The Assassin by Clive Cussler (epub ebook reader .txt) 📕

“Obviously you declined. Did you consider it?”

“I told them to go to blazes.”

Bell asked, “Can’t you see that I’m offering you an opportunity to help send them there?”

He pointed down at the orderly rows of tanks and the belching furnaces, then across the forest of derricks looming over the roofs of what must have been a peaceful town. A gust of wind swept the smoke aside. Suddenly he could see clear to the farthest of the wooden towers.

“You built your refinery to serve independents. That’s where your heart lies. Wouldn’t you agree, sir, that you owe it to all independent oil men to testify?”

Hopewell shook his head.

Bell had one card left. He bet the ranch on it. “How much did the Standard pay for a barrel of crude when you drilled two years ago.”

“A dollar thirty-five a barrel.”

“How much are they paying now? Provided you could deliver it.”

“Seventy cents a barrel.”

“They raised the price artificially high, nearly doubled it, to encourage you to drill. You and your fellow wildcatters did the Standard’s exploratory work for them, at your own expense. Thanks to your drilling, they know the extent of the Kansas fields and how they stack up against the Indian Territory and Oklahoma fields. They suckered you, Mr. Hopewell.”

“More homework, Mr. Bell?” said Spike Hopewell. “Is that the Van Dorn Detective motto: ‘Do your homework’?”

“The Van Dorn motto is ‘We never give up! Never!’”

Hopewell grinned. “That’s my motto, too . . . Well, it’s hard to say no to a man who’s done his homework. And damned-near impossible to a man who won’t give up . . . O.K., put ’er there!”

Spike Hopewell thrust a powerful hand into Bell’s. “What do you want to know first?”

Bell stepped closer to take it, saying, “I’m mighty curious about those tricks up your sleeve.”

Hopewell stumbled backward, clutching his throat.

3

Still gripping the hand that Hopewell had extended, Isaac Bell heard a muted gunshot and realized that the sound was delayed by the time it took a bullet to fly an enormous distance. He pulled Spike down on the cornice’s narrow plank floor, behind the partial shelter of the railings. But it was too late to protect him. The oil man was dead. A slug had pierced his throat and torn out the back of his neck.

A second slug passed through the space that Bell’s own head had occupied a half a heartbeat earlier. It twanged against the steel crown pulley, ricocheted, and splintered oak. Bell looked for the source. The shot echoed crazily. It seemed to come from the west, where a plain riddled with gullies drained toward a creek. On the far side of the creek, low, wooded hills stretched to the horizon. He spotted a flicker of motion to the north. A figure was climbing down a derrick at an astonishing seven hundred yards’ distance.

Isaac Bell plunged three rungs at a time down the ladder.

His Locomobile was parked between the slanting legs of the derrick and the engine house. Still hot, the motor fired on the second spin. He leaped behind the steering wheel and thundered off in the direction the shot had come from, weaving a wild path through the densely packed oil derricks and skidding around drill machinery, pump houses, engines, and machine shops. When he burst out of the last row of derricks, he saw a big man on horseback galloping across the open plain that stretched beyond the oil field.

Bell raced after him.

The fleeing rider was well mounted on a strong, big-boned animal of fully seventeen hands. Bell shoved his accelerator to the floorboards and wrenched his steering wheel side to side as he plowed his big auto over rough ground, slewing around hummocks and dodging gullies.

Ahead of the horseman, the grassland ended abruptly at a thick wood. If he got inside the trees, he was free. Bell drove faster. The deep cut of the creek bed separated the grassland from the trees. Bell exulted; he had him trapped.

He yanked open his exhaust bypass for maximum power. Unimpeded by back pressure, the Locomobile’s four cylinders roared with all their might.

The horseman galloped straight at the creek and dug his spurs in. The horse gathered its legs and jumped. Its forelegs struck the far bank. Its left rear hoof slipped down the earthen wall of the creek. The right hoof dug into the grass, and the animal scrambled free and galloped for the trees.

Isaac Bell was forced to slam on the Locomobile’s anemic brakes and slide the auto into a sideways drift to stop before it tumbled into the creek. He yanked his Winchester from its scabbard buckled to the passenger seat. The horseman was already inside the woods, partially screened by the thinly scattered outer fringe of trees. Bell saw one chance and opened fire.

He worked the Winchester’s ejection lever in a blur of motion. Had a cartridge jammed, the pivoting lever would have snapped in his hands. The heavy rifle boomed repeatedly. The horseman’s hat flew in the air. He swayed and started to fall off. A flailing hand gripped his saddle horn and he stayed on his mount. Before Bell could fire again, horse and rider found the shelter deep inside the woods.

Bell heard a loud report behind him. Another gunman? It seemed to come from the oil derricks. It was followed immediately by a metallic clanging noise like a blacksmith’s hammer. Then he heard a sharp retort like a blasting cap or a quarter stick of dynamite.

A blinding light flashed from the refinery.

A hollow Boom! shook the air. The explosion blew the top off a crude oil tank that stood in the outermost ring of tanks. Shattered planking tufted into the sky. Black smoke pillared. The first explosion, Bell surmised, had ignited the natural gas that rose from the crude oil and collected in the top of the tanks. The gas explosion had set the oil itself to burning.

That it