The Big Thaw (38 page)

“Well, we better hurry,” said Hester, “whatever we do. I do know that those little bastards are about as busy as they can get, moving that money into the trucks. We aren’t going to have much more time, and we need the fog on our side for a while. I don’t know how long that stuff will last.”

Sally informed us that the chopper with the TAC team would be above Frieberg in two minutes. They reported zero visibility really near us, but could land on the bridge deck, which was above the fog ceiling.

Volont had been getting hold of himself gradually, since Gabriel’s first call. He began to speak with his old decisiveness.

“Have them set down on the bridge.” He indicated the playground that had been built for the kids who came with the gamblers. Summer only. “A two-man sniper team to the bridge ramp where they can command the best exit from the bank. Four to the boat. Have Alpha Chase pick ’em up. Leave the rest with the chopper.” He smiled. “Wouldn’t want anybody to steal our Huey.”

“I think they might be done at the boat,” said Hester. “We’re gonna need a decision pretty soon…”

I really thought that Volont was ready to take out the trucks. I really did. And he might have, if Gabriel hadn’t had another little surprise for us.

“They’re pullin’ their ramp away from the boat,” said Hester. “I counted seven suspects coming off with the last load. They’re all getting in the van.”

Suddenly, there was a loud, double-cracking sound. It was accompanied by what looked to be a momentary ripple in the fog all around the
General Beauregard
. Weird sight.

“Jesus!” said Art. “They’re sinking it!”

“No … no … no, they’re not! Not yet, anyway.” Hester pointed, but I couldn’t make out what she was looking at. Not at first. But, then, as I watched, I could see the bow of the
Beauregard
slowly pull away from the pier, as the boat herself slipped slightly sternward, with the current. They had blown off the bollards and cleats from both ends of the boat. The thick cables attaching her to the pier, with no grip on the boat, slowly slid off her open weather decks and dropped into the icy waters of the Mississippi.

“Where can she go?” I asked.

James watched, horrified. “There’s sort of an ice-free area around the hull… warm water from bilge pumps, stuff like that. She can go a ways out into the water, but she’ll hit the ice in a little ways, and stop, I think…”

As he spoke, the stern of the
General Beauregard
disappeared into the fog, while she came around by the bow. She stopped, her bow about 100 feet from the riverbank, and about 90 feet from the pier. Out of reach. No engines to propel her.

Art said something that, in other circumstances, would have had me rolling on the floor. “That rotten bastard really does think of everything.”

“It’s time to do something,” said Volont. “We can’t let him call all the shots…” He moved Sally aside, and picked up her mike. “Alpha Mobile, get down to the intersection and block off the street before the bank. Alpha Chase, do the same on the cross street and keep that stretch van where it is.” He fumbled for a second. “How the hell do I talk to the fire trucks on this thing?”

Sally pressed one of the frequency keys.

“Fire units, bring a truck into the exit from the bank parking lot and stay there. Use any auxiliary light you have to shine on the building. Bring a truck to the boat landing, to the dock, and park there and try to keep the public away. Shine your floodlights toward the boat.” He looked at Sally again. “Now the police cars?”

She pushed another button.

“We need some units to block the bridge approach, some to surround the bank.” He took a deep breath. “We need three or four squad cars to block the road north and south of Frieberg. And Twenty-nine, Twenty-nine, you go to the bank and provide support for the fire truck.”

That was good. That was very good. The north-south road through town was bordered by bluffs for two or three miles each way. No side roads. No turnoff except to a vacant summer dock area to the south. No way to go around a roadblock.

And 29 now had something useful to do.

Actually, it looked like it was just a matter of whether or not the cop cars could get here before the bank trucks were ready to pull out with all the money.

I watched Volont give Sally back her microphone. “Try for some ETAs for us, see when the cavalry is going to get here,” I said. “And make sure Conception County has the other end of the bridge blocked.”

Her answer told me she was still in top form. “Get me some coffee, would ya?”

I did.

What was happening now was that Gabriel’s little army was actually being shown the opposition for the first time. We should begin to find out what they were made of real soon. I was betting on jelly, at least for the majority.

The growl of an engine, and the sound of the chopper blades as the Huey settled down on the bridge deck was a nice effect. We couldn’t see them, of course. Neither could Gabriel and his people. But the noise was unmistakable.

None of us could see anything moving or changing at the bank, but at the boat, the headlights of the stretch van moved slowly up from the dock. Apparently, they saw the fire truck and the two TAC team agents from Alpha Chase blocking the road and the agents taking cover with their M-16s. The stretch van simply stopped. They didn’t appear to have taken this development into consideration. Just what we intended, and just as I thought. Amateurs. Finally, I thought, things are beginning to move in a direction we’ve chosen.

Volont spoke into his secure radio. “This is Volont. If the van advances, you are authorized to use deadly force to prevent its leaving.”

The van promptly backed up.

“What the hell…” was Hester’s first reaction.

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” said George.

Art comprehended last. “They can hear us!”

Not only hear, but understand. They’d cracked the scrambled code of the secure radios.

“Well, now we know what they really needed all the computers for,” I said. Another fucking surprise. Did his own download from the code banks. Slick. “Where did the FBI get those secure radios?”

“GSA, I suppose,” said George. “Where the government shops…”

“From the Army,” said Volont. “Via the NSA development people. Damn.”

Gabriel, as an Army Special Operations soldier, quite likely was familiar with those radios before the FBI even purchased them. Even I knew that much.

“We’d better let the troops know,” said George.

“Wait a second. If he doesn’t know we know…” Volont was up to his old tricks.

“No.” George glared at him. “No games. He’s smart, and he knows. We have to tell our own people.”

Volont came up with the ultimate leader’s cop-out. “Then you tell them.”

George knew it. Hell, George was an MBA. George had had all the “corporate think and manipulate” classes you could name.

He reached in his jacket and pulled out his walkie. “CP to all units. The security on this frequency has been compromised. Repeat, this is no longer a secure frequency.” He replaced his walkie-talkie, and looked out the window toward the boat. “There.”

“Well,” I said, “there goes my chance to say ‘fuck’ on a radio.”

The phone rang. Sally put us on the speaker phone as soon as she realized it was Gabriel.

“Didn’t think you’d have the balls, Agent Volont. I planned for the eventuality, but I really didn’t think you had them.”

“Life,” gritted Volont, “is full of surprises.”

I didn’t think that was a particularly good choice of words, all things considered.

“Oh, it is,” agreed Gabriel. “Indeed. Now, I’d recommend getting your people out of the way of my people, or we’re going to be producing victims.” He paused, and then chuckled. “By the boatload, as it were.”

Volont’s face was several shades lighter than normal, but he stood his ground. “Completely counterproductive. Victims mean bad publicity. Victims mean no money for you. Victims, and your goals are done. Gone. Because with victims, we take out your whole team, and the horses they rode in on.”

Yeah. Me too.

“I think I’ll tell the crew to hand out the life jackets. You have five minutes,” and the line went dead.

“… ‘tell the crew to hand out the jackets,’” said Hester. “He
is
on the boat.”

Nice.

Volont spoke to James of boat security. “All right. Get all your rescue units up and running. All lifeboats, all rescue craft. We’re going to need them in a very short time.”

James stared, and then barked out a laugh. “All available ‘rescue’ equipment is on that boat, out there. Two thousand PFDs and one sixteen-person inflatable boat.”

“What?! What’s a PFD?”

“Personal flotation device. A little half-assed life jacket that looks like a piece of gym mat with straps. As for ‘units,’ it’s fucking winter, mister. The three rescue launches are in storage, with the oil drained out of the motors. They can’t run on ice, anyway. That’s all we have.”

“My God,” said Volont.

“It’s just a damn riverboat,” said James. “In a river that’s thirty feet deep. We meet all the Coast Guard requirements, and we don’t put out from shore in the winter. What do you expect?”

“We can round up about a half-dozen iceboats,” said Sally. “Maybe ten people each … but it’ll take time…”

“Get on it! Jesus H. Christ, life jackets and a rubber boat!” Volont turned to George. “Get over to that Huey and see what sort of good they can do us in a rescue.”

“You might as well let me give you all the bad news at once,” said James. He did. If a passenger used a life jacket, in the water out there today, they would live about fifteen minutes. That was, if the current didn’t carry them under the ice. If they were to be recovered after ten minutes, since the average gambler was about fifty-eight years old, they would likely still die of exposure. The nearest hospital was in Conception County, across the bridge. They had two ambulances. Frieberg had two ambulances. Our entire county could muster another six. By calling in everything available, and declaring an extreme emergency, we still wouldn’t be able to get more than a dozen ambulances to Frieberg in the first hour.

With twelve ambulances, at eight to ten minutes per trip, into an ER that held six, into six hundred and fifty passengers in the water, meant that more than six hundred of them would be dead in fifteen minutes. But that was assuming they went into the water.

“How deep is it out there?” I wanted to know.

“Winter depth we’ve never really looked at…” said James. “It’s low. Probably lower. That’s for sure.”

I picked up a phone book. “Anybody mind if I call the lock and dam? To get the depth?” Nobody did. I got the lock master, and he had the data in about a second. They could only give me the main channel data, and the general river stage at Frieberg. They said it was fourteen feet.

I motioned James over. “How much does the boat draw? Like, how deep does she sit in the water?”

He thought for a second. “I’d have to check to make sure, but I think it’s seven or eight feet.”

I grinned. “Really … Look at this.” I showed him the figure fourteen, underlined. “That’s the current river stage data from the lock and dam, with the measurement taken by the robot sensors under the bridge, here. So it’s the depth of the water about five hundred feet from the
Beauregard
.” I thanked the master.

I went over to Volont, who was on the phone to the Coast Guard station in St. Louis. He was quite exasperated, from the tone. He hung the phone up, and almost ran into me as he turned. “What?”

“I might have the first surprise for our side, I think. Look at this.”

“Wait … what?”

“That’s right,” I said. “If the sensors are accurate, if she sinks, she goes down six or seven feet. And stops on the bottom.”

“What’s going on?” asked George.

“If Gabriel blows the bottom out of the boat, the people on the lowest casino deck are just going to get their feet wet.” I handed him the paper.

The phone rang again, and I expected it to be Gabriel. Nope. It was Lamar, for me.

“What the fuck is going on down there?”

I told him, being sure to get in the good news about the water depth.

“I thought you told me this was going to be a simple goddamned bank robbery at five goddamned banks?”

I explained the part about the five locations. How it all fit the information we had. Just in a different way. “Neater ’n shit, Lamar, you think about it…”

“‘Neat’?”

“Well, yeah.” I explained just what we had in as positive a light as I could. Not easy. I also said that we appeared to have Gabriel pretty well bottled up, and with a TAC team and a Huey, it was virtually impossible for him to escape. And this time, we even had his photograph.

He decided to come down.

“Before you do, Lamar, be sure to get a couple of people on Nola’s sister’s place. Linda Grossman’s. If we would miss him, for some reason, that’s where he might go.”

“‘Miss him’?! ‘Miss him’?! If that son of a bitch disappears this time, all of you better disappear right along with him!”

I thought that was a little unfair. But the message certainly was clear.

Volont was apparently encouraged by the river depth. He was on the no longer secure radio. “Alpha Chase, you clear to take out some tires on the stretch van?”

“Roger that.”

“Stand by…” He turned to me. “Come on, Houseman. Let’s go down by the tracks.”

We hurried out of the pavilion, down into the deepest fog I’d ever experienced. We headed due east, and stopped just behind the big fire truck. In the intense light from its big halogen floodlights, we had a pretty good view of the stretch van. Just sitting there, filled with very still shadows. Several of them.

Volont picked up his radio, and gave the order to shoot out the tires on the van. “Do it.”

I’d never seen that before. It was a bit of a disappointment, really. There was no discernible firing, either visually or audibly. Just a popping sound. The front and rear tires on the right side of the stretch van just went flat. Instantly. I think I might have seen a little bit of dust or something, or maybe just rapidly condensing air as it blew out of the tires. Very unremarkable. But now the little group in the van was totally screwed. Their vehicle was immobile. The only other refuge had been the boat, which was now across about a hundred feet of icy water. The concrete area they were parked on offered no cover whatsoever, for at least twenty yards in any direction.