“With more than one hundred miles of road to choose from? Damn right we are.”
“Okay,” the hood called Bertrand said. “But if we’re about to shack up with the other mobs... if there’s gonna be so much more bread flyin’ around once the Comrades buy in... do we really need to take the risk? Or is this a joint operation?”
Jean-Paul shook his head. “No way. This is strictly a one-off. For us alone. As to why... well, it’ll be a while before the arrangement with the Russians pays off. And in the meantime, we have a slight liquidity problem. It’s only temporary but, among other things, that Corsican raid cost. In any case, it seemed too good a hit to miss, right? If any of you guys think it’s a dumb idea...” He left the sentence unfinished.
Apparently nobody did. Bolan least of all because it had given him an idea of his own.
The heist was well planned and expertly carried out, Bolan had to admit. The site Jean-Paul had chosen was one of the tunnels that pierce the mountain mass above the ocean between Nice and the principality.
There were three advantages to the site. First, the expressway ran on the landward slopes of the mountain, and there were no towns or villages for several miles; second, the eastbound and westbound sections of the road were routed separately instead of sharing one wide tunnel; finally, the site chosen was only a couple of miles from the Monte Carlo turnoff, so the armed guards protecting the consignment would already be relaxing, figuring their trip was almost over.
Raoul, Bertrand, Smiler, Delacroix, Bolan and J-P himself were the inside men. Of the remaining six in the team, two were drivers and the other four had the task of removing the money.
Most of the money would be in bills equivalent to five and ten dollars, but there would be a sizeable amount in ten-franc coins, parceled in heavy sacks of one thousand. Smoothness and efficiency in the disposal of the loot was therefore going to be vital.
It was midafternoon when the armored truck with its four motorcycle outriders, two in front and two behind, approached the long upward grade that led to the tunnel. The cash would be in the casino strong room before the big-time roulette and baccarat players began to drift in at dusk.
It was a sultry day, the heat haze spreading inland from the sea and over the hills. Traffic was light. The tourists were either crowding the beaches or packing before they left their rented vacation villas and returned home. Most of the heavy commercial transport running between France and Italy had already passed.
But there was a forty-ton semi parked some way from the tunnel entrance on the emergency strip, with its hazard lights blinking. The driver was squatting by the front suspension, tightening something with a wrench. When the convoy was still several hundred yards away he climbed into his cab and the rig rumbled back onto the roadway and headed for the tunnel.
It was more than half a mile long. When the two leading bikers rode in out of the heat, the semi was still some way short of the exit. The armored truck and the other two cops followed. They were halfway through when it happened.
A sudden hiss of compressed air brakes... a squeal of rubber... and the front section of the huge truck skated across the roadway to graze the curved tunnel wall with a shriek of tortured steel. At the same time, the light, unloaded rear trailer jackknifed, swinging wide to hit the opposite wall and completely block the exit.
Double doors at the rear of the trailer had been flung open before the armored truck skidded to a halt and the two cops could draw their Brownings. From inside the trailer Jean-Paul and Delacroix fired heavy-caliber rubber bullets at the bikers, knocking them from their saddles. Simultaneously Bolan launched three gas grenades from an M-203 tube attached to an M-16 rifle — one between the fallen bikers, one beside the cab of the armored truck, the third toward the back of the vehicle, beneath the floor.
The fragile canisters were of a type unfamiliar to Bolan, but J-P had told him they should knock a man out for thirty minutes and leave no aftereffects.
They sure acted fast. Both cops were inert by the time Bolan and the two mafiosi, wearing gas masks and woolen balaclavas, thumped down the tailgate and raced toward the armored truck.
The gas, visible as faint wreaths of smoke in the yellow overhead lights illuminating the tunnel, coiled around the truck’s cab. There was a driver and a guard armed with a Belgian FN machine pistol inside. But the windows were down because of the heat and both of them were out by the time the three hardmen sprinted up.
A third guard, similarly armed, would be in the back of the truck, with instructions not to come out under any circumstances, but to fire at once if anyone unauthorized tried to break in.
He wouldn’t be coming out.
He wouldn’t be firing when they broke in, either. There was a grill between the strong room and the cab, open too because of the heat, and a small ventilator revolving on the roof. Enough to allow in sufficient gas to render the guy unconscious.
There were ventilator fans also set in the tunnel roof, their five-foot blades designed to extract gasoline and diesel fumes. Buy they lay motionless now in the yellow light. The mobsters working outside had cut the current powering their motors and dismantled the blades minutes before the convoy was due.
Sensing trouble, the two cops riding shotgun had accelerated the moment they’d seen the semi blocking the exit. Passing the truck, they rode straight into the motionless gas cloud... and straight out of action, the BMW 650s toppling over and spinning to the tunnel walls as the cops slumped over their handlebars.
Bolan cut the fuel feed on all four roaring engines as J-P and the giant hauled the security men from the cab and searched them for keys.
A second semi was now broadsided across the roadway to block the tunnel’s entrance. The driver, followed by Smiler and his two thugs, all of them wearing gas masks and balaclavas, ran to the stalled security vehicle. They were joined a moment later by the hood who had blocked the exit.
Everything now depended on timing. And it was here that Jean-Paul’s organizational genius paid off. Instead of loading their haul into cars and attempting a getaway on one of the expressway lanes, instead of leaving the tunnel and making it across the countryside to another road, he had come up with a smarter idea.
The sabotaged fans in the roof, when they were working, pushed the extracted air up into shafts that penetrated the hillside and emerged into the open air 150 feet above the twin tunnels.
These shafts were thirty-six inches wide.
J-P stood now beneath one of them and blew three shrill blasts on a police whistle.
Seconds later a steel loader’s hook on the end of a rope appeared at the shaft mouth in the tunnel roof. Rapidly it was lowered to the roadway. Working feverishly, Smiler and the other mobsters ransacked the armored truck, ranging boxes stuffed with bills and the heavy cylindrical coin sacks beneath the vent.
A second rope snaked down from the next shaft, fifty yards nearer the exit. Bolan, Raoul and Delacroix humped sacks and boxes over. Quickly now the hooks, loaded with three sacks at a time, rose upward and were swallowed in the darkness of the ventilator shafts, reappeared for another load, and then vanished again. On the hillside above two garage pickups equipped with powered hoists worked overtime.
It was a smart idea, all right. Bolan wondered with an inward grin just how much it had been influenced by his own ruse — as he had explained it to his boss — to get rid of the Husqvarna after the Telder “assassination.”
Except for a few sacks of coins, the contents of the armored truck had been hoisted by the time the men in the tunnel heard the distant bray of police sirens. Bolan guessed that the guards, before the gas got to them, would have had time to send out an SOS.
“Okay, guys, that’s it,” Jean-Paul ordered at once. “We’ll take the ropes ourselves now, two at a time.”
While the first four men ran for the ropes, the others ranged the unconscious cops and guards alongside the plundered truck.
Jean-Paul had been insistent that on this deal there were to be no deaths. Mobsters and bribed police along the coast had reached an understanding. The mafiosi, handing out their hush money, could continue their protection rackets, the organization of cathouses and gambling joints, the distribution of drugs, the sacking of bank strong rooms — on condition.
There were to be no public shootouts; no hostage situations; no killings.
It would be exactly what the do-gooders wanted: The kind of thing that would bring the law down on the mafiosi at a critical time.
