The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

“No, but it’s the best we have.”

The captain bit at his lip in worry, not about himself but about his crew.

Two crewmen arrived on the bridge with Arn, who’d changed out of his smoke-infused clothes but whose face remained streaked with soot. They fitted a sheet of plywood already cut to size over the broken window. The relief from the cold and wind was almost instantaneous. They also used a couple of magnets to secure some thick paper stock over the hole blown through the back of the radio room. Arn stoked the potbellied stove until it was almost glowing. When the work was done, Bell and Fyrie went over their plan and made certain the big harpooner understood the risks. If he was concerned, he gave no indication.

Two tension-filled hours later, they were still working to get into the proper position. It was a game of chess, with each ship playing the role of queen, and the expanse of icebergs as the board determining which moves were possible. Twice the French ship had appeared from around a berg and opened fire with its cannon. They weren’t trying to sink the whaler—otherwise, they’d lose the prize—but the shots roared by the pilothouse close enough to burn off paint and singe the metal. The scream of their passage rattled the windows and left the men temporarily deafened.

To make things worse, a fog had descended, lacy and a-swirl, deadening noise so that everything sounded muffled and oddly distant, the groaning of the ice became a haunting lament. The hunt was slow. Each time they thought they spotted the Lorient, it turned out to be a small berg. The occasional crash of ice cascading off the face of a taller berg sent jolts of adrenaline through Bell’s body. At one point, as the afternoon wore on, a big iceberg lost in the mist calved enough that its center of gravity shifted and it flipped entirely over in the water, splashing and thrashing like a drowning victim.

The fact that they were being hunted in a ship that was taking on water without any visible means of defending itself made the experience just one degree more unnerving. But Captain Fyrie acquitted himself well, in Bell’s estimation. He was making the best of a horrendous situation and remaining in full command and calm, even when artillery shells were falling around his ship.

During what seemed like a lull in the hunt, the sun suddenly burning through the fog and the air turning crystalline, Bell went below to check on the miners. They were growing resentful of being forced to stay in the mess. Bell explained that because of the pursuit by agents of th

e Société des Mines, staying in the dining area was for their own safety. As he talked, he couldn’t help but think one of them had deliberately set the fire without knowing how large the blaze could grow. He’d risked a conflagration that could have killed them all. That the arsonist was a native Coloradan, a man well known to the others, made his act of sabotage especially fiendish. He had no compunction about seeing his fellow miners dead so his French conspirators could take possession of the byzanium ore.

Such reptilian disdain was chilling.

27

Bell felt a renewed tension as soon as he climbed back to the bridge. In the chasm between two towering icebergs ahead of them, the converted French warship was steaming away from the whaler. They’d surely spotted the quarry, but in the confines between the pair of bergs there wasn’t enough room in the sea to turn the ship and launch another attack.

“This could be our chance,” Fyrie said.

“Not if they reach the end of the bergs and come about,” Bell countered, putting the binoculars to his eyes. “We’ll be trapped like a rat in a sewer pipe.”

“Then let’s hope Ivar’s plug holds.” The captain ratcheted the engine telegraph, asking for full power.

Down in the engine room, Ivar Ivarsson and his men began adding their own labor to the automatic feeding system, shoveling bucket after bucket of crushed coal into the firebox so the heat swelled and the pressures rose. The ship’s acceleration wasn’t very dramatic, but it did come.

Fyrie’s attention never left the French ship. They knew the prey was behind them because they had increased speed, if the expanding plume of smoke belching from her stack was any indication. He was judging angles and relative speeds, committing to one final gamble. Because if the Lorient managed to turn in time, their range meant the pilothouse could be scythed off the Hvalur with just a couple well-placed shots and the fight would be over.

Several minutes elapsed. Bell struggled not to ask the captain if they were going to make it.

The two ships kept accelerating down the gap between the miles-long icebergs. As night approached, the air temperature between the bergs dropped and yet another fog began to coil off the surface of the sea. It wasn’t thick enough to be dangerous, but the effect was eerie.

The French were a half mile ahead and approaching the point where the berg on the left ended in a tall, spiked peak resembling a miniature Matterhorn. The Lorient began to turn to starboard to swing around and race back at the whaler before she broke free of the gap herself.

The captain’s hands remained loose and relaxed on the wheel, his eyes squinting just a fraction. The engine’s thrum was like a heartbeat, rhythmic and powerful. Aft, her wake was a creaming white line that spread in a V and lapped at the base of the icebergs.

“Well?” Bell asked when he could stand it no more.

“She’s faster than I thought. They might get a shot off, but not two.”

Cutting as tight an arc as she could manage, the French vessel continued to turn while the Hvalur Batur charged down the gap at her best possible speed.

“You’d best get into position, Mr. Bell. Good luck.”

Bell had donned a coat and had the equipment he needed. “To us all, Captain.”

He went down the stairs and out onto the deck via one of the hatches. The wind slammed into him, forcing him to take a few staggering steps before gaining solid footing. The ship was cutting through the sea at better than fifteen knots. The fog was clammy and diaphanous, and Bell felt disoriented by it and the sight of the massive walls of ice streaming past him as they raced after the French warship. The icebergs felt close enough to touch.

He found cover at the stern rail behind one of a pair of winches used to haul in the carcasses of the massive whales the ship so doggedly hunted. He could look ahead and see the enemy had almost completed the turn. The ship had looped wide to port in order to come around parallel to the larger of the two bergs. Had she not been able to turn so tightly, she would have slammed bow first into the wall of ice. As it was, the Lorient came dangerously close to sideswiping the iceberg and that would have torn her hull open like she was made of paper. Bell could only wish to be that lucky.

The French steamer completed its turn and was barely a thousand feet from them and charging hard under a pall of coal smoke. The two vessels were now coming at each other like jousting knights racing down the lists. Only one of the knights sported a lance, in the guise of a five-inch gun. The other appeared defenseless.

Bell watched a silent gout of white smoke explode from the cannon. The sound of the blast took a moment to reach him, but the scream of shot was near instantaneous. The shell struck one of the tall derricks on the aft deck, severing the steel column halfway up. The crane crashed down in a tangle of lines and pulleys and ruined metal, forcing Bell to hurl himself over the winch capstan to avoid being crushed. He immediately had to leap back as the mass of debris didn’t settle on deck but rather was dragged over the side of the ship by its own weight. It vanished into the foggy wisps and inky sea as surely as if it had been swallowed.

On the bridge, Fyrie spun the wheel to get them out of the direct line of fire and called for full reverse on the telegraph to slow the headlong rush toward the French.