Colin Forbes - Year of the Golden Ape

It was a tableau which immediately aroused Gibson's suspicions – the classic set-up for a hi-jack. First, the seeming car accident with the girl lying on the highway, apparently injured. A classic set-up except for two things – the second armoured truck, the sight of which reassured Gibson to some extent, and the appearance of the girl. 'Drive a little closer,' Gibson ordered as he leaned close to the windscreen. The lights played over the sprawled girl and Gibson saw her face. He told Taglia to stop as a helmeted figure appeared from behind the other truck.

'What do you think?' Taglia asked.

'I think it's OK. Look at her face, for God's sake. Keep trying to raise Roosevelt,' he added as he opened his door.

The security man with the helmet and visor waited for him in the rain with one hand behind his back as Gibson jumped down beside him.

Behind the wheel Taglia was getting a lot of static on the radio link. The security man whose face Gibson couldn't see had a shaky voice. 'She was hitting seventy, I swear to God she was. She just came out of nowhere…'

'They always do,' Gibson said as rain hit his face. 'And they end up nowhere. She has to be dead, of course?'

'I'm not sure…' The security man sounded in a bad way, in a state of shock, Gibson guessed. 'I thought I felt a pulse at the side of her neck. Trouble is we can't get through to the base – the static is hell tonight…'

'Same problem.' Gibson glanced over his shoulder to see how Taglia was getting on, then something rammed into his stomach. He looked down and saw the Colt. 45 as the helmeted man pulled the trigger. The heavy bullet threw him against the cab as the man stepped back and raised the revolver. Inside the cab Taglia, the mike still in his hand, stared in disbelief at Gibson, at the man holding the Colt. The man whose face they never saw fired twice at Taglia, lowered the gun, fired once more at Gibson. Both men died inside fifteen seconds.

Another man wearing security guard uniform came from behind the truck which appeared to have crashed into the Dodge and ran forward. 'I was monitoring their set – they didn't get through the jamming…'

'Stop jabbering, Walgren, and get this thing open…'

LeCat found the keys inside Gibson's pocket and used them to open the back of the truck. Rows of steel boxes were stacked along either side of the truck and each box had a legend stencilled across its lid. LeCat started on the difficult task of levering off the padlock from one of the boxes with a wrench. 'Keep an eye on the bloody road,' he told Walgren as he strained at the heavy padlock. Then the hasp cracked. LeCat switched on his torch again, lifted the lid cautiously, stared inside. The box contained two large steel canisters, each protected with foam rubber to minimise travel shake.

LeCat lifted one canister out by its handle, grinning sourly as the American stepped away from the truck. 'Frightened, mon ami? This stuff is as safe as milk – until our associate, Antoine, has treated it. One five-kilogram canister would be more than enough, he said…'

He slid the canister carefully inside a reinforced carton Walgren had placed on the floor of the truck, a carton which was the right size because the American had known in advance the exact dimensions of the canister. Like the steel boxes, the canister carried the same warning legend. GEC, Morris, Illinois. Highly Dangerous -Plutonium.

On the night when LeCat attacked the armoured truck in Illinois, the plutonium was flown across the United States border aboard a Beechcraft piloted by Walgren, who had served with the US Army Airforce during the war. So while a huge dragnet was spread out south of the border, the plutonium canister was taken across Canada to Vancouver by car. As a precaution, LeCat kept the canister inside a house in Winnipeg for a few days, then, when it was clear that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had not spread its own dragnet, he completed his journey across the continent.

Antoine had to wait two weeks for the canister's arrival, but for the French physicist it was a busy fortnight. He constructed his laboratory in the large basement of the house from equipment LeCat had arranged to be delivered there. For a man of Antoine's background it was not too difficult; Walgren, using Arab money, had earlier found the engineering workshop by the simple process of consulting the 'for sale' section in trade magazines. There were plenty to choose from with so many small firms going bankrupt through the mounting energy crisis. And the nuclear physicist had just completed his preparations when LeCat delivered the plutonium late one evening at the end of March.

It took Antoine seven months to make the nuclear device.

During that time he never left the house on Dusquesne Street. He worked a twelve-hour day, working alone except for an ex-OAS engineer, Varrier, who produced the required metal casing and parts under Antoine's instruction. There was one other man in the house, forty-four year old Andre Dupont, the man who had met them with Walgren when they arrived in Montreal. Dupont doubled up as cook and housekeeper. It was a regime most men could never have endured, but Antoine was a scientist who lived only for work and reading the novels of Marcel Proust. And the cuisine was good – Dupont in his youth had once served an apprenticeship in the kitchens of the Ritz in Paris before he was discovered trying to blackmail a wealthy woman of a certain age staying at the hotel.

LeCat had delivered to Antoine no more than five kilograms of reprocessed plutonium – used fuel refined back to its original energy-producing state at the GEC plant at Morris, Illinois. This plutonium had been on its way back to a nuclear power plant when it was hi-jacked by LeCat. Antoine's task was to design a nuclear device and insert the charge inside it. The public, with memories of the vast plant required to make the first atomic bomb, still imagined that something on the same scale was necessary to make a nuclear device. But that vast plant had been required to process the plutonium – and Antoine had in his possession the end-product which came from Morris, Illinois.

Antoine's agreed price for this dangerous assignment was fifty thousand tax-free dollars, together with the passport to enable him to start a new life in the province of Quebec once his work was finished. Being a solitary man, he probably enjoyed the seven months it took him to complete his task.

Following LeCat's detailed instructions, he constructed a device which was the size of a largish suitcase. In fact, when the device was ready, he fitted it inside a specially reinforced suitcase and then plastered the outside with hotel labels from different parts of the world which Andre Dupont supplied. The case was very heavy – the plutonium charge was packed inside a heavy steel shell to maximise its power on detonation and weighed almost two hundred pounds. But a man of exceptional strength like LeCat could carry it short distances as though he were transporting an ordinary suitcase. When Antoine completed his work in late October, LeCat was informed and flew direct to Vancouver from London on a BOAC flight.

'Show me how it works,' LeCat demanded when they stood in the basement laboratory with the suitcase open on a work-bench.

'This activates the trigger…'

'I shall need to attach a time mechanism…'

'I would suggest…'

LeCat listened only to the first part of the explanation. As an explosives and boobytrap specialist, the Frenchman knew before Antoine explained how he was going to deal with the problem – he simply wanted confirmation that he would be going about it the right way. After all, the nuclear physicist had produced a bomb large enough to destroy a medium-sized city.

Antoine had carefully not enquired to what purpose the device would be put; he believed he knew – that it would be handed over to either Israel or one of the Arab states for a large sum of money. The Frenchman had managed to persuade himself that he was going into business like any other armaments manufacturer; if he did not supply the device, someone else would. It was the way of the world, and fifty thousand dollars was a sum he would never have seen all his life had he remained in the service of his own government.