The Race

Bell turned his rudder back to a neutral position, stopped pulling on the control post and shoved it forward. Then, as gently as if he were commanding a frightened horse, he tilted the post sideways, raising the alettone on his left wing, lowering the one on the right. The American Eagle straightened out of its heel, stopped falling sideways, dipped its nose, and accelerated.

He was out of it in seconds. The gusts were still knocking him about, but the Eagle felt more like an aeroplane now than a falling rock. Speed, he thought ruefully, as the machine settled down. Easy to know in theory when flying on an even keel, hard to remember in the heat of the moment.

The confluence of river and sea winds that had nearly undone him proved to be as determined as it was deadly. It spawned a second maelstrom, more vicious than the first, that slammed into Josephine.

Bell had been lucky, he realized. It had hit him with a glancing blow. The full force of a band of crazily twirling wind gusts struck Josephine’s Celere so hard that it knocked her out of the sky. Her machine flipped on its side. And, in an instant, the monoplane was falling in an uncontrollable flat spin.

As it plummeted under his machine, Bell saw a piece break off her left wing.

The broken piece trailed her, snared by control wires. He recognized an alettone, one of her hinged control flaps. Then the wires parted, and the flap blew away like a leaf in the wind. If Bell himself had not just battled the same gusts, he would have reckoned that Harry Frost had blasted the appendage with a heavy rifle slug. But this assault on Josephine was no criminal attack. This was Mother Nature at her worst. While not as malicious, the effect would be as deadly.

Josephine did not hesitate. Speed!

Bell saw her throw herself forward, thrusting all the weight of her slight frame to push her control wheel. She was trying to drop the nose, pushing the aeroplane to fall forward instead of sideways. At the same time, she was tilting her remaining alettone to turn against the spin.

Bell tensed every muscle, as if he could somehow help her machine survive by force of will. But it seemed certain that despite her cool courage, lightning reflexes, and vast experience, the power of the wind and the crippling loss of a control flap would smash her into the harbor.

He saw a blur of light ripple across the waters around the Statue of Liberty. Spectators on scores of boats were looking up at her falling craft, thousands of faces agape with horror.

Bell hit his blip switch, cutting off his motor, and put the monoplane into a steep volplane, dropping after Josephine’s machine at a sharp angle, trying to stay with her, in a desperate impulse to help that was as impetuous as it was futile. The wind humming in the wire stays rose in pitch, shrieking, as the Eagle increased speed.

One hundred feet above the water, Josephine’s aeroplane banked sharply into a turn that put her on a collision course with the colonnaded pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Leveling off, her craft headed directly into the wind, which was blowing every flag in a stiff line from the south. It descended and wobbled left of the statue. She was attempting to alight, Bell realized with unexpected hope. She appeared to be aiming for a tiny patch of lawn beneath the stone walls of the star fort and the water.

The narrow space looked no bigger than a country vegetable garden, not more than sixty yards long and barely two wingspans wide. But as Bell leveled out of his glide and restarted the Gnome, he saw that that was all the room the aviatrix needed. Her wheels touched at the start of the green grass, and the monoplane bounced, skidded, and stopped a foot from the water’s edge at the tip of the island.

Josephine scrambled out of the nacelle. She stood, arms akimbo, inspecting the wing where the alettone had broken. Then, mirroring the colossal green statue, she raised her right arm like Lady Liberty lifting her torch of freedom and waved to the crowds on the spectator boats. The pasty ripple of horror-stricken faces exploded into the joyous flutter of thousands of handkerchiefs saluting her pluck and good fortune.

As soon as Isaac Bell saw a V-marked Van Dorn Agency steam launch speed to Bedloe’s Island, he whipped his flying machine past the Statue of Liberty’s stern Gallic nose and raced up the Hudson River at sixty miles an hour. Nature had lent a hand with her lethal wind gusts, and it was not a gift he would waste. Josephine was safely on the ground, soon to be protected by armed detectives, and if Harry Frost was lurking on the route ahead, Bell’s decoy was now the only yellow flying machine the killer would see to shoot at.

The tall detective did not have long to wait.

Four minutes later – four miles up the smoke-shrouded river, with Midtown Manhattan on his right and the Weehawken piers thrusting into the water on his left – a high-power rifle slug whistled past his head.

19

ANOTHER SLUG CRACKLED BY. A third slammed through the Eagle’s fuselage immediately behind Isaac Bell and shook the back of his seat. A fourth screeched off the tip of the triangular steel king post above the wing. Heavy bullets – Marlin.45-70s, Bell guessed – Frost’s favorite. A fifth shot banged his rudder so hard, it rattled the control post. The gunfire was coming from behind him now. He had overflown Frost’s position and was moving out of range.

Bell spun the American Eagle on a dime and roared back, searching the busy river for the boat from which the gunman had fired. He had been flying up the middle of the mile-wide Hudson when the shooting started, equidistant between the pier-lined shores of Manhattan Island and New Jersey. The resultant half-mile range was too far from land for Frost to have done such accurate shooting. He was directly under Bell, somewhere in the gloom of smoke and haze, screened by the moving traffic of tugs, barges, car floats, lighters, ferries, launches, and sailing vessels.

Bell spotted a short, wide, flat gray hull scooting between a triple-track car float carrying half a freight train, and a three-masted schooner under clouds of sail. He descended to investigate. It was an oyster scow moving at an unusual rate of speed, trailing a long white wake and blue exhaust from a straining gasoline engine. The helmsman was hunched over his tiller in the stern. Its mast had been unstepped and shipped flat on the deck. A passenger was sprawled on his back beside the mast. He was a big man, Harry Frost’s size, who appeared to have fallen. But as Bell’s aeroplane caught up with the scow, he saw the sun glint on a long rifle.

Bell grabbed the control wheel in his left hand, drew his pistol with his right, and shoved the control post forward. If Harry Frost wondered why his wife’s yellow monoplane had circled back, he was about to get the surprise of his life when he learned that he had mistaken a similar profile in an identical color for Josephine’s Celere.

The Eagle dove at the oyster scow. Bell braced the automatic on the hull of the aeroplane, found the supine figure in his sights, and pulled the trigger three times. He saw one of his shots send wood chips flying from the deck and another tear a long furrow in the mast. The aeroplane lurched on an air current, and his third shot went wild.

The Eagle flew over the boat so close that Bell could hear the full-throated answering roar of Frost’s rifle, three shots fired so fast that the closely spaced holes they stitched in the wing a yard from Bell’s shoulder tore the fabric like a cannonball. So much for the surprise effect of two yellow aeroplanes.

“And you can shoot,” Bell muttered. “I’ll give you that.”

He had flown over and past the oyster scow in a flash. When he got the Eagle turned around again and headed back, he saw the scow fleeing at high speed toward Weehawken. Seen from above, a great sprawl of railroad track fanned from a dozen piers into rail yards and a vast thirty-acre stockyard packed with milling cows, where, in the thousands, they were herded off trains coming in from the west, bound for cattle boats that would ferry them across the river to Manhattan slaughterhouses.

Bell swooped after him, coming up from behind, firing his pistol again and again. But at such a low altitude, the flying machine bounced and slid in the smoky surface wind, making it impossible to steady his aim, while Harry Frost, firing from the more stable platform of the oyster scow, was able to send another astonishingly accurate hail of lead straight at him. Bell saw another hole appear in his wing. A slug fanned his cheek.