The Bootlegger

Bell zigzagged, rapid turns hard left, hard right. He cut the distance from two hundred yards to one hundred, to fifty. Marat Zolner stopped firing, his face a startled mask of disbelief at the sight of the burning cruiser flying at him.

“Ramming!” Bell warned his people. “Hold tight!”

Bell aimed for the softest target just ahead of the engines. The Van Dorn boat struck Black Bird dead center and cut the Comintern boat in half. Bell saw Zolner thrown from the Lewis gun into the water. Then he was past, drawing back his throttles.

He saw Marat Zolner swimming hard toward the tanker.

“Ed! Asa! Pick him up, right side.”

Marion swooped alongside Zolner.

Tobin leaned over to grab him.

“Look out, Ed!”

Bell saw Zolner turn over onto his back to deliver a vicious thrust with a short dagger. The blade plunged into Tobin’s forearm. Blood fountained. The detective swung his fist and pitched forward and started to slide over the gu

A Lewis gun opened up with a rapid Boom! Boom! Boom! Ricochets shrieked, splinters flew. The Sandra T. Congdon was raking them with machine-gun fire from the flying bridge.

Bell poured on the gas and peeled away. Zolner kept swimming toward the tanker. Bell ventured closer, but the gu

The rain fell hard. The tanker disappeared. Thick mist gathered.

“We’ll never him see in this,” gasped Tobin as Somers fought to stop the bleeding. “Where’s he going?”

“Where he’s been going all along,” said Isaac Bell. “Wall Street.”

Yuri Antipov had bombed a symbol of capitalism. Marat Zolner would burn its heart out with an alcohol-fueled fireball. And the Comintern would welcome the hero who incinerated New York’s Financial District the length of Wall Street from the East River to Trinity Church.

Bell stepped on the starter. The third engine fired back to life.

The battered Marion roared for New York Harbor at fifty knots.

She carried them between the arms of Sandy Hook and Rockaway Beach and up the Lower Bay in ten minutes, through the Narrows and across the Upper Bay in another seven. The third motor died at the Battery. The second in the East River under the Brooklyn Bridge.

Peering through a scrim of sheet rain, Bell spotted the tall hangars of the Loening factory and, just past it, the 31st Street Air Service Terminal. His last engine coughed, ru

Bell pulled the Thompson submachine gun from a locker. “Pauline, get Ed to Bellevue. Asa, grab that box.”

“Where’d you get hand grenades?”

“Miami River. Come on!”

They ran to the Loening factory on the river’s edge. The mechanics had floated the Flying Yachts into the hangars, out of the wind. Bell climbed onto his and threw off the lines. “On the jump, boys. Open those doors and start my engine.”

“You can’t take off in this weather!” the foreman shouted.

“My mother died when I was a boy. I’ve gotten by without one since. Start my engine!”

42

Bell battled high waves taking off from the East River and ferocious gusts in the air as his flying boat climbed toward the Williamsburg Bridge. He steered between its towers, whose tops were lost in cloud, and aimed for the lowest dip in its suspension cables. He cleared them by inches. The horizon vanished in the rain.

He kept track of the horizon with a new Sperry instrument that combined a turn indicator and an inclinometer. But it was no help avoiding the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, much less the skyscrapers of Wall Street, and he flew blind, relying on his compass, Tank watch, and memory.

Asa Somers couldn’t stop gri

When the Flying Yacht finally broke from the murk that enshrouded the port, Bell saw that he had already flown past the Narrows. The Lower Bay spread below him, dotted with ships. He ignored the vessels he saw at anchor. They were riding out the storm, huddled along the Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Jersey shores. Marat Zolner’s tanker would be moving, steaming up the Ambrose Cha

Bell flew the length of the cha

Asa tapped Bell’s arm. He was sca

“Asa. Lash those grenades together in bundles of four.”

“Are we going to bomb him?”

“You are going to bomb those ca

He banked into a tight circle, straightened up behind the ship, and descended. The flying boat caught up quickly. Asa stood up in the cockpit so he could reach over the side windows. Bell soared fifty feet above the stack and over the wheelhouse, his Blériot wheel in constant motion as he tried to counteract the buffeting wind.

“Now!”

Thirty feet over the foredeck, they couldn’t miss. The bundled stick grenades landed on the ca

Bell circled for another try.

Zolner was ready with his Lewis gun. As Bell caught up with the tanker again, he flew into streaks of blue smoke. Incendiary bullets tore through his wing. Each left a trail of fire. Flames wrapped the wing.

“Seat belt, Asa, we have to land.”

“How can we stop him if we land?”

“Watch me.”

The wind, Bell thought, was blowing behind the ship, in line with her course up the cha

Old Donald Darbee stopped his oyster boat in the middle of his hurricane whisky run to see what happened next. He and little Robin had noticed the tanker proceeding up the cha