The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

“That’s what I keep telling them.”

“But you told Patmore you can do it by May.”

“Yes.” Brewster grimaced and showed a mouth of tobacco-stained teeth. “If they’re suspicious enough, then they’ll sail back as soon as they’re able and wait for us. Gly knows that I won’t allow any of his men to overwinter with us, and the ice gets too thick January through April, so they can’t wait offshore. But they will come back as early as they can.”

“What do you know about the ship they’re using?”

“We saw it when they transferred our mining gear from the ocean liner in Le Havre.”

“And?”

“And what? It was a Navy ship converted into a fast freighter, about a hundred feet in length, with extra-long boom arms on its main crane to move cargo ashore.”

If it was a Navy vessel, the Société des Mines had secured government sanction for this job. Notable, but ultimately unimportant at this time, Bell concluded. “Did it have icebreaking capabilities?”

Brewster shrugged. “I don’t know. Wait! It doesn’t.”

“Keep your voice down,” Bell admonished in a harsh whisper.

“Sorry. I remember them saying that it was a good thing summer stayed until so late in October or they would have to use a different ship.”

“Okay. That’s our advantage. We’ll use an icebreaker and get you out before the French leave for the island. What’s the soonest you can finish the job?”

“Mid-April. That’s shaving two weeks off the estimate I gave Gregg.”

“Not good enough,” Bell said quickly.

“You don’t know the conditions up there.”

“It doesn’t matter. If we try to pick you up in mid-April, the French are going to be waiting. We need to go earlier, Brewster, or it’s all for nothing. We’ll be there on April first.”

“Damnit.”

Bell could see the conflict in Brewster’s fiery eyes. The miner knew just how hard he could push his crew to make the tighter deadline and it was clear he recognized the need for the revised schedule, that he’d have to drive them like a biblical slavemaster. His body was tense, like a cable on a bridge, and he seemed to vibrate, but then he accepted the inevitability of his decision and the muscles of his shoulders relaxed slightly.

A fist banged on the bathroom door.

“Hurry it up, man,” Foster Gly growled.

“A minute,” Brewster shot back. “The food you’re givin’ is killing me.”

Brewster’s eyes drilled into Bell’s, and he whispered as quiet and as deadly as a cobra. “If you’re not there on the first, most likely my boys are gonna kill me for what I done to them to make the deadline. They’re good lads all, but they’re facing some hardships no man or beast should endure. And if, by some miracle, they don’t kill me for pushing them so hard, Mr. Bell, I’m surely gonna kill you.”

Isaac Bell wasn’t someone to be intimidated or threatened, especially by a man he towered over, but the glare Brewster gave him suppressed the defiant reply he’d normally give in this situation.

“Understood, Mr. Brewster.”

The Coloradan yanked the chain to empty the toilet’s cistern. Bell let himself back into the closet in case Gly happened to check again.

“About time,” Gly said to Brewster when he stepped out of the small lavatory.

As Bell waited in the dark and cramped closet, breathing ammonia in concentrations not much weaker than smelling salts, he contemplated the only flaw that he could see in his plan—that he had no idea how to get access to an icebreaker or a captain reckless enough to attempt an evacuation of American miners from a Russian island with a vessel from the French Navy possibly lurking nearby.

He had four months.

17

Sandefjord, Norway