The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

It was a good question for an average person to ask, but a Van Dorn man should be able to lie his way out of such a question and turn it around so the vendors gave up their lists. “Ask Charles to teach you how it’s done. I don’t have time now.”

Bell hopped into the REO’s cab, got the engine ready to fire, and instructed young Mr. Rhodes to crank the starter. The engine caught right away. Bell massaged the throttle and choke until satisfied with the motor’s hum and took off out of the depot parking area. The sad-eyed Rhodes watched him leave and made Bell feel like he was abandoning a puppy in the street.

The journey back to the mine took longer, of course, but Bell pushed it as hard as he dared. There was still enough time to get in the dive that day and get back to Central City for a hot bath and clean sheets.

When he arrived back at the Little Angel Mine, the sun was out, though the air remained cold. Tony was seated near the fire, leaning over a wooden box of the booster charges needed to blow the main TNT charges already in place above the adit. Water continued to spew from the dark mine entrance. Bell parked next to the camp, and Wickersham set aside one of the flashlight-sized charges and came over.

“Made good time,” the Englishman said as Bell unlimbered his long legs and headed to the REO’s bed.

“It’s the truck. Thing’s as sure-footed as a goat.”

Rather than wrestle the trunk to the ground, Bell leapt in the back and sprang open the lid. He removed a thin piece of protective wood that lay just inside and peered at the equipment Alex Hecht had sent along. The rebreather was in a web harness worn over the shoulders like a backpack and consisted of three parts—a square chemical scrubber that bonded the excess carbon dioxide from the diver’s breath, a separate copper cylinder of oxygen under pressure that bled into the system via a control knob, and a face mask with an attached hose that fed air to the diver and took away each exhalation.

Alex’s work was to make the system as hands-free to use as possible, with different types of valves and pressure-sensitive backflow preventers. Still, there was a great deal more to be done to make the rebreather a simple device to operate. Had he not been properly instructed back in San Francisco, Bell would have never dreamed of making this dive.

He set aside the rebreather carefully. Next came a belt of lead weights. Though the rebreather itself was heavy, the oxygen tank made it positively buoyant, thus the need for additional ballast. He then whistled aloud as he lifted what appeared to be the hide of a man who’d been skinned alive. It was a diving suit unlike any other in the world. This was the other contribution to the world of diving from the mind of Alex Hecht.

Unlike the bulky vulcanized canvas suits worn by traditional hard hat divers, this was supple—pliable, even. It felt waxy to the touch. Bell wasn’t sure what Hecht used to coat his suit to make it waterproof, but he had been warned that the suit maintained its integrity for only an hour or so. After that, water would begin leaching through, especially at the joints, where the diver’s natural motion would have worn away more of the protective emulsion. Also, the suit needed to be thoroughly cleaned and dried and recoated following every dive. Not knowing how much dive time Bell required, Hecht included a heavy drum of his proprietary sealant.

The suit was heavily padded at the knees and elbows and ended with thick elastic bands at the wrists and ankles. Hecht hadn’t yet perfected gloves for his suit, and he figured most divers would wear flippers on their feet. Bell still had the cheap shoes he’d worn earlier.

At the neck was a metal collar with a rubber gasket studded with upright bolts that fit exactly the holes drilled into the matching collar of the rebreather mask. Depending on the depth of the dive, the two collars were fastened together with special lug nuts that could exert countless pounds of pressure on the gasket to keep it airtight. Since Bell wasn’t diving too deeply, the nuts would just be tightened by hand and not with the special torque-controlling wrench also included in the trunk. The suit was just baggy enough that Bell’s heat would warm the layer of air trapped against his body, though eventually the cold would reach him if this was to be a longer dive.

A final piece of equipment was a dry-cell-battery flashlight that had been made waterproof using layers of rubber. The battery was heavy and had to be worn at the waist, hanging from the rebreather harness, but the lamp was the size of a beer mug, and the connecting wire had been wound in steel to protect it from damage.

Tony helped Bell shimmy and contort his way into the suit and slid on his shoes and laced them for him. Together, the men carried the equipment up to the mine’s entrance. The water sluiced out unabated. Bell first clipped on his belt of lead weights and then Tony held the rebreather so Bell could wriggle into the straps and tighten them so they were snug against his back. The rebreather was heavy, but the detective could still move around without too much difficulty, and once he was in the water he expected to be perfectly balanced. Next came the helmet. Bell had already tested the oxygen flow. Tony lifted it over Isaac’s head and fitted the holes over the suit collar’s studs and tightened the wing nuts. Finally, Tony clipped on the battery, and Bell turned it on before slipping on some thick leather gloves. Gloves wouldn’t protect his hands from the cold water but were necessary to protect them from the stones. He’d regretted not wearing any during his initial trip.

Bell waited a bit, testing that he was breathing the proper mixture of gasses and that the scrubbers were working properly. After three minutes, Bell nodded to Tony, who clapped him on the back, and he waded into the frigid discharge.

He felt the cold, but nowhere near the savage bite of his first swim. He walked in an awkward, lurching gait because of the gear but was soon deep enough to drop under the surface. He found that it was best to crawl on his hands and feet, making certain his knees didn’t scrape the sharp stone floor. This had the added bonus of presenting a most streamlined silhouette to the rushing water and easing the resistance. He flicked on the light occasionally, seeing that the next thirty or so feet were clear, and crawled on in the dark. The resonance of the water gushing past and the hiss and purr of his own breathing were oddly calming.

But after just a few minutes, the darkness felt like it was squeezing him from all sides. His imagination began to work itself into overdrive against his resolve to remain calm. At any second he expected a bloated and waterlogged corpse to come hurtling out of the mine and dash him against the wall or floor. He quickly relit the flashlight and saw that ahead was nothing more than an empty mine shaft. Peering up, he could see that he was now deeper than he’d ever been. The tunnel here was flooded to the ceiling.

He kept the electric torch lit as he forged ever deeper. He could feel the water pressure building against his body, but it was just a mild discomfort.

At last, fifteen minutes into his swim, Bell came upon an obstruction. The ceiling and walls had collapsed into the tunnel and nearly filled it with rubble. Here too the current was strongest, since this was the spot where the mountain’s aquifer drained into the shaft. Because there was so much force coming from the artesian spring, Bell wasn’t concerned about dislodging rocks and causing further collapse. Whatever loose stones remained following the cave-in had been picked up and carried partway down the mine. Still, he remained cautious as he swam up and over the pile of debris. At the top, he had to fight to keep from getting pinned to the rocks by the jet of water blasting into the shaft. Once he was through, the current abruptly ended. There was no outlet on this side

of the divide.

He swam easily in the still water, the cone of light from his lamp receding as he chased after it with long, powerful strokes. He had passed the Little Angel’s nadir, its lowest point relative to sea level, and was now climbing a gentle incline. He did pass a few side chambers, as Tony said there would be, but his light was strong enough to show they were relatively small spaces unable to conceal any of the dead.

He came upon yet another obstruction and, unlike the earlier area of collapse, this one spanned the shaft from left to right and from top to bottom. And it hadn’t been cleared relatively free like the other one. This was a fractured mass of loose stones, some boulder-sized, others little bigger than his fist. Bell stared thoughtfully at the rubble for a solid minute before tentatively reaching out and moving just one stone from the matrix. As he had suspected, it caused a cascading avalanche of other rocks. It would take weeks of labor—months maybe—to clear enough material away to get to what was beyond this mess.

Bell turned and started swimming back the way he’d come. Another man might have cursed or lashed out in frustration at being denied a definitive answer to the puzzle, but he was wired differently and those differences made him a superior detective. He rarely made his investigations personal, so without an emotional stake, he could endeavor to do his best and be satisfied with whatever answer he found. And then he could simply walk away from the affair.

He was now composing his report to the Brothers Bloeser. His answer as to whether Joshua Hayes Brewster and the other miners actually died in the disaster was inconclusive. However, his intuition, based on a few subtleties, led him to believe that they had not perished in the mine but had faked their own deaths for reasons unknown.

He climbed over the first cave-in, straining once again not to snag his diving suit and potentially rip through the fabric. So far, it had worked flawlessly. He was cold but could still function with little impediment to his limbs or senses. Once he was past the rockfall, the current pushed him toward the surface. He turned himself edgewise to reduce his profile and better control his ascent back to the surface. As before, his exit from the mine was much easier and faster than his entrance. In just a couple of minutes he could raise his head above the surface, and, all too soon, the water became so shallow that he had to walk rather than ride the current all the way out. He eventually saw a corona of weak gray light up ahead. He powered down his electric torch and clipped the lamp to the dry-cell battery at his hip. Just inside the entrance was a bench of rock along the right-hand wall, and Bell noticed that it wasn’t empty as previously. A figure lay upon it, utterly still.

7

Bell charged like a bull, running through the swift-flowing water in a rampage, needing all his skill not to lose his balance and tumble. He reached the bench in moments, and his worse fears did not come to pass. It indeed was Tony Wickersham, but he wasn’t dead. However, he had been shot, his shoulder was a crimson mess and his hands were sticky with the blood he’d tried to stanch. Bell’s .45 caliber pistol was at Tony’s side, its checkered grip also sticky with blood.

“Tony. It’s me, Bell. What happened, man?” Bell slapped him lightly on the cheek.

By force of will, Wickersham roused himself. His eyes fluttered open, then focused. When he finally recognized the detective inside the bulky dive mask, they went wide with fear and relief. “Mr. Bell . . . I was shot.”

“I can see that. Who did it?”