The flip of a switch the.., p.1
The Flip of a Switch (The Notables Book 1), page 1
THE FLIP OF A SWITCH
THE NOTABLES
BOOK 1
P.R. DURHETT
Copyright © 2025 by P.R. DuRhett
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Ten Hut Media
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-96400-731-1 (Paperback)
CONTENTS
Also by P.R. DuRhett
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Acknowledgments
Also by P.R. DuRhett
About the Author
ALSO BY P.R. DURHETT
The Notables
The Flip of a Switch
To find out more about P.R. DuRhett and his books, visit severnriverbooks.com/collections/p-r-durhett
“The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”
—Winston Churchill
“For after the Battle, comes quiet?”
—H.G. Wells
“You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.”
—Margaret Thatcher
PROLOGUE
North Atlantic Airline, Flight 1605, GLA to BWI
All Alexander Chandler wanted to do was get home to celebrate his 25th anniversary. Phoebe had it all planned—a quiet week on Folly Beach, near Charleston, South Carolina. His normal route, after completing his monthly intel briefing at Whitehall, was a direct flight out of Heathrow to Dulles. However, to get him home in time to fly out for his vacation, the ONI travel office had booked him out of Gatwick, through Glasgow, and then on to Baltimore’s BWI Airport.
“At least it’s business class,” Alex thought as he settled into his aisle seat, 21-B. “And it’s on time.” He looked at his new smart watch before completing his normal assessment. “Where are the exits, the life rafts, the galley?” he recited in his mind as he scanned the interior of the plane and then did a quick once-over of the passengers around him. Alex didn’t register that anything was wrong. Not then.
When he heard a muted whump, felt the fuselage shudder, and registered a noise that was not the normal sound of the landing gear retracting after take-off, it clicked in his mind. The face.
“I know that man who was working on the jet bridge when I was boarding. Why didn’t that register before now? These things always jump out at me,” he thought. “I would’ve given a signal to the Air Marshall, if I had caught it at the time.”
It was Burton E. Shott. Alex had seen both his name and his face during recent intelligence briefings. Just a few weeks earlier, Shott had been flagged as ‘unaccounted for’ and nobody knew how or why. Unfortunately, the revelation that this man had been standing on the jetway came too late for the 318 souls on board flight 1605.
Even as Alex thought of Phoebe, he simultaneously calculated how far over and above the Firth of Clyde the flight should be. The plane shuddered again and dropped in altitude before pitching hard to the left. Oxygen masks dropped and personal effects began flying around the cabin like yard debris in a tornado.
A massive secondary blast, deafeningly loud and abrupt, came with a flash of hot fuel and smoke, and he knew this was why Shott had been on the jetway. The plane broke apart and what remained began to fall from the sky and litter the Firth. Within minutes, the section where Alex had sat plunged deep into the frigid waters of Holy Loch, Scotland.
1
29 October 1929
A long day of work at the docks had finally ended. During his shift, Alex was in charge of moving a load of goods to the southern end, near Lock #10 on the Ohio River, where the towboats tied up and the davits and small railway cranes offloaded the barges. Part of his job was to inventory and arrange the various goods—everything from food to bricks—for the merchants and suppliers who would be waiting to load the commodities onto their trucks.
Alex had worked at the North American Barge Line docks, north of Steubenville, Ohio, for almost two years. His father, Charles, had gotten him the job not long after his mother died. Donna Boyd passed away from a fever when Alex was only fifteen years old. Up to that point, her son was very studious and loved to read. She had been his tutor and was very adamant about Alex excelling at school.
Donna’s death created a gaping hole in Alex’s life. He stopped going to school altogether and his father buried himself in work. Father and son never fully connected or discussed much from that point on. However, after two months of just sitting in the house doing nothing but feeling sorry for himself, Alex finally went to his father and asked for his help. Charles felt that the physical labor of working the docks might get Alex out of his melancholy mood.
Charles was an engineering foreman on the Stanton Bridge project, a new toll bridge that spanned the river and linked the steel mill towns of Weirton, West Virginia, and Steubenville, and he worked closely with Jon “Tun” Bergen, the dock master. Dock work was an easy fit for Alex since he was strong and smart, exactly what Tun was looking for. He was six feet tall with a well-defined physique, like his father, but his smarts were a direct result of his mother. Alex started as a general dockhand, the lowest rung on the ladder. He made only two dollars a day, but because he still lived in the same house as his father on Willis Creek in Alikana, it provided him enough to start saving.
Moving goods all over the river front dock and loading the items into the awaiting trucks, wagons, or carts added more strength to his already athletic frame. And after a year of working the docks, Alex had not only demonstrated that he was up to the physical aspects of the job but also proved his administrative ability to organize and distribute the commodities. Tun promoted him, raised his pay to four dollars a day, and essentially let him run the upper dock.
It was a cold, wet October morning. The rain had fallen heavy and steady for the better part of the past two days with no sign of letting up. But it was that way every October in the valley, so it was inexplicable to Alex that none of the regular merchants or suppliers had shown up to receive the goods offloaded from the latest barges to tie up. It wasn’t until Alex saw Tun lumbering toward him from his office at the head of the pier that he knew something was wrong.
“Alex, there’s a problem,” Tun panted, out of breath by the time he made it to where he stood at the end of the dock, easily the length of five football fields. “The rain washed away the hillside above the road to Steubenville. Rocks blocked the road and crushed the trolley, and, and…” Tun’s voice started to quiver. “Your dad was on the trolley. He’s dead, Alex.”
Alex did not say a word as Tun repeated his devastating news a second time. Alex finally blinked and sighed before turning and walking away with his head bowed in grief.
“Alex! Alex!” Tun kept shouting, but Alex kept walking. He walked the well-worn path a long the riverbank in the opposite direction of the town. With heavy steps he plodded up the stairs that led to the crossing at the railroad tracks and continued to traipse up the steep, muddy road until he finally arrived at his parents’ small house on Walter’s Street in Alikana.
The house hadn’t seemed like a home for years, but looking at it now, Alex thought it was a sad shell of its former self. The small, two-story clapboard house used to be neat and white, but now the paint was gray from the residue from the mills and peeling in several places. Inside it wasn’t much better and certainly no more welcoming. Alex remembered coming home from school to the smell of fresh bread, and the sight of bright flowers from his mother’s small garden in vases adding color in each room. Now it was a dreary, colorless, and somewhat shabby living room that smelled of damp and neglect.
He didn’t linger long but went to his bedroom and grabbed a deep canvas bag—one his dad had told him was a government-issued sea bag from his time in the Navy before the Great War. He stuffed it with two changes of clothes, a toiletry satchel, and a small, battered lock box containing ten months’ worth of wages, a family photograph, his mother’s wedding ring, and a pocket watch from his grandfather, along with other small items that he had thought worthy of safekeeping.
Before walking out the front door for the last time, Alex turned slowly around taking in his surroundings and committing them to memory. He was seeing it as it was before his mother died. Those were the memories he wanted to keep with him. Now that his father was gone, there was nothing to keep him in the Valley and these echoes of the past were all he had.
Alex left the house on the banks of Willis Creek, mumbling a phrase he had read in one of the classics his mother had made him study by Cicero, “Praetorium mortus est et abiit, procecere vel mori.” The past is dead and gone, move on or die.
Alex walked away and never looked back.
2
October to December 1929
When Alex walked away from his home and followed the path back down to the Steubenville Docks, he saw a riverboat captain. Thomas Quinlan, better known as ‘Finn’ to everyone who worked the river, sat in the pilot house of his boat. Finn was a crusty, old, fat man who always had a cigar in his mouth, but no one could recall it ever being lit.
Seeing Alex, as he walked by The Flemming with his sea bag slung over his shoulder, Finn bellowed out around that cigar, “Wherya hea’n’?”
At first Alex just stared at Finn, not saying a word. Instead, he proceeded to look down the length of the old towboat in front of him. It was basically a barge fitted with a simple single-story superstructure and a pilot house on top with two stacks behind it. This one was nothing special, and not at all different to anything Alex had seen every day for the past two years pushing barges up and down the river. “It will do,” he said to himself.
Thinking Alex had not understood him the first time, Finn took the cigar out of his mouth and repeated his question more clearly, “Where are you heading?”
“To wherever The Flemming is bound,” Alex finally responded confidently.
Finn told Alex that he would allow him to travel with The Flemming on two conditions: a promise to learn each of the duties that made up daily life on the boat and an under-the-table payment for his services. Within the hour, Alex was busy helping the crew load cargo boxes, half a barge load of coal, and fresh food and water for the coming voyage. The small crew of The Flemming consisted of four men: Finn, the captain and pilot; two engineers, Frank ‘Rock’ Chambers and Parker ‘Smudge’ Smith, who kept the small steam engine running; and a deck mate, Ben “Cargo” Chaffe.
Cargo was a huge black man who towered over Alex’s six-foot stature. Where Alex was wiry and strong, Cargo had broad shoulders that required him to turn sideways to pass someone in the narrow passageways of the boat. His biceps were so massive and solid that they split the rolled-up sleeves of his work shirt, and his wide calloused hands attested to years of hauling lines and loading cargo. What Cargo didn’t have was a desire to entertain unnecessary conversations. For Alex, who was partnered with him during the first leg of the trip down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, this trait was a welcome one. He didn’t have any interest in talking about ‘before’ and he certainly didn’t know what was to come ‘after.’
As The Flemming went from Lock #10 in Steubenville to Lock #53 in Grand Chain, Illinois, Alex worked alongside Cargo as a deck mate. It was work he was familiar with, tying up the boat and barges at each lock as they readied themselves to navigate through the narrow structures that raised or lowered the water levels to aid their passage around dams and falls. The transit through each took thirty minutes, give or take, before they could steam down river to the next one. By the end of the fifteen-day transit, Cargo and Alex worked like a well-oiled machine. They didn’t need to speak to each other, as Alex instinctively knew the motions to tie up, tie off, and stow the lines through each of the forty-three locks. Once The Flemming cleared Lock #53, there were no more to traverse, and by the time they passed Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio and Mississippi converge into one, Alex was ready to learn something new.
For the next five days, as The Flemming navigated closer to New Orleans, Alex worked with Rock and Smudge and learned both the art and the science of keeping the boat moving. From Rock he learned the ‘engineering’ of the engines. “Twin-horizontally mounted cylinder steam engines that generate one hundred and fifty horsepower,” Rock proclaimed with pride as he taught Alex how to deal with the different personalities of the boat’s engines.
Smudge, on the other hand, cussed colorful words that Alex added to his mental dictionary, fussed over every drop of oil or leak from a valve, and fretted that this or that would be their demise. To most, Smudge’s fretting would not be a valuable learning experience, but for Alex, it taught him that no valve or oil pot was insignificant to the efficient running of the machinery. Details mattered, and Alex filed that alongside the colorful language for future use.
The remainder of the voyage was less physically challenging, but Alex was not idle. He spent his remaining four days working in the pilot house learning what it took to safely guide the vessel and its eight barges down one of the most traversed commercial waterways in the world. Late one night, in a wider section of the river where shipping traffic was sporadic, Finn gave Alex the helm and went to his rack to get an hour down. The heat from the day and the cooler temperature of the water collided to form a thin layer of fog that floated over the surface. The humidity was thick in the air and the trees along the riverbanks flickered with the lights of thousands of fireflies. With the rhythmic thrum of the engines and murmur of the water hitting the hull, Alex was more relaxed than he had felt in months.
“Hey! You awake?” Finn barked as he came back into the pilot house.
Alex jerked violently at the unexpected interruption and twisted the wheel wildly, sending the barges far forward of the boat and veering outside the channel lanes. Finn jumped in to help him get back in control and Alex finally replied sardonically, “Well if I wasn’t, I am now.”
As if he hadn’t just frightened years off Alex’s life, Finn asked in a conversational tone, “You’ll’ve fig’r’d out by now that this is the last trip on The Flemming for a bit for the boys n’ me?”.
“Yeah. Rock was saying something about the boat being turned over to the company owners for a re-fitter to install modern diesel engines when we get to New Orleans,” Alex replied. “What does that mean once you get to port?”
“Oh, don’t you worry about us,” Finn said. “Cargo told me you saw what was in that broken cargo box we loaded back at Lock #33 in Mayesville.” He left the comment hanging between them.
Alex had seen the contents and suspected the unlabeled bottles contained bourbon. He knew that Prohibition, which had been the law for the past nine years had not decreased the demand for the illicit liquid. He also guessed that Finn and other river boat captains and dockmasters had a lucrative side trade. Although Alex had worked the docks for almost two years, he had never seen the whiskey trade occur until now.
