The Race by Clive Cussler (red white royal blue .txt) 📗

Bell rolled Archie onto the side of the wound while Josephine worked the cloth under him. Bell tied the ends.

“Grab those shrouds to keep him warm. Doctors!”

A doctor ran up at last. He banged his bag down, knelt beside Archie, and felt for a pulse. “Good job,” he said of the patch. “Are you a physician?”

“I’ve seen it done,” Bell answered tersely. On his own chest, he could have added, when he was twenty-two years old, by Joseph Van Dorn, calmly trying to save his apprentice’s life while tears were soaking his whiskers.

“What put the hole in him?” asked the doctor.

“Hollow-point .455.”

The doctor looked at Bell. “Is he a friend?”

“He is my best friend.”

The doctor shook his head. “I’m sorry, son. There’s a reason they call it a manstopper.”

“We need an ambulance.”

“One’s coming right now. The English birdman didn’t need it.”

WITHIN MINUTES ARCHIE was loaded into the ambulance and on his way to the hospital with two doctors riding with him. By then the Van Dorns had regrouped, and formed a powerful cordon around Josephine.

Harry Frost had escaped in the confusion.

Bell quickly organized a manhunt, which included alerting every hospital in the area.

“He’s carrying at least three slugs in him,” he said, “maybe four. And Archie broke his jaw.”

“We caught two of their crew, Isaac. Brooklyn toughs. I recognize one. He works for Rod Sweets, the opium king. What do we do with them?”

“See what you can get out of them before you hand them to the cops.” Bell had no doubt that Archie had romanced the local police when he first arrived at the racetrack. It was standard practice to cozy up and find who should be paid off to be friends in an emergency.

“They’re singing already. Frost paid them a hundred bucks a head. Gave them the dough up front so they could bank it with their girlfriends in case they got caught.”

“O.K. I doubt they’ll know anything useful about Frost. But see what you can learn. Then turn them in. Tell the cops Van Dorn will press charges. Give them a reason to hold them.”

Bell spoke briefly with Josephine to make sure she felt safe and to assure her that he had ordered up additional guards until they caught Frost. “Are you all right?”

“I’m going up,” she said.

“Now?”

“Flying clears my mind.”

“Don’t you have to replace the fabric you cut out of your airship?”

“I didn’t cut it from an essential surface.”

BELL HURRIED TO WHERE Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s biplane had struck the ground. It was a very odd coincidence that the Englishman’s accident had distracted everyone in Belmont Park, including his detectives, at the moment Harry Frost’s thugs attacked. In fact, it could not be a coincidence. Frost must have somehow engineered it.

Bell saw from a distance that the Farman had crashed nose first. Its fuselage was sticking straight up in the air like a monument, a tombstone, to poor Eddison-Sydney-Martin, who, if Bell’s suspicions were correct, was the victim of a murder, not an accident. The baronet’s wife was standing beside the wrecked biplane. A tall man in a flying helmet had his arm around her as if to comfort her. He was smoking a cigarette. He leaned down and whispered in her ear. She laughed.

Bell circled so he could see their faces. The man was Eddison-Sydney-Martin himself. He was dead white in the face, with a trickle of blood seeping from a bandage over his eye, and he was leaning heavily on Abby. But, miraculously, the Englishman was standing on his own two feet.

Bell looked again at the =wrecked Farman, and asked, “Who was driving your machine?”

Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin laughed. “I’m afraid I attended the entire adventure in person.”

“Something of a miracle.”

“The framework tends to absorb the impact—all that wood and bamboo collapses in a cushiony manner, if you know what I mean. So long as one doesn’t tumble out and snap one’s neck, or one’s motor doesn’t jump its moorings and crush one, one has a fair shot at surviving a smash. Not that a chap is not immensely grateful for whatever part luck plays, what?”

“I’m sorry to see you’re out of the race.”

“I’m not out of the race. But I do need another machine straightaway.”

Bell glanced at his wife, wondering whether, as she wrote checks, she would risk sending her husband up in the air again. Abby said, “Some clever folk in New Haven are experimenting with a sort of ‘headless’ Curtiss that has a lot of go.”

“They’ve a license from Breguet, who make an excellent machine,” her husband added.

“What went wrong?” Bell asked. “Why did she go down?”

“I heard a loud bang. Then a wire stay shrieked past my head. It would appear that a counterbracer parted. Unsupported, the wing collapsed.”

“Why did the counterbracing stay break?”

“That is something of a mystery. I mean, one never encounters shoddy construction on a Farman machine.” He shrugged. “My chaps are looking into it. But it’s all in the game, isn’t it? Accidents do happen.”

“Sometimes,” said Bell, even more convinced that the Englishman’s accident was no accident. He stepped closer to the wreck, where Lionel Ruggs, the Farman’s chief mechanician, was removing parts to be salvaged. “Did you find the wire that broke?” he asked.

“Bloody little that didn’t break,” Ruggs retorted. “She hit so hard, she’s mostly splinters.”

“I mean, the wire that broke that caused the accident. The baronet said he heard one let loose.”

“I’ve laid them all over there.” He pointed at a row of wires. “So far, I find none broken. It’s Roebling wire. Same as was spun into the cables that hold up the Brooklyn Bridge. Virtually indestructible.”

Bell went to look for himself. A helper, a boy no more than fourteen, came and went with more wire. He was puzzling over one end of a strand when Bell asked, “What do you have there, sonny?”

“Nothing.”

Bell took a shiny silver dollar from his pocket. “But you’re staring like something struck you—here.”

The boy grabbed the coin. “Thank you, sir.”

“Why don’t