Clive Cussler - The Spy

“Treat them well,” Engels had demanded as they clasped hands cementing their deal. “They are brave men.”

“Like my own family,” O’Shay had promised.

All had served as Royal Navy submariners. All had ended up in British prisons. All hated England. They dreamed, O’Shay knew, that when the Americans discovered that the submarine and its electric torpedoes were from England, it would appear that England had instigated an attack to cripple American battleship production. They dreamed that when war engulfed Europe, angry Americans would not side with England. Then Germany would defeat England, and Ireland would be free.

A lovely dream, thought the spy. It would serve no one better than Eyes O’Shay.

“There is your submarine torpedo boat,” Engels called from across it. “Where are my Wheeler torpedoes?”

Eyes O’Shay pointed at the sailboat.

Engels bowed. “I see the fair Katherine. Hallooo, my beauty,” he hailed through cupped hands. “I did not recognize you out of your sumptuous gowns. But I see no torpedoes.”

“Under her,” said O’Shay. “Four Wheeler Mark 14s. Two for you. Two for me.”

Engels gestured. The steamer’s seamen swung a cargo boom out from her king post. “Come alongside, Katherine. I’ll take two torpedoes-and maybe you, too, if no one is looking.”

As Katherine effected the difficult maneuver and Engels’s crew snaked the torpedoes out of the catboat, they heard a rumble like distant thunder. O’Shay watched the submarine’s crew coolly assess what the noise really meant and the distance from which it was coming.

“U.S. Navy’s Sandy Hook Test Range,” he called down to them. “Don’t worry. It’s far away.”

“Sixty thousand yards,” Hunt Hatch called back, and a man added, “Ten-inchers, and some 12s.”

O’Shay nodded his satisfaction. The Irish rebels who would crew his submarine knew their business.

It may not have looked like a fair trade, the submarine being six or seven times longer than the torpedoes and capable of independent action. But the Holland, though considerably elongated and modified by the English from its original design, was fully five years old and outstripped by rapid advances in underwater warfare. The Mark 14s were Ron Wheeler’s latest.

Each man had what he wanted. Engels was steaming away with two of the most advanced torpedoes in the world to sell to the highest bidder. And the Holland and the two torpedoes that the tug and barge crews were wrestling out of the sailboat and into the submarine made a deadly combination. The Brooklyn Navy Yard would never know what hit it.

JIMMY RICHARDS’S AND MARV GORDON’S DUTCH UNCLE, Donald Darbee, sailed them six miles across the Upper Bay in his oyster scow, a flat-bottomed boat with a square bow and a powerful auxiliary gasoline motor he only used when chasing or running from something. Jimmy and Marv knew every watery inch of the Port of New York, but neither of the enormous young men had ever set foot on Manhattan Island despite many a night poking around Manhattan piers for items that had fallen off. Uncle Donny recalled going ashore in 1890 to rescue a fellow Staten Islander from the cops.

As they approached the Battery, a Harbor Squad policeman on a launch tied to Pier A called his roundsman up on deck. “Looks like we’re being invaded.”

Roundsman O’Riordan cast a jaundiced eye on the Staten Island scowmen. “Watch ’em, closely,” he ordered, hoping they were not up to no good. Arresting a gang of muscle-bound oyster tongers would cost broken arms and busted teeth on both sides.

“How do we get to the Roosevelt Hospital at 59th Street?” called the shaggy oldster at the helm.

“If you got a nickel, take the Ninth Avenue El.”

“We got a nickel.”

Jimmy Richards and Marv Gordon paid their nickels and rode to 59th Street, staring at tall buildings and crowds of people they could scarcely believe, many of whom stared back at them. Wandering the huge hospital wards, they finally asked directions from a pretty Irish nurse and found their way to a private room with only one bed. The patient in the bed was completely wrapped in bandages, and they would never have recognized Cousin Eddie Tobin except that hanging on a clothes tree was the snappy suit of clothes that the Van Dorns had staked Eddie when they hired him to apprentice last winter.

A tall, yellow-haired dude, lean as wire rope, was bending over him, holding a glass so Eddie could drink from a straw. When he saw them in the doorway, his eyes turned gray as a nor’easter, and a big hand slid inside his coat where he could keep a pistol, if he was the sort to pack one and he looked like he was.

“May I help you gentlemen?”

Jimmy and Marv instinctively raised their hands. “Is that little Eddie Tobin? We’re his cousins come to visit.”

“Eddie? Do you know these fellows?”

The bandaged head was already craning painfully toward them. It nodded, and they heard little Eddie croak, “Family.”

The blue-gray eyes turned a warmer shade. “Come on in, boys.”

“Fancy digs,” said Jimmy. “We looked in the ward. They sent us up here.”

“Mr. Bell paid for it.”

Isaac Bell offered his hand and shook their horny mitts. “Everyone chipped in. Van Dorns look out for their own. I’m Isaac Bell.”

“Jimmy Richards. This here’s Marv Gordon.”

“I’ll leave you boys to your visit. Eddie, I’ll see you soon.”

Richards lumbered out after him into the hall. “How’s he doing, Mr. Bell?”

“Better than we hoped. He’s a tough kid. It’s going to take a while, but the docs are saying he’ll come out of it in pretty good shape. But I have to warn you, he won’t win any beauty contests.”

“Who did it? We’ll straighten them out.”

“We’ve already straightened them out,” said Bell. “It’s a Van Dorn fight, and your cousin is a Van Dorn.”

Richards didn’t like it. “None of us was happy when Eddie joined the law.”

Isaac Bell smiled. “The law does not like their appellation given to private detectives.”

“Whatever you say, bub. We appreciate what you’re doing for him. You ever need a church burned down or someone drowned, Eddie knows how to find us.”

ISAAC BELL WAS PORING through the noon reports from the squads hunting for Billy Collins when Archie Abbott telephoned from Grand Central. “Just got off the train. Something is missing from the Newport Torpedo Factory.”

“What?”

“Is the Old Man still in town?”

“Mr. Van Dorn’s in his office.”

“Why don’t you meet me downstairs?”

“Downstairs” meant privacy in the Hotel Knickerbocker’s cellar bar. Ten minutes later, they were hunched over a dark table. Archie beckoned the waiter. “You might want a drink before we report to the boss. I certainly do.”

“What’s missing?”

“Four electric torpedoes imported from England.”

The waiter approached. Bell waved him off.

“I thought everything burned up in the fire.”

“So did the Navy. They loaded all the junk on a barge to dump it offshore. I said to this Wheeler character, ‘Why don’t we count torpedoes? ’ Long story short, we went through the debris with a fine-tooth comb and tallied four missing electrics.”

Bell stared at his old friend. “By any chance were they the ones armed with TNT?”

“Wheeler is certain that those with TNT warheads are the ones missing.”

“Do you agree?”

“He had serial numbers. We found them on the remains of the cowlings. Found them all except those four-they’d been set aside for a torpedo boat to fire on the Test Range. It would have been too much of a coincidence if they’d been the only ones blown completely to smithereens.”