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 tunnel and everything in it.
“Round up four cases of dynamite.”
Bell wired Grady Forrer for more information from the geological survey that Osgood Hennessy had commissioned for his tunnel.
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 Tunnel.”
“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 Tunnel, Bell ran into a snag he hadn’t considered. The cast-iron walls of the St. Clair Tunnel were two inches thick, which would make it immensely strong. Hennessy’s abandoned tunnel had been built of similar cast-iron segments.
Stymied, and hoping to see the problem from another, more productive angle, Bell put it to Dashwood in the starkest terms. “We can’t count on explosives breaching the main tunnel. They will easily destroy the connector. But if the connector collapses too far from the main tunnel, the debris will seal it before the water reaches the main tunnel. To guarantee breaching the main tunnel and destroying the Comintern’s stockpile, we have to explode the dynamite very near the joint where the tunnels connect.”
Dashwood asked, “Why don’t we just raid the tunnel? That will shut it.”
“It won’t stay shut long,” said Bell. “The cops and courts are for sale on both sides of the river. They’ll put pictures in the papers of a prosecutor swinging an ax at a case of whisky. But hush money will keep that booze safe where it is. Zolner and his partners will lay low ’til the politicians are done demanding another ‘drive’ against liquor, then back to business—unless we flood the tunnel and destroy the Comintern’s stockpile. I told Mr. Van Dorn, and I’ll tell you: I will not settle for bloodying his nose this time. I’m going to drive Marat Zolner out of Detroit.”
“Where do you think he’ll go?”
Bell answered, “Where do I think? Listen.”
He sat at the private-wire Morse key and tapped out a message to New York.
FORWARD FINAL PAYMENT LYNCH & HARDING MARINE.
DELIVER MARION EXPRESS CRUISER MIAMI.
“We have to stop him from setting up business the way he’s doing here in Detroit and back in New York.”
“What if he goes to The Bahamas?” Dashwood asked.
“He won’t. He has no reason to go to Nassau. Nassau is like Canada, a relatively safe base for legal liquor. Florida is lawless, an import-and-distribution center like Detroit and New York where he can fight to expand and take over.”
Bell gave Dashwood a cold smile and added, “If for some reason he does go to Nassau, Nassau is three hours from Miami by fast boat. And Marion is going to be one fast boat.”
• • •
HE WIRED GRADY AGAIN.
HOW FAR FROM SHORE DID HENNESSY TUNNEL STOP?
Grady telephoned long-distance.
“Too complicated for the wire. I found handwritten engineers’ notes on the survey that suggest they stopped excavating just where the bank began to slope upward.”
Bell spread open his Detroit River chart. “There’s a deep channel down the middle, nearer to Fighting Island, and then a narrower one, the Wyandotte Channel, that hugs the Ecorse shore.”
“They must have dredged it deeper since the survey. There’s no channel mentioned.”
“It hugs the shore,” said Bell. “The dredge would have struck the crown of the tunnel probably, so just beyond the current Wyandotte Channel is where they must have stopped.”
He improvised calipers with two fingers and compared the distance to the chart’s scale.
Grady said, “The other reason I telephoned . . .”
“What?” Bell was distracted. It wasn’t so much the headache—they were tapering off, and the plague of double vision had pretty much ended. He was puzzling some way to drop his improvised depth charge exactly one hundred feet offshore. “What did you say, Grady?”
“The Research Department is assembling a complete Prohibition file—an up-to-date encyclopedia of bootleggers, gangsters, rumrunners, et cetera, with curriculum vitae, photographs, fingerprints.”
“Good job. That’ll show the Justice Department what we can do.”
“I thought I’d pop down to The Bahamas. Get the latest on the Nassau import-export racket. What do you think?”
“I think you’d get in Pauline’s way.”
“Oh, that’s right, she’s down there,” Grady said innocently. “Is she all right on her own?”
“Pauline is quite all right on her own . . . Actually, you raise a good point. She could use a trustworthy runner. Tell you what, send young Somers to Nassau. I’ll cable Pauline.”
APPRENTICE ASA SOMERS COMING YOUR WAY.
GO-GETTER SAVED JVD BACON.
Then Bell called for the Protective Services op, whom he had sent earlier to the library.
“Go buy a rope.”
“How long?”
“One hundred four feet.”
“One hundred four?”
“The four’s for a loop. Watch carefully how they measure.”
• • •
JACK PAYNE, a Van Dorn detective on loan from the Cleveland field office, had been a combat engineer in the trenches during the war. Working in an empty backwater slip Bell located near the Detroit Yacht Club, Payne rigged the dynamite with waterproof fuses and detonators and screwed twenty pounds of old horseshoes to each of the forty-pound cases so they would sink fast.
After dark, they tied the cases into one heavy packet perched on the stern of one of the Gar Wood speedboats.
“Just to review your scheme, Mr. Bell,” said Detective Payne, “keep in mind that that shock wave will go up as well as down. The moment you drop these crates, jam your throttles and get away from there as fast as you can.”
• • •
“THE BUREAU CHIEF found
