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

“It’s gonna be a record breaker anyway. Good thing the company doubled up on firemen.”

“If we hadn’t blocked the high ground, she’d have attacked from up there. You can’t see from here, but I saw it from the roof. A mammoth crude oil tank above the city.”

Wally nodded. “Number 14. The first of the new crude storage tanks to feed the stills below. One hundred thousand gallons.”

“That’s her goal—a Johnstown Flood of burning oil.”

—

Wally Kisley was incredulous. “Why attack the city?”

“There is a deranged logic to her scheme,” said Bell. “While everyone’s trying to protect the city, she can concentrate on the refinery.”

He borrowed a police sergeant and a squad of local cops from Eddie Edwards’ headquarters at the refinery gates. The cops led him and Wally on a shortcut past twisted ruins of burned-out tanks and through tank yards and stills. Firemen were deluging them with hose water to cool them. They entered the city streets, passing a school from which the children had been sent home and a hospital into which injured firefighters were stumbling.

Bell spotted Edna Matters, somber in black. She had an Evening Sun press card in her hatband and was taking down in shorthand the words of the rail-thin, harried-looking chief of Constable Hook’s volunteer firefighters. “Gossip that we refused to fight Standard Oil’s fire is bunk. We are protecting twenty thousand people in our city—families, friends, and neighbors.”

“Can you speak to the rumor that water is running so low that you won’t have enough pressure to fill your hoses?”

“Bunk! We get our water direct from the Hackensack River and the Hackensack is wet yet.”

Three fire horses galloped past pulling a steamer pump engine and the chief jumped on the back. Edna closed her notebook. “Hello, Isaac. Thank you for letting me see my father the other day.”

“Have you seen Nellie?”

“Of course not. If I had, I would have turned her in. What could make her do . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Whatever made Father do it, I suppose.”

Bell said, “Be careful here, Edna. Don’t let the fire get above you.”

The city streets ended abruptly at a shiny new chain-link fence. It had a gate manned by two cops. On the slope above the gate loomed Tank 14, which was painted white to reflect the heat of the sun.

“How could she miss?” said Wally. “Big as the battleship Maine and twice as explosive.”

Freshly poured concrete footings were laid on both sides of the tank. Sheets of steel were stacked next to them, awaiting assembly.

“I need twenty strong men,” Bell told the sergeant.

“There ain’t a man in The Hook not fighting the fire.”

“O.K. Take four armed men, empty the jail, bring the prisoners here.”

“I don’t think I’m allowed—”

Bell cut him. “A champion sniper with a gun that fires exploding bullets is going to blast a hole in that tank by hitting it repeatedly in the same spot until one of them ignites a crude oil fire that will drown your city in flames. I need your prisoners to erect a barricade. Now!”

The sergeant took off at a dead run. Bell removed his coat and said to the others, “Let’s get to work.”

Wally asked him quietly, “You’re just guessing about those bullets, aren’t you? Who knows if the smith actually made them.”

“I know,” said Bell. “I found one in his shop. It looked like he had set up to run a batch of them. My only guess is that Nellie got the first batch. Knowing her, she probably did.”

“You found one? Where is it?”

“In my rifle.”

—

When night fell, the fires lighted Constable Hook bright as day, from Tank 14 on its highest hill to the Kill Van Kull waterfront, where flames were eating through the piers, consuming the sheds, and burning the pilings down to the waterline. An entire warehouse of case oil was fueling a pillar of flames visible from every point of New York Harbor, and a burning barge of oil barrels glared at Staten Island like vaudeville limelights.

Isaac Bell had still not seen a trace of Nellie Matters. But Tank 14 was shielded on all four sides by a hastily erected barrier of sheet steel. “Now she can’t pierce the tank by hitting it repeatedly in the same spot,” Bell told Joseph Van Dorn. “And since it’s on the top of the hill, there is no vantage point on the Hook—no hill, no building, no tree—high enough to shoot through the roof.”

“She’ll shoot other tanks,” said Van Dorn.

“She’ll start fires. We’ll put them out. Eventually, she’ll run out of ammunition and strength.”

44

Amanda Faire was bitterly disappointed.

The redheaded keynote speaker for the Staten Island Suffragette Convocation at the Cunard estate on Grymes Hill had expected her usual packed house rapturously chanting her catchy watchword “Women’s votes are only Faire.” But despite her appearance being advertised in all the New York newspapers, and her arrival heralded by a magnificent scarlet balloon tethered on the lawn, half the chairs in the lecture tent were empty.

“I’m afraid we lost some of our gentlemen to the firebug tourists,” apologized her mortified hostess. She gestured helplessly at the smoke-stained western sky. “New York, Jersey City, Newark, and the Oranges are all flocking to see the conflagration.”

“Well,” Amanda said, bravely, “those who took the trouble to come deserve to hear me.”

“I’ll introduce you.”

“I’ll make my own introduction, thank you.” That was all she needed, a windbag driving the rest of the audience to the fire.

Amanda, who had positioned her podium so that her balloon created a striking backdrop directly behind her, stood to thin applause. As she opened her mouth to begin her speech, she could not help but notice a restive stir in the seats. Now what?

They were staring at her. Past her. Mouths were dropping open.

A woman cried, “There goes your balloon.”

—

Nellie Matters never doubted the wind would be in her favor. Things always worked out that way. Just when she needed it, it had shifted south,