Clive Cussler - The Striker

As Isaac Bell watched the miners fortify the point, he had to concede Archie was right. This place they had retreated to was vulnerable until they barricaded the approaches. But it had the grim face of war.

“At least,” he said, “the hotheads lost their dynamite. Maybe now both sides can settle down and horse-trade.”

“What in heck is that?” said Archie. The tall redhead was staring at the river behind Bell, his expression a mix of puzzlement and awe. Bell turned to see.

Chimneys billowing smoke, stern wheel pounding foam, an enormous steamboat rounded the point. It was immensely long, and tall, and black as coal.

“Is that a cannon on the foredeck?” asked Archie.

Bell shielded his eyes with cupped hands and focused on the gun. “Two-inch Hotchkiss,” he said. “The Navy had them on a gunboat Wish and I boarded in New Orleans.”

“Where the heck did they get it?”

“More to the point,” said Bell, “who are they and what do they want?”

“I can’t quite make out her nameboard.”

“Vulcan King.”

The black giant came closer.

One after another, then by the hundreds, the women pitching tents and the men building barricades stopped what they were doing. Ten thousand stood stock-still, waiting for the black apparition to turn midriver and point its cannon at them. It steamed very slowly, its giant wheel barely stirring the river, closer and closer, at a pace no less menacing for its majesty.

Directly opposite the point, it stopped, holding against the current. Not a living figure showed on deck, not a deckhand, not a fireman. The boiler deck and engine doors were shut, the pilot invisible behind sun-glared glass. Ten thousand people held their breath. What, Isaac Bell asked himself again, have I led these people into?

It blasted its whistle. Everyone jumped.

Then it moved forward, slicing the current, up the river, swung around the bend of the Homestead Works, and disappeared.

“Where’s it going?” asked Archie.

“My guess is, to collect the Pinkertons,” said Bell. “We’ll have to find out. But if I’m right, then the miners hold this point of land, and the owners hold the river. And if that isn’t the beginning of a war, I don’t know what is.”

Dried off and clothes changed, Bell went looking for Camilla ’s pilot.

He found Captain Jennings and his son in a Smithfield Street saloon up the slope from where their boats were docked. The two pilots congratulated him on the strikers’ safe passage.

“Did you see the Vulcan King ?” Bell asked.

“Hard to miss,” said the younger Jennings, and his father declared, “Who in hell would paint a steamboat black?”

“Who owns her?”

Both pilots shrugged. “Never seen her before. We was just asking ourselves, was we thrown off by the black? But even imagining her white, she does not look familiar.”

“Where do you suppose it came from?”

“She weren’t built in Pittsburgh or we’d know her for sure. That leaves Louisville or Cincinnati.”

“Nowhere else?”

“It took a heck of a yard to build a boat that size. Like I say, Louisville or Cincinnati. I’d say Cincinnati, wouldn’t you, Pa?”

The older Jennings agreed. “One of the big old yards like Held & Court.”

“They still in business, Pa?”

“They’re the last that make ’em like that anymore.”

“What do you think of that cannon?” asked Bell.

“Not much,” said the senior Jennings.

His son explained, “Riverboats are made of spit-and-sawdust. The recoil will shake her to pieces.”

“Could they reinforce it to stand the recoil?”

Both Jenningses spit tobacco. “They’d have to.”

“Insurrection,” said Judge James Congdon, casting a stony gaze about the Duquesne Club’s paneled dining room. “When first offered the privilege of addressing the august membership, I intended to call my speech ‘New Economies in the Coal, Iron, Coking, and Steelmaking Industries.’ But for reasons apparent to anyone in your besieged city, my topic is changed to ‘Insurrection.’”

He raised a glass of mineral water to his wrinkled lips, threw back his head, and drained it.

“By coincidence, I happen to be your guest speaker on the very day that the criminal forces of radicalism and mindless anarchy seized a modern enterprise in which I hold an interest, the Amalgamated Coal Terminal. Amalgamated is a center of coal distribution, east, west, north, and south. Winter looms. City dwellers will freeze in their homes, locomotives will come to a standstill, and industry’s furnaces will be starved for fuel. Insurrection, you will agree, is a subject if not dear to my heart, extremely close by.”

The members laughed nervously.

“Were this attack to occur in New York City, where I conduct business, I have no doubt that government would respond with force and alacrity. Not blessed with residency in Pittsburgh, I can only guess your city fathers’ answer to this challenge. For the moment, I will leave that to them, trusting in their Americanism, their decency, their principles, and their courage to stand up to labor, which wields far too much influence in the state of Pennsylvania.

“But to you — those who have built this great city by transforming the minerals that God deposited in Pennsylvania’s mountains into the mightiest industry the world has ever seen, producing more iron and steel and coal than Great Britain and Germany could dream of — to you titans I say, labor must be brought to heel.

“Labor must be brought to heel or they will destroy everything you have worked to build. If we fail to master labor, future enlightened civilizations will look back on us in pity. ‘What did they fail to do?’ The answer will be, ‘They failed to fight. Good men failed to fight evil!’”

Judge Congdon slammed his fist down on the podium, glared one by one at every face gaping back at him, then turned his back and stalked off the stage.

Stunned silence ensued. It was followed by a roar of applause.

“Come back!” they shouted, pounding their palms together. “Come back! Come back!”

Congdon returned to the podium with a wintry smile.

“I hope,” he said, “that the men of Pittsburgh know who the enemy is and have the courage to face him. To those who don’t, to those who would appease, to those who would restrain the forces of order, I say, Get out of the way and let us do our job.”

James Congdon’s special was waiting for him at a Union Station platform reserved for private trains. His Atlantic 4-4-2 locomotive, which had just rolled, gleaming, from the roundhouse, had steam up, and his conductor was arranging to clear tracks with a Pennsylvania Railroad division boss. The cook was shucking oysters from Delaware Bay, a steward was chilling champagne, and the actress who had come along for the ride to New York was luxuriating in a hot bath.

Congdon himself raised a brandy in the paneled library that served as his mobile office and said, “Nothing becomes Pittsburgh like the leaving of it.”

“You seem mighty cheerful for a man whose business has been seized by radicals,” answered Henry Clay.

“Bless them!” Congdon laughed. “They’ve outdone themselves. And outdone you, for that matter, Clay. You could not have planned it better.”

“They exceeded my expectations,” Clay admitted. “Even my imagination. But I will take full credit for creating the atmosphere that stimulated them.”

“Credit granted. What’s next?”

“Exploding steamboats and burning union halls.”

“In that order?”

“Simultaneous.”