The Bootlegger Clive Cussler (that summer book .txt) 📖

railcar?” The starlight reflected on cut-glass windows.

“A private car.”

“Does it belong to Fern?”

“Of course not. We would not risk any connection to Fern. Everything’s rented in cash by agents. In case we have to break camp quickly, none of this can be traced to her.” He stopped the Packard, climbed out, and stretched the kinks from the long ride. Antipov stood beside him. “What is that?” he asked, pointing at the silhouette of a tall spire.

“The hothouse chimney,” said Zolner. “It conceals a radio antenna. The signal guides our boats ashore.”

“What is out there? I see no lights.”

“Great South Bay. Forty miles long, five miles wide. Across it is Fire Island Inlet, and, through the inlet, the Atlantic Ocean.”

“What is around us on the land?”

“Other estates of similar size. All private.”

He walked Antipov to a large garage, led him in a side door, and turned on the lights to reveal a canvas-topped stake truck and six Packard and Pierce-Arrow automobiles. “The autos have strengthened suspensions so they don’t sag when loaded.”

“Why don’t you deliver it by rail? From your siding?”

“Have you forgotten trains are trapped on tracks? Rails are easily choked. The Prohibition agents would love nothing more than the opportunity to seize a railcar full of booze. We scatter it on the highways. If they’re lucky, they catch one auto in ten.”

“But you concentrate it here.”

“Many miles from the market in a dark and lonely place.”

“How do you get it here?”

“The boats.”

He turned out the garage lights and walked a gravel path to another large building on the bank of a still creek. The boathouse had no windows, so only when Zolner opened the door did Antipov see that it was brightly lit inside. Two large boats were tied in separate bulkheaded slips. One was broad beamed, a forty-foot freight boat with two huge motors.

“She carries a thousand cases at twenty-five knots,” said Zolner. “The price fluctuates according to demand, but in general her cargo will earn us fifty thousand dollars. A lot of money for a night’s work.”

“You have made a success of bootlegging.”

“The boats are the rum-running side of the business. Distributing and selling it is the actual bootlegging. I’ve made a success of that, too.”

“What is that other boat?” It was much longer than the freight boat and much narrower.

“My pride and joy,” said Zolner. “She, too, will carry a thousand cases, but at fifty miles an hour. And if anyone gets in her way, look out. She’ll gun them down. Her name is Black Bird.”

“Your pride?”

Zolner ignored the mocking note in Antipov’s voice.

“Her sailors are Russian—the best seamen in the world.”

“Why have they disassembled her motors?”

The heads were off all three Liberty engines. Carborundum growled against steel, cascading white sparks as a mechanic ground valves.

“The price of speed,” shrugged Zolner. “These motors burn up their valves on a regular basis.”

“Intake or exhaust?” asked Antipov.

“I forgot, you apprenticed as a mechanic. Exhaust, of course. It’s the heat that builds up. No one’s come up with a good way to cool them, though not for lack of trying every trick in the book, including hollow valves filled with mercury or sodium. Fortunately, the United States built seventeen thousand Liberty engines, most of which were never used in the war. We buy them for pennies on the dollar.”

He gestured at wooden crates stacked against the rear wall. “Believe it or not, it is often more efficient to replace the entire motor than waste time on the valves.”

“I would believe almost anything at this point.”

Antipov spoke softly, but he was seething with anger.

Now was the time, Zolner decided, to get this out in the open.

“What is it?” he asked. “What is troubling you, Yuri?”

“What of the revolution?”

“What of the revolution?”

“You are a Comintern agent, Comrade Zolner. You were sent here to spearhead the Bolshevik takeover of America.”

9

“WHAT PRECISELY have you done to spearhead the Bolshevik takeover of America?”

The boathouse mechanic switched off his electric grinder. For a long moment the only sound Marat Zolner heard was the lap of water echoing in the slips.

The Communist International—the “Comintern”—was Soviet Russia’s worldwide espionage network. The Russian Communist Party had launched it as its foreign arm when it seized control of the revolution that brought down Czar Nicholas II. The Comintern’s mission was to repeat that victory everywhere in the world and overthrow the governments of the international bourgeoisie by all available means—spying, sabotage, and armed force.

Marat Zolner was a battle-hardened soldier of the revolution. During the war he had provoked entire regiments to shoot their officers. He led the Soviet unit that captured the czar’s train, fought with the Bolsheviks to subvert the democratic provisional government, and shone in cavalry battles with White Loyalists in the Russian Civil War. Beyond the Russian border, he proved versatile, rallying Berlin street fighters to the barricades. Antipov had fought at his side.

“Go get something to eat!” he called to the valve grinder, a Russian, too. When they were alone, he said to Antipov, “Come here!”

He strode to the wall of spare motors. Sitting on one of the crates was a steel strongbox.

“Open that!”

Antipov flung back the lid. The box was crammed with cash, banded stacks of bills in denominations of one hundred and one thousand dollars.

“Where did you get this?”

“Profits,” said Zolner.

“Profits?”

“Money earned smuggling alcohol from Rum Row to Long Island roadhouses and New York speakeasies.”

“I ask of the revolution and you answer like a banker. Profits?”

“What I am doing costs money.”

“And what precisely are you doing?”

Marat Zolner said, “Masking our Comintern network of assassins and saboteurs as a liquor-bootlegging crime syndicate.”

“You wear your mask too well. You boast of pride and joy. You boast of gangsters, smugglers. Bootleggers. Where are the comrades?”

“Black Bird’s sailors are comrades—loyal Russian Bolshevik comrades of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Fleet. Johann was a comrade. You are a comrade.”

“And you?”

“My smugglers and gangsters obey me. I am their bootlegger boss. They don’t know I’m Comintern. They won’t know why I expand