Page 2 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
At Eastham, a short distance upriver from Liverpool, theDuke of Monmouthentered the Manchester Ship Canal through a tight-fitting set of locks. Such was the state of the tide that they needed to only be lifted a couple of feet before the water in the lock equalized with that of the canal, which, when it first opened in 1894, made the city of Manchester an actual seaport, though it sat some thirty miles from the coast.
More first- and second-class passengers were coming out to the decks to take in the sights now that the ship was no longer tossing them about. Many still looked a little sickly, but most had color returning to their cheeks and obvious relief in their voices as any threat of a submarine attack was well and truly over.
The canal hugged the southern bank of the Mersey River, which remained busy with the tide still up and the sandbars and shoals buried deep under the water. At low tide, much of the estuary was agreat mudflat that, in the right conditions, could smell something awful. At points the canal was narrow enough that it seemed they were sailing through earthen fields rather than on water. Bell felt he could lean over the rail and pluck a skeletal branch from a tree growing on the berm separating the canal from the river.
A detective all his adult life, Bell relied as much on instinct as he did on intellect, both of which he honed to a keen edge with every opportunity. He loved what he did and was therefore very good at his job. His instincts were telling him something his intellect said was unlikely, but he listened to his gut all the same. He turned around and looked up to where the first-class passengers were enjoying their superior view of the Lancashire countryside. He caught the blond woman watching him. He smiled as he saw a slight blush against her alabaster skin. Bell tipped his hat and she flustered for only a moment before regaining herself. She turned away with a look that managed to elevate her haughtiness to some form of high hauteur.
That brief exchange quickened his pulse the same as the first time he’d seen her.
Quickly though, reality intruded as a noxious smell enveloped the liner in a cloud that sent multiple passengers back into the salons and reception areas.
“Lord, that’s awful,” Eddie remarked. This from a man who’d once sorted through several tons of rotten oysters to find a gun used to kill a dockside security guard.
TheDuke of Monmouthhad passed around Weston Point and was approaching the docks at Runcorn. They were about nine miles from the sea. The air was heavy with coal smoke and the other odors of the industrial revolution, but atop it was the farm smell of animalmanure, which was somehow much worse, like the noisome discharge of a diseased herd already in the throes of death.
Another ship was tied to the dock that ran parallel to the canal. She flew the Canadian ensign, a predominantly red flag with the Union Jack in one corner and the Great Seal of Canada toward the center. She was an animal transporter about halfway finished unloading hundreds of horses destined for the front and hundreds more sheep destined for the soldiers’ mess. The passage had to have been even worse for the animals than it had been for the passengers aboard theDuke of Monmouthbecause the quay was awash in loose dung.
Men with hand-pumped hoses were washing the treacle into the canal, but that did little to alleviate the cloying stench. All the horses Bell could see stood with their heads low, their tails motionless, and their mien listless. The sheep that had already been unloaded and fenced inside temporary corrals bleated miserably, their once-white coats stained down almost to the skin.
The cowboys who’d tended the animals all the way from Halifax, sleeping near their stalls and keeping them fed and watered despite the rough seas, were struggling to keep their charges together. Only a few had mounts well enough to ride, leaving just a handful of the ranchers to coax the seasick animals into a semblance of a line so they could be herded to a nearby railhead. From there they would be transported to farms around the south of England, where they would be acclimated and then trained to become warhorses.
Bell had read somewhere that the British were losing around three hundred horses per day on the front. It was early March. He doubted any of the animals on the pier would see the summer.
TheMonmouthslid past the livestock transporter and came upagainst its pier, the harbor pilot working the ship’s rudder and engine to ease the liner up against the dock with barely a kiss. Below, workers with scarves tied over their noses and mouths because of the smell prepared to unload the ship.
Bell assumed that whatever cargo and passengers she’d return with to North America would be loaded at her regular slot back in Liverpool. Providing for a nation that was fielding millions of men in a foreign country to fight a war no one really wanted was an exercise in precision timing and industrial might on a scale never seen in all of human history.
One group of men on the pier caught Bell’s eye. A couple were obviously dockworkers, but two looked different. They wore plain clothes but had the look of cops, sharp-eyed and situationally aware. They stood around an open back lorry with a canvas cover protecting the driver and passenger compartment. The stevedores smoked cigarettes while the two police guards scanned the ship. They knew he was coming in as a second-class passenger and so ignored the people on the top deck already getting ready to depart the ship via a long switchback set of gangways.
The second- and third-class passengers returning to Europe after working in America wouldn’t disembark until the premier passengers had all cleared customs and were on their way to London or wherever they were headed. Just by interpreting their body language, the British police recognized the two Van Dorn men slouched against theMonmouth’s railing. While other passengers gawked at the sights of the harbor and the canal traffic still moving past or stared in fascination at the chaotic unloading of the horses, Bell and Eddie Tobin watched the cops.
The older of the two cops pointed in Bell’s direction. In turn Bell pulled a slender flashlight that was no bigger than a cigar and usedthe nonstandard AA batteries from his overcoat pocket and flashed the Morse code of his initials:Dot, dot. Dash, dot, dot, dot.
The policeman acknowledged the gesture. Bell swung his gaze toward theDuke of Monmouth’s bow. The forward hatch had already been knocked open and an operator was standing by the mast derrick. Near him was the ship’s third officer, as previously arranged when the assignment had been discussed with the ship’s owner and captain. Bell’s cargo would be the first off the ship and the police in charge to receive it would be well on their way before anyone else cleared customs with their luggage.
As the crane hook vanished into the hold, Eddie nudged Bell and pointed at something happening on the dock. “Hey, boss man, what is that thing?” he asked.
Bell wasn’t sure. It was a wheeled tower made of metal struts with a ramp that spiraled down from the top all the way to the ground. The floor and outer wall of the helical were made of individual rollers that would spin freely if something were to pass over them or bump against them in the case of the outer wall.
“If I’d have to guess,” Bell said as the odd tower was wheeled closer to the ship, “it’s some Rube Goldbergian contraption for unloading steamer trunks. A guy on the ship sets a trunk on top and with a little shove it coils down and around the ramp until it reaches the bottom and another stevedore is there ready to heave it onto a waiting truck. If you notice, the struts can be jacked up or down depending on how high up on the ship the trunk storage compartments are.”
“Damned clever.”
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Bell said. “The Brits are facing a massive labor shortage with all their men off in the trenches, so they need to get creative.”
Dockworkers pushed the unloading ramp toward the ship, while the crate Bell and Eddie had been hired to protect rose from the forward hold. It looked like a standard packing crate, maybe with thicker-than-average wood, but unremarkable in all respects. Once the crate was high enough to clear the ship’s rail, the boom was swung outward enough for it to lower the package directly onto the waiting truck. The two cops stepped back as the stevedores craned their necks back and reached up with their arms to guide the load into position.
As soon as the crate landed on the truck’s open bed, a carefully set trap was sprung.
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The two stevedores turned onthe police officers, swinging leather cudgels with lead-shot heads, while a third supposed dockworker raced to the scene and leapt onto the truck’s bed to slash the knots securing the crate to the crane. Bell gave credit to the operator on board theDuke of Monmouth. He was quick on the controls, but when he spooled back the iron hook, the ropes had just parted and the crate remained on the dockside in the bed of the AEC Y-type lorry. The bobbies were laid out on the dock, dark stains around their heads where the coshes had likely cracked bone.
Bell’s mission had ended the moment the crate landed in the back of the truck, but that didn’t end his personal commitment. He could no more let the crime unfold before him than he could stop the sun rising in the east.
The gangway to unload passengers was two decks up and half the ship away. Out of the question, so Bell took the alternate routeoff theDuke of Monmouth. With a startled grunt from Eddie Tobin, whose shoulder he used to climb onto the rail, Bell moved down the thin wooden rail with the agility of a cat and twice the cunning. As the loading derrick hook swung back around the side of the ship, Bell put on a burst of speed to launch himself at it, not thinking about the thirty-foot drop to the unforgiving concrete below.
He was weightless for only a moment before his hands wrapped around the cold steel hook with a sure grip. Momentum swung the line even farther out, like a penduluming weight at the end of a string. He arced back toward the ship right above the unloading trunk tower. He let go just before he was above the contraption and his body arrowed downward like a dart. He hit where the ramp met the wall, a blow hard enough to knock the air from his lungs in a painful whoosh. But there was no time to find his bearings. The rollers were as finely made as the insides of a Swiss watch and he was soon being flung around the coiling spiral, dropping and accelerating until he reached the bottom and was tossed from the device with all but his dignity.
