The Green Eagle Score (12 page)

“The Motor Pool Receiving Depot,” Webb said, slurring the last words. “I got to deliver this goddam thing sometime tonight. The stinking snowtop at the gate gave me the wrong directions.”

“Snowtop?” That was a slang word for Air Policemen, because of the white helmets they wore, and most APs didn’t like it. This one was no exception. Taking the carbine off his shoulder and holding it at a loose port arms, he came another step closer, almost to the curb, and said, “Maybe you heard him wrong, my friend. The motor pool isn’t anywhere around here.”

“I don’t want the motor pool,” Webb said, being angry now. “You as dumb as that other one? I want the Motor Pool Receiving Depot.”

The AP was now bridling. Coming all the way to the bus door, he said, “You got any orders on you, smart guy?”

Parker was out of sight just beside the door. Now, softly, he said, “I’ve got one. If you’re smart, you’ll step up into the bus.” As he spoke, he extended his hand out so the AP could see the revolver in it, aimed at his forehead. The AP blinked. “What?”

“Come up here,” Webb said, speaking more quietly himself now. “Just like there’s nothing wrong.”

“This isn’t the war to be a hero in,” Parker said.

“I don’t—” The AP was squinting, trying to see up the arm past the gun. “What is this?”

“Just money,” Webb told him, “We’re just taking the payroll. Don’t worry about it, we’re not spies or saboteurs or anything.”

“The payroll? You’re going to steal— You’ll never get away with it!”

“If you raise your voice again,” Parker said, “your buddy on the other side of the building is going to hear a car backfire. Now get in here.”

“But—”

“One,” said Parker. “Two.”

The AP didn’t know what the top number was. He put his foot up on the bus step before Parker could say three. Webb said, “Hand me the rifle.”

The AP came up the steps, and anger was struggling with fear in his eyes. He was being humiliated, and he hated it, and he suspected that if he tried to do anything about the humiliation he would lose his life, and he hated the cowardice that weighed those factors and opted for cooperation. He was calling it cowardice now, in his mind, but what it was was intelligence.

Webb took the carbine from him, and Parker prodded him to move on down the aisle into the bus. His uniform was stripped off him, and Devers put it on, took the carbine from Webb, and got out of the bus.

“Thanks, buddy,” Webb called, and shut the bus door, and started away.

Devers began to march up and down in front of the building. He looked bulkier than the other AP because, although he was about the other man’s size, he was wearing another complete set of clothing under the borrowed uniform, complete to a snub-nosed .32 revolver in the hip pocket of the trousers. But to anyone passing by, or to either of the APs inside the building upstairs who might decide to look out a window, he would pass.

Webb drove straight for a block and a half, turned right for one block, turned right again, and parked. Meanwhile the AP had been put down in the aisle in his underwear and tied and gagged.

Stockton, wearing his hood and carrying his Sten gun, got out of the bus and moved away in the darkness like a long thin shadow. Three strides from the bus he was out of sight, these side streets being lit only by overflow from the lights at the intersections with the main avenues.

There was a second guard on duty behind the building, and this was who Stockton had gone after.

He brought him back three minutes later, a young scared boy, his face almost as white as his helmet. Stockton held the Sten gun in his right hand, butt braced against his hip bone, with the boy’s carbine hanging loose in his left hand.

They tied and gagged number two, left him in the bus with the first one, and they all moved off except Webb, who was to stay with the bus, move it if it seemed necessary and keep an eye on the two APs.

Parker led the way through the darkness. The sky was clear and full of stars, but they were only three days from the new moon, so that only a thin curved sliver, like a fingernail clipping in light, showed to mark where the moon would be a few nights from now.

They came at the finance office building from the rear, moved around it on the side between it and the other building on that block, and at the front corner waited, the others strung behind Parker, who watched Devers marching back and forth out there with the same stoop-shouldered fatalistic tread as the boy he was replacing.

Parker stepped around the corner, stood against the front of the building. He showed there as a dark man-shaped shadow against the stucco wall. His hood was on, the only pale thing about him were the rubber gloves on his hands. He moved these back and forth in front of himself, fingers splayed, until Devers saw the motion. Then he stopped marching, yawned, stretched, and walked over to the building entrance in the middle of the long front wall. He stood there and lit a cigarette, the signal that it was all right to come on.

Parker had Devers’ bootleg keys in his hand when he reached the door. He unlocked it and stepped through, stood just inside holding the door, and felt the other three slide in behind him. Devers, who had said nothing and who had looked ashen-faced beneath the helmet, field-stripped his cigarette and went back out to march up and down on the sidewalk some more.

Devers had given them complete maps of the building. Parker and the others moved without hesitation through the darkness to the stairs and up, their shoes silent on the metal stairs.

The door to the left at the head of the stairs had glass in the upper half. Through it, Parker could see two overhead globes lit, both down at the far end of the finance office; the one inside Major Creighton’s office and the first one on the right on this side of the Major’s office. The two APs on guard here were sitting at a desk under this second light, playing cards. They were about twenty-five feet from the door where Parker was standing, and the area between was lined with two rows of desks up to a chest-high counter which stretched across the room about six feet in from the door. To the left of the door was a bench for people who had to wait.

Parker used another key, opened the door with a faint click timed to happen when one of the APs was shuffling the cards, and, as down there under the light a new gin rummy hand was dealt out, Parker and the other three slid through the slightly open door and moved at a half-crouch to the counter. They straightened slowly and stood spread out there, Kengle and Stockton at the ends with the Sten guns resting on the countertop, Parker and Fusco in the middle with their revolvers in their hands. Ahead of them, the APs continued to be absorbed in their game.

A cord was hanging down over Parker’s head. He reached up with his free hand and pulled it, and the globe up there came on, flooding their end of the room with light.

The APs looked over, startled.

“Freeze,” Parker said.

One of them would have, but the other was a cowboy. He made a lunge for where his carbine was leaning against another desk, and Kengle’s Sten gun rattled briefly. The AP half-turned in midair, slid over the desk, and crumpled like used cardboard on the other side.

The shots shook the other one, who had frozen the way Parker told him to. He abruptly dropped out of sight behind the desk.

Parker said, “Don’t be stupid, son. You don’t want to die.” Nothing happened.

Parker nodded at Stockton, who was nearest the flap in the counter. He pushed it up, left it up, and went on through. Moving fast and silent, he went down along the rear wall, where he wouldn’t be seen by anybody passing in the street, and when he got to where the second AP had disappeared he waved to the others that it was all right.

When they walked down to him, they saw that AP number two hadn’t ducked, he’d fainted. AP number one wasn’t dead, but his breathing was shallow and his color bad. He had one hit in the left side, just above the waist, and one that had gone in his left shoulder and out his back above the shoulder blade. Fusco used some of the boy’s clothing to make simple bandages to stop the bleeding; they weren’t in a hurry for a murder rap. The law might think it looks as hard for every kind of felon, but it doesn’t. Just as the cop killer is tracked with more savagery and singlemindedness than is the ordinary killer, the ordinary killer in his turn is hunted more fiercely than is the robber.

Stockton used the rope and handkerchief he’d brought to tie AP number two, and even though AP number one looked to be out for it for the rest of the night, Fusco did the same for him. Meantime Parker helped Kengle out of the small knapsack he’d put on just before leaving the bus.

The knapsack contained tools: drill, various bits, screwdrivers, two hammers, a chisel, some other things. With it all, while Stockton kept an eye on Devers and the street and Fusco watched the two APs up here, Parker and Kengle went to work on the vault.

“Vault” was a little too grand a name for it, but on the other hand “safe” was too small a word. It was like a reinforced metal closet in one corner of the room, with a heavy rectangular vault door on it. There was no point trying to go through the wall, so Parker and Kengle concentrated on the door itself, on the combination lock and the hinges.

The hinges proved to be impossible to get at, no matter how they drilled. The weak spot was in the lock. With a combination of drilling and sawing they managed to remove it completely, leaving a hole they could reach into and get at the lock components on the inside. The whole job of opening the door took forty-five minutes.

When the door was open, they saw several metal shelves. The floor was higher than the office floor, because it was reinforced, and on it were two large metal cases, side by side, filling up the whole space. These were what the payroll had arrived in by air this morning. Parker and Kengle pulled them out and opened them.

Several of the shelves were lined with metal boxes, dark green, like long squared-off tool kits, and in each of these was the payroll for a different organization on the base. There was too much bulk and weight to carry all these separate boxes, so Kengle and Parker now went to work forcing each of them open and dumping the money into the larger crates. In each box, beside two or three stacks of bills with red rubber bands around them, there were always a few rolls of coins and a list from a computer giving each man’s name and how much money he was to receive. Only the bills went into the crates, the coins and lists being discarded with the boxes.

It took another half hour to unload all the boxes, and when they were unloaded the two crates were both about three-quarters full. It was now two-fifteen; they’d been at work an hour and a quarter. In that time, Devers had not had cause at all to high-sign Stockton. This part of the base was strictly offices, and deserted at night. And tonight, just before payday besides being a week night, there weren’t very many men with the money or inclination to be out for any reason. They had the area to themselves.

The crates had been pretty heavy to start with, being made of steel, and now that they were full of money they were a full two-man job each. Parker and Fusco took one, Kengle and Stockton took the other, and they moved out of the office and down through the blackness to the first floor.

Parker lit a match in the doorway, and when Devers saw it he stopped and shifted his carbine to port arms. He stood there, his back to the building as he watched in both directions, and Parker and the others carried the two crates out, hurried along the front of the building with them and around the corner into the deeper darkness between the buildings. Here they put them down to rest for a minute, and out front Devers went back to his marching.

From the side of the building to the bus was fast and easy, in solid darkness. Webb opened the door for them and they piled the cases aboard, then carried the two APs out and put them under some bushes at the side of a building across the street, where it was unlikely they’d be found before morning.

When they got back to the bus Webb had put the rear banner on again. They quickly put the side banners on and climbed aboard. Webb had discarded his fatigue jacket and cap and switched to his gold tunic. Now, as the bus started forward, the others got out of their hoods and black sweaters and put their own tunics back on.

Webb turned the corner, stopped for a second, and Devers swung on, grinning from ear to ear, “Beautiful,” he said.

“Get changed,” Fusco told him. It wasn’t over yet.

Devers quit grinning. He shucked out of the borrowed uniform, put his tunic on, and rolled the uniform and carbine and helmet and Webb’s fatigue cap and jacket into a ball. Webb stopped on one dark street and Devers went out to stow these things in a litter basket. Then they drove on.

By the time they reached the South Gate the money crates were stowed way in back, hidden by the musical instruments. The machine guns were back there, too, but the four revolvers were still in pockets, close to hand, when Webb pulled to a stop beside the AP shack.

The guard who came out was young and heavy-lidded. Webb handed the pass to him and the guard looked at it with sleepy suspicion. “You guys are leaving awful late,” he said.

“We were a smash, pal,” Webb told him. “They wouldn’t let us go.”

“Sure.” He waved them through, saying, “Okay, go ahead.”

“Right, pal.”

Out on Hilker Road they turned left and accelerated. There was no traffic anywhere. The speedometer touched ninety, and in under three minutes Webb slowed for the dirt road. This time he went up as fast as the road and bus would take it, not caring how much he jounced the contents or the passengers. Parker and the others clung to seat backs and got bounced around.

At the top, Webb stopped in front of the garages. Stockton ducked out to open one of the doors and Parker and Fusco and Devers and Kengle carried the two crates out and put them in the garage. While they were doing that, Webb turned the bus around and Stockton opened the other garage doors.

Devers said, “See you next week.” The plan was that he was to meet Fusco in New York in ten days to get his piece of the pie.