Any good knife fighter knows the margin of victory is the width of a blade.
Bell spun as Raul committed himself to the change of tactics, like a matador getting as close as he can to the horns of the bull. He physically brushed against Morales as he went around, reaching blindly over his shoulder to pull his knife from the man’s chest. Twirling like a flamenco dancer, he spun and plunged the dagger into Morales’s left kidney. Even as Raul opened his mouth to scream, Bell clamped a hand over it. Blood gushed from the chest wound because the knife had severed the major vessel that fed the arm. He held the man as his life drained from him and slowly let him slump to the ground, the sightless eyes glinting like two poker chips in the moonlight. Bell wiped his blade clean, looking over and seeing a second steel box about to touch down on the workboat’s aft cargo area. None of the men saw the silent fight.
Morales had a key looped around his neck. Bell pulled it free and used it to open the little safe sitting close to the most comfortable-looking chair in the clearing, obviously Talbot’s. Inside was a chamois sack filled with coins heavy enough to be gold, a .38 caliber short-barreled revolver, and some papers. He took it all.
Keeping an eye on the work going on on the dock, Bell dragged Raul Morales’s corpse a short distance into the bush in case anyone else returned to the clearing. His blood was already being absorbed by the jungle’s black soil.
Bell went back to his original hiding spot. The second box was fully down now and its braided cable about to be detached. Court Talbot was at the stern, making sure the box was properly centered so its weight didn’t cause his boat to list. He motioned to one of his crewmen and the man climbed up the stairs to the bridge.
Satisfied with the placement, Talbot nodded to the man perched atop the container to unhook the crate from the airship. When the hook swung free, Talbot sent two men to untie the mooring lines from around the thickest trees they could find and finally signaled the hovering dirigible that it was free. Its engine beat changed seconds later, and the airship began to glide away.
As much as Bell wanted to rush back to the seaplane to chase it down, he had to wait to make sure he’d stopped Talbot and hope he could find the dirigible during its flight back to its floating base. He had already deduced its likely whereabouts and thought he could intercept her before it got there.
If he was wrong, then he’d gambled with Marion’s life and lost.
35
The jungle’s nighttime cacophony resumed as the airship flew away, down the valley, and the roar of its engines and whir of its propellers slowly receded. The men busied themselves around the boat for a few more minutes, including topping off the tanks from the spare cans. Bell was relieved he’d thought ahead, because they’d poured in the water as though it were gasoline. Five minutes after the airship had gone, Talbot realized Raul had not returned, and he bellowed his name several times. When he still didn’t return to the boat, Talbot gave an order to a man in the pilothouse and jumped down to the dock, taking long-legged strides toward the camp.
Unseen in the pilothouse, the crewman with the most mechanical experience took a firm grip on the crank next to the helm, which was connected to the engine below through a set of gears. He gave it a solid shove.
The fumes had built to a volatile level inside the enclosed engine room, meaning Bell’s wick wasn’t necessary after all. The very air itself was explosive, and the moment the ignition kicked on it all turned to flame. The hatch blew off, and a column of fire rose through it like the Gates of Hell had opened. The pressure from the explosion blew the door off its hinges and shattered the glass in a couple portholes, tongues of fire shooting from them like cannons.
That’s when the five-gallon gasoline bomb Bell had left behind detonated. The bridge rose six feet off the deck and came apart in a spray of wood and steel that peppered the water and scythed through the jungle. The fireball rolled fifty feet up into the canopy of trees, lighting up the scene in stark relief.
The men on the boat were so close to the blast, their insides were turned into so much jelly, and they died instantly. Bell saw Court Talbot launched into the air when he was struck in the back by the concussive wave. There was a chance he was alive, but a very slim one.
The workboat started to sink immediately, even as its deck was awash in flame. The dock too started to burn, and very quickly the few remaining gas cans went up in a successive string of bright explosions. Bell was close enough that he felt the heat of the conflagration on his face.
Just as the workboat and its cargo slid beneath the water, and all the fires were extinguished, the night shattered again as two tons of experimental high explosives inside the naval mine went off in a sympathetic detonation.
Bell was fifty feet away when it happened and still found himself flying through the air for a moment before
