As Katherine effected the difficult maneuver and Engels’s crew snaked the torpedoes out of the catboat, they heard a rumble like distant thunder. O’Shay watched the submarine’s crew coolly assess what the noise really meant and the distance from which it was coming.

“U.S. Navy’s Sandy Hook Test Range,” he called down to them. “Don’t worry. It’s far away.”

“Sixty thousand yards,” Hunt Hatch called back, and a man added, “Ten-inchers, and some 12s.”

O’Shay nodded his satisfaction. The Irish rebels who would crew his submarine knew their business.

It may not have looked like a fair trade, the submarine being six or seven times longer than the torpedoes and capable of independent action. But the Holland, though considerably elongated and modified by the English from its original design, was fully five years old and outstripped by rapid advances in underwater warfare. The Mark 14s were Ron Wheeler’s latest.

Each man had what he wanted. Engels was steaming away with two of the most advanced torpedoes in the world to sell to the highest bidder. And the Holland and the two torpedoes that the tug and barge crews were wrestling out of the sailboat and into the submarine made a deadly combination. The Brooklyn Navy Yard would never know what hit it.

Chapter 44

44

JIMMY RICHARDS’S AND MARV GORDON’S DUTCH UNCLE, Donald Darbee, sailed them six miles across the Upper Bay in his oyster scow, a flat-bottomed boat with a square bow and a powerful auxiliary gasoline motor he only used when chasing or running from something. Jimmy and Marv knew every watery inch of the Port of New York, but neither of the enormous young men had ever set foot on Manhattan Island despite many a night poking around Manhattan piers for items that had fallen off. Uncle Donny recalled going ashore in 1890 to rescue a fellow Staten Islander from the cops.

As they approached the Battery, a Harbor Squad policeman on a launch tied to Pier A called his roundsman up on deck. “Looks like we’re being invaded.”

Roundsman O’Riordan cast a jaundiced eye on the Staten Island scowmen. “Watch ’em, closely,” he ordered, hoping they were not up to no good. Arresting a gang of muscle-bound oyster tongers would cost broken arms and busted teeth on both sides.

“How do we get to the Roosevelt Hospital at 59th Street?” called the shaggy oldster at the helm.

“If you got a nickel, take the Ninth Avenue El.”

“We got a nickel.”