{"product_id":"the-bootlegger-isbn-9780425272817","title":"The Bootlegger","description":"\u003cb\u003eDetective Isaac Bell is on the hunt for justice in this extraordinary adventure in the #1 \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestselling series.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is 1921, and Prohibition is in full swing—even as millions still imbibe and ruthless criminals get rich overnight by selling them booze. Cops, Feds, and Coast Guardsmen are all susceptible to bribery. But when Bell’s boss and lifelong friend Joseph Van Dorn is shot and near-fatally wounded while chasing bootleggers, he enters the fray.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBell promises Van Dorn that he will try to save the detective agency from the corrupting effects of Prohibition. But when the first witness to Van Dorn’s shooting is executed in a ruthlessly efficient manner invented by the CHEKA, the Russian Communist secret police, Bell finds himself combating men far more deadly than ordinary criminals. And he’s about to fight a one-man war…“Another wonderful page-turner.”—\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal \u003c\/i\u003e(starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The Isaac Bell series continues to tell compelling stories.”—The Associated Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Another fine entry in a strong series. Cussler is a perennial A-lister, popularity-wise, and his Isaac Bell novels are the pick of his prodigious litter.”—\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] laudable historical action novel.”—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003eCLIVE CUSSLER is the author or coauthor of more than fifty previous books in five bestselling series, including Dirk Pitt®, NUMA® Files, Oregon® Files, Isaac Bell, and Fargo.His most recent \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestselling novels are \u003ci\u003eThe Eye of Heaven\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eMirage\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eGhost Ship\u003c\/i\u003e. His nonfiction works include \u003ci\u003eBuilt for Adventure: The Classic Automobiles of Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt\u003c\/i\u003e, plus \u003ci\u003eThe Sea Hunters\u003c\/i\u003e, and Th\u003ci\u003ee Sea Hunters II\u003c\/i\u003e; the latter two describe the true adventures of the real NUMA®, which, led by Cussler, searches for lost ships of historic significance. With his crew of volunteers, Cussler has discovered more than sixty ships, including the long-lost Confederate submarine Hunley. He lives in Colorado.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJUSTIN SCOTT’s novels include \u003ci\u003eThe Shipkiller \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eNormandie Triangle\u003c\/i\u003e; the Ben Abbott detective series; and five modern sea thrillers published under his pen name Paul Garrison. The coauthor with Clive Cussler of four previous Isaac Bell novels, he lives in Connecticut.1\u003cp\u003eTwo men in expensive clothes, a bootlegger and his bodyguard, dangled a bellboy upside down from the Hotel Gotham’s parapet.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe bodyguard held him by his ankles, nineteen stories above 55th Street. It was night. No one saw, and the boy’s screams were drowned out by the Fifth Avenue buses, the El thundering up Sixth, and trolley bells clanging on Madison.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe bootlegger shouted down at him, “Every bellhop in the hotel sells my booze! Whatsamatter with you?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChurch spires and mansion turrets reached for him like teeth. “Last chance, sonny.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA tall man in a summer suit glided silently across the roof. He drew a Browning automatic from his coat and a throwing knife from his boot. He mounted the parapet and pressed the pistol to the body- guard’s temple.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Hold tight.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe bodyguard froze. The bootlegger shrank from the blade pricking his throat.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Who the—”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Isaac Bell. Van Dorn Agency. Sling him in on the count of two.” “If you shoot, we drop him.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“You’ll have holes in your heads before he passes the eighteenth floor . . . On my count: One! Pull him up. Two! Swing him over the edge . . . Lay him on the roof— Are you O.K., son?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe bellboy had tears in his eyes. He nodded, head bobbing like a puppet.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Go downstairs,” Isaac Bell told him, sliding his knife back in his boot and shifting the automatic to his left hand. “Tell your boss Chief Investigator Bell said to give you the week off and a fifty-dollar bonus for standing up to bootleggers.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe bodyguard chose his moment well. When the tall detective reached down to help the boy stand, he swung a heavy, ring-studded fist. Skillfully thrown with the full power of a big man’s muscle behind it, it was blocked before it traveled four inches.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA bone-cracking counterpunch staggered him. His knees buckled and he collapsed on the tar. The bootlegger shot empty hands into the sky. “O.K., O.K.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe van Dorn detective agency—an operation with field offices in every city in the country and many abroad—maintained warm relations with the police. But Isaac Bell spotted trouble when he walked into the 54th Street precinct house.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe desk sergeant couldn’t meet his eye.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBell reached across the high desk to shake his hand anyway. This particular sergeant’s father, retired roundsman Paddy O’Riordan, augmented his pension as a part-time night watchman for Van Dorn Protective Services.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“How’s your dad?” Paddy was doing fine.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Any chance of interviewing the bootlegger we caught at the\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGotham?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“The big guy’s at the hospital getting his jaw wired.” “I want the little one, the boss.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Surety company paid his bond.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBell was incensed. “\u003ci\u003eBail? \u003c\/i\u003eFor attempted murder?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“They expect the protection they pay for,” said Sergeant O’Riordan, poker-faced. “What I would do next time, Mr. Bell, instead of calling us, throw them in the river.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBell watched for the cop’s reaction when he replied, “I reckoned\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCoasties would fish them out.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eO’Riordan agreed with a world-weary “Yeah,” confirming the rumors that even some officers of the United States Coast Guard—the arm of the Treasury Department charged with enforcing Prohibition at sea—were in the bootleggers’ pockets.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStarting this afternoon, thought Bell, the Van Dorns would put a stop to that.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne big hand firm on the throttle of his S-1 Flying Yacht, the other on the wheel, Isaac Bell began racing down the East River for take-off speed. He dodged a railcar float and steered into a rapidly narrowing slot between a tugboat pushing a fleet of coal barges and another towing a bright red barge of dynamite. Joseph Van Dorn, the burly, scarlet- whiskered founder of the detective agency, sat beside him in the open cockpit, lost in thought.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Greenpoint ferry surged out of the 23rd Street Terminal straight in their path. The sight of the slab-sided vessel, suddenly enormous in their windshield, made Joseph Van Dorn sit up straight. A brave and cool-headed man, he asked, “Do we have time to stop?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBell shoved his throttle wide open.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Liberty engine mounted behind them on the wing thundered. He hauled hard on the wheel.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Loening S-1 held speed and altitude records but was notoriously slow to respond to the controls. Bell had replaced its stick and pedals with a combined steering and elevating Blériot wheel, in hopes of making it nimbler.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePassengers on the Greenpoint ferry backed from the rail. Bell gave the wheel one last firm tug.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Flying Yacht lunged off the water and cleared the ferry with a foot to spare.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“There ought to be a law against f lying like you,” said Van Dorn. Bell flew under the Williamsburg Bridge and between the spotting masts of a battleship docked at the Navy Yard. “Sorry to distract you from your dire thoughts.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“You’ll distract us both to kingdom come.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBell headed across leaf-green Brooklyn at one hundred t miles an hour.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVan Dorn resumed pondering how to deal with misfortune.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe World War had upended his agency. Some of his best detectives had been killed fighting in the trenches. Others died shockingly young in the influenza epidemic. A post- war recession in the business world was bankrupting clients. And only yesterday, Isaac Bell had discovered that bootleggers, who were getting rich quick off Prohibition by bribing cops and politicians, had corrupted two of his best house detectives at the Hotel Gotham.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eBell climbed to three thousand feet before they reached the Rock- aways. Where the white sand beach slid into the ocean like a f laying knife, he turned and headed east above the string of barrier islands that sheltered Long Island from the raw fury of the Atlantic. A booze smugglers’ paradise of hidden bays and marshes, inlets, creeks and canals stretched in the lee of those islands as far as he could see.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThirty miles from New York, he banked the plane out over the steel-blue ocean and began to descend.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Can I come in the launch, Chief ?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSeaman Third Class Asa Somers, the youngest sailor on the Coast Guard cutter CG-9, was beside himself. He had finally made it to sea, patrolling the Fire Island coast for rumrunners on a ship with a cannon and machine guns. Now the fastest f lying boat in the world—a high-wing pusher monoplane—was looping down from the sky. And if the roar of its four-hundred-horsepower Liberty motor wasn’t thrilling enough, it was bringing a famous crime fighter he’d read about in \u003ci\u003eBoys’ Life \u003c\/i\u003eand the \u003ci\u003ePolice Gazette\u003c\/i\u003e—Mr. Joseph Van Dorn, whose army of private detectives vowed: “We never give up! Never!”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“What’s got you all stirred up?” growled the white-haired chief petty officer.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I want to meet Mr. Van Dorn when he lands.” “He ain’t gonna land.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Why not?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Open your eyes, boy. See that swell? Four-foot seas’ll kick that f lying-boat ass over teakettle.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Maybe he’ll give it a whirl,” Somers said, with little hope. \u003ci\u003eFlight\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eMagazine \u003c\/i\u003epraised the S-1’s speed at lot more than its handling.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e“If he does,” said the chief, “you can come in the launch to pick up the bodies.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUp on the f lying bridge, CG-9’s skipper expressed the same opinion.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Stand by with grappling hooks.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe f lying boat circled lower. When it whipped past, skimming wave tops, Somers recognized Van Dorn, who was seated beside the pilot in the glass-surrounded, open-roofed cockpit, by his red whiskers bristling in the slipstream.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe roar of the big twelve-cylinder engine faded to a whisper. “Lunatic,” growled the chief.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut young Somers watched the Air Yacht’s ailerons. The wing f laps fluttered up and down almost faster than the eye could see as the pilot fought to keep her on an even keel. Back in her tail unit, the horizontal stabilizer bit the air, and down she came, steady as a loco- motive on rails. Her long V-shaped hull touched the water, flaring a vapor-thin wake. Her wing floats skimmed the swell, and she settled lightly.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Somers! Man the bow line.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe boy leaped into the launch and they motored across the hundred yards that separated the cutter and the flying boat. The huge four-bladed propeller behind the wing stopped spinning, and the pilot, who had made an almost impossible landing look easy, climbed down from the cockpit onto the running board that extended around the front of the rocking hull. He was a tall, lean, fair-haired man with a no-nonsense expression on his handsome face. His golden hair and thick mustache were impeccably groomed. His tailored suit and the broad-brimmed hat pulled tight on his head were both white.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSomers dropped the bow line.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“What in blazes are you doing?” bellowed the chief. “I bet that’s Isaac Bell!”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I don’t care if it’s Mary Pickford! Don’t foul that line!”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe boy re-coiled the line, his gaze locked on the pilot. It had to be him. Bell’s picture was never in a magazine. But reports on Van Dorn always mentioned his chief investigator’s white suit and it suddenly struck Somers that the camera-shy detective could go incognito in a f lash simply by changing his clothes.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Heave a line, son!” he called. “Come on, you can do it—on the jump!”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSomers remembered to let the coil reel out of his palm as the chief had taught him. To his eternal gratitude the rope fell into Bell’s big hand.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Good shot.” He pulled the plane and the boat together. Somers asked, “Are you Isaac Bell, sir?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I’m his butler. Mum’s the word—Bell is still passed out in a speakeasy. Now, let’s get Mr. Van Dorn into your boat without drop- ping him in the drink. Ready?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBell reached to help Van Dorn, a heavily built man in his fifties with a prominent roman nose and hooded eyes. Van Dorn ignored Bell’s hand. Bell seized his elbow and guided him toward Somers with a conspiratorial grin.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Hang on tight, son, he’s not as spry as he looks.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBehind his grin, Bell’s blue eyes were cool and alert. He watched carefully as the older man stepped between the bouncing craft, and he relaxed only after Somers had him safely aboard.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“What’s your name, sailor?” asked Van Dorn in a voice that had the faintest lilt of an Irish accent.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Seaman Third Class Asa Somers, sir.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Lied about your age?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“How did you know?” Somers whispered.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I worked that dodge to join the Marines.” He shot a thumbs-up toward the stern. “All aboard, Chief. Back to the ship.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Aye, sir.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe boat wheeled away from the seaplane.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVan Dorn called to Bell, “Watch yourself at the Gotham. Don’t forget, those shameless SOBs have fifty pounds on you.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIf a mountain lion could smile, thought Asa Somers, it would smile like Isaac Bell when he answered, “Forget? Never.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJoseph van Dorn cast a skeptical eye on CG-9, a surplus submarine chaser the U.S. Navy had palmed off on the Coast Guard for Prohibition patrol. With a crow’s nest above a f lying bridge, six- cylinder gasoline engines driving triple screws, and a three-inch Poole gun mounted on the foredeck, she had been built to spot, chase, and sink slow-moving German U-boats—not fast rumrunners.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe’d been worked hard in the war and scantly maintained since. The drone of pumps told him that her wooden hull had worked open many a leak. Her motor valves were chattering, even at half speed. She would still pack a punch with the Poole gun and a brace of .30.06 Lewis machine guns on the bridge wings. But even if she somehow managed to get in range of a rumrunner, who was trained to fire them?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHer middle-aged skipper was pouch-eyed and red-nosed. Her aged chief petty officer looked like a Spanish-American War vet. And the crew—with the exception of young Somers, who had scrambled eagerly up the mast to the lookout perch in the crow’s nest as soon as they shipped the launch—were pretty much the quality Van Dorn expected of recruits paid twenty-one dollars a month.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe skipper greeted him warily.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVan Dorn disarmed him with the amiable smile that had sent many a criminal to the penitentiary wondering why he had allowed this jovial gent close enough to clamp a steely hand on the scruff of his neck. A twinkle in the eye and a warm chortle in the voice fostered the notion of an easygoing fellow.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I suppose your commandant told you the Treasury Department hired my detective agency to recommend how better to combat the illegal liquor traffic. But I bet scuttlebutt says we’re investigating who’s in cahoots with the bootleggers—pocketing bribes to look the other way.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“They don’t have to bribe us. They outrun us, and they outnumber us. Or someone—I’m not saying who ’cause I don’t know who—tips them where we’re patrolling. Or they radio false distress calls; we’re supposed to save lives, so we steam to the rescue, leaving our station wide open. If we happen to catch ’em, the courts turn ’em loose and they buy their speedboats back at government auction.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVan Dorn took a fresh look at the skipper. Maybe his nose was red from a head cold. Drinking man or not, he sounded genuinely indignant and fed up. Who could blame him?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the year since Prohibition—the banning of the sale of alcohol by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution and the Volstead Act—it seemed half the country had agreed to break the law. Millions of people would pay handsomely for a drink. Short of striking oil or gold in your backyard, there was no way to get richer quicker than to sell hooch. All you needed was a boat you could run a few miles offshore to a rum fleet of foreign- registered freighters and schooners anchored beyond the law in international waters. The newspapers had made a hero of Bill McCoy, captain of a schooner registered in the British Bahama Islands. He had come up with the scheme for circumventing the law, which made enforcing Prohibition a mug’s game.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Like the song says”—Van Dorn recited a lyric from Irving Berlin’s latest hit—”‘You cannot make your shimmy shake on tea.’ How fast are the taxis?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhile fisherman and yacht owners sailed out to the rum fleet to buy a few bottles, big business was conducted by “taxis” or “contact boats”—high-powered, shallow-draft vessels in which professional rumrunners smuggled hundreds of cases ashore to bootleggers who paid top dollar.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“They build ’em faster every day.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVan Dorn shook his head, feigning dismay. Isaac Bell had already convinced him to recommend f lying-boat patrols, though God knows who would pay for them. Congress banned booze but failed to cough up money for enforcement.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e“Taxi!”\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAll eyes shot to the crow’s nest.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJoseph van Dorn whipped a pair of binoculars from his voluminous overcoat and focused in the direction Asa Somers was pointing his telescope. Low in the water and painted as gray as the sea and the sky, the rum boat was barely visible at a thousand yards.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Full speed!” ordered the skipper, and bounded up the ladder to\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003ethe f lying bridge atop the wheelhouse. Van Dorn climbed heavily after him.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe engines ground harder. Valves stormed louder. The subchaser dug her stern in and boiled a white wake. “Fifteen knots,” said the skipper.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSubchasers had been built to do eighteen, but the oily blue smoke spewing from her exhaust ports told Van Dorn her worn engines were pushing their limits. Their quarry was overloaded, with its gunnels almost submerged, but it was churning along at seventeen or eighteen knots and growing fainter in the distance.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Gunner! Put a shot across his bow.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Poole gun barked, shaking the deck. It was not apparent through Van Dorn’s powerful glasses where the cannon shell landed, but it was nowhere near the rum boat’s bow. The gunners landed their second shot closer. He saw it splash, but the boat continued to pull ahead.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSuddenly, just as it seemed the rummy would disappear in the failing light of evening, they got a break. The taxi slowed. She had hit something in the water, the skipper speculated, or thrown a prop, or blown a cylinder. Whatever had gone wrong on the heavily laden boat, the subchaser caught up slowly.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“They’ll dump the booze and run for it,” said the skipper.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVan Dorn adjusted his binoculars. But he saw no frantic figures throwing contraband overboard. The boat just kept running for the night.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Gunner! Another across his bow.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Poole gun shook the deck again, and a shell splashed in front of the rumrunner. “They’ll pull up now.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe warning shot had no effect and the rumrunner kept going.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVan Dorn made a quick count of the cases of whisky he saw heaped on deck, estimated the amount she could hold belowdecks, and calculated a minimum cargo of five hundred cases. If the bottles contained the “real McCoy”—authentic Scotch that had not been stretched or doctored with cheap grain alcohol—the boatload was worth thirty thousand dollars. To the crew of a rum boat, who before Prohibition had barely eked out a living catching fish, it was a fortune that might make them more brave than sensible. For thirty thousand dollars, six bootleggers could buy a Cadillac or a Rolls-Royce, a Marmon or a Minerva. For the fishermen’s families it meant snug cottages and steady food on the table.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe skipper switched on an electric siren. CG-9 screamed like a banshee. Still, the rum boat ran. “They’re crazy. Fire again!” the skip- per shouted down to the gun crew. “Get ’em wet!”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe shell hit the water close enough to spray the crew. The rum boat stopped abruptly and turned one hundred eighty degrees to face the subchaser that was bearing down on them in a cloud of blue smoke.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Stand by, Lewis guns!”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGrinning Coasties hunched over the drum-fed machine guns mounted on pedestals each side of the wheelhouse. Van Dorn reckoned that good sense would prevail at last. The Lewis was a wonderful weapon—fast-firing, rarely jamming, and highly accurate. Rumrunners could be expected to throw their hands in the air before the range got any shorter and let their lawyers spring them. Instead, when the cutter closed to a hundred yards, they started shooting.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShouts of surprise rang out on the Coast Guard boat.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA rif le slug crackled past the mast, a foot from Van Dorn’s head.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnother clanged off a ventilator cowling and ricocheted against the cannon on the foredeck, scattering the gun crew, who drove for cover. Van Dorn whipped his Colt .45 automatic from his coat, rammed his shoulder against the mast to counter the cutter’s roll, and took careful aim for a very long pistol shot. Just as he found the distant rif leman in his sights, a third rif le slug struck the Coastie manning the star- board Lewis gun and tumbled him off the back of the wing to the main deck.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe big detective climbed down the ladder as fast as he could and squeezed into the wing. He jerked back the machine gun’s slide with his left hand and triggered a three-shot burst with his right. Wood flew from the taxi’s cabin, inches from the rifleman. Three more and the rifle flew from his hands.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e“Another taxi!” \u003c\/i\u003ecame Asa Somers’s high-pitched yell from the crow’s nest. “Another taxi, astern.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVan Dorn concentrated on clearing the rumrunner’s cockpit. He directed a stream of .30- 06 slugs that made a believer of the helms- man who let go the wheel and f lung himself f lat.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSomers yelled again, “Taxi coming up behind us!” Fear in the boy’s voice made Van Dorn look back.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA long, low black boat was closing fast. Van Dorn had never seen a boat so fast. Forty knots at least. Fifty miles per hour. Thunder chorused from multiple exhaust manifolds. Three dozen straight pipes lanced orange f lame into the sky. Triple Liberty motors, massed in a row, each one as powerful as the turbo-supercharged L-12 on Isaac’s f lying boat, spewed the fiery blast.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe gun crew on the foredeck couldn’t see it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCharging from behind, slicing the seas like a knife, the black boat turned as the subchaser turned, holding the angle that screened it from the cannon. The port machine gunner couldn’t see it either, blocked by the wheelhouse. But Joseph Van Dorn could. He pivoted the Lewis gun and opened fire.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe vessel began weaving, jinking sharply left and right, agile as a dragonfly.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA cold smile darkened Van Dorn’s face.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“O.K., boys. That’s how you want it?” He pointed the Lewis gun straight down the middle of the weaving path and fired in bursts, peppering the black boat with a hundred rounds in ten seconds. Nearly half his shots hit. But to Van Dorn’s amazement, they bounced off, and he realized, too late, that she was armored with steel sheathing.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe raked the glass windshield behind which the helmsman crouched. The glass starred but did not shatter. Bulletproof. These boys had come prepared. Then the black boat fired back.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt, too, had a Lewis gun. Hidden below the deck, it pivoted up on a hinged mount, and Van Dorn saw in an instant that the fellow firing it knew his business. Scores of bullets drilled through the subchaser’s wooden hull right under where he manned his gun and riddled the chest-high canvas that protected the bridge wing from wind and spray. Van Dorn fired long bursts back. A cool, detached side of his mind marveled that he had not been hit by the withering fire.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSomething smacked his chest hard as a thrown cobblestone. Suddenly, he was falling over the rim of the bridge wing and plummeting toward the deck. The analytical side of his brain noted that the taxi they were chasing was speeding away, covered by machine- gun fire from the black boat, and that, as he fell, the Coast Guard cutter was wheeling to bring the Poole gun to bear. In turning her flank to the seas, she took a wave broadside and heeled steeply to starboard, so that when he finally landed it was not on the narrow deck but on the safety railing that surrounded it. The taut wire cable broke his fall and bounced him overboard into bitter cold water. The last thing he heard was Asa Somers’s shrill,\u003ci\u003e”Mr. Van Dorn!”\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"G.P. 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