Gangway! (19 page)

    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.