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

The sky was heavily clouded. They’d left the rain behind, and the forecast of the hurricane moving west over Cuba seemed to hold. But, Ed Tobin grumbled, wind gusts were swinging south of east, and the Dunmore Town residents had pulled small boats out of the water.

“Did you see a big black speedboat about the size of this one?”

“No, mon.”

“The tanker could have hoisted it on deck,” said Tobin.

“No, he’d have to catch up at sea,” said Bell, “if the tanker left two days ago.”

“Black boat last week,” an islander ventured.

Made sense, thought Bell. Even in wind and roiled seas, Marion had covered the sixty miles from Nassau in less than three hours. Zolner would have found this an ideal place to hide Black Bird, too. He could have zipped in and out with the boat.

He shook his head again. “Last time we almost caught the black boat, Zolner blew up his boathouse.”

“Maybe we’re lucky he moved the ship. If he left it, he would blow it up like his boathouse.”

“Going home a hero of the revolution,” said Pauline.

“But first finish Yuri’s job? What job?”

Bell smelled tobacco burning. The dockworkers had hunkered down behind the gasoline barrels to share a smoke.

“Douse that cigarette! You’ll blow my boat to kingdom come!”

The smoker took a last drag, passed it to his friend, who inhaled another. A third man grabbed a quick puff and flicked the butt in the water.

The man Bell was talking to chuckled. “Just like de boss man. Every day he always say, ‘No smoke by ship. Big explosion.’”

Isaac Bell plunged his hand in his pocket and pulled out his bankroll. Twelve tons of pure alcohol would make a very big explosion. “I want that gasoline.”

Tobin said, “We’ve got plenty in the tanks, Mr. Bell. It’ll only weigh us down.”

“We’ll burn it soon enough. It’s twelve hundred miles to New York.”

•   •   •

THEY HAD STOWED the last barrel they could fit, and Bell had tipped the dockworkers lavishly, when a church bell began to toll. The islanders’ smiles faded at the urgent clamor. Their eyes shot to the government building. The Union Jack was descending the flagpole. A red flag with yellow stripes jumped up in its place.

“What’s that?” asked Bell.

“Red flag with black square say hurricane.”

“I know that. What do those yellow stripes mean?”

“Hurricane come straight here.”

•   •   •

MARION thundered through South Bar Passage. The tide was strong, the ocean swell steep and destructive in the narrow cut and breaking on the sandbar. Bell aimed at what looked deepest and drove her through in a welter of foam and headed for the open sea.

Beyond the reef, the seas were big but orderly. He set a course north and was glad to see that Marion could maintain forty knots without straining. His crew, he could see, were apprehensive, and he tried to raise their spirits.

“Between a cashiered Coastie, a Staten Island pirate, and a yachtsman, we ought to be able to find Cape Hatteras Light. From there, it’ll be an easy run up the coast.”

“How far is Cape Hatteras?” asked Pauline.

Bell shrugged. “Less than eight hundred miles.” He showed her the chart. “We’ll steer a course just west of north.”

Pauline’s brow furrowed as she studied the chart in the murky light that penetrated the windshield and the isinglass side curtains. “It appears we have to get around Abaco, first.”

“We should see Hope Town Light in a couple of hours,” said Bell.

“If we can make forty knots in these seas, we’ll take a full day and night to Cape Hatteras.”

“We’re burning a lot of gas at forty,” said Tobin.

“There’s a hurricane chasing behind,” said Bell. “I want room between it and us.”

Spray drummed on the cockpit tarp. The seas continued to mount and the wind rose. Every few minutes, the boat plowed into a wave markedly bigger than the rest and slowed dramatically.

Bell ordered a watch schedule in which each would steer for two hours, the limit before they lost focus and concentration. Asa brewed coffee in the galley tucked under the foredeck, then helped Pauline steer when it was her turn. Tobin passed around sandwiches of foie gras that Fern’s chef had contributed. In the dark, the compass cast a red glow on faces growing weary of the constant motion and the ceaseless thunder of the Libertys.

Bell caught catnaps, sitting near the helm, but only when Tobin was steering.

He awakened with cold water dripping on his face. The tarpaulin was soaked and it was beginning to leak. He rescued the chart, which was getting wet. The boat was laboring. Reluctantly, Bell cut their speed to thirty-five knots—still a phenomenal pace for any vessel in any seas—and reduced it again in a few hours to thirty knots as the waves grew taller and chaotic.

He decided that, at that rate, they could stop the forward Liberty to conserve it. Asa wrestled on canvas as soon as the pipes cooled. Soon after, they stopped the sternmost motor, as the boat would make her speed on two having burned off the weight of the extra gasoline.

The wind, which had blown from the south and then gradually east, backed suddenly north. Bell pictured the storm whirling, its counterclockwise winds moving sharply to the east as if it had crossed their wake and was heading toward Bermuda.

This was good news if it was traveling away from them rather than overtaking them but bad news if the powerful north wind set up counter- and crosscurrents. Worse, it suggested a storm that was growing in diameter, flinging ever-more-powerful winds hundreds of miles from its eye.

“Getting bad,” Tobin said quietly when they exchanged tricks at the wheel.

“She’s a big boat,” said Bell.

Ed’s lopsided, scarred face formed a tired grin. “I never met a captain who didn’t love his vessel.”

They were twenty-three hours beyond The Bahamas when the western horizon, which looked darker than a coal mine, began to cast an intermittent glow. Bell steered toward it and in a few miles it appeared to be the pulsing beam of