Page 47 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)
M arion Bell rushed out the door of Winston Churchill’s sprawling Tudor manor house and into her husband’s arms as soon as he stepped from the car sent to fetch him from London.
She’d been a guest of the Churchills the entire time he’d been away.
Winston and his charming wife, Clementine, waited with more decorum by the front door.
Bell greeted them with Marion still clinging to his arm and her beaming face turned to his.
“Welcome back, old boy,” Winston said with a firm handshake. Marion and Clemmie, as Marion had been given the privilege to call her, had become friends enough for her to allow Bell to kiss her cheek in greeting.
“Good to be on friendly soil again,” Bell said as the Churchills led them inside their newly acquired home.
They settled in a large informal library and Churchill had a servant pour champagne all around. Churchill lit an enormous cigar.
“Was the trip worth your time?” he asked.
“I don’t think it was, to be honest. Karl Rath and his men had moved on as soon as they sent Holmes and me on our one-way flight.
I spoke to the girlfriend he left behind, in the family way, I might add.
She confirmed that Rath had more men than I ever saw, forty-five to be exact.
She also shared he and his men would often toast someone named Joaquim Marques Lisboa. Mean anything to you?”
“Can’t say that it does. Give me a moment.” He pulled a discreet chain attached to a summoning system to alert a servant. When he arrived, he whispered instructions into the man’s ear. Churchill tuned back to Bell. “I always have my computer on hand, even when I’m out in the country.”
“Computer?”
“Maths whizz, but my girl is a bit of a prodigy and knows practically everything about everything.”
While they waited, Bell told his tale of his time in Belgium and about his escape from the train.
Marion admonished him for being reckless, even though she admitted it was just bad luck that Kreisberg was on the same train and it was not Bell’s fault.
He knew not to sugarcoat the dangers of his profession, but he vowed to deliver an edited version of his time in France and Germany when the time came.
Some things, like flamethrowers and artillery barrages, need never be spoken of again.
A woman in a plain white blouse and simple brown skirt came into the room as his tale was winding down and stood in front of Churchill.
She was in her early sixties, plump but not overly so, with the classic British peaches-and-cream complexion, horn-rimmed glasses of considerable thickness, and her hair done into a bun with such expertise that not a single hair managed to escape it.
“You wanted to see me, sir?”
“Yes, Davida. Question for you. Does the name Joaquim Marques Lisboa ring any bells?”
“Lisboa?” She paused as if to think, but Bell could tell by her eyes that the answer had come to her in an instant. “Ah yes, Joaquim Lisboa is considered the father of the Brazilian Navy.”
The British statesman and the American detective traded an intrigued glance. Churchill said, “Navy, eh? That’s a step in the right direction. Is he still alive?”
“No, sir. He died twenty years ago. Almost to the day.”
“Damn.” Churchill grunted. “Looks like that’s a dead end after all. I thought this chap could have been helping your anarchists.”
Bell played poker well enough to keep his own sense of disappointment off his face.
“Thank you, Davida. That is all.”
“Yes, sir.” She turned to go, but then paused at the double doors leading to the house’s main entry. “Not sure if this is anything for you, but the Brazilians named an old dreadnought they bought from the Germans after him.”
This time, Bell’s poker face failed him completely. His grin was wide and wolfish.
“When?” he asked.
“It’s a bit of a muddle. Archduke Ferdinand was killed during the middle of the deal.
Knowing war was inevitable at that point, the Germans wanted to cancel the sale to keep their fleet reinforced, but the Brazilians refused to give it up.
The Brazilians named her after Admiral Lisboa about this time to bolster their position.
“As the ship happened to be in the Azore Islands at the time of the sale, the Portuguese government offered to mediate, but as things here in Europe went from bad to worse, nothing ever got resolved. The Germans ferried all their stranded sailors home on U-boats. The ship has remained under impound at Ponta Delgada since the autumn of ’fourteen, presumably with a skeleton crew of Brazilian sailors aboard to keep up her maintenance. ”
Bell asked Churchill, “Could forty-five men crew a battleship?”
“Not if she’s coal-fired. How about it, Davida? This ship, oil or coal?”
“I’m good, Mr. Churchill, but I’m not that good. I’m sure somebody at the Admiralty would know. Her German name was Saarland .”
“Thank you, Davida. You’re a tremendous help, as always. Please follow up on this for me and contact our chargé d’affaires in Ponta Delgada to confirm the ship is still there.”
“Yes, sir. Right away.”
After she’d gone, Bell said, “Quite a remarkable woman.”
“A second cousin of mine. She has what they call an eidetic memory. Never forgets a thing.”
“Invaluable in this instance. Consider the Saarland . A German ship would have German signage throughout. That explains why I saw evidence of Rath’s men being taught German nautical terms. He must have learned of a battleship being impounded in the Azores and it inspired his whole mission.”
Churchill nodded, his cigar cradled in his fingers. “If your anarchist is going after this ship, what do you think are his ultimate goals?”
“Could be anything,” Bell admitted, and then something occurred to him. “Thinking aloud, I had the feeling he regretted mentioning to me that he’d sent his brother to New York. So maybe New York is a target. I need to know more about the ship and its capabilities.”
“I just remembered I have exactly what you want.” Churchill got off his sofa and ambled over to one of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.
His hand went unerringly to the book he wanted, as if he’d memorized the location of every tome on the shelves.
“This will do. Jane’s All the World’s Fighting Ships.
It’s an older edition, but it should suffice. ”
He began thumbing through the thick book, repeating under his breath the German name of the battleship, Saarland , until he found it.
“Here we go. The Saarland is her own class of ship, a one-off the Germans laid down in 1907 when they got wind of the construction of our HMS Dreadnought . So, Davida got one wrong. The Saarland would technically be classified a pre- Dreadnought .”
“Pardon the interruption, Winston,” Marion said as politely as possible. “I hear talk about this Dreadnought , but I don’t understand its significance.”
Clementine Churchill, dutiful wife and chief confidante of the former Lord of the Admiralty, answered for him.
“She was built as the largest battleship ever, back in 1906 or so. She was the fastest, best-armed, and best-armored ship of any fleet in the world and completely changed how such capital ships are conceived and constructed.”
“At a cost of just over one point seven million pounds,” Churchill added, “it makes her the most expensive as well. It set off an arms race unlike any before, as she made all other battleships immediately obsolete.”
“Thank you.” Marion smiled prettily, thinking, but not mentioning, that the arms race the Brits started had been a huge determining factor in the current war.
“Okay,” Churchill said, his head wreathed in fragrant cigar smoke.
“Back to the Saarland . She’s four hundred and sixty feet long, seventy-four wide, and displaces a little under sixteen thousand tons.
She carries four of the German SK L/40 main guns in two turrets.
Eleven-inch bores and the ability to hurl a quarter-ton shell about twelve miles, as well as a bunch of six-inch guns in broadside barbettes.
“And, Marion, in comparison, the Dreadnought displaces twenty thousand tons. She’s five hundred and thirty feet long, is armed with ten main guns, and can launch a shell some fourteen miles.”
“Wow,” she replied, understanding Churchill was trying to impress her. “I guess that is quite the difference.”
Churchill went back to his reference book and within just a couple of seconds exclaimed, “Well, that certainly explains it.”
“What?” asked the three others simultaneously.
“They miscalculated her propulsion. She is slow, only about fifteen knots. They converted her to oil in 1911 in hopes of boosting her speed, but to no avail. She can’t keep up with the rest of Germany’s High Seas Fleet.
She’s useless to them. I wager they just wanted her big guns back when they tried to cancel the sale. ”
Bell couldn’t remain in the plush chair he’d been occupying.
He got to his feet and began to pace, his brain racing with ideas and possibilities.
“Winston, you said Rath couldn’t operate a large ship with only forty-five men if he needed to feed coal into the boilers.
The Saarland is now oil-fired. Do you believe he and his crew could steal the ship from impound on the Azore Islands and sail it to New York in order to bombard the city? ”
“Why on earth would they do that?” Clementine asked in her thick Scottish brogue.
Bell answered straight away, even though the idea had just struck him.
“For the same reason they wanted to plant false invasion plans in Holland. They want to draw yet another belligerent into the war, sow more carnage, weaken Old World institutions so that he and his ilk can implement their vision of what Europe should be when it’s all over, some twisted form of Bolshevism, I would imagine. ”
“Oh my.”
“Indeed. How about it, Winston?”
Before the seasoned statesman could respond, his aide, Davida, knocked on the library door as timidly as a church mouse.