NCIS Los Angeles

by Jerome Preisler

“Did you work up a historical overlay?”

  “Yes. One merging every source into a single cool interactive map,” he said. “With intelligent geo-referencing.”

  “It’s ready now?”

  “You and Deeks should have it in your email queues.”

  She drove past a string of flatcars loaded with brown, blue, and red forty-foot containers. It was less than five minutes since she’d left the checkpoint, where the security guard had been unable to reach Drew Sarver on his cellphone.

  “Okay,” she said as Deeks pulled the map up on her dash console. “Meanwhile, did you notice where the general shops were located?”

  “American Pacific built them all around the yard,” Eric said. “But my guess is Deep Dive commandeered one of the big old shops on the west or southwest sides.”

  Deeks was already checking out the map. “Why there?”

  “It’s where the coastal line’s run since the eighteen-sixties,” Eric said. “The drums could have come straight up from Hueneme on that track for a quick offload.”

  Kensi had been driving west for that very reason, but was still on the north edge of the yard leading off the entrance from Lamar.

  “Stay with us, we’re on our way there,” she said.

  And drove on for fifty yards to where the access road forked south, picking up speed as she swung sharply into the turn.

  * * *

  Tomas received Alysha’s text message on his cell at 5:00 P.M.—a green apple emoji giving him the go-ahead to proceed with the operation. If she was unable to access the tunnel, or had to call a halt to things for any reason, she would have sent him a red apple emoji. A yellow pear would have notified him to stand by for one of the other signals.

  Her position was easy to fix. The tracker application on her phone used two different localization systems—GPS and radio tower-based GSM networking—to transmit its whereabouts within a twenty-five foot radius. Because it wouldn’t pull a signal once she was in the tunnel, Alysha had dropped the cell outside its entrance before she descended.

  Their plan had so far worked to perfection.

  He quickly checked her coordinates and saw she was at the southwestern edge of Piggyback Yard, just below the spot where the coastal line curved up toward Santa Barbara and points north. He was now heading toward her from the east, moving along the yard’s southern perimeter at a moderate Run 5. Normally the Metroline’s approach to Union Station would go directly past her position before swinging west over the Los Angeles River.

  Tomas would ensure the train did not get that far—not yet.

  Glancing out the cabin window toward his right, he observed row upon row of parked freight and tanker cars stretched along a commercial siding. The adjacent loading area was filled with huge truck-mounted cranes and winches, yellow and orange forklifts, and a smattering of cargo trucks and other vehicles.

  He turned to look straight ahead. The switchpoint lights at the crossover were yellow, indicating the track was aligned for diverging movement. That was likely its default position, allowing operators to pull off the main track onto the siding in the event of an emergency. But an operator needed the command center to authorize such action, and Tomas knew the Pomona DOC would take swift notice of his deviation from the route.

  He hoped to keep its suspicions from escalating as long as possible.

  “Karik,” he said into his mike. “I’m about to initiate.”

  “How long?”

  “Two minutes,” he said. “Be ready.”

  Taking hold of the throttle, Tomas notched it down to Run 4, then Run 3. He eased the train into the crossover, bringing it off the main rail toward the siding.

  As expected, the cabin radio squawked almost at once.

  “Antelope Zero-Two-One, I repeat Antelope Zero-Two-One. This is Pomona Dispatch, do you read?”

  Tomas lifted the handset to his ear and pressed the “Talk” button.

  “Loud and clear,” he said. His neutral American accent was flawless. “We have a medical situation, Pomona. We’re pulling into the yard.”

  “The hell you are, you can’t switch tracks without permission!”

  “Pomona, it looks like an emergency childbirth—”

  “I don’t care, Zero-Two-One. Procedure is to call in. There are medical personnel at Union Station.”

  Tomas throttled down to Run 1. He needed to end the call right away.

  “The passenger needs immediate assistance,” he said. “Will update ASAP, Pomona. Over and out.”

  “Zero-Two-One, hold on a minute—”

  Ignoring the dispatcher, Tomas cradled the handset and carefully eased off the main track onto the siding. Then he gripped the reverser and brake lever and backed up to straighten the train.

  Bringing it to a relatively smooth full stop, he turned toward the Selective Door Operation touchscreen on the cabin’s right wall. Its interface was nearly identical to those on the simulations—a basic schematic of the train, with the doors of each car simply marked Front, Middle and Rear.

  “Karik,” he said. “Are you in position?”

  “Yes.”

  Tomas tapped the SDO display, then watched an animated visual of the cab car’s front door opening up. An instant later he looked out his window and saw Karik and his men scrambling out into the yard.

  He took two deep breaths to fill his lungs.

  This is it, he thought. At long last.

  The Day of Fire had truly begun.

  * * *

  His baseball cap pulled down over his forehead, Karik sprang off the train, his two companions behind him. Their weapons concealed beneath their team jerseys, they walked quickly and silently across the dirt-and-rock berm onto the blacktop of the transfer station, turning toward its southwestern corner.

  The siding was to their left now, rows of freight cars to their right, the station’s parking area straight ahead of them with its small fleet of forklifts, stackers, and cranes.

  Karik saw only a skeleton crew of yard workers—two men using steam pressure washers on the vehicles, a mechanic crouched under a forklift with his tools, and a fourth man standing near an open trailer at the far end of the parking area.

  “Petros—stay with me,” he said to the tall man beside him. He had to raise his voice over the loud roar of the pressure washers. “Simon, take the workers.”

  He strode toward the trailer, Petros keeping pace, Simon breaking off toward the cluster of industrial vehicles.

  The yard worker outside the trailer was wearing a florescent lime safety vest over blue coveralls, SUPERVISOR written across the front of the vest.

  He turned toward Karik and Petros as they came closer.

  “Can I help you guys with something?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Karik said. He nodded toward the trailer’s entrance. “We need the forklift keys.”

  The supervisor stared at him with incomprehension.

  “Who are you?” he said. “This is a restricted—”

  Karik reached under his jersey for the Glock longbarrel and fired two bullets into the supervisor’s heart, the reports muffled by the racket of the nearby pressure washers. As the man dropped to the pavement, blood pulsing from his chest, Petros stepped past him into the trailer.

  Karik stood with his back to the trailer, gazing across the parking area toward the industrial vehicles. A yard worker had noticed Simon and cut the flow to his steam hose. Lowering it to his side, he stepped toward Simon as if to ask what he was doing there.

  Simon’s ghost gun whipped up from under his jersey in a blur. Karik heard a ripple of semiautomatic fire issue from the weapon, saw the worker crumple to the ground in a heap, then watched Simon pivot on his heel and take out the remaining two men with a sustained burst.

  He’d needed less than ten seconds to neutralize all three workers.

  After a moment, Karik turned back toward the trailer.

  Petros was already leaning outside, the forklift keys dangling from numbered tags in his fist.
>
  “Easy,” he said, glancing down at the supervisor’s body. “They were racked above his desk.”

  Karik nodded toward the parked vehicles.

  “Come,” he said. “We need to hurry.”

  * * *

  Drew had only gone a few feet toward the loading ramp when he reached a second walled-off archway and stopped dead, shining his flash over the bricks.

  “Milena, look,” he breathed.

  Alysha halted a step behind him, slipping her hand from under her peasant blouse, leaving the tiny Ruger pistol in its open pouch. Ready for the kill, she felt the shock of interruption like a sudden dash of ice water on her skin.

  She turned toward the wall and lifted her eyebrows. It only took her a second to understand the reason for his excitement.

  The middle of the wall was bowed where its salt-and-mold filmed brickwork had loosened, pushed outward from the weight of the bricks above them. She saw chips of crumbled mortar at the foot of the wall.

  Drew trained his flash on the section that bulged outward, testing the bricks with his free hand, applying only the slightest pressure.

  They wobbled discernibly under his fingertips.

  “It was never like this before, not even close,” he said. “I’ll bet I can get some of those bricks out easy. But you’ll need to hold the flashlight.”

  She heard her molars click. By now Tomas had surely pulled the train into the yard, and she wanted her conductor friend out of the way before Karik’s team broke through to the ramp. But the urge to see the drums—see them with her own eyes—was irresistible.

  “Of course,” she said. “I want to help.”

  Drew smiled and passed her the flash. “Here goes… hold this sucker steady.”

  Kneeling to examine the weakened area, he wedged his fingertips around a protruding brick and worked it back and forth, prying it from its slot in the wall. It began to disintegrate almost at once, the fragments spilling to the floor amid clouds of dusty, crumbled mortar.

  Alysha saw the surrounding bricks shift out of position as he removed what was left of it, leaving a dark, rectangular gap in the wall.

  “We’re almost ready,” he said, a chunk of the moldering brick in his hand. “I’ll take out a couple more of these. Then it’s all yours.”

  She nodded, her fingers tight around the handle of the flash.

  Reaching into the gap, Drew pulled out two of the displaced bricks and then set them down intact beside his feet.

  Alysha aimed the flashlight into the widened hole.

  22

  Kensi was approaching the yard’s southwestern transfer station when she noticed a Metroline commuter train stopped up ahead. It seemed oddly out of place on the industrial siding.

  Deeks was also staring at it.

  “Kens,” he said. “Do you see what I see, or has this godawful cologne finally gone to my brain?”

  “Godawful?”

  “Hey, we’re partners. If I can’t tell you I’m tired of smelling like a spoiled salami sandwich, what’s the point?”

  She frowned. “Something definitely stinks here,” she said. “Besides you for a change.”

  “I’m no expert. But if this transfer station’s meant for freight trains…”

  “Then why’s a passenger train sitting there?” she said, finishing his thought.

  Deeks turned to her. “Do we check it out?”

  Kensi thought a moment, her hands on the wheel. She’d noticed a prefab metal shed forty or fifty yards to her left, almost directly under a half fallen railroad trestle. To her right, a blacktop parking lot extended west past the shed toward the river.

  “Take a look at Eric’s overlay map,” she said. “We need to pin down the location of the old general shop.”

  He studied the display a second, then gestured out his window.

  “See that shed under the trestle?” he said. “It would’ve run all the way from there to the river.” He paused, his attention drawn toward the river wall. “Ah, Kens… since when do yard forklift operators wear baseball jerseys to work?”

  She immediately knew what he meant. The three forklifts moving toward the wall—or rather their drivers—were as conspicuous as the Metroline train.

  “I think the wrongness factor around here just shot off the charts,” she said.

  “All right,” Deeks said. “Drivers first, train second?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” she said, and veered off the access road into the station, tires screaming.

  * * *

  Alysha centered the flashlight in the opening, Drew half-crouched beside her, both of them leaning forward to peer into the storeroom beyond.

  The beam revealed the barrels at once. They stood on a metal pallet in the middle of the room, six of them, their surfaces mottled with rust. From their size, Alysha judged their capacities were fifty or fifty-five gallons.

  “I can hardly believe my eyes,” Drew said, fascinated. “There’s something painted on them… words… can you see?”

  She nodded, moving the flashlight’s beam over one of the drums. The rust had eaten away some of the letters, but like the stenciled signs in the passage, the writing was mostly legible:

  CA TION

  HAZ RDOUS M TERIALS

  “A seventy-something year old hazmat warning,” Drew said. “I wonder what’s inside them?”

  Alysha looked at him. “I don’t know,” she lied smoothly. “We should—”

  She broke off, a mechanical whine suddenly catching her attention. Drew heard it too, turning his head toward its source.

  It was coming from their left, the direction of the exit ramp.

  He looked around at her. “Sounds like engines,” he said in a confused tone. “Outside the loading door.”

  Karik’s team, Alysha thought. They’re here.

  She offered Drew a replica of his baffled expression, once again lowering her hand toward her weapon, thinking it was finally time to end the charade—and his life.

  Then she heard the gunfire erupt outside and everything changed.

  * * *

  Kensi had barely gotten within thirty yards of the forklifts when one of the drivers—a slight man in sunglasses wearing a red Angels cap—glanced around at her SUV, shoved a hand under his jersey, and brought out a very large and dangerous-looking firearm.

  She registered at once that it was a Glock 41—the same type of pistol used in the Greer and Daggut killings. As the other two drivers followed his lead, reaching for their own weapons, she saw that they were carbine versions of Isaak Dorani’s ghost gun.

  It all added up to a whole lot of bad news.

  “Hang on!” she shouted to Deeks, swinging the wheel to the left, right, left, and right, zigzagging evasively as the drivers opened fire on them.

  Beside her Deeks unholstered his own sidearm, a Beretta 92 he preferred to the OSP’s standard issue SIG, mainly because it had saved his life more than once—which seemed an excellent reason, being how guns were supposed to do just that.

  He lowered his window. The river wall was about ten yards up ahead now, the forklifts moving between its facing side and the SUV. As he raised the 92 in both hands, Deeks noticed a graffiti-covered rollup door in the wall, drifts of garbage and mechanical junk flush against it.

  Then the nearest forklift driver swung his ghost gun around at the SUV, rattling off a burst of semiautomatic fire that pecked loudly into its front end, gouging out large chunks of its carbon-fiber bumper.

  “Kensi, duck!” Deeks shouted.

  “Way ahead of you there!” she shouted from the driver’s seat. Swerving right, left, right, left…

  Besides turning his stomach, the zigging and zagging made it hard for Deeks to get a decent bead on his target. As he swayed back and forth, the driver released another volley, his bullets smashing into the windshield, their impact pounding star-shaped fractures into the glass.

  Deeks focused on the driver, forgot about Kensi’s swerves making him carsick. Leaning out the w
indow, tucking his head as low as possible, he leveled his gunbarrel, took quick aim, and returned fire with three fluid pulls of the trigger.

  The driver flew sideways off his seat in a spray of red, sailing through the little vehicle’s safety bars to land on the blacktop, his arms and legs sprawled limply around his body.

  Deeks did not let himself feel even an instant’s relief. The other two men had turned their fork trucks around full circle and were bearing straight toward the SUV. Steering one-handed, the rider with the ghost gun poured long streams of fire at the car, the guy in the red baseball cap shooting round after round from his Glock.

  Bullets punched into the SUV’s windshield, leaving the glass pocked with stellated holes.

  “These psychos aren’t playing,” Deeks said.

  “You think?” Kensi said, cutting the wheel hard to the left… and then to the right.

  Deeks swayed this way and that again. Then another slice of the wheel hurled him back toward the passenger door. He leaned out his open window, hands wrapped around the Beretta’s grip, zeroing in on the man with the ghost gun.

  He fired twice, the guy simultaneously discharging a volley from his weapon. Pain seared through his left arm as his attacker tumbled out of the forklift, a gaping wound in the middle of his chest, his vehicle flipping over on its side.

  Wincing, Deeks looked down at his bloodied sleeve.

  “Ouch,” he said.

  Kensi glanced over at him. “Bad?”

  He gulped a mouthful of air, examining the wound. His arm was pulsing with agony.

  “How rhetorical is that question?”

  Kensi didn’t reply. She had turned back toward the windshield, her eyes widening.

  “Deeks,” she said, one hand dropping from the wheel to unfasten her seatbelt.

  “Yeah?”

  “We have to bail.”

  “What?”

  “Bail!”

  Deeks looked up to see the man in the red baseball cap coming straight at them in the forklift with a fixed, stony expression on his face.

  Kensi reached across and opened the clasp on his belt, unstrapping him as the forklift came close, closer, closer, the vehicle growing large in the bullet-pocked windshield as he reached for his door handle and Kensi shoved him through the door with both hands, then pushed herself backward out her side of the SUV, falling free of it even as he went rolling across the blacktop.