Текст книги "Gangway!"

Автор книги: Brian Garfield

Соавторы: Donald E. Westlake
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

    "Now and then we stamp an issue of five-dollar half eagles, but it don't happen very often here so if you find a half eagle with our stamp on it maybe you want to hang onto it. They're as rare as a pair of clean socks around a bunkhouse."

    Vangie had the metal grating unscrewed. She lifted it out of its frame and set it aside on the ceiling beams. She waited until the minute hand of the watch she'd stolen last week came around to exactly ten-thirty, and then she dropped silently into the vault room.

    She slipped across the room, keeping close to the wall. At the front corner she turned, went across to the barred door, and waited just inside it.

    The tourists entered the anteroom beyond.

    "… rest assured your money's safe. Nobody's ever tried to rob the United States Mint, of course-nobody's ever been stupid enough to try. I reckon someday somebody will, but you probably won't even read about it in the papers because whatever they do they ain't gonna get anywheres near your Government's gold."

    Finally the group turned and left the anteroom. When the tourists turned left, Gabe, Roscoe and Ittzy turned right and waited just around the corner until the group was gone.

    Vangie stepped to the barred door. She had the flask in one hand and the knuckle-duster in the other.

    "Stick 'em up."

    The guards whipped around in amazement and stared at her. "Huh?"

    "Stick 'em up. These are guns."

    They grinned. One of them pointed to the whisky flask. "That one must have quite a kick," he said.

    "I mean it. They really are guns."

    "Sure they are." The guard lifted his key ring. "I don't know how you got in there, honey, but you're about to come out." He began to unlock the door.

    "Don't make me shoot. Don't make me prove it!" Her voice was rising toward a hysterical pitch.

    The two guards yanked the barred door open.

    That was when Gabe and Roscoe arrived. Gabe said mildly, "Okay, hold it right there." Ittzy came in behind them. All three were holding guns that actually looked like guns.

    Vangie, her voice still shaky, said, "I thought you said you'd be right down."

    "We got here as fast as we could," Gabe said.

    The guards were getting over their surprise. One of them said, "You'll never get away with this."

    Vangie said, "That's what I keep telling them."

    "Let's move it along," Gabe said. "We're in kind of a hurry."

    Roscoe relieved the guards of their weapons and tied them up in a corner of the anteroom while Gabe locked the outer entrance-the steel-plated door that fitted right over the incoming handcart rails. Now they were sealed off from the rest of the Mint.

    Ittzy and Gabe climbed into the hole in the ceiling; Roscoe stood guard with his huge pistols. Presently the canisters and the box of dynamite made their way down to the floor, whereupon Roscoe carried the gas canisters out into the anteroom and placed one on each side of the door. Ittzy opened the box of dynamite, removed several sticks, got out his book again, and went thumbing through the pages.

    Roscoe returned from the anteroom, wheeling the handcart in. "Okay to turn those valves now?"

    Gabe said, "Not yet. Come on."

    As Ittzy approached the vault, lip-reading slowly in his dynamite book, Gabe led Vangie out to the anteroom, followed by Roscoe. "We'll wait out here," Gabe said. "Ittzy will set the charges in there and then come out here before they go off."

    "I don't know," Vangie said, "how I ever got invol…"

    There was a sudden explosion.

    The three of them turned, open-mouthed, and stared at the doorway to the vault room. A cloud of smoke puffed out through the doorway, and Ittzy came walking out through it, leafing through the book. He seemed mildly bewildered but otherwise unhurt. "I don't know," he said, shaking his head. "It shouldn't have done that."

    Awed, Vangie said, "Ittzy, are you okay?"

    He looked up from the book, blushed when he met Vangie's eye, and said, "Fine. Uh, I'm fine. Why not?"

    Roscoe said, "What about the vault?"

    "Right," said Gabe. He and Roscoe hurried into the next room through the settling smoke, with Ittzy and Vangie right behind them. Inside they found the steel door of the vault sagging wide open like a tin can that had been pried apart with a chisel.

    And just inside it were piles and piles of dull yellow metal.

    "That's the stuff," Gabe said. "I'd know it anywhere."

    Roscoe said, "That's pretty."

    "The handcart," Gabe told him.

    "Right."

    Roscoe wheeled the handcart as close as possible to the ruined door and he, Gabe and Ittzy went to work filling it with the ingots, stacking them with loving care.

    Gabe said, "Vangie? Get the valves, will you?"

    "Right."

    Vangie went back to the anteroom and across to the outer door, took a deep breath, held it, opened wide the valves of both canisters of laughing gas, left them hissing, hurried back to the inner room, slammed the steel door shut behind her, and let out the breath she'd been holding.

    Ittzy said, "This stuff's heavy."

    "Keep loading," Gabe told him.

    Throughout the building armed men were beginning to react to the sound of the explosion. For most of them, the first reaction was to say, "What was that?" And stand looking blankly at one another. But a few had already remembered the gold and were starting to move, and the rest would catch on any second now.

    Down on the waterfront, Francis was ambling along, easy and casual, taking the air. Pausing at an intersection, he glanced uphill toward the Mint, indistinct in the fog. He looked at his watch and moved on along the street until he came to a fire-alarm box. He posted himself near it and waited, the snap-lid watch in his hand.

    Vangie tried to lift an ingot, but it was too heavy for her. She stepped back and let the men do it. Her face was filled with anxiety.

    Guards ran from all directions through the mazed corridors toward the vault.

    The first arrivals found the anteroom door locked. Seven men dashed off in seven directions to find a key.

    Vangie was hopping up and down with nervousness. "That's enough," she cried. "That's enough. You've got enough!"

    "All of it," Gabe said grimly, and dropped another ingot onto the pile in the handcart.

    Three guards with three keys crashed into each other at a corridor junction. One was dazed, but the other two rushed into the railway-tracked corridor. After a minor skirmish they got the anteroom door unlocked.

    Two men clawed the edge of the door and swung it ponderously open. Twenty-two guards poured into the room and all but trampled one another in their flying rush for the vault.

    They didn't have time to notice the two canisters hissing quietly to themselves in a room already filled with laughing gas. Their attention was fixed on that closed steel door to the vault room across the way; midway to it, the guards began to sag. Grinning feebly, they sank to the floor.

    Two of them, realizing too late what was going on, tried to get to the canisters to turn them off but failed. Chuckling stupidly, they embraced the cool smooth canisters in flaccid grips, sliding slowly down to the floor.

    Three others, at the rear of the group, turned around and made it back to the hallway before collapsing like their mates with idiotic smiles and glazed eyes.

    The canisters hissed on, above the supine smiling guards.

    Francis took out the watch, glanced at it, and looked upward at the Mint. The fog was thinning more and more with every passing second.

    The handcart was full.

    Too full.

    "Oh, no," Gabe said.

    Five thousand pounds of gold was a lot of gold. It was in fact too much gold to push.

    The four of them leaned as hard as they could, but the handcart wouldn't even rock. It might have been a stone wall.

    "Damn!" Gabe said. "Damn, damn, damn, damn!"

    Vangie cried, "I knew it wouldn't work! I knew it couldn't be done!"

    Ittzy said, "I guess we'll have to take a lot of the gold out."

    "Over my dead…" And then Gabe whipped around and grabbed Ittzy's arm. "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Gimme that book!"

    Ittzy gave him the book and Gabe thumbed feverishly through it. "I know I saw it in here someplace, someplace… Something about shaped charges…"

    Nervously, Francis paced back and forth, eyeing the fire alarm box and the Mint up at the top of the hill.

    Captain Flagway had remembered a bottle tucked away in his desk, and made it stand for both breakfast and lunch. There was enough left for dinner, plus snacks. Now, he peeked out the porthole and watched Roscoe's crew stacking bales of hay along one side of the ship, at the foot of the mainmast on deck. He reeled back to his chair and took another swallow from the bottle.

    Sixteen additional guards piled into the anteroom, collapsing before they reached the second door.

    "I've got it!" Gabe cried.

    "We'll all be getting it," Roscoe said. Discouragement was becoming general.

    "Ittzy," Gabe said, "get the rest of the dynamite. All of it. Bring it over here."

    So while Gabe held the book open under Ittzy's nose, one finger tracing the words, Ittzy read with one eye and packed all the dynamite into a charge that he fixed to the face of the mangled vault door right behind the immobile handcart.

    Ittzy finished and stepped back, "Now what?"

    Gabe scowled toward the iron door. "Listen, what if there's guards lying across the tracks out there?"

    Roscoe said, "So we run over them."

    "No!" Vangie cried.

    "Vangie's right," Gabe said. "We don't want them after us for murder."

    Vangie said, "I'll go," and before anyone could react she was over by the steel door.

    Gabe rushed to catch her. "Wait a minute… wait a minute!"

    "What for?" She pushed the steel door open an inch. Gabe peered over the top of her head and saw that three of the guards were indeed sleeping across the tracks, broad smiles on their faces.

    Vangie pulled the door open just wide enough to slip through. Gabe crowded through behind her, and the two of them, holding their breaths, dashed into the anteroom, dragged the sleepers to one side, dashed back, slammed the door, and breathed.

    Roscoe said sourly, "You ready now?"

    Gabe smiled at him. "Sure… sure," he said lazily.

    "Then let's go."

    Gabe smiled. Then he frowned and shook his head to clear it. "I must've got a whiff of that stuff." He glanced at Vangie. "You okay?"

    She gave him a sleepy grin. "Hi, lover."

    "No, Vangie. Definitely not." He grabbed her arm. "Come on, snap out of it."

    "You bet." She kept on grinning and swayed happily toward him.

    He put his lips close to her ear. "Think about how we're gonna get caught."

    The smile faltered.

    "Think about how we'll never get away with it, not in a million years; you warned us and we wouldn't listen to you."

    She was frowning again, irritable again. "That's right!"

    "That's better." Gabe turned back to Ittzy. "You all set?"

    "I suppose so."

    "Then let her rip." Gabe crossed to the steel door with two long strides. "Everybody take a few deep inhales and then hold your breath."

    There was a lot of huffing and puffing in the room for the next few seconds. Long sighs and heaves of breath. Finally Gabe nodded his head and flung the steel door wide open. A cloud of gas rolled into the vault room…

    Ittzy lit the dynamite and they all headed for the corners, holding their breath. Almost instantly the new charge went off.

    The blast filled the room with deafening noise and vibration. And emptied it of the handcart, which shot like a cannonball out of the inner room and across the anteroom and right on down the corridor…

    And Gabe, Vangie, Roscoe and Ittzy were running like mad, chasing it through the laughing gas and down the long corridor…

    They bolted out of the gas cloud and the pent-up breath exploded from their chests. They ran full-tilt, panting and straining, but the cart was way out ahead and it really wasn't any contest.

    The cart won.

    It shot right off the lip of the loading platform and crashed into the back of the waiting wagon. The blow shook the wagon loose in its tracks and started it rolling toward the main gate with the handcart's dumpbucket tilting over and cascading lumps of gold onto the driver's seat and into the footwell. Two or three ingots fell off and lay in the courtyard, glistening in the mist…

    Gabe, Vangie, Roscoe, and Ittzy were still running to catch the damned thing, jumping down off the loading platform and bolting forward at a dead run, toes straining, chests heaving, arms wind milling…

    The main gates stood wide open. The two guards there were momentarily paralyzed with disbelief. But now doors in the building began to crash open, and guards came pouring into the courtyard. Roscoe brandished his huge revolvers and fired three quick shots into the air. It made the guards hesitate, just that extra second long enough.

    Francis, the watch in his hand for the fifth nervous time, looked up in relief and delight at the sound of the shots. Turning, slipping the watch back into his pocket, he took two quick strides to the waiting fire-alarm box, yanked the handle, and took off at a fast clip for the pier.

    Up at the Mint the wagon was closing toward the gate. The ground was level here, so the wagon was gradually losing speed, trundling inexorably but not rapidly toward freedom.

    Gabe, Ittzy, Roscoe and Vangie were in its wake, strung out in a ragged line, gasping, running, staggering, slowly overtaking the monster they themselves had created. Guards were rushing at them from everywhere, while other guards scrambled frantically to get the main gates closed in time.

    Gabe caught the wagon. He clung frantically to the tailgate, his toes dragging in the dirt as he gasped for breath before pulling himself aboard.

    Behind him Roscoe had picked up a trailing Vangie and was holding her under his arm as he barreled forward, looking very nearly as powerful and inexorable as the wagon itself. Trailing the pack came Ittzy, still clutching the dynamite book in one of his pumping hands.

    Gabe, lying atop the jumbled ingots, reached back and down to the running Roscoe, who half-lifted and half-threw a squealing, kicking, red-faced Vangie over the tailgate and into his arms. Gabe and Vangie went rolling into the gold, and Roscoe lunged for the tailgate himself.

    The guards were running, they were shooting into the air, one or two were even shooting at the wagon. Tourists were scampering in all directions. More guards were pushing against the massive slow-moving gates.

    Ittzy scrambled over the tailgate, over Roscoe, over Gabe and Vangie, over the ingots, and finally reached the seat, where he grabbed the wagon-tongue as though it were a tiller, which it was. He didn't even bother to look at the brake, because with all this weight nothing short of total collision was going to stop this juggernaut.

    It was roaring right into the gateway. The gates were closing, but not in time. Guards were running, shouting, shooting. Guns were going off and voices were bellowing orders and obscenities. The people on the wagon clung to fragile purchases with toes and fingernails and kept their heads down against the hail of bullets-all except Ittzy, who sat up in plain view and steered and ignored the occasional bullet that skinned a bit of nap from his hat.

    Out of the firehouse roared the great fire engine behind its magnificent white horses.

    The wagon full of gold and Gabe and Vangie and Roscoe and Ittzy gathered speed as it moved through the gates. A guard lunged for the side of the wagon and clung to it, his feet dragging, until Vangie removed her shoe and rapped his knuckles with the heel, whereupon the guard yelped and let go, and the wagon was through and rolling…

    It tipped into the steep downslope beyond the paved apron of the gate area. Now it picked up speed ponderously, clattering and thundering like a battalion of artillery on the march. A block ahead of it, midway down the slope, the great fire engine roared into view preceded by the clangor of its bells.

    The fire engine made the turn on two wheels, horses lunging, men straining forward. One or two of them glanced back and saw the gold wagon bearing down on them. Their faces went wide with amazement.

    And on ahead of the fire engine the warning bells and sirens were being obeyed. The street emptied of pedestrians and wagon traffic all the way down to the waterfront.

    As the fire engine topped the hump of the second hill, the gold wagon roared through the trough and swung up the other side. The wagon slowed perceptibly on the upslope, but Gabe was grinning because he could feel in the seat of his pants that it was going to make it.

    And it did. It trundled up over the hump, seeming to hesitate for just a second. During that second the riders had a brief panorama of San Francisco spread out below them. The empty street stretched straight down through it all to the tiny listing absurdity of the San Andreas far away at the pier.

    Gabe glanced to one side because a flash of red caught his eye. It was the red hair of Officer McCorkle, watching without expression. When the wagon began to gather speed on the downslope, McCorkle took his big notebook out, licked his pencil, and began to jot something in his laborious hand.

    Now there was no time for anything but hanging on desperately while the fire engine preceded the wagon straight toward the docks, clearing the way, clanging and whooping, with the wagon catching up on it from behind.

    "We're gaining too fast!" Gabe yelled at Ittzy. "Hit your brakes!"

    "They won't work!"

    The wagon was still accelerating, and the red rear end of the fire engine was getting closer and closer… A pool table wouldn't fit between the two vehicles now… A horse could jump between them now… A man couldn't squeeze between them now…

    Gabe opened his mouth to yell, and the fire engine squealed around a corner to the right, and there in front was the panorama again, closer and emptier and clear all the way to the deck of the San Andreas.

    Except for Francis.

    He had just reached the pier after completing his false alarm task and was starting up one of the planks onto the ship. Gabe and Vangie and Roscoe and Ittzy all bawled at him at once to get out of the way, and their combined racket made him turn and look over his shoulder.

    Here came the gold wagon, crossing the flats at the bottom of the hill, barreling this way with undiminished speed.

    Ruffled for once in his life, Francis legged it up the plank. Behind him he could hear the booming thunder of the wagon as it shot out from the end of the street onto the wooden pier. The thunder was coming closer incredibly fast.

    Francis dashed for the deck. The plank suddenly rumbled beneath his feet. He didn't look behind him, because he knew something was gaining on him; it was on the plank with him.

    He dove from the plank, sideways toward the deck, trying to land on the relative softness of a coil of rope. The wagon flashed up the planks past the spot where he'd just been, thudded to the deck with a bone-rattling jar, careened across the ship and crashed to a shuddering stop against the pile of hay bales stacked up against the base of the mainmast.

    There was a second of stunned silence, everywhere in the world. Francis sat up on the coil of rope and blinked. Then, like a lazy railroad semaphore, the mast tilted slowly and fell across the wagon, just behind Ittzy and just in front of Gabe, landing with a crackling, grinding roar and disintegrating itself into kindling.

    Gabe looked at it. He seemed to be deaf. "Uh," he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

    As the last echoes of the self-destructing mast faded into history, Captain Flagway emerged from his cabin and walked forward toward the gold wagon as though the deck were heaving under his feet in a heavy storm. An almost empty whisky bottle was clutched in his right hand.

    Roscoe's crew was swarming over the ship, casting off lines, raising sail, shouting nautical gutterances at one another. Ittzy and Roscoe were stretching a tarpaulin over the length of the gold wagon. Vangie was seated on a water barrel, fixing her hair with the aid of an ivory comb and a small mirror. Francis was brushing hemp flecks from the seat of his trousers. Gabe was standing by the side rail, tensely watching an endless stream of mounted men pouring from the main gate of the Mint, thundering downhill toward the pier.

    And up in the rigging, there was no wind.

    Gabe collared Roscoe. "Why the hell aren't we moving? They're after us!"

    Roscoe looked up, shielded his eyes with his hand, and studied the sails. "No wind," he decided.

    Everybody else also looked up. Captain Flagway, in looking up, overbalanced himself and sat down on the deck. He went on looking up.

    "I don't believe it," Gabe said. The posse was topping the nearer slope, men and riders leaping down the second hill. "I just don't believe it," he said.

    Vangie closed her eyes, the mirror and comb forgotten in her lap. Now that disaster had struck, she was no longer loud. "I knew it," she said quietly. "I knew it, I knew it all along."

    Gabe tottered across the deck, staring upward. He still couldn't believe it.

    The Bay was filled with ship traffic, and a steamer, Daniel Webster, was sliding past just now, outward bound for the Golden Gate. It passed very close to the San Andreas and its wake made the water heave, causing the San Andreas to roll from side to side on the ripples.

    The motion took Gabe's mind away from the empty sails. Greenly he staggered back and turned to the rail. Leaning there, he watched the steamship easing by just a few feet away, nearly close enough to touch.

    Gabe stared at that other ship. Why couldn't the San Andreas move like that? He looked upward and saw no sails on Daniel Webster, only a black stack spouting smoke. And that was the difference right there-the difference between being old-fashioned and out of date and caught, or being modern and up to date and safe.

    Then the thought hit him. "God damn," he whispered, just for himself, and suddenly forgot about being sick or caught or any of that negative stuff. "I've got it!" he yelled, and smacked the rail with his palm.

    The rest of them had been alternately watching the posse getting closer and the sails staying empty. Now they turned and watched Gabe suddenly race across the littered deck toward the prow of the ship. Just beyond him, Daniel Webster steamed majestically along, matching his pace, so that to the rest it looked as though Gabe and the steamship were fixed in one spot while the San Andreas was sliding backward.

    Captain Flagway covered one eye, the better to see and comprehend what was happening. Unfortunately, he then closed the uncovered eye instead of the covered one and could see nothing at all. "An eclipse," he suggested. "They'll never find us in the dark."

    Ashore, the posse thundered to the bottom of the hill and streamed toward the pier.

    Aboard, Roscoe's crew huddled together, trying to look like a passing acrobat act that had nothing to do with all this. Ittzy was calmly lashing the tarp over the gold. Roscoe and Francis, side by side, stared at the oncoming posse. Captain Flagway tried to see in the dark. Vangie was tearing her hair.

    Gabe reached the bow and lunged to the rusty anchor that lay on the deck. He picked it up with a great rattle of chains, and with superhuman effort heaved it out across the rippling water.

    The stern of the steamer was just passing, and the flying anchor fell across her taffrail like a grappling hook.

    The posse hit the pier like Bedford Forrest's cavalry. You could count every tooth in every horse's mouth.

    Daniel Webster steamed ponderously on into the fog and the anchor chain ran out from its rusty winch, making a sagging dip into the water between the two ships until suddenly the winch caught, the U-shaped sag became shallower, the dripping rusty links lifted out of the water, the chain became a straight line, the straight line became taut-and the San Andreas was all but jerked from the water.

    She leaped away from the pier and went churning off in the wake of Daniel Webster, heading straight for a passing fogbank, pulling out from the pier just as the lead horsemen were starting up the planks. The planks slid along the pier, angling to keep one end on the ship and one on the pier, held down by the weight of horses and riders, until the San Andreas moved out from shore, turning away from San Francisco and toward wherever Daniel Webster had it in mind to go-

    The planks couldn't stretch. They lost their grip, the outer edges slid off the rail of the ship, and planks and horses and horsemen and all went bubbling and screaming and flailing their way into the water. Men sat on horses who stood on planks that fell rapidly through the air and slapped mightily at the ocean, sinking everybody.

    And that's how the surfboard was invented.

    Out in the Bay the great white fogbank bounced lazily, like God's beachball. The two ships steamed steadily toward it.

    Seven horsemen in the posse didn't stop in time and followed the leaders into the water. The rest milled around on the pier getting things sorted out. One or two of them started shooting at the disappearing ship, and then they all opened up with a fusillade of gunfire over which their angry voices roared with frustration and rage.

    Into the fog steamed Daniel Webster, unwittingly towing a decrepit sailing ship with her sails filling in the wrong direction.

    The red-haired cop, McCorkle, raced onto the dock with his huge notebook brandished in the air. "Wait, pull over to the pier!"

    Bullets punched holes in the rotten wood of the San Andreas at the waterline and below decks thin little fountains began to arc into the bilges.

    Roscoe's crew swarmed aloft to furl the sails before they braked Daniel Webster to a stop. And meanwhile on board the steamship, the captain was studying his gauges in a state of confusion bordering on apoplexy. He turned to the speaking tube and yelled down to the engine room: "More speed, damn it! What's wrong with you down there?"

    "Captain, she's goin' full out. Whaddya want from us?"

    "We're only making five bloody knots, and how are we supposed to beat the bloody clipper record that way?" The captain straightened up and looked around into the thickening fog, trying to figure out why his ship had slowed down.

    Aboard the San Andreas, joy was unrestrained. Vangie, in relief and elation, allowed herself to be kissed by Francis and Ittzy and Captain Flagway (who had found his sight and his legs again in the general triumph). Then Roscoe and his crew approached, wiping their mouths on their sleeves, and Vangie switched to shaking hands.

    They were in the fog now. Francis peered around in its cottony whiteness, saying, "Where's Gabe? The man's brilliant, he should be toasted in champagne. Where is he?"

    "He was here a minute ago," Ittzy said.

    "Maybe he went ashore during the eclipse," Captain Flagway suggested.

    Vangie looked all around. "Gabe? Gabe?"

    They found him at last hanging over the rail. "No champagne," he groaned. "For God's sake, no champagne."