Seven Silent Men Page 5

  The explosion was muted. The front door disintegrated. A wave of police stormed through. Then a second and third wave. The ground-level floor on the bank premises was secured within moments. Not a crook was to be found.

  Ned Van Ornum, over the objections of Frank Santi, decided to lead the assault on the basement vault room. Rigged out with a flak jacket and combat helmet and bulletproof visor, he took a shotgun and started down the steps alone, his back sliding against the wall. Sharpshooters at the head of the stairwell aimed their weapons beyond and below him. Once near the open door at the bottom of the steps, Van Ornum stopped, cocked his finger up at the battery of guns.

  The officer with the electric bullhorn moved in behind the poised sharpshooters, implored the criminals in the vault room to give up.

  No response came from the open door.

  Van Ornum crouched as low as a ski jumper at trestle top, keeping low, bounced up and down on his haunches. Once more he cocked a finger at the head of the stairs. Before the bullhorn officer could get out more than an amplified word or two, Van Ornum dove through the open door with shotgun raised. Landed on the cement floor on his elbows, ready to fire.

  The large room was empty. The burnished metal walk-in vault stood in the middle of the chamber with its huge hydraulic door securely locked.

  Chief Frank Santi and Ned Van Ornum and a robbery squad detective by the name of Hogan conferred near the vault with the bank’s manager, who said there could be no doubt someone unauthorized had violated the premises, since all the doors leading down to the vault room were opened instead of being closed as they should have been. The official pointed out that not only had all those doors been electronically locked, they were electronically programmed to remain locked until nine o’clock the next morning. Hurrying down into the sublevel chamber was the assistant bank manager, the ranking expert on ultrasonic alarm systems, who imparted, urgently, that while the vault door looked unopened, even untouched, one of the many control panel dials upstairs indicated that someone had definitely been inside the vault … could, conceivably, still be inside.

  Flak-jacketed police were rushed in to keep their machine weapons trained on the vault door. When the area engineer for the Northern California-based ultrasonic alarm company could not be found, H.L. Jessup, the seniormost FBI agent at the scene, was asked to join the vault room confab. Jessup, after hearing the specifics of the situation, confessed to having little knowledge of ultrasonic alarm systems and volunteered to phone Bureau headquarters in Washington for expert advice. Detective Hogan said if someone was trapped inside, they’d best try to contact whoever it was before the person suffocated. Hogan had seen too many vaults to suspect this one of being booby-trapped. His offer personally to check for explosives and try to contact anyone inside was accepted.

  Hogan moved toward the vault. The others in the room moved back, far back. The detective, without touching, studied the hydraulic door. Finding no indication of booby-trapping, he began feeling it with his hands … tapped on it with a finger … made a fist and knocked on it … knocked again hard.

  A rumbling occurred. The room quivered. Hogan jumped back. Others bolted up the stairway. A mighty and echoing crack resounded. The vault tilted to one side. A second, louder cracking reverberated. Atilt, the vault sank straight down into the cement floor. Stopped after a foot’s descent. The cement cracked further. The vault sank deeper. Tilted more. Stopped.

  THREE

  Martin Leo Brewmeister was a native-born Prairie Portian. Like many other boys of the area, he had spent a goodly part of his childhood at the Mississippi River. He swam there and boated there and, on two occasions, took courage by the flying mane and rode the Treachery. Much more time had been given to the river’s western bank. Specifically, the sheer rock-faced palisades running from Warbonnet Ridge down past Lookout Bluff. Martin, from the earliest of years, had been an inveterate spelunker. Hardly a cave existed on the cove side of Lookout Bluff he hadn’t explored. His prepubescent thirst for suspense and discovery was slaked by these often perilous forays into uncharted darkness. The passion later mingled with a more sophisticated interest, geology. He had briefly entertained hopes of going to the Colorado School of Mines, where, among other electives, two lecture courses in speleology were offered. Martin’s parents, a proud and proper Hessian married to a, proud and practical Junker, which was which didn’t matter all that much, counseled their seventeen-year-old son that whereas geologists and speleologists were each a stalwart and noble breed, examining rocks and exploring caves was hardly an endeavor to provide bread for the table of the children they expected him to have after wedding Elsie Heeren that coming June. If he wished to be a criminal lawyer, as he always professed he wanted to be, or attend a proper agricultural college, the family would see to many of his and his wife-to-be’s needs during the ensuing years of higher education. But he might as well stay home on the family farm for all the good a university degree in anything else, speleology included, would do him, for all the help he would get from his parents. Or his betrothed’s parents, who were lifelong friends of his parents. Though he was reverential toward his family, threats of such disenfranchisement hadn’t mattered to Martin. What had were his future wife’s desires. He explained to Elsie that he might like becoming a geologist. That geology, even more than criminal law, had been a devotion. He told Elsie he had no idea where a geologist could work or live in this day and age or how much money the two of them would have in the beginning. But he thought it best she should know how he felt. He asked her opinion on their future. What she wanted, expected. Elsie told him she possessed but one desire after their marriage … to have children as soon as they could afford to.

  Martin Brewmeister married his childhood sweetheart, Elsie Louise Heeren, and sired their first son his freshman year at Illinois Central College and their second his first year of law school. He passed his bar exams and spent twenty-one months working for a Springfield, Illinois, attorney in an office across the street from a parking lot reputed to be the location of a building in which young Abe Lincoln had once practiced law. Just before a scheduled move to Chicago to take a position with a distinguished criminal law firm on Michigan Avenue, he accidentally got Elsie pregnant. There was no consideration of abortion. Both parents loved and wanted their unborn child. But Elsie was frugal and Martin was practical. They had barely managed to get by on what Martin earned from the Springfield law job. The Chicago position, being more prestigious, paid less than Springfield, was, more than anything, a career move. Sustaining themselves in Chicago would be costlier than in Springfield. Nor would Martin entertain going ahead alone, separating the family for even a short period. Martin and Elsie were fiercely self-reliant. Borrowing money from their parents, even though they could, was out of the question. Every month since taking his Springfield job, Martin had paid back a small amount of what he owed his father for financing his education. Another mouth to feed simply meant that Martin must forgo both Springfield and Chicago and find a better-paying law job. Elsie grew larger. Martin shopped vigorously for a position in criminal law. Elsie gave birth to twin girls. Martin joined the FBI, had another son and served with the Bureau in three other cities before being assigned to the resident office in Prairie Port. In the six months since arriving home, Brewmeister had had little interest in, and less time for, spelunking.

  … Now, listening as construction engineers for the River Rise project tried to assure skeptical police welders that the concrete floor in the vault room was absolutely safe, that there was sheer rock underneath the crack, Martin Brewmeister was reminded of boyhood legends of certain palisades in this area being beehived by passageways and caves. Caves used by the underground railroaders of Civil War repute and favored by the bootleggers of Prohibition days.

  When a compromise was reached whereby an acetylene torch and its police operator would be suspended over the vault in a harness attached to the walls and ceilings, Brewmeister got Jessup’s permission to scout about a bit. He wen
t to the clifftop cul-de-sac in front of the bank, looked over the edge, saw that the rock below slanted outward, that certain ledges existed far below … that segments of an age-old, rusted metal ladder hung to the cliff. Despite the sharp angle below, Brewmeister was tempted to rig a climbing line and descend to the ladder segment and ledges. He thought better of the idea and gazed off along the sharp wall of cliffs running upstream. He spotted what he thought to be a crease in the rock front. The crease seemed to have a gentler slope and be filled with slag and overgrowth. Staring at it, he noticed something else. Segments of another decaying metal ladder trailed down the rock front some thirty yards beyond the crease. The lowest segment of ladder ended beside a dark spot in the cliff. A spot whose general shape could be that of a small, roughly hewn opening. A door or tunnel mouth cut into the rock face five feet above water level.

  Brewmeister had to drive through the construction site of Prairie Farmer Industrial Park to reach the stretch of clifftop above the dark spot. Peering over the edge, he could not find the metal ladder. But he did see rusted iron rungs, climbing rungs, like those used by the utility company, protruding from the rock face right on down to what appeared to be river level. Brewmeister tested the uppermost rung with his hand, then his foot. It held. He pressed on the rung below with a length of plaster-splattered two-by-four. It too seemed firm. He backed down over the edge of the cliff, with one foot felt for the first rung. Found it. Applied weight. Brought the other foot down and located the second rung. Stood on it. Rung after rung he descended the rock face. Halfway down he saw a segment of corroded metal ladder several inches to his right. More ladder could be seen below that. The next rung he stepped on gave, pried itself out of the rock and fell into the water below. Brewmeister clung to the rungs above, hoped they would hold as he dropped his body, eased a foot down past the missing rung to the one beneath that. It was firm.

  Fifteen more minutes of cautious descent brought him beside the dark spot. It was indeed an opening in the rock. A dark tunnel mouth five feet above river level. An entrance apparently intended to be reached by the line of rungs, since the last rung ended here beside it. The step from the rung into the opening was easily negotiated.

  Bending somewhat, Brewmeister started up the dark tunnel, almost immediately ran into a barricade of wooden boards and screening. He pushed against it. The barricade was loose. He kicked at it. It gave somewhat. Reaching out and pressing his hand firm against the tunnel walls for leverage, he kicked harder. The barricade crashed over backward. Brewmeister studied the darkness beyond, thought he saw a glimmer of light in the far distance, heard a murmur. He proceeded forward. Feeling the rock walls as he moved, he knew this was a man-made passageway cut in the cliff. Why it had been excavated, what its purpose was, eluded Brewmeister. The passage grew lower, forcing him to bend more. It grew even smaller.

  Brewmeister got on all fours and crawled toward the fragile light source. The tunnel began to slope downward. His hands touched on something smooth and powdery. Dried mud. He felt the walls, the ceiling. All was coated by dry mud. The tunnel turned. The mud carpet grew thicker, firmer. He crawled around the turn into a cavern. A cavern illuminated by cross shafts of overhead, filtering light. A cavern totally and completely encrusted by dried mud. Stalactites of dried rich brown mud hung down from the ceiling like chocolate icicles. Stalagmites of mud rose up from the floor as round and dark as scoops of ice cream. Further back in the cavern, the stalactites met with the rising stalagmites to form twisting columns.

  Brewmeister damned himself for not bringing a flashlight along from Jez’s car. He had heard of underground mud eruptions, but never of a cavern being crusted in the stuff. He went to the wall on which a sliver of light played, felt it … dug into it with his fingernails. The mud had an almost moist texture to it.

  A sound was heard nearby. A sound louder and clinkier than the continual murmur. Brewmeister followed the lowest light shaft back around through the cave to a half wall of rolling, smooth brown balcony stalactites. Beyond the wall he could see an opening in the cave. One sure kick crumbled a section of balcony stalactites. He walked through and into the opening and along a natural tunnel beyond. A turning tunnel which ended at a mud-crusted spiral staircase encased in a circular mud-coated shaft. Gazing up, Brewmeister saw that the shaft ascended thirty feet into a bright light source which was definitely electric in origin. He also noticed the mud covering went up only ten feet. Beyond that the red brick of the shaft wall and the dark iron of the circular steps were in plain view.

  Brewmeister climbed to the top and came out on a cement platform in a large underground construction he assumed erroneously was part of the Prairie Port sewer system. Far below the platform murmured a fast-moving stream of water which disappeared into a nearby tunnel mouth. The glowing light bulbs on the cement-beamed ceiling were unglazed. Brewmeister tried the metal door at the far end of the platform. It was locked. He looked for another way off the platform, noticed a metal catwalk leading into the huge tunnel. He took it.

  Brewmeister followed above the gurgling stream for fifty yards before entering a small natural cave where the catwalk ran onto a platform. The catwalk continued beyond the platform and into a larger tunnel. For whatever his instinct Brewmeister chose to climb the short metal ladder leading up from the platform. He ascended into another small cave. Here there were no stalactites or stalagmites. Only walls and ceilings and floors covered in smooth dry mud. Illumination was ample but not electrical. It emanated from a far opening. As he had done earlier, Brewmeister followed the light source, entered a second cave which had a natural stream trickling through and which was also coated by dried mud. Beyond the stream was another natural tunnel. It too was mud-coated. Then he came out into someplace he couldn’t believe.

  The underground chamber he stood in was as wide as any cavern he had ever seen in the area, ever heard of. Went up twenty-five feet. Was electrified by string after string of glaring light bulbs suspended from on high. In the middle of the floor an enormous metal scaffold rose to the ceiling. To a spot from which the rock had been chipped away. To where something black and square was exposed.

  Brewmeister walked around for a better view. One couldn’t be had from this distance. He climbed the scaffold. Red and white microflashes sparked above. He stopped below the huge metal square block protruding down through the rocks. A hole had been torn out of its bottom. Up inside the hole he could see a white-hot flame cutting through the darkness. The flame withdrew. A loud metal bang echoed. Something fell and clanged, leaving behind a circle of light above. A circle into which the plastic-masked face of a police welder appeared.

  The mask popped up. The police technician stared down in disbelief at the face of Brewmeister looking up at him from the hole in the bottom of the vault.

  A terrible rumbling occurred. Brewmeister’s face undulated back and forth, in and out of view. Disappeared. The police technician stared harder down through the hole in the bottom of the vault … saw surging, foaming water … torrents and eruptions of water as if a dam had burst. Before the lights below went off he caught a glimpse of Brewmeister’s face gasping for air, of his hand clutching for help. Both face and hand disappeared in a swirl of froth.

  “Have you reached Grafton?” It was 1 P.M. and the long-distance voice of A. R. Roland spoke from SOG. SOG was the acronym for Seat of Government. Seat of Government was J. Edgar Hoover’s own personal and preferred title for the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the FBI, where Roland served as assistant to the Director, the fifth-highest-ranking man in the Bureau.

  “No, sir, not yet.” This voice was from Prairie Port and belonged to forty-six-year-old, silver-haired John Lars Sunstrom III. “We did get through to Silver Lake and they’re sending someone after him.”

  “Silver Lake?”

  “The fishing camp in Montana he’s vacationing at.”

  “Damnable time for a vacation.”

  Sunstrom thought of saying it was a damnable time for a robbery
as well. “Yes, sir.”

  “But they have found our man Brewmeister?”

  “Twenty minutes ago,” Sunstrom said. “They’re bringing him to the University Hospital now.”

  “How badly hurt is he?”

  “It’s hard to say. He’s unconscious and pretty well banged up, from what I’m told.”

  “He’s not about to die, is he?”

  “… I don’t know.”

  “He was found in the river? The Mississippi River?”

  “Yes, sir. The River Patrol spotted him lying on a delta island three miles below Prairie Port.”

  “So he was spit out into the river somewhere along the way, is that right?” Roland asked. “He was swept out from under the bank and spit into the river?”

  “Yes, sir, that’s right,” Strom, as Sunstrom was known, said.

  “Amazing.”

  “What might prove more amazing, sir, is how far he was swept in those tunnels. We’ve been told there’s no outlet to the river between the Mormon State National Bank and on down into Prairie Port proper. This could mean Brewmeister traveled a minimum of seventeen miles underground, assuming he came out through the Sewerage Department’s tunnel in the middle of town. If he came out of the tunnel on the far end of town, which empties out into the river close to where he was found, you can add five miles to the seventeen.”

  “Twenty-two miles underground? Underground in water?”

  “If he came out the far tunnel, yes, sir.”

  “… You said in your earlier report that the robbery was receiving an inordinate amount of publicity. Is that still the case?”

  “I was referring to local media coverage, and that is still true. Now national television news people have arrived in Prairie Port. People from ABC and NBC—”