Clive Cussler - The Striker

Fortis’s answer was a stark reminder that Bell had entered a war that was already well under way. “We’ve arranged a reception for the battering ram that’ll buy us some time— Wait! Now what are they up to?”

A trolley car glided from the mouth of one of the barns and stopped where a curve in the rails pointed it straight at the gate. If the rails continued to the gate, the car would have been an electrified battering ram, but the rails turned away. Puzzled, Bell looked more closely and suddenly realized that the front windows of the car had been removed. In their place, the strikebreakers had jury-rigged headlamps cannibalized from other cars.

Bell turned his back on the gate just as all the headlamps lighted at once. The men who had their faces pressed to the cracks in the gate cried out, temporarily blinded. Bell snatched a rifle from the nearest miner, shut his left eye, slitted his right, scrambled to the top of the barricade, and fired repeatedly into the blazing-white glare. The rifle magazine held five bullets. When it was empty, two headlamps still glared. He whipped out his Colt Army, steadied the barrel on the top of the gate, and squeezed the trigger twice.

The trolley yard was dark again. Shadows rose from the ground, and the strikebreakers who had dropped their battering ram when they ducked for cover picked it up again.

“Run!” Isaac Bell shouted. “Run!”

They started toward the barges, twenty miners trundling wheelbarrows, ten firing wild shots behind them, as the strikebreakers charged the gate. Bell, taking up the rear, gun in hand, heard the battering ram thunder against the gate. Once. Twice. Running backwards, he waited for the third blow to burst the gate open.

An orange flash lit the dark, followed by a loud explosion and the shouts of dismayed strikebreakers. When the fleeing miners cheered, Bell realized that the Defense Committee had mined the gate with dynamite, set off when the battering ram smashed into a detonator.

“That’ll fix the sons of bitches!” Fortis yelled.

And give the militia the excuse to attack, thought Bell.

The towboat Sadie blew her whistle as the running men drew near. The Defense Committee fought to shove their wheelbarrows through the mud to the barges, from which came shouts of encouragement.

Isaac ran ahead of them. “Stow all your dynamite in that lead barge, away from these people.”

The wheels were sticking in the muddy bank, and that barge was distant.

“Here’s fine,” yelled Fortis. “There’s room in this one. Dump it here, boys!”

“Dynamite deteriorates in damp and becomes volatile,” Bell protested. “You’ve been carrying it in the rain.”

“Are you telling a coal miner how to handle explosives?”

Bell seized the older man’s arm in an iron grip. “Volatile means boom , it goes off by itself. Get it away from these people.”

“I won’t abide some whippersnapper—”

Isaac Bell held his Army high. “I’ll blow the head off the first man who puts dynamite anywhere but that front barge.”

Isaac Bell stood watch outside the pilothouse on towboat Sadie ’s hurricane deck, wishing that the river fog was thicker. Sadie wheezed slowly past the Homestead Works, and the Amalgamated tipple rose against a sky that was turning bright.

He heard shouts.

Pursuit, he thought, looking for a fast police launch packed with riflemen. But the shouts were coming from the lead barge, where some miners had elected to ride with the dynamite, and it sounded like a drunken fight. Bell ran down to the main deck and onto the barges, intending to run to the front of the tow to break it up before they accidentally set off an explosion.

A muffled boom told him he was too late.

Smoke pillared from the lead barge. A geyser of water shot into the sky. It sounded to Bell as if a single stick of dynamite had blown a hole in her hull. Would the rest blow before the water rushing in smothered the detonators?

The dynamite barge was sinking. Three men clambered off drunkenly onto the barge behind it. As the stricken dynamite barge sunk deeper, it pulled hard against the lines holding it to the other barges in the tow. All at once, they snapped, parting with a loud bang. The dynamite barge broke from the pack. The tow pushed it ahead as it sank, dashing it to pieces. The next barges ran over planks, timbers, and crates of dynamite. Bell waited, heart in his throat, for the rest of the dynamite to explode under the barges loaded with people. As each barge rumbled over the debris, bottom planks were staved, water rushed in, and the people in them tried frantically to plug the holes.

Bell felt it crunch under the barge he was on. Then the towboat ran over it. Bell saw the pilot turning his wheel to force the tow out of the deep channel.

“She’s sinking!” a deckhand howled. “Ripped her bottom out.”

For a second, Bell stood frozen. I led these people into this, he thought. All their lives are in mortal danger. This was why Joseph Van Dorn had warned not to take sides. Two thousand were about to drown in the bitter-cold river, and what in the name of God could he do to save them?

Bell ran back and leaped to the towboat’s main deck. Archie was peering down into the engine room. The water was knee-deep and rising. When it drowned the engine, the current would sweep the people past Amalgamated while the damaged barges sank.

Bell jumped into the hold and waded toward a surge of current that marked the breach in the planks. The water clamped around his legs like ice. Archie peeled off his coat and threw it to Bell and ran, shouting he would get blankets. Bell waded to the breach, stomped Archie’s coat in it, pulled off his own and stuffed it in. His shirt went next. Archie returned with blankets, towels, and people’s precious coats.

Isaac Bell stuffed garments and blankets into the broken seam.

The leak slowed, but not enough. The water kept rising. He heard steam roar. The rising water had reached the furnace and was beginning to drench the fire. Steam pressure was dropping. The engine slowed. Just as the stern wheel stopped turning, Bell felt the hull grounding in the mud.

Boots pounded on deck as men ran with ropes.

“O.K., she’s on the bottom. She can’t sink any more. Save the blankets.”

“You’ll need one more,” said Archie, throwing it to him. “The ladies have suffered enough. Spare them their hero in his altogether.”

Bell slung the blanket around himself and climbed out of the hold. To his astonishment, in the time he was belowdecks, the sun had burned through the fog and was shining bright. Ashore, the gentle upward slope of the Amalgamated Terminal was dotted with white tents pitched by the people who had arrived on the first tows. He smelled bacon frying and coffee brewing. In the shadow of the coal tipple, small boys had started a pickup game of baseball.

“Happy sight, Isaac. A safer place, and no one drowned.”

“It would be a lot happier if they weren’t tearing up that rail line.”

A thousand miners were uprooting track on which the coal trains entered the terminal. A thousand more were tumbling cars on their sides, blocking the trolley lines from the Golden Triangle.

“They’re digging in,” said Archie. “You can’t blame them for keeping the Pinkertons out.”

“And the cops,” said Bell, directing Archie’s attention to the downtown side of Amalgamated’s spit of land.

A contingent of uniformed Pittsburgh police dismounted from a toast-rack trolley that had been stopped by a heap of crossties and a gap in the tracks. A second contingent was milling around blocked tracks on the Homestead side. Neither formed a line nor charged. On the river, a police steam launch flitted about agitatedly like a bird helpless to stop its nest from being invaded. The cops on land climbed back on their trolleys and rode away.