to stand mere feet from the flames. The chain dangling from the hoist mechanism had been exposed to heat for many long minutes and doubtless burned the Irishman’s hands as he yanked on it to open the door. No sooner had the door risen a few inches than the influx of fresh oxygen caused the fire to expand in nearly every direction as though the air itself was combustible.

  Bell was protected by the dump truck’s enclosed cab, and Brewster and Hall were afforded some protection by the high sides of the truck’s body, but Warry took the blast of flame full force. His hair burned off like a flaring match and his clothes were alight, yet he didn’t stop working the chain, sacrificing himself so the others could live and complete their mission.

  Isaac Bell had never witnessed such an act of bravery in his life.

  Even before the door was high enough, Bell put the truck in gear and started gunning for the exit in the vain hope that somehow Warry could be saved. But welding tanks near the gate just then reached critical temperature and exploded with the force of a bundle of dynamite.

  Warry O’Deming ceased to exist.

  Bell slammed on the brakes as blinding white flame rolled over the truck’s cab and rocked the vehicle on its suspension. The mechanic Bell had seen earlier had been fortunate enough to be sheltered from the blast by the truck’s steel body, but the concussion wave left him dazed, and he started walking back toward the center of the building rather than picking his way through the burning debris toward the exit. Bell opened his door enough to grab the man’s arm and guide him up onto the running board. He then raced through the inferno and out onto the street, the truck trailing smoke from where the fire had burned off some paint.

  He braked a half block from the fire, and looked the mechanic in the eye. “I just saved your life. Do what you were told to do in there but don’t mention the dump truck. Understand?” The man was too frightened to speak. “Nod your head if you understand.”

  The man nodded, and Bell released his grip. The mechanic stepped down onto the road. Bell yelled for his companions. The two men, sooty but unharmed, climbed down from the back of the truck and joined Bell in the cab. They accelerated away while crowds of onlookers began to gather to watch the fire consume the local crime boss’s garage.

  39

  No one spoke during the ride back to the abandoned cotton mill where they’d stashed the byzanium. Rather than empty the crates into the dump truck so the ore looked like so much gravel, Bell decided to load them filled and just bury them with more dirt from behind the mill. The truck was more than powerful enough for the extra weight. Vern Hall was no help with any of the physical labor, and while Brewster was willing, he was too weak and wasted to be of any use either. It fell on Isaac Bell to load the hundred-pound crates and shovel a few hundred pounds of dirt on top.

  They were back on the road around suppertime. Bell circled as far around Birmingham as he could before turning south. The men kept their own counsel while they drove. The only sound in the truck was the growl of the engine and the hiss of the tires on the pavement. They stopped for food and fuel once, but then kept going. It was only when they were about ten miles north of the Port of Southampton that Bell turned the truck off the main road and followed a country lane into the rolling farmland. The truck’s headlamps barely cut through the darkness, forcing Bell to drive at a walking pace. Ancient rock walls lined parts of the road and divided some of the pastures.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We have thirty-six hours before we need to board the ship. I have a healthy aversion to anyplace Foster Gly might lay an ambush, so I thought we’d wait it out in the countryside. I saw a sign back there for a little town. They’ll hopefully have an inn. Or at least a pub for a meal and a barn where we can sleep.”

  As it turned out, Southby wasn’t much of a town at all and had neither inn nor pub and barn. The place was all but abandoned, with only a few thatch-roofed homes showing any light. They passed a church and were back out into pastureland. A half mile later, Bell spotted a gate that had been left to rot. He turned onto a narrow track that led to a house with a collapsed front wall, but the barn behind it was intact, if not a little run-down. The silence when Bell killed the engine was soon filled with the sound of a gentle breeze moving through the tall grass and rustling the leafless trees.

  “We’ll try to get food in the morning,” Bell said, knuckling kinks out of his lower back.

  The barn door only closed partway, and most of the floor was bare earth, but one stall was packed with hay bales left from the previous autumn. They had hardened over the winter, but a little pulling and twisting loosened enough straw to make them comfortable enough for exha
usted sleep.

  When they were settled in, Vern Hall said, “That was a hell of a thing Warry did for us back there.”

  “Aye,” Brewster replied, but in such a way as to indicate he didn’t want to talk about it.

  Bell changed the topic by asking, “Do you remember anything about what happened on the train with you and Johnny and Alvin?”

  “Some,” Hall said. “It was Johnny. When you went back to uncouple the cars, Johnny hit Alvin with the blade of the coal shovel without warning and shoved him right off the train. He swung at me and did a good number on my head, but I think I got ahold of the sledgehammer they use to break up bigger chunks of coal and swung it back just before my legs went out from underneath me.”

  “So, it was Johnny who was working for the French,” Bell said.

  “Must be,” Vern said.

  “I wonder why,” Bell mused.

  “I’ve been thinking about that, Mr. Bell, and there’s something I’ve kept secret.”

  “What’s that?” Brewster asked with suspicion. “What secret?”

  “Jake Hobart was married, and I think Johnny had fallen in love with his bride and killed Jake over it.”

  “What?” Brewster cawed.

  “It’s true. Jake knew about how you didn’t trust working with married miners, Josh, so he never told you. He confided in me, and even asked that I send some postcards on his behalf when we were in Paris. I mailed some when we went to the tasting session at the food company, and I had Arn send a final one from Aberdeen that told her Jake had died back in Russia.”

  Bell said, “I did find evidence that Johnny had a girl he couldn’t be with.”

  Vern Hall nodded in the darkness. “He spent a lot of time with Jake Hobart because Jake was teaching him how to be a blaster. That’s how Johnny met the wife, who’s much younger than Jake. Maybe even younger than Johnny. I think what happened was Johnny fell in love with her and wanted to get Jake out of the way. He must have seen an opportunity on the island, committed the murder, and made it look like Jake had died in a storm.”