I Was Owen Stewart

Chapter Eight

Standing at the bow of the glide boat, the lights of New Hollywood came into view.  They looked strange to my eyes.  A lifetime had passed since I’d last been downtown; at least, it felt that way.

   For the mission, we were using a Peppard Mark VII cruiser.  The big old taxi was actually more of a ferry.  The Cavalry had reinforced the hull with armored plating and painted it to look like wood.  Astaire was on the pilot deck over the engine compartment.  The rest of the team stood on deck, leaning against the gunwale and looking out at the night.  Each of us was lost in our own thoughts, as we glided on a cushion of air down the grand canals to an alley behind The Hotel Berlin.

   We were all dressed as hotel wait staff.  The disguises were meant to throw off suspicion, but since we were sneaking in through a fire door and had four large duffle bags filled with weapons and other equipment, I really can’t say how effective they would have been if they were put to a test.

   Once our feet hit the dock, Elvis led the way.  I was in the middle of the pack.  At first, I thought it was to protect me, but then I wondered if they were worried I would take the opportunity to run off, and were keeping me hemmed in.  It annoyed me that they might think I’d desert them.  Abandoning the mission had never crossed my mind; at least it hadn’t until that moment.  I looked over my shoulder at Chaplin, who was bringing up the rear.  His eyes scanned everything in front of him, taking in every detail.  There would be no chance of slipping by him.

   We marched down the stairs, until we reached the boiler-room in the sub-basement.  Elvis set the charges against the northwest wall.  If our calculation were correct, we would soon have a doorway into the Barton Central Bank and Depository.  If they were wrong, the room would soon be flooded with canal water.

   Fay and I started breaking out the gear, while Boris and Chaplin kept guard on the door.

   “The fuse is lit,” Elvis said, as he dashed away from the explosives, warning us he was about to hit the detonator.

   We all took shelter behind the industrial boiler, and he flicked the switch.  For a few seconds, fire lit up the basement like the noonday sun.  The room erupted with a shriek and rubble showered down all around us.  When my ears stopped ringing, I noticed that the noise of the blast had been replaced by the sound of the fire alarm. 

   Water wasn’t pouring in, so we were clear to seal the door behind us.  Chaplin took care of that with a welding torch.  I wasn’t crazy about shutting off our only escape route, but we needed to, if only for the little extra time it would give us.

   We had estimated that it would take emergency response squads twelve minutes to reach the sub-basement, once they got the signal from the hotel’s security system.  It would take them another two minutes to cut through the door.  But if we were lucky, there would be enough confusion that they would be slow to get to work on it.  We were counting on having fifteen minutes before they discovered the break-in and alerted the police - fifteen minutes to shake the world.

   As soon as the final weld was in place, Chaplin tossed the torch aside, and we all started crawling through the opening into the bank.  The lower level was filled with backup generators.  There were no lights, and the beams of our flashlights captured little more than the thick dust that filled the air after the blast.  The only way I could find my way, as we wound our way through the machinery, was by following the faint outline of Boris’s back.  Fay was having an even harder time.  I could feel her fingertips brushing against my shoulder.  The sensation was reassuring, even though I knew I was just providing her a guide through the darkness.

   The lack of visibility made it a slow go, but it was a good sign.  It meant that the explosives had successfully fired backward into the hotel and hadn’t triggered the bank’s security systems.  The alternative was having the place lit by emergency lights, but we’d never complete the mission before the Exec raiding units got there.