“Can you guarantee that all the bars will arrive in good condition?” Gottlieb demanded.
“Sure as shootin’,” JR said, and told him to watch and simply count bars.
Colonel Holt took him aside and said, “I figure it will take two days to empty this vault, if nothing breaks.”
“How long to load up fifty tons? Can we get that accomplished today?”
“Maybe.”
“Make it happen. Get soldiers down here to help carry the ingots out by hand. Fifty tons is our goal. I’ll tell Gottlieb we’ll be back for the rest tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
With the help of a dozen soldiers who were soon sweating profusely, the work speeded up. The soldiers grabbed an ingot in each hand and carried it to the elevator while Gottlieb and another bank officer counted them. For the receipt, of course.
JR tried to stay calm. Fifty tons would be a good haul. Be satisfied with that, he told himself.
He had been there an hour when one of the officers came to the vault holding a handheld radio. “Just talked to the airport,” he said. “Some FAA guy came around. He stayed ten minutes and left.”
“Keep me advised,” JR said, and watched the gold being loaded onto dollies. He was learning a lot about gold ingots. The standard bars in the vault were Good Delivery bars, each with a serial number. They weighed 12.4 kilograms each, contained 400 troy ounces, or 438.9 ounces. That translated to about 27.5 pounds each.
He did some figuring in his head. Fifty tons was one hundred thousand pounds, which equals about 3,600 bars, more or less.
They weren’t going to get it done using dollies or a dozen soldiers. He had Colonel Holt assemble a conga line of thirty soldiers, and they passed gold bars from hand to hand into the elevator, and when it held a couple of hundred, sent it up to be off-loaded into a truck while more were stacked at the entrance. The work went faster.
The men ate MREs in shifts at midday and took a five-minute potty break in shifts. The pile of gold shrank slowly.
We should have brought some dollies, JR thought. Well, one can’t think of everything. He found himself glancing at his watch every few minutes. The minute hand crawled.
Our flight back to Dawson was uneventful. The weather was benign, a typical September day in the eastern United States. We watched for ambushes and found none. We did see our columns snaking along. They had made almost a hundred miles since we saw them in the early morning. We saw another convoy of trucks and cars heading west from Baltimore, approaching Frederick, about fifty miles behind our northern army column. This convoy wasn’t ours.
Grafton circled the convoy, low enough that we could see flags with Soetoro’s image on them (a sort of Che Guevara T-shirt look) fluttering from car and truck aerials. Then we headed for Dawson.
I decided to deliver myself of an opinion. “The problem with democracy,” I told Grafton on the ICS, “is that fools elect fools.”
He snorted. “And the problem with hereditary kings is that too often you get the pampered, coddled village idiot running the country.”
“Life is tough,” I told him.
The National Guard camp near Kingwood was almost deserted. We taxied up and shut down in the precise spot where we had manned the plane hours before.
I chocked the plane and tied it down after Grafton went off to find whoever was manning the radios. I got busy fueling the plane. An army portable generator supplied the power to pump the avgas.
As I finished I noticed some metal blossomed out on the left wing. I climbed off the ladder and took a look. There was a bullet hole in the wing, about six feet in from the port wingtip. A bullet had gone in the bottom of the wing and out the top. A .30 caliber, from the look of it. And neither Grafton nor I had felt a thing. Someone we flew over today was unhappy with us, with life, maybe with the world.
After I got the fueling hose put away and the generator secured, I looked the airplane over carefully for any more punctures, didn’t find any, and then strolled away carrying my M4. I found Sarah with Grafton in the headquarters building by the radios.
He was on the horn to General Martinez. “I’ll meet you at first light at the Hagerstown airport. I suspect you are going to meet that bunch coming from Baltimore tomorrow mid-morning between Hagerstown and Frederick. I want to be with you.”
“Roger. I’ll meet you there.”
Sarah looked at me and I looked at her. She didn’t say anything, and I couldn’t think of anything except, “Want to go see if we can find something to eat?”
She did, so with a nod to Grafton, we left. He got busy talking to the southern column.
“Seen the Wire around?” I asked.
“Not hide nor hair.”
I wondered where in the world that fool was. Giving him a weapon the other night in Kingwood was a bad mistake. He wasn’t any part of a warrior, which was why I liked him. I was worried. It was a tough world out there these days, and he wasn’t a tough man.
The Bank of Manhattan’s president, Abe Gottlieb, wanted to know if the Fed was waiting for the gold. “Of course,” JR said. “I have troops there. They’ll stay open until we arrive and if necessary will work all night getting it into their vault.”
“Ah, the army!”
“Indeed.”
“How do you know that a few soldiers won’t steal some bars?”
That sally drew a frosty stare from the general. Gottlieb said he needed something to eat, and wandered away.
JR was upstairs in the bank when the power came back on in Manhattan. He knew it was on because the outside telephone lines began ringing. The receptionist smiled broadly, shouted to the other tellers, and answered the phone.
Uh-oh.
JR looked around for Gottlieb. Two FBI agents were with him, and he signaled to one of them, who jogged over.
“Power’s on, phones are up,” said JR. “We’ve got to move. Close the doors, round up the staff — all of them including Gottlieb — and put them in a conference room upstairs. Confiscate all cell phones and remove the regular phones from the room. Get cracking.”
“Yes, sir.”
JR went back to the vault. Soldiers were passing bars along at a good clip. “How many ingots have you loaded?” he asked Holt.
“By my count, about two thousand.” JR looked at his watch. It was almost one o’clock.
“Sixteen hundred to go. Get the bank employees out of here and give them to the FBI agents. Get more troops down here.”
“Yes, sir.”
JR went along encouraging his soldiers. “Come on, men. You can do it. We’re over half way there.”
He went up on the street and checked the trucks. As soon as a truck had four hundred bars in it, a new truck was pulled into position. Armed soldiers were stationed around the trucks, and they kept the curious moving on. Not all of them, of course, since the sight of all that gold stopped people in their tracks.
Three policemen had been enlisted to help keep the crowd moving along the sidewalks. As JR watched, another police car pulled up and a captain in uniform came over. He had scrambled eggs on his hat. He saluted JR, who returned it.
“We got no notice of this move.”
“We can handle it. We figured you had enough troubles as it was.”
The cop took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his hair, then put it back on. “We sure do, General. We sure do. But with the electricity back on, maybe things will start returning to normal.”
“We can only hope.”
He pointed to JR’s combat infantryman’s badge on his chest. “I got one of those,” the captain said. “The Gulf War, Desert Storm.”