Page 4 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)
Bell gave the cowboy an apologetic look and leapt for the car’s running board. The mission was officially over and he was off the clock, as they say, and so he no longer had to pretend his wife hadn’t been on the same steamer over from New York as he and Ed Tobin.
Marion Bell eased her foot off the clutch, over-revved the engine a bit, but got them rolling without stalling it.
Forced to shift with her left hand in the right-hand-drive Austin 40, Marion had trouble synching the gears, but eventually meshed them with brute force and some unladylike oaths.
Bell wrestled open the passenger door and got himself seated as the car began putting on some speed.
The truck was too far ahead to see, but for now there was only one way out of the port, so Marion drove with confidence they were going to catch their quarry.
“Where’s Eddie and where did you get this car?” Bell asked, unsurprised that she’d come to his rescue.
“Eddie was still trying to find a way up to first class so he could disembark and come after you himself. Remember, you heels in the lower-class cabins don’t get off the ship until us toffs are on our way.”
Bell cocked a dubious eyebrow. “You’ve been in England two minutes and you’re already using their slang?”
She threw him a cheeky smile. “I do love it here, you know. The car belongs to a Lord something pompous-sounding who was returning to England after meetings with the War Department. He was at the captain’s table the first night out and blathered incessantly.
Then the weather turned so dreadful. I made it to the dining room a couple of nights, but His Lard Fatness remained in his cabin for the rest of the trip.
Oh, and wasn’t that just a dreadful crossing?
” Marion’s delivery was a rapid-fire staccato that was music to Bell’s ears.
“It was,” he agreed. “The car?”
“Car? Yes, the car. Well, the Earl of Too Many Sandwiches was on the pier arguing with the porters about his luggage and his driver was just standing around. I saw you steal that wagon, so I figured I might as well steal something a bit more practical.”
Bell laughed. “You are a marvel.”
“And don’t you forget it.”
All around them were warehouses and small industrial concerns with tall chimneys belching black smoke into the already hazy air.
There were countless trucks and horse-drawn wagons and men shouting orders.
A heavy booming sound came from a foundry as massive trip-hammers flattened cold-rolled iron.
While the thieves could have turned off onto any one of the side roads crisscrossing the commercial area closest to the docks, there was only one major artery out of the maze, and logic dictated that the men would want to put as much distance as possible from the scene of the crime.
The area gave way to some open land and a proper road heading inland. Traffic was light.
“There,” Bell shouted, pointing. Up ahead was an open-backed truck moving faster than the rest of the cars on the road, passing where it had barely any room to maneuver.
“Hah!” Marion whooped and tried to sink her foot through the floorboard. The four-cylinder engine responded like a thoroughbred and they quickly started passing the cars that the truck had just rushed by.
As they turned slightly north, back toward the canal and the Mersey River, an odd structure appeared out of the haze.
It was a bridge of some sort, but unlike anything Bell had ever seen before.
It consisted of two towers nearly two hundred feet tall with a thousand-foot-long steel latticework truss lancing across the river about halfway up.
The massive weight of the steel girders was supported by wires like a conventional suspension bridge from the tops of the towers.
The span was eighty or so feet above the water, giving clear passage for all but the largest ships.
Bell couldn’t understand how anything could cross the bridge.
There were no ramps up to the truss like those used to access the Brooklyn Bridge back in New York.
Then he noticed a platform big enough for several trucks as well as hundreds of passengers dangling from the truss on a cableway system like an aerial tram.
The passenger area was glassed in like a greenhouse, but was as ornate as a decorative birdcage.
Above it was a glass-enclosed cupola for the operator.
The entire structure had the delicacy and industrial grace of Paris’s Eiffel Tower.
The cable car hung just a dozen or so feet above the water, so its trips across had to be timed to avoid ships headed toward Manchester or heading west back to the Irish Sea.
“It’s a transporter bridge,” Bell said as he suddenly recognized the hybrid structure. “Never seen one before. Not as efficient as a suspension bridge, but a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to build.”
“Judging by how slow that platform is moving, if we can’t make the same trip across as the thieves, they’re as good as gone.” Addressing her own concern, Marion flashed past a lorry loaded with bails of barbed wire, doing nearly twice its speed.
“Easy,” Bell cautioned. “They don’t know they’re being followed yet and I don’t want to lose that advantage. There’s a couple of them and only one me.”
“You’ve got me,” Marion said with a defiant lift of her chin.
“I do, but I only have one gun.”
“What about the derringer you always carry?”
“Dropped it between two running horses,” he admitted.
“Nicely done, Keystone.”
The thieves’ truck started across the bridge’s access pier. Marion’s deft driving had managed to get them only a couple of cars back. They would make the crossing together.
“Shouldn’t you arrest them now?” Marion asked.
“Too many people,” Bell said. A large crowd was gathered next to the road, where they waited their turn to cross the Mersey River on the large cableway platform. “If those guys are armed it could turn into a massacre. Better we confront them in a less-crowded spot.”
The transporter reached the loading ramp.
A worker was ready to open the safety barrier, while behind him at least fifty people had left the sheltered passenger compartment and waited to rush off the platform.
Most were workers from the industrial sprawl on the far side of the river and at least half were boys barely in their teens, while the others were older men nearing retirement.
It was a stark reminder that the young men of England were shoulder-deep in muddy trenches across the breadth of France.
The platform came to a stop with a slight slam of metal on metal that caused a few of the passengers to sway.
The barrier came down and the throng of people rushed from the transporter, eager to get to their next destination.
Then two trucks trundled off the platform followed by a wagon being pulled by a lone pony.
The worker made a hand gesture and the next set of passengers stampeded onto the transport, rushing for the enclosed area to get out of a misting rain that was intensifying.
Bell could see ahead that the thieves were ordered onto the platform under the guidance of a worker, who wanted them to park at a specific set of marks.
Next aboard were two Austin sedans a few years older than the one Marion had lent herself.
Then came a wagon pulled by a single horse, and finally it was their turn.
Mindful that she was driving an unfamiliar car, Marion was easy on the clutch, inching the car onto the platform as if she had all the time in the world.
Without warning, the transporter lurched away from the loading ramp.
It took just a second for the platform to pull itself from under their car’s front wheels.
The bridge worker who directed traffic had a horrified look on his face at the disaster unfolding before his eyes.
Marion didn’t have time to react. The transport platform slid out from under their Austin and the car’s nose fell so that the chassis just behind the engine hit the loading ramp and the vehicle began to teeter over the edge, balanced as if on a knife’s edge.
The engine stalled and the dying vibration set the car rocking in ever larger arcs.
The sudden drop had slammed Marion into the steering wheel, and had Bell not braced himself at the last instant, he would have likely been launched through the windshield. Their view out the windscreen was of the green waves of the Mersey at ebb tide rushing past at a ferocious speed.
The car continued to rock like a child’s teeter-totter. The transport platform was already a few yards away, the worker still standing in shocked awe with a couple of passengers at his shoulder staring in horror at what was about to happen.
Keeping his left arm braced against the dash, Bell used his right hand to grab the back of Marion’s coat and pull her back so she was pressed into her seat.
“Don’t move. Don’t even breathe hard,” he cautioned in a whisper. “We’re one toot away from toppling into the river.”
Bell took a second to study the operator’s perch atop the mobile platform.
As he’d guessed, there were two men up there now and one looked like he had a knife pointed at the uniformed crewman.
The thieves had spotted their tail and forced the operator to try and kill them by pulling away when they were only half aboard.
He cursed, but then set himself the task of saving their lives.
Like a momma cat moving her kittens, Bell kept his right hand clamped onto the scruff of Marion’s coat and began lifting her up and over the back of her seat.
Had they been in America, and seated on the right, he wouldn’t have had the strength, but here he could unleash the full power of his dominant arm.
He had little leverage, other than what he could generate by tightening the bands of muscles across his lean belly.
A groan escaped his lips as her backside formed a supple speed bump over the headrest. Finally he managed to deposit her in the back seat.
The Austin teetered for a few seconds more and then its rear tires kissed the road once again, though only with a few pounds of pressure.
People suddenly swarmed the car, pressing against its back bumper to keep it from going over the edge.
They were the workers who’d just gotten off the transporter and must have sensed something was wrong and returned.
The Austin was now firmly planted on the deck. The rear doors were opened, and Marion was pulled to safety. The crowd roared their approval when she emerged from the back seat and Bell was encouraged to climb over into the passenger seats after her.
“Hold it tight,” Bell said as he climbed from the car. “It still might—”
No one listened. As soon as he was clear, the men and boys weighing down the back bumper let go as one.
The car’s rear lifted a few inches, fell back, bounced and lifted again, until it passed a point of no return.
The Austin tumbled off the access ramp. It was a fifteen-foot fall into the swiftly flowing river, and by the time Bell reached the edge of the ramp to look down, the sedan was already half sunk and a good twenty yards downstream.
“Think that’ll buff out?” Marion quipped.