Seven Silent Men (60 page)

Strom said he could, took the gun Yates handed him, trained it down on Jez.

Yates unfastened a rifle from inside the prow gunnel. “Better kill the light.”

Strom placed his foot on Jez's chest, reached behind his back and snapped off the search beam.

Putt-putting echoed far off. So did the voice of someone singing “We're in the Money.” Light flickered in the darkness of the tunnel to their left. Putt-putting turned to the constant whirr of a motor. The lyrics grew louder.

Yates brought the rifle onto his lap.

The tunnel to the left filled with glaring light. The deafening roar of an outboard motor resounded. A rubber boat burst into view carrying Mule, Wiggles and Rat Ragotsy, all of whom were singing at the top of their lungs “We're in the Money.”

As they passed the dark recess in which Yates, Jez and Strom were hidden, Jez, in one fast move, shoved Strom's foot backward, knocking Strom down, and jumped up and into the black water. Hitting the water, Jez grabbed hold of a guide rope on the side of Mule's boat, yelled for Mule to get the hell going. Mule threw open the throttle. The boat lurched into the darkness.

Yates hurriedly arranged a dazed Strom on the floor, started up the motor. Seeing nothing but blackness ahead, he stretched forward and snapped the search beam on, stood up to follow the turbulence in the water ahead. The tunnel opened into a small water-filled cave, then a large cave, then into a wider, curving tunnel. Speeding into another cavern, he heard gunshots ring out. Strom, now recovered, snapped off the searchlight as Yates zigzagged the boat, reduced the power, followed the sound of Mule's roaring outboard motor. In the next stretch of tunnel, the light went back on. Gunshots ricocheted back off the tunnel walls.

Yates was gaining on the boat, around another turn in the tunnel momentarily caught sight of it … and caught a hail of gunshots. Strom answered the fire. They sped into a narrower maze of tunnels. More shooting erupted from ahead. Again Yates and Strom had to kill their searchlight, travel at halfpower.

Tunnels gave way to cavern after cavern, each wider and higher than the last. Colder too. Yates felt his fingers numb. Strom was shivering. But the caverns offered an acoustical advantage … Yates and Strom could now hear the motor ahead in the darkness more clearly. They briefly caught sight of Mule's boat. Yates threw open the throttle. Strom began to fire. The fire was returned. Mule's boat turned off its light. Strom turned on his search beam, sighted in on Jez kneeling down and firing back at them with an automatic weapon. Again Strom switched off the light.

The chase crossed more caves. Mule's boat was gaining speed, outdistancing its pursuer. Again Yates reduced power so he could follow the sound of the motor ahead of him in the middle of a grotto. The sound cut off. Yates shut down his motor as well. There was a slight current in the water. He let the boat drift. It bumped against the grotto wall, moved along the wall until an opening was found. Yates and Strom paddled through into what seemed to be a narrow corridor. Shafts of light flickered in the distance. Navigating toward it, they reached another opening and started in.

They floated out onto a vast underground lake spread across an enormous cavern. The walls had a pulsating blue sheen to them, a sheen that cast shimmering reflections onto huge mud stalactites hanging from the arching ceiling high overhead. At the far end of the lake was an island. On the island, and draped between odd-angled, truncated telephone poles, were string after string of glowing, low-wattage light bulbs. Running from the lights to a pile of industrial batteries that powered them was a frayed cable. Mule's boat was drifting just off the island. All four men in it, Mule and Jez and Ragotsy and Wiggles, were standing. Standing motionless as if frozen by what they were encountering. Drawing closer, Yates and Strom saw what that was.

Sitting cross-legged on the island, in front of the charred logs of a burnt-out fire and clutching canvas money sacks, was the decomposed corpse of Meadow Muffin Epstein. Jessup and Ragotsy noticed something else. So did Strom, who nudged Yates to look beyond the island and higher up, to look at the mud-crusted cavern wall curving up behind Meadow Muffin and the mud-covered ceiling arching down over the island. There, frozen in the mud, were the bodies of the remaining gang members … Bicki “Little Haifa” Hale and Reverend Wallace Tecumseh “Windy Walt” Sash and Thomas “Worm” Ferugli, each contorted in the final postures of struggling mortality. Embedded amid the corpses, like the treasure from some great Pharoah's tomb, were the artifacts of their last lost achievement, the tools of Mormon State … torn rubber boats and parts of a large log raft lashed together with strands of fusing cord and segments of outboard motors and sections of metal scaffold and shovels and picks and hammers and walkie-talkie radios and drills and thermos bottles and dollar bills and waterproof crates of dynamite and a shattered television monitor screen and a field telephone and a first-aid kit and a bottle of whiskey and cans of beer and bits of food and faded packs of cigarettes and pulpish leftovers of magazines and comic books or whatever else was read or looked at to kill some time while preparing for the heist. Tattered rubber wet suits and hardhats with plastic visors and hip-high fisherman's boots lent an eerie animation to the gigantic frieze of robbery and death, made it appear as if a cavorting band of specters, in parts and in whole, were performing some mad and ghoulish dance.

“Don't shoot,” Mule hissed out rather than shouted.

Yates looked down to see Strom standing beside him with a rifle raised at Mule and Jez. Their two boats had drifted within twenty feet of one another.

Mule waved his hands frantically and pointed to the ceiling. “There's nitroglycerin in them ceiling and walls.” His tones were still hissing and low. “Dynamite too. Enough to blow us all to kingdom come.”

Sunstrom, his gunsight alternating from Mule to Jessup and back to Mule, tried to control his rage, his hatred of the two men who had conspired to violate and murder his wife.

“We're in the salse,” Ragotsy, who was standing beside Wiggles and Jez, whispered urgently. “The heart of the volcano. Them blue lights at the other end of this place, them's from the salse. You don't need dynamite to send this whole place up. A sneeze can do it. Don't fucking shoot no gun.”

The image of Alice won out. Strom fired at his old friend, the man who had once kept him from seriously harming a SAC who had impugned his wife. Jez collapsed into the boat, his shoulder splintered. As he did, Wiggles ducked down, came up a split second later brandishing a submachine gun. Strom fired again. Wiggles dropped … and as he sank, his dead finger contracted on the trigger. The submachine gun fired into the air. Into the ceiling.

Something detonated. A chain reaction of explosions began, each one more powerful and shattering than the next.

Yates knocked Strom down into the boat, scrambled to the stern, jerked on the motor, sped across the lake as segments of ceiling began to fall … as dropping segments themselves began to explode. Mule, too, was speeding his boat through the subterranean holocaust, reached the cavern exit moments after Yates and Strom sped through. More explosions followed. Then came a rumble of terrifying proportions. A lateral quaking of untold immensity. The underground mud volcano, the salse, erupted.

The caves and tunnels through which the two rubber boats were fleeing trembled and shook, split at the seams in many places. Lightning flashed, thunder volleyed. Torrents of water, greater than any unleashed when the reservoir had been opened after the robbery, poured in. Long-dormant pockets of underground mud began to flow in avalanche enormity. A phenomenon known as “tunnel wind” occurred, sent gusts of up to sixty miles an hour whistling through the subterranean passageways.

The boats, one following the other, found themselves being swept along the rampaging waters at a dizzying speed. Yates concentrated on survival. Strom was obsessed with Mule … he waited and watched the lightning-streaked darkness behind him for glimpses of Mule's boat. Mule's boat, like their own, had the search beam on.

It was in a wide bend of tunnel that Strom found his chance. The other boat had been brought almost parallel with their own. Mule was at the outboard motor, holding onto a gunnel cord for dear life with one hand, trying to steer with the other.

Strom dove out across the darkness, caught Mule around the neck, dragged him down into the turbulent current, forced him under … tried to hold him there. Mule thrashed and twisted and broke loose long enough to get a breath. They were in the darkness and alone and being carried along at great speed. Strom was on Mule again, trying to pull him under, strangle him or drown him.

Abruptly the combatants were sucked backward and spun upside-down around a maelstrom and spat out into a side tunnel of shallow water. Mule ran off, splashing through the tunnel trying to escape. Strom caught him, punched him, again tried to strangle him. Mule somehow freed himself, trudged up onto dry concrete flooring, was hit by a small piece of tunnel roof, glanced back to see Strom coming after him, ran forward, dodging falling concrete.

Strom brought Mule down with a tackle, wrestled him over on his back, put his hands on Mule's neck and began choking. Mule had no strength left, could do nothing … began to die.

The chunk of failing concrete struck Strom squarely on the back of the head and instantly killed him. Mule didn't realize what had happened. Let Strom lay there motionless on top of him, thinking, hoping maybe the FBI man had changed his mind about murdering him. When Strom's fingers loosened and fell away from his neck, Mule realized something else had happened, soon determined exactly what it was.

Mule stripped Strom's pockets of money, a penlight, credit cards and an FBI shield, then went trooping up the unflooded tunnel. For a brief stretch the footing was dry. Then mud began to appear. So did the end of the tunnel and an electric light. The light was beside a metal door. Mule pulled it open, switched on a second electric light. He was in an underground supply room belonging to the water or sewerage company. He climbed onto a high concrete shelf and immediately fell asleep.

Yates's boat was rocketing through the sewerage tunnel under Prairie Port. Ragotsy, a wounded Jez Jessup and the corpse of Wiggles rode in the boat directly behind. They were traveling at breakneck speed and the water currents were growing faster. So was the water turbulence. Yates's craft was the first to capsize. The other boat overturned moments later. Yates managed to get to Jez, kept him afloat as they were carried along. He got a hand on Ragotsy too, tried to hold him up but couldn't, and in the dim lights of the sewerage tunnel watched him drown.

“… I'm sorry … I'm sorry,” Jez began mumbling. “I never meant for Alice to get hurt … for Strom to suffer …”

They were spat from the tunnel mouth, arched ten feet out into the air before dropping into the Mississippi River. Jessup landed badly, face first and where the currents were especially fast. By the time Yates reached him he had gone under once and was being carried downstream.

Yates attempted the rescue with a one-arm crawl. The current started pulling them backward. He told Jez to hold on to him around the neck so he could swim with both hands free.

“I don't have the strength,” Jez yelled.

“Just fucking
do
it.”

“So I can get hanged?” Jez clutched as instructed. Held on as best he could with blood pouring from the wound in his shoulder.

Yates battled the current. “Who are the Silent Men?”

“Never heard of them.”

“Who gave you your orders?”

“The Director.”

“Hoover?”

“Yes, he'd call and say what he wanted me to do … or sometimes an assistant called, but the Director always verified instructions.” Jez gasped for breath. “… No one wanted to hurt anybody, I swear to Christ, Billy … I was sent here to protect Ed Grafton … from the beginning, the Director wanted Ed protected, and I helped Strom way back when …”

“Who was the assistant who gave you orders from Hoover?”

“… Freddie … Freddie was the name we used … the voice was covered … could have been a woman … a secretary … who I thought it really sounded like was Sissy Hennessy …”

“Who did Hoover want you to protect Grafton from?”

Jez's grip loosened. “… Can't make it, Billy … can't hold on any longer …”

Yates felt Jez's fingers slip, grabbed back for Jez's arm … and missed.

Jez Jessup was sucked into the Treachery feet first and spun over … feet first shot on down the river, his face in the water and his arms outstretched.

Mule felt the coldness and opened an eye. His arm was hanging over the concrete shelf, and he could see that mud was encasing his fingers. He scrambled up on all fours and looked down. He was on a high ledge and everything below him was mud. The door across the room was already hidden beneath mud. And the mud was still rising. He crawled, swung around on the ledge, began pounding on the wall behind him, on the wall to his left. He shouted for help, kept shouting. The ceiling fractured and mud dripped through. The wall across from him cracked around the edges … began moving toward him.

BOOK

FOUR

TWENTY-SIX

From the moment he swam ashore, Yates had puzzled over what to report about Jez Jessup's complicity with Mule, Rat and Wiggles. It was almost inconceivable to Billy that J. Edgar Hoover would knowingly be party to such a conspiracy. Yet if it
was
true, if Hoover was involved, absolutely no one in the FBI would believe it … or anyone in the media … unless far more corroboration was available than Jessup's final watery statements.

Should the Hoover connection be deleted from the report, Yates still foresaw other problems. Any mention of Jessup's actual activities might reveal to the Silent Men that he knew even more about them and their plot … far more than when they had tried to kill him before and got Brew instead. Besides the danger to himself and Tina Beth this could incur, he was worried the Men might panic and withdraw, cover their tracks. He very much wanted the Men, and was fairly certain he had established a direct link between them and Mule, Rat and Wiggles: Freddie, the voice on the telephone. A voice that could possibly be female and belong to Sissy Hennessy. If Sissy was implicated, Cub Hennessy might be too. He doubted if Cub was a member of the Men itself, but he could be an ally. If he wrote a report eliminating Hoover but including Jessup's role, how could he avoid letting Cub see it? Cub was second-in-command of the residency. How could he avoid letting Corticun, whom he always mistrusted, see it as well? A third consideration was crucial to Billy's thinking: the raw facts themselves, without any mention of Jessup or Hoover, would be all that was needed to stop the fraudulent trial of Otto Pinkny. So he'd give up little and avoid possibly compromising himself by not telling the real story of Jez.