Clive Cussler - The Spy

“Where?”

“Up these ladders. When I raise my leg, you raise your arm.”

“Why?”

“There’s a test scheduled for dawn to see how the cage mast fares in battle conditions when bombarded by 12-inch guns. Any spy worth his salt would give his eyeteeth to watch. Let’s go.”

It was long climb to the spotting top, but neither man was breathing hard when they reached the platform. “You are in excellent condition, Louis.” Bell removed the cuff from his ankle and locked it to the tubing that formed the mast.

“Now what?”

“Wait for dawn.”

A cold wind sprang up. The mast swayed as it sighed aound the tubing.

At first light, the silhouette of a battleship took shape on the horizon.

“New Hampshire,” said Bell. “You recognize her, I’m sure, by her three funnels and old-fashioned ram bow. You will recall that she carries 7- and 8-inch guns in addition to four 12s. Any minute now.”

The battleship emitted a red flash. A five-hundred-pound shell roared past like a freight train. Louis ducked. “What?” he screamed. “What?” Now the sound of the gun rumbled their way.

Another flash. Another shell roared closer.

“They’ll have the range soon!” Bell told Louis Loh.

The 12-inch gun flashed red. A shell struck in a shower of sparks fifty feet below. The mast shook. Louis Loh cried, “You’re a madman.”

“They say this helix design is remarkably strong,” Bell replied.

More shells roared by. When another hit, Louis covered his face.

Soon there was enough light in the sky for Bell to read his gold watch. “A few more single shots. Then they’re scheduled to blast salvos. Before they finish up with full broadsides.”

“All right. All right. I admit I am tong.”

“You’re more than tong,” Isaac Bell replied coldly. He was rewarded by an expression of surprise on Louis’s ordinarily immobile face.

“What do you mean?”

“Sun-tzu on the art of war. If I may quote your countryman: ‘Be so subtle that you are invisible.’ ”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You told me on the train, ‘They think we’re all opium addicts or tong gangsters.’ You sounded like a man with a broader point of view. Who are you really?”

A salvo thundered. Two shells ripped through the structure. Still it stood, but it was swinging side to side.

“I am not tong.”

“You just told me you are. Which is it?”

“I am not a gangster.”

“Stop telling me what you aren’t and start telling me what you are.”

“I am Tongmenghui.”

“What is Tongmenghui?”

“Chinese Revolutionary Alliance. We are a secret resistance movement. We pledge our lives to revive Chinese society.”

“Explain,” said Isaac Bell.

In a rush of words, Louis Loh admitted that he was a fervent Chinese Nationalist plotting to overthrow the corrupt Empress. “She is strangling China. England, Germany, all Europe, even the U.S., feed on China’s dying body.”

“If you are a revolutionist, what are you doing in America?”

“Dreadnought battleships. China must build a modern fleet to fend off colonial invaders.”

“By blowing up the Great White fleet in San Francisco?”

“That wasn’t for China! That was for him.”

“ ‘Him’? Who are you talking about?”

With a fearful glance at the New Hampshire, Loh said, “There is a man-a spy-who pays. Not in money but in valuable information about other nations’ dreadnoughts. We, Harold Wing and me, pass it along to Chinese naval architects.”

“And you pay for it by doing his bidding.”

“Exactly, sir. Can we go down now?”

Bell knew this was a major breakthrough in the case. This was the freelance whom Yamamoto had tried to betray in exchange for a clean escape. Louis had gotten him close again.

“You are working for three masters. The Chinese Navy. Your Tongmenghui resistance movement. And the spy who paid you to attack the magazine at Mare Island. Who is he?”

Another freight train of a shell roared by. The structure trembled. “I don’t know who he is.”

“Who is your intermediary? How does he give you orders and information?”

“Mailboxes. He sent information, orders, and money for expenses in mailboxes.” Loh ducked another shell. “Please, let us go down.”

Across the water, sparkling in the first rays of sunlight, all the New Hampshire’s guns traversed toward the cage mast. “Here comes a broadside,” said Bell.

“You must believe me.”

Bell said, “I feel a certain affection for you, Louis. You held off shooting me until I jumped from the train.”

Louis Loh stared at the battleship. “I was not sparing your life. I didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger.”

“I’m tempted to let you down, Louis. But you haven’t told me all you know. I don’t believe that everything came in the mail.”

Louis Loh cast another fearful gaze at the white battleship and broke down completely. “It was Commodore Tommy Thompson who told us to attack the magazine at Mare Island.”

“How did you hook up with the Gopher Gang?”

“The spy bribed the Hip Sing to allow us to approach Commodore Tommy Thompson in their name, pretending we were tong.”

Bell handed Louis Loh a snowy white handkerchief. “Wave this.” He led Loh down the mast. When they reached the barge, apoplectic Test Range officers raced up in a boat. “How did you-”

“Thought you’d never stop shooting. We were getting hungry up there.”

“I DON’T BELIEVE for a moment that Commodore Tommy is the spy,” Isaac Bell told Joseph Van Dorn. “But I’m willing to bet Tommy’s got a good idea who he is.”

“He better,” said Van Dorn. “Raiding his territory is costing a carload of money for the cops and some very expensive favors to keep Tammany Hall from protesting.” The tall detective and his broadchested boss were overseeing preparations for the raid from inside a Marmon parked across from Commodore Tommy’s Saloon on West 39th Street.

“But the railroads will love us,” said Bell, and the boss conceded that several rail tycoons had already thanked him personally for cutting back the worst depredations of the Gopher Gang. “Looking at the bright side, after this the spy’s ring will be a lot smaller.”

“I’m not counting on that,” said Isaac Bell, mindful of learning about the explosion at the Newport Torpedo Factory while on the train to San Francisco.

A dozen railroad cops led the attack, battering down the saloon door, breaking up the furniture, smashing bottles, and staving in beer kegs. Shots rang within. Harry Warren’s boys, standing by with handcuffs, marched a dozen Gophers into a Police Department paddy wagon.

“Tommy’s holed up in the cellar with a bullet hole in his arm,” Harry reported to Bell and Van Dorn. “He’s all alone. He may listen to reason.”

Bell went first, down wooden steps into a damp cellar. Tommy Thompson was slumped in a chair like a mountain brought low by an earthquake. He had a pistol in his hand. He opened his eyes, looked up blearily at Bell’s weapon pointed at his head, and let his pistol fall to the earthen floor.

“I’m Isaac Bell.”

“What’s wrong with the Van Dorns?” Tommy was indignant. “It’s always been live and let live. Pay the cops, stay out of each other’s business. We got a whole system at work here, and a bunch of private dicks screw it up.”

“Is that why you put one of my boys in the hospital?” Bell asked coldly.

“That wasn’t my idea!” Tommy protested.

“Wasn’t your idea?” Bell retorted. “Who ramrods the Gophers?”