The Wrecker by Clive Cussler (book club reads .TXT) 📕

“straight from Japan,” was followed by a comic song “I Think I Oughtn’t Auto Any More”:

... happened to be smoking when I got beneath her car,

gasoline was leaking and fell on my cigar,

blew that chorus girl so high I thought she was a star...

When the song was over, a solitary snare drum began to rattle. A single chorus girl in a blue blouse, a short white skirt, and red tights marched across the empty stage. A second snare drum joined in. A second chorus girl fell in with the first. Then another drum and another girl. Then six drums were rattling and six chorus girls marching to and fro. Then another and another. Bass drums took up the beat with a thumping that shook the seats. Suddenly, all fifty of the most beautiful chorus girls on Broadway broke off their dance on stage, snatched up fifty drums from stacks beside the wings, ran down the stairs on either side, and stormed the aisles pounding their drums and kicking their red-clad legs.

“Aren’t you glad we came?” shouted Abbott.

Bell looked up. A flash through the skylight caught his eye, as if the theater were training lights down from the roof in addition to those already blazing on the stage. It looked as if the night sky were on fire. He felt a harsh thump shake the building and thought for a moment it was the rolling shock wave of an earthquake. Then he heard a thunderous explosion.

26

THE FOLLIES ORCHESTRA STOPPED PLAYING ABRUPTLY. AN eerie silence gripped the theater. Then debris clattered on the tin roof like a thousand snare drums. Glass flew out of the skylight, and everyone in the theater—audience, stagehands, and chorus girls—began screaming.

Isaac Bell and Archie Abbott moved as one, up the aisle, through the canvas rain curtains and across the roof to the outside staircase. They saw a red glow in the southwest sky in the direction of Jersey City.

“The powder pier,” said Bell with a sinking heart. “We better get over there.”

“Look,” said Archie as they started down the stairs. “Broken windows everywhere.”

Every building on the block had lost a window. Forty-fourth Street was littered with broken glass. They turned their backs on the crowds surging in panic on Broadway and ran west on Forty-fourth toward the river. They crossed Eighth Avenue, then Ninth, and ran through the slums of Hell’s Kitchen, dodging the residents spilling out of saloons and tenements. Everyone was shouting “What happened?”

The Van Dorn detectives raced across Tenth Avenue, over the New York Central Railroad tracks, across Eleventh, dodging fire engines and panicked horses. The closer they got to the water, the more broken windows they saw. A cop tried to stop them from running onto the piers. They showed their badges and brushed past him.

“Fireboat!” Bell shouted.

Bristling with fire monitors and belching smoke, a New York City fireboat was pulling away from Pier 84. Bell ran after it, jumped. Abbott landed beside him.

“Van Dorn,” they told the startled deckhand. “We have to get to Jersey City.”

“Wrong boat. We’re dispatched downtown to spray the piers.”

The reason for the fireboat’s orders was soon apparent. Across the river, flames were shooting into the sky from the Jersey City piers. With the end of the rain, the wind had shifted west, and it was blowing sparks across the river onto Manhattan’s piers. So instead of helping fight the fire in Jersey City, the fireboat was wetting down Manhattan’s piers to keep the sparks from igniting their roofs and wooden ships moored alongside.

“He’s a mastermind,” said Bell. “I’ve got to hand him that.”

“A Napoleon of crime,” Archie agreed. “As if Conan Doyle sicced Professor Moriarty on us instead of Sherlock Holmes.”

Bell spotted a New York Police Department Marine Division launch at the Twenty-third Street Lackawanna Ferry Terminal. “Drop us there!”

The New York cops agreed to run them across the river. They passed damaged boats with sails in tatters or smokestacks toppled by the blast. Some were adrift. On others, crewmen were jury-rigging repairs sufficient to get them to shore. A Jersey Central Railroad ferry limped toward Manhattan, its windows shattered and its superstructure blackened.

“There’s Eddie Edwards!”

Edwards’s white hair had been singed black, and his eyes were gleaming in a face of soot, but he was otherwise unhurt.

“Thank God you telephoned, Isaac. We got the gun in place in time to stop the bastards.”

“Stop them? What are you talking about?”

“They didn’t blow the powder pier.” He pointed through the thick smoke. “The dynamite train is O.K.”

Bell peered through the smoke and saw the string of cars. The five that been sitting there when he left Jersey City last evening to take the night off at the Follies were still there.

“What did they blow up? We felt it in Manhattan. It broke every window in the city.”

“Themselves. Thanks to the Vickers.”

Eddie described how they had driven off the Southern Pacific steam lighter with machine-gun fire.

“She turned around and took off after a schooner. We saw them in company earlier. I would guess that the schooner probably took their crew off. After the murdering scum locked the helm and aimed her at the pier.”

“Did your gunfire detonate the dynamite?”

“I don’t think so. We shot her wheelhouse to pieces, but she didn’t explode. She bore off, turned a full hundred eighty degrees, and steamed away. Must have been three, four minutes before the dynamite exploded. One of the boys on the Vickers thought he saw her hit the schooner. And we all saw her sails in the flash.”

“It’s almost impossible to detonate dynamite by impact,” Bell mused. “They must have devised a trigger of some sort ... How do you see it, Eddie? How did they get their hands on the Southern Pacific steam lighter?”

“The way I see it,” said Edwards, “they ambushed the lighter upriver, shot McColleen, and threw the crew overboard.”

“We must find their bodies,” Bell ordered in a voice heavy with sorrow. “Archie, tell the cops on both sides of the river.