The Bootlegger

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