Thursday night-H-hour minus eighteen-the Major gathered them together in the log-paneled front room for a precombat pep talk. Walker, who was scared but had made a kind of peace with himself, sat in one of the leather captain’s chairs and lifted his pack of cigarettes out of the bicep pocket of his leather flight jacket. His chin stung a little-a tiny nick from a nervous morning razor-and the tooth cavity was giving him trouble, but he felt surprisingly good: alert, anxious to start; confident and balanced like a halfback who, expecting to be rammed, intended to stay on his feet regardless.
He lit the cigarette and watched the Major open the long brown case and display the guns they would use.
“The shotguns will make them nervous. We want them scared. Baraclough and Hanratty carry these because they’re the two who’ll be in front holding everybody still. Burt and I will take out the armored-car guards; we’ll need our hands free for the spray cans so we’ll carry these revolvers. Walker stays with the car, he won’t need a weapon. Burt will stay with the guards in back until he gets my signal, and then he’ll come around the side of the building to the car. As soon as we’ve taken out the guards I’ll go into the bank and Steve Baraclough will come across the tellers’ fence with the duffel bags. The two of us will stuff the bags while Hanratty stays by the door and keeps the room covered with his shotgun. Any questions?”
They had been over it a dozen times; nobody spoke. Walker saw how cleverly the Major had worked out the assignments. The Major figured the weakest links were Hanratty and Walker. He had to assume that because he had combat experience with the other two. So he was leaving Walker out in the car where he wouldn’t cause trouble and he was sending Baraclough into the front of the bank with Hanratty so that at no point would Hanratty be alone. Hargit himself would be taking out the armored-car guards in the back room because that was the trickiest part of the operation, neutralizing those armed men, and he would have Burt with him because Burt was almost as accomplished a jungle fighter as the Major was himself. The two of them weren’t likely to have much trouble with a crew of hick truck guards.
For himself, Walker had no objection to the arrangement. He had no desire to hog the limelight or the action. Sitting in the car was fine with him.
The Major put the guns away and zipped up the case. “You all know the operation depends on timing. They’ll be setting off alarms, we can’t stop that, and we’ll have no more than four minutes to get in and get loaded and get out. But we’ll do fine as long as everybody does his own job. I don’t want to have to kick ass every half minute-if anybody hangs back too long he’s going to get shot dead because we can’t afford to leave any of you behind alive to talk. I guess you understand that.”
It wasn’t a threat. The Major wasn’t the kind who made threats. He made logical statements and trusted that everybody could see the logic.
Walker felt chilled. He had begun to wonder why he had got along at all with Hargit during the Vietnam thing. At the time he had regarded the Major with respect and admiration-Hargit had been a bit of a legend out there. Now he saw that Hargit was as cold as any human being could be.
It wasn’t that Hargit had changed; it was only, Walker thought, that war gave men a common enemy, it threw them together so that men with nothing in common created between them a temporary brotherhood which was not false, but conditional. Now the conditions had changed and Walker was no longer a bystander to Hargit’s feats but a part of them, and he understood why the men who had served under the Major had been terrified of him. With the Major around you didn’t have to worry about the enemy, or in this case the police; you had to worry only about the Major, because if you made one slip you were finished.
“By this time tomorrow night,” the Major said amiably, “we’ll be crossing the Idaho mountains into British Columbia and we’ll all be rich men. We have three automobiles staked out in the trees beside the runway up there. Baraclough and Sergeant Burt and I will take our share of the money and one of the cars. The other two cars are for Hanratty and Walker, and personally I don’t care where the two of you go from there. By the time either of you gets a chance to blunder into trouble the rest of us will be halfway, to Africa. But let me repeat one warning. Arizona still has the death penalty. I don’t want anybody killed. I don’t even want anybody bruised. They’ll forget the money but there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”
At the time the warning had not meant very much to Walker. He didn’t expect anybody would get killed.