Page 59 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)
A rchie Abbott and James Dashwood were sitting in a conference room inside the Van Dorn headquarters. Archie was sipping a coffee. James was cleaning his Colt pistol. Hanna was on the couch thumbing through a magazine from the waiting room. They were all three bored.
Then came the sound like a sharp thunderclap followed by the unmistakable noise of an explosion.
Abbott and Dashwood looked to each other and said at the same time, “Penn Station.”
All three leapt to their feet and rushed for the exit.
They were outside in a handful of seconds.
One of the agency’s highly tuned Ford Model Ts sat at the curb.
A pair of agents had been assigned to fire up the car at the first sign of trouble or if they saw Archie and his party rushing out of the Knickerbocker.
The engine was running by the time they reached it.
One agent held the door for Archie, while the other opened the rear door for Hanna.
They were away from the curb long before the cloud of dust thrown into the air by the blast began to resettle back on the ground.
They raced past pedestrians who continued to stand still, unsure of what had just happened.
Closer to the epicenter, they encountered crowds of panicked people running from the explosion. Traffic became a snarled mess.
Archie and James shared another look that conveyed they were thinking the same thing. If the streets were already this jammed, Balka Rath and Hanna’s brother, Hanzi Muntean, would get entangled in traffic and would be unable to do their job.
“They’ll be a couple blocks further out than we thought,” James said.
“Yeah,” Archie drawled. “My bet is Hanzi will stay with the truck, while Balka scouts the scene on foot and runs back with the necessary adjustments.”
Before they encountered full gridlock, Archie steered the car down an alley, nosing aside several trash cans in his bid to find a clear street. The next block was far less pandemonium, though faces were etched with concern and people were still fast-walking away from the explosion.
Archie parked the Ford in a dedicated loading zone. “Stay here with Hanna. I’m going to get over to where the shell hit and see if I get lucky.”
He made sure his pistol was secured in a holster under his jacket and the Ford’s key remained in the ignition.
On the sidewalk, Abbott was like a salmon swimming against the spawn.
Everyone was moving west while he bulled his way east. He was well above average in height and he’d been a boxer and knew how to twist and torque to keep himself protected.
Despite the throngs of people he knifed through, he bumped into no one.
He finally reached the area where the big naval shell had plowed into the city.
For the most part, they’d been lucky. The shell had hit the street just four blocks from Penn Station—a remarkedly accurate opening shot.
The crater it left continued to billow noxious smoke as did the remains of two cars that had been blown more than forty feet when the warhead detonated.
Clear-thinking pedestrians were giving aid to the injured.
Others had taken the time to drape the bodies pulled from the cars with rumble seat lap robes or overcoats.
Archie counted five dead and assumed that number would climb as the most grievously wounded succumbed.
What he didn’t see was anyone matching Balka Rath’s description in the area. Nor anyone making note of where the shell had slammed into the street. He continued scanning the crowd for another two minutes on the off chance Rath had been farther from the blast and would just now show up.
At last, Archie had to cede defeat, and he rushed back to the car.
“We were too late,” he announced. “The shell hit north and east of the station right in the middle of the street. I saw five dead.”
Hanna gave a small choking gasp and Dashwood muttered a quiet oath. He said, “We now know the target, so I think we should get closer to the station.”
“Agreed,” Archie said. He opened the car’s rear door. “Are you up for this, Hanna?”
“More than you know,” she replied with anger.
—
B alka nodded to Hanzi as he walked past the panel truck’s cab.
He opened the rear door and crawled inside.
He had hooked up the transmitter to a truck battery and attached it to an aerial that poked out through a hole drilled into the van’s roof.
The top of the antenna had been clamped to the third story of a fire escape in the alley where Hanzi had parked.
Light came from a lamp attached to a second, smaller battery.
He had practiced diligently with the telegraph arm that sent messages over the airwaves, but he hadn’t developed much proficiency. He didn’t have what amateur radio enthusiasts called “fist.”
With slow deliberation he tapped out instructions to his brother some miles distant on the bridge of a stolen battleship.
They didn’t use any fancy codes, but just a simple straightforward set of instructions.
Three Blocks East One Block South . That would put the first of several shells through the roof of the vital Pennsylvania Station.
Balka yanked on the antenna wire sticking through the van’s roof to pull it free from the metal fire escape and drew its full length into the van’s body. Once it was secure, he rapped on the bulkhead separating the cab from the cargo area.
The truck’s engine had been idling. Hanzi put his van in gear and drove them away from the curb.
He had told Balka that it was possible for a radio transmission to be tracked back to its source.
While unlikely that someone who heard the open-air broadcast would inform the police, it was a smart move to relocate after each time he called to the ship.
Of course he’d seen the bodies and had arrived at the blast zone in time to hear one of the victim’s wails of agony go silent when she died.
His brain wasn’t wired for him to care. That they’d died, that anyone died, didn’t register to him the way it did to any other human being.
Someone was alive and then they were not. It was that simple to him.
His brother, Karl, could feel sympathy. Pain and loss motivated him.
But not Balka. He knew how to make the appropriate expressions and say the right things, but his heart remained unmoved.
He never understood grief because he never really understood loss.
When he was a boy and was told his parents were dead, he’d kept sharpening the little knife Karl had given him without pause.
Traffic remained a snarled mess. Hanzi used the van’s fender to exploit any advantage in order to get out of the area. A block away from where they’d parked, cars began to move in a more orderly fashion. It was still crawling, but at least there were no abandoned vehicles blocking their path.
A clap like thunder shook the city once again, followed seconds later by an eleven-inch naval projectile falling from the sky.
Balka expected it to land almost seven blocks from where they were.
Instead it hit close enough to rock the van on its suspension as it exploded in the iron skeleton of a nearby ten-story building under construction.
Rath had been thrown to the floor by the concussion.
He got to his knees and pushed open the van’s doors in time to see girders beginning to rain from the sky as the building began to collapse.
Pedestrians were screaming, construction workers were trying to flee the fenced-off lot.
The sound of collapsing steel was a combination of roaring destruction and the ringing clang of metal careening off metal.
The building folded in on itself, pancaking into a thirty-foot-tall tangle of bent steel and dead workers shrouded in a veil of concrete dust that billowed for several blocks.
Balka lost a full minute staring at the devastation and listening to the screams of trapped and dying men. He finally roused himself. He leapt from the van and raced up to Hanzi, who was leaning out the driver’s side window, his mouth agape.
“This is a disaster,” Balka said.
“I’ll say,” Hanzi replied, still eyeing the wreck that had once been the bones of a skyscraper.
“No, you idiot. Karl missed by at least half a mile. I don’t know what went wrong but we have to warn him before he fires again. Find us a place to put up the antenna.” He ran back into the cargo bed and slammed the doors shut.
Hanzi made no pretense of his intentions to leave the area.
He used his truck’s powerful engine to push aside a smaller car and did it a second time when the driver wouldn’t pull to the curb as he stood on the street, his Ford’s door open at his side.
The man cursed at Hanzi as he drove by. The Roma threw him a rude hand gesture and ground his way down the block.
They turned down a tree-lined side street and found an alley much like where they’d parked before.
Balka shoved several feet of the antenna wire out through the roof, enough for Hanzi to grab a handful and begin to climb a fire escape.
He wasn’t halfway up when another shell streaked over the city from the north and detonated less than fifteen feet from the ruins of the building the ship had already leveled.
The explosion destroyed a storage shed but by this time all the workers who’d survived the initial blast had evacuated the construction site.
While Hanzi clamped the aerial to a fire escape railing, Balka calculated how far off his brother’s shots were landing. He tapped out, Both Landed Eight Blocks East Three Blocks South .
Karl had two sets of coordinates and would now figure out the proper targeting. Rush hour was winding down, but there would be enough people at the train station to make this the greatest tragedy since the paddle steamer General Slocum sank in the East River, killing more than a thousand people.