The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

Bjørnson was also guzzling water from a canteen, so Lars answered, “The fairlead under the cannon was finally sealed. That room’s airtight so long as it and this hatch here are closed. The fire will put itself out. We can enter in twenty or so minutes with water hoses and cool everything so the fire does not re . . . ah . . .”

“Reignite,” Bell offered. The men all had such a good command of English that he sometimes forgot it wasn’t their first language.

“Ja.” Lars was unreeling a two-inch canvas hose from a wall-mounted firefighting station.

Isaac hauled himself to his feet. He was unsteady for a moment but found his center. “You don’t need me, then. I’m going to see who the hell was taking potshots at us with a machine gun.”

From the floor, Arn offered his hand to shake. Bell did. The two men nodded. No words were necessary.

“Mr. Olufsen, I advise you round up all the miners and confine them to the mess until we get everything sorted out.”

The man looked at him with incomprehension.

“Don’t let on that we suspect, but this fire was likely deliberate.”

At that, the man gaped.

Bell took just a second to rush to his cabin. On his way, he passed weary miners and mariners, each seemingly paused midstride since no one ahead was asking for more sand. The bucket brigade had come to a halt.

“We did it, men,” he told them as he passed, patting Tom Price on the shoulder in recognition. “We beat the fire.” The cheers were ragged, exhausted, but heartfelt.

In his room he soaked a cloth in water left in the basin from that morning and wiped the worst of the smudges from his face. He stripped off his sweater to don his only spare. He still felt grimy, and his eyes would be red for hours. And his chest ached. But at least he could stand his own smell.

“Report,” Captain Fyrie snapped from the helm as soon as Bell stepped onto the bridge. He hadn’t turned toward Bell but had detected him coming up the stairs in his peripheral vision.

“We had the fire three-quarters out when the room was sealed. Arn’s waiting twenty minutes before moving in with the hoses. He seems confident. I’ve instructed Second Engineer Olufsen to keep all the miners in the mess for a while.”

Bell studied the ship’s surroundings. The sky was streaked with purple clouds, the sea remained inky. A towering berg cut off his view starboard. The mass of ice stretched at least a mile, and ahead was another berg, only slightly smaller. Others sat stolidly to port and more loomed in their wake. Of the ship that had attacked earlier, he saw no trace. What dominated his attention, however, was the long, coiling finger of smoke that rose from the ship to a height of several thousand feet, proclaiming their location as surely as if they were an island marked on a nautical chart.

“Who was it?”

“No flag, but it’s got to be the French you warned me about. Hundred feet long. Painted dark gray. Looked like military surplus. Machine gunner was on a platform aft of the bridge. On her foredeck is a cannon turret. Don’t know if it works. Aft, she carried twin cranes with extended-length booms.”

“How’d they find us so quickly?” Bell asked, more of himself than actually seeking an answer.

Fyrie replied anyway. “I made a mistake. I expected them to remain east of us when I believed we were flanking them, but the French captain is smart. He came west immediately and set a picket for when we turned south along the Norway coast. I thought we were farther offshore than we are. I turned right into where he was waiting for us. The smoke pouring off our bow was all he needed to zero in.”

“Damned bad luck, is all,” Bell said, trying to ease the captain’s guilt. “We’ll figure something out.”

“Will we?” he shot back. “They’ve got a machine gun, Mr. Bell. Magnus saw the whole thing. That initial barrage we heard? It hit Petr first. He had just reached the pulpit. Magnus said he came apart like he was made of wet red straw. I managed to get some distance on them so Mags could finally seal the mechanical room, but if they find us again in all these bergs, I’m surrendering the minute he gets his sights on us.”

Bell let a moment pass so Fyrie could get his temper under control.

“They won’t leave any witnesses, Ragnar.” He deliberately used the captain’s Christian name. The man was reeling from the death of a crewman, the fact that a saboteur had tried to burn his ship, and that he was now being actively hunted, the irony of which couldn’t be lost on a man who himself hunted across all corners of the ocean. “I am sorry about your man. But the truth is, if we surrender, they get the ore without having to fight for it. It won’t change our fate.”

“Are you saying we’re dead either way?”

Bell shook his head, a devilish glint in his bright blue eyes. “I’m saying we take control of our fate. They picked the fight, Captain. I say we end it. And I know how.”

26

The explosion came a few moments later, while Bell was outlining his plan, and was followed almost immediately by the boom of the French ship’s bow cannon hurling a solid projectile over their heads. The shell had struck a hundred feet up the side of a large berg they had sought shelter in the lee of, and chunks of its ice, some the size of refrigerators and larger, were blown from the berg and crashed into the sea. Smaller bits raked the side of the Hvalur Batur like a fresh barrage from the machine gun.

Before the echo had a chance to dissipate, as it rattled through the field of ice, the French fired again. This time, the shell landed lower, just above the smokestack, but also a good hundred feet behind them.

Straight off the port beam, about a half mile distant, was another berg that resembled a flat-topped mesa from the American Southwest. Steaming around it, and headed right for them, was the French ship Lorient, its bow still obscured by white smoke from the brace of shots it had just fired.

Captain Fyrie cursed and jerked the engine telegraph to emergency full power. Bell plucked the binoculars from their canvas sling and glassed the approaching ship. The Lorient was swinging to port in order to keep her bow pointed straight at the Hvalur, and Bell suspected he knew why. The whaler wasn’t quick or maneuverable, so coming up to speed took time. This allowed the prow of the French ship to track her progress across the face of the big berg as though it were the barrel of a shotgun swinging around at an escaping bird.