Clive Cussler - The Assassin

They rushed him to a nearby Russian Army fort, where he died within moments of arriving. Isaac Bell raced Rockefeller and Matters back to Batum and onto the train to Baku. At Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, halfway to the Caspian Sea, there were reports of riots. A bomb exploded outside the station. Bell kept his party on the train and they slept the night sitting up on hard benches.

Next morning, the authorities dithered. It was midday before the train pulled out, proceeded by a pilot engine, in case wreckers taking advantage of the collapse of law and order had mined the tracks to rob the passengers. They steamed slowly across an endless, ever-more-desolate dry valley between snowy mountains to the north and indistinct highlands to the south.

An hour before nightfall, still fifty miles from Baku, the pilot engine hit a mine.

The explosion blew it off the rails and into a ravine, taking with it the riflemen guarding the train. Horsemen in black cloaks gathered on a ridge that loomed above the tracks.

Isaac Bell opened his carpetbag and joined the Savage 99’s barrel to its chamber with a practiced twist. Another explosion blocked the rails behind them, and a wild-eyed conductor ran through the car yelling, “Wreckers!”

They attacked, galloping down the slope, brandishing long guns and sabers.

“Get Mr. Rockefeller under cover,” Bell told Matters. “Fort him up with those bags.”

Matters obeyed instantly, helping Rockefeller to the floor, pulling luggage down from the racks. The old man remained calm and watchful and seemed to have the horse sense to trust the job to the man he had chosen to protect him. If C. C. Gustafson was the most philosophical man on the subject of getting shot, John D. Rockefeller took the cake as the calmest man without a gun that Isaac Bell had ever seen in a gunfight.

Bell counted ten expert riders on agile ponies. Without a telescope on the rifle, he’d be wasting ammunition if he opened up any farther than four hundred yards. But four hundred yards would give him only forty seconds to stop them before they reached the stranded train. He glanced about the car. Some of the men had pulled revolvers. Bill Matters unlimbered an ancient Civil War Remington. Bell’s was the only rifle.

When will you shoot?” John D. Rockefeller called to Isaac Bell.

“When I can hit them.”

He chose a large boulder on the hillside as his quarter-mile marker. The lead horseman steered his mount directly at it. As he raised his whip to make the animal jump, Bell pressed the Savage to his shoulder. The whip descended. The animal gathered its haunches and left the ground. Isaac Bell waited for the rider’s chest to cross the iron sight and curled his finger gently around the trigger.

Dave McCoart had loaded a box of wildcats for him and Bell decided he owed the gunsmith a box of Havana cigars. The train wrecker slid off his horse almost as smoothly as if he had chosen to dismount. His foot jammed in a stirrup. The panicked animal veered sharply, dragging its dead rider across the line of charge. Two train wreckers crashed into them and went down in a tangle of hoofs.

Bell levered in a fresh shell.

He fixed a bead on a rider who was whirling a carbine over his head like a sword. Again the perfectly balanced trigger kept the weapon dead steady as Bell fired and another wrecker fell off his horse. But they had closed within two hundred yards. Bell’s next target was an easy hit, and they were so near for his next that he could have dropped his man with a rock.

“Shoot!” he roared at the men gaping out the windows.

They jerked the triggers of their revolvers, hitting nothing. Through that hail of wild fire, the horsemen charged. The Savage’s magazine indicator read one shot left. Bell fired at a man so close, he could see the hairs of his beard.

That shot and the volume of pistol fire broke the charge. Twenty yards from the train, the survivors turned their horses and drove them back up the ridge. Bell reloaded, shouting to the others, “Keep shooting before they change their minds.”

He sent two slugs whistling over their heads and they kept going, lashing their horses. The revolver-toting passengers stopped shooting or ran out of ammunition. The beginnings of a ragged cheer died on their lips as each and every man considered how close he had come to annihilation. Silence finally descended in the hot, dusty railcar.

Isaac Bell helped John D. Rockefeller to his feet.

“Now what?” asked the Standard Oil magnate.

“We wait for a wreck train to repair the tracks.”

“They’re coming back,” a passenger shouted.

Men clutched their revolvers. But this time the thunder of hoofbeats was only a roving police patrol of Cossacks armed with bolt-action rifles and shashka sabers.

Bell broke down the Savage.

“Nice shooting,” said Matters. “Where’d you get the rifle?”

Bell hid it in his carpetbag. “What rifle?”

If he owed Dave McCoart a box of cigars for his bullets, he should in all fairness send one to the assassin for his gun. Lacking a name and address, Bell would wait until he installed him in his cell in death row.

Isaac Bell led a much-jauntier John D. Rockefeller off the train at Baku Station than the geezer in the overcoat who had boarded the Lake Shore Limited to Cleveland. His actress friend’s Comédie-Française costumers had camouflaged the magnate’s famous features with a silver-gray wig to cover his bald head and matching eyebrows fastened with spirit gum to replace those he had lost to alopecia. Tinted spectacles shaded his piercing gaze. A white flannel “ice cream” suit, a straw panama, and a gold-headed walking stick bedecked a gracefully aging dandy visiting a southern Russian city in the summer.

He even cracked a joke.

“Process servers from the Corporations Commission won’t know me from Adam.”

With Bell at his side, he strode through the station, the picture of an adventurous American who might be a tourist or a wealthy missionary. Though, in fact, they had made him a diplomat. Rockefeller’s Washington “correspondents” had provided unassailable documents for a fictitious Special U.S. Envoy for Commercial Affairs to Russia and Persia — the Honorable Joseph D. Stone.

On Bell’s orders, Bill Matters had left the train earlier at a suburban station. Matters was traveling under his own name as the representative of the American refinery builder Purest Incorporated of New Jersey — which happened to be one of Standard Oil’s secret subsidiaries. His letters of introduction to the mayor of Baku, the prefect, the governor, and the city’s leading oil men stated that his mission was to persuade the Russian government to let Purest build new, modern refineries and replace the old ones owned by Rothschild and Nobel. A seemingly chance meeting with Special Envoy Joseph D. Stone would lead to Matters and Stone discovering that their business interests coincided.

Isaac Bell, too, traveled under his own name. Bogus papers established the tall detective as Special Envoy Stone’s private secretary and bodyguard who had been granted extended leave from the United States Secret Service.

Compared to Tiflis and Batum, the much-bigger city of Baku seemed peaceful and less tense, exhibiting few outward signs of last winter’s murderous riots. Baku was also quite clearly the thriving capital of an oil-rich region that pumped half the entire world’s petroleum. The lavish railroad station, bustling with crowds of people speaking Farsi, Russian, and Armenian, was the equal of any in Paris or London.

Outside the station, women wore veils, cart horses plodded under tall Russian yokes, and the ruins of a centuries-old Persian citadel loomed on a hill. But swift modern trolleys glided on broad cobblestone avenues. The stonework, mansard roofs, towers, cupolas, and porte cocheres of Baku City Hall and the Embassy Row buildings were typical of a great metropolis. The ostentatious private palaces built by the oil kings spoke of vast fortunes made as suddenly as they were on Wall Street — and were no less gaudy than those lining Fifth Avenue.