The Wrecker (with Justin Scott) by Clive Cussler

Author:Clive Cussler [Cussler, Clive]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller
ISBN: 9781101151488
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons; Penguin Group
Published: 2009-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

26

THE FOLLIES ORCHESTRA STOPPED PLAYING ABRUPTLY. AN eerie silence gripped the theater. Then debris clattered on the tin roof like a thousand snare drums. Glass flew out of the skylight, and everyone in the theater—audience, stagehands, and chorus girls—began screaming.

Isaac Bell and Archie Abbott moved as one, up the aisle, through the canvas rain curtains and across the roof to the outside staircase. They saw a red glow in the southwest sky in the direction of Jersey City.

“The powder pier,” said Bell with a sinking heart. “We better get over there.”

“Look,” said Archie as they started down the stairs. “Broken windows everywhere.”

Every building on the block had lost a window. Forty-fourth Street was littered with broken glass. They turned their backs on the crowds surging in panic on Broadway and ran west on Forty-fourth toward the river. They crossed Eighth Avenue, then Ninth, and ran through the slums of Hell’s Kitchen, dodging the residents spilling out of saloons and tenements. Everyone was shouting “What happened?”

The Van Dorn detectives raced across Tenth Avenue, over the New York Central Railroad tracks, across Eleventh, dodging fire engines and panicked horses. The closer they got to the water, the more broken windows they saw. A cop tried to stop them from running onto the piers. They showed their badges and brushed past him.

“Fireboat!” Bell shouted.

Bristling with fire monitors and belching smoke, a New York City fireboat was pulling away from Pier 84. Bell ran after it, jumped. Abbott landed beside him.

“Van Dorn,” they told the startled deckhand. “We have to get to Jersey City.”

“Wrong boat. We’re dispatched downtown to spray the piers.”

The reason for the fireboat’s orders was soon apparent. Across the river, flames were shooting into the sky from the Jersey City piers. With the end of the rain, the wind had shifted west, and it was blowing sparks across the river onto Manhattan’s piers. So instead of helping fight the fire in Jersey City, the fireboat was wetting down Manhattan’s piers to keep the sparks from igniting their roofs and wooden ships moored alongside.

“He’s a mastermind,” said Bell. “I’ve got to hand him that.”

“A Napoleon of crime,” Archie agreed. “As if Conan Doyle sicced Professor Moriarty on us instead of Sherlock Holmes.”

Bell spotted a New York Police Department Marine Division launch at the Twenty-third Street Lackawanna Ferry Terminal. “Drop us there!”

The New York cops agreed to run them across the river. They passed damaged boats with sails in tatters or smokestacks toppled by the blast. Some were adrift. On others, crewmen were jury-rigging repairs sufficient to get them to shore. A Jersey Central Railroad ferry limped toward Manhattan, its windows shattered and its superstructure blackened.

“There’s Eddie Edwards!”

Edwards’s white hair had been singed black, and his eyes were gleaming in a face of soot, but he was otherwise unhurt.

“Thank God you telephoned, Isaac. We got the gun in place in time to stop the bastards.”

“Stop them? What are you talking about?”

“They didn’t blow the powder pier.” He pointed through the thick smoke. “The dynamite train is O.

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