the Spy (2010) by Cussler Clive (early readers .txt) 📕

was next. He battled to stay afloat, but he was weakened by cold and rendered breathless by the poison gas. A wave curled over him, and his mind suddenly filled with his memory of the day he met Marion and the floor had trembled beneath his feet. His eyes were playing tricks on him. Her thick, lustrous hair was piled atop her head. One long, narrow strand fell nearly to her waist. She looked dainty but strong as a willow, and she was reaching for him.

She gripped his hand. He tightened his own grip and pulled himself to the surface. He looked up into the grinning face of a bearded sailor.

THE NEXT ISAAC BELL KNEW, he was sprawled on his back in the bottom of a wooden boat. Beside him lay Captain Lowell Falconer. The Hero of Santiago looked as beat-up as Bell felt, but his eyes were bright.

You'll be O.K., Bell. They're taking us into sick bay.

It hurt to talk and was hard to breathe. His throat was burning. Better warn the salvage boys that the Holland has a live Wheeler Mark 14 still in its tube.

Still in its tube, thanks to you.

The launch bumped against a dock.

What are those lights? asked Bell. The sky was white with them.

Hull 44 is going to double shifts.

Good.

Good'? Lowell Falconer echoed. The most you can say for yourself is good'?

Isaac Bell thought hard. Then he grinned. Sorry about your yacht.

ON DISTANT SERVICE

TEN YEARS LATER

NORTH SEA, GERMAN COAST

FOG BLINDED THE GERMAN SOLDIERS HUNTING THE American spy.

Oozing from the Friesland peat bogs into the morning air, it crowded under the trees and covered the flat ground. It was supposed to last until the sun burned it off midmorning. But it grew thin early when a salt wind from the North Sea roamed ashore. Isaac Bell saw the daylight penetrate, revealing fields crisscrossed by ditches, trees stationed along fence lines, and in the distance a boathouse by a canal. A boat would come in handy now.

Bell saw his own face on a wanted poster nailed to the boathouse.

He had to hand it to the Kaiser's military intelligence. Three days after he had come ashore, the German Army had plastered his image on every tree and barn between Berlin and the coast. One thousand Marks reward, five and a half thousand dollars, a fortune on either side of the Atlantic. The grim-faced fugitive on the Steckbrief bore his general likeness. Though they had no photograph, only the account of a sentry at the Wilhelmshaven Naval Station U-boat yard, the sketch artist had captured the determined set of his chin and lips and the hard, lean look of a man more muscle than flesh. Thankfully, the written description of blond hair and mustache and blue eyes fit most men in the Saxon region. Though few stood as tall.

With the United States now fighting Germany in the World War, his clothes-a ragbag mix of uniform parts-and the crutch he carried as a wounded veteran, guaranteed he'd be shot as a spy if they caught him. Nor could he expect any mercy for the map he had drawn of the new U-boat yard that serviced the latest submarines-immensely more powerful than the old Holland, and heavily armed-that were suddenly and unexpectedly winning the war for Germany. The map that was useless until he delivered it to America's Sixth Battle Squadron steaming offshore.

The canal was narrow, and the rushes planted on both sides to protect the banks from wakes tended to hold the fog. He rowed two miles to Wilhelmshaven, abandoning the boat to evade naval station sentries and stealing another. The fog continued cooperating, after a fashion, at the harbor, still fitful, thinning for moments, then thickened by clouds of coal smoke from a hundred warships.

It was low tide. The entrance to the harbor was shallow, and Wilhelmshaven was crowded with funnels and masts of the High Seas Fleet's cruisers, battle cruisers, and dreadnoughts waiting for high water. But shallow-draft torpedo boats could leave, which meant that Bell's escape vessel had to be small enough to operate by himself and very fast, which eliminated tugboats, lighters, launches, and fishing scows.

Intelligence supplied by a Van Dorn who had gone underground when war had closed the Berlin office pinpointed a captured Italian-built MAS fifty-foot armed motorboat. Bell had spotted it on the way in and it was still there, in the grimy shadow of a dreadnought.

He prayed for more fog, and his prayer was answered so quickly that he had only a moment to get a compass fix on the MAS before every vessel in the harbor was buried to its mast tops. He rowed, repeatedly checking the compass on the seat beside him, and tried to judge the current. But to strike a fifty-foot target in a quarter mile was impossible, and the first he knew how far he had missed by was when he banged into the armored side of the dreadnought.

The vague looming of 12-inch guns overhead indicated he was near its bow, and he quietly paddled alongside until he found the MAS. He boarded, confirmed it was unmanned, and untied all but one line. Then he inspected the motors, a pair of the sort of beautifully compact gasoline engines he expected of the Italians. He figured out how to start them, got their fuel pumps primed, and released the last line. Using one of the oars, he paddled it slowly away from the dreadnought and waited for the sun to start burning off the fog. At the moment he could see and be seen, he started the engines, each of which was as a loud as his old Locomobile.

By the time he reached the narrow mouth of the harbor, the Germans knew something was up, if not exactly what. The confusion and still-murky fog bought him a few precious moments, and by the time individuals began firing rifles at him he was thundering across the water at nearly thirty knots. He streaked past some picketboats, drawing