Instead, a newsboy sprang aboard and ran up the aisle, crying, “Great air race coming our way!”
Marco Celere bought a copy of the Hannibal Courier-Post and scanned it fearfully for a murder story that included his description.
The race occupied half the front page. Preston Whiteway, described as “a shrewd, wide-awake businessman,” was quoted in boldface print, saying, “Sad as the recent death of Mark Twain— Hannibal’s own bard—sadder still that Mr. Twain did not live to see the flying machines in the Great Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race for the Whiteway Cup alight in his beloved hometown of Hannibal, Missouri.”
Celere looked for the short out-of-town stories that these local newspapers plucked from the telegraph. The first he saw was an interview with a “prominent aviation specialist” who said that Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s headless Curtiss Pusher was the aeroplane to beat. “Far and away the sturdiest and fastest, its motor is being improved every day.”
It would improve less rapidly with Ruggs out of the picture, Celere thought. But the famous high-flying baronet would have no trouble attracting top mechanicians eager to join up with a winner. The headless pusher was still the machine that posed the worst threat to Josephine.
Celere thumbed deeper into the paper, looking for his description. The state militia was being called out. His heart skipped a beat until he read that it was to quell a labor strike at Hannibal’s cement plant. The strike was blamed on “foreigners,” egged on by “Italians,” who were seeking protection from the Italian consulate in St. Louis. Thank God he was disguised as a Russian, Celere thought, only to look up at the grim-faced businessmen lowering their newspapers to stare at him from across the aisle. He did not look Italian in his Platov getup, but there was no denying it made him look like the most foreign passenger in the chair car. Or had they already seen a story about the murder and a description of his curly hair and mutton chops, his ever-present slide rule, and his snappy straw boater with its stylish red hatband?
The nearest leaned across the aisle. “Hey, there!” he addressed him bluntly. “You . . . mister?”
“Are you speaking to me, sir?”
“You a labor striker?”
Celere weighed the risk of being a foreign agitator versus a murderer on the run and chose to deal with the more immediate threat. “I am being aviation mechanician in Whiteway Cup Cross-Country Air Race.”
Their suspicious expressions brightened like sunshine.
“You in the race? Put ’er there, feller!”
Soft pink palms thrust across the aisle, and they shook his hand vigorously.
“When are all you getting to Hannibal?”
“After thunderstorming over.”
“Let’s hope we don’t get tornadoes.”
“Say, if you was a bettin’ man, who would you put your money on to win?”
Celere held up the newspaper. “Is saying here that Englishman pusher is best.”
“Yeah, I read that in Chicago, too. But you’re right there in the thick of it. What about Josephine? That little gal still behind?”
Celere froze. His eye had fallen on a telegraphed story down the page.
MURDER AND THEFT IN SHADOW OF STORM
“Josephine still behind?”
“Is catching up,” Celere mumbled, reading as fast as he could:
An air race mechanician was found diabolically murdered at the Columbia fairground with his throat slashed, the victim of a robbery. According to Sheriff Lydem, the murderer could well be a labor agitator on the run from the cement strike in Missouri, and willing to stop at nothing to facilitate his escape. The victim’s body was not discovered for many hours due to the violence of last night’s storm.
Marco Celere looked up with a broad smile for the businessmen.
“Josephine is catching up,” he repeated.
The train trundled loudly onto an iron-girder bridge, and the sky suddenly spread wide over a broad river.
“Here’s the Mississippi. I read birdmen wear cork vests when they fly over bodies of water. Is that so?”
“Is good for floating,” said Celere, gazing through the girders at the famed waterway. Brown and rain-swollen, flecked with dirty whitecaps, it rolled sullenly past the town of Hannibal, whose frame houses perched on the far side.
“I thought was wider,” he said.
“Wide enough, you try crossing it without this here bridge. But you want to see real wide, you get down below Saint Louis where it meets up with the Missouri.”
“And if you want to see really, really wide, wide as the ocean, you take a look where the Ohio comes in. Say, mister, what are you doing on the train when the race is back in Illinois?”
Suddenly they were staring again, suspecting they’d been hoodwinked.
“Scouting route,” Celere answered smoothly. “Am getting off train in Hannibal and going back to race.”
“Well, I sure do envy you, sir. Judging by the smile on your face, you are one lucky man to be part of that air race.”
“Happy being,” Celere replied. “Very happy being.”
A good plan always made him happy. And he had just come up with a beauty. Kindly, bighearted, crazy Russian Platov would volunteer to help the baronet’s mechanicians by filling in for poor murdered Chief Mechanician Ruggs.
Steve Stevens would complain, but the hell with the fat fool. Dmitri Platov would help and help and help until he had finished the job on Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s infernal headless pusher once and for all.
30
ISAAC BELL SAID, “Eustace, I’ve been watching you and you don’t look happy. Are you homesick?”
They were getting the machine ready to take off from Topeka, Kansas. The Chicago kid he had hired to help Andy Moser was pouring gasoline through layers of cheesecloth to strain out any water that may have contaminated the supply. It was a daily ritual performed before mixing in the castor oil that lubricated the Gnome engine.
“No, sir, Mr. Bell,” Weed answered hastily. But judging by the expression knitting his brow and pursing his lips, Bell thought something was very much wrong.
“Miss your girl?”
“Yes, sir,” he blurted. “I sure do. But . . . You know.”
“I do know,” Bell said sincerely. “I’m often away from my fiancée. I’m lucky on this case, as she’s around filming the race for Mr. Whiteway, so I get to see her now and then. What’s your girl’s name?”
“Daisy.”
“Pretty name. What’s her last name?”
“Ramsey.”
“Daisy Ramsey. There’s a mouthful . . . But wait. If you marry, she’ll be Daisy Weed.” Bell said it with a grin that coaxed a wan smile out of the boy.
“Oh, yes. We kid about that.” The smile faded.
Bell said, “If something is troubling you, son, is there anything I can do to help?”
“No, thank you, sir, I’m O.K.”
Eddie Edwards, the white-haired head of the Kansas City office, approached Bell, muttering, “We got trouble.”
Bell hurried to the hangar car with him.
Andy Moser, who had been working nearby, tightening the Eagle’s wing-stay turnbuckles, said, “You sure you’re O.K., Eustace? Mr. Bell seems concerned about you.”
“His eyes go through you like iced lightning.”
“He’s just looking out for you.”
Eustace Weed prayed that Andy was right. Because what Isaac Bell had spotted on his face was his sudden horrified realization of what they would force him to do with the copper tube of water sealed with paraffin wax.
He had been hoping that the criminals threatening Daisy had changed their minds. No one approached him in Peoria or Columbia, or Hannibal, Missouri, to tell him what to do with it. After Hannibal, where the race crossed the Mississippi River, he assumed it would happen in Kansas City. It was the only real city on the map since Chicago, and he had developed a picture in his mind of big-city saloonkeepers knowing one another but disdaining their counter
parts in small towns. So he had dreaded Kansas City.
But no one had approached him there, either, nor when the race pulled up on the far side of the Missouri River. There had even been a letter from Daisy waiting for him, and she sounded fine. This very morning, camped by the Kansas River outside Topeka, preparing Mr. Bell’s machine to head south and west over the empty plains toward Wichita, the terrified mechanician had begun to wonder, would the whole nightmare simply go away? Trouble was, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. And just now, while Mr. Bell watched him strain the gas before mixing the fuel, Eustace Weed suddenly knew that Harry Frost’s man would order him to drop the tube in Isaac Bell’s flying-machine fuel tank.
He had figured out how that little copper tube would make Bell’s flying machine smash. It was as ingenious as it was horrific. The Eagle’s Gnome rotary engine was fuel lubricated. It had no oil reservoir, no crankcase, no pump to maintain oil pressure—in fact, no oil at all. The castor oil suspended in the gasoline did the job of oil, greasing the passage of the piston through each of the cylinders. It mixed in readily because castor oil dissolved in gasoline.
Like paraffin. The paraffin wax that plugged the copper tube would also dissolve in gasoline. When the gas melted the plugs, in an hour or so, the water would leak out and contaminate the fuel. Two tablespoons of water in a flying-machine gas tank was more than enough to stop Isaac Bell’s engine dead. Were he flying high at the time, he might manage to volplane down safely. But if he was taking off, or attempting to alight, or making a tight turn low to the ground, he would smash.
ISAAC BELL LISTENED WITH DEEP CONCERN, but not much surprise, as Eddie Edwards reported grim news he had just learned from a contact in the United States Army. Someone had executed a daring raid on the arsenal at Fort Riley, Kansas.
“The Army’s hushed it up,” Eddie explained, “criminals busting into their arsenal not being the sort of event they want to read in the newspaper.”
“What did they get?”
“Two air-cooled, belt-fed Colt-Browning M1895 machine guns.”
“Had to be Frost,” said Bell, picturing in his mind the four-hundred-and-fifty-rounds-per-minute weapons enveloping Josephine’s monoplane in blizzards of flying lead.
“You gotta hand it to him, that man’s got nerve. Right under the nose of the U.S. Army.”
“How’d he break in?” Bell asked.
“The usual way. Bribed a quartermaster.”
“I find it hard to imagine that even a quartermaster more larcenous than most his ilk would risk the Army not noticing missing machine guns.”
“Frost tricked him into thinking he was stealing surplus uniforms. Said he was selling them in Mexico, or some cock-and-bull story the quartermaster believed. Or wanted to believe. A drinking man, needless to say. Anyhow, he got the surprise of his life when he woke up in the stockade. But by then the guns were long gone.”
“When did this happen?”
“Three days ago.”
Bell pulled the topographic map of Kansas down from the hangar-car ceiling. “Plenty of time for Frost to get between us and Wichita.”
“That’s why I said we have trouble. Though I do wonder how he’ll fit two machine guns in a Thomas Flyer. Much less hide them. Takes three men to mount one of those guns. They weigh nearly four hundred pounds with their landing carriage.”
“He’s strong enough to pick one up himself. Besides, he has two helpers in that Thomas.”
Bell traced on the map the rail line they would follow to Wichita. Then he traced those converging at Junction City, the nearest town to Fort Riley. “He’ll move the guns by train, then freight wagon or motortruck.”
“So he can attack anywhere between Kansas and California.”
Bell had already concluded that. “We know by now that he doesn’t think small. He’ll hire more men for the second gun and spread them apart on either side of the railroad track we’re flying along. They’ll rake her coming and going from both sides.”
Bell did some quick calculations in his head, and added darkly, “They’ll open up at a mile. If she somehow makes it past them, they’ll whirl the guns around and keep firing. As she’s coming down the line at sixty miles per hour, they will be able to fire accurately for two full minutes.”
STEVE STEVENS SHOOK a copy of the Wichita Eagle under Preston Whiteway’s nose and roared indignantly, “They’re quoting your San Francisco Inquirer quoting me saying I’m glad that crazy Russian is helping that English feller because everyone’s in the race together, like we’re all one big family.”
“Yes, I read that,” Whiteway said mildly. “It didn’t sound like you.”
“Darned right, it don’t sound like me. Why’d you print it?”
“If you read it carefully, you will see that my reporters quoted Mr. Platov, who quoted you saying that the Great Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race for the Whiteway Cup and fifty thousand dollars is for everyone, and we’re all one big family.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You might as well have. Everyone believes it now.”
Stevens hopped angrily from foot to foot. His belly bounced, his jowls shook and turned red. “That crazy Russian put those words in my mouth. I didn’t say—”
“What’s the trouble? Everyone thinks you’re a good man.”
“I don’t give a hoot about being a good man. I want to win the race. And there’s Platov sashaying off to help Eddison-Highfalutin-Sydney-Whatever when my own machine is rattling to smithereens.”
“You have my sympathy,” said Preston Whiteway, smiling at Stevens’s confirmation of happy rumors his spies had reported: the fast-flying farmer might not go the distance. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, sir, I want to see my own entry—which is not rattling to smithereens, thank you very much—take to the air in the capable hands of Josephine, America’s Sweetheart of the Air, who will win the race.”
“Is that so? Well, let me tell you, Mr. Fancy-Pants Newspaperman, I hear tell folks is losing interest in your race now that we’re so far west there’s no one to watch it but jackrabbits, Indians, and coyotes.”
Preston Whiteway arched a disdainful eyebrow at the rotund cotton farmer who was very rich but not as rich as he was. “Keep reading, Mr. Stevens. Events reported soon will surprise even you and keep ordinary folk on the edge of their seats.”
ISAAC BELL FLICKED the blip switch on his control post to slow the Gnome. Andy Moser had tuned the motor so finely that he was unintentionally overtaking Josephine’s Celere monoplane while riding herd above and behind her. Ironically, as her Celere began to suffer the wear and tear of the long race, his American Eagle seemed to get stronger. Andy kept repeating that Danielle’s father “built ’em to last.”
They were navigating by the railroad tracks.
Two thousand feet below, Kansas’s winter wheat crop spread dark yellow to the horizons on either side of the rails. The flat, empty country was broken now and then by a lonely farmhouse, in a cluster of barns and silos, and the occasional ribbon of trees lining a creek or river. It was from one of those ribbons that Bell expected Frost would rake Josephine’s aeroplane with machine-gun fire, and he had persuaded her to fly a quarter mile to the right of the tracks, to increase the range, and to steer clear of clumps of trees. If Frost did attack, Bell instructed her to veer away while he would descend in steep spiral dips, firing his mounted rifle.
They had just crossed a railroad junction helpfully marked with canvas arrows when Bell sensed motion behind him. He was not surprised to see Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s blue headless pusher overtaking them. The baronet’s new Curtiss motor just kept on getting faster. Andy Moser credited “the crazy Russian” with its performance. Bell was not so sure about that. A conversation with Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s regular mechanicians led him to believe that the six-cylinder engine was the real hero, being not only more powerful but smoother than the other flyers’ fours. They certainly were not inclined to credit the Russian volunteer with
more than helping out.
“The six might not be so smooth as your rotary Gnome, Mr. Bell,” they said, “but it’s considerably easier to keep tuned. Lucky for you you’ve got Andy Moser to keep it running.”
The blue pusher sailed past Bell, and then Josephine, with a jaunty wave to each from the baronet. Bell saw Josephine reach up to fiddle with her gravity-feed gas tank. Her speed increased, but at the expense of gray smoke pouring from her motor. Eddison-Sydney-Martin continued to pull ahead, and was several hundred yards past her, when Bell saw something dark suddenly fly back in the Englishman’s wake.
It looked like he had hit a bird.
But when the Curtiss staggered in the air, Bell realized that the dark object falling behind Eddison-Sydney-Martin was not a bird but his propeller.
Suddenly without power, forced to volplane, Eddison-Sydney-Martin tried to dip his elevator. But before the pusher could descend in a controlled glide, a piece flew from the tail. It was followed by another, and another, and Bell saw that the departing propeller had chopped parts of the tail as it flew away, still spinning like a buzz saw.
The biplane’s elevator broke loose and trailed in blue shreds. The vertical tail with its rudder went next. A thousand feet above the ground, the baronet’s swift headless pusher fell like a stone.
31
“CAT RAN OUT OF LIVES.”
“Don’t say that!” Josephine rounded on the mechanician who had muttered what they all feared. She ran to Abby, who was weeping. But when she tried to hold her, the baronet’s wife pulled back and held herself stiff as a marble statue.
All Josephine could think of was Marco promising her, “You will win. I will see that you win. Don’t you worry. No one will stay ahead of you.”
What had he done?
They were gathered on the banks of a wide creek twenty miles southwest of Topeka, she and Isaac Bell, who had both alighted on a dirt road beside the tracks, and Abby and all the mechanicians, who had seen the smash from their support train. The blue pusher—what was left of it—was floating in the creek, caught on a snag halfway across.