The War Heist Read online

  THE WAR HEIST

  RALPH DENNIS

  The author would like to thank the Crown, the Keeper of the Records, and the Public Record Office for permission to search the documents related to British War Cabinet and Admiralty matters in June 1940 He owes a debt as well to the staff of the War Museum in London.

  This is a substantially revised edition of a novel that was previously published under the title MacTaggart’s War.

  Copyright © 2019 Adventures in Television, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 1-7320656-9-1

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7320656-9-7

  Published by

  Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line #253,

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  In memory of Jessie Rehder (1908—67) a writer, a teacher at the University of North Carolina, and a valued friend

  Also by Ralph Dennis

  The Hardman Series

  Atlanta Deathwatch

  The Charleston Knife is Back in Town

  Golden Girl And All

  Pimp For The Dead

  Down Among The Jocks

  Murder Is Not An Odd Job

  Working For The Man

  Deadly Cotton Heart

  The One Dollar Rip-Off

  Hump’s First Case

  The Last Of The Armageddon Wars

  The Buy Back Blues

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

  AFTERWARD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THIS BOOK

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  During the workday week of June 10 through the fourteenth 1940, in the cities of London and Manchester, in Liverpool and in Edinburgh, selected teams of bank officials and clerks worked late hours in the vaults. The overtime activity began when the daily banking hours were over and the other staff had left for the day.

  In wooden crates the size of melon boxes, constructed to specifications furnished by the Bank of England, the bank staff packed the contents of certain vault compartments. The staff worked in two-man teams—a supervisor and a packer. The supervisor read a file number from a list provided by the Bank of England. The packer located the tied and taped packet; he read the file number to the supervisor, and, after the proper check was made on the list, the package was fitted into the packing crate. As each case was filled it was numbered, and the crate number was noted beside the packet file numbers.

  The filled and covered cases were not heavy. They contained only paper. Each package—and they varied in size and weight—contained the investment wealth of one British family. At the beginning of the war, by emergency decree of the British government, private citizens were required by law to turn in their stocks and bonds to certain local appointed banks. Since then the dividends from these stocks and bonds had been collected by Britain and used to finance the war against Germany.

  By the end of the week, by the fifteenth, the crates had been shipped by truck and rail to collection centers. There, under heavy security, they awaited shipping orders.

  Altogether there were 488 cases.

  The contents of these cases, when the final totals were computed at the Bank of England in London, were valued at something in excess of $400 million.

  That same week, in London, two shifts labored in the caged vaults of the Bank of England. At a work area near the loading ramps, high stacks of special shipping cases ringed the space, leaving room only for an entrance and an exit.

  Trestle tables constructed from thick raw lumber ran like a plumb line down the center of the room.

  From time to time a rubber-wheeled cart was pushed down the aisle beside the tables. It was stacked with what looked like slabs of yellow tub butter. Each slab was a gold ingot weighing 27 pounds. At the established world price of thirty-two dollars an ounce, each ingot was worth almost fourteen thousand dollars.

  Each shipping case was divided into four compartments. Loaded—the four ingots in place—each case held 108 pounds of gold. The value of each shipping box filled with bullion was something over fifty-five thousand dollars.

  In all, during the week, the two shifts packed and sealed 2,229 cases of gold, a total of 8,916 ingots. The value of the whole consignment was in excess of $123 million.

  As each case was closed and the straps attached and tightened, a man moved the length of the table with a stencil card and an ink brush. Across each case, before it was loaded on a cart, the man stenciled salt fish.

  It was, for some reason, a big joke around the bullion yard.

  The spring flowers were in bloom in Montreal’s Dominion Square. In front of the Sun Life Assurance Company Building, the wide bands and sprays of yellows and reds danced off the gray, bleak stone.

  The statue of the mounted horseman peering through binoculars at the South African landscape saw, instead, the girls in their spring dresses and the coatless men lounging in the sun on park benches.

  It was the afternoon of Tuesday, June 11, 1940.

  From his office high above the square the president of Sun Life watched the Bank of Canada official hesitate on the sidewalk before he crossed Rue Cathedral. A driver waited there beside the bank car.

  The president backed away from the window. Two men were seated on the other side of his desk. Both men had attended the meeting with the Bank of Canada officer. One man, MacAndrew, was in charge of Sun Life real estate, and the other, Poole, was the company architect.

  “He doesn’t want much, does he?” The president’s tone was amused. He gave Poole a questioning look, his eyebrows raised.

  “It’s possible,” Poole said. “It’s incredible but still possible.”

  “It has to be the third basement,” MacAndrew said.

  The third basement was far below the street level, cut from the rock that formed this part of the island of Montreal. The specifications the man from the Bank of Canada had outlined were within those available there: eight thousand square feet of work space and a vault that would measure fifty feet by sixty feet. The security for the work area and the vault had to be of the best design, to the standard of the Bank of England or the Bank of Canada buildings on Wellington Street in Ottawa.

/>   “We’d better anticipate the problems,” the president said. “It is one matter to agree to an official government request and it is another to be able to carry it out.”

  Poole, the architect, lifted his head from a pad where he’d been doodling. “Steel. Structural steel. Even with the proper priority there is just no way that we’ll find the quantity of steel we need. At least, not from the usual sources.”

  “Even if we find the steel,” MacAndrew added, “where in heaven’s name do we come up with a vault door?”

  Poole nodded. He made a large check that slashed across one of his doodles. “For the steel, we could use railway-track rails. That is, if there is a track left in Canada that hasn’t already been salvaged.”

  The president edged his high-backed chair toward the desk and drew his telephone toward him. “Canadian National would know if there’s an abandoned spur line out there somewhere.”

  MacAndrew stood. He circled his chair. “While you’re on the phone …”

  “Yes.”

  “Bank of Canada would know of a vault door under construction, one that’s due to be delivered in the next two weeks.”

  The president lifted the phone receiver from its hook. “A bank somewhere will have to do without until the war is over.”

  Within twenty-four hours the workshops and the storeroom were cleared from the third basement of the Sun Life Assurance Building.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was going to rain down on him. Torrents and hail as big as goose eggs and as heavy as bricks.

  Seated behind his desk at Company D headquarters, Major Tom Renssler wasn’t thinking about the rolling dark thunderclouds that he watched through the screened window. He had observed that swirl and tumble, the innocent menace, for the last twenty minutes. The storm on its way, the oppressive stillness in the air around him—those had given him the metaphor that fitted what was about to happen to his professional life.

  “Let it come down.” That was in Macbeth somewhere. So much for that kind of useless knowledge he’d picked up in the humanities classes at the Point.

  And it would come down, this storm on the dusty parade ground at Fort Sam Belwin in the sandy coastland of North Carolina, in thick sheets, as if poured from a tin bucket. Perhaps they would have hail, too, the size of acorns. It would be a brief storm. The winds that brought it would carry it away, leaving behind only the soaked half inch of topsoil and the strong scent of dust that had been whipped up by the wind and the hard pounding of the rain.

  Tomorrow or the next day—Thursday or Friday—it would be his turn. His time to stand bareheaded in the open. The reason for it was right in front of him, centered on the desk blotter. A gray cloth-covered book with company d recreational fund printed on its spine.

  The final figure in the ledger, when he’d deducted the expense of 2 pairs boxing gloves, 4 checker sets, tips for pool cues, box chalk for same, showed an unspent balance of $532.27.

  Tom Renssler, without looking in the locked metal box in the file cabinet, knew that the actual amount left in the recreation fund was $32.27.

  The other five hundred dollars, through a bad three-day run of cards at BOQ, was re-creating a certain Captain George Marsh. Marsh of all people. Marsh who didn’t need the money, who had a steady income from a trust. After the third night, the final hand played, Marsh had folded the bills and stuffed them in the breast pocket of his shirt. He’d said, “After this bit of luck, I might consider trading in last year’s Ford for the new model.”

  Tom laughed. It was all he could do. He had to pretend to be the good loser, the gentleman loser.

  Already, minutes before, he had refused Marsh’s offer of “eating money,” the loan the winning gambler usually offered the big losers. He’d shrugged it off, as if to say there was still more where that five hundred came from. The fact of the matter was that twenty dollars wouldn’t do much to solve the shortage in the funds. If he was going to be cashiered, it might as well be for five hundred rather than four hundred and eighty. Five hundred had a full round sound to it. Four hundred and eighty had the mark of a careful man, someone who’d stolen fifty dollars this time and thirty another. No, Tom Renssler was anything but a careful man.

  The storm was almost directly above the camp now. The first rain hissed down. Dust swirled in the wind, and the window screens vibrated as if from an electrical charge.

  Tom reached over the back of the chair and opened the file-cabinet drawer. He tossed the ledger on top of the cashbox. A nudge, and the drawer slid closed. That was that. That was the way the new Regimental Finance Officer would find them when, tomorrow or the next day, he came by to do his audit.

  The quarterly audit wasn’t due for another two or three weeks. The first of July. And that was normally more than enough time to cover the shortage. There was his pay, some borrowing he could do, and, if he had to, there was always an uncle or an aunt on the wealthy side of the Renssler family. If there was time.

  Circumstances had trapped him this time. Old Major Sam Carter, a drinking friend, hadn’t told anybody that he had requested a transfer to Oklahoma so he could be close to his mother who was ill. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to say anything about it because it might be turned down. The transfer had come through a week ago. That in itself hadn’t sent out the danger signals. The audit still wasn’t due until the first of July.

  The bad news had come the first of the week through the Regimental grapevine. A new Regimental Finance Officer had been transferred in from Fort Jackson. A Major Griggs. He’d told his clerk, an enlisted man, that he intended to do an audit of all the company funds as a part of assuming the new post. His clerk told another enlisted man, and that one told another, and in two and a half days the information made its way across the camp. Earlier that afternoon, when Tom returned from lunch, Sergeant Jefferson stopped him on the parade ground and passed the rotten grape to him.

  He drifted toward the window. Dampness blew in on him. It was raining harder now, curtains of heavy drops that sent the officers and enlisted men scurrying for cover. The parade ground was empty in no time at all. He placed his elbows on the window sill and leaned forward, closing his eyes, and let the cold mist wash across his face.

  Tom Renssler was a tall man. Six-two in his bare feet. The uniform he wore had been tailored in London. His boots were made from the best English leather, from a shop on the Strand that specialized in military footwear. He knew to the penny what the uniform and the boots had cost. In his mail that morning, forwarded from the American Embassy in London, had been the third desperate dun from the tailor and the fourth from the boot makers.

  His hair was black. His face was lean and tanned. The hawkish nose was the mark of the Renssler blood. It was all that he had inherited from the family. From ship’s captains dealing in slaves, the Rensslers had gone on to own the ships, and, after the Civil War, they had left the ships and moved into banking. But somewhere in those last seventy years there had been a rupture, a tearing apart. One branch of the family retained the wealth, the position, and the prestige. The other, the branch that produced Tom Renssler, had been left only with the name, the hawk nose, and a knowledge of and taste for the kind of life it couldn’t afford anymore.

  Like the second and third sons of British nobility years ago, he’d been sent to the Army to make his living and his fortune. He’d done well at West Point. He’d applied himself, all his drive and his intelligence, and he’d graduated fourth in the class of 1930.

  In ten years, in a peacetime Army where promotion and advancement came slowly, if at all, he was a major when other men with equal time in the service and equal skills remained in the grade of captain.

  The post of military attaché in London had been the plum. He had used all the influence he could muster to obtain it. Since it had not cost them money, the wealthy side of the Renssler family had pushed him forward, collecting on some political IOUs. The story he’d heard later was that the Renssler influence had reached all the way to the back door
of the White House.

  Two years in the London post, if he’d handled it well, should have led to his promotion to lieutenant colonel. And with the war surely coming, colonel should have been the natural next step. With some luck, by the time the war ended, he might have been a general.

  The gambling, the drinking, the mounting debts, and the halfhearted affair with Lady Denham had spoiled that pretty dream of the future.

  His last fitness report, filled out at the Embassy in London, had followed him to Fort Sam Belwin. It was a collection of truths and half-truths. The result was that he’d been rated unsatisfactory. With that rating came the automatic Class-B status. At the next fitness report, if he wasn’t classed as satisfactory or above that, he would be given one year’s pay and discharged.

  Not that it mattered anymore. The new Regimental Finance Officer, Major Griggs, would solve that for him. As soon as he checked the ledger against the cash on hand, Tom Renssler would be up on charges. You could forget the fitness report. One unit of paperwork less for the Army.

  The center of the storm passed. A light rain trailed it as it moved inland. There had been no hail after all. Tom opened his eyes and ran a hand across his damp face.

  Work to do. He had made up his mind that he would continue to work until Major Griggs arrived at Company D. He returned to his desk and stacked the accumulation of paperwork on the center of the blotter. For the next two hours he lost himself in the twists and mazes of it, and he was still working when Sergeant Jefferson, at 1630 hours, opened the door and pointed at his watch. Tom waved him away. After Jefferson left, he spent another ten minutes reading a report from the Surgeon General of the Army. The report, in almost sacred terms, worried about the spread of drunkenness in the enlisted ranks.

  And what about the officers? Of course, he didn’t write that in the margin. He initialed it in the proper space on the cover sheet and sailed it into the out basket.

  Enough. He put on his cavalry hat and tucked his swagger stick under his arm. And then, as he was about to leave for the day, the impulse hit him. He opened the file cabinet and took out the ledger and the cashbox. He unlocked the box and dumped the bills and the change on the desk top. Without counting it he stuffed it into his pocket. He locked the cashbox and placed it in the file drawer. Another impulse. He opened the ledger to the last sheet where the balance was given. He wrote, in a thick slash of a pen, IOU $532.27 and signed his name.