The Golden Gate. Alistair MacLean

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      ALISTAIR MACLEAN

       The Golden Gate

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       Logo200 Copyright

      HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Previously published in paperback by HarperCollins 2005

      and by Fontana 1963

      First published in Great Britain by Collins 1963

      Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1963

      Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020 Cover photograph © Stephen Mulcahey

      Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780006144946

      Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 9780007289295

      Version: 2020-08-04

       Dedication

       To Mary Marcelle

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

       FOUR

       FIVE

       SIX

       SEVEN

       EIGHT

       NINE

       TEN

       ELEVEN

       TWELVE

       Keep Reading

       About the author

       By Alistair MacLean

       About the Publisher

       ONE

      The operation had to be executed with a surgically military precision marked with a meticulousness that matched, in degree if not in scope, the Allied landings in wartime Europe. It was. The preparations had to be made in total stealth and secrecy. They were. A split-second co-ordination had to be achieved. It was. All the men had to be rehearsed and trained, over and over again until they played their parts perfectly and automatically. They were so trained. Every eventuality, every possible departure from the planned campaign had to be catered for. It was. And their confidence in their ability to carry out their plan, irrespective of reversals and departures from the norm, had to be total. It was.

      Confidence was a quality exuded by their leader, Peter Branson. Branson was thirty-eight years old, just under six feet tall, strongly built, with black hair, pleasant features, lips that were curved in an almost perpetual smile and light blue eyes that had forgotten how to smile many years ago. He was dressed in a policeman’s uniform but he was not a policeman. Neither was any of the eleven men with them in that disused trucker’s garage not far from the banks of Lake Merced, halfway between Daly City to the south and San Francisco to the north, although three were attired in the same uniform as Branson.

      The single vehicle there looked sadly out of place in what was, in effect, nothing more than an open-ended shed. It was a bus, but barely, by normal standards, qualified for the term. It was an opulently gleaming monster which above shoulder level was composed, except for the stainless-steel crossover struts, entirely of slightly tinted glass. There was no regular seating as such. There were about thirty swivel chairs, anchored to the floor but scattered seemingly at random, with deep armrests and aircraft-type swing-out dining-tables housed in each armrest. Towards the rear there was a cloakroom

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