In the end he knew it was the only chance he was going to have—one last grab at the brass ring before they shut down the merry-go-round. And so after all the panic and all the considerations of what might go wrong, he stayed with it.
9
Thursday night—H-hour minus eighteen—the Major gathered them together in the log-paneled front room for a precombat pep talk. Walker, who was scared but had made a kind of peace with himself, sat in one of the leather captain’s chairs and lifted his pack of cigarettes out of the bicep pocket of his leather flight jacket. His chin stung a little—a tiny nick from a nervous morning razor—and the tooth cavity was giving him trouble, but he felt surprisingly good: alert, anxious to start; confident and balanced like a halfback who, expecting to be rammed, intended to stay on his feet regardless.
He lit the cigarette and watched the Major open the long brown case and display the guns they would use.
“The shotguns will make them nervous. We want them scared. Baraclough and Hanratty carry these because they’re the two who’ll be in front holding everybody still. Burt and I will take out the armored-car guards; we’ll need our hands free for the spray cans so we’ll carry these revolvers. Walker stays with the car, he won’t need a weapon. Burt will stay with the guards in back until he gets my signal, and then he’ll come around the side of the building to the car. As soon as we’ve taken out the guards I’ll go into the bank and Steve Baraclough will come across the tellers’ fence with the duffel bags. The two of us will stuff the bags while Hanratty stays by the door and keeps the room covered with his shotgun. Any questions?”
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 planned nicely to arrive in San Miguel not more than twenty minutes ahead of time so as to spend as little visible time there as possible, waiting for the plane to land on the highway beyond town.
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 running twenty minutes behind schedule and he had to push the old kluge up to its maximum—and a hick cop had pulled him over.