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

The oyster scow stopped alongside a ladder. Frost climbed fast as a grizzly. When he attained the pier’s deck, he stood still for a long moment, watching Bell circle overhead. Then he waved a triumphant good-bye and bolted toward the shore. Two big men in slouch hats—railroad company detectives—blocked his path. Frost flattened both yard bulls without breaking stride.

Bell’s eyes roved urgently over the industrial ground. There was no grass field in sight, of course. The rail yard was crisscrossed with freight trains, and the stockyards were thick with steers. He chose the only option. Battling a crosswind and hoping for eighty yards of open space, he tried to bring his aeroplane down on the pier that paralleled the one on which Frost had disembarked. A switch engine obligingly pulled a string of boxcars off it toward the yards. But stevedores scuttled about with wheelbarrows, and a team of horses ventured onto the pier, hauling a freight wagon.

The noisy racket of Bell’s Gnome engine, blatting loudly as he blipped it on and off to slow down, spooked the horses. They stopped dead in their tracks. When they saw the bright yellow monoplane dropping out of the sky, they reared and backed up. The stevedores dove for cover, clearing a path except for the wheelbarrows they abandoned.

The pier was eighty feet wide. The American Eagle’s wings spread forty feet. Bell brought her in right down the middle on a smooth wooden deck between two railroad tracks. His rubber-sprung wheels took the first impact, which forced them up to let the skids act as brakes. But the timbers were smoother than turf, and the Eagle glided like a skier on snow, losing almost no speed until it hit a wheelbarrow. The barrow tangled in the skids and caused the Eagle to tip forward onto her propeller. The nine-foot polished walnut airscrew snapped like a matchstick.

Bell jumped from the aeroplane and hit the ground running, extracting the empty magazine from his pistol and shoving in a fresh one. The ships moored along the pier that Frost had mounted from the scow blocked his view of the fleeing man. Bell was almost to the shore before he glimpsed Harry Frost, already on solid ground, running full tilt toward the stockyards.

Another railroad cop made the mistake of attempting to stop him. Frost knocked him down and jerked a revolver from the yard bull’s waistband. A fourth rail cop shouted at him and pulled a gun. Frost stopped, took careful aim, and shot him down. Now he stood his ground, turning on his heel, slowly, deliberately, daring any man to try to stop him.

Bell was a hundred yards behind, an impossibly long pistol shot, even with his modified No. 2 Browning. Pumping his long legs, he put on a burst of speed. At a distance of seventy-five yards, he aimed for Frost’s head, assuming that the marauder was wearing his bulletproof vest. It was still extreme range. He braced his pistol on a rock-steady forearm, exhaled, and smoothly curled his trigger finger. He was rewarded with a howl of pain.

Frost’s hand flew to his ear. The howl deepened to an angry animal roar, and he emptied the rail dick’s revolver in Bell’s direction. As the bullets whistled past, Bell fired again. Frost threw down his empty gun and ran toward the stockyards. Wild-eyed steers edged away. Frost vaulted a rail fence into their midst, and the animals stampeded from him, smashing into one another.

A steer jumped over the back of another and landed on the fence, knocking over a section. As fencing fell, animals crowded through the opening, leveling another section and then another, streaming in every direction, into the rail yard, onto a road to Weehawken, and toward the piers behind Bell. In seconds, hundreds of beef cattle were milling between him and Frost. Frost shoved through them, shouting and firing a gun he had pulled from his coat.

Bell was surrounded by horn-clashing, galloping animals. He attempted to clear a space by firing in the air. But for every fear-maddened creature that shied from the gunfire, another charged straight at him. He slipped on the dung-slicked cobblestones. A heel went out from under him, and he almost lost his footing. If he went down, he would be trampled to a pulp. An enormous whiteface steer came at him—a Texas Longhorn–Hereford crossbreed he knew well from his years in the West. Ordinarily more docile than they looked, this one was knocking smaller cows out of its way like bowling pins.

Bell holstered his pistol to free his hands. Seeing nothing to lose and his life to gain if he could only get out of the herd, he jumped with lightning speed, grabbing the whiteface’s horns with both hands and twisting himself over its head and onto its back. He clamped his knees with all his strength, grabbed the shaggy tuft between its horns with a steel fist, whipped off his flying helmet, and waved it like a bronco rider’s.

The frightened bucking steer kicked its legs into a frantic gallop, shoved through the writhing mob, leaped a tumbled length of fence, and thundered back into the now empty stockyard. Bell tumbled off and staggered to his feet. Harry Frost was nowhere to be seen.

He scoured the acres of cobblestoned corrals for Frost’s trampled body, peered into sheds and under the elevated office. He had no illusions about his own escape: he had been extremely lucky, and it was highly unlikely that Frost had been as fortunate. But he found no body, or even a dropped weapon or a torn coat or a mangled hat. It was as if the murderer had taken wing.

He kept hunting, as the stockmen began returning from the piers, the rail yards, and the city of Weehawken, driving captured steers that shambled into the yards too exhausted to pose any threat. Evening shadows cast by the stone cliffs of the