The Golden Gate
A tense and nerve-shattering classic from the highly acclaimed masster of action and suspense.A ROLLING FOR KNOXis how the journalists describe the Presidential motorcade as it enters San Francisco across the Golden Gate. Even the ever-watchful FBI believe it is impregnable – as it has to be with the President and two Arab potentates aboard.But halfway across the bridge the unthinkable happens. Before the eyes of the world a master criminal pulls off the most spectacular kidnapping in modern times…
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ALISTAIR MACLEAN
The Golden Gate
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1963
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1963
Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1963
Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006144946
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 9780007289295 Version: 2018-10-30
To Mary Marcelle
CONTENTS
The operation had to be executed with a surgically military precision marked with a meticulousness that matched, in degree if not in scope, the Allied landings in wartime Europe. It was. The preparations had to be made in total stealth and secrecy. They were. A split-second co-ordination had to be achieved. It was. All the men had to be rehearsed and trained, over and over again until they played their parts perfectly and automatically. They were so trained. Every eventuality, every possible departure from the planned campaign had to be catered for. It was. And their confidence in their ability to carry out their plan, irrespective of reversals and departures from the norm, had to be total. It was.
Confidence was a quality exuded by their leader, Peter Branson. Branson was thirty-eight years old, just under six feet tall, strongly built, with black hair, pleasant features, lips that were curved in an almost perpetual smile and light blue eyes that had forgotten how to smile many years ago. He was dressed in a policeman’s uniform but he was not a policeman. Neither was any of the eleven men with them in that disused trucker’s garage not far from the banks of Lake Merced, halfway between Daly City to the south and San Francisco to the north, although three were attired in the same uniform as Branson.
The single vehicle there looked sadly out of place in what was, in effect, nothing more than an open-ended shed. It was a bus, but barely, by normal standards, qualified for the term. It was an opulently gleaming monster which above shoulder level was composed, except for the stainless-steel crossover struts, entirely of slightly tinted glass. There was no regular seating as such. There were about thirty swivel chairs, anchored to the floor but scattered seemingly at random, with deep armrests and aircraft-type swing-out dining-tables housed in each armrest. Towards the rear there was a cloakroom and a remarkably well-stocked bar. Beyond that there was a rear observation deck, the floor of which had for the moment been removed to reveal the cavernous baggage department. This was filled to near capacity but not with baggage. This enormous storage space, seven and a half feet wide by the same in length, held, among other things, two petrol-driven electric generators, two twenty-inch searchlights, a variety of smaller ones, two very peculiar-looking missile-like weapons with mounting tripods, machine-pistols, a large crated unmarked wooden box, four smaller wooden boxes, and a variety of other items of material, conspicuous among which were large coils of rope. Branson’s men were still loading.
The coach, one of only six ever made, had cost Branson ninety thousand dollars: for the purposes for which he intended to use it, he considered this figure a trifling investment. He was buying the coach, he had told the Detroit firm, as an agent for a publicity-shy millionaire, who was also an eccentric who wanted it painted yellow. And yellow it had been when it was delivered: it was now a gleaming, translucent white.
Two of the remaining five coaches had been bought by genuine and extrovert millionaires, both of whom intended them for luxurious, personal vacation travel. Both buses had rear ramps to accommodate their mini-cars. Both, presumably, would rest for about fifty weeks a year in their specially built garages.
The other three buses had been bought by the Government.
The dawn was not yet in the sky.
The other three white buses were in a garage in downtown San Francisco. The big sliding doors were closed and bolted. In a canvas chair in a corner a man in plain clothes, a sawn-off riot gun held on his lap by flaccid hands, slept peacefully. He had been dozing when the two intruders arrived and was now blissfully unaware that he had sunk into an even deeper sleep because he’d inhaled the single-second squirt from the gas gun without being aware of the fact. He would wake up within the hour almost equally unaware of what had happened and would be extremely unlikely to admit to his superiors that his vigilance had been a degree less than eternal.
