The Storm Maker

by Sid K

  Vanx would give the orders to State Minister Tonex to fulfill Boss’s demands.

  CHapter 2 – it’s all about the cash

  08/10/958

  On the national road between King Starryvk City, Capital of the Starfire Nation and Port Skazvyt, about three-fourths of the way from the later and one-fourth from the former, is a town by the name of Ironbridge. There used to be an iron bridge there along with one bridge keeper living nearby in a two room house. That was the extent of settlement when the bridge was built. Today the bridge has been replaced with one made of steel and cement, because it was now part of the national road; the settlement has increased to thousands and thousands of people. The right exit ramp just after the bridge while driving southwest towards the Capital led to the central road that ran smack in the middle through Ironbridge.

  In Ironbridge, a young man dressed neatly in a gray shirt and dark blue pants with a same colored hat and a shotgun slung over his shoulder, stood in front of the Helvyk National Bank awaiting the arrival of his manager. He had gotten up early today, way earlier than usual, because today was a special day at work. The bank behind him was three stories tall; with a wide front gate made of light golden colored glass while the walls of the bank were cream colored; rectangular slabs ran across the entire outside perimeter of the building where one floor separated from another. In front was a neatly maintained lawn split into four squares. There was the central town street, then a sidewalk and two squares of grass split down the middle for customers to walk up to the gate. In between the street and the front door was another small street, a two-lane one-way road where the bank manager and the higher ups on visit could conveniently park. Another two squares of grass separated that reserved private street from the door.

  The manager pulled up in his car and parked it on that street. The manager was a man in his late thirties with well combed hair and was wearing black suit and pants with black leather shoes. He got out and rushed to the front door.

  “Good morning sir,” the young guard said with an early morning smile and then yawned a bit.

  “Feeling sleepy huh?” the manager asked as he took a key from his pocket.

  “It’s seven o’clock now, two hours earlier than the regular bank day,” the guard said. “Too early,” he said and took out a key of his own.

  The manager turned his key in the door and said, “It’s only once a month that we open this early. We have to count all the cash, count it twice, and track it to the accounts and transactions. A lot of this work has to be done by seven this evening when the armed truck sent by headquarters will arrive to take the monthly cash to the big vault in the Capital.”

  “I suppose once a month I can be bothered,” the guard said and turned his own key. The front door only opened when both the manager and the guard keys were inserted and turned.

  “Look at the bright side of this bright morning,” the manager said as he opened the door. He turned around and pointed to the four young bookkeepers walking up to the bank. “Those bookies have to work from seven in the morning to seven at night doing all the counting and accounting. You just have to sit back and watch.”

  The manager entered the bank, followed by the guard and the four bookkeepers. In the front were five counters and the tellers would arrive at nine o’clock. The guard walked to counter furthest to the left, pushed the half sized swinging door and put his shotgun on the counter. There were only three tellers on hire at this branch and the guard had made the fifth counter his own corner.

  “Sir, mind if I get a coffee?” the guard asked, “just down the road.”

  “Sure,” the manager said. “By the way, I brought my pistol with me. Today is the only day of the month I do.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t be more than five minutes,” the guard said and went to get his coffee.

  The manager and the bookkeeper went inside to the inner room behind the counter desks and the manager used a special key and a number combination to open the lock to the cash vault. They kept the cash that was needed for each day’s transactions in the counters with the tellers, but all the extra cash that was deposited was locked in this vault. Once a month it would be driven by the armed truck to the main vault at the bank’s headquarters. But before it went, the branch had to provide a full accounting of it signed by the manager.

  As the guard walked out of the coffee shop located across from the bank just a block away, he noticed a car parked in front of it. Two men sat on the front seat reading newspapers. He was surprised to see a car parked there this early. Most stores and offices did not open till nine and no workers would just sit around in the car. Suspicious, he walked closer to the car and looked inside as he walked by. The two men did not appear to be Starfirians. They were perhaps tourists, he thought to himself.

  He crossed the empty road and as he walked up the street to the bank front door he turned around and looked again at that car . It was still there motionless. He went in and took his seat behind his counter, put the coffee down next to the shotgun and leaned back on the chair. He tapped on the gun, smiled, then drank his coffee.

  The three bank tellers, all women, came at nine and the first customer walked in ten minutes later. The business today was the usual pace. Four to five customers would be in the bank at any time. The manager and the bookkeepers were busy in the back doing their cash counting.

  When the afternoon rolled around there were twelve customers in the bank, taking advantage of their lunch hour to conduct their banking business. The guard, who had been sitting and playing cards with himself all morning, was debating his choice of lunch meal when both the doors crashed open.

  Two men with automatic rifles rushed in pointing their guns as they yelled "Don’t move" to a suddenly panicked crowd. The guard had reflexively grabbed the shotgun from the countertop when the doors had been slammed open and he fired two shots into the nearest bank robber, dropping him to the ground. He scrambled to reload his shotgun while the second robber opened fire on him and dropped him dead. His gun hit the floor with a thud while his body slumped over the counter with blood dripping down.

  A couple of women screamed. An elderly counter lady started sobbing—she had known this young man for quite a while. Four more armed men rushed in, pointed their rifles at the crowd and shouted for them to shut up. The bank manager had heard the shots and commotion and he came out of the back room with his pistol drawn. He fired four shots at one of the bank robbers instantly killing him. Two robbers turned around and unloaded at the manager whose body flipped around violently at the hailstorm of bullets and fell down dead with a spin.

  “Damn,” one of the bank robbers said, “this is a bad start; two dead already.”

  “You two get the crowd against the side wall,” another one said, “then execute our plan.”

  Two robbers corralled the twelve customers and the three bank tellers toward the left wall and had them sit down with their backs against the wall. The remaining two bank robbers went to the vault where the bookkeepers were sitting distraught at the table. They had thought better than to come out. The vault door was closed but not locked. One of the robbers opened the vault door while the other one escorted the four men out to the front lobby at gunpoint and herded them with the rest of the hostages.

  “Alright, you two take your positions as we had planned,” he said to the other two. “While he gets the money, I will watch the hostages and the front door.”

  The two of them nodded and headed towards the staircase.

  * * *

  The Ironbridge police chief was having a breakfast in the police cafeteria. He had just finished drinking his coffee and was on the last of his three sausages. At the table with him was an elderly policeman reading the newspaper and a police clerk working his way through his omelet. Half a dozen other policemen strolled around with their breakfasts, chatting. Their regular conversational murmur was broken when the police chief’s secretary rushed into the cafeteria.

  “Sir, they are calling f
or you upstairs,” she said to the chief. “There are reports of gunfire at the Helvyk National Bank.”

  “Reports or rumors? Did the bank manager call in?” he said calmly as he ate his sausage. It could have been boys setting off firecrackers nearby and he did not want to alarm everyone before proper confirmation came in.

  “Shopkeepers on the central road opposite to the bank called in,” she said, “but nobody is answering the phone at the bank.”

  “I will be up in a minute,” he said taking his last bite. “Meanwhile, send a patrol car to the bank to find out what is going on.””

  * * *

  The robber took a key from the dead manager’s pocket and went to lock the front glass door. Just as he turned the key and locked the door from inside, he saw a man in a suit walking on the sidewalk turn towards the bank. They both looked at each other through the glass and for a moment both of them froze. The customer saw the rifle in the robber’s hand as the robber fumbled with the key. The man turned on his heels and ran screaming as the robber turned the key, opened the door and let loose a volley of bullets at the fleeing man. Suddenly he sighted a police car two blocks away. The patrol car turned on its siren and gunned straight for the bank.

  The robber sprayed its windshield with bullets. The car braked hard as the two policemen ducked, then jumped out and took cover behind their car. They pointed their Lockyett repeating rifles towards the door and one of them reached inside for his radio. Meanwhile the people on the street had quickly disappeared and the shops and the stores had dropped their shutters.

  * * *

  The police chief had just walked over to his office when the police radio crackled loud and clear.

  “The patrol car came under automatic fire,” his secretary said, rushing into his office.

  “Automatic fire, damn,” the chief said. “We have got a syndicate on our hands here.” He walked outside where the policemen had left their desks and were grabbing rifles and shotguns from the gun racks. He looked at the patrol chart that was nailed to the wall. Counting himself, he had a total of fifty-nine policemen with him in Ironbridge; out of them, twenty had night duty and would be sleeping in their homes by now. That left him with thirty-nine to deal with these robbers and still maintain a constant patrol in the town.

  “I don’t have an account in that bank,” the police chief said, “Anybody know the physical lay about of that place? How many doors, windows and all that?”

  “I do,” a policeman holding a shotgun came forward. “I live nearby and have my account there. There is only one large glass front door on the first floor facing the central road. No other doors or windows on the first floor. There are two big windows each on the second and the third floor above the door. The left and right sides of the bank are windowless concrete walls. In the back there is a single window in the center on the third floor, rest is all wall in the back as well.”

  “I am going there myself,” police chief said, “and taking fourteen of you with me, including you,” he said to the policeman who had volunteered the information. “We have twelve patrol cars on the town, direct three to the back of the bank to watch that window and send two cars to meet the one we already have in the front. Tell them to hold their position and not attempt anything till we reach there,” he said to his secretary.

  She nodded and rushed to the police radio to dispatch the orders to the patrol cars. The police chief checked his pistol and then said, “Let’s go.” Fourteen other policemen ran out with him, carrying their repeating rifles and shotguns.

  The police chief and his team reached the bank in sixteen minutes. Three police cars had already taken up position in front of the bank with six policemen with rifles drawn positioned behind the cars for cover.

  “What has happened since you got here?” the police chief asked as he took out his pistol and walked up to the first patrol car that had arrived. The rest of the policemen parked their cars and took their positions behind them with all of their rifles and shotguns aimed at the front door.

  “Just as we turned on this street,” one of them said, “we saw a man shooting at a fleeing customer. So we decided to head straight for the bank, but unfortunately he had an automatic rifle and shot out the front of our car.”

  “ATR Rifle?” the police chief asked, because that was the standard automatic rifle issued to the army and the warriors. While it wasn’t lawful for the civilians or the police to possess them, underworld syndicates sometimes managed to get their hands on some.

  “Strangely no,” the other policeman said and handed three bullets to the chief that had come through their windshield, “I have never seen this caliber before, but definitely not ATR rifle.”

  “I haven’t either,” the chief looked puzzled as he examined the bullets. “And I had training to recognize different ammunitions. This must be a foreign caliber.” Importing foreign arms and ammunition into Starfire Nation was completely banned and thus considerably harder to procure. This must be a very formidable syndicate, the chief thought.

  “By the way, there are three patrols cars behind the bank. They just radioed us,” he said to the chief.

  “I told them to go there and watch the back window as the robbers may try to dangle a rope ladder to escape,” police chief said, “Anyways, pass these bullets around, see if anyone recognizes them, and someone get me a megaphone.”

  The policemen passed the bullets amongst themselves but none of them had seen the caliber before. A megaphone was given to the chief. He looked up from behind the car with the megaphone in his left hand and the pistol in his right, pointing to the door.

  “Bank robbers, you are completely surrounded by the police,” he said. The megaphone amplified his voice to a loud boom that could be heard even behind the bank. “I have twenty policemen outside the front door and six behind the back window. There is no other way out of the building. You can’t escape. Surrender or we will shoot to kill.”

  There was no reply. Every ten minutes the police chief repeated himself till he finally gave up after his fourth attempt.

  “Looks like we are going to have to storm them,” the chief said to his men.

  “We just got radioed from the station that there might be around ten to fifteen hostages in there,” a policeman said. “About dozen people called into the station saying someone they knew had gone in that bank this morning but had not returned.”

  “They have left us with no choice,” the chief said. “One of them shot at our car, must be at least one more inside cleaning the vault. If we rush in fast we could surprise them.”

  “I am all for it,” another man said.

  “We practice this very scenario twice every year,” the police chief said. “You all know what to do. Let’s implement the standard operating procedure recommended for this situation.”

  Three police drivers started their cars and slowly brought them to the front pathway leading to the door. Some policemen assembled behind the car that was the third in the line while others clutched their guns behind nearby cars. The three cars would drive up to the door while providing cover for the attackers. As soon as the police chief gave the signal, the first car turned on the engine, bumped up on the sidewalk and the driver hit the accelerator towards the bank door with the second police car following close behind.

  The next instant complete bedlam broke out as a robber pushed open one side of the glass door and opened fire at the first car forcing the driver to duck below the dashboard. He lost his foothold on the accelerator when the car behind slammed into his car’s bumper. The third car braked hard but still hit the second one in the front. Two more robbers opened fire from the second floor windows at the car train. The policemen had abandoned those cars to avoid getting caught in the accidents. Now exposed in the open, they scrambled and ran back to the cover of the patrol cars on the street. The policemen behind the patrol cars opened fire on the front door and at the two second floor windows, and some fired at the third floor windows for good measure. Glass s
hattered everywhere: the bank door and windows glass, the police cars’ windshields, mirrors and windows, even some shop windows.

  “Two of our men were hit in the back with bullets,” one policeman said to the chief. “One is seriously injured, other one just took two bullets in his side. Shall we call an ambulance?”

  “No too risky for an ambulance here,” the chief said, “Put them in the back of a patrol car and have them driven to the hospital right away.”

  “We will be down to sixteen then,” he replied.

  “No matter,” the chief said. “We can’t rush them in the face of multiple automatic fire even if we had forty with us. We are just going to have to think of another way.”

  The policeman said ‘yes sir’ and went to get the injured to the hospital.

  The chief looked at his magazine, he had fired four shots at the door when the firefight had broken out. He reloaded four bullets into the magazine and put it back into his pistol.

  “What are we going to do now?” a policeman asked him.

  “There must be four to five of them,” the chief said. “If three of them came out to fire upon us, there must be at least one or two more inside cleaning out the vault.”

  “Our bad luck,” the policeman said. “The warriors moved out of their headquarters here just a while back otherwise they would have stormed this bank with ease.”

  The chief suddenly remembered about the incident of the big boiler that had blown up about three weeks ago at the headquarters of the local warrior class that was located just two blocks north of this bank. It was closed pending the repair of the damages and installment of the new boiler, and the warriors had temporarily relocated to a town two hours’ drive away.