Page 8 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)

The restaurant was cozy, with low ceilings and mismatched chairs and tables, but the smell of the food was enticing.

Rath hadn’t eaten for a while and the aroma kicked off a series of eager sounds from his belly.

Fred and one other man were at a back table, away from the two couples sharing a meal and the lone man who looked like he’d been out on sales calls across Long Island and needed a bite before pushing on to the city.

A waitress caught his eye. He indicated that he was joining the party in the back corner, and she nodded.

Fred poured beer into a glass from a heavy pitcher as Rath approached. Fowler’s wire-framed glasses flashed in the light of the dining room’s overhead lamps.

Rath slid into a seat and accepted the glass. They never shook hands. “Good to see you, Fred.” He spoke with an accent that no one could place because he’d grown up in more than a dozen countries. “You, too, Stan. Where’s Marcus?”

“Pneumonia or the flu or something. He couldn’t get out of bed.”

“Doesn’t really matter. Is everything set?”

“The device is in the trunk. Stan’s gone over it a dozen times. It’s foolproof.”

“The timer?”

“You set it yourself a couple of blocks from the target,” Stan the bombmaker answered. “Fifteen minutes is enough time for you to get away, but not enough for them to discover it. Here’s the thing—”

“Ahem,” Fred said softly. The waitress was approaching.

“Sir, your friends are having the roast beef and fried potatoes. Would you like that, too?”

“That’ll be fine.”

“We have some apple pie for afters. Can I save you a piece?” She smiled at him. Most women did.

He’d used his looks many times in the service of the cause, but the drawback was that people, women especially, tended to notice him, when all he wanted was anonymity.

He’d found indifference worked better than rudeness to retain some semblance of privacy.

He turned away from her and declined the offer with little more than a grunted “No.”

Her smile faded and she returned to the kitchen to add his order.

“What were you about to say about the timer?”

“Once you set it, you can’t stop the countdown.”

“Why not? What if there’s a delay?”

“I did it that way in case a worker discovers it before it goes off. Any kind of tampering, like cutting the visible wires or moving the clock’s hands, will set if off immediately.”

Balka thought about that for a moment and nodded. It was a good idea. “And how big is it?”

“Not as big as we’d like, but it can’t weigh too much or a worker could become suspicious when they roll the bags off the truck. There isn’t that much mail coming in from out this way.”

“That was the trade-off,” Fowler said. “Easy to ambush a truck here in the sticks, but the load is far lighter than one coming in from New Jersey or another part of Manhattan.”

“Risk versus reward.”

“It won’t matter anyway,” Fred Fowler said, his eyes glittering again as he moved his head in birdlike bobs.

“We don’t need to destroy the building. This is a symbolic strike to show that Washington is losing its sacred trust with the people.

My God, governments have been in charge of the mail for thousands of years.

Postal service is often the first thing they establish.

If we can disrupt it, it’ll show that the control they have over their subjects isn’t as great as they think it is. ”

Stan added, “If we’re successful tonight, other cells in other cities will follow our example. We can collapse the whole system.”

Fowler made another gesture and the conversation paused while the waitress, far less friendly than before, doled out their plates of food, asked perfunctorily if there was anything else, and retreated once again.

“The schedule?”

“Marcus timed the truck every night for two weeks. It never varies by more than a couple of minutes and it’s always the only vehicle he sees that early in the morning. This one’s an easy one, Balka.”

No one in the cell knew much of his past, certainly no details of the violence he’d committed, but still they were in awe of his stillness and calm.

They recognized that he was dangerous, a coiled spring ready to go off even if they’d never seen such a thing occur.

The cell was almost entirely composed of men of words.

Stan was a little different. He was a tradesman, good with his hands, who understood the needs of the workingman.

But the others were romantic talkers and dreamers who saw the struggle in the abstract.

Tonight was the first time the abstract was about to become reality.

Rath suspected the delicate-featured Marcus had faked an illness in order to spare himself having to witness the violence that was forthcoming. Fred was trying to hide that he was a little ill at ease. Only Stan seemed to understand and accept the reality of consequence.

After the meal, they found a secluded lane to wait the several hours before the postal truck carrying mail from eastern Long Island into the city was due.

Balka sat alone in his car and dozed. The other two were in Fred’s car.

Whenever Rath looked over at them, he saw Fowler smoking cigarette after cigarette. Yes, he was definitely nervous.

About fifteen minutes before the earliest mail truck would pass their ambush spot, the men left the lane and made for their intended rendezvous.

It was a lonely patch of the main two-lane road that was hemmed in with trees along both verges.

They parked their cars so it looked like they had been in a head-on collision that left most of the oiled dirt lane blocked.

Twenty minutes later, the sound of a vehicle approaching from the east cut the silence. Fred crushed a half-smoked cigarette beneath the toe of his shoe. Stan cracked his knuckles. Balka remained impassive.

A few seconds later, as the noise grew, a glow showed from around a bend in the road.

It brightened and then turned dazzling as the truck made the turn.

The engine beat immediately changed as the driver saw what he thought was an accident.

The men began waving down the driver. The six-wheeled truck slowed, its brakes rubbing a little under the sudden deceleration.

He came to a halt five yards short of the “accident” and opened his door as the three “victims” approached.

“You fellas—”

Balka rushed the final couple of steps, twisting his wrist and opening and closing his hand in order to release the blade of his Filipino butterfly knife.

The move was oft-practiced and took under a second.

He rammed the blade between the driver’s ribs all the way to the knife’s handles, twisting when he felt it stop against the bone.

The damage to the man’s heart was instantly fatal and Balka just let him collapse onto the lonely road.

Mostly stoic Stan retched at seeing the amount of blood that had managed to leak from the wound before the driver’s heart stopped.

Balka’s knife was slick with it and his hand was half covered.

Fred Fowler went very pale and watched in sickened fascination as Rath bent to clean his weapon and himself against the driver’s white shirt.

In the glow of the headlights, the stains looked black and as thick as tar.

“This is what the revolution looks like,” Balka said as he stood. “Get over it or get the hell out of it.”

Fred shuddered and managed to drag his gaze away from the dead postal driver.

“Stan,” Balka snapped. “Help me.”

Together they dragged the body twenty yards into the woods and covered up their trail by straightening bent branches and ruffling some shrubs they’d knocked flat.

For his part, Fred had gathered his wits and retrieved a large box from the trunk of his car and brought it to the mail carrier’s cargo truck.

He set it on the ground and opened the truck’s tailgate.

The mail was in large cloth bags fitted inside tubular metal frames that had wheels so they could be rolled around more easily.

There were four such hoppers and they were loaded nearly to the very top with letter-sized envelopes and packages.

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 business hours, 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.