The War Heist

by Ralph Dennis

  Captain McGuire lowered the Webley to his side. He reached across his body and lifted the holster flap with his left hand. He shoved the revolver deep in the holster as Private Black said, “Captain … there.”

  McGuire looked up and saw a man who’d just jumped from the tailgate of the truck. He carried a Thompson in one hand. A big man, an agile man. He didn’t hesitate. He ran directly for the tracks. For an instant it seemed that he might turn the Thompson on McGuire and his detail. He didn’t. He threw the weapon away and took a sharp turn to his left. He jumped from the road to the track bed and sprinted toward the darkness.

  A young soldier was still on one knee in front of Captain McGuire. Bracing himself against the pain McGuire limped forward. He grabbed the young soldier’s rifle and swung it to his shoulder. He sighted down it and took in a breath and let out half of it. He squeezed the trigger and felt the recoil slam the butt against him.

  Like an echo to his round a shotgun boomed from the road to the captain’s right.

  It was better in the flop hotels in New York.

  It was better mugging drunks when you needed a few dollars.

  Damn Mr. Arkman for playing cards with cowboys.

  But he was going to make it. Harry Churchman was nobody’s fool. He didn’t play with people who used shaved cards.

  The dark shadows were right ahead of him. He was going to make it, and twenty years from now he could tell people about this Canadian adventure he took once against his better judgment.

  Fools. All fools.

  And then a mountain fell on him.

  Two forces appeared to strike the running man at the same time. He was pushed forward and, at the same time, he was slammed hard to his left. He seemed to trip. He tumbled away into the darkness.

  “Here, son.” McGuire lowered the rifle and passed it to the kneeling soldier. From behind him, Private Black moved forward and offered him a shoulder.

  As Captain McGuire hobbled toward the stalled truck he looked over his right shoulder and saw Duncan MacTaggart crossing the tracks.

  Except for the dirty raincoat he looked like a Scots gentleman out on a morning shoot.

  Private George Cooper thought that all the action had passed him by. The whole night he’d done nothing but stare at the entrance to the waiting room.

  When he heard the firing close by he thought, it ain’t over yet, and he forgot his post and ran toward the road. He reached the sidewalk in time to watch the truck hurtle from the road onto the far sidewalk and ram against the brick wall.

  With his back to the depot, intent on firing at anyone who tried to leave the truck, he did not see the tall angular man with dark hair. The man ducked low around the back corner of the depot. A fleeting look at Private Cooper’s back and the man headed in the opposite direction, to the west.

  The sound of his footfalls was covered by the boots of the soldiers who trotted past Private Cooper and lined up beside the truck.

  The first soldier to reach the Bulldog jerked the sliding door on the driver’s side. It slid open. He grabbed the arm of the man behind the wheel and pulled him into the light. One look at the head wound and the soldier released him and let him tumble into the road at his feet. He backed away and gagged.

  The man in the center of the cab was huddled forward, as if he’d tried to lower himself to the floorboards for protection. A second soldier replaced the one who’d walked away. He leaned across the seat and grabbed the man under the arms and dragged him from the cab. When the soldier lowered him to the road, there was a hisslike breath from him, and his lips moved. The soldier bent down and turned an ear toward his lips.

  Captain McGuire dropped his hand from Private Black’s shoulder. He stood over the young soldier. “What did he say?”

  The soldier turned his face toward the captain. “He said something about a mine.”

  “A gold mine?” MacTaggart lowered the shotgun and tapped the butt on the sidewalk. “That’s presuming.” He walked around a couple of soldiers who were staring into the truck cab. A look at the third man, the one on the far right, told him that he was past help. “Leave him,” he said. “He’s not going anywhere.”

  He backed away from the truck and squatted over the man with the bull neck and the wide shoulders. The man’s eyes were open and they flickered at MacTaggart.

  “Who are you?”

  The man closed his eyes. Breath hissed out of him. Before MacTaggart could repeat the question the man died.

  The Frenchman’s black 1940 Cadillac was parked in the driveway of the old seed-and-feed building. Clark Gipson leaned on the dusty hood for a couple of minutes while he got his breath back to normal.

  He staggered to the double doors and tried them. A heavy padlock rattled in the hasp.

  He yanked at the lock. He could feel the screws give in the rotten wood. Some, but not enough. He released the padlock and returned to the Cadillac. He felt around in the back seat. Nothing to pry with. He found nothing he needed in the front seat either, but when he gave the sun visor a shove, the car keys fell at his feet.

  He unlocked the trunk. The jack handle he found there was the right tool. One heave at the lock and the hasp pulled away from the splintered wood.

  The kerosene lamp hung from a nail on a rafter. He lit it and adjusted the wick. He carried the lamp to the side of the building where the bags and suitcases were stored. He located his bag and unstrapped it. One quick dig through it and he realized he didn’t have a clean undershirt or a shirt. He tossed his bag aside and moved on to the next one. A look at the size of the shirt and he knew it was Harry’s suitcase. There was no way he could wear one of them.

  The third suitcase was imitation leather. He opened it and stared down at the contents. Banded bundles and bundles of money. Ones and fives and tens. He remembered the bag. The last time he’d seen it Captain Whitman was carrying it. It was, he realized, what was left of the money they’d taken from the bank in Renssler, New York.

  Clark closed the suitcase and buckled the straps. He placed it beside the lamp.

  With the next suitcase he was in luck. He recognized a green shirt that he’d seen Vic wearing a few days before. The undershirts were a couple of sizes too large, but they were clean. He peeled away the bloody one he wore and pulled on one of Vic’s. He added the green shirt and made a few tucks in the side so it didn’t bag.

  After a last look around the building he carried Captain Whitman’s suitcase and the lamp to the doorway. Nothing else he needed. He snuffed out the lamp and placed it on the floor. He went out and closed the double doors.

  The Cadillac engine kicked over the first time. It purred. As he backed down the driveway he had a look at the fuel gauge. There was a quarter tank of gas.

  He drove north.

  MacTaggart stood in the road beside the boxcar and waited for Captain McGuire. He’d retrieved the sawed-off shotgun that belonged to Telford, and he held it in the crook of his arm and watched the flicker of the flashlight on the far side of the freight car.

  It wagged, it swept, it hesitated, and then it switched off. MacTaggart listened to the thump-thump of the butt of the rifle that McGuire used as a crutch.

  The captain stopped at the edge of the road. He placed the rifle in front of him and clasped the barrel with both hands. He stared down at the road.

  “Who were these people?”

  MacTaggart shivered at the rage in the other man’s voice. The pain, too. He felt the same pain in his chest that he knew McGuire was suffering. It tightened across his chest until he could hardly breathe. And then, MacTaggart realized that Captain McGuire was crying. It was not a woman’s crying. The rage, the grief, and the pain mixed and churned in the captain. It poured out of him in coughs and sputters and gasps.

  MacTaggart walked away without looking back. A man had the right to some privacy when he cried for his dead.

  AFTERWARD

  By midmorning the next day the damaged rails on the east and west approaches to Wingate Station had
been replaced and the track bed restored.

  The original freight car, scarred by grenade fragments and explosives and .45-caliber fire, still had the hotbox problem that had placed it on the siding. MacTaggart requested a baggage car as a replacement. It arrived in time to test the rails east of town. While MacTaggart had a bath and a nap in a room at the Wingate Inn Hotel, an Army working party transferred the two hundred bullion cases from the two Mack Bulldogs. In the late afternoon MacTaggart climbed aboard the baggage car. Two armed guards from Railway Express joined him. The sliding doors were locked from the inside, and MacTaggart kept the key. After an hour’s wait the next scheduled train heading west took the baggage car as far as Montreal, where it was shunted to an express bound for Ottawa.

  It was a long trip, a nightmare journey, with one man sleeping while the other two had the duty. Eight hours on and four hours off was the way it worked out. MacTaggart took his rest breaks, but he didn’t sleep. He allowed himself to relax only after the baggage car reached Ottawa and the gold was hauled away to the vaults at the Bank of Canada on Wellington Street.

  The Canadian government’s official version of the events at Wingate Station was in the papers and on the radio the next day. A fire and related explosions had created one of Canada’s worst rail disasters. A train transporting troops, ammunition, and aviation fuel was rammed by a truck at a Wingate Station crossing. The newspaper account celebrated the exploits of members of a Canadian Army unit aboard the train. One officer and twelve enlisted men died while fighting fires and attempting to unload a boxcar of ammunition and explosives that overheated as flames raced the length of the train. Seven American tourists died in the same disaster. They’d joined with their northern neighbors in the heroic struggle that contained the fires and kept the whole town from being razed.

  Through other channels, however, the American State Department was informed of the real nature of the deaths of the seven Americans. The State Department had no explanation for the excursion across the border, and it was argued that it was obviously an isolated outlaw action that should not spoil the good relationship that existed between the two countries.

  Six Canadian civilians perished at Wingate Station as well. Two died in the truck that rammed the passing train and initiated the disaster. Three more were tourists from Montreal. The final civilian death was that of a respected local lawman, Constable Lafitte. The confusing story he’d told townspeople about night Army exercises was explained away as a well-meant lie that was intended to keep townspeople away from the dangers at the train yard.

  MacTaggart was to pass through Wingate Station three more times. His next journey through, certain that it would be his final one, he sat at a coach window and looked for the scars of the nightmare. Most of them had disappeared. It amazed him what some rebuilding and a few hundred gallons of paint could do to disguise the horrors of only a week before.

  He arrived at Halifax only to learn that his trip east was not for the purpose he believed. He was not in Halifax for transportation back to England. Instead, he was billeted at the Nova Scotian Hotel in a room fit for an admiral and told to await his orders.

  On July 13 a second shipment arrived from England. Six British ships of the line, including a battleship, H.M.S. Revenge, and a cruiser, H.M.S. Bonaventure, formed the escort. Three refitted passenger liners, Monarch of Bermuda and Sobieski and Batory, the last two of these Free Poland ships, carried the consignment. The cargo, of which $773 million was gold bullion, had a value in excess of a billion dollars.

  MacTaggart assisted with the security. It took five trains to transport the gold and securities across Canada. Departures from Halifax and the arrivals at Montreal and Ottawa were scheduled over a five-day period so that the cargo could be unloaded during the late-night or early-morning hours.

  This time he passed through Wingate Station while locked in a baggage car. It was a cloudless night and all he saw of the town was a glow of lights. Darkness and then the glow and then the darkness again. It could have been a passage through hell, he thought.

  He remained in Ottawa until the end of July.

  When his orders came he was booked space on a local. It stopped in every town that had a depot. He was not surprised when the schedule called for a ten-minute layover at Wingate Station. It was high noon when MacTaggart left his coach and walked along the platform. He stood in the doorway and stared into the waiting room. A new coat of paint covered the walls, and the newly replaced window panes had already collected an ageless layer of dust and soot.

  Across the tracks to the southeast the huge doors of the roundhouse were wide open. A crew of workers swarmed over the sides of a locomotive. If anything had happened at the siding three or four weeks before, there was no sign of it now.

  His orders called for passage to England by the next available transport. Within a week he sailed from Halifax on a troopship, Lady of the Highlands. After a stop at Iceland to unload troops the liner reached the River Clyde without incident.

  The first Sunday in September Duncan MacTaggart married Peggy Sloan in a civil ceremony in London.

  Turbeville, South Carolina, in 1940 wasn’t a town or a village. It was a crossroads with a couple of stores, a cotton gin, and a tobacco warehouse, where the auctions were held in July and early August.

  In the early fall of 1940 a young man arrived in Turbeville. He drove a black 1939 Ford sedan, and he wore a new black suit that he’d bought at J. C. Penney’s. There wasn’t a hotel in Turbeville. The young man took a room in the hotel in Sumter, a short drive away, and people got used to seeing him in Turbeville almost every day.

  He seemed to be interested in land. Often he was seen driving slowly along the highway, or his Ford would be parked on the shoulder of the road, and he’d be standing, deep in thought, at the edge of the field.

  The piece of land that appeared to interest him the most belonged to Addison Malachi Turner, “Uncle Ad” to his friends and neighbors. People thought of Addison as a bit of a wild man. He was a deeply religious person, and his friends said that it was his own business if he wanted to let his hair grow long, all the way down over his collar.

  In season Uncle Ad sold the vegetables he grew on the farm from the back of his truck. He was in Sumter most mornings, six days a week. Sunday was the Lord’s Day, and he didn’t even allow cooking in his house on Sunday.

  Nobody seemed surprised when they heard that Uncle Ad had sold the young man the ten acres of land that was across the highway and half a mile down from the Turner farmhouse. The land was cleared, and some people thought that Uncle Ad had taken advantage of young Mr. Gipson. The land was dead played out, those people said.

  The fall was mild that year and the foundation and the framework were completed on the highway side of the ten-acre plot by the first of November. The building continued with a full crew on the job and with payment for labor and materials cash on the barrelhead. The structure was, onlookers said, large for a house, and there was a running debate about what the young man intended to build. One lady said it looked like a schoolhouse.

  The curiosity was satisfied in early December. A brick mason worked all morning one day putting up some kind of brick framework in front of the building. It was about four feet high and five feet wide and it faced the highway. The sign and the plate-glass cover arrived two days after the brick mason finished his work. The sign had been painted in Sumter. The plate glass came all the way from Columbia.

  THE CHURCH OF THE LORD JESUS CHRIST THE REDEEMER AND THE FORGIVER

  PASTOR: REV. CLARK GIPSON SUNDAYS AT 11:00 A.M. AND 6:00 P.M.

  The first service was held on the Sunday before Christmas. More than a hundred people, Methodists and Baptists, crowded into the church that morning. They sat in the newly painted pews and smelled the paint and the fresh wood, and they stared at the dark-haired young man who leaned on the unpainted pulpit. Young Mr. Gipson was perspiring even in the cold, and his face was the color of bleached flour.

  Uncle Ad had a
rrived early and had taken the front pew. With him were his wife and his granddaughter, Edna. Edna was just back from her first semester at Winthrop College in Rock Hill. She was a plain girl with long black hair and the luminous glow of thyroid eyes.

  “I am a sinner,” Pastor Gipson said. “And all of you are sinners, too.”

  A lengthy, brittle silence followed the opening statement from Pastor Gipson. The joints in the new pews creaked as the gathering of farmers and their families became restless and shifted in their seats.

  The pastor’s mouth opened, it closed, and it trembled open again, like a beached fish gasping for air.

  “Amen,” Uncle Ad Turner shouted from the front pew. “Amen, Pastor.”

  Young Mr. Gipson stared down at him. His expression was a mixture of shock and confusion.

  Next to Uncle Ad, dressed in a dark skirt, a white blouse, and a dark sweater, the school uniform for Winthrop College, Edna Turner smiled shyly at the new preacher.

  And then the Lord God touched his tongue the way he knew He would.

  From the Montreal Star, August 31, 1945:

  POLICE GUARD RICH CARGO

  VALUABLE U.K. SECURITIES LOADED ON SHIP HERE

  More than 1,000 cases containing millions of pounds worth of British securities, sent to Canada in 1940 to avoid possible capture by the Germans, were packed aboard the British cruiser, H.M.S. Leander, in port here today under close R.C.M.P., naval and harbor police guard. The vessel is leaving shortly for England.

  A British warship brought these British assets here in June, 1940. They comprised millions of pounds worth of securities that had been collected by the British Government from private owners under their finance regulations, and a lot of gold. The gold was sent to the Canadian mint and to Fort Knox in the United States for storage.

  The hundreds of thousands of stock script securities were stored in the specially built vault in the Sun Life Building, 50 feet below street level. R.C.M.P. men were kept on duty guarding the securities.