Brief description:
From the dust jacket:
June 1940. France is about to fall to the German invaders. England prepares for what seems to he the hopeless defense against the expected invasion across the Channel. The cruiser, His Majesty's Ship Emerald, sets sail for Canada, her task to deliver more than $500 million in gold bullion and securities to the safety of North america. In Fort Sam Belwin, North Carolina,two men watch their lives rot away in the peacetime American Army: Captain Johnny Whitman, who left the coal mines to become a football star at Duke,the “golden boy” gone to seed and saddled with a nagging ex-showgirl wife; and Major Tom Renssler, West Point 1930, born to wealth, but new plagued with gambling debts and the knowledge that his military career, once so promising, is about to come to a sudden end.
Even a small portion of that English gold will go a long way toward restoring some of the glitter to their shabby lives. A former drinking friend of Major Renssler’s, a British major on a military mission to the States, arrives from London and unwittingly sets a scheme to steal the gold, which is as audacious as it is brilliant, in motion.
Whitman and Renssler lead six former enlisted men—a retired gunnery sergeant dying of tuberculosis, a weapons expert who has become a strong arm man for the Mob, an expert in explosives, a mechanic, and two roughneck railroaders to Canada where at Wingate Station, an isolated Canadian National Railway Depot, their lust for money intersects with a train hearing the fortune in English gold bullion and securities.
And on this train is Duncan MacTaggart, a dour Scotsman assigned by the Bank of England to see that the British gold and securities are safely transported to the underground vaults in Canada. Nothing has mattered as much to MacTaggart since his service in the Great War. And nothing in that slaughter has prepared him for his war at Wingate Station.
June 1940. France is about to fall to the German invaders. England prepares for what seems to he the hopeless defense against the expected invasion across the Channel. The cruiser, His Majesty's Ship Emerald, sets sail for Canada, her task to deliver more than $500 million in gold bullion and securities to the safety of North america. In Fort Sam Belwin, North Carolina,two men watch their lives rot away in the peacetime American Army: Captain Johnny Whitman, who left the coal mines to become a football star at Duke,the “golden boy” gone to seed and saddled with a nagging ex-showgirl wife; and Major Tom Renssler, West Point 1930, born to wealth, but new plagued with gambling debts and the knowledge that his military career, once so promising, is about to come to a sudden end.
Even a small portion of that English gold will go a long way toward restoring some of the glitter to their shabby lives. A former drinking friend of Major Renssler’s, a British major on a military mission to the States, arrives from London and unwittingly sets a scheme to steal the gold, which is as audacious as it is brilliant, in motion.
Whitman and Renssler lead six former enlisted men—a retired gunnery sergeant dying of tuberculosis, a weapons expert who has become a strong arm man for the Mob, an expert in explosives, a mechanic, and two roughneck railroaders to Canada where at Wingate Station, an isolated Canadian National Railway Depot, their lust for money intersects with a train hearing the fortune in English gold bullion and securities.
And on this train is Duncan MacTaggart, a dour Scotsman assigned by the Bank of England to see that the British gold and securities are safely transported to the underground vaults in Canada. Nothing has mattered as much to MacTaggart since his service in the Great War. And nothing in that slaughter has prepared him for his war at Wingate Station.
Publication
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston (1979), Edition: 1st, 378 pages