"Leinster, Murray - The Mole Pirate v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

IV


Sing Sing prison is forty miles from the Wedgewood Arsenal, and the Mole turned up there at eleven o'clock. Its speed was greater than that performance would indicate however, and it is probable that Durran stopped somewhere to rest and possibly to investigate the Mole's various mechanisms more thoroughly.
It is clear that he had made his plans in detail between four in the afternoon^ when he-stole the Mole, and eight at night when he raided the arsenal. To carry out his plans he needed help, and he knew where to get it, and he had to move fast to avoid being outguessed and having his men hidden away from him.
It was a bright, moonlit night. At eleven o'clock the high concrete walls of the prison glowed palely where the moonlight struck them and showed utterly black in shadow. White arc lights glittered within the prison enclosures making a misty white aura above the walls. The cell blocks of course were dark, save where corridors reached to windows and showed the faint illumination within. The lights of Ossining twinkled in the distance, and a river steamer floated upstream out in the middle of the Hudson River.
A guard, pacing the top of the wall, saw a vaguely moving thing outside. It was too dark for him to see it clearly3 but he watched curiously. Something was moving, past question, but the suspicion of Sing Sing guards is directed always toward the interior, not the outside, of the prison.
The guard could make out only motion. Its line was clear. The guard fixed his eyes upon a whitish stone on the ground and waited for it to be obscured. The moving thing, whatever it was, went smoothly up to that stone. The guard watched.
But the movement continued and it was past the whitish stone, and the stone was not hidden for even an instant. The guard grew doubtful and even more curious. The inexplicable thing was headed straight for the base of the wall. He saw or felt it reach a spot directly below him. Movement continued. Then there wasn't anything there at all. He called to the guard next to him.
'Somethin' funny,' he said uneasily. 'I saw somethin3 movin', down on the ground, an' then it wasn't there.'
The other guard looked down, but on the inside of the wall, because it is toward the inside that a prison guard bends all his alertness. He searched with his eyes.
'There it is!'
He pointed. From the height of the wall and in the glare of the bright arc lights a misty, phantomlike shape could be seen. But it could be looked through. The floor of the exercise yard was visible below it.
'What the hell!' said the second guard.
'Y'guess we oughta make a report? It looks like a ghost!'
The second guard continued to stare. The phantom swam smoothly across the open space. It reached the outer wall of a cell block. It vanished, apparently into that wall.
'Gosh!' said the second guard. 'That was a funny thing!'
'What was it? A ghost?'
"Hell, no!' said the second guard, without conviction. 'It was some mist, maybe. A speck of fog or somethin'. Y'want to be kidded to death?'
The first guard did not want to be kidded to death. He returned to his pacing back and forth.
Quietness again. A steamer out of sight on the river hooted dismally. Somewhere a motor car bummed along a distant road. Insects stridulated insistently. The crunch of feet on concrete. The wailing, plaintive cry of some night bird. One minute, two, five, ten minutes, with only such sounds as guards upon a tall concrete wall will normally hear.
Then a single, muted *pop* in a cell block. A small sound, but distinctive. Every guard in every watching post heard it and gripped his rifle more tightly. Every man turned to face the sound. Silence. Another muted *pop*. Then the sudden snarling roar of a machine gun, unmistakable even though it came from a cell block.
An instant later., there was the shattering concussion of a hand grenade. Glass in the cell block broke out and went tinkling down the stone sides of the building. A neat row of windows gaped glassless into the night. Then a man screamed, a high, shrill scream that was not less horrible from being distant. Another shattering explosion. Yet another.
Guards raced for the building. Then pandemonium broke loose. The guards on the wall stayed there. It was their job to check a break, if one came, on the outer defences. But they saw running men with rifles make for the cell block. They heard shouts, yells, howlings of terror and of exultation alike. The cell building became a madhouse.
And then a series of detonations began which were thunderous in intensity and deliberate in spacing, suggesting an inhumanly cold-blooded destructiveness at work. After each explosion came screams.
Then the men on the wall saw a phantom come out of the cell building. It was feet above the level of the exercise yard. It was unsubstantial and unreal. It was the wraith of a nightmare.
Shimmering, ghostly, impossible, it careened out of the wall and toppled to the ground. It seemed to bury itself- if a ghost can bury itself - before it came slowly into view again.
Not one shot was fired at it. It was impossible. It was a figment of the imagination. It simply could not be.
The phantom swam across the exercise yard of Sing Sing prison. It moved steadily toward the massive, monstrous outer wall of the prison. It reached that wall. It went into it. It vanished.
The guard who had first sensed movement outside now looked down again, shivering a little. He would not have known what the phantom of the Mole was, even if he could have seen it clearly.
But he saw nothing. He did sense that something was moving down on the ground below him, but that was all. A vague stirring moved soundlessly away from the prison walls and vanished into darkness. He did not shoot at it because he saw nothing to shoot at.
That was his story after the whole disturbance was ended, and he stuck to it. He wasn't believed, of course. There were four prisoners missing, twenty or thirty injured by explosions, three guards dead and others hurt, and nearly one floor of the northeast cell block so badly wrecked as practically to be destroyed. A guard who said he saw something moving, but nothing to shoot at, was not telling a plausible story. Four men, escaping, should have made a magnificent target in the arc-lighted exercise yard.
It was not until the next day that a reasonable two was put to an incredible two and an inevitable four was arrived at. The missing prisoners were pals of Durran's. The phantom seen by the guards, the explosives, the destruction, told all.
Taken with the raid on the Wedgewood Arsenal, the uproar at Sing Sing made it perfectly clear that Durran, in the Mole, was a criminal with an unparalleled opportunity to gratify his every impulse. And it seemed likely that he intended to use his opportunity.
For the next three days there was no word of Durran or the Mole or any of the four men he had raided Sing Sing to release.
Something had been pieced together of what he did, of course. On the fifth, a radio store in Newburgh, New York, was looted of practically all its material for radio repairs, wire, tubes, sockets, transformers, batteries - everything that goes into the making of a radio receiver was stolen. That same night, too, fancy groceries in considerable quantity were taken from the town's most expensive food shop.
Next day, on the 18th, police surveillance of the women formerly beloved by the released prisoners came to an abrupt end. The women vanished. From sheer habit the police instituted the customary search to find out who had taken them away from their usual haunts. They discovered nothing.
It is reasonable to assume that the first two thefts, of radio parts and food, were preparatory moves by Durran. The removal of the women was a part of the process of making the released prisoners contented.
Meanwhile Durran seems to have used all his intelligence in the examination of the Mole, and on the 19th he was probably busy. Certainly on the 20th he was prepared for action on a larger scale than before.
At nine thirty that night a thunderous, clanging uproar broke out in Newburgh. The outdoor alarm gong of the First National Bank went off with a tremendous noise. Simultaneously, the local police station received due warning of prowlers at work inside the bank. It was not a large bank, but even the little ones have more than one burglar-alarm system installed nowadays.
In less than five minutes from the sounding of the alarm, a patrol load of cops was on hand, prepared to do battle with bank robbers. The bank doors were closed and locked. They were opened from inside by a scared and bewildered watchman. He had heard the gongs, too. His own telltale registered a disturbance. But he could find no sign of anything wrong.
Then bank officials tore up in a motor car. A third alarm system had reported disturbance to the home of the cashier. They crowded into the bank, to be faced by puzzled cops and nearly deafened by the insistent, frantic clanging of the alarm gong outside.
Somebody managed to turn off the gong. It looked as if a freak accident had set off every protective device at once. The cops were rather sheepish, standing embattled in the bank with absolutely nothing to do. But there could be nothing wrong.
The vault was closed and locked and obviously untouched. There were no thieves to rout, it seemed, so the question became that of discovering and correcting the flaw in all the protective devices. The bank suddenly gleamed light everywhere. A master switch turned on every light in the place.
Then they saw the Mole. It was quite stationary. It was a huge, shimmering phantom, its bow end lost in the metal of the vault. Its tail, also, vanished into the side wall of the bank building. Standing still as it was, it could be examined with some detail, and presently it was observed that the four huge, vertical screws turned lazily, maintaining its position in spite of the gravity pull which tried to drag it down to the centre of the earth.
Men shot at it. The bullets went harmlessly through. They hacked at it with fire axes from a case on the wall. The blows spent themselves on seemingly empty air. The men drew back, regarding the earth-ship helplessly. Then a minor official of the bank, desperately daring, plunged first his hand and then his whole body into the phantom.
He could feel no resistance to his movements. The Mole remained as transparent and as unsubstantial as before. But, from within, he could see wraiths about him - machinery like gossamer, even men, like ghosts.
One of those ghosts saw him and pointed at him. Another ghost rocked back and forth, laughing, and the bank clerk was tormented by the suspicion that he heard a whispering thread of that Homeric laughter. Then one of the ghosts made an elaborate, mocking gesture of lifting a phantom cap in greeting.
A roar of rage brought the clerk out of the phantom. Somebody had thought to put his ear to the vault. And there was movement within. Through the steel walls came thumpings, crashings, bumps. There were men at work within the monstrous sealed safe - methodical hangings, deliberate, purposeful thuds and clanks.
'They're looting it!' panted the president of the bank, purple with rage. 'Looting it! And the time lock's on, and we can't get in!'