The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

By five o’clock in the afternoon following the bar fight, everything was as ready as it could be. Night was falling in the northern latitudes, and the stars and moon were covered by a blanket of high clouds. The harbor itself remained glassy calm, the reflection of the town’s lights lancing across its surface in perfectly straight lines.

Bell implemented the last part of the initial phase of the plan personally. At the base of the Hvalur Batur’s gangplank sat the little metal guard shack, with its blackened chimney poking through the roof and wisps of fragrant smoke blowing out across the water. The same guard was on duty, and his eyes lit up when Bell approached and pulled a bottle of clear liquid from inside his peacoat. The man quickly stepped out into the chilly night air.

“This is to thank you,” the Van Dorn detective said, handing over the liquor.

The guard smiled a little. “I hear you find Captain Fyrie and also captain of the Isbjørn. Ja?”

“Any word how he’s doing?”

“His mouth, ah, teeth. No, jaw. His jaw is closed for a month with wire.”

“Wrong place, wrong time.” Bell shrugged.

“Ach, the man is a raevhål. Um, a—”

“No need to translate,” Bell assured him quickly. “Enjoy your drink. And thanks again.” He thrust his hands back into his pockets and ambled off down the street. When he looked back, he could see the guard retaking his seat in the shack and tilting the bottom of the bottle toward the ceiling.

At its strongest, the native drink called akvavit is eighty proof. Bell had just handed over a bottle of West Virginia low-holler white lightning flavored with Georgia peaches. It was ninety-five percent alcohol. Three shots of that moonshine and the man would be incoherent and never know what hit him.

When Bell returned twenty minutes later with the truck, the guard was facedown on the desk and the bottle was a third empty. He’d be out until dawn.

In the back of the truck were six of the oaken barrels. Each weighed about three hundred pounds and was filled with water just a few degrees below boiling. They’d cooled some on their journey, and would keep doing so, but Bell’s plan needed to start with water well above the near-freezing temperatures of the harbor. The Icelandic sailors had little trouble wrestling the barrels off the back of the truck and rolling them up the gangplank.

Once the first barrel was on deck, the chief engineer was waiting with a hose connected directly to the whaler’s boilers. Even as the second and third barrels were being manhandled up the plank, he was draining the first into the propulsion system. Bell had explained his concept by using electricity as an example.

“A good electrician can bypass an active circuit if he’s careful enough. It saves time by not having to shut down the power. They call it hot-wiring. What we are going to do, essentially, is ‘hot-pipe’ your boilers, and the first step is to heat the water as much as we can off-site before I pull the next trick from up my sleeve.”

When the last barrel was off the truck, but before it had been rolled up the ramp, Bell was behind the wheel of the Leyland driving back to the barn behind his hotel for the next load of preheated water. This was how he was getting past Captain Fyrie’s concern about thermal inertia. It took time. By outsourcing the first one hundred and fifty degrees to the boiler in the barn, they’d need far less energy, and time, to bring the mass of water in the engine’s tank to a full boil and produce enough pressure to energize the Hvalur Batur.

By eleven o’clock, with no one the wiser that anything was taking place, they had four thousand gallons of preheated water in the whaler’s boilers. Once they got the water up to steam, the automatic introduction of additional cold water from the seawater inlets wouldn’t chill the system so much as to cause a drop in pressure. The boiler was said to be self-sustaining at this point.

The trick now was to get the water to a high boil because they were racing the clock. Every minute in the icy tanks meant the water was losing another fraction of a degree of heat.

“Okay,” Ragnar Fyrie said. They were in the Batur’s engine room. “You’ve taken us this far. Show the men what you demonstrated this morning.”

Bell had done a small-scale demo for the captain and chief engineer in order to convince them his plan was viable. Now it was time to make it happen for real. He had worked it all out with the engineer back in New York and had conducted enough experiments to convince them both of the plan’s viability, but still so much rode in the balance for the next hour or two.

“Right. Salt, iron, and magnesium mixed together do absolutely nothing. But mix them with water and you create an exothermic reaction.” His last words lost his audience, so he said, “The chemicals will produce heat. Lots and lots of heat.”

He’d premeasured the chemicals and combined them in the proper ratio. The ship was running a diesel generator to produce heat so the men could live aboard throughout the cold winter, and the electricity it provided had been shunted to the boiler pumps so that about fifty gallons of water could be isolated in a separate tank but still be able to be added back to the steam loops when needed.

Bell used a scoop to pour his chemical mix

ture through an opening at the top of the tank. The engineer, Ivar Ivarsson, was ready with a hastily made cap with a hose running from it. Inside the tank, the chemicals came in contact with the water and a fast chain reaction took place. Chemical bonds broke down and reformed, and in the end the water was superheated and a cloud of hydrogen gas was forced out through the hose. The tube ran down to the main firebox, where it was paired with a line from a natural gas tank. When the hydrogen reached the air, Ivar lit the natural gas. The blue flame, augmented by the highly flammable hydrogen, amplified the chemical reaction taking place inside the tank.

Moments later, the muffled burble of the reaction inside the steel vessel waned. The engineer purged the tank and added fresh water that Bell quickly laced with the powdered mixture of salt, iron dust, and an oxide of magnesium. It too came within just a couple of degrees of boiling before the reaction abated. It took a couple of hours, and they lost heat in the process, but without producing any discernible exhaust Isaac Bell had been able to bring thousands of gallons of water aboard up to within just a few degrees of operational temperatures.

“So now what?” Ivar asked, wiping grease from his hands on a wadded cotton cloth. “If the boiler was a woman, I’d say you have her attention. But she hasn’t said yes yet.”

“Ultimate icebreaker,” Bell said, and opened the last of his trunks. This was a smaller one, and its insides had been triple-secured against any moisture getting in. “Captain, I advise you get to the bridge because we’re going to be up to operating temperatures and pressures in moments. Have men in place to cast off and your harpooner ready to snag our goodies on the way out.”

“What’s in there?” Ivar asked suspiciously, pointing at the waxed paper bundle contained inside the trunk.

“It’s called thermite. This particular version is made of powdered aluminum and some other chemicals. It’s a recent German discovery. When I dump this into the main tank, the reaction is going to be swift and violent. The heat will flash-boil enough water to bring your engines up to at least half speed. Also, it should be sustained for twenty minutes at least.”

Fyrie grinned like a pirate. “More than enough time. Mr. Bell, I must say I am not disappointed that you came into our lives.” He cast a glance to his crewmen huddled around in the boiler room. “Magnus, get over to the barge and be ready to tie it off. Arn, get to your cannon and make damned sure you don’t have an explosives tip on the harpoon. Petr, go find Other Petr and be ready to cast off.

“Once we’re clear of the harbor, provided no one is chasing, we’ll head to the islands just south of Reykjavik. It’s well sheltered, so the transfer should go smoother, but it will in no way be easy. Our next stop will be Denmark for provisions and then Novaya Zemlya, some two thousand four hundred kilometers northeast. Once we drop Mr. Bell and his guests . . . Ah, where do you want us to take you?”