The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

Another blast from the cannon sent a projectile flashing past them. It hit the berg off the starboard side. Bell was showered with bits of ice and snow but was otherwise unharmed. He crouched. The two ships were about to come abreast of each other with little more than fifty feet separating the hulls. The enemy machine gunner was about to enjoy the best hunting of his military career.

From his concealed position, Bell could see the gunner, who was wearing a long khaki greatcoat and a fur hat. He stood behind a pintle-mounted Hotchkiss M1909, fitted with a small armor shield. Bell recognized the weapon by its distinctive brass feeding strip inserted on the right side of the receiver. As the gun was fired, the strip slid through the mechanism until it fell out as the last round left the barrel. Each strip held thirty 8-millimeter bullets, and the gun could fire at nearly six hundred rounds per minute.

At this range, the majority of the bullets would rip right through the wheelhouse’s thin steel skin.

“Arrêtez-vous!” someone called out from the other ship but gave no time to have his demand heeded before the gunner racked back on the Hotchkiss’s charging handle.

Bell rose up from his hiding place. The ships were side by side, passing each other at a combined speed of twenty knots, but there was more than enough time for the gunner to wreak such devastation that the Icelandic whaler would be all but dead in the water. The gunner didn’t see him. He was crouched behind his weapon, sighting in to unleash a barrage on the superstructure.

Arn had to be watching all of this from where he was hiding, and Bell knew the man would instinctively react because his captain was in danger. Bell would have done the same. But the plan called for the harpooner to remain unseen until Bell engaged the machine gunner. If Arn made his move too soon, then he and the rest of the crew were going to die.

Shouting at the top of his lungs, his voice echoing off the towering ice massif in front of him and sounding like the banshee wail from mythology, Bell took aim with his .45 and started firing.

The machine gunner too opened up with quick, controlled bursts that reverberated like an autocannon, the plink of lead against steel lost in the din of exploding powder and dropping brass. Bell kept firing with one hand, holding steady, until a few rounds hit close enough to the French sailor to draw his attention. The sailor stopped firing at the pilothouse and swung the heavy machine gun around to direct his aim toward the armed threat at the whaling ship’s stern.

Bell saw the muzzle coming toward him and still he kept pulling the trigger. He dropped the box magazine from the .45’s grip when the last round was still in the chamber so he wouldn’t lose time pulling his aim off target to recock the pistol. The French gun was almost on him. Bell had played it out as long as he could, but his definition of bravery wasn’t being the target of an automatic weapon. He managed firing one more round, and was about to drop behind the capstan, when the French gunner suddenly ducked low behind his little armor shield. That last bullet had hit close enough to make him seek cover. Bell tightened his grip, rummaging in a pocket for his last magazine, while he fired shot after shot.

Unseen on the bow, and totally ignored, thanks to Bell’s efforts, Arn Bjørnson tossed aside the stained canvas sheet he’d hidden himself under and rose up behind the big harpoon cannon. Had he moved a single second sooner, the French gunner would have seen him and he would have been cut down as easily as his crewmate Petr. The harpoon cannon had been primed and loaded. All he need do was grab the trigger grip and muscle the barrel into position. He’d done this a thousand times on targets not much smaller than the French ship. And, for the first time, he’d take some satisfaction in the hunt.

The harpoons were fired using an explosive charge in a breach chamber much like a conventional cannon. Only, these projectiles were heavily barbed and tipped with an explosive to kill their quarry as mercifully as possible. Prior to the engagement, and at Isaac Bell’s urging, he’d double-loaded the harpoon with a second grenade. And now he swung the cannon over and down until the Lorient’s lower hull showed in the aiming reticle. Aft of him, the French shooter had paused, and he could hear the steady crack, crack, crack of the American’s handgun.

r />

Arn pulled the trigger, and the big cannon thundered. Unburdened by the rope it normally trailed behind it, the harpoon flew straight and true and struck the French ship just above the waterline at just about where Bjørnson had estimated the engine room would be. It hit with a heavy clang, and half of the three-foot projectile buried itself in the steel side of the ship, meaning both grenades were inside the hull when they exploded.

The blast sent a shock wave racing across the waters almost faster than the eye could track, and the Hvalur Batur began to heel onto her port side even as fire and smoke erupted from the French vessel in a vision straight out of hell. The explosion tore a hole in her side big enough to drive an automobile through. Water began sluicing down the rupture in an unending surge. It took just seconds to fill the spaces below engineering and climb high enough to envelop the boiler.

The thermal shock of ice water quenching the red-hot firebox and massive steam tanks blew the aft section of the ship into oblivion. Bell had sought cover behind the windlass as soon as he heard Arn fire the cannon but still cringed, as if to make himself even smaller, as the concussion and spray of shrapnel rolled across the whaler. He chanced looking up to see the bow of the Société’s warship slow to a stop and then get pulled under the waves in a sucking maelstrom of bubbles and debris.

Already weakened by the warming spring temperatures, the iceberg looming over the Icelandic whaler shuddered at the reverberating onslaught of such a nearby explosion. Chunks weighing many times that of the ship dropped off the sheer face of the berg. The ship itself was just out of range, but the swells created when they collapsed into the sea would have swamped them had the captain not spun the whaler to take them on the rear quarter rather than broadside.

Afterward, nothing of the Lorient remained on the surface of the sea but a few bits of flotsam and some smoldering wreckage no larger than steamer trunks. It was all that marked the grave of the men sent to murder the Coloradans.

Suspended above the awful destruction, the discharged cloud of superheated steam from the boilers had transformed from gas to solid in the shape of shimmering particles of ice that filled the air as enchantingly as fairy dust.

The Hvalur Batur bobbed like a child’s toy in a bathtub, and Bell was forced to totter drunkenly back to the bridge. He lurched up the stairs, dread rising in his chest at what he’d find when he reached the bridge. He knew Fyrie was alive—he’d steered them out of harm’s way following the icy avalanche—but that didn’t mean he’d survived the autofire unscathed.

“Ragnar. It’s Bell,” he called halfway up the steps. “Are you okay?”

He reached the bridge. The portside wall was peppered with a dozen holes, and the window glass in the bridge wing door was missing. Arctic air whistled through the holes and gusted through where the glass was missing. What little decorative woodwork the bridge had possessed was now so many splintered shards. Fyrie himself stood among the destruction without any outward sign of being attacked. He turned to Bell with a slight shrug as if to convey a recognition of the absurdity this trip had become.

“Upon further consideration, Mr. Bell,” he said at last, “I believe it would have been in our best interest to remain in the custody of the Norwegian authorities back in Sandefjord.”

Bell saw out on the prow that Arn Bjørnson had finished securing the harpoon cannon and was making his way back from the pulpit. “And I wouldn’t blame you for that assessment one bit,” he said.

They shared the laugh of men who’d cheated death by the narrowest of margins. But then both remembered that one of the crew had paid for the escape with his life, and the laughter died on their lips.

Like a harbinger of ill omens, the chief engineer climbed up from the main deck a few minutes later. He had some crewmen with him, who got busy patching holes and boarding up the window.

“How does she look, Ivar?”

“We might make Aberdeen, Captain, but I don’t see the old girl steaming back to Reykjavik without a long overhaul in dry dock. The hull plates are buckled a lot worse than I first thought. I had to reset my plug, thanks to you running about like a madman, and I realized the damage is bad. The keel itself might even be compromised. I’ve got a few new leaks on the boiler system from blown fittings. That will keep us slow enough to protect the plug since I have enough steam pressure for ten knots.”

“Anything else?”

“All the arresting gear in the mechanical room is so much charred junk now. None of it’s salvageable. We lost the aft deck main derrick. It’s just gone. And you can see what a mess they made of the bridge. Radio’s shot dead, charts are ruined. Only a few panes of glass remaining.”

Fyrie moved the handle of the engine telegraph. It flopped uselessly, obviously ruined by the Hotchkiss. “And this.”