The Bootlegger by Clive Cussler (novels in english TXT) 📗

“Didn’t get past that wire.”

Bell asked whether the black boat might have sunk in the channel before it reached the boathouse.

Darbee shook his shaggy head. “First of all, the channel ain’t deep. If he sunk, we’d see him sticking up. Second, I saw him go in here. And I saw them close that door.”

Bell beckoned Ed Tobin. “Bring your light.” Tobin and Darbee followed him outside. “Point it at the tracks.”

Ed shone his light on the rail. They knelt down and inspected it closely. “Son of a gun,” said Tobin. “Almost no rust on top.”

Bell ran his fingers along the side of the rail. The base and the web were heavily encrusted with iron oxide, but the running surface atop the head was almost smooth, the rust ground away recently by the wheels of a train.

“The builders told me,” said Bell, “that whoever bought the boat took it away on a railcar. Looks like they did it again.”

“Where?”

“They’ve had the better part of a day to take it anywhere. There’s a telephone inside. Call the railroad and get started tracking a flatcar. Where’s Dashwood?”

“Right here, Isaac. I was just checking the mansion.”

“Let’s see what they left behind.”

They stepped back into the lit boathouse.

Bell saw the blood rush from Dashwood’s face. His skin went dead white, and he seemed to be holding his breath. “Are you all right, James?”

Dashwood narrowed his eyes and appeared to be looking everywhere at once.

“James.”

“Sorry, Isaac.” His color returned as quickly as it had faded. But he still looked tense. “Threw me, for a second, back to the war. When we broke out of the trench and took a village, I’d climb the church belfry or the town hall cupola for a shooting position. When the Germans retreated, they’d booby-trap the place. My spotter stepped on the stairs and it blew him to kingdom come.”

“What did you see here?” Bell asked sharply. “What set you off?”

“It was the emptiness, I think. Deserted. Like we found in France.”

Bell saw the Prohibition agents clustered around the open strongbox. “What have you got there, gents?”

“That’s O.K., Mr. Bell. We’ll be confiscating this. It’s government property now.”

“Is there something in that strongbox?”

The agents moved closer, shielding it with their bodies.

“What is in there?” demanded Bell.

“Just a couple bucks. Looks like they took the money and ran and forgot a couple of bucks.”

“Don’t touch that money.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll count it up and take proper care of it. You go about your business.”

“Don’t touch it!” Bell roared. “It’s a booby trap.”

The Dry agents ignored him and grabbed the cash.

Isaac Bell caught one glimpse of what looked like thousands of dollars, not “a couple of bucks,” as he yanked Dashwood and Ed Tobin backwards through the door. With a flash of light and hollow Boom! an explosion erupted under the barrels of grain alcohol. Flaming liquid leaped to the rafters, and the whole place was afire in seconds.

23

MARAT ZOLNER drove Black Bird the length of Lake Erie in a single dark night.

With new propellers and driveshafts, and her Libertys freshly tuned, she cruised the two-hundred-forty-mile voyage from Buffalo Main Light to the mouth of the Detroit River at an easy-on-the-valves, fuel-stretching thirty miles an hour. Zolner kept her so far offshore, straddling the invisible border between Canada and America, that all he could see of the lights of Erie and Cleveland were low halos to the south. She slowed only twice: for heavy seas, when a squall lashed the western flats with wind and rain; and, earlier, to sink with her Lewis gun a wooden customs boat, which could never catch her but had a radio to report her presence.

Nearing the Detroit River, Zolner stopped off the Pelee Passage Light and flashed an Aldis signal lamp. A motorboat sped out from Point Pelee, driven by a Comintern Maritime Section agent with a smuggler’s knowledge of the long, narrow strait’s labyrinth of coves, islands, and inlets. He led the black boat up the Pelee Passage, past the Bar Point Shoal Lighthouse and into the Amherstburg Channel. Reserved for inbound shipping, the channel ran north between Bois Blanc Island and the Canadian mainland. They overtook monster shadows in the dark, six-hundred-foot iron ore carriers, riding high in ballast.

“What a wonderful place,” said Marat Zolner.

City lights and chimneys belching fire marked the office buildings, automobile plants, and foundries of Detroit on the American side of the river. On the Canadian side—ninety seconds at Black Bird’s top speed—were the “border cities” of Windsor, Riverside, Ford City, Walkerville, Sandwich, Ojibway, and La Salle. Their population was a mere tenth of Detroit’s, but they were as brightly lit, their waterfronts crammed with distilleries, breweries, and the government export docks where customs cleared alcohol for export. The cleared booze was absolutely legal until it crossed the international border in the middle of the river.

The boat leading them veered toward Windsor and pointed the way to a hidden inlet that led to a brick boathouse that had been built before the war for an industrialist’s yacht.

Black Bird rumbled into it. Men lowered the door, and she was safe.

•   •   •

ISAAC BELL ordered a dozen Van Dorn detectives to track the flatcar that had taken Black Bird from Marat Zolner’s Great River estate. He had no proof that Zolner had rented the estate; whoever had had paid cash through brokers who had disappeared. Vanished, too, were the agents who had arranged for the railroad to move the car. But if not Zolner, who else? Besides, Zolner or not, the black boat served the Comintern.

The Van Dorns started at Zolner’s siding, the remnants of a passenger spur that had served the exclusive South Side Sportsmen’s Club. The spur connected to the Montauk Branch of the Long Island Railroad. Detectives went west toward New York City and east toward Montauk Point. In both directions were many towns with freight sidings near creeks, inlets, and harbors.

Bell