Page 11 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
He emptied one of the hoppers of most of its contents and placed the bomb inside. He opened the container. The clock was attached to thirty pounds of dynamite that they had stolen from a Hudson Valley construction company. Fred then packed loose mail around the device and placed a thin layer of letters over the top.
Balka inspected his handiwork when he and Stan returned from disposing of the hapless driver. Balka now wore the dead man’s jacket. The bloodstain was nearly the same color as the dark blue fabric.
They’d worked fast given how exposed they were. Balka tossed his car keys to Stan, climbed up into the truck’s seat, and fired up the engine with its electric ignition. He gave his two companions a sardonic wave, eased off the clutch, and pulled away from the ambush.
New York’s principal post office was located in lower Manhattan in a five-story Second Empire building on a corner near City Hall Park. It was widely considered to be one of the ugliest buildings in the borough. The lower floors and basement were used by the postal service, while upstairs there were courts and offices for judges and their clerks. The building was only open during regular businesshours, but the mail-processing center never stopped receiving and resending mail by the truckloads. The loading docks were in back, visible as an eyesore to the daytime visitors of the adjacent park.
Forty minutes after stealing the truck, Balka Rath guided it off the Brooklyn Bridge and continued on for several blocks. The post office was dead ahead. It was three in the morning and there was no other traffic. Two blocks from his destination, Rath pulled the truck over to the curb and climbed out. He looked up and down the street. Not even an alley cat could be seen. He jumped up onto the tailgate, pushed aside the letters covering the box, and opened its lid.
Stan had instructed him on how the mechanism worked. The hands both pointed to twelve. Using his finger he reset the minute hand back to the nine-o’clock position. Done. He covered the box again and hurried back to the cab. He’d left the engine running, so he hit the clutch, palmed the heavy gear lever into first, and pulled from the curb. It had all taken less than thirty seconds.
The wheels came off his plan when he was about to turn the corner to access the building’s multi-bay loading dock. Several trucks identical to his own were parked nose to tail, their drivers still in their seats, many of them with a hand out their window and lit cigarettes held loosely in their fingers.
Unsure of what was happening, Balka pulled up behind the last truck. He set the brake and opened his door, only to have a pugnacious supervisor he hadn’t noticed rush up to him before he could step to the pavement.
“What do you think you’re doing?” The man had a squint and an unlit stub of a cigar in the corner of his mouth. “You know the rules. You can’t leave your truck for any reason.”
“What’s the holdup?” Rath asked, matching the man’s bellicose attitude.
“Loading elevator crapped out. They just got it working, but as you can see, there’s a backlog of trucks to unload. You’re lucky. Should be twenty or so minutes for you. Some of these schmoes have been here for more than an hour.”
The man walked away.
Balka was uncertain, a feeling he despised. He didn’t have a watch, but knew the minute hand on the bomb behind him was slowly winding back up to twelve. How much time he had was unknown. Ten minutes? Five?
The truck ahead of him suddenly lurched forward as space was made at the dock. But not enough for him to reach his destination. There were still several trucks ahead of him. He felt trapped and he felt time’s relentless march. Once he’d pulled forward a couple of feet, he stopped and opened his door a second time. Just as before the supervisor appeared.
“You deaf or stupid?” the man barked around his relit cigar.
“Listen, I need—”
“Pal, does it look like I care what you need? Sit down, shut up, and wait your turn.”
Rath’s eyes darted around. The other truckers were in their vehicles facing forward. There were no pedestrians around and they weren’t yet in sight of the busy loading dock and the hive of postal workers unloading the mail. The butterfly knife came out of his coat pocket without the supervisor noticing and he had the blade open and secure in a blur too fast to follow.
He stuck the blade into the man’s chest with a roundhouse blow that allowed him to step down from the truck, move behind the startled man, and bodily heave him up into the cab in a fluid motion as pretty as any dance. He twisted the blade as he got the supervisor into the seat. The man wasn’t very big, but he had a strong heart.Despite the damage, it kept pumping blood for several seconds, soaking Rath’s hand and pooling in the man’s lap.
At last, he shuddered in a death rattle and went still.
Just then another truck pulled up behind him. Rath closed his door, crossed between his vehicle and the one ahead of him, and made his way back down the street, keeping low so the driver of the new truck didn’t see him. Once clear of the logjam, Rath started running, turning at every block he reached in order to put as much distance as possible between him and the inevitable blast.
He’d been running for four minutes when he heard the blast echoing up the canyons of four-story brick row houses. The acoustics made it sound like the explosion had taken place at more than one location. There were too many intervening structures for him to feel the pressure blast, but he knew it would have blown out windows for several hundred feet.
He slowed to a casual walk. He was far enough from the explosion that no reasonable person would think he was connected to it. It hadn’t been the blow against the government he’d hoped for, but the symbolism would still strike a chord with those dissatisfied with their government as well as the people in power whose grip, they had to realize, had just slipped ever so slightly.
6
Isaac Bell had bought thenecklace because its four matching gemstones, each the size of an acorn, were the exact shade and depth of blue as Marion’s eyes. It always struck admirers when she wore it that nature created the same lustrous hue in both warm living flesh and icy cold stone. Her gown was the same color as the necklace’s platinum setting and had a playful little train and winglike sleeves. Her thick blond hair was up and held in place by two diamond-tipped platinum pins he’d bought her in Paris.
She was every inch the vision and more beautiful now than the day they’d met more than a decade ago. He couldn’t tear his eyes from her. His direct, appraising gaze made her start to blush self-consciously.
“What?” she asked demurely.
“You look spectacular.”
“I have no choice but to believe you, since you are a trained investigator who misses nothing.” They were in the living room of theirsuite at the Savoy. She did a twirling pirouette for him, but then sidled up close so her lips were near his ear. “What you likely did miss, Mr. Detective, is that under my slip I’m wearing nothing at all.”
She danced away and was out of range when that sunk in, and Bell tried to grab her around the waist. “You’ve bewitched me,” he said.
