The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

Knowing how few rounds remained in his pistol, Bell held his fire until he had better situational awareness and fully understood the scope and press of the attack. Near the gate they’d entered, he saw the upper half of several men just outside the wall. They had to be standing atop the delivery wagon. Yves Massard was there, holding a smoking shotgun pressed to his shoulder as he prepared to fire another shot. Other men were trying to find a way over the coiled barbed wire that topped the fence.

Bell didn’t know why Massard hadn’t used the gun back at the dock unless he and Gly thought they could get the job done with muscle alone or they didn’t want to draw undue attention. As he’d thought at the time, his single shot had been ignored, but a protracted gun battle would have brought the police.

Two thoughts struck him as he ran under a pull cart loaded with quarter-ton hogsheads of distilled Scotch whiskey. The first was that the shotgun had to be an expensive model to fire such a tight grouping at the range Massard had engaged from. The other was that the Frenchman wasn’t a very good shot, because he’d pulled it to the left and killed the brakeman rather than firing the double-aught straight into Bell’s back.

The shotgun roared again, and the gravel in front of Bell’s position turned into so much shrapnel when the lead pellets raked its surface. His eyes were spared the worst of it, but they teared up from a faceful of grit. His skin burned where sharp stone chips bit into his flesh. As the Frenchman was reloading, Al Coulter, who’d reached the locomotive’s cab, vented a shrieking blast of steam from the boiler that enveloped the train in a dense white cloud. Unseen in the mist, the engine began to creep forward, causing the string of mechanical couplings to clank taut.

Under cover of the cloud of steam, Bell scrambled out from under the cart and climbed up into the moving l

ocomotive’s cab. It was a tight fit, with all four men, but the labor of shoveling coal from the tender into the firebox would be better shared with him present.

Massard fired two more times. For the most part, the pellets pinged off the rolled-steel boiler, but a couple found their way into the cab and ricocheted for a couple of terrifying moments before falling harmlessly to the floor. Massard’s men were unable to find a way through the concertina wire without tearing themselves to shreds, and the gate remained impassable despite the unseen efforts of more hired thugs trying to force it from the outside.

For good measure, Alvin sounded the whistle as the train gathered speed out of the rail yard. Bell watched the wall, where Massard’s men were coming to the realization that they’d failed and were giving up their struggle to breach the wire. They watched bovinely as the train continued to pull inexorably from the depot. Massard was ready when it drew abreast of his position. It was his best angle from which to fire down on the locomotive. The door to the boxcar containing the ore and the remaining miners was closed on the Frenchman’s side, so all his rage was focused on the cab.

Unwilling to risk Massard’s getting off a lucky shot, Bell fired off three rounds just before both barrels of the Purdey 12-gauge thundered. From a moving vehicle, and at well over eighty paces, one of Bell’s shots still managed to strike one of Massard’s men and spin him into the tangle of razor wire. It was enough of a distraction to throw the Frenchman’s aim off. The tight spread of pellets peppered the engine’s tender.

And then the train was past the danger zone. The relief at making such an audacious escape made Bell laugh aloud. The others—Coulter and the two acting stokers, Hall and Caldwell—joined in.

31

The depot’s six rail spurs merged into a single track out of the yard, and, by necessity, Coulter kept the speed down so the train didn’t derail. They were also hauling at least a dozen cars, and the weight slowed the locomotive.

Bell holstered his weapon.

“How’d they find us, Mr. Bell?” Alvin Coulter asked.

Bell could safely remove Coulter from his list of suspects. He could have said nothing about knowing how to drive the locomotive and potentially strand them at the yard or, had he been the saboteur, he could have jammed up the controls once he was in the cab. The fact they were under way and almost clear of the freight depot meant he wasn’t Jake Hobart’s murderer. The same logic didn’t hold true for young John Caldwell. Volunteering to shovel coal put him in a better position to help the French agents than had he remained with the ore. He was glad Vern Hall was the second stoker because he was one less unknown variable.

“I’m not sure,” Bell lied.

He believed that the night the saboteur had informed the French the miners had been picked up from the beach by an Icelandic whaling ship, Bell recalled mentioning in the mess, before he’d been informed of the nature of Jake Hobart’s death, that they were heading to Aberdeen. That information had obviously been passed on as a contingency in case the Lorient failed to detain the Hvalur Batur.

After learning that one of the men was a murderer and had secretly used the radio, Bell should have changed the destination. Once again, he’d underestimated his opponent. So far, the cost of his mistake hadn’t been high, but, given the stakes, he expected that to change at any moment.

He said, “If I were to guess, I’d say the French ship that attacked us in the ice floe got word back to the Société des Mines before we sank them that we were steaming to Aberdeen. When they couldn’t reach the Lorient after a day or so, Gly and Massard crossed the Channel with a bunch of their heavies to meet us.”

Alvin and the other two seemed satisfied with Bell’s answer, and none saw the glaring hole in his hypothesis and asked the logical follow-up question of how the crew of the Lorient could possibly guess the whaler’s destination.

Bell leaned out of the cab’s open side just before they cleared the freight depot’s perimeter fence. He looked back along the length of the train. It appeared that the gate he’d wedged closed was now open. It didn’t really matter. They were accelerating smoothly and soon would be on the main line to Glasgow at a comfortable forty miles per hour.

“What about an oncoming train?” John Caldwell asked. His baby face was already streaked with sweat and coal dust from his labors shoveling. Tom Price sat on a spare stool ready to spell Caldwell when his strength waned.

Bell pointed to the telegraph lines. “They’ll cable ahead and make sure the line’s clear. At some point, they might try to stop us with a barricade, but not for a while. I doubt anyone’s ever stolen an English train before, so they’ll take time to get organized.”

“Can we get all the way to the south coast?” Coulter asked.

“No,” Bell said emphatically. “Glasgow’s a big city with a lot of train traffic. If we go that far, they’ll shunt us onto a dead-end spur. We need to leave the train before then.”

They soon left the lights of Aberdeen as the tracks took them along the coast. The sparsely populated farmland was as dark as the ocean surging off to the left side. Thankfully, the moon was high and full, bathing the landscape in a silvery aura that made the fields glow but turned shadows stark and impenetrable.

Bell believed that Gly and Massard’s next move was to race to Glasgow ahead of the train and steal the crates during the inevitable confusion of a mass arrest for—he considered the proper charge—grand theft railroad.

To counter the move, Bell had to get the men and ore off the train sooner and find a bigger, more powerful truck. He needed to telephone the Van Dorn office in London. He knew Joel Wallace was on his way north with additional men but hoped the local station chief had left someone behind to man the phones. Bell needed to know what ship Wallace had booked passage back to the States. He assumed they would sail out of Southampton, yet any number of other ports were possible.

Johnny Caldwell finally stepped back from heaving shovelfuls of coal into the hungry firebox, and Vern Hall, perhaps the most recovered of the sickly men, took his place. Caldwell crossed to the open window to let the chilled April air dry some of the sweat from his face and hair. No sooner had he draped himself over the sill, he came upright as if yanked by wires.

“Mr. Bell!” he shouted over the roar of the fire and the clang of the locomotive’s steel wheels. “You need to see this.”