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“Bringing more tallow to grease the ways.”
“Do you know him?”
“Can’t say that I do. But here comes one of your men checking him now.”
Bell watched the Van Dorn intercept him. The man with the wheelbarrow showed the bright red pass required to work under the ship. Just as the detective stepped aside, motioning for the man to continue, someone whistled, and the detective ran in that direction. The man lifted the handles of his barrow and wheeled it toward the rails.
“A regular patriot,” said the carpenter.
“What do you mean?”
“Wearing that red, white, and blue bow tie. A regular Uncle Sam, he is. See you later, Mr. Bell. Stop by the workmen’s tent. I’ll buy you a beer.” He hurried off, chuckling, “I’m thinking of getting me one of those bow ties for Independence Day. The waiters was wearing them at the boss’s tent.”
Bell lingered, studying the man pushing the wheelbarrow toward the back of the ship. A tall man, thin, pale, hair hidden under his cap. He was the only man on the ways except for Bill Strong, who crouched with his ram hundreds of feet away at the bow. Coincidence that he wore a waiter’s bow tie? Did he get past the gates pretending to be a waiter until the ways were cleared and it was time to make his move unhindered? His pass had convinced the detective, though. Even at this distance Bell had seen it was the proper color.
He began hastily shoveling globs of tallow out of the barrow onto the flat rail. So hastily, Bell noticed, that it looked more like he was emptying the barrow rather than spreading the grease.
Isaac Bell plunged down the stairs. He ran the length of the ship at a dead run, drawing his Browning.
“Elevate!” he shouted. “Hands in the air.”
The man whirled around. His eyes were big. He looked frightened. “Drop the shovel. Put your hands in the air.”
“What is wrong? I showed my red pass.” His accent was German.
“Drop the shovel!”
He was gripping it so tightly that tendons stood like ropes on the backs of his hands.
A hoarse cheer erupted overhead. The German looked up. The ship was trembling. Suddenly it moved. Bell looked up, too, sensing a rush from above. In the corner of his eye he glimpsed a timber thick as railroad crosstie detach from the hull and tumble toward him. He leaped back. It crashed in the space in which he had been standing, knocking his broad-brimmed hat off his head and brushing his shoulder with the force of a runaway horse.
Before Bell could recover his balance, the German swung the shovel with the gritted-teeth determination of a long-ball hitter determined to turn a soft pitch into a home run.
24
THE LAUNCHING PLATFORM HAD BEGUN TO SHAKE WITHOUT warning.
The crowd fell silent.
It suddenly felt as if after three years of building, growing heavier every day as tons of steel were bolted and riveted to tons of steel, the battleship Michigan refused to wait a moment longer. No one had touched the electric button that would activate the rams that would release the triggers. But she had moved anyway. An inch. Then another.
“Now!” the Assistant Secretary of the Navy cried shrilly to his daughter.
The girl, more alert than he, was already swinging the bottle.
Glass smashed. Champagne bubbled through the crocheted mesh, and the girl sang out in golden tones, “I christen thee Michigan!”
The hundreds of onlookers on the launching platform cheered. Thousands more on the shore, too far away to see the bottle break or the slow movement of the hull, were alerted by the voices of those on the platform and cheered, too. Tugboats and steamers tooted in the river. On the train tracks behind the shed, a locomotive engineer tied down his whistle. And slowly, very slowly, the battleship began to pick up speed.
UNDER THE SHIP, the German’s shovel smashed Bell’s gun out of his hand and caromed off his shoulder. Bell was already thrown off balance by the falling timber. The shovel sent him pinwheeling.
The German jumped back to the wheelbarrow and plunged his hands into its gelatinous cargo, confirming what Bell had seen from the stairs. He had been
shoveling tallow onto the ways not only to appear to be innocently performing his job but to expose what he had hidden under the tallow. With a glad cry he pulled out a tightly banded pack of dynamite sticks.
Bell leaped to his feet. He saw no fuse to detonate the explosive, no powdered string to light, which meant that the German must have rigged a percussion cap to detonate on contact when the saboteur smashed it against the cradle. The German’s face was churning into a mask of insane triumph as he ran at the cradle holding the dynamite aloft, and Isaac Bell recognized the cold-eyed fearlessness of a fanatic willing to die to set off his bomb.
With every shore and block removed, Michigan was balanced precariously as she started down the ways. An explosion would derail the cradle and spill the 16,000-ton battleship on its side, crushing the launching platform and sweeping hundreds to their deaths.
