Falconer nodded at the Reuterdahl. “My friend Henry’s got his tail in a crack. The Navy invited him along to paint pictures of the Great White Fleet. They did not expect him to also fire off articles to McClure’s Magazine informing the world of its shortcomings. Henry will be lucky to find his way home on a tramp steamer. But Henry’s right, and I’m right: It’s O.K. to learn by experience. O.K. to learn by failure, even. But it is not O.K. not to improve. That is why I build in secret.”

“You’ve told me why. You’ve not told me what.”

“Don’t be impatient, Mr. Bell.”

“A man was murdered,” Isaac Bell replied grimly. “I am not patient when men are murdered.”

“You just said men.” Captain Falconer stopped bantering and demanded, “Are suggesting that Langner was murdered, too?”

“I rate his murder increasingly likely.”

“What about Grover Lakewood?”

“Van Dorn operatives in Westchester are looking into his death.

And in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, we are investigating the accident that killed Chad Gordon. Now, are you going to tell me about Hull 44?”

“Let’s get topside. You’ll see what I mean.”

Dyname had continued to increase her speed. There was still no trembling from the engines, despite a powerful drone of rushing sea and wind. The steward and a sailor appeared with seaboots and oil-skins. “You’ll want these on, sir. She’s no yacht, once she gets moving. More like a torpedo boat.”

“Torpedo boat, hell,” muttered the sailor. “She’s a submarine.”

Falconer handed Bell a pair of goggles with smoked glass so dark it seemed opaque and looped another pair over his own head.

“What’s this for?”

“You’ll be glad you have them when you need them,” the captain answered enigmatically. “All set? Let’s get up to the bridge while we can.” The seaman and steward wrestled the door open, and they stepped on deck.

The slipstream hit like a punch in the face.

Bell pushed forward on the narrow side deck less than five feet above the rushing water. “She must be doing thirty knots.”

“Still loafing along,” Falconer yelled over the roar. “We’ll get moving once we pass Sandy Hook.”

Bell glanced back. Fire was flickering from the smoke funnel, and the wake was so frothed that it glowed in the dark. They climbed onto the open bridge, where thick slabs of glass screened the helmsman, who was clinging to a small spoked wheel. Captain Falconer shouldered him aside.

Ahead in the dark, an intermittent white light blinked every fifteen seconds.

“Sandy Hook Lightship,” said Captain Falconer. “Last year we’ll see it. They’re moving the light to mark the new Ambrose Channel.”

Dyname bore down on the fifteen-second blinker. In its back glow, Bell glimpsed the white-lettered “Sandy Hook” and “No. 51” on the side of the black vessel as it fell rapidly behind them.

“Hang on!” said Captain Falconer.

He laid the hand with the missing fingers on a tall lever. “Bowden cable connection direct to the turbines. Same as flexible-cable brakes for bicycles. I can increase steam from the helm without ringing the engine room. Like the throttle on your auto.”

“Alasdair’s idea?” asked Bell.

“No, this is mine. You’re about to feel Alasdair’s.”

14

BELL GRIPPED A HANDHOLD AS DYNAME’S BOW LIFTED from the water. The drone of sea and wind grew explosive. Spray battered the glass screen. Captain Falconer switched on a searchlight mounted in front, and the reason for her knife-shaped narrowness was immediately apparent. The light revealed eight-foot seas sweeping under them at fifty knots. A hull of any other shape would have smashed against the water so hard it would wreck itself.

“Did you ever drive anything this fast?” Falconer shouted.

“Only my Locomobile.”

“Care to try her?” Falconer asked casually.

Isaac Bell grabbed the helm.

“Steer around the bigger seas,” Falconer recommended. “If you bury the bow, those nine propellers will drive us straight to the bottom.”

The helm was remarkably responsive, Bell thought, capable of whisking the hundred-foot yacht left and right with a twitch of the spokes. He dodged big seas repeatedly, getting a feel for how she handled. In half an hour they were more than twenty-five miles from land.

Bell saw a flicker of light in the distance. A deep rumbling noise began rolling in the night.

“Are those guns?”

“Twelves,” said Falconer. “See the flash?”

Orange-and-red flames lanced the dark ahead.

“Those higher-pitched sounds are 6s and 8s. We’re inside the Sandy Hook Atlantic Test Range.”

“Inside? While they’re shooting?”

“While the cat’s away the mice will play. The senior captains are circumnavigating the world with the Fleet. My boys are right there, learning their trade.”

Powerful beams of light bristled into the sky.

“Searchlight exercise,” said Falconer. “Battleships hunting destroyers, destroyers hunting battleships.”

Sweeping sky and water, the searchlights suddenly converged on a battleship, previously invisible in the dark, and lit bright as noon a low-slung white hull hurling spray.

“Look! That’s just what I’ve been telling you about. That’s New Hampshire. She wasn’t yet commissioned when the Fleet sailed. Just finished her shakedown. Watch what happens to her foredeck.”

The searchlights showed seas breaking over the battleship’s bow and deluging her forward guns.

“Decks awash in light seas! Guns underwater! Told you paint will be the easy part. We need higher freeboard and flared bows. Our newest capital ship has a ram bow, for God’s sake, like we’re going to war with Phoenicians!”

Bell saw a wave strike her anchor billboard and scatter in blinding clouds.

“Now, watch her on the roll. See that armor belt rising?… Now, watch it disappear as she rolls back and submerges it. If we don’t extend our armor to protect the ships’ undersides when they roll, the enemy will draft small boys to sink them with peashooters.”

A searchlight swung their way, probing the dark like an angry white finger.

“Goggles!”

Bell covered his eyes with the black goggles just in time. An instant later the light that caught Dyname would have blinded him. Through the blackened glass he could see clear as day.

“Searchlights are as powerful as big guns,” Falconer shouted.

“They’ll completely disorient every man on the bridge and blind the spotters.”

“Why are they aiming at us?”

“It’s a game we play. They try to catch me. Good practice. Though once they get your range it’s impossible to shake them loose.”

“Oh, really? Hang on, Captain!”

Bell yanked back on the throttle. Dyname stopped as if she had hit a wall. The searchlight beam soared ahead in the direction they had been steaming. Bell spun the helm with both hands. The light was coming back for him. He nudged the throttle lever as he steered the yacht at a right angle, waited for the propellers to bite, then rammed it forward.

Fire belched from the stack. Dyname took off like an Independence Day rocket, and the searchlight beam skittered away in the wrong direction.

“O.K., Captain. You’ve told me why and you’ve shown me why. But you still haven’t shown me what.”

“I’ll lay a course for the Brooklyn Navy Yard.”

A NEW DAY WAS LIGHTING the tops of the Brooklyn Bridge towers as Dyname sliced into the East River. Bell was still at the helm, and he steered under the bridge and bore right, toward the navy yard. From the water he could see numerous ships under construction on the ways and in the dry docks. Falconer pointed to the northernmost way, which was isolated from the others. He called down the voice pipe to the engine room to disengage the propellers. The tide was slack. Dyname drifted on her momentum to the foot of the way, where its rails angled into the water. Above her soared a gigantic skeletal frame partially sheathed in steel plate.