Hot Mahogany

15

Barton settled himself and began. “We were pulling back from positions north of Saigon,” he said. “We knew it was almost over, and we were just trying to do it in an orderly fashion. Some of the South Vietnamese commanders were in much more of a hurry.

“There was a ragged column of their forces pulling out of our joint fire base very early one morning, and I saw a South Vietnamese unit in several vehicles pulling out, one of them a truck with a fairly large object in the back, covered with a tarp and tied down. Later in the morning, when we finally began moving our equipment down the road to Saigon, our last two trucks caught up with Bob Cantor, riding point in a Jeep, and he took me forward a few yards on foot and showed me something through the reeds.

“The truck carrying the object was mired to its rear axle, along a riverbank, and they had the blanket off and were cutting the ropes tying it down. It was a large safe, quite an old one, from the look of it. The truck was listing toward the river at an alarming angle, and it looked as if it might tip over any moment.

“As we watched, the commanding colonel ordered a dozen of his men to get hold of the safe and tip it into the river. It made a big splash and disappeared into the muddy water. They abandoned the truck and got into another one and headed south.

“We were in less of a hurry than they, so several of us went into the water, got some cable around the safe and, using a winch mounted on our truck’s front bumper, dragged it out of the river. We also had a wrecker with a crane, so we got it aboard a truck, covered it and began driving toward Saigon. We came under mortar fire twice and lost one man, but we finally made it to the city.

“I had rented a house there, with an attached garage, and Cantor and I, along with three enlisted men, got the safe in there and washed the mud off. Then we had to get the thing open, which turned out to be easier than I had imagined. It took Cantor about forty minutes to crack the safe. Who knew he had these skills?”

“Bob has many skills,” Stone said. He knew because he had employed many of them.

“What was in the safe?” Holly asked.

“A lot of papers, mostly in Vietnamese, and six large leather sacks, containing hundreds of gold Chinese coins. They had been crudely struck, probably during or shortly after World War Two, and they weighed about an ounce apiece. I locked them in the garage, and we agreed to meet the next evening for dinner to talk about what to do with them. Two of my men got the safe onto the wrecker, drove it down to the river and made it go away.”

“I don’t get it,” Stone said. “If the safe had gold in it, why didn’t the Vietnamese officer open it and take the gold with him?”

“I can only guess,” Barton said, “but I think he didn’t have the combination. It was probably his commanding general’s safe, and only he knew how to open it. I also think the Vietnamese colonel planned to go back for the safe when things cooled down. Fortunately for us, they never cooled down.

“Anyway, the city was pretty chaotic at the time, and when I happened to stop in at the headquarters of South Vietnamese intelligence to talk to an officer I knew there, I found them emptying their file cabinets and burning all the papers in their courtyard. The file cabinets were heavy and had combination locks. My officer friend was cleaning out his desk, and I asked him if I could have some of the filing cabinets. He was happy to give me six, along with the combinations, and I got a truck in there and took them back to the house.

“We put a sack of coins in each of the cabinets, then Cantor and I went to headquarters that night and typed up all the necessary shipping documents, put seals on the file drawers, secured them further with steel banding, labeled them as top secret and addressed them to me at my unit’s headquarters at Fort Ord, California. Empty, except for the coins, they weighed about what they might have if they had been filled with documents.

“We met the others for dinner, told them about the plan and agreed that we would meet in San Francisco after returning home and decide how to deal with our newfound wealth. The next morning I got the file cabinets aboard a C-130 that was flying a lot of similar stuff home, and off it went.

“Ten days later, our unit arrived at Fort Ord in Monterey, and there were the cabinets, in a storeroom, waiting for us. Then it got a little tricky. We couldn’t just walk into a coin dealer’s and dispose of a huge quantity of very odd coins, so I went to a man I had known who was in the antique business in San Francisco. He was also an engraver, as were three earlier generations of the men in his family. One of them had been the first engraver at the San Francisco Mint, when it opened to deal with the proceeds of the 1849 Gold Rush.

“He had the equipment to melt down the coins and turn them into ingots weighing a kilogram each, and by spreading them around we were able to dispose of them over a period of a month, without attracting too much attention. As a result we accumulated a large amount of cash, and I threw a party for the men and distributed the proceeds. Each man got about three quarters of a million dollars.”

“And you got considerably more,” Stone said. “Half of everything, wasn’t it?”

“That’s correct, but apart from pulling the original safe out of the water, I had done all the work, with Cantor’s help. He got a million dollars.”

“And there was an argument among the men about this?”

“I heard later that one of them had objected to the arrangement.”

“And what happened to him?”

“I don’t know, exactly, but I have my suspicions. I was told about it, in veiled terms, as I was about to get onto an airplane for Washington.”

“And that was it? Everybody was happy?”

“As far as I knew. There was one other facet to all this, though, and I’ve never told anyone about it.”

Both Stone and Holly sat silently and waited.

“I’m afraid this is going to require a history lesson,” Barton said finally.