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“Just like always. He vanished into thin air.”
“Where is Billy Collins?”
The wounded gang leader shrugged, winced, and took another pull on a flask. “Where do hop fiends go? Under a rock. In a sewer.”
43
TEN MILES OFF FIRE ISLAND, A BARRIER BEACH BETWEEN Long Island and the Atlantic Ocean, fifty miles from New York, three vessels converged. The light of day started to slip over the western horizon, and stars took shape in the east. Atlantic Ocean swells were bunching up on the shallow continental shelf. Neither captain of the larger vessels-a 4,000-ton steam freighter with a tall funnel and two king posts, and an oceangoing tugboat hipped up to a three-track railcar barge-was pleased with the prospect of getting close enough to transfer cargo in such choppy seas, particularly with the wind shifting fitfully from sea to shore. When they saw that the third vessel, a broad-beamed little catboat powered only by sail, was steered by a petite redheaded girl, they began snarling at their helmsmen.
It looked like the rendezvous would end before it started. Then the girl took advantage of a shifty gust to bring her craft about so smartly that the steamer’s mate said, “She’s a seaman,” and Eyes O’Shay said to the tugboat captain, “Don’t lose your nerve. We can always throw you overboard and run the boat ourselves.”
He spotted Rafe Engels waving from the steamer’s bridge wing.
Rafe Engels was a gunrunner wanted by the British Special Irish Branch for arming rebels of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and by the Czar’s secret police for supplying Russian revolutionists. O’Shay had first met him on the Wilhelm der Grosse. They had danced carefully around each other, and again on the Lusitania, probing warily at the kindred spirit they each sensed behind the other’s elaborate disguise. There were differences: the gunrunner, always on the rebels’ side, was an idealist, the spy was not. But over the years they had worked out several trades. This exchange of torpedoes for a submarine would be their biggest.
“Where’s the Holland?” O’Shay called across the water.
“Under you!”
O’Shay peered into the waves. The water started bubbling like a boiling pot. Something dark and stealthy took shape under the bubbles. A round turret of armor steel emerged from the white froth. And then, quite suddenly, a glistening hull parted the sea. It was one hundred feet long and menacing as a reef.
A hinged cover opened on top of the turret. A bearded man thrust his head and shoulders into the air, looked around, and climbed out. He was Hunt Hatch, at one time the Holland Company’s chief trials captain, now on the run from Special Irish Branch. His crew followed him out, one after another, until five Republican Brotherhood fighters who had pledged their lives to win Home Rule for Ireland were standing on the deck, blinking in the light and breathing deeply of the air.
“Treat them well,” Engels had demanded as they clasped hands cementing their deal. “They are brave men.”
“Like my own family,” O’Shay had promised.
All had served as Royal Navy submariners. All had ended up in British prisons. All hated England. They dreamed, O’Shay knew, that when the Americans discovered that the submarine and its electric torpedoes were from England, it would appear that England had instigated an attack to cripple American battleship production. They dreamed that when war engulfed Europe, angry Americans would not side with England. Then Germany would defeat England, and Ireland would be free.
A lovely dream, thought the spy. It would serve no one better than Eyes O’Shay.
“There is your submarine torpedo boat,” Engels called from across it. “Where are my Wheeler torpedoes?”
Eyes O’Shay pointed at the sailboat.
Engels bowed. “I see the fair Katherine. Hallooo, my beauty,” he hailed through cupped hands. “I did not recognize you out of your sumptuous gowns. But I see no torpedoes.”
“Under her,” said O’Shay. “Four Wheeler Mark 14s. Two for you. Two for me.”
Engels gestured. The steamer’s seamen swung a cargo boom out from her king post. “Come alongside, Katherine. I’ll take two torpedoes-and maybe you, too, if no one is looking.”
As Katherine effected the difficult maneuver and Engels’s crew snaked the torpedoes out of the catboat, they heard a rumble like distant thunder. O’Shay watched the submarine’s crew coolly assess what the noise really meant and the distance from which it was coming.
“U.S. Navy’s Sandy Hook Test Range,” he called down to them. “Don’t worry. It’s far away.”
“Sixty thousand yards,” Hunt Hatch called back, and a man added, “Ten-inchers, and some 12s.”
O’Shay nodded his satisfaction. The Irish rebels who would crew his submarine knew their business.
It may not have looked like a fair trade, the submarine being six or seven times longer than the torpedoes and capable of independent action. But the Holland, though considerably elongated and modified by the English from its original design, was fully five years old and outstripped by rapid advances in underwater warfare. The Mark 14s were Ron Wheeler’s latest.
Each man had what he wanted. Engels was steaming away with two of the most advanced torpedoes in the world to sell to the highest bidder. And the Holland and the two torpedoes that the tug and barge crews were wrestling out of the sailboat and into the submarine made a deadly combination. The Brooklyn Navy Yard would never know what hit it.
44
JIMMY RICHARDS’S AND MARV GORDON’S DUTCH UNCLE, Donald Darbee, sailed them six miles across the Upper Bay in his oyster scow, a flat-bottomed boat with a square bow and a powerful auxiliary gasoline motor he only used when chasing or running from something. Jimmy and Marv knew every watery inch of the Port of New York, but neither of the enormous young men had ever set foot on Manhattan Island despite many a night poking around Manhattan piers for items that had fallen off. Uncle Donny recalled going ashore in 1890 to rescue a fellow Staten Islander from the cops.
As they approached the Battery, a Harbor Squad policeman on a launch tied to Pier A called his roundsman up on deck. “Looks like we’re being invaded.”
