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Zusatztext Globe and Mail Fiction Bestseller “The Isaac Bell series continues to tell compelling stories. Tidbits of history are sprinkled throughout the narrative! and it’s fun to filter out fictional characters and events from historical facts.” —Associated Press “Cussler and Scott have written another wonderful page-turner. This is historical action-adventure fiction at its rip-roaring best!” — Library Journal (starred review) “As always in this series! the novel is very exciting! with excellent pacing and some very well-drawn characters. Cussler is a perennial A-lister! popularity-wise! and his Isaac Bell novels are the pick of his prodigious litter.” — Booklist “The seventh page-turner featuring indomitable detective Isaac Bell—great fun from one of the better Cussler series.” — Kirkus Reviews Informationen zum Autor Clive Cussler, Justin Scott Klappentext Detective Isaac Bell tracks a killer across the nation's oilfields in this adventure in the #1 New York Times-bestselling historical series. As Van Dorn private detective Isaac Bell strives to land a government contract to investigate John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly! the case takes a deadly turn. A sniper begins murdering opponents of Standard Oil! and soon the assassin-shooting with extraordinary accuracy at seemingly impossible long range-kills Bell's best witness. Then the shooter detonates a terrible explosion that sets the victim's independent refinery ablaze. Bell summons his best detectives to hunt down the mysterious killer. But the murders-shootings! poisonings! staged accidents-have just begun as Bell tracks his phantom-like criminal adversary from the "oil fever" regions of Kansas and Texas to Washington! D.C.! to the tycoons' enclave of New York! to Russia's war-torn Baku oil fields on the Caspian Sea! and back to America for a final! desperate confrontation. And this one will be the most explosive of all. PROLOGUE 1899 PENNSYLVANIA “Do I hear a train?” asked Spike Hopewell. “Two trains,” said Bill Matters. The heavy, wet Huff! of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s 2-8-0 freight locomotives carried for miles in the still night air. “They’re on the main line, not here.” Spike was nervous. It made him talkative. “You know what I keep thinking? John D. Rockefeller locked up the oil business before most people were born.” “To hell with Rockefeller. To hell with Standard Oil.” Bill Matters had found their Achilles’ heel. After thirty years fighting the “Standard,” thirty years of getting driven into the mud, he was finally going to break their pipe line monopoly. Tonight. Under a sky white with stars, in a low-lying hayfield in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. Wooded slopes ringed the field. Pennsylvania Railroad tracks crossed it, bridging the dip in the hills on a tall timber trestle. Spike Hopewell was going along with the scheme, against his better judgment. Bill had always been susceptible to raging brainstorms that verged on delirium, and they were getting worse. Besides, when it came to driving independents out of business, John D. Rockefeller had personally invented every trick in the book. “Now!” Bill drew his big old Remington six-cylinder and fired a shot in the air. Whips cracked. Mules heaved in their harness. Freight wagons full of men and material rumbled across the field and under the train trestle—a framework of braced timbers that carried the elevated tracks above the low ground. Pipe lines that Matters and Hopewell had already laid stopped just inside the woods at either edge of the field. The west trunk stretched two hundred miles over the Allegheny Mountains to Pennsylvania’s oil fields. The east continued one hundred eighty miles to their seaboard refinery in Constable Hook, New Jersey, where oceangoing tank steamers could load their kerosene. Pumps and breakout tanks were installe...
