Page 87 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
The punch landed at the hinge of Rath’s jaw, perfectly placed and executed all the way to the follow-through. Even as Bell’s mouth opened for a scream of unholy pain the likes he’d never felt before, Karl Rath’s head snapped around. When his neck reached its maximum amount of twist, his torso started to torque as well. The momentum staggered him one step and then another. He had no control over the lengths of his strides nor the direction. It was all physics that Bell had mapped out in his head.
Reeling backward, Rath fell directly into the lifeboat’s spinning propeller. The whirling brass blades chewed through the muscle, sinew, and bone of his right shoulder until they emerged out his back, so that only a few inches of skin kept the limb attached to his body.
Blood washed the deck in a crimson tidal wave and Rath’s scream grew even more shrill than Bell’s. He collapsed while Bell paced in a fast circle, clutching his hand as if that could somehow ease the pain of his doubly broken bones. Bell sucked air through his clenched teeth, mindful of nothing except his own agony.
The ship’s main gun roared once again. Only a minute or two had elapsed since it had last fired. This snapped Bell from dwelling on his own misery as he realized the full bombardment of the city was underway. He had to go but he had to tell Rath something.
He dropped to his knees next to the killer. Rath’s wound was ungodly gruesome and the man looked half crazed with pain. If a surgeon got to him in the next minute or so, his life might have been saved but that wasn’t going to be Rath’s fate.
“Rath, listen to me,” Bell panted. “We planned for you to find that bomb because it would mean you’d stop looking for a second one we set. You can die knowing your plan failed at the eleventh hour.”
Rath seemed unfazed. He grabbed Bell’s arm. He spoke through his pain, his voice enfeebled by the blood loss leaching his life away. “There are others. Fulcrum will prevail in the end.” And then he breathed his last.
“Sure thing,” Bell said, dripping sarcasm. He ducked under the lifeboat and lurched to the rail. It was only a ten- or twelve-foot drop because the alcove was one deck below the main. He legged over the stanchion and was about to drop perilously into Long Island Sound when he saw his savior namedAlice N. not forty feet away.
“There,” he heard Joe Marchetti shout from the fishing boat’s bow.
Captain Grimm spun the wheel to get closer. Bell leapt from the battleship, his left hand protected in his right. The impact still sent pain waves crashing through to the top of his skull, but an amazingthing happened by the time he’d resurfaced. The icy water numbed his hand so quickly the pain was temporarily tolerable.
Moments later and without fully stopping, Grey and Joe used a boat hook to help him over the motor sailer’s transom. The instant his feet were out of the water, Grimm gunned his beloved old boat and they ran as hard as they could to get away from the warship.
Bell knew the chances were high that he and Joe would be spotted during their time on theSaarland. Rath and his men would know exactly what they were attempting and discover the bomb after they’d left. Bell’s plan was then to intentionally give away their presence, let Rath find the device, and rely on a second, less obvious, bomb to destroy the warship. It increased the risk that more shells could be lobbed at New York, but it was the only way to guarantee Rath couldn’t bombard the city for hours on end.
In the tight crawl space under the powder magazine elevator, Joe Marchetti had affixed a pressure sensor on one of the rails while Bell had been running around the battleship distracting its crew. The pressure switch became active when one of the lift’s guide wheels reached the bottom of its rail. That was the point when crewmen returned to the magazine from up in the turret with their special trolley to fetch more high explosives.
The bomb he’d wired to the sensor would wait while hundreds of pounds of powder were loaded onto the cart and then wheeled back into the elevator. Only when the elevator rose would the sensor release and trigger the thirty pounds of explosives Bell had lugged aboard in his pack.
TheAlice N. was a mile from theSaarlandwhen the main gun fired a third salvo in relatively quick succession.
The men down in the magazine were hurrying to keep up. They were supposed to have fresh powder up to the guns by now and yetthey were just now loading the last bags onto their cart. They didn’t bother closing the powder room’s armored door before wheeling the trolley down the corridor to the waiting elevator.
One of the men closed the accordion door and pressed the lift button. A fraction of a second after the elevator started to rise the bomb under their feet exploded. Joe had assembled his bomb so that much of its intensity was directed upward and so the blast front tore through the elevator car’s floor and detonated the mountain of powder piled atop the cart. This was the second link in the chain reaction that set off the hundreds upon hundreds of tons of powder remaining in the ship’s main magazine.
The battleship’s belt armor kept much of the detonative force contained within the side hulls, but the blast ripped through her bottom and rebounded off the seafloor, lifting the front half of the ship out of the water. Her thick keel snapped like a piece of kindling and a rolling wave of fire and pressurized air exploded from where she tore in half. Steam from her boilers and sea water boiled by the heat added to the hellish tableau. The sound was dozens of times louder than the firing of one of her big guns, a sound that would carry to Albany and Baltimore and Providence, Rhode Island.
The detonation blew the forward turret clean off the ship and peeled back her decking. A visible blast wave moved through the air even faster than the sound of the explosion, followed soon after by surging walls of water that sloshed around in the tight confines of the upper East River. Moments after the main blast, theSaarlandrolled onto her side and settled onto the seabed, air geysering from gaps in the exposed portion of her hull. The waters near the smoldering derelict were littered with the corpses of seabirds killed by the concussion and patches of burning bunker fuel.
Windows for miles around were shattered by the detonation anda few civilians were hurt by flying glass, but no fatalities would be reported. Because she’d been firing at the city, the very presence of theSaarlandhad run off any boaters from the area, so that the only vessel caught in the surging waves following the blast was theAlice N. She’d gone on the ride of her life, as she was too near the blast to avoid danger. The small boat was rocked by a torrential wave that sent her barreling north against her will. After surviving a second powerful tempest in as many weeks, she was left stranded fifteen feet up on a beach near the mouth of the Bronx River, her four crewmen battered, but safe.
Epilogue
Fear gripped the residents ofNew York City in a paralyzing stranglehold. Rumors ran like wildfire that German troops had landed on Long Island and were marching toward the city. Sidewalk whispers claimed an entire fleet of the Kaiser’s battlewagons were steaming toward New York Harbor to finish leveling Manhattan. Woodrow Wilson rushed to the city by private railcar the very next day, in order to both quell the rumors and to see for himself the damage done by the rogue dreadnought.
Seven eleven-inch naval shells had ultimately been fired at Manhattan, six high explosive and one armor piercing. Despite the onslaught, the city had been relatively lucky. The explosive shell aimed at Penn Station following the armor-piercing ranging shot had fallen short of the building and hit a streetcar on the north side of Thirty-Third Street. It had killed ten people, but would have killed far more had it struck the station. The later shells Rath had ordered Pesha Orsos to fire landed in Midtown. One destroyed a pair ofbrownstone row houses, while another flattened a merchant bank building.
Out of a city of over two million people, forty-eight lost their lives that fateful day, with several dozen more injured in some way. All knew it could have been much worse.
Repairs were already underway at Penn Station when President Wilson and his entourage took a quick walking tour of the building. Initial wreckage had been cleared away and the station was operating at a limited capacity. City road crews had repaired the blast holes left on the surrounding streets and sidewalks and there were plans being discussed to put up a memorial of some sort in nearby Bryant Park commemorating the victims of the attack.
Of course, there were no survivors of the explosion of the battleshipAdmiral Joaquim LisboaneeSaarland.There weren’t really any remains either. The Navy was already negotiating with a local salvage company to remove the ship’s gutted carcass, once investigators had completed their examination of the remains that were above water, and hardhat divers had explored the sunken portion of the wreck.
After meeting with families of the victims and then speaking with reporters to allay fears about a further attack, the President entered the New York Yacht Club building in Midtown Manhattan. He was there for a private meeting with Bell arranged by Franklin Roosevelt, who was a member of the club. Bell was waiting at a corner table in the downstairs lounge when Wilson entered. The President waved off his assistants and approached alone.
“Mr. Bell,” Wilson said as Bell stood and offered his right hand in greeting. “I’ve heard from Joe Van Dorn about what you did to save New York City, and what you’ve endured on my behalf the last few weeks. Had I known the toll it would take”—he pointed to Bell’sleft hand, wrapped in a bandage the size of a boxing glove—“I never would have asked you to be my eyes and ears on the battlefront.”
Bell had known this meeting was coming and had taken as small a dose of painkiller as he could, but he still felt its effects and so spoke slowly and with great deliberation. “Mr. President, I assure you that my sacrifice and that of all the others who I have encountered was well worth my involvement.”
“Our nation owes you a heartfelt thanks. And the City of New York an extra debt of gratitude. While I am eager to hear how you disabled the dreadnought, I am more interested in your visit to the front lines in Europe.”
