The Golden Gate

by Alistair MacLean

  The rear coach was also well occupied, again by newspapermen and men with no interest in newspapers, although in this case the ratio was inversed. The greatly outnumbered journalists, although they realized that the Presidential coach would soon, in terms of the realizable assets of its passengers, be nothing less than a rolling Fort Knox, wondered if it were necessary to have quite so many FBI agents around.

  There were only three people aboard the Presidential coach, all crew members. The white-coated driver, his ‘receive’ switch depressed, was waiting for instructions to come through the fascia speaker. Behind the bar, an extraordinarily pretty brunette, who looked like an amalgam of all those ‘Fly me’ airline advertisements, was trying to look demure and inconspicuous and failing miserably. At the rear, the radio operator was already seated in front of his communications console.

  A buzzer rang in Branson’s coach.

  ‘P5,’ the speaker said. ‘On schedule. Twenty minutes.’

  A second buzzer rang.

  ‘P4,’ the speaker said. ‘All okay.’

  ‘Excellent.’ For once Branson permitted himself a slight feeling of relief. The take-over of the Tamalpais radar stations had been essential to his plans. ‘Scanners manned?’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  A third buzzer rang.

  ‘PI?’ Johnson’s voice was hurried. ‘P2. Can we go now?’

  ‘No. Trouble?’

  ‘Some.’ Johnson, seated at the helicopter controls, engines still not started, watched a man emerge from Eysenck’s office and break into a run, rounding the corner of the building. That could only mean, Johnson realized, that he was going to look through Eysenck’s office window and that could only mean that he had failed to open the door which he and Bradley had locked behind them: the key was at that moment in Johnson’s pocket. Not that looking through Eysenck’s window was going to help him much because he and Bradley had dragged the unconscious Eysenck and petty officer into the windowless washroom leading off the Commander’s office. The key of the washroom door was also in his pocket.

  The man came into sight round the corner of the building. He wasn’t running now. In fact, he stopped and looked around. It wasn’t too hard to read what was going on in his mind. Eysenck and the petty officer might well be going about their lawful occasions and he was going to look pretty sick if he started to cry wolf. On the other hand if something had happened and he didn’t report his suspicions he was going to make himself highly unpopular with his superiors. He turned and headed in the direction of the Station Commander’s office, obviously with the intent of asking a few discreet questions. Halfway towards the office it became clear that his questions weren’t going to be all that discreet: he had broken into a run.

  Johnson spoke into the walkie-talkie.

  ‘Bad trouble.’

  ‘Hold on as long as possible. Leave in emergency. Rendezvous remains.’

  In coach PI Van Effen looked at Branson. ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘Yes. Johnson and Bradley are in trouble, want to take off. Imagine what’s going to happen if they do, if they have to cruise around ten minutes waiting for us? A couple of hijacked helicopters with the President and half the oil in the Middle East in the city? Everybody’s going to be as jittery as hell. They’ll take no chances. Panic-stricken. They’ll stop at nothing. The choppers will be shot out of the sky. They have Phantoms in a state of instant readiness on that base.’

  ‘Well, now.’ Van Effen eased the coach to a stop at the back of the garage which held the motorcade. ‘Bad, but maybe not as bad as all that. If they have to take off before schedule, you could always instruct them to fly over the motorcade. It would take a pretty crazy air commander to instruct his pilots to fire machine-guns or rockets at a chopper hovering above the Presidential coach. Bingo – no President, no Arabian oil kings and sheikhs, no Chief of Staff, no Mayor Morrison. Chopper might even crash down on to the top of the Presidential coach. Not nice to be a sacked Rear Admiral without a pension. If, that is to say, he survives the court-martial.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way.’ Branson sounded half convinced, no more. ‘You’re assuming our air commander is as sane as you are, that he would react along your line of thinking. How are we to know that he is not certifiable? Extremely unlikely, I admit, but I have no option other than to accept your suggestion. And we’ve no option other than to go ahead.’

  The buzzer rang. Branson made the appropriate switch.

  ‘PI?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘P3.’ It was Reston from the garage. ‘Lead coach has just moved out.’

  ‘Let me know when the Presidential coach moves.’

  Branson gestured to Van Effen, who started up the engine and moved slowly round the side of the garage.

  The buzzer rang again.

  ‘P5. On schedule. Ten minutes.’

  ‘Fine. Get down to the garage.’

  Again the buzzer rang. It was Reston. He said: ‘Presidential coach is just moving out.’

  ‘Fine.’ Branson made another switch. ‘Rear coach?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Hold it for a couple of minutes. We’ve a traffic jam here. Some nut has just slewed his articulated truck across the street. Pure accident, I’d say. But no chances. No panic, no need for anyone to leave their seats. We’re coming back to the garage for a couple of minutes till they decide on a new route. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  Van Effen drove slowly round to the front of the garage, nosed it past the front door until the first third of the coach was visible to the occupants of the rear coach inside, still parked where it had been. Branson and Van Effen descended unhurriedly from the opposite front seats, walked into the garage: Yonnie, unobserved by those inside, exited via the back door and began to clamp the new number plate on top of the old.

  The occupants of the rear coach watched the approach of the two white-coated figures curiously, but without suspicion, for endless frustrating delays were part and parcel of their lives. Branson walked round to the front door opposite the driver’s side, while Van Effen wandered, aimlessly as it seemed, towards the rear. Had there been any cause for concern on the part of the occupants, it would have been allayed by the sight of two blue-overalled figures busily doing nothing by the main doors. They were not to know they were Reston and his friend.

  Branson opened the front left-hand door and climbed up two steps. He said to the driver: ‘Sorry about this. It happens. They’re picking out a new route, a safe route, for us to go up to Nob Hill.’

  The driver looked puzzled, no more. He said: ‘Where’s Ernie?’

  ‘Ernie?’

  ‘Lead coach driver.’

  ‘Ah! That’s his name. Taken sick, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Taken sick?’ Suspicion flared. ‘Only two minutes ago -’

  The driver twisted round in his seat as two minor explosions occurred in the rear of the coach, less explosions than soft plops of sound, to the accompanying sounds of breaking glass and a hiss as of air escaping under pressure. The rear of the coach was already enveloped in a dense, billowing and rapidly mushrooming cloud of grey smoke, so dense that it was impossible to see the now closed rear door and the figure of Van Effen leaning against it and making sure it stayed that way. Every man in the bus – or those who were still visible – had swung round in his seat, reaching for a gun in an automatic but useless reaction for there was nothing to be seen to fire at.

  Branson held his breath, threw two of the grenade-shaped gas bombs in rapid succession-one in the front aisle, one at the driver’s feet-jumped to the garage floor, slammed the door and held the handle, a somewhat pointless precaution as he knew, for the first inhalation of that gas produced immediate unconsciousness. After ten seconds he left, walked round the front of the bus where he was joined by Van Effen. Reston and his companion had already closed and bolted the main entrance. Now they were stripping off their overalls to reveal the conservative and well-cut suits beneath.

 
; Reston said: ‘Over? So soon? Just like that?’ Branson nodded. ‘But if one whiff of that can knock a man out, surely it’s going to kill them-if they keep on sitting there, I mean, inhaling the stuff all the time?’

  They left via the side door, not too hurriedly, locking it behind them. Branson said: ‘Contact with oxygen neutralizes the gas inside fifteen seconds. You could walk inside that bus now and be entirely unaffected. But it will be at least an hour before anyone in that bus comes to.’

  Harriman stepped out of a taxi as they came round to the garage front. They boarded the coach – now the new rear coach of the motorcade – and Van Effen headed for Nob Hill. Branson made a switch in the fascia.

  ‘P2?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How are things?’

  ‘Quiet. Too damned quiet. I don’t like it.’

  ‘What do you think is happening?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can just see someone on the phone asking for permission to launch a couple of guided missiles at us.’

  ‘Permission from whom?’

  ‘The highest military authority in the country’

  ‘Could take time to contact Washington.’

  ‘Take damn-all time to contact Nob Hill.’

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Momentarily, even Branson’s habitual massive calm was disturbed. The highest military authority in the country was, indeed, in the next suite to the President in the Mark Hopkins hotel. General Cartland, Chief of Staff and adviser extraordinary to the President, was indeed participating in that day’s motorcade. ‘You know what happens if they do contact him?’

  ‘Yes. They’ll cancel the motorcade.’ Chief of the Armed Forces though the President might be, he could be overruled in matters of security by his Chief of Staff. ‘Hold it a minute.’ There was a pause then Johnson said: ‘One of the guards at the gate is on the telephone. This could mean anything or nothing.’

  Branson was conscious of a slight dampness in the region of his neck collar. Although he had given up the habit of prayer even before he’d left his mother’s knee, he prayed it was nothing. Perhaps the call to the guard was perfectly innocuous: perhaps the outcome of the call might be innocuous: if it were not, the many months and the quarter million dollars he’d spent in preparation for this coup was so much irrecoverable water under the bridge.

  ‘PI?’

  ‘Yes?’ Branson was dimly aware that his teeth were clamped tightly together.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this but tower has just given us permission to lift off.’

  Branson remained silent for a few moments while someone lifted the Golden Gate Bridge off his back. He was not one much given to brow-mopping but this, if ever, seemed a warranted occasion. He refrained. He said: ‘Never look a gift horse in the mouth. How do you account for this?’

  ‘The guards must have said that they’d checked our identity papers and that they were in order.’

  ‘Start up, will you? I’d like to find out if I can hear you over the racket of the rotors.’

  Twin lines of security men, back to back at a distance of about six feet and facing outwards, formed a protective lane for the short distance between the hotel and the waiting Presidential coach, which seemed rather superfluous as the streets had been barricaded off from the public for a hundred yards all around. The visiting dignitaries from the Persian Gulf seemed to be in no way put out by this nor to be suffering from any claustrophobic sense of imprisonment: in their own homelands, where the fine art of assassination had reached peaks as yet undreamed of in the United States, this was part and parcel of their everyday lives: not only would they have felt naked without this overt show of protection, they would have been offended if not humiliated by the very concept that they were sufficiently unimportant not to merit the massive security precaution.

  The President led the way, looking almost wistfully from side to side as if disappointed that there was no one there for him to wave at. He was a tall, rather portly figure, immaculately attired in a tan gaberdine suit, with a patrician face vaguely reminiscent of one of the better-fed Roman emperors and a splendid head of the purest silver hair which was widely supposed to be his especial pride and joy. One had but to look at him to appreciate that he had been doomed from the cradle to end up in the Oval Office: that anyone else should aspire to be – or be – the Chief Executive was quite unthinkable. Better brains there might be on Capitol Hill, but that magnificent presence was unique. As far as politicians went he was a man of the utmost probity – the fact that he was a multi-millionaire may have helped him in this-intelligent, humorous and was loved, liked, admired or held in genuine affection to an extent that had been achieved by no other President in the previous half century, a remarkable but far from impossible achievement. As always, he carried a stout cane, a relic from that occasion when he had required it for almost two days after tripping over the leash of his Labrador. That he had no need of the cane was quite indisputable. Perhaps he thought it rounded off his image, or lent him a slightly Rooseveltian aura. Whatever the reason, he was never seen in public or private without it.

  He reached the coach, half turned, smiled and bowed slightly as he ushered the first of his guests aboard.

  Precedence and pride of place went inevitably to the King: his vast kingdom held as much oil as the rest of the world put together. He was a tall, imposing figure, a king from the floor-sweeping skirts of his dazzling white robes to the top of the equally dazzling burnous. He had an aquiline dark face, with a splendidly trimmed white beard and the hooded eyes of a brooding eagle. Supposedly the wealthiest man in all history, he could easily have been a tyrant and despot but was neither: against that his autocratic rule was absolute and the only laws he obeyed were those he made himself.

  The Prince came next – his small sheikhdom had never rated and never had had a king. While his territorial holdings came to less than five per cent of the King’s, his influence was almost as great: his sheikhdom, an arid and barren expanse of some of the world’s most inhospitable sands, was literally afloat on a sea of oil. An extrovert and flamboyant personality, who owned a Cadillac for every four miles of his principality’s hundred miles of road – it was said with some authority that if one of his cars had the slightest mechanical trouble it was regarded as obsolete and never used again, a fact which must have given some small satisfaction to General Motors – he was an excellent pilot, a remarkably gifted race-car driver and an assiduous patron of many of the most exclusive nightclubs in the world. He went to considerable lengths to cultivate his reputation as an international playboy, an exercise which deceived nobody: behind the façade lay the computerized mind of an outstanding businessman. He was of medium height, well built and wouldn’t have been seen dead in the traditional Arab clothes. He was Savile Row’s best customer. ‘Dapper’ was the only word to describe him, from the pointed crocodile shoes to the almost invisible hairline moustache.

  They were followed by Sheikh Iman and Sheikh Kharan, the oil ministers respectively of the King and the Prince. They looked remarkably alike and were rumoured to have the same grandfather, which was not at all impossible. Both wore Western clothes, both were plump, smiling almost to the point of beaming and extremely shrewd indeed. The only way to tell them apart was while Iman sported a tiny black goatee beard Kharan was clean-shaven.

  The next to board was General Cartland. Although wearing civilian clothes – an inconspicuous blue pin-stripe – he was unmistakably what he was. If he had been wearing only a bath towel he would still have been immediately recognizable as a general. The erect bearing, the precise movements, the clipped speech, the cool blue eyes that never asked a question twice – everything marked him out for the man he was. Even his grey hair was shorn. Although Cartland had more than a peripheral interest in oil – he did, after all, require some form of fuel for his ships, tanks and planes – he was not along because of any special expertise in the oil business. He was along primarily because the President refused to cross the street without him. The
President – and he made no bones about it – was heavily dependent on Cartland for his advice, far-ranging width of experience and solid common sense, a fact which had given and still gave rise to considerable if wholly misplaced jealousy in Washington. Cooler judgements in that city regarded him as being virtually irreplaceable as Presidential adviser, and although his duty left him with less and less time to run his army, navy and air force Cartland seemed to cope with both tasks effortlessly. He would have made an excellent politician or statesman but had unfortunately been cursed from birth with an unshakable incorruptibility and moral integrity.

  The next man to board was Hansen, the President’s energy czar. He was the latest appointee to the post and as yet a largely unknown quantity. His qualifications for the post were impeccable but his experience so far slight. Energy was one thing he appeared to possess in abundance. He was a darting, nervous, volatile individual, painfully thin, whose hands and dark eyes were never still. He was reputed to have a first-class brain. This was his biggest – indeed almost his only – confrontation with great oil barons and his awareness of being on trial was painful.

  Muir went next. He was a very rubicund man, almost bald, and the number of his chins varied from two to four according to the angle of his neck. Unlike most fat men he had a permanently doleful expression. He had a positively bucolic appearance about him, an unsuccessful farmer who concentrated less on the production than the consumption of what he grew on his farm. This proposed deal with the Arab nations could raise as many political as physical problems, which was why Under-Secretary of State Muir was along. Although it was almost impossible to believe he was unquestionably the country’s leading expert on the Middle East.