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

in a swamp was a risky place to hide. Once in, there was no getting out, other than by railcar, and loading a boat onto a railcar was far too slow a process to escape a chase.

“Here he is,” whispered Tobin.

A long shadow glided by, fifty feet from their boat’s bow, faintly silhouetted by factory lights across the river. Bell waited until it had cleared the freight slip and moved a hundred yards farther upstream. It wasn’t likely it could outrun the Van Dorn boat, and, even if it could, it couldn’t go far.

Bell stepped on his starters. He had warmed the Libertys every thirty minutes. All four fired up at once. He shoved all props forward and the boat shot from the slip. He turned his wheel hard over, swinging her upriver, and switched on the forward searchlight.

If Isaac Bell had any doubts that Marat Zolner was Prince André, they vanished when he saw Black Bird’s helmsman look over his shoulder into the glare. Bell recognized the lean, handsome face, the elegant stance he remembered gliding over the Club Deluxe dance floor, and the reptilian grace of movement he had first seen on the roof of Roosevelt Hospital the night that Marat Zolner shot Johann Kozlov.

Bell’s boat covered the yards between them in a flash.

He was pulling alongside before Black Bird unmuffled her engines. Suddenly, the black boat was thundering, leaping ahead on a boiling wake.

Ed Tobin shouted over the roar of their own engines, “I can’t shoot!”

Bell saw why. Ahead, on both sides of the narrow river, were the red and green and white lights of small boats. Fishermen were standing in them, dragging nets. Behind them on one shore was a white-shingled hotel, and lining the opposite shore was a row of houseboats. The powerful Lewis gun would chew them to pieces and kill anyone with the bad luck to meet a stray bullet.

“Hold your fire.”

The black boat was pulling ahead.

Bell poured on the gas.

The black boat left the fishing boats in its wake.

The channel ahead was clear.

“Fire!”

Ed Tobin triggered a burst of shells. He stopped firing almost instantly.

“Look out, Isaac!”

Bell was already jerking his throttles back.

“Hold on, Dash!” he shouted over his shoulder. “It’s a trap!”

35

THE FISHING BOATS were racing to shore, hauling lines out of the water, dragging something across the channel.

Marion struck before Isaac Bell could disengage his propellers.

Bell braced for a timber-jarring crash and hoped the reinforced bow would take it. Surprisingly, the express cruiser slowed without collision and seemed to hang mid-channel. Instead of a crash in the bow, he heard several loud bangs deep within the boat. His engines screamed, revving wildly, and he realized that Zolner’s men had strung a heavy cargo net across the channel. Its thick strands had fouled his churning propellers. Blades sheared and driveshafts snapped.

The Van Dorn boat was trapped in the middle of the river.

“Thompsons!” Dashwood called coolly. “Get down!”

The night exploded with red jets of fire and flying lead.

Their searchlight went black in a burst of hot glass.

Thank the Lord for armor plate, thought Isaac Bell. And bless Lynch & Harding. She carried two thousand gallons of explosively flammable gasoline, but the speedboat builders had snugged her fuel tanks under the sole, out of the range of bullets storming past.

Their Lewis guns were still useless. Behind the Thompson submachine guns strafing them from both sides of the river were homes with thin wooden walls. Bell yanked from its sheath a .30-06 bolt-action Springfield rifle he had stowed for such a contingency.

Tobin had one in his machine-gun nest.

Dashwood had one in his.

The Thompsons’ muzzle fire made excellent targets, particularly as the two-handled submachine guns were designed to be clutched snug to the torso. Bell fired. A gunman tumbled into the river.

Tobin fired and missed.

Dashwood made up for it, firing twice and dropping two.

The three Van Dorns whirled in unison to shoot the submachine gunners on the opposite bank. Before they could trigger their weapons, the shooting stopped.

Isaac Bell saw why in an instant.

The black boat was coming back.

It stormed downriver, Lewis gun pumping bullets with a continuous rumble. The rapid fire starred Bell’s windshield and clanged off the armor. By now, he knew what to expect of Marat Zolner. He stood up and aimed his rifle. A man on the bow of the speeding boat was about to throw a grenade. James Dashwood shot it out of his hand and it exploded behind the boat.

A second grenade sailed through the air. Isaac Bell and Ed Tobin fired together, and the grenade dropped into the river. Black Bird raced past the Van Dorn boat at fifty knots, thundering toward Biscayne Bay.

“Close,” said Tobin.

“Not close enough,” said Bell, watching the red glare of her exhaust disappear behind a bend in the river. He called to a fisherman, venturing out in his rowboat. “Shooting’s over, friend. Would fifty bucks get us a lift ashore?”

“A hundred.”

“It’s yours.”

On shore, Tobin went looking for a tugboat to tow them to a boatyard for repairs. Bell and Dashwood scoured the riverbank. The ambushers had taken their wounded with them. Bell retrieved a Thompson submachine gun they had dropped. Dashwood found a full box of German stick grenades.

“I don’t suppose our ‘Captain’ friend is waiting at the dock for the rest of his reward.”

Bell said, “Zolner is counterpunching. Question is, where’s he going to hit us next?”

•   •   •

ASA SOMERS had been in love many times. He had fallen head over heels for Mae Marsh in Intolerance and returned to the movie house again and again. Mary Pickford was next, in Little Lord Fauntleroy, and then Mabel Normand. And of course he fell in love regularly with girls he saw on streetcars until they jumped off at their stops. But never until now with a real live girl.

And Fräulein Grandzau was a real live girl. She was beautiful beyond description, wore wonderful-smelling perfume, and had a way of looking him right in the face when she talked to him.