The Bootlegger

“He did?”

“He laid a two-thousand-foot cast-iron tube, using the same Beach shield compressed-air method as they did for the Saint Clair Tu

“First? Ahead of the rest of the line?”

“First off, he commissioned a geological survey for the tu

Bell said, “I remember when he built the Cascades Cutoff. He bridged Cascade Canyon first, way ahead of the line. ‘Speed,’ he used to say. ‘It’s all about speed.’ Why doesn’t anybody know about this tu

“He

“Fighting Island?” Bell put down his coffee.

“The Canadians were glad to keep mum. The scheme would boost their railroads. Plus He

“Fighting Island to where?”

“Ecorse.”

“Grady, are you sure?”

“All the main lines pass close to Ecorse. Ecorse was the ideal place to co

“So where is it?”

“Abandoned. The scheme collapsed and He

“Is it still there?”

“It must be. He’d have sealed it up, having paid for it, hoping to finish it sometime in the future. But it strikes me that if some smart bootlegger found out, he might have finished the last hundred feet or so and had himself a hooch tu

“So this would be a much bigger tu

“Bigger? I’ll say. He

“Grady, you are a genius.”

Bell heard a sharp clang on the telephone line. Grady said, “I am raising a glass to that thought. Hope it helps.”

“Wait! Find me a map. Somewhere must be engineers’ plans and surveys.”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you? I put it on the night train. You’ll have it this morning.”

Bell hired a surveyor. The surveyor confirmed with his transit what already looked likely to the naked eye. The jumping-off point indicated on Osgood He

“Maybe,” said Bell.

Plotting where the tu

Bell presented his New York Yacht Club credentials to gain admission to the Detroit Yacht Club. He bought a river chart and rented two Gar Wood speedboats. He made one a guard boat, ma

“You’ll have to be quick,” he told the surveyor. “We don’t want to be noticed by customs or hijackers.”

Nearing Ecorse, Bell throttled back and disengaged the propellers to let the boat drift on the current while the surveyor sighted the terminal. He was quick.

“X marks the spot, Mr. Bell. The original tu

Bell engaged the engines in reverse to hold the boat against the current. The surveyor whipped his transit one hundred eighty degrees to pinpoint where on the Ecorse waterfront the tu

“That red boathouse, Mr. Bell, if the extension is in-line with the original.”

Bell noted that the chart showed a water depth of thirty feet. He wondered how deeply the crown of the tu

Bell headed downriver, waited for dusk, and went back to the spot between the ferry terminal and the red boathouse. Idling the engines to keep the boat in place, he checked their position relative to the two structures. Then he took compass bearings on a light atop the red boathouse and bearings on prominent lights up and down the river. Returning to this precise spot tomorrow night would be a simple matter of lining up the lights.

30

James Dashwood returned to Detroit with more bad news. He had come within sixty seconds of catching up with Fern Hawley — one minute too late to stop her chartered flying boat from taking off from Miami.

“Florida is a good place to hide if you’re as rich as she is. She could be in Palm Beach or the Florida Keys, or Havana, Cuba, or Bimini or Nassau or any other islands of The Bahamas. Or she could have rendezvoused with a yacht at sea. I put the word out to our various people and decided I’d be more useful back in Detroit.”

Bell said, “Maybe Nassau — where the booze tanker is headed. In which case, Pauline will deal with her.”

“Maybe I should go down and look out for Pauline?”

“Pauline looks out for herself. Do you remember the spy who was sabotaging the Navy’s battleships?”

Dashwood gri

Bell said, “Admiral Falconer showed me experiments in a test caisson where armor experts simulated torpedo attacks to measure the impact of explosions underwater. Torpedoes were coming into their own just as the science boys began to understand what made them so deadly.”

Blast energy from mines and torpedoes was terrifically amplified and concentrated underwater. By the middle of the war, depth charges were sinking submarines, which gave Bell an idea how to deal with the tu

“Round up four cases of dynamite.”

Bell wired Grady Forrer for more information from the geological survey that Osgood He

HOW DEEP TUNNEL?

WHAT IS BOTTOM MATERIAL?

Bell had decreed that gangland Detroit was too dangerous for even a fortified Van Dorn field office to employ apprentices, so he was forced to press tough Protective Services operatives into apprentice tasks. “Run to the library. Look in the 1891 issues of Harper’s Weekly for an article about the Saint Clair River Tu

“Library?”

“You can count on Harper’s for a rundown on the big engineering feats. 1891. The librarian will help you find it.”

“When?”

“Now! On the jump!”

The broad-shouldered house dick lumbered off, scratching his head.

Grady wired back:

BOTTOM CONSISTS OF SAND, CLAY, BOULDERS, AND ROCK.

TUNNEL CROWN THREE FEET UNDER BOTTOM.

“Good!”

But when the Protective Services op returned with the Harper’s article about the St. Clair Tu