The Golden Gate (14 page)

The President had to make himself heard. After all, most of the so-called civilized eyes in the world were upon him. He said, with heavy sarcasm and a cold distaste: 'I'll wager you haven't paid for your TV set, Branson.'
"That's hardly relevant. The point is that I don't want to make you and your guests feel like second-class and deprived citizens. All the world will be able to see in close detail how we are going to attach the first of our explosive charges to one of the cables by the south tower and I feel it would be unjust to deprive you of the same privilege. After all, at a distance of over two thousand feet and an elevation of over five hundred feet, it would be difficult for even the keenest-eyed to appreciate the finer points of this operation. But the box here will show you everything you want' Branson smiled. 'Or don't want. Now, please direct your attention to the vehicle descending the ramp from the rear coach.'
They so directed their attention. What they saw could also b« seen on the TV set before them. The vehicle looked like a stripped-down, miniaturized golf-cart. It was self-propelled but silent, clearly electrically powered. The driver, Peters, stood on a tiny platform at the rear immediately over the batteries. On the flat steel platform before him was a large coil of very thin rope and, at the very front, a small, double-drummed winch.
At the foot of the ramp, Peters stopped the vehicle. Four men appeared from the rear of the coach. The first two were carrying an obviously very heavy canvas strap of explosives - similar to the one that Branson had earlier demonstrated on TV. This they deposited, very carefully indeed, on the vehicle's platform beside the rope. The other two men carried objects about eight feet in length: one was a boat-hook, the other an H-sectioned steel beam with butterfly screw clamps at one end and a built-in pulley at the other.
"The tools of our trade,' Branson said. 'You should be able to guess what they're all for but in any event this will be explained to you when they are put to use. Two things are of particular interest: the explosives and the rope. That strap of explosives is ten feet long and contains thirty bee-hives of high explosive, each five pounds in weight: the rope, which is a quarter of a mile long, looks, and is, thinner than the average clothes-line, but, as it is made of steel-cored nylon, has a breaking strain of eight hundred pounds which is exactly five times as much as will be required of it.' He gestured to Peters, who nodded, eased open the circular control wheel and trundled off in the direction of the south tower. Branson looked directly at the TV lens.
He said: 'For those of you who don't know, and apart from the citizens of San Francisco there will be many who will not know, those towers are something less than solid structures.' On the TV set before him and on countless millions of sets throughout the world, the south tower came into sharp, close focus. These towers consist of steel framework boxes called cells. Each is about the size of a phone booth, but twice as high, riveted together and connected by manholes. Each tower consists of over five thousand such cells. They contain elevators and ladders-a rather staggering twenty-three miles of them.'
He reached under his seat and brought up a manual.
'As you will appreciate, it would be very easy for the inexperienced to get lost inside this labyrinth. Once, when they were building this bridge, two men spent the entire night inside the north tower trying to find their way out and, indeed, Joseph Strauss, the designer and builder of this bridge, was capable of getting completely lost inside the tower. It was with this in mind that Strauss produced this twenty-six-page manual - well, not this one, this is a facsimile I was fortunate enough to come by-instructing inspectors how to find their way about inside the towers.
'At this moment, two of my men, each with a. copy of this manual - although they hardly need them, they're using the elevator - are at, or nearing, the top of the east tower there, the one facing towards the bay. They are carrying with them nothing except a fifteen-pound weight, the purpose of which you will shortly discover. May we observe the progress of our electric truck, please?'
The telephoto TV camera obligingly descended and closed on Peters, travelling along the wrong side of the bridge. Even as they watched, it slowed and came to a halt almost directly under the lowest of the four massive cross-struts of the south tower.
Branson said: 'Elevation, please.'
Again the telephoto camera focused on the saddle-the curved steel housing over which the cable passed-on the bayside tower. Almost immediately two men came into sight by the saddle, tiny figures for those directly observing from the middle of the bridge, close-up for those looking at the TV screens.
'On cue, on time,' Branson said with some satisfaction. 'In those matters, co-ordination is of the essence. I dare say that not one in ten thousand of you would care to be where those two men are now. Quite frankly, neither would I. One misstep and it's over seven hundred and fifty feet down to the Golden Gate: only a seven-second fall but at a hundred and seventy miles an hour hitting water is no different from hitting solid concrete. But those two are as safe as you would be in a church pew. Spidermen, they're called-the workers you can see standing on girders a thousand feet above the streets of New York or Chicago when they're building a new skyscraper.'
The camera closed on Peters again. He produced a pistol, unusual as to both length of barrel and width of muzzle, took brief aim upwards and fired. Neither camera could track nor eye see the nature of the missile ejected: what the camera did show, four seconds after firing, was that Bartlett, one of the men by the saddle, had a green cord safely in his hands. He reeled this in swiftly. At the end of the cord was a leather-hung pulley, which in turn was attached to one end of the rope. Two and a half minutes elapsed before the rope was in Bartlett's hands.
He held this securely while his partner, Boyard, undid both cord and pulley. Bartlett reeled in about another dozen feet, cut this section off with a knife and handed it to Boyard, who secured one end to a strut and another to the strap of the pulley. The rope was then passed through the pulley, through a hole at its top, to a pear-shaped lead weight which the men had brought up with them. Both weight and rope were then released and sank swiftly down to bridge level again.
Peters caught the weight, undid the knot that secured the rope but did not withdraw the rope. Instead he passed it through the pulley in the steel beam and a ring at the end of the boat-hook and secured all three together. He took a few turns of the other end of the rope round one of the drums of the winch and started up the electric motor.
The winch, though small, was powerful and fast. From bridge to saddle took less than a minute and a half. There was a gentle breeze blowing from the north, apparently freshening as the altitude increased, and the rope and its burden swayed quite noticeably, striking each of the cross-struts, at times quite forcibly, on the way up. Peters seemed unconcerned, his gaze fixed on Bartlett. As the rope and its cargo neared the top Bartlett made a horizontal waving motion of his arm. Peters eased the winch drum to a crawl. Bartlett made a slow upwards beckoning motion with his arm then stretched it out horizontally. Peters unwound the rope after stopping the winch, leaving only one turn on the drum.
Bartlett and Boyard pulled in the beam and boat-hook, detached them along with the lead weight, passed the rope through the pulley and resecured the lead weight. They then eased out the H-beam for a distance of about six feet then clamped the inner end to a strut, tightening the butterfly nuts to their maximum. Bartlett signalled Peters who took the last turn off the drum. Weight and rope sank rapidly downwards.
Two minutes later the rope was on its way up again, this time with the canvas strap of explosives which dangled at its full length, fastened to the rope by two heavy metal buckles at one end of the strap. Unlike the previous occasion Peters now moved with great caution, the drum moving very slowly and occasionally stopping altogether. General Cartland commented on this to Branson.
'Your winchman is trying to eliminate all sway?'
'Yes We don't want that strap of explosives to bang against one of the cross-struts.'
'Of course. I'd forgotten how sensitive fulminate of mercury detonators are.'
The detonators are in Bartlett's pocket. But the primers can be temperamental too. That's why we have that extended beam up top-to give clearance. Also, it's asking a bit much for even two strong men to haul a hundred and sixty pounds -not a hundredweight as you estimated, General-over five hundred feet vertically upwards."
They watched the explosive safely negotiate the second top cross-strut. Cartland said: 'So it's one strap there, one on the opposite cable and the other two at the north tower?"
'No. We've changed our minds on that. We suspect that the suspension cables-and don't forget that there are over twenty-seven thousand spun wires inside that steel sheath -may be considerably stronger than the mock-up we used for the test. So we're going to use all four explosive straps at the south tower, a pair on each cable. That will leave no margin for doubt. And if the south end of the bridge falls into the Golden Gate it seems reasonable to expect that the north end will follow suit. Whether the north tower-don't forget it will then be bearing most of the weight of the four-thousand-two-hundred-feet span-will be pulled down too we haven't been able to determine but it seems pretty close to a certainty.'
Van Effen took two quick steps forwards and clicked off the safety catch on his machine-pistol. Mayor Morrison, half out of his seat, slowly subsided back into it but his fists were still tightly clenched, his eyes still mad.
By now, Bartlett and Boyard had the boat-hook round the rope and were steadily, cautiously and without too much trouble, overhanding the explosives in towards themselves. Soon it disappeared out of the range of the telephoto TV camera. So, immediately afterwards, did all of Bartlett except for head and shoulders.
'Inserting the detonators?" Cartland asked. Branson nodded and Cartland gestured to the section of the cable nearest them. At that point, in the centre of the bridge, the cable dipped until it was almost within arm's length. 'Why go to all that immense labour? Wouldn't it have been easier just to fix the charges here?'
'Easier, yes, but there's no guarantee that severing the cables in mid-bridge would bring the bridge down. There's no way of knowing: what's for sure is that no one has ever carried out a control test or experiment on this sort of thing. Suspension bridges come expensive. If the cables were severed here the towers, as far as weight is concerned, would still be in a fair state of equilibrium. Bridge might sag a little or a lot, it might break but it wouldn't drop the whole span clear into the water. My way, success is guaranteed. You wouldn't expect me to charge two hundred million for a botched-up job, would you?'
General Cartland didn't say whether he would or he wouldn't.
'Besides, if things go wrong, that is, if you turn out to be stingy with the money, I intend to trigger off the explosives immediately we take off. I don't want to be within half a mile of six hundred pounds of high explosives when it goes up.'
The President said carefully: 'You mean the triggering device is aboard one of those helicopters?'
Branson gave a patient sigh. 'I've always maintained that all Presidential candidates should undergo an IQ test. Of course it is. In the nearest one. What did you expect me to do? Press a button inside a coach and then go down with the coach and bridge to the bottom of the Golden Gate?'
Branson removed his disbelieving gaze from the President and returned it to the TV screen before him. Bartlett, with Boyard steadying him, had the canvas strip wrapped round the cable, hard up against the saddle and was buckling tight the second of the two straps that held the strap securely in position. That done, he moved back along with Boyard to admire their handiwork. The camera then left them and zeroed in on the section of cable wrapped in the lethal embrace of the high explosive.
Branson smiled broadly. 'Well, now, isn't that a perfectly splendid sight?'
Cartland remained poker-faced. 'It all depends upon your point of view.'
SEVEN
Vice-President Richards switched off the TV set. He looked thoughtful, shocked and concerned all at one and the same time. When he spoke, those emotions were reflected in his voice.
'That was a remarkably effective performance. One has to confess that our villainous friend appears to know exactly what he is about and has the total ability to carry out his numerous threats. At least, that is how I see it, but I'm just a newcomer to the scene. Do you gentlemen see it any differently^'
The Vice-President was a tall, genial, loquacious southerner, much given to slapping-one could not call it clapping -the unwary rather painfully on the back and was an internationally-known gourmet, a fact amply testified to by his ample figure. He was far from being the nincompoop Hagenbach had alleged - Hagenbach's opinion stemmed from the fact that theirs were two totally differing personalities: he was forceful, shrewd, intelligent and was remarkably well informed on a very wide range of topics: if he had one fault it was that he had, unlike Hagenbach, a consuming desire for power. Branson had hardly been exaggerating when he had suggested that a yearning look came into Richards's eyes whenever he entered the Oval Office in the White House.
Richards looked, without much hope, around the company assembled in the office of the hospital supervisor. Hagenbach, Hendrix and the two Secretaries sat around a small table. Newson and Carter, as if to demonstrate the exclusivity of the highest echelons of the military, sat at a second and smaller table. O'Hare, arms folded and leaning against a radiator, wore the wry, slightly amused, slightly condescending expression that most doctors reserve for all those who are not also doctors. April Wednesday sat, quietly and alone, in a corner chair.
From the silence that followed it was clear that none of the gentlemen present saw it any differently.
Richards's geniality yielded to a certain amount of testiness. 'You, Hagenbach, what do you propose to do?'
Hagenbach restrained himself. Even though he was the head of the FBI he had to pay his due respect, albeit lip-service respect, to the Vice-President.