'That looks a most exceptional camera.'
'It is.' Revson permitted himself a small proprietary smile that almost bordered on a smirk. 'Hand-made and assembled. Swedish. A rare species. The only camera in the world that can take colour stills, black and white stills and is a cine camera at the same time.'
'May I have a look? I'm a bit of a camera buff myself.'
'Certainly.' The battery-powered air-conditioning in the coach, Revson thought, was falling down on the job.
Van Effen examined the camera with the eye of a connoisseur. Inadvertently, as it seemed, his hand touched the spring clip at the base. A dozen cassettes and spools tumbled on to the seat beside Revson.
'I
'Well, you went to the right finishing school, anyway.'
'It always shows.' Van Effen gave him his vacuous smile and left.
Revson did not mop his brow for it was a gesture alien to his nature. Had he been a brow-mopper, he would have done so. He wondered if Van Effen had noticed the two tiny spring clips in the base. He probably had. Had he realized their significance? Equally probably not. They could have been the retaining clips for any number of esoteric attachments.
Revson turned in his seat. The hostages were descending from their coach, the President manfully substituting for his black scowl a calm, resolute and statesmanlike expression. Even Van Effen, Revson saw, had his eyes on them. Revson left the coach by the door opposite the driver's so that he was on the blind side of all the spectators and participants. He leaned his elbows in brief contemplation on the outer rail, then opened his right hand, the one that held the transceiver. He had read somewhere that it took a solid object, accelerating at thirty- two feet per second, only three seconds to fall from the bridge to the Golden Gate and he gravely doubted whether the man responsible for those figures could count. Nobody had noticed anything amiss. Revson had covered his bets again.
He made his unhurried and silent entry into the coach again, closed the door quietly behind him and emerged, much less quietly, from the opposite door. Van Effen turned, smiled vaguely, then turned back his attention to the circus on hand.
As before, Branson had everything stage-managed to perfection, hostages and newsmen seated in their proper places, cine and still cameramen strategically positioned although, this time, there was one minor but significant difference from the previous occasion. This time Branson had two TV cameras instead of one. Without further ado Branson, calm, relaxed and as assured as ever, re-embarked upon his psychological warfare. Apart from being a born general and a born stage manager, he could also have been a born anchor-man on TV.
He divided his attention fairly evenly between the TV lens and those seated beside him. After a wholly unnecessary introduction of himself, the President, the King and the Prince, his first reference, not unsurprisingly, was to cameras.
'We have, this afternoon, two television cameras with us. One for the illustrious company you are now viewing, the other facing the other way towards the south or San Franciscan shore. The second one is a tracking camera with a telephoto zoom lens, that, up to half a mile, can give the clarity of resolution that one would expect at the distance of ten feet. As there is no trace of fog this afternoon it should be able to perform its function admirably. Its function is as follows.'
Branson lifted the canvas cover from a large, rectangular box then, microphone in hand, went and sat in a specially reserved vacant chair by the President. He gestured towards the object he had just unveiled.
'A courtesy gesture towards our assembled guests. A rather splendid colour TV set. No better obtainable anywhere. American, of course.'
The President had to make himself heard. After all, most of the so-called civilized eyes in the world were upon him. He said, with heavy sarcasm and a cold distaste: 'I'll wager you haven't paid for your TV set, Branson.'
'That's hardly relevant. The point is that I don't want to make you and your guests feel like second-class and deprived citizens. All the world will be able to see in close detail how we are going to attach the first of our explosive charges to one of the cables by the south tower and I feel it would be unjust to deprive you of the same privilege. After all, at a distance of over two thousand feet and an elevation of over five hundred feet, it would be difficult for even the keenest-eyed to appreciate the finer points of this operation. But the box here will show you everything you want.' Branson smiled. 'Or don't want. Now, please direct your attention to the vehicle descending the ramp from the rear coach.'
They so directed their attention. What they saw could also be seen on the TV set before them. The vehicle looked like a stripped-down, miniaturized golf-cart. It was self-propelled but silent, clearly electrically powered. The driver, Peters, stood on a tiny platform at the rear immediately over the batteries. On the flat steel platform before him was a large coil of very thin rope and, at the very front, a small, double-drummed winch.
At the foot of the ramp, Peters stopped the vehicle. Four men appeared from the rear of the coach. The first two were carrying an obviously very heavy canvas strap of explosives — similar to the one that Branson had earlier demonstrated on TV. This they deposited, very carefully indeed, on the vehicle's platform beside the rope. The other two men carried objects about eight feet in length: one was a boat-hook, the other an H-sectioned steel beam with butterfly screw clamps at one end and a built-in pulley at the other.
'The tools of our trade,' Branson said. 'You should be able to guess what they're all for but in any event this will be explained to you when they are put to use. Two things are of particular interest: the explosives and the rope. That strap of explosives is ten feet long and contains thirty bee-hives of high explosive, each five pounds in weight: the rope, which is a quarter of a mile long, looks, and is, thinner than the average clothes-line, but, as it is made of steel-cored nylon, has a breaking strain of eight hundred pounds which is exactly five times as much as will be required of it.' He gestured to Peters, who nodded, eased open the circular control wheel and trundled off in the direction of the south tower. Branson looked directly at the TV lens.
He said: 'For those of you who don't know, and apart from the citizens of San Francisco there will be many who will not know, those towers are something less than solid structures.' On the TV set before him and on countless millions of sets throughout the world, the south tower came into sharp, close focus. 'These towers consist of steel framework boxes called cells. Each is about the size of a phone booth, but twice as high, riveted together and connected by manholes. Each tower consists of over five thousand such cells. They contain elevators and ladders — a rather staggering twenty-three miles of them.'
He reached under his seat and brought up a manual.
'As you will appreciate, it would be very easy for the inexperienced to get lost inside this labyrinth. Once, when they were building this bridge, two men spent the entire night inside the north tower trying to find their way out and, indeed, Joseph Strauss, the designer and builder of this bridge, was capable of getting completely lost inside the tower. It was with this in mind that Strauss produced this twenty-six-page manual — well, not this one, this is a facsimile I was fortunate enough to come by — instructing inspectors how to find their way about inside the towers.
'At this moment, two of my men, each with a copy of this manual — although they hardly need them, they're using the elevator — are at, or nearing, the top of the east tower there, the one facing towards the bay. They are carrying with them nothing except a fifteen-pound weight, the purpose of which you will shortly discover. May we observe the progress of our electric truck, please?'
The telephoto TV camera obligingly descended and closed on Peters, traveling along the wrong side of the bridge. Even as they watched, it slowed and came to a halt almost directly under the lowest of the four massive cross-struts of the south tower.
Branson said: 'Elevation, please.'
Again the telephoto camera focused on the saddle — the curved steel housing over which the cable passed — on the bayside tower. Almost immediately two men came into sight by the saddle, tiny figures for those directly observing from the middle of the bridge, close-up for those looking at the TV screens.
'On cue, on time,' Branson said with some satisfaction. 'In those matters, co-ordination is of the essence. I dare say that not one in ten thousand of you would care to be where those two men are now. Quite frankly, neither
