The Race (Isaac Bell 4)
rut, and knelt to loosen another.
“If something were to happen to ‘Dmitri Platov,’ don’t worry.”
“What do you mean?. . Hurry it up! ” she shouted to her detective-mechanicians, who were tipping cans of gas and oil into the tanks. “What are you talking about? You’re Dmitri Platov.”
“‘Dmitri Platov’ is being watched by Bell’s detectives. He may have to suddenly disappear.”
Josephine untied the last tie-down, jumped up on the soapbox, and scrambled onto her machine, desperate to get up in the air. The train of her wedding dress tangled in a stay. “Knife!” she yelled to a detective-mechanician, who flicked open a sharpened blade and slashed the train off her dress.
“Keep it out of the propeller!” she ordered, and the mechanician dragged it away. Marco was still standing on the soapbox, his whiskered face inches from hers. “What about you?” she asked.
“I’ll be back. Don’t worry.”
She plunged her control post forward and pulled it back and tilted it sideways, checking that her elevator, rudder, and alettoni moved properly. “O.K., I won’t. Get out of my way. . Contact!”
She raced off the ground ten minutes behind Stevens.
Isaac Bell was already circling the field, having instructed Andy Moser to keep the motor warm and gas and castor oil topped off. From high in the air, he saw the North Side Coliseum, and all of Fort Worth, as a dull glow lost in the infinite sea of darkness that was the night-blackened Texas rangeland.
Josephine raced west, following the railroad tracks by the light of the moon.
The tall detective was right behind her, tracking the aviatrix by the pinprick of fire that marked her Antoinette’s exhaust. For the first ten miles, he kept slowing his engine so as not to overtake her. But when the glow of Fort Worth had completely disappeared, and the ground was as dark behind as it was ahead, he fixed his eyes on the double line of moonlit steel, took his finger off the blip switch, and let the Eagle fly.
BOOK FOUR
“in the air she goes! there she goes!”
34
HARRY FROST THOUGHT he heard something coming from the east. He saw no glow of a locomotive headlamp. But he knelt anyway and pressed his good ear to the cold steel rail to confirm that it was not a train. The track transmitted no tuning-fork vibration.
Dave Mayhew hunched over his telegraph key. It was he, eavesdropping on the railroad dispatchers, who had suddenly reported the startling news that several flying machines had ascended from Fort Worth in the dark. The blushing bride Josephine’s was among them.
“This time,” Harry Frost vowed in grave tones that chilled the hard-bitten Mayhew to the bone, “I’ll give her a wedding night she will never forget.”
He had been watching the eastern sky for nearly an hour, hoping to see her machine silhouetted against first light. So far, nothing. Still dark as a coal mine. Now he was sure he heard a motor.
He turned left and called into the dark, “Hear me?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Frost.”
He turned right and shouted again.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Frost.”
“Get ready!”
He waited for a return shout, “Ready!” turned to his right, shouted again, “Get ready!” and heard, “Ready!” back.
Sound carried in the cold night air. He heard the distinctive metallic snick when, to either side of him, the machine gunners levered open their Colts’ action to chamber their first rounds.
There were three men on each gun, knee-deep in rainwater left by the evening storms: a gunner, a feeder to the gunner’s left guiding the canvas belt of cartridges, and a spotter with field glasses. Frost kept Mike Stotts standing by to run with orders if they couldn’t hear him.
The noise grew louder, the sound of a straining machine. Then Frost distinguished the clatter of not one but two motors. They must be flying very close to each other, he thought. Too close. Something was wrong. Suddenly he realized that he was hearing two poorly synchronized engines driving Steve Stevens’s biplane. Stevens was in the lead.
“Hold your fire! It’s not her. Hold your fire!”
The biplane passed over, motors loud and ragged, flying low so the driver could see the rails. Josephine would have to fly low, too, making her an easy target.