The Spy (An Isaac Bell Adventure)

Book by Cussler Clive Scott Justin

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

 

THE GUNNER’S DAUGHTER

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

 

ARMORED COFFINS

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

 

THE FLEET

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

 

A STREAK OF GOD

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

 

ON DISTANT SERVICE

DIRK PITT® ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER

Arctic Drift

(WITH DIRK CUSSLER)

 

Treasure of Khan

(WITH DIRK CUSSLER)

 

Black Wind

(WITH DIRK CUSSLER)

 

Trojan Odyssey

 

Valhalla Rising

 

Atlantis Found

 

Flood Tide

 

Shock Wave

 

Inca Gold

 

Sahara

 

Dragon

 

Treasure

 

Cyclops

 

Deep Six

 

Pacific Vortex!

 

Night Probe!

 

Vixen 03

 

Raise the Titanic!

 

Iceberg

 

The Mediterranean Caper

 

 

 

FARGO ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER
WITH GRANT BLACKWOOD

 

Spartan Gold

 

 

 

ISAAC BELL NOVELS BY CLIVE CUSSLER

 

The Wrecker

(WITH JUSTIN SCOTT)

 

The Chase

 

 

 

KURT AUSTIN ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER
WITH PAUL KEMPRECOS

 

Medusa

 

The Navigator

 

Polar Shift

 

Lost City

 

White Death

 

Fire Ice

 

Blue Gold

 

Serpent

 

 

 

OREGON FILES ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER
WITH JACK DU BRUL

 

The Silent Sea

 

Corsair

Plague Ship

 

Skeleton Coast

 

Dark Watch

 

 

 

WITH CRAIG DIRGO

 

Golden Buddha

Sacred Stone

 

 

 

NONFICTION BY CLIVE CUSSLER AND CRAIG DIRGO

 

The Sea Hunters

 

The Sea Hunters II

 

Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt Revealed

CLIVE CUSSLER AND JUSTIN SCOTT

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

Copyright © 2010 by Sandecker, RLLLP

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Published simultaneously in Canada

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Cussler, Clive.

The spy / Clive Cussler and Justin Scott.

p. cm.

ISBN: 9781101188057

1. Bell, Isaac (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Fiction. 3. Sabotage—Fiction. 4. Railroad trains—Fiction. 5. Washington (D.C.)—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Scott, Justin. II. Title.

PS3553.U75S79 2010

2010009053

813’.54—dc22

 

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For Amber

THE GUNNER’S DAUGHTER

1

MARCH 17, 1908

WASHINGTON, D.C.

 

 

THE WASHINGTON NAVY YARD SLEPT LIKE AN ANCIENT city guarded by thick walls and a river. Old men stood watch, plodding between electric time detectors to register their rounds of factories, magazines, shops, and barracks. Outside the perimeter rose a hill of darkened workers’ houses. The Capitol Dome and the Washington Monument crowned it, glittering under a full moon like polar ice. A whistle moaned. A train approached, bleeding steam and clanging its bell.

U.S. Marine sentries opened the North Railroad Gate.

No one saw Yamamoto Kenta hiding under the Baltimore and Ohio flatcar that the locomotive pushed into the yard. The flatcar’s wheels groaned under a load of fourteen-inch armor plate from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Brakemen uncoupled the car on a siding, and the engine backed away.

Yamamoto eased to the wooden crossties and stone ballast between the rails. He lay still until he was sure he was alone. Then he followed the tracks into the cluster of three-story brick-and-iron buildings that housed the Gun Factory.

Moonlight lancing down from high windows, and the ruby glow of banked furnaces illuminated an enormous cavern. Traveler cranes hulked in shadows overhead. Colossal fifty-ton dreadnought battleship guns crowded the floor as if a fiery hurricane had leveled a steel forest.

Yamamoto, a middle-aged Japanese with threads of gray in his shiny black hair and a confident, dignified manner, wove a purposeful route through the watchmen’s prescribed paths, examining gun lathes, machines for rifling, and furnaces. He paid special attention to deep wells in the floor, the brick-lined shrinking pits where the guns were assembled by squeezing steel jackets around fifty-foot tubes. His eye was sharp, refined by similar clandestine “tours” of Vickers and Krupp—the British and German naval gun factories—and the Czar of Russia’s ordnance plants at St. Petersburg.

An old-style Yale lock secured the door to the laboratory storeroom that dispensed supplies to the engineers and scientists. Yamamoto picked it open quickly. Inside, he searched cabinets for iodine. He poured six ounces of the shiny blue-black crystals into an envelope. Then he scrawled “crystal iodine, 6 ounces” on a requisition sheet with the initials “AL” for the Gun Factory’s legendary chief designer, Arthur Langner.

In a distant wing of the sprawling building, he located the test caisson where armor experts simulated torpedo attacks to measure the awesomely magnified impact of explosions underwater. He rummaged through their magazine. The sea powers locked in the international race to build modern dreadnought battleships were feverishly experimenting with arming torpedoes with TNT, but Yamamoto noted that the Americans were still testing formulations based on guncotton propellants. He stole a silk bag of Cordite MD smokeless powder.

As he opened a janitor’s closet to filch a bottle of ammonia water, he heard a watchman coming. He hid in the closet until the old fellow had shuffled past and disappeared among the guns.

Swift and silent, Yamamoto climbed the stairs.

Arthur Langner’s drawing loft, which was not locked, was the workshop of an eccentric whose genius spanned war and art. Blueprints for stepped-thread breeches and visionary sketches of shells with smashing effects as yet unheard of shared the workspace with a painter’s easel, a library of novels, a bass violin, and a grand piano.

Yamamoto left the Cordite, the iodine, and the ammonia on the piano and spent an hour studying the drafting tables. “Be Japan’s eyes,” he preached at the Black Ocean Society’s spy school on the rare occasions that duty allowed him home. “Take every opportunity to observe, whether your ultimate mission is deception, sabotage, or murder.”

What he saw frightened him. The 12-inch guns on the factory floor could throw shells seven miles to pierce ten inches of the newest face-hardened side armor. But up here in the drawing loft where new ideas were hatched, the Americans had preliminary sketches for 15-inch guns and even a 16-inch, seventy-foot-long monster that would hurl a ton of high explosives beyond the curve of the Earth. No one knew yet how to aim such a weapon when the distances were too great to gauge range by “spotting” the splashes of near misses. But the bold imagination that Yamamoto saw at work warned him it was only a matter of time before America’s “New Navy” invented novel concepts for fire control.

Yamamoto stuffed a wad of paper money in the gun designer’s desk—fifty twenty-dollar U.S. gold certificates—considerably more than what one of the arsenal’s skilled workmen earned in a year.

Already the U.S. Navy was third only to England’s and Germany’s. Its North Atlantic Fleet—brazenly rechristened the “Great White Fleet”—was showing the flag in a swaggering voyage around the world. But Britain, Germany, Russia, and France were not America’s enemies. The true mission of the Great White Fleet was to threaten the Empire of Japan with naked steel. America aimed to command the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Tokyo.

Japan would not allow it, Yamamoto thought with a prideful smile.

It was only three years since the Russo-Japanese War spawned in blood a new master of the Western Pacific. Mighty Russia had tried to strong-arm Japan. Today the Empire of Japan occupied Port Arthur. And Russia’s Baltic Fleet lay under three hundred feet of water at the bottom of the Tsushima Strait—thanks in no small part to Japanese spies who had infiltrated the Russian Navy.

As Yamamoto closed the drawer on the money, he had the eerie sensation of being watched. He looked across the desk into the bold gaze of a beautiful woman whose photographic portrait stood in a silver frame. He recognized Langner’s dark-haired daughter and admired how faithfully the photographer had captured her compelling eyes. She had inscribed it in a flowing hand “For Father, the ‘gunner’ who ‘dreads nought’!”

Yamamoto turned his attention to Langner’s bookshelves. Bound volumes of patent applications vied with novels for the space. The applications filed recently had been written on a typewriter. Yamamoto pulled volume after volume, working his way back to the last year that applications were submitted in longhand. He spread one on the designer’s desk, then chose a sheet of paper from a side drawer and a Waterman fountain pen with a gold nib. Referring repeatedly to the sample of handwriting, he forged a brief, incoherent letter. Ending it with the words “Forgive me,” he scrawled Arthur Langner’s signature.

He took the iodine and the ammonia into the gun designer’s washroom. With the butt of his Nambu pocket pistol he crushed the iodine crystals on the marble washstand and brushed the resultant powder into a shaving mug. He wiped the gun clean with the washroom towel, leaving a purplish smear on the cloth. Then he poured ammonia onto the iodine powder, stirring with Langner’s toothbrush until he had a thick paste of nitrogen iodide.

He propped open the lid of the grand piano, reached into the narrow end farthest from the keyboard, and smeared the paste on the closely bunched strings. After it dried, the explosive concoction would become unstable and extremely sensitive to impact. A gentle vibration would set off a loud bang and a flash. Alone, the explosion would damage little beyond the piano. But as a detonator, it would be deadly.

He placed the silk sack on top of the cast-iron frame, immediately above the strings. The sack contained enough Cordite MD smokeless powder to propel a twelve-pound shell two miles.

YAMAMOTO KENTA LEFT the Gun Factory the way he had entered, his eyes still stinging from the ammonia. Suddenly, things went wrong. The North Railroad Gate was blocked by an unexpected burst of late-night activity. Switch engines were huffing gondola cars in and out, attended by a horde of brakemen. He retreated deeper into the arsenal, past the powerhouse, through a maze of roads, buildings, and storage yards. Orienting himself by the powerhouse smokestacks and a pair of experimental radio-antenna towers silhouetted against the moonlit sky, he crossed a park and gardens bordered by handsome brick houses in which slept the families of the commandant and officers of the yard.

The ground rose higher here. To the northwest he glimpsed the Capitol looming over the city. He saw it as yet another symbol of America’s fearsome might. What other nation could have erected the largest cast-iron dome in the world at the same time they were fighting a bloody Civil War? He was almost to a side gate when a sentry surprised him on a narrow path.

Yamamoto had just enough time to back into a hedgerow.

His capture would disgrace Japan. He was ostensibly in Washington, D.C., to help catalog the recent contribution of the Freer Collection of Asian...