“Heave a line, son!” he called. “Come on, you can do it — on the jump!”
Somers 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.
“Good shot.” He pulled the plane and the boat together.
Somers asked, “Are you Isaac Bell, sir?”
“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 dropping him in the drink. Ready?”
Bell 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.
“Hang on tight, son, he’s not as spry as he looks.”
Behind 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.
“What’s your name, sailor?” asked Van Dorn in a voice that had the faintest lilt of an Irish accent.
“Seaman Third Class Asa Somers, sir.”
“Lied about your age?”
“How did you know?” Somers whispered.
“I worked that dodge to join the Marines.” He shot a thumbs-up toward the stern. “All aboard, Chief. Back to the ship.”
“Aye, sir.”
The boat wheeled away from the seaplane.
Van Dorn called to Bell, “Watch yourself at the Gotham. Don’t forget, those shameless SOBs have fifty pounds on you.”
If a mountain lion could smile, thought Asa Somers, it would smile like Isaac Bell when he answered, “Forget? Never.”
Joseph 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 flying 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.
She’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?
Her 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.
The skipper greeted him warily.
Van 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.
“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.”
“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.”
Van 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?
In 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 rich 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.
“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?”
While fishermen 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.
“They build ’em faster every day.”
Van Dorn shook his head, feigning dismay. Isaac Bell had already convinced him to recommend flying-boat patrols, though God knows who would pay for them. Congress banned booze but failed to cough up money for enforcement.
“Taxi!”
All eyes shot to the crow’s nest.
Joseph 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.
“Full speed!” ordered the skipper, and bounded up the ladder to the flying bridge atop the wheelhouse. Van Dorn climbed heavily after him.
The engines ground harder. Valves stormed louder. The subchaser dug her stern in and boiled a white wake. “Fifteen knots,” said the skipper.
Subchasers 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.
“Gunner! Put a shot across his bow.”
The 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.
Suddenly, 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.
“They’ll dump the booze and run for it,” said the skipper.
Van Dorn adjusted his binoculars. But he saw no frantic figures throwing contraband overboard. The boat just kept running for the night.
“Gunner! Another across his bow.”
The Poole gun shook the deck again, and a shell splashed in front of the rumrunner. “They’ll pull up now.”
The warning shot had no effect and the rumrunner kept going.
Van 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.
The skipper switched on an electric siren. CG-9 screamed like a banshee. Still, the rum boat ran. “They’re crazy. Fire again!” the skipper shouted down to the gun crew. “Get ’em wet!”
The 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.
“Stand by, Lewis guns!”
Grinning 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.
Shouts of surprise rang out on the Coast Guard boat.
A rifle slug crackled past the mast, a foot from Van Dorn’s head. Another clanged off a ventilator cowling and ricocheted against the cannon on the foredeck, scattering the gun crew, who dived 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 rifleman in his sights, a third rifle slug struck the Coastie manning the starboard Lewis gun and tumbled him off the back of the wing to the main deck.