The Assassin (Isaac Bell 8)

The tawny yellow all-stateroom train offered its pampered customers the unique benefit of not being rousted from their beds for passport checks at the border crossings as they steamed through Munich, Strasbourg, Vienna, and Budapest. Sixty-four hours after leaving Paris, they awakened to the balmy air and dazzling sunshine of Constantinople, a vast and ancient cosmopolitan city of mosques and minarets, a sprawling bazaar, mangy dogs, and a bustling harbor on a deep blue sea.

A mail steamer carried them up the Bosporus Strait and four hundred miles across the

Black Sea to Batum, the world’s biggest oil port, where the snow-covered Caucasus Mountains loomed over the harbor, and the six-hundred-mile pipe line from Baku terminated.

Dozens of steam tankers rode at anchor, queuing to load at the kerosene docks. But the city’s streets were deserted and buildings shuttered.

“Muslims and Christians are shooting each other,” Bill Matters reported when he met them at the steamer in a Rolls-Royce. “It’s a pogromy, Tatars attacking Armenians.”

“Where do the Russians stand?” asked Bell.

“The cops and Army turn a blind eye.”

They drove five miles out of the city to Manziadjani. The American vice consul, a prosperous and well-connected ship broker whom Rockefeller had arranged to meet, had his country place there. Shots were fired from the woods as they pulled in through the front gate. Bell had his pistol out and was opening his carpetbag when Vice Consul Abrams staggered up to the car with blood pouring from his mouth.

They rushed him to a nearby Russian Army fort, where he died within moments of arriving. Isaac Bell raced Rockefeller and Matters back to Batum and onto the train to Baku. At Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, halfway to the Caspian Sea, there were reports of riots. A bomb exploded outside the station. Bell kept his party on the train and they slept the night sitting up on hard benches.

Next morning, the authorities dithered. It was midday before the train pulled out, proceeded by a pilot engine, in case wreckers taking advantage of the collapse of law and order had mined the tracks to rob the passengers. They steamed slowly across an endless, ever-more-desolate dry valley between snowy mountains to the north and indistinct highlands to the south.

An hour before nightfall, still fifty miles from Baku, the pilot engine hit a mine.

The explosion blew it off the rails and into a ravine, taking with it the riflemen guarding the train. Horsemen in black cloaks gathered on a ridge that loomed above the tracks.

Isaac Bell opened his carpetbag and joined the Savage 99’s barrel to its chamber with a practiced twist. Another explosion blocked the rails behind them, and a wild-eyed conductor ran through the car yelling, “Wreckers!”

They attacked, galloping down the slope, brandishing long guns and sabers.

“Get Mr. Rockefeller under cover,” Bell told Matters. “Fort him up with those bags.”

Matters obeyed instantly, helping Rockefeller to the floor, pulling luggage down from the racks. The old man remained calm and watchful and seemed to have the horse sense to trust the job to the man he had chosen to protect him. If C. C. Gustafson was the most philosophical man on the subject of getting shot, John D. Rockefeller took the cake as the calmest man without a gun that Isaac Bell had ever seen in a gunfight.

Bell counted ten expert riders on agile ponies. Without a telescope on the rifle, he’d be wasting ammunition if he opened up any farther than four hundred yards. But four hundred yards would give him only forty seconds to stop them before they reached the stranded train. He glanced about the car. Some of the men had pulled revolvers. Bill Matters unlimbered an ancient Civil War Remington. Bell’s was the only rifle.

20

When will you shoot?” John D. Rockefeller called to Isaac Bell.

“When I can hit them.”

He chose a large boulder on the hillside as his quarter-mile marker. The lead horseman steered his mount directly at it. As he raised his whip to make the animal jump, Bell pressed the Savage to his shoulder. The whip descended. The animal gathered its haunches and left the ground. Isaac Bell waited for the rider’s chest to cross the iron sight and curled his finger gently around the trigger.

Dave McCoart had loaded a box of wildcats for him and Bell decided he owed the gunsmith a box of Havana cigars. The train wrecker slid off his horse almost as smoothly as if he had chosen to dismount. His foot jammed in a stirrup. The panicked animal veered sharply, dragging its dead rider across the line of charge. Two train wreckers crashed into them and went down in a tangle of hoofs.

Bell levered in a fresh shell.

He fixed a bead on a rider who was whirling a carbine over his head like a sword. Again the perfectly balanced trigger kept the weapon dead steady as Bell fired and another wrecker fell off his horse. But they had closed within two hundred yards. Bell’s next target was an easy hit, and they were so near for his next that he could have dropped his man with a rock.

“Shoot!” he roared at the men gaping out the windows.

They jerked the triggers of their revolvers, hitting nothing. Through that hail of wild fire, the horsemen charged. The Savage’s magazine indicator read one shot left. Bell fired at a man so close, he could see the hairs of his beard.

That shot and the volume of pistol fire broke the charge. Twenty yards from the train, the survivors turned their horses and drove them back up the ridge. Bell reloaded, shouting to the others, “Keep shooting before they change their minds.”

He sent two slugs whistling over their heads and they kept going, lashing their horses. The revolver-toting passengers stopped shooting or ran out of ammunition. The beginnings of a ragged cheer died on their lips as each and every man considered how close he had come to annihilation. Silence finally descended in the hot, dusty railcar.

Isaac Bell helped John D. Rockefeller to his feet.

“Now what?” asked the Standard Oil magnate.