in on their basement room, they could expect time in jail or the brig, and be busted in rank, but that was a chance they were willing to take. It was also why they’d posted a guard outside the door.
Thus, they were stunned when two masked and armed men burst in, guns pointed at them.
“Put your hands on your heads and stand up.”
It was awkward, but they complied, almost too shocked to speak. One, a sailor whose cousin had been standing guard, was worried and asked about him.
“Your friend at the door is taking a nap. Whether he wakes up or not is largely up to you. Now, turn and face the wall and disrobe completely.”
“What?” one of the gamblers exclaimed.
“Shut up and do as you’re told. We could kill you all here and leave you and no one would notice for days, but we won’t unless you force us to.”
Sullenly, the men stripped down. They were told to stand naked and facing the wall with their hands stretched up as high as they could. While one robber held a gun on them, the other scooped up the money and stuffed it into a cloth laundry bag. The second man then rifled through their clothing and found a little more money along with a small cache of weapons.
“I guess you don’t trust anybody,” the first man cackled. “Can’t say as I blame you.”
“We’ll get you, you prick,” snarled one of the gamblers.
“Actually, you won’t. First, you have no idea who we are and where we’re going and, second, you were performing an illegal act. What are you going to do, run to the police and admit that you got robbed while committing a crime? What do you think they might say when you asked them to get you your money back? That would not be smart. No, you will write this off as a cost of doing business. You might want to get a better man as a guard. It was very easy to take him down, although I don’t think he’s badly hurt.”
The second man gave the money bag to the first and then scooped up the gamblers’ clothing. “This will ensure that you don’t leave for a while,” the first gunman continued. “We’ll leave your clothing just a ways down the alley.”
With that, Braun and Krause departed. They were laughing and almost exhilarated. They took off the bandannas that served as masks and turned the reversible jackets they’d been wearing inside out. They got on a San Diego bus and sat separately, even going past where they’d pulled off the holdup. No one was in sight. Braun thought the gamblers might still be looking for their clothes. It would be a while before they found them in a trash container, and they would not wander around naked for the same reason that they would not go to the cops.
Two hours later, they were in the apartment above Swenson Engineering. Braun laughed and held up a wad of cash. “A little over two thousand dollars. Well, along with the other heists we’ve pulled, this ought to keep us in money for at least a little while.”
The two men had spent time scouting out a number of such high-stakes games and in a two-night period following a payday, they’d hit four of them. They now had more than ten thousand dollars to keep them going.
“Yes,” said Krause, “but we can’t do it again. The next time they’ll have real guards on lookout and others watching the guards. They’ll catch us and we’ll have our asses kicked and then we’ll be thrown into the ocean as shark bait. The next time we’re short of cash, we’ll have to come up with something new.”
“Suggestions?”
Krause grinned. “I suppose we could always rob a small bank in a small town.”
“Those are Japs,” yelled Stecher. Farris took half a second to confirm that the planes screaming only a few feet overhead were indeed Zeros before throwing himself prone and beginning to crawl to a culvert.
Machine guns chattered and bullets ripped into the American camp at Fairbanks. Men ran in all directions, stunned by the suddenness of the attack. Some were chewed by bullets and left sprawling. Farris could hear screaming.
“What happened to our radar?” yelled Stecher. “And where the hell are our planes?”
Farris saw that the handful of American fighters and transports lined up along the still inadequate airstrip were being shot to pieces. So too were fuel dumps and other storage facilities. He didn’t bother telling Stecher that radar was inadequate and maybe pointed in the wrong direction, but he did wonder just why no American planes or spotters had caught sight of the oncoming Japanese horde.
Plane after plane swept over the base, strafing and bombing without much in the way of resistance. A few antiaircraft guns opened up, but they didn’t stop the Japanese. A couple of enemy planes were hit and one crashed into a warehouse, resulting in an explosion and fire that quickly consumed the entire building. Farris wondered if the Japanese pilot, his plane damaged, had directed his plane there.
A pair of American P47s did make it into the air and a couple more Zeros were shot down before the American planes went down in flames too.
It was over as quickly as it had begun. Farris checked his watch. He thought the raid had lasted no more than fifteen minutes. A grim-faced Colonel Gavin began shouting orders and yelling at a major who looked like wanted to be anyplace else on the planet. Perhaps it was the major’s fault that the Japs had gotten so close, although overall responsibility for the base was Gavin’s.
Ambulances had begun to pick up the wounded and the dead, while shocked but unhurt GIs crawled out from where they’d been hiding. Stecher grabbed Farris’s arm and pulled him.
“Come this way.”
Farris did as directed. In a little while they stood with a bunch of others around the wreckage of an airplane, a Japanese Zero. The tail was burning brightly. The gas tank had exploded and fires were consuming it.
“Look in the cockpit,” Stecher said, laughing. “That’s a fucking Jap.”
Indeed it was, Farris thought. The man had been burned to a crisp and was little more than a charred and blackened skeleton. His white teeth seemed to be laughing at them. Should I feel sympathy for him, Farris wondered. After all, didn’t the pilot have a family? Or friends? Where there people who would mourn for him when they received word that he’d gone on a final mission?
So, should I feel sorry for him? Farris asked himself.
Fuck no.
CHAPTER 16
A TALL, RANGY MARINE LANCE CORPORAL WALKED INTO HARRIS’S office and almost saluted, stopping quickly when he remembered that he was seeing a civilian, and not an officer. His face was pale and there was a large white bandage on his head. He looked around curiously at the decrepit furniture that was clearly a bunch of castoffs.
The FBI, recognizing its lack of numbers and communications limitations in the San Diego area, had convinced the navy to give them a group of offices on base and, by design, these were down a drab hallway from where Dane worked. As usual, the last to show up got the crummiest in the way of chairs, tables, and desks. Harris did not complain. It was how the game was played and, besides, he didn’t anticipate spending a whole lot of time in the office. Once the problem of the saboteurs was solved, he would move on to other cases.
“What’s your name, son?” Harris asked softly to try and gain the Marine’s confidence. The young man had telephoned earlier and said he wanted to meet. Harris guessed him as in his early twenties.
“Eppler, sir, Lance Corporal Lee Eppler.”
“Great. Now close the door and sit down.” Eppler did as directed and Harris continued. “Now tell me what you have on your mind.”
Eppler took a deep breath as if what he was going to say was difficult to admit. “Sir, there are rumors all over the place, and me being here talking to you confirms one of them, and that’s that the FBI is actually here on base. The second rumor is that you’re chasing saboteurs like the ones who derailed those trains.”
“We haven’t announced that any saboteurs derailed anything.”
“You don’t have to, sir. A whole bunch of people were working on clearing wrecks, treating injured, and stuff like that. They could see things and they listened to you guys talk. The trains were sabotaged.”
