Three minutes later, the five of them were coming at the truck, and the driver, from three sides… slowly, stealthily, steadily. But not, in all cases, completely silently. "You ever seen the old silent flick, The Lonedale Operator?" Murdock whispered to Carter.

"Gee, I don't think so."

"Some guys tried to stick up a train loaded with a minin' company payroll… 'course, those were the old days, before armored cars. Had a lotta style, though. They show pictures like that on Saturday nights back at the V.A. hospital. Back at our place, everythin's a talkie… and if you show the same picture twice, you get two different soundtracks. Sometimes three, if they're runnin' low on Thorazine."

"Are you really a nut? I mean, lunatic… I mean…" Carter's voice wound down into an awkward asymmetrical spiral before imploding. "Aw, heck, I don't know what I mean."

The next voice out of Murdock's mouth was a cross between Charlton Heston and Charles Laughton. "The moon is a giant Slurpee, and my elevator goes exactly six and seven-eighths of the way up to my top floor, which is also the basement and gets mighty wet durin' the monsoon season." To Carter's perplexed expression, he added, this time in his own voice, "Yeah, I'm completely whackdoodle. Don't let anybody tell you any different. I got papers and everythin'."

"Oh." Well, that cleared that up.

Kinch and Newkirk approached the truck from the front. It was their job to try to divert the driver if the truck were to start up and begin to pull out of the driveway before they'd made the hit, by any means possible... except getting themselves run down. Gold was nice, but it would never replace a good healthy upright posture. "What's Baracus plannin' to do?" Newkirk asked in hushed tones.

"You're asking me? He'll do anything he wants, and I can tell you right now that whatever it is, I plan on staying out of his way. I'm glad I never faced anything like him on the football field… I might have joined the intramural knitting team instead."

"Y'know, it's kind of odd… he ain't really all that tall of a bloke, is he? But to look at 'im, seems like…"

"Just be glad he's on our side. I think."

B.A. had positioned himself on the business side of the hoped-for transaction, also known as the driver's side door. He saw Newkirk and Kinch, barely visible in the farthest reaches of the truck's headlights, at the edge of the manicured shrubbery, keeping their heads down. Murdock and Carter should be approaching on the passenger side, but if they weren't in position he was fully prepared to go ahead without their help… those two put together on a good day barely made up one half-wit. It was now or never with the truck; it wasn't going to sit there all night. The driver had his head down and appeared to be doing some paperwork on a clipboard. The dome light was on and would make it almost impossible for him to see anyone approaching until they were right on top of him. B.A. stood up and sprinted toward the armored car.

"There he goes," Kinch relayed. "Whatever the plan is, this is it." He and Newkirk both stood up as well, and trained their pistols on the windshield.

B.A. took hold of the door handle and practically dislocated the hinge wrenching it open. "You're off-duty, sucker!" he informed the startled driver, grabbing him bodily and flinging him with almost no effort at all through midair into the nearby brush.

Murdock grinned widely when he heard both the threat and the resulting heavy crunch. "That's my best buddy."

By the time the other four had made it to the truck, B.A. was behind the wheel and yanking the shift lever into gear. He leaned over to unlock the passenger door from the inside before he took his foot off the brake. "Hurry it up or you'll be walkin'!" he called to the others.

Rutger and some other members of the household staff appeared at the back door just in time to get a spray of loose gravel spit up at them from the spinning drive wheels; they ducked and covered their heads. "Has Meinhoff lost his mind?" Rutger shouted.

His question was answered when he saw the driver stumble out of the bushes, battered but still ambulatory. "Those men!" he called back to Rutger. "There were eight of them! Perhaps nine! There was nothing I could do!"

"After them!"

Not eight. Not nine. Five. And a good thing, too, because not even five of them were a comfortable fit in the cab of the fleeing armored car. They were piled into the passenger seat like an armload of laundry that just happened to have men inside it. "Newkirk, get your elbow outta my ribs!" Kinch snapped.

"I will, when Carter gets his out of my eye!"

"You guys should've sent LeBeau," Carter cracked. "He's a lot smaller." Unlucky enough to be on the bottom, he squirmed uncomfortably. "Newkirk, don't take this the wrong way, but I think you could stand to lose some weight…"

"I almost did, earlier tonight, but then the Colonel made me come get you!"

Murdock had realized that the area immediately behind the seat offered some room to travel in, if you were thin as a rail and weren't too fussy how you traveled, and he was stretched out like a cat on top of the long lockbox, tool kit and a few other sundry items that were stored in the rear of the cab. He didn't have much of a view, though… just the back of B.A.'s head. And the bump going over the curb and into the street at top speed sent him three inches in the air and back down again with a resounding thump. "Nice drivin', B.A.… but… ouch… for the love of soapbox derbies, wouldya slow down?"

A loud, abrupt, metallic thunking sound came at them from behind, and then they heard it again. "What's that?" Carter asked.

"They're shootin' at us!" B.A. answered as he checked the rear view mirror. "And they're hittin' us! You still want me to slow down, fool?"

"Pedal to the metal, big guy!" Murdock yelled at the top of his lungs.

Newkirk physically removed Carter's elbow from the area of his left kidney. "You had to find the ruddy gold, didn't you?"

Rutger fired one last volley in the direction of the rapidly-retreating taillights of the armored car and uttered a few words he almost never used. There was no way the thieves could be followed; there was nothing immediately available to follow them in. There wasn't even the slightest clue as to who they were. "What do we do now?" the battered driver asked, sounding justifiably afraid of the answer.

Well… there was only one thing to do. "I would suggest we go inside and activate the receiver for the tracking device in the armored car. And if I were you, Meinhoff, I would hope very fervently that it is operating adequately… if not, you will soon be wishing for your miserable life to be cut even shorter."

"What will you tell the major…?"

"Everything you have to fear, Meinhoff, will be coming directly from me." He holstered his sidearm. "Inside."

oo 0 oo

Hogan checked his watch. A full four minutes since the last time he'd checked it. It was almost twenty past eleven now, and not a sign of any of the personnel who'd been sent out to look for Carter. "They ran into trouble," he told Hannibal.

"Maybe," Hannibal nodded calmly.

Hogan envied him that calm, but he also suspected it was a veneer. Smith cared every bit as much about his own men as Hogan did; he didn't have to say it in so many words. He was a good officer. And a good man. "I say we go after them."

"Me too," LeBeau agreed.

"It's starting to look that way, Hannibal," Face was forced to concur. "We don't have much firepower, but we've got some. We could split into two teams, one at the front and one at the back."

"We could. And maybe we will. But we need to give it a little more time. We can't all go running off; not with the major in the limo. We have to consider the…"

The sudden sharp squeal of tires on the street level above made him look towards the ramp. That sounded like B.A.'s driving… but they'd gone out on foot; they wouldn't be coming back in a…

The armored car barreling down the entrance ramp sent them all scrambling for cover. It bottomed out when it hit the parking level, shooting sparks from the undercarriage, then skidded in a semi-circle and braked to an abrupt halt near the limousine. Before they could decide what to do about it, a very familiar voice greeted them from the passenger compartment behind the heavily-tinted windows.

"Anybody here order a fortune?" Murdock called.

oo 0 oo

A precise accounting would have taken more time than they had at the moment, but once they had accessed the cargo area of the armored vehicle, one thing was crystal clear.

"Well, helloooo, Dollars!" Face fairly glowed at the sight of the massive wooden crate filled with gold bars. "Someday I'll want to know how you did this, fellas, but right now I'd just like to sit next to it for a while and cuddle."

"Forget it," Hannibal instructed. "We need to get this, and the major, to the air strip. Those guys at the villa aren't going to just let us drive away with this kind of a bankroll. They'll come looking for the truck, and when they find it I want us to be at least twenty thousand feet in the air above it."

"Ain't flyin', Hannibal," B.A. insisted as always.

"How are you gonna get home if you don't fly?" Carter asked.

"I'll walk before I fly!"

"You've made your point, Sergeant," Hannibal told him.

"Could you use a few extra hands getting everything on board?" Hogan asked. "We've come this far together; I guess we could manage one more evening of clandestine illegal activity for old times' sake. It's too late for dinner and a movie anyway."

"You're on. B.A., you handle the armored car. Face, you're in the jeep."

Peck's expression fell. "The jeep?"

"You scammed it; you can drive it."

"It's your color," Newkirk assured him. "Goes well with your wristwatch."

"We could use a good man behind the wheel in the limo," Hannibal told Hogan.

"Sounds like Kinch," Hogan nodded. "Okay with you, Kinch?"

"Sure thing, Colonel."

Hannibal nodded. "I'll go in the limo too, in case Hochstetter starts to come around, and Hogan, you might want to come as well… I don't think he will, yet, but I did go a little light on the shot since I wasn't sure about his weight. The rest of you, find a seat somewhere in this caravan and let's get this show on the road."

Faced with either a seat next to Baracus in the armored car or one next to Peck in a pink jeep, Newkirk considered his options as 'bad' and 'worse'. The armored car won the mental coin toss, and he clambered inside before anyone else could beat him to it. "You'll 'ardly know I'm 'ere," he assured Baracus as he pulled the heavy plated door shut. Baracus gave him a hard, brow-furrowed glare. "What?" A low growl began to rise from his throat. "Oh, all right…" He pulled the half-pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and tossed them out the window. "There... 'appy now?" The big man's expression never changed. What would Baracus actually look like if he were happy, Newkirk wondered, and how could anybody ever tell?

"It's dark out," Face reminded Carter and LeBeau as they both considered the pink jeep with less than enthusiastic expressions. "Nobody'll notice. I promise."

"I'll hold you to that," LeBeau nodded. "And if you get a ticket on the way to the airstrip, I never saw you before in my life… you picked me up hitchhiking, and I'm colorblind."

Murdock leaped in with total abandon, stood on the rear seat and took hold of the roll bar. "Onward, my very-extremely-pale-red chariot, onward!"

"He's really nuts, you know," Carter told Louis. "He told me so himself."

"Oh really? I would never have imagined such a thing." He gave Carter a push. "Go on, get in. Let's get this over with."