Relentless

They had been over it a dozen times; nobody spoke. Walker saw how cleverly the Major had worked out the assignments. The Major figured the weakest links were Hanratty and Walker. He had to assume that because he had combat experience with the other two. So he was leaving Walker out in the car where he wouldn’t cause trouble and he was sending Baraclough into the front of the bank with Hanratty so that at no point would Hanratty be alone. Hargit himself would be taking out the armored-car guards in the back room because that was the trickiest part of the operation, neutralizing those armed men, and he would have Burt with him because Burt was almost as accomplished a jungle fighter as the Major was himself. The two of them weren’t likely to have much trouble with a crew of hick truck guards.

For himself, Walker had no objection to the arrangement. He had no desire to hog the limelight or the action. Sitting in the car was fine with him.

The Major put the guns away and zipped up the case. “You all know the operation depends on timing. They’ll be setting off alarms, we can’t stop that, and we’ll have no more than four minutes to get in and get loaded and get out. But we’ll do fine as long as everybody does his own job. I don’t want to have to kick ass every half minute—if anybody hangs back too long he’s going to get shot dead because we can’t afford to leave any of you behind alive to talk. I guess you understand that.”

It wasn’t a threat. The Major wasn’t the kind who made threats. He made logical statements and trusted that everybody could see the logic.

Walker felt chilled. He had begun to wonder why he had got along at all with Hargit during the Vietnam thing. At the time he had regarded the Major with respect and admiration—Hargit had been a bit of a legend out there. Now he saw that Hargit was as cold as any human being could be.

It wasn’t that Hargit had changed; it was only, Walker thought, that war gave men a common enemy, it threw them together so that men with nothing in common created between them a temporary brotherhood which was not false, but conditional. Now the conditions had changed and Walker was no longer a bystander to Hargit’s feats but a part of them, and he understood why the men who had served under the Major had been terrified of him. With the Major around you didn’t have to worry about the enemy, or in this case the police; you had to worry only about the Major, because if you made one slip you were finished.

“By this time tomorrow night,” the Major said amiably, “we’ll be crossing the Idaho mountains into British Columbia and we’ll all be rich men. We have three automobiles staked out in the trees beside the runway up there. Baraclough and Sergeant Burt and I will take our share of the money and one of the cars. The other two cars are for Hanratty and Walker, and personally I don’t care where the two of you go from there. By the time either of you gets a chance to blunder into trouble the rest of us will be halfway, to Africa. But let me repeat one warning. Arizona still has the death penalty. I don’t want anybody killed. I don’t even want anybody bruised. They’ll forget the money but there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

At the time the warning had not meant very much to Walker. He didn’t expect anybody would get killed.

10

There had been a hitch that had almost soured the whole thing but Walker hadn’t found out about it until afterward, when Baraclough had told them about it.

Baraclough had cruised through San Miguel on Thursday afternoon to have a last look around. Everything looked calm and he had driven across the plateau and up over the mountains to Fredonia to spend the night in a motel. There was no point hanging around San Miguel overnight because someone later might remember having seen him there; it made sense to drive a few extra miles and spend the night elsewhere. There would be plenty of time to drive back to San Miguel Friday morning and Baraclough had it pla

Only when he’d gone out after breakfast to drive away from the Fredonia motel, the Lincoln had refused to start.

By that time the rest of them were already airborne out of Reno and Baraclough didn’t have a radio to make contact with them. He spent a few minutes angrily poking around under the hood of the Lincoln and finally determined the trouble was in the fuel pump. Nothing serious, but it would have taken time to get it towed to a gas station and even then there was not much chance this town would have the right parts in stock.

In a town that tiny it wasn’t easy to boost a car. Baraclough had spent almost an hour in fruitless exploration and by the end of it he felt clammy and slightly panicky, sweating in the cool mountain air.

Finally the old Buick came down out of the pines and stopped at the curb and Baraclough watched the driver get out carelessly, leaving the keys in the car. The man walked half a block and turned into a café. Baraclough crossed the street and looked in through the window—if the man was just having coffee it wouldn’t work.

The man was putting on an apron and going around behind the short-order counter.

Baraclough walked up the street, got into the Buick, drove back to his motel. He had a bad ten minutes there; he parked the Buick around the side of the motel where nobody was likely to see it, but he had to make several trips to transfer all the gear from the Lincoln into the Buick and that was hard to do without looking like a thief.

When he drove out of town he kept his head down and hoped no one would recognize the Buick or notice a stranger was driving it.

Nobody raised any alarums but by then he was ru

“I’d have shot the son of a bitch but he had a partner back in the car. Anyhow it takes a special kind of stupidity to leave dead cops around.”

On his way into San Miguel he had watched the power lines and when they began to diverge from the highway he pulled off into a side street to follow them; tossed his rope over the high lines, tied both ends to the Buick and pulled the cables down.

Then he had driven straight through San Miguel, glancing at the bank as he passed it. It was just about lunchtime and there was quite a crowd of workers streaming into the place. That would subside by one-thirty or so and then the next mob would appear about three o’clock when the shifts began to change. They had settled on two o’clock as the best time to hit the bank.

He had sped through the fringe of hills, emerged on the flats and pulled over opposite the crescent grove of scrub the Major had singled out two weeks earlier. Baraclough had got out the wirecutters and portable chain saw and taken down forty feet of roadside barbed-wire fence. Then he’d pulled the power lines down and driven the Buick in through the hole in the fence, jounced across the flats and concealed the car behind the grove.

By then the drone of the Apache’s twin engines was an insistent buzz in his ears and when he stepped out of the Buick he saw it making a sweep along the highway and pulling up and turning a slow gentle circle. Then he saw the stake-bed truck meandering along the highway.

The plane had to circle for ten minutes while three more cars and trucks went by. Then Walker had climbed for an altitude search, swept the highway in both directions with his inspection, and put the Apache into a fast nose-down descent. He made a quick low S-turn to come in final on the pavement and set the Apache down in a short landing which jarred the passengers but took the minimum time. He had judged the distance well; standing on the brakes he had the speed down sufficiently to make the nose-wheel turn into the gap in the fence and taxi straight across the flat, around the edge of the grove and into the little hidden pocket in back.