Seven Silent Men (4 page)

Muttering to himself how dumb they all were, Little Haifa raised his walkie-talkie and alerted Meadow Muffin that the connection was to follow and to relay the information on to Mule. He ordered Windy Walt to join him and train his miner's lamp on the detonator. The beam shone down. Little Haifa twisted the detonator's dial switch to “inactive”… took a penknife and sliced away the protective coating on both strands of fuse end until the copper wire below lay exposed … connected the first strand of naked copper to the detonator … connected the second piece … announced loudly enough into the walkie-talkie for all in the passageway to hear that the countdown was about to begin. He specifically told Meadow to tell Mule that he would be going on 10 rather than 20 this time.

The detonator crank was turned twice and stopped at “preactivate.” The counting down began aloud at 10 and went to 9 and 8. 7 … 6 … 5 … Fingers seized the “activate” switch, ready to turn it to “activate.” 4 … 3 …

Meadow Muffin's voice cried out from the walkie-talkie to stop everything … shouted that a car had pulled up on the street outside the bank … a police car with multicolored warning lights spinning on its roof … that a second police car with spinning lights was pulling in behind.

The countdown was aborted.

Rat, Worm and Cowboy moved back around Little Haifa and Windy Walt … listened to the crackling radio as Meadow Muffin said that the spinning roof lights on the police cars had gone off … that a policeman was getting out of the first car … that two more policemen were getting out of the second car … that one of the policemen was at the glass doors of the bank, had cupped his hands to the pane and was looking in … that one of the policemen standing near the curb had lit a cigarette … that the TV picture was clear. Meadow Muffin could read the number on one of the cars: 115.

Meadow Muffin's audible gasp of surprise was followed by word that the cop lighting the cigarette wasn't a cop at all, but a girl … a rather young girl, wearing a cop's cap and with a cigarette hanging from the side of her mouth, who was beginning to undress … undress on the street … that she had dropped to her knees … that …

Worm, from over Little Haifa's shoulder, implored Meadow Muffin to continue talking.

Meadow Muffin said he couldn't see … said the television monitoring screens in the command bunker had begun to dim out, had turned to snow … that the electric light bulb in the bunker was also dimming.

Wiggles, lying prone behind the interior barrier of sandbags, told the men crowded around the walkie-talkie he didn't give a hoot in hell who was copping what cop's joint … announced he couldn't take the oppressive heat in the passageway one instant longer … jumped up and stripped off his wet suit. Cowboy did the same. Windy Walt prayed aloud that the young girl was professional at what she was doing, and rapid.

Meadow Muffin's voice came through with word that the monitor screens had lit up again along with the bunker's light bulb … that the cops and girl were rushing back to the two patrol cars … that the girl was dressing on the run … that they had gotten into the cars … that they were driving away … that the street was once more empty, and as always, dark … that inside the bank premises above, all seemed normal …

The countdown resumed at 10. Went to 9 and 8 and 7. To 6 and 5. 4 … 3 … 2 …

The detonator was activated.

Nothing happened.

Little Haifa twisted the switch back to “inactivate,” then forward once more to activate.”

No thud resulted. No trembling of earth.

Again the lever was switched off and on.

There was no response.

Little Haifa reached to the side of the detonator, cranked and recranked the primer arm … seized the “activate” lever on the face of the detonator and turned it off and on again. And again.

All remained still.

A naked Wiggles and Cowboy attacked the double barrier of sandbags sealing the entrance of the passageway … pulled and pushed and tore and lifted and tossed in a frenzy … scrambled through the opening they created followed by Little Haifa … ran deep into the cavern and stared up.

The three-by-three-foot square of metal in the rock ceiling twenty-five feet overhead was unchanged, still had eleven strands of fusing trailing down from the eleven vials of nitroglycerin embedded in it.

Rat and Worm and Windy Walt stepped up beside Wiggles and Cowboy and Little Haifa and also stared above. One of them wondered aloud, What the hell now?

Little Haifa shrugged and lifted his walkie-talkie and told Meadow Muffin to radio Mule and tell him something had gone wrong and that Mule should be prepared to shut down the generators and forget opening the flood gates at the reservoir.

How can he forget what's already been done? Meadow Muffin asked. Mule's already opened them gates.

WHATYA MEAN, ALREADY OPENED? Little Haifa said.

Mule opened them gates when you counted down and said number ‘one' just like you told me to tell him to do.

I NEVER TOLD YOU NO SUCH THING!

Sure did. Said for me to tell Mule he would be going on 10 rather than on 20. And I told him.

ME, YOU TWOT! ME! ME! ME! THAT WAS FOR ME, NOT HIM! THAT'S WHEN I WAS GOING TO ACTIVATE THE DETONATOR! NOT WHEN HE WAS TO OPEN THE GATES! NOW WE GOT HALF A GODDAM RESERVOIR OF WATER HEADING OUR WAY AND THE DETONATOR DON'T WORK!

No shit?

IS THAT ALL YOU CAN SAY, YOU PEA-BRAINED SCUMBAG? I'LL SHIT YOU OKAY! I'LL SHIT YOU TILL YOU WISHED YOU WAS A PIECE OF RAW MEAT BEING GROUND UP LIVE, YOU … YOU … YOU!

Little Haifa, in a rare fit of animated rage, hurled the walkie-talkie into the dirt with all his might.

The flash was blinding … the concussion from the exploding nitroglycerin so powerful that all six men were knocked flat on their backsides. And as they lay there stunned and staring up, dollar bills floated down from on high.

Windy Walt rolled onto his stomach and beat the ground with his fists shouting, We did it, we did it, while Rat ran around and around in circles yelling pretty much the same thing.

Stark naked, Wiggles was also running, running the portable scaffold forward under the perfect three-foot-by-three-foot-square hole blown in the hard metal surface above. He clambered to the top, hoisted himself up into the opening. An equally nude Cowboy clambered up the scaffold after him, also disappeared into the hole overhead. Indian whoops were heard. Money sacks began plummeting down. Handful after handful of loose bills fluttered after them. Bigger sacks dropped. The men on the floor scrambled to stuff the loot into the oversized waterproof bags. Filled and bulging bags were run, in relays, out through the passageway and onto the concrete pier in the irrigation tunnel.

The rumbling rose like evil thunder. Thunder trapped deep underground and not far off. The cavern's walls and ceiling, which had hardly quivered when the nitroglycerin exploded, began to shake violently. Wiggles poked his head down through the hole in the vault, saw that rock chips and rock segments were shaking loose all around him and showering down on the four men in wet suits who were dashing for cover twenty-five feet below.

Quaking intensified. Thunderclaps became louder and more frequent. The rumbling grew deafeningly near. Little Haifa shouted the men out of the cavern, held the scaffold as steady as he could while Wiggles and Cowboy dropped onto it from the hole above and bounded down … grabbed up Rat's abandoned walkie-talkie and, running to avoid the hail of rocks and falling dirt, screamed for Meadow Muffin to drop everything and make tracks for the rendezvous point.

Meadow Muffin, in wet suit and miner's hat, disappeared through the hatch in the command bunker's floor, came out into the tumultuously echoing irrigation tunnel, all but slid down the metal ladder onto the iron catwalk, which was only inches above a swirling river of fast-flowing water. He turned to run along the iron walkway … run the hundred and fifty yards in the curving subterranean conduit to where the gang members were assembling for the getaway. Before Meadow Muffin could take a single running step he heard, behind him, a sound like he had never heard. A roaring of unimaginable magnitude. He turned back and saw a sight like he had never seen before … a solid wall of water reaching from the top of the twenty-foot-high tunnel to the bottom … a wall of water bearing down on him at breakneck speed. A wall from which Mule's head and upper torso protruded as he lay riding the front half of a rickety wood raft as one might ride a surfboard. As he rode, Mule shouted in great glee, only his words were lost in the din.

The rubber boats pushed off one after the other with Little Haifa and Windy Walt in the lead craft and Wiggles alone in the second and Worm riding the third. The fourth rubber boat had been cut loose from the other three, was manned by Cowboy and Rat, who were doing the best they could to hold it close to the concrete platform … Rat was shouting into his walkie-talkie for Meadow Muffin.

Seconds later, at approximately 11:58
P.M.,
Friday, August 20, 1971, the vanguard of 18,000,000 gallons of rampaging water hit the four rubber boats, sucked them in, devoured them like some unspeakable monster … shot them through seven and a half miles of irrigation tunnels as a bullet might be shot through a rifle barrel … jettisoned them at incredible speed toward a tortuous tangle of sewers and mains and stand ponds and diversion terminals and hairpin turns beneath the sprawling city of Prairie Port.

At 7:36
A
.
M
., Sunday, August 22, 1971, the alarm system at Mormon State National Bank, which had been inoperative since before Little Haifa and his gang blew a hole in the vault more than thirty-one hours earlier, activated and began emitting ultrasonic alert messages to the communications center at the Prairie Port Police Department. The messages, for whatever the reason, were inaccurate. They indicated the long-since-perpetrated robbery was still in progress. The police, while immediately responding to the scene, withheld the information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This was not unusual. There was bad blood between the Prairie Port PD and the local resident office of the FBI.

… Five minutes after that, a clandestine informant within police headquarters notified his Bureau contact in Prairie Port that the robbery was in progress and where.

TWO

Screeching reverberated. Green-eyed, sandy-haired, youthful special agent of the FBI William B. Yates looked up and off and saw a four-door black and dented Chevrolet slide to a sideways stop several feet beyond the red light at the bottom of a superhighway exit ramp, watched the driver's arm thrust out the window and flash a finger at a motorist yelling at the Chevy for partially running the light. The light greened. The car lurched forward, screechingly veered into the elm-shaded parking lot of Prairie Port's Marriott Motel and continued on to where Yates, in a freshly pressed, neatly tailored summer suit, stood waiting beside the entrance.

“Yates?” The face of the driver calling through the Chevrolet's half-open passenger window was flat-nosed, square-jawed and fortyish. A Stetson rode low on a wide, wrinkled forehead. Dangling from the collar of his western-style shirt was a string tie. “Billy Yates?”

“Hennessy?” Yates asked back.

“Nope, Jessup.” And Jessup, with a fetching smile, pushed open the passenger door. “Resident agent H.L. Jessup. Hennessy will meet us on ahead.”

Yates slid in, shook Jessup's outheld hand, pulled the door shut … was told, “That's Brew in the back. Marty Brewmeister.”

Turning, Yates peered in the direction of Jessup's hitching thumb. FBI resident agent Martin L. Brewmeister lay on the rear seat with his legs pulled up and a narrow-brimmed straw hat covering most of his face. The jacket of his Ivy Leagueish seersucker suit lay open on a white-on-white Hathaway shirt, a Dacron tie with blue-and-brown stripes too wide to be Ivy League and a black leather shoulder holster.

“Brew, you awake?” Jessup called.

“No,” the voice beneath the hat responded.

“Say ‘hi' to Billy Yates.”

The hat lifted, revealing a gentle-featured and unhurried countenance with deepset brown eyes. “Welcome to Prairie Port, Billy Yates.” Brew replaced the hat on his face, crossed his arms over his chest.

Jessup burned rubber, sent Yates tumbling back against the seat … sent the car zooming across the parking lot and out into the street and up a long and winding concrete access ramp. Glancing into the back, Yates saw Brewmeister lying exactly where he was before with his hands still peaceably folded on his chest and the hat over his face.

“We're two-thirds of the robbery squad, Brew and me,” Jessup said. “Cub Hennessy, he's the other one-third. You're to tag along with us till you get acclimatized.”

The car made a squealing turn onto the elevated superhighway. “We're chasing an eight-oh-five alert that's likely an eight-oh-three,” Jessup explained as he swerved the car out into a middle lane and tried to squeeze in between a lumbering oil truck and a Greyhound bus … couldn't. He let the Chevy drop back a foot or so. “Eight-oh-three is the Prairie Port Police Department's code number for bank-robbery-in-progress, only this particular call we're chasing went out as an ordinary eight-oh-five robbery-in-progress with no mention made of banks. That's so the police can overlook telling the FBI about it. They overlook telling us lots of things. You could say it's a professional discourtesy.” Jessup's laugh was not unpleasant. “Can't really blame them. We have trouble with just about everybody. Local police, state police, county sheriff's office, National Guard, ACLU, U.S. attorney, Boy Scouts, PTA. Biggest trouble of all is with FBI headquarters back at Washington. We piss them off like you cannot believe.”

“Amen,” Brew added from under the hat.

Jessup cut into the outer lane, tailgated the Dr. Pepper truck ahead. “So when did you get to town?” he asked Yates. “Friday, wasn't it?”