by Dale Brown
guy's chest. "Then I'm going to break your neck,
and then your skull. Youll be a vegetable for the
rest of your life. Now talk. Where's the Major?"
"I swear I don't know," the biker gasped, his face
contorted in pain.
"Who contacted Mullins? Who met Mullms
here?"
"I never seen him. One of his guys, one of his
lieutenants, came here, but I didn't see him. Mullins
told me he was going to meet the Major at a
ranch in Wilton. I don't know where, I swear to
God! . . ." f
"Were they Germans?"
The biker nodded. "Yeah ... yeah, Mullins said
he didn't want to deal with no krauts, but they paid
him good."
"Where was this ranch in Wilton? What road?"
No response. Patrick forced the biker's head between
his left arm and his side and squeezed. "I'll
pop your head right off your damned shoulders if
you don't talk!" But the guy had fainted. Patrick let
him drop in a heap on the floor and headed for the
bar. He knew that the patrons had probably scattered
like rats in a fire when they heard the gunshots
, but he had to find that other biker. If he was
this guy's friend, he might know more about . . .
"Police! Freeze!" Patrick turned. Two plainclothes
cops with gold badges hanging from their
necks were taking cover just outside the back door,
aiming what looked like very large automatic pistols
at him. "Hands up! Turn and face the wall!
Now!"
Patrick ran a system self-test. Battery levels were
still in the green, but down to less than two hours'
endurance. He had only had the suit on for less than
an hour-must be a problem with the power-reserve
indicators. Taking all those gun blasts certainly
didn't help. He could probably withstand these cops
emptying their guns on him, but he couldn't take
the chance of more cops showing up and his power
draining down into the reserves or to emergency
levels. He would then have no choice but to surrender
"I'm unarmed," Patrick told the cops. He raised
his hands, palms out, so they could see they were
empty. "I'm leaving now. Don't shoot me. I might
hurt you if you shoot, and I don't want to hurt the
police."
"Shut up, turn, and face the wall!" one of the
cops yelled. Patrick started walking out the door,
hands raised.
"Oh shit," the second cop muttered, "he's not
going to stop. I heard gunshots in there-do we
shoot this asshole?"
"He doesn't have a gun, dammit," said the first
cop. "I don't see any weapons." He shouted again
for the guy to freeze, but he kept on coming.
"Fuck," said his partner, bolstering his weapon.
He shouted, "Cover me!" and ran full speed into
Patrick like a charging linebacker.
The first cop heard a dull clunk when the two
bodies collided. -The guy was knocked backward
into the wall by the flying tackle, but his buddy lay
facedown on the floor and wasn't moving. The guy
simply got on his feet, took a second, as if regaining
his balance, raised his hands again, and started for
the door, careful not to step on the unconscious cop. A
"Freeze!" the first cop shouted again, aiming his
9-millimeter SIG. "Stop right there or I'll shoot!"
He had made the decision to shoot; his partner was
down. At Patrick's next step, he fired three
rounds-two in the chest, one in the head. He heard
the scream as Patrick collapsed on his back.
The cop grabbed his portable radio and keyed the
mike with a shaking hand, keeping his gun aimed.
"KMA, Sam One-Niner, shots fired, officer down,
officer down, one suspect down, send cover and an
ambu-"
He broke off in midword, gaping as the guy in the
helmet crawled to his feet, held on to the wall for
support for a moment, then walked toward the
door.
This time the shot hit somewhere in the torso,
but after reeling back against the wall as before, the
guy pulled himself up, pushed the cop out of the
way, and stumbled out into the alley. The arm that
shoved him felt like a steel bar, but by now he was
so stunned, the guy could've used a feather..
"Mother of God!" the cop muttered. He followed
the guy outside, his smoking pistol still leveled at
him, but a small crowd had formed out in the alley,
so he had to lower the gun and decock it. The crowd
let the guy trot past them and down the alley, his
gait improving with every step until he was sprinting
by the time he vanished out of sight.
Tom between pursuit and his downed partner,
the cop retrieved his radio and mashed the mike
button: "KMA, Sam One-Niner, the 245 suspect
. . ." Shit, how in hell was this going to sound
on the radio? He'd just reported that the suspect
was down-now he was running down the
street? . . . "Suspect is on foot heading west down
the alley behind the Bobby Tohn Club, heading
toward Fairfield Street. All units be advised, the 245
suspect is wearing a black leather jacket, dark coveralls
, some kind of backpack, and a full-face motorcycle
helmet. Suspect . . . shit, suspect does not
appear to be armed but should be considered dangerous./I
A
At Del Paso Boulevard, Patrick ran left onto Fairfield
Street. Using the thrusters in his boots, he
leaped to the second-story roof of an abandoned
printing shop, then paused to do another system
self-test. Battery levels were already in the emergency
reserve range. The emergency reserves were
for escaping and survival, not for fighting. if he encountered
any police now, he'd have no choice but
to surrender.
Patrick called up and interrogated the discrete
global positioning satellite search function on the
heads-up display inside his helmet. A tiny red blip
appeared, with a direction and range to the target.
The red blip was Jon Masters, riding inside a specially
equipped AMC Hummer they were using as a
mobile support vehicle. Both Patrick's suit and the
Hummer carried satellite navigation transponders,
for each of them to see and track the other's location
. Masters was now less than two-tenths of a
mile away,, cruising around the target area and trying
to look as inconspicuous as a six-thousandpound
Hummer wagon could look on a city street in
the middle of the night.
Using the thrusters, Patrick hopped from roof to
roof along Fairfield and Forrest streets until he got
to Arden Way. He waited on the roof of an apartment
building until he saw the Hummer moving
closer. Then he leaped off the roof, landing on a
patch of lawn-right beside a startled guy just getting
out of his car in the parking lot not forty feet
away. Patrick ignored him. Fifteen seconds later,
/> when the thrusters had recharged, he made another
leap across the parking lot and lit down a few feet
away from the Hummer as it slowly cruised down
Arden Way. He pulled open the door as it stopped;
then Jon hit the gas and sped away as fast as the big
all-terrain vehicle could take them.
After they crossed the river and headed down Sixteenth
Street south toward the downtown area, Jon
finally asked, "How did it go?"
"Great! It went great!" Patrick said, removing
the helmet. Remembering his awful visage when he
had taken off the helmet after the demonstration,
Jon had been afraid of what he might see this time,
but Patrick looked pretty normal. "Everything
worked great!"
They had installed a portable gasoline-powered
generator in the back of the Hummer, and Patrick
started it up with a push of a button, then brought a
cable around and plugged it into a receptacle on a
bottom corner of his backpack. Although he
couldn't monitor the power levels without the helmet
on, he knew from testing that it would take
thirty to sixty minutes to recharge the backpack
power unit.
"We're done for the night, right?" Jon asked hopefully
. "You got what you were looking for?"
"Hell no-we do it the way we planned!" Patrick
answered. "I got a lot of good information, but I
need more. The next stop might give us the rest of
what we need to bust these guys."
"There seemed to be a lot of cops around . . .
"We'll do it the way we planned, Jon," Patrick
repeated. "We'll go to a wider radius to keep this
vehicle away from the next location. If all else fails,
I'll meet you at Sac Executive Airport, at our rendezvous
point. I can hide in the hangar or up on the
tower."
Jon fell silent. it had to be played out . . .
ROSALEE SUBDIVISION,
ELDER CREEK NEIGHBORHOOD,
SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA
A SHORT TIME LATER
Sometimes it took days to find the best location
for parking a surveillance van. Ideally, the crew
wanted a spot a block or so'down the street from the
target address, close enough to see and photograph
everyone entering or leaving the premises with a
medium telephoto lens or to look inside an open
garage, but not so close as to attract attention to
itself or the target. Even in better neighborhoods,
the van had to be moved periodically so it didn't
attract attention or become a target for thieves or
vandals.
Although it only involved sitting, waiting,
watching, and listening, doing a surveillance was
tough, uncomfortable, tiring work. Depending on
the neighborhood and the nature of the operation,
the cops doing the surveillance could sometimes
switch with other officers for food or relief breaks.
But a lot of times they -were stuck inside the van for
the entire eight-hour shift, forced to use "piddle
packs," portable toilets, garbage bags, or soft drink
cans to do their thing.
But the worst part of a surveillance, even after
only a couple of days, was the godawful smell.
Thankfully, few cops smoked inside the van anymore
, but a closed-up surveillance van quickly
collected a variety of odors-fast food of every conceivable
kind, sweat mixed with various deodorants
and perfumes, fumes from a leaky exhaust, and
other, more unmentionable, smells. Leaving the van
actually made it worse. The cops grew accustomed
to the smell after a couple of hours, no matter how
bad it was, and if they then left the van to grab a
bite or take a piss, the fresh air made getting back
into the stinky, stifling, claustrophobic vehicle that
much worse.
The Rosalee subdivision, between Sixty-flfth
Street and Stockton Boulevard north of Elder Creek
Road, was one of the predominantly white areas of
the Elder Creek section of town, with lower- to
middle-class homes on generally nice suburban or
semirural streets. Go a few blocks in' any direction
around Elder Creek, howeveri and it was very different
territory. Some houses showed pride of ownership
, with clean yards, neat landscaping, and fresh
paint; but most were rentals, subrentals, sub-
subrentals, or squatter-occupied, and no handyman
or can of paint had come near them in years. The
area was a melting pot of races and ethnic backgrounds
: whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, plus every
possible mix.
The house just north of the target address on the
corner was a very nice single-family property with a
decent-looking lawn, well-trimmed shrubs still
wrapped in burlap to protect them against the winter
frost, plenty of lights surrounding the place, and
a For Sale sign in the yard. The reason for the sale
was probably the ramshackle house next door, a
one-story frame structure of rotted wood and cracking
stucco set in a dirt yard covered with patches of
brown grass. It was surrounded by a mangled, rusting
chain-link fence, and a huge pit bull terrier
prowled the yard, barking fiercely at the slightest
provocation. Some of the windows were boarded up,
and others caged in steel bars bolted onto the outside
of the house.
Usually it's the dirtbag traffic around a house
that gets cops' attention, but this time it was the
dog that had roused the interest of Intelligence and
Narcotics again. When the occupants of the house
were first busted, they had a fierce rottweiler guarding
the place; after the bust, the dog was gone. The
new occupants had a dog too, but it was small, a
beagle or something like it, just as noisy but no
killer guard dog. Drug dealers rarely used beagles as
watchdogs. A few kids' toys in the yard, a morning
newspaper, and pizza boxes in the trash cans were
more indications that maybe the occupants weren't
dealing or cooking meth.
But a few weeks later, all these domestic touches
began to disappear. The foot traffic increased, the
toys vanished, the take-out food containers were
gone-meth users never ate very much-and the
beagle was replaced by a pit bull. It definitely attracted
attention.
The objective of this surveillance was to observe
and look for opportunities. it had been suspected
that the Satan's Brotherhood was using this house
for selling or distributing crank, but Narcotics had
never been able to get enough solid evidence to
prove it. They had tried every trick in the book:
making traffic stops of vehicles that had recently
been to the place, hoping to find some crank inside
so they'd have probable cause to get a warrant to
search the house; tailing frequent visitors, hoping
to catch someone on possession with enough stuff
to go after the house itself. N
one of this ever panned
out. Neighbors were too terrified of the Brotherhood
to cooperate with the police, and there was simply
not enough weight moving into or out of the place
to attract serious manpower. Surveillance on the
house had been spotty at best, and it was finally
terminated because the police couldn't justify the
cost or time to the captain, or the probable-cause
circumstances to a judge who would be asked to
sign a search warrant.
But the house was definitely Brotherhood and
probably a meth lab-and it had survived the recent
bombings. Even on lean days, the place probably
turned several thousand dollars' worth of methamphetamine
a week-if someone was going to wipe
out the Brotherhood's drug outlets, this certainly
would have been on the list. That was enough information
for Deanna Wyler to order surveillance restarted
.
The last three hours of this twelve-hour shift
were the real dog part. This was when all the coffee
in the thermos was cold and the burgers sat like
lead weights in the gut, slowing down blood circulation
and acting like a big sleeping pill. The van was
cold, the seats smelled musty, and the rubbercovered
eyepiece in the 180-millimeter telephoto
camera was slimy from all the oily eyes that had
touched it.
A few subjects had approached the house this
evening, but they had been scared away by the pit
bull. One visitor did bring out an occupant of the
house; the surveillance teams got some good snapshots
of a big biker-looking guy with long, stringy
dark hair a beard, and a leather vest over a bare
torso, but little else. The big-ear directional microphone
picked up an argument between the two.
"What you got, man?" the visitor had asked, his
voice coarse and cracking.
"What you need? You need a snort, man? I got
what you need." They had met at the chain-link
fence, but it was obvious that the occupant didn't
want to be out in the open too long.
"What the hell is this, man?" the buyer asked
angrily. "That ain't no line."
"Where you been, muthafucker? There ain't no
shit on the street. The Brotherhood's fucked. This is
it, man. You want it?"
"You rippin' me off, man."
The surveillance officer eyeing them through the
