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

shreds. The vertical tail with its rudder went next. A thousand feet above the ground, the baronet’s swift headless pusher fell like a stone.

31

“CAT RAN OUT OF LIVES.”

“Don’t say that!” Josephine rounded on the mechanician who had muttered what they all feared. She ran to Abby, who was weeping. But when she tried to hold her, the baronet’s wife pulled back and held herself stiff as a marble statue.

All Josephine could think of was Marco promising her, “You will win. I will see that you win. Don’t you worry. No one will stay ahead of you.”

What had he done?

They were gathered on the banks of a wide creek twenty miles southwest of Topeka, she and Isaac Bell, who had both alighted on a dirt road beside the tracks, and Abby and all the mechanicians, who had seen the smash from their support train. The blue pusher—what was left of it—was floating in the creek, caught on a snag halfway across.

Had Marco sabotaged Abby’s husband’s machine so that she could win? There he was, in his crazy Russian disguise. She was the only one who knew who he really was and the only one who suspected he had done something terrible. But she was afraid to ask.

I must, she thought. I have to ask him. And if it is true, then I have to admit everything, all the lies. She walked up to Marco. He was waving his Dmitri slide rule, and he looked as distraught as the others, but she realized with a terrible sense of lost trust that she could not be sure he wasn’t pretending. She said, in a low voice, “I have to talk to you.”

“Oh, poor Josephine!” he cried in full Platov mode. “You are seeing all happening in front of eyes.”

“I have to ask you.”

“What?”

Before she could speak, she heard a scream. Abby was screaming. Then, miraculously, a cheer from every throat. She whirled toward the creek. Everyone was looking downstream. Baronet Eddison-Sydney-Martin was limping unsteadily along the bank, soaking wet, covered in mud and fumbling with a cigarette he could not light.

BELL TOLD ANDY MOSER that he was certain that he had seen Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s propeller fall off. “Is it common?”

“It happens,” said Andy.

“What would cause it?”

“Lots of things. A crack in the hub.”

“But he inspected the machine every time he flew. He walked around it and checked mounts and stays and everything. Just like all of us do. So did his mechanicians, just like you do for me.”

“Could have hit a rock bouncing on the field.”

“He would have noticed, felt it, heard it.”

“He’d notice if it shattered the propeller,” said Andy. “But if a rock hit right on the hub at the same moment he had his hands full just getting her into the air and his motor was straining loudly, maybe he didn’t. Couple of months ago I heard about a propeller getting unstable because it was stored standing up. Moisture sunk into the bottom blade.”

“His was brand-new and used nearly every day since he got it.”

“Yeah, but you get these cracks.”

“That’s why it was painted silver,” countered Bell, “so little cracks would show.” That was standard procedure on pushers. His own propeller was not because a silver propeller spinning in front of the driver would dazzle him.

“I know, Mr. Bell. And obviously it wasn’t around long enough to rot, either.” Moser looked up at the tall detective. “If you’re asking me was it sabotage, I’d say it sure as heck could have been.”

“How? If you wanted a fellow’s propeller to fly off, what would you do?”

“Anything I could to throw it out of kilter. When the propeller is off balance, it vibrates. Vibrations will break it or rattle the hub loose, or even shake the motor right off its mounts.”

“But you wouldn’t want it shaking that much because the fellow you’re trying kill would notice and stop his motor and volplane down as fast as he could.”

“You’re right about that,” Andy said gravely. “The saboteur would have to really know his business.”

But that, Isaac Bell had to admit, was true of every mechanician in the race, with the possible exceptions of Josephine’s disguised detectives. Another truth he could not ignore was that Preston Whiteway had gotten the wish he had so unabashedly hoped for back in San Francisco. He had had to wait long past Chicago and halfway across Kansas, but a “winnowing of the field” had indeed turned the race into a contest that pitted the best airmen against plucky tomboy Josephine.

Eddison-Sydney-Martin had probably been the best—and his winnowing by sabotage had hardly been natural. But steady Joe Mudd was proving himself to be no slouch, while the thoroughly unpleasant but undeniably courageous Steve Stevens was a fast flier who pushed ahead unintimidated by the vibrations endangering his machine.

Bell had no way of knowing who the saboteur would try to attack next. In fact, the only thing that the tall detective knew absolutely for sure was that his first job was still what it had always been: keep Harry Frost from killing Josephine.

BELL WONDERED WHETHER the machine-gun raid at Fort Riley could have been an elaborate feint by Harry Frost, a distraction to lull Josephine’s protectors into loosening the cordon they kept around her each night at the fairgrounds and rail yards. With that possibility in mind, Bell laid an ambush. He waited for dark—after sad good-byes with the Eddison-Sydney-Martins, whose support train steamed out of the tiny Morris County Fairgrounds rail yard back to Chicago—and climbed onto the roof of Josephine’s private car. For hours, he lay in wait, scanning the trains parked on the other side of Whiteway’s special and listening for the crunch of boots on gravel ballast.

It was a hot night. Windows, skylights, and roof hatches were open. Murmured conversations and occasional bursts of laughter mingled with a quiet sighing of locomotives bedded down with banked fires producing just enough steam to power lights and warm water.

Around midnight, he heard someone