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

their hangar cars are all that’s keeping them in the air. By any chance did you wound him at all?”

“I think I creased his leg when I went down. Wouldn’t be surprised if he limps a mite.”

“Well done,” said Isaac Bell.

EUSTACE WEED DECIDED that since he had no other choice than to do this terrible thing to Isaac Bell, he would at least do it right so nothing bad happened to Daisy by mistake. That would be the worst, to get caught doing the terrible thing but also have Daisy hurt.

To steady his nerves, he pretended that he was back in Tucson, hustling hick-town pool players in their hick-town parlor. One thing he knew for sure: if you wanted to win at pool, you had to trust yourself. At the end of the game, the dough was won by the guy who didn’t lose his nerve.

He snugged the copper tube inside his left hand and kept it hidden while he poured the strained gasoline–and–castor oil mix into the American Eagle’s tank right under Isaac Bell’s nose. That way, he wouldn’t look suspicious pulling it from a pocket. Andy came over to report that the machine was ready. Bell turned away to speak to Andy. Eustace reached for the gas cap to screw it on with his right hand.

Bell said, “Andy, let’s check the control post again.”

Eustace passed his left hand over the open mouth of the tank.

Isaac Bell’s thumb and forefinger closed around his wrist, hard as a steel shackle.

“Eustace. You’ve got some explaining to do.”

EUSTACE WEED OPENED HIS MOUTH. He could not speak. Tears welled in his eyes.

Bell watched him sternly. When he spoke, the chief investigator’s voice was glacial: “I’ll tell you what happened. You nod. Understand?”

Eustace was trembling.

“Understand?” Bell repeated.

Eustace nodded.

Bell let go his wrist, palming the copper tube as he did, shook it speculatively, then tossed it to Andy Moser, who took one look and glowered, “When the gas melts the wax, what’s inside leaks out. What is it? Water?”

Eustace Weed bit his lip and nodded.

Bell pulled a notepad from his coat. “Do you recognize this fellow?”

Eustace Weed blinked at a drawing like you’d see in the newspaper.

“A saloonkeeper in Chicago. I don’t know his name.”

“How about this one?”

“He worked for the saloonkeeper. He took me to him.”

“And this one?”

“He’s the other one who took me to see him.”

“How about this man?”

Bell showed him a sketch of a grim-faced man, more frightening than the others, who looked like a prizefighter who had never lost a bout. “No. I never saw him.”

“This fellow is a Van Dorn detective who has lived for the past two weeks across the hall from Miss Daisy Ramsey and her mother. He shares his rooms with another fellow, a bigger fellow. When one has to go out, the other is there, across the hall. When Daisy goes to work at the telephone exchange, a Van Dorn man watches the sidewalk and another watches the telephone exchange. Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Eustace?”

“Daisy is safe?”

“Daisy is safe. Now, tell me everything. Quickly.”

“How do you know her name?”

“I asked you her name back in Topeka, Kansas. You told me, confirming what we were already turning up in Chicago. It’s our town.”

“But you can’t watch over her forever.”

“We don’t have to.” Bell held up the pictures again. “These two will be locked back in Joliet prison to resume serving well-deserved twenty-year sentences. This saloonkeeper is about to go out of business and open a small dry-goods store in Seattle, a city to which he is moving for his health.”

ON A REMOTE STRETCH of dun-colored ranchland between Los Angeles and Fresno, the Southern Pacific West Side Line that the air racers were supposed to follow crossed the tracks of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. Intersecting at that same point were local short-line railroads that served the raisin growers and cattlemen of the San Joaquin Valley. The resultant junction of rails, switches, and underpasses was so confusing that dispatchers and train conductors called it the Snake Dance. The Whiteway Cup Air Race stewards had marked the correct route with a conspicuous canvas arrow.

Dave Mayhew, Harry Frost’s telegrapher, climbed down from a pole and read aloud his Morse alphabet transcriptions.

“Josephine’s way in the lead. Joe Mudd had trouble getting off the ground. Now he’s stuck in a cotton field in Tipton.”

“Where’s her support train?” asked Frost.

“Keeping pace. Right under her.”

“Where’s Isaac Bell?”

“The Tulare dispatcher heard his motor sputtering when he saw Bell and Josephine fly over. No one’s spotted him since. The last dispatcher who spotted her said Josephine was flying alone.”

“Where is Bell’s support train?”

“Sidelined north of Tulare—probably where he went down.”

Harry Frost pulled his watch from his vest and confirmed the time. By this hour, the water in his gas should have made Isaac Bell smash.

“Get the auto,” he told Mayhew.

With decent luck, Bell was dead. But, at the very least, the Van Dorn posed no threat to Frost’s plan to shoot Josephine out of the sky and wreck Whiteway’s support train.

To Stotts, Frost said, “Move the pointer.”

Mike Stotts ran onto the Southern Pacific main line, rolled up the canvas arrow pointing north and unrolled it pointing northwest up the short line that angled toward the dry hills that rimmed the valley to the west. Then he threw the switch to divert Josephine’s train in the same direction.

Dave Mayhew drove a brand-new Thomas Flyer onto the short line. Frost and Stotts climbed in, and the three raced northwest.

39

THE ONLY NOISE ISAAC BELL HEARD was the wind humming in the wing stays as he volplaned his yellow machine in gently descending circles. Beef cattle grazed peacefully under him, and a flock of white pelicans stayed on course, proof that he was passing over the ground as silently as a condor.

A storm from the distant Pacific was surmounting the coastal mountains, and the shadow cast by his machine flickered and faded as the sun was covered