“What are we hearing from the downtown banks, Wes?” Bednarski demanded. “Have they checked in yet this morning? Yes, just give me Key Bank, Huntington, National City—the big ones.”
“Please hold, sir. I’ll check.”
A moment later, the duty officer spoke up again.
“We have nothing from them, sir,” the officer replied. “You may want to send messengers over there. Each of the banks you named is within a few blocks of your current location.”
“Which one is closest?” Bednarski demanded.
“That would be Fifth Third Bank. It’s right next door to you on Superior. National City and Huntington are two blocks south, at East Ninth and Euclid.”
Bednarski thanked the Guard officer for his briefing and led the DSS team outside. As they made their exit, he ordered Linder to visit the National City Bank and report right away by radio, while Denniston was to drop in on the Huntington.
Linder set off at a fast jog down East Ninth and had to take care to avoid slipping on the treacherous layer of broken glass. When he reached the entrance, he was surprised to find no troops or policemen outside. The lobby was deserted, though it showed signs of fighting. By radio, he asked Bednarski to find out from the Guard officer at the Fed where he could locate the vault.
“Find the central stairwell and go down two flights,” the officer told him. “It should be somewhere under the lobby.”
Linder did as he was told but, upon hearing an odd murmur from behind a closed door, opened it to find a room full of bank employees lying bound and gagged on the floor. He immediately set about cutting the plastic loop restraints that bound the employees’ wrists and ankles, then left his knife with one of the freed employees and followed another to the main bank vault and the safe-deposit boxes.
Nothing could have prepared Linder for the shock of what he saw when he entered the anteroom to the main vault. He had expected to see the massive steel door swinging open or perhaps even blown off its hinges, and the cavernous vault picked clean. But the main vault door remained securely closed. Instead, a gaping hole had been blasted in an adjacent wall. Not only had the main vault been emptied, but the safe deposit vault had been breached, as well, and every individual safe deposit box drilled open and looted. The floor around the safe deposit boxes was a complete mess, strewn ankle deep in non-negotiable documents like property deeds, wills and trusts, birth and marriage certificates, along with empty envelopes and containers that had once held cash, gold, jewels and negotiable securities.
For several minutes, Linder remained speechless as he waded through the debris. Then he turned to his escort, a bank officer who appeared equally dazed, and asked the question that bothered him most.
“How did they get in?”
“Underground,” the banker replied. “They left the same way, with everything they could cart out.”
“When?”
“Two or three hours ago.”
As Linder surveyed the chaos, loud static burst forth from his two-way radio.
“Linder here,” he answered.
“Are you inside?” Bednarski asked.
“I’m in the safe-deposit vault. We’re too late.”
“Why? What’s there?”
“It’s what’s not here,” Linder replied. “The rebels blasted their way into the main vault and breached every last safe deposit box. They came and went underground without anyone noticing. It’s a clean sweep.”
Bednarski kept the transmit button on his radio depressed while he cursed aloud.
“What do you mean, underground? Are you talking tunnels? Sewers? Subways? Nobody over here told me anything about any goddamned tunnels. Fred!” the chief bellowed, apparently addressing an aide within earshot, “get that FEMA guy back in here! And send one of your people down to where Linder is and find out how the bastards did it!”
Then he addressed Linder.
“Does anyone know where the tunnel leads to?” Bednarski demanded.
“Not yet,” Linder said. “Until a few minutes ago, everyone here was all lying bound and gagged on the floor.
“Well, find out," Bednarski ordered. “We need to intercept the sons of bitches. Fred, get the Coast Guard back on the radio again and tell them to watch for any suspicious vessels leaving the waterfront.”
“Chief, stand by,” Linder interrupted. “I have a question for you. When you spoke to the Coast Guard, did they say whether the rebels attacked the Guard base and got away with any captured weapons?”
“That’s a negative,” Bednarski replied. “The rebels never breached the perimeter.”
“Did they attack the Guard base in force or might it have been a feint?”
“I see what you’re getting at, Linder. You don’t think the weapons were ever their target, do you?”
Linder chose not to reply. Instead, he asked, “Has Denniston checked in?”
“He’s been trying to get through,” the Chief of Base answered. “Stand by and I’ll ask him.”
While he waited for Bednarski to get back to him, Linder combed through the litter on the floor. Among the discarded papers were pieces of jewelry that Linder thought exquisite but that apparently were fakes or otherwise failed to meet the thieves’ standards.
A few moments later Bednarski’s voice came back over the radio. His tone was somber.
“That was Denniston. They hit his bank the same way. Safe deposit boxes and all. Clean as a whistle.”
“And I’ll bet you ten to one that these aren’t the only two banks they hit,” Linder replied. “It looks like we’ve been duped. While our forces were defending the Fed and battling a bunch of suicidal fanatics in the Terminal Tower, the insurgents pulled off the greatest bank heist in American history.”
S10
Don’t believe, don’t fear, don’t ask. Camp saying
LATE DECEMBER, CAMP N-320, YUKON
The pickup truck that was to take Linder to the camp’s disciplinary unit was an hour in coming. While Linder squatted in the snow outside Bracken’s office, he tried to recall what a veteran prisoner had told him one night at dinner about life in that dreaded troop. Lately, the veteran had said, the disciplinary unit had been working to clear the Point, a rocky outcrop that lay in the path of a proposed logging road leading to a virgin spruce forest north of the camp. Owing to a shortage of bulldozers, the unit’s task was to clear unwanted rock using explosives, picks and shovels. The work was backbreaking and the pace unremitting. The disciplinary unit was the only work team required to work a twelve-hour day every day of the year, using headlamps or floodlights during the long hours of winter darkness.
When the pickup arrived, Linder’s two guards flipped a coin to determine who would ride in the back with the prisoner and who would ride in the heated cab with the guard dog and its handler. The loser muttered a curse before climbing into the cargo bay, kicking Linder to move aside so he could sit with his back against the cab to dodge the wind.
“Make a wrong move and I’ll blast you,” the guard warned as he padlocked Linder’s shackles to a steel rail that ran along the side of the pickup’s cargo bed.
The pickup had difficulty on the rutted logging road, fishtailing as the driver gunned the engine to maintain forward momentum. When they reached the edge of the spruce forest, the road leveled slightly as it emerged onto a narrow shelf that hugged the side of a canyon wall. The pickup was now a hundred feet above the canyon floor where a frozen creek wound its way among jagged rocks.
The truck rounded a bend and the icy road narrowed, becoming scarcely wide enough for a big log hauler to get past. Linder, who had a pathological fear of heights, prayed that the driver would slow down and that the truck’s studded tires would hold through the curves.
A quarter mile further on they came to a shelf wide enough for the pickup to turn around. The truck stopped.
“This is it,” the guard ordered as he dropped the tailgate and opened the padlock that held Linder fast.
Linder followed the
guard off the truck and around the next bend in the logging road. Some fifty meters ahead, he spotted a scattered herd of slow-moving scarecrows in filthy orange coveralls. Some swung picks against the jagged rock face, while others pried apart boulders with iron staves, shoveled loose dirt and stone into rubberized canvas hods, or dragged crude sledges laden with debris to the edge of the road before dumping it into the ravine below. The only modern equipment in sight was a diesel generator connected to a bank of floodlights.
At ten-yard intervals along the road, wood fires blazed in perforated oil drums but not a single prisoner warmed himself, as these were reserved for the guards. A feeble-looking gray-bearded prisoner shuttled between the fires and a disorderly woodpile to stoke the flames.
The guard led Linder past the fires to the command hut and put his head inside the door. Moments later a solidly built man of average height emerged wearing a Russian-style fur hat and a government-issue parka with the insignia of a captain in the Corrective Labor Administration. The man’s face was hard and lean, with intelligent brown eyes and an inquiring expression. Linder guessed his age to be in the mid-thirties and guessed that this was Holzer, the Camp Security Officer, who presided over the disciplinary unit.
“Captain Holzer, Sir,” the guard announced. “The Deputy has another one for you. Special orders.”
“Okay, you can go, Sergeant. I’ll log him in.”
Holzer turned to Linder.
“From the new convoy?” he asked.
“Yes, Captain,” Linder replied.
Holzer gave Linder a quizzical look, as if annoyed by Linder’s response. At once Linder realized that, though his response was formally correct, his tone had been that of addressing a peer, not a superior.
“What’s your name and sentence, prisoner?” the captain demanded.
“Linder, first name Warren. Life at hard labor for seditious conspiracy, espionage and sabotage.”
“Party member?”
“Expelled.”
“What the hell is a ex-Party member doing in the disciplinary unit? Didn’t Bracken’s people talk to you about work assignments?”
“I told Bracken he could assign me wherever he liked.”
“Hold on a second—you’re not the one from…”
“State Security,” Linder answered. “But that’s history. I don’t want special treatment.“
“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Holzer replied with a wolfish grin. “You can start with those rocks over there. Otherwise, work begins when the trucks drop you off in the morning and ends twelve hours later. You’ll get bread and hot water at the worksite around midday. Leave the perimeter for any reason and you’ll be shot without warning. Is that clear?”
Linder nodded.
“Then get started.”
For the rest of the day Linder joined a crew of six men assigned to fill sledges with loose rocks and to pull the sledges up the road to a spot where they were tipped into a ravine. By the end of the first hour, Linder’s calloused hands were bleeding where jagged rocks had cut through his threadbare gloves. By sunset, shortly before four, the muscles in his shoulders and thighs ached miserably. By the end of the workday at six, Linder could barely make it down the road to where the trucks were waiting to take the men back to camp.
The next day Linder joined the same rock-hauling team. By now, he was anything but surprised at the lack of team spirit among the men. While each did his share of the work, there was little talk and no effort to develop rapport with one another. On the contrary, squabbles broke out over the most trivial matters and several of these ended in fistfights. But the combatants were so enfeebled by malnutrition and exhaustion that the fights usually subsided quickly without posing a mortal danger. Even so, it alarmed Linder that neither the guards nor other prisoners ever separated the combatants.
From time to time, Linder crossed paths with Rhee, who had been assigned to a pick-and-shovel crew at the opposite end of the worksite. Rhee looked no better than Linder felt, but seemed to pull himself together whenever he noticed Linder watching him. By his third day with the disciplinary unit, Linder noticed that Rhee seemed to quarrel with someone every afternoon. The former soldier’s eyes grew darker and more intense with each day, and he glowered at anyone who dared make eye contact with him. Still, Linder did not give up the idea of reconciling with Rhee and greeted him daily as if nothing had come between them. Each time Rhee looked at Linder as if he, and not Rhee, were the madman.
On his fifth day in the unit, Linder passed by Rhee’s work crew while they were attempting to free a half-exposed boulder from the wall of frozen earth surrounding it. Upon noticing that Linder was watching, Rhee swung his pick with fanatic determination. Though the tool was not light, he took powerful swings and would not stop to rest. It was an astonishing show of strength for someone in his weakened condition. Then, without warning, the pick fell from his hands and hit the ground with a dull thud. Rhee stood with legs splayed and swayed for a moment before his knees collapsed and he dropped face first onto the frozen earth.
Linder dropped his hod and ran at once to Rhee’s side. While the prisoner’s teammates stood by with vacant expressions in their eyes, Linder removed a glove from the man’s cold hand and pushed up the sleeve to lay bare the wrist, then held the wrist against his ear to listen for a pulse. He listened hard but heard nothing but his own racing heartbeat. For the next minute or two, he sat atop Rhee and compressed the center of his chest with the heels of both hands at a vigorous rate in an effort to revive him.
But it did not take long for a pair of guards to come along and pull him away. At their order, Linder stood aside while another prisoner lifted Rhee’s inert body by the armpits and dragged it to the side of the road. A supervisor would come by before long to check his pulse once more. If Rhee revived, he would be sent back to work or taken to the infirmary. If he died, his burial would consist of four prisoners swinging his naked corpse by its arms and legs into a ravine. Trembling and out of breath, Linder hoped for Rhee’s recovery, but quickly picked up his hod and went back to work under the kicks and curses of his captors.
Later that evening, it dawned on Linder that he had been wrong to expect any sort of camaraderie among the prisoners in the disciplinary unit and just as wrong to have expected friendship from Rhee. Friendship, he realized, could not thrive under such desperate conditions. Its foundations must be laid in better times, before misery and hopelessness robbed men of their last vestiges of emotion. Once firmly established, friendship could survive extreme hardship. But any hardship that allowed the bonds of friendship to take root and flourish, he thought, was not truly profound. In the disciplinary unit, hunger, exhaustion, extreme cold, and deliberate cruelty combined to create a level of hardship guaranteed to extinguish even the most heroic friendship.
On Linder’s seventh night in the disciplinary unit, a storm blew through camp, leaving behind two feet of new snow and a mass of frigid Arctic air. The next morning, en route to the worksite, Linder looked out from the truck upon hills that glistened in the moonlight like glowing sugarloaves. Even though the truck’s arched tarpaulin sheltered him from the wind, the cold squeezed his chest with a vise grip and made it difficult for him to breathe. When he spit, the phlegm froze in mid-air.
Upon arriving at the Point once more in the pre-dawn darkness, Linder despaired of surviving a twelve-hour workday in such cold. But no sooner did he utter a dejected sigh than he heard a faint tinkling sound and looked up to see a million tiny crystals sparkling in the moonlight. The sound reminded him of the first time he experienced his frozen breath falling to the ground and realized now that this magical whispering of stars was the sound of frozen dew falling to earth.
A few moments later, Holzer announced that, for today only, the prisoners would be permitted to gather around the oil-drum fires for warmth during the last five minutes of every hour. The guards grumbled at this, complaining that the fires belonged to them and not the prisoners, but they grudgingly move
d aside each hour when the whistle blew. The concession could not have come at a more critical time for Linder, nor from a more unlikely source, and aroused in Linder a profound sense of gratitude.
Yet this humane gesture stood out in stark contrast to the unrelenting callousness of the guards. These young men, representing every region of the country and every ethnic group, though certainly not every socio-economic class and worldview, seemed to have been so brainwashed as to perceive no commonality at all between themselves and the prisoners. As if to prove the point, not long after Holzer’s announcement, Linder overheard fragments of a conversation between a senior guard named Dorsey and a civilian contractor claiming that lax treatment of prisoners was counterproductive because it lowered their output and made them soft and lazy.
“You could give these loafers steak dinners and a sauna every night and it wouldn’t improve their work a damned bit,” Dorsey declared between sips of coffee from his insulated mug. “I think there’s some sort of chemical reaction that goes on in their brains once they’ve been out here a few months. Once it happens, that’s it, they’re worthless.”
“I’ve seen lots of work gangs in my time, but I’ve never seen rejects like these,” the contractor agreed. He was a stout fellow in a full-length sheepskin coat whose porcine face bore the rosy traces of past frostbite. “Judging by their output on a day like today, it’s a total waste of government money to go on feeding them.”
The senior guard, also of hefty build, nodded his assent and felt compelled to add an insight of his own.
“Anybody who hasn’t spent a winter up here just doesn’t get it. The thing is, once prisoners reach this stage, the cold is the only thing capable of squeezing work out of them.”
Dorsey pointed to the prisoners huddled around the nearest fire.
“Just look at them. The cold makes them wave their arms and stomp their feet, whether they feel like working or not. On days like today, all we have to do is put tools in their hands and we have a fair chance of getting some work out of them. Without the cold, forget about it.”
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