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Bell grinned back but sobered quickly.
“If Mr. Langner did not kill himself, someone went to a lot of trouble to murder him and besmirch his reputation. The Marines guard the gates of the navy yard. They must have seen that someone leave the night before.”
3
MORE LIMESTONE!” YELLED CHAD GORDON. GREEDILY watching his newest torrent of molten iron gush like liquid fire from the taphole into its ladle, the Naval Ordnance Bureau metallurgist muttered a triumphant, “Hull 44, here we come!”
“All canvas and no hull” was a charge regularly leveled at Chad Gordon for running risks with three-thousand-degree molten metal that no sane man would.
But no one denied that the brilliant star deserved his own blast furnace in a remote corner of the steel mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he experimented eighteen hours a day to create low-carbon pig iron to process into torpedo-resistant armor plate. The company had to assign him two separate crews of workmen, as even poverty-stricken immigrants accustomed to working like dogs could not keep up with Chad Gordon’s pace.
On this snowy March night, his second shift consisted of an American foreman, Bob Hall, and a gang that Hall regarded as the usual bunch of foreigners-four Hungarians and a gloomy German who had replaced a missing Hungarian. As near as Bob Hall could make out from their jabbering, their missing pal had fallen down a well or been run over by a locomotive, take your pick.
The German’s name was Hans. He claimed to have worked at the Krupp Werke in the Ruhr Valley. That was fine with foreman Hall. Hans was strong and seemed to know his business and understood more English than all four Hungarians combined. Besides, Mr. Gordon wouldn’t give a damn if the German had come straight from Hell as long as he worked hard.
Seven hours into the shift, a “hang” of partly solidified metal formed near the top of the furnace. It threatened to block the uptake that vented volatile hot waste gases. Foreman Hall suggested clearing it before it got any bigger. Chad Gordon ordered him brusquely aside. “I said, ‘More limestone.’ ”
The German had been waiting for such an opportunity. Quickly, he climbed the ladders to the top of the furnace where barrows were standing by with fresh stock. Each contained a twelve-hundred-pound load of iron ore, or coke, or the dolomitic limestone with an unusually high content of magnesia that the hard-driving Chad Gordon was counting on to strengthen the metal.
The German grabbed a barrow of dolomitic limestone and rolled the two-wheel cart to the mouth of the furnace.
“Wait for the boil!” the foreman bellowed from down at the base where melted impurities were tumbling from the slag notch. The molten iron and slag in the bottom of the furnace were roaring at a full three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. But the ore and coke on top had barely reached seven hundred.
Hans didn’t seem to hear him as he dumped the limestone into the furnace and hurriedly descended the ladders. “You lunatic,” yelled the foreman. “It’s not hot enough. You blocked the uptake.”
Hans shouldered past the foreman.
“Don’t worry about the hang,” Chad Gordon shouted without bothering to look up. “It’ll drop.”
The foreman knew better. The hang was trapping explosive gases inside the furnace. Hans’s dump had only made it worse. A lot worse. He shouted to the Hungarians, “Get up there and clear the uptake!”
The Hungarians hesitated. Even if they couldn’t fully understand English, they knew the danger of flammable gases accumulating above the batch. Hall’s clenched fist and angry gestures at the ladder sent them scrambling to the top of the furnace with bars and picks. But just as they started to break up the hang it dropped on its own accord in one solid piece. Just like Mr. Gordon had predicted. Except the barrow of limestone heaped on the cool surface had also blocked the uptake. When the hang dropped, the sudden burst of outside air into the furnace combined with the heat below to ignite the trapped waste gases.
They exploded with a roar that lifted the roof off the building and threw it onto a Bessemer converter fifty yards away. The blast blew boots and clothing off the Hungarians and incinerated their bodies. Tons of fiery debris splashed down the sides of the furnace. Like a burning waterfall, it drenched the foreman and Chad Gordon
in flames.
The German ran, gagging from the stink of cooked flesh. His eyes were wide with horror at what he had set off and terror that the boiling metal would catch up with him, too. No one took notice of one man running when suddenly every man in the giant mill was running. Workers from the other blast furnaces raced to the scene of death, driving wagons and carts for makeshift ambulances to carry the injured. Even the company thugs guarding the gate ignored Hans as they gaped in the direction from which he ran.
The German looked back. Flames were shooting into the night sky. The buildings around the blast furnace were wrecked. Walls had collapsed, roofs tumbled to the ground, and everywhere he saw fire.
He cursed aloud, astonished by the immensity of the destruction he had wrought.
THE NEXT MORNING, changed from his workman’s clothing into a somber black suit and exhausted from a sleepless night of brooding on how many had died, Hans stepped off a train at Washington, D.C.’s National Mall Station. He scanned the newsstands for headlines about the accident. There were none. Steelmaking was dangerous business. Workmen were killed daily. Only local newspapers in the mill towns bothered listing the dead-and often then only the foremen for their English-speaking readers.
He took a ferry to Alexandria, Virginia, and hurried along the waterfront to the warehouse district. The spy who had sent him to the steel mill was waiting in his curious den of obsolete weapons.
He listened intently to Hans’s report. He asked probing questions about the elements that Chad Gordon had introduced into his iron. Knowledgeable and insightful, he drew from Hans details that the German had barely noticed at the time.
The spy was lavish in his praise and paid in cash what he had promised.
“It is not for the money,” said the German, stuffing it in his pocket.
“Of course not.”
“It is because when war comes the Americans will side with Britain.”
“That is beyond any doubt. The democracies despise Germany.”
