Clive Cussler: The Race

The ground below was seething with ten thousand El Paso Texans who had turned out to greet the aviatrix, primed for her arrival by newspaper headlines blaring:

HERE COMES THE BRIDE!

They crammed the business district to watch from streets, city squares, windows, and sixth-story roofs. Mindful of the mobs they encountered in Fort Worth, Bell had demanded that Whiteway move the actual alighting spot to a more easily guarded rail yard beside the Rio Grande. Looking at the mad scene below, he was glad he had.

Josephine was still giving them a show when Steve Stevens’s big white biplane appeared in the east with Joe Mudd’s red Liberator laboring after it. She circled once more for the crowd, embellished the maneuver with a string of steep spiral dips that set them ooohhhing and aaahhhing, and descended to the rail yard.

Bell landed beside her.

The air racers had battled strong headwinds all day, and their support trains had already arrived. The crews were celebrating. With the state of Texas behind them now, the finish line seemed almost in sight. South, across the river, exotic Mexico shimmered in the hot sun. But it was the west that gripped their interest – the New Mexico Territory, the Arizona Territory, and finally California at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

They weren’t there yet, Bell knew, his eye captured by a series of blue mountain ranges that pointed toward the Continental Divide. To clear even the low end of the Rockies, the machines would have to climb higher than four thousand feet.

He found telegrams waiting. One lifted his spirits mightily. Archie was recovered enough to risk traveling west with Lillian on Osgood Hennessy’s special train to see the end of the race. Bell wired back that they should light a fire under the lawyers angling to free Danielle Di Vecchio from the asylum and bring her with them so she could see her father’s machine had flown across the continent while guarding the race – provided, of course, Bell thought, knocking ruefully on wood, that he didn’t smash it to pieces or get shot out of the sky by Harry Frost.

Less happy news was contained in a long telegram from Research:

PLATOV UNMET UNSEEN UNKNOWN,

Grady Forrer had begun, confessing his failure to turn up anything about the Russian inventor Dmitri Platov beyond the reports from Belmont Park. The head of the Van Dorn Research Department added an intriguing slant that deepened the mystery:

THERMO ENGINE DEMONSTRATED AT PARIS INTERNATIONAL AERONAUTICAL SALON BY AUSTRALIAN INVENTOR/SHEEP DROVER ROB CONNOLLY.

NOT PLATOV.

AUSTRALIAN SOLD ENGINE AND WENT HOME.

CURRENTLY INCOMMUNICADO OUTBACK.

THERMO ENGINE BUYER UNKNOWN.

??? POSSIBLY PLATOV???

Isaac Bell went looking for Dmitri Platov.

He found James Dashwood, whom he had assigned to watch the Russian, staring at the back of Steve Stevens’s support train. A perplexed expression clouded his face, and he ducked his head in embarrassment when he saw the chief investigator striding purposefully straight at him.

“I surmise,” Isaac Bell said sternly, “that you lost Platov.”

“Not only Platov. His entire shop car disappeared.”

It had been the last car on Stevens’s special. Now it was gone.

“It didn’t steam off on its own.”

“No, sir. The boys told me when they woke up this morning, it was uncoupled and gone.”

Bell surveyed the siding on which the Stevens special sat. The rails pitched slightly downhill. Uncoupled, Platov’s car would have rolled away. “Can’t have gotten far.”

But a switch was open at the back end of the yard, connecting the support train siding to a feeder line that disappeared among a cluster of factories and warehouses along the river.

“Go get a handcar, James.”

Dashwood returned, pumping a lightweight track inspector’s handcar. Bell jumped on, and they started down the factory siding. Bell lent this strength to the slim Dashwood’s effort, and they were soon rolling at nearly twenty miles per hour. Rounding a bend, they saw smoke ahead, the source hidden by clapboard-sided warehouses. Around the next twist in the rail, they saw oily smoke rising into the clear blue sky.

“Faster!”

They raced between a leatherworks and an odoriferous slaughterhouse, and saw that the smoke was billowing from Platov’s shop car, which had stopped against the bumper that blocked the end of the rails. Flames were spouting from its windows, doors, and roof hatch. In the seconds it took Bell and Dashwood to reach it, the entire car was completely engulfed.

“Poor Mr. Platov,” Dashwood cried. “All his tools. . God, I hope he’s not inside.”

“Poor Mr. Platov,” Bell repeated grimly. A shop car filled with tanks of oil and gasoline burned hot and fast.

“Lucky the car wasn’t coupled to Mr. Stevens’s special,” said Dashwood.

“Very lucky,” Bell agreed.

“What is that smell?”

“Some poor devil roasting, I’m afraid.”

“Mr. Platov?”

“Who else?” asked Bell.

Horse-drawn fire engines came bouncing over the tracks. The firemen unrolled hoses to the river and engaged their steam pump. Powerful streams of water bored into the flames but to little effect. The fire quickly consumed the wooden sides and roof and floor of the rail car until there was nothing left but a mound of ash heaped between the steel trucks and iron wheels. When it was out, the fireman found the shriveled remains of a human body, its boots and clothes burned to a crisp.

Bell poked among the wet ashes.

Something gleaming caught his eye. He picked up a one-inch square of glass framed with brass. It was still warm. He turned it over his fingers. The brass had grooves on two edges. He showed it to Dashwood. “Faber-Castell engineering slide rule. . or what’s left of it.”

“Here comes Steve Stevens.”

The fast-flying cotton farmer waddled up, planted his hands on his hips, and glowered at the ashes.

“If this don’t beat all! Ah got a socialist red unionist creepin’ up on me. Every sentimental fool in the country is rootin’ for Josephine just ’cause she’s a gal. And now my high-paid mechanician goes and barbecues hisself. Who the heck is goin’ to keep my poor machine runnin’?”

Bell suggested, “Why don’t you ask the mechanicians Dmitri helped?”

“That’s the dumbest idea Ah ever heard. Even if that damn-fool Russian couldn’t synchronize my motors, nobody else knows how to fix my flying machine like him. Poor old machine might as well have burned up with him. He knew it inside and out. Without him, Ah’ll be lucky to make it across the New Mexico Territory.”

“It’s not a dumb idea,” said Josephine. Bell had noticed her glide up silently behind them on a bicycle she had borrowed somewhere. Stevens had not.

The startled fat man whirled around. “Where the heck did you come from? How long have you been listenin’?”

“Since you said they’re rooting for me because I’m a girl.”

“Well, darn it, it’s true, and you know it’s true.”

Josephine stared into the smoldering ruins of Platov’s shop car. “But Isaac is right. With Dmitri. . gone. . you need help.”

“Ah’ll get on fine. Don’t count me out ’cause I lost one mechanician.”

Josephine shook her head. “Mr. Stevens, I have ears. I hear those motors chewing your machine to bits every time you take to the air. Do you want me to have a look at them?”

“Well, Ah’m not sure-”

Bell interrupted. “I’ll ask Andy Moser if he would look them over with Josephine.”

“In case you think I’m going to sabotage your machine when you’re not looking,” Josephine grinned at Stevens.

“Ah didn’t say that.”