The Striker by Clive Cussler (ebook reader web TXT) 📕

answers to someone, don’t you?” She shook her head. It was too dark to see her eyes, much less read her expression. He tried again to force an honest answer. “Who paid for a hundred barges?”

“That was the first thing I asked,” she said.

“Did he answer?”

“Bank robberies. They raised the money with bank robberies.”

“Where?”

“Chicago.”

“What would you say if I told you that those robberies were committed by several different gangs, half of whom have been caught this week?”

“I’d say you’re practicing again.”

Mack stepped out of the cabin, calling urgently. “Isaac! If you insist on trying this tonight, there isn’t a moment to lose.”

A towboat loomed out of the fog, paddles thrashing, and banged against the barges. Miners clambered onto them with ropes and looked around uncertainly, waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

“Now or never, Isaac.”

“Mary, I will talk to you tomorrow.”

She climbed the ladder onto the barge and started toward the shore.

“Where are you going?”

“You’re not the only one who has ‘right’ to do, Isaac.”

“Will you be careful?” Bell called after her.

“Why should I be careful? You’ll be following me.”

“Not tonight. I can’t tonight.” He gestured helplessly at the steamboat and the barges.

“Then tonight I’ll take my chances.”

“Clay is deadly.”

Mary Higgins stopped, turned around, and looked back at him. Spark and flame erupted from the towboat’s stacks, illuminating her pale skin. Eyes aglow, chin high, she looked, Bell thought, utterly beautiful and supremely confident. He wondered how she could be so sure of herself in the face of her disappointment. The answer came like an icicle in his heart.

“He is not deadly to me.”

36

PITTSBURGH’S INFAMOUS “BLACK FOG” WAS A GRIMY MIX of the natural fog that rose from the rivers and the coal smoke and soot that tumbled out of mills, foundries, powerhouses, locomotives, and steamboats. Black fog was dense and oily, painful to breathe, and nearly impossible to see through. When the pilot of the lead tow shined his electric carbon arc searchlight ahead to inspect the empty barges he was pushing, the beam bounced back into the pilothouse as if reflected by a mirror.

“The barges are up there somewhere,” the pilot joked to Isaac Bell, who was standing at his shoulder. He was Captain Jennings, an old-timer with a tobacco-stained swallow-tailed beard. His boat was the Camilla, a low-slung, two-deck ninety-footer with a stern paddle wheel as wide as she was. The glass pilothouse, which reminded Bell of a New England sea captain’s widow’s walk, was perched on the second deck behind the chimneys and let them view the murk ahead, behind, and to both sides.

“You can feel it different in the wheel if the tow breaks up and you and the boat are out all by your lonesome while they’re drifting every which way. We’re doing fine, don’t you worry none. I don’t have to see what I know.” He spit tobacco juice into a box filled with sawdust. “Heck, most of what I can’t see I can feel in the floor or whether the paddle wheel turns sluggish. Feeling the river shoals tells me where I am. What I can’t see or feel, I have stashed in my memory machine.”

Bell wondered how the pilot saw other tows on a collision course with his. Jennings’s white beard suggested he had survived decades on the river, but it seemed worth asking.

“If in doubt, I ring the stopping bell,” came the laconic reply.

Bell looked back and saw a dim light that might be the barge fleet behind them. Jennings’s son was driving it. The three tows behind it were invisible. Bell had stationed the levelheaded Archie Abbott, who like he had grown up around sailboats and steam yachts, on the rearmost. He put Wally Kisley on the next, then Mack Fulton. And if there was anything to be grateful for, it was the blinding black fog.

Ahead, an eerie reddish luminescence began to spread in the dark. It grew steadily in size and intensity. “What’s that red light?”

“Jones & Laughlin blast furnaces . . . Watch close, you’ll see something you’ll never forget. There!”

A procession of red balls appeared to float in the air as they moved across the river, high above the water. Bell was mystified at first until his keen eyes distinguished the girders of trusswork. “Is that a bridge?”

“The Hot Metal Bridge.”

As the forward barges in their tow pushed under it, Bell could see a locomotive pulling flatcars through the trusses. On each car was a glowing red mass of fire.

“What are those railcars carrying?”

“J & L crucibles of molten steel from the furnaces across to the rolling mill. Ain’t that something?”

After clearing the bridge, the pilot nudged his big wooden wheel, which was as tall as he was, and coaxed the tow into a broad turn. There was a white glow to the left. A gust of wind shredded the fog momentarily, and Bell glimpsed the point of the Amalgamated Coal Terminal. It was ablaze in electric work lights as the conveyors lifted coal from barges to the tipple. Seven miles of dark river to go. At least an hour. Load the people, and seven miles back. The black fog thickened.

Suddenly, Bell sensed movement alongside. Camilla’s searchlight played on a masonry bridge pier. They passed close enough to see the cement between the stones. “Brown’s Bridge,” said the pilot. “We’re on our way.”

Below the Homestead Works, as the smoke thinned, the black fog dissipated slightly, just in time to see a fully laden twenty-barge tow coming downriver straight at them—a fast-moving two-acre island of coal.

“Shoot!” growled Bell’s pilot. “That’s Captain Andy. Of all the boats to run into tonight.”

“What’s the matter?”

Jennings spat at the box of sawdust. “Captain Andy owns three steamers, inclining him toward the capitalist camp. Allowing what we’re up to for our friends in labor would be like dipping an oar in a nest of water moccasins.”

He blew his whistle. The oncoming tow’s