Wong took a breath and attached the positive wire to the detonator’s second leg. Nothing happened. Of course, he thought wryly, if it had gone wrong he wouldn’t know it, being suddenly dead. He scrambled up the ladder, emerged from the hatch, and told the man steering to signal the schooner. It came alongside, sails flapping wetly, and banged hard against the lighter.
“Take it easy!” yelled Weitzman. “You want to kill us?”
“Chinaman!” yelled Captain Yatkowski. “Get up here.”
Wong Lee launched his creaky middle-aged limbs up a rope ladder. He had climbed much worse in the mountains, but he had been thirty years younger.
“Weitzman!” the captain yelled. “Do you see the pier?”
“How could I miss it?”
Electric lights blazed a quarter mile ahead. The railroad cops had it lit up like the Great White Way so no one could sneak up on them from the yards, but it had never occurred to them that somebody would sneak up from the water.
“Aim her at it and get off quick.”
Weitzman turned the wheel until he had lined Lillian I’s bow with the lights on the powder pier. They were coming in from the side, and the pier was six hundred feet long, so even if she went off course a bit she would still hit close enough to the five boxcars of dynamite.
“Quick, I say!” roared the captain.
Weitzman didn’t need any urging. He scrambled onto the wooden deck of the schooner.
“Go fast!” shouted Wong. “Get us away.”
No one was better qualified than Wong to understand the forces about to be unleashed on the rail yards, the harbor, and the cities around it.
When Wong and the schooner’s crew looked back to check that the steam lighter was on course, they saw a New Jersey Central Railroad ferryboat cast off lines to steam out of the Communipaw Passenger Terminal. A train must have just pulled in from somewhere, and the ferry was taking the passengers on the last leg.
“Welcome to New York!” the captain muttered. When twenty-five tons on the lighter detonated one hundred tons on the powder pier, that ferryboat would vanish in a ball of fire.
25
MARION MORGAN STOOD OUTSIDE ON THE OPEN DECK OF THE Jersey Central Ferry. She pressed against the railing, ignoring the rain. Her heart was pounding with joy and excitement. She had not seen New York City since her father had taken her on a trip back East when she was a little girl. Now dozens of skyscrapers with lighted windows soared just across the river. And somewhere on that fabled island was her beloved Isaac Bell.
She had debated whether to wire ahead or surprise him. She had settled on surprise. Her trip had been on again and off again and on again as Preston Whiteway juggled his busy schedule. He had decided at the last minute to stay in California and send her to meet with his bankers in New York to present his proposal for financing the Picture World moving picture newsreels. The brash young newspaper publisher must have been impressed enough by her banking experience to give her such an important assignment. But the real reason he would send a woman, she suspected, was that he hoped to woo her and thought that the way to her heart was to respect her independence. She had invented a phrase to emphasize to the persistent Whiteway her commitment to Isaac.
My heart is spoken for.
She had already had to use it twice. But it said it all, and she would use it ten times if she had to.
The rain was thinning and the city lights were bright. As soon as she got to her hotel, she would telephone Isaac at the Yale Club. Respectable hotels like the Astor frowned upon unmarried women receiving gentleman visitors. But there wasn’t a house dick in the country who would not turn a blind eye to a Van Dorn operative. Professional courtesy, Isaac would smile.
The ferry tooted its whistle. She felt the propellers shudder beneath her feet. As they pulled away from the New Jersey shore, she saw the sails of an old-fashioned schooner silhouetted by a brightly lighted pier.
IT HAD TAKEN FOUR men a full ten minutes to lift the heavy automatic machine gun atop the boxcar. And as Isaac Bell had predicted, the railroad police manning the water-cooled, tripod-mounted, belt-fed Vickers on top of the dynamite train stayed wide awake. But Eddie Edwards, the forty-year-old Van Dorn investigator with a startling shock of prematurely white hair, kept climbing up the boxcar’s ladder to check on them anyway.
Their weapon was equally reliable, adapted from the Maxim gun which had proved itself mowing down African armies. One of the rail bulls was a transplanted Englishman who told tales of slaughtering “natives” with a Maxim in the previous decade’s colonial wars. Edwards had instructed him to leave the natives of Jersey City alone. Unless they tried something. The old gangs there weren’t as tough as they had been when Edwards had led the Van Dorn fight to clear the rail yards, but they were still ornery.
Standing on top of the railcar, turning slowly on his heel and surveying the machine gun’s field of fire, which now encompassed a full circle, Edwards was reminded of the old days guarding bullion shipments. Of course the Lava Bed Gang’s weapons in those days were mostly lead pipes, brass knuckles, and the occasional sawed-off shotgun. He watched a brightly lit ferry leaving Communipaw Terminal. He turned back toward the gate, blocked by three coal tenders and manned by cinder dicks with rifles, and saw that the freight yards looked as calm as a freight yard ever looked. Switch engines were scuttling about making up trains. But in each cab rode an armed detective. He looked back at the river. The rain was lifting. He could see the lights of New York City clearly now.
“Is that schooner going to run into that steam lighter?”
“No. They were close, but they’re moving apart. See? He’s sailing off, and the lighter’s turning this way.”
“I see,” said Edwards, his jaw tightening. “Where the hell is he going?”
“Coming our way.”
Edwards watched, liking the situation less and less.