The Bootlegger

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.
The 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.
“Another taxi!” came Asa Somers’s high-pitched yell from the crow’s nest. “Another taxi, astern.”
Van Dorn concentrated on clearing the rumrunner’s cockpit. He directed a stream of .30-06 slugs that made a believer of the helmsman, who let go the wheel and flung himself flat.
Somers yelled again, “Taxi coming up behind us!”
Fear in the boy’s voice made Van Dorn look back.
A 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 flame into the sky. Triple Liberty motors, massed in a row, each one as powerful as the turbo-supercharged L-12 on Isaac’s flying boat, spewed the fiery blast.
The gun crew on the foredeck couldn’t see it.
Charging 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.
The vessel began weaving, jinking sharply left and right, agile as a dragonfly.
A cold smile darkened Van Dorn’s face.
“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.
He 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.
It, 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.
Something 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,