by DL Barbur
I nodded. Thinking about Struecker’s death brought me back to reality a little bit.
“Everybody else is still asleep. Jack is over at the hangar, sleeping with the helicopter. I guess it needed some kind of maintenance and he finished it up last night.”
I nodded. I was trying to figure out how I was going to spend my day. I wondered if I could convince Alex to get out of town with me. My SUV was still parked in the garage bay. Maybe we could head up into the mountains for a night or two.
One of the desk phones rang and Henry answered it. He listened for a second, then held the receiver out for me.
“It’s for you. Some guy named Zach?”
For a second, the name drew a complete blank, then I remembered the security guard at the water reservoir.
“Zach, how can I help you?” I wondered if he could give us some more information about Lubbock. On the way back from grand jury the day before, I’d been making a list in my mind of loose ends that needed tied up. It was time to start thinking like an investigator again, and not a door kicker.
“Hey, uh, Detective Miller. This is Zach, the security guy from the Water Bureau?” He sounded uncertain like he’d debated calling and fully expected to be blown off by the real cops.
“Good to hear from you, Zach. You gave us an awesome briefing that day, and it really helped us out when those assholes tried to blow up the reservoir.” I needed to shore up this guy’s confidence before he flaked on me.
“It did? Wow. Hey, you remember those pictures you showed me, the one of the bald guy?” It worked. I could hear the confidence in his voice.
“I do.”
“Well, I’m at the zoo right now with my daughter and I just saw him.”
My stomach went cold.
“Are you sure it’s him?”
“Pretty sure. I’ve been studying it on my phone. He’s with five guys dressed as waiters.”
“Where in the zoo?” My mind was racing, trying to figure out what to do next.
“The amphitheater, down by the elephants. There’s a free kids’ concert starting in a few minutes.”
“Oh shit,” I said. It was out of my mouth before I had a chance to think.
“They all went inside the cafe here. You want me to go inside and see if I can get sight of them again?”
“No. Zach, I want you to take your daughter and get out of there now. Right now. This is going to be bad.”
“Uh, ok. Well, call me back if you need anything.”
I didn’t even say anything to him. I just hung up and turned to Henry, who was typing away frantically.
“Kids’ concert at the zoo today,” he said pointing at a computer monitor. “There’s free admission. It’s a multicultural event, kids from all over the place invited.”
“Shit,” I said. ?My brain was vapor locked. Bolle was gone and nobody had been left in charge.
“It starts at noon,” Henry said. He pointed at the time at the bottom of the computer screen. “Sixteen minutes from now.”
Having a definite deadline snapped me out of my fugue.
“Call Jack. Tell him to get the Little Bird over here. Then call Portland Police and the zoo. Try to get them to evacuate. I’m going to start waking our people up.”
“I can wake everyone up,” Henry said and mashed down on a button on the console in front of him. I jumped when an alarm klaxon blared out in the factory floor. He let it ring for thirty seconds or so then turned it off and picked up a phone. I ran out into the hallway, nearly colliding with a bleary-eyed Dalton who was wearing PT shorts, a t-shirt and a pair of running shoes. He had an empty coffee mug in his hands.
“What the hell?” he asked.
“Todd is at the Oregon Zoo. He’s going to shoot up a bunch of kids. Jack is on the way with the Little Bird.”
Dalton set the mug down on the floor. “I’ll unlock the gun cage.”
I ran out into the factory floor. Dale was dressed and standing by the garage door, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. Eddie appeared barefoot in the doorway of his trailer, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
“We’re rolling in five. Gear up in the gun locker.”
Dale started towards me. Eddie disappeared inside the trailer and reappeared a few seconds later with a pair of boots in his hand.
I turned and ran back towards the gun cage. Dalton was throwing gear into the hallway. It was a good idea because there was no way for all of us to fit inside at once. I picked up a vest, already laden with ammo, flash bangs, and other gear and threw it over my head. Dalton handed me a spare Glock pistol, which I shoved in the holster attached to the front of the vest. Then he tossed me a carbine and a helmet.
Dale and Eddie ran down the hall. Dale had his long gun slung over his shoulder and Eddie was trying to pull a boot on and run at the same time. I kicked a vest towards each of them and turned to Dalton.
“There’s a kids’ concert at the zoo. Remember the security guard from the Water Bureau? He saw Todd there with five guys dressed as waiters.”
“Shit,” he said and handed me a radio. “Cops?”
I stuffed the radio in a pouch and plugged the earpiece into my ear, trying to keep all the various cords and straps on the vest from getting tangled.
“Henry’s trying. The concert starts at noon.”
“Shit,” he said again and handed me two more radios.
I turned to hand the radios to Dale and Eddie. Alex was standing in the hallway, wearing sweatpants, a t-shirt, and her medical backpack.
“I’m coming,” she said. She looked so much like her father at that moment it was uncanny.
I opened my mouth to argue, then shut it. Instead, I turned to Dalton.
“I need another vest, helmet and carbine.”
He handed them out without comment. Alex shucked her backpack and I helped her into the vest. She grunted at the weight.
“Will you ride inside the cockpit with Jack? There’s only room for four on the skids.”
“Ok,” she said, ducking her head, so I could put the carbine sling over it. “Helicopters scare the shit out of me anyway.”
As I handed her the helmet, I realized then she was scared. Her hands were shaking and the corners of her mouth quivered a little bit. Nobody would have blamed her for staying here, but she was coming anyway.
“I love you,” I said before I had time to think.
She kissed me quickly on the lips. “I love you too.”
I shoved the kiss out of my mind and looked around. We were a pretty motley looking bunch, with the t-shirts, gym shorts and what not, but everybody had armor and a gun.
“Let’s roll,” I said.
We trotted towards the factory floor. I could hear the clatter of rotor blades as we went. Jack was flaring for a landing as we broke out into the sunlight. The doors were still off the bird, and the benches were still rigged. Perfect. We ducked under the rotor arc and I helped Alex shrug out of her backpack. I clipped it to the back seat with a carabiner, then turned to see that she was buckling herself in.
Dale and I took one side of the helo, Eddie and Dalton took the other. I strapped the belt across my lap and pulled a headset off from where it was hanging on a hook. It killed the rotor noise a little.
I keyed the mic. “Henry tell you what was up?”
“Yup. Oregon zoo. Are we ready on the left?”
Eddie and Dalton both stuck their thumbs out so Jack could see them in the little mirror stuck on the sides of the canopy bubble.
“Ready right?”
Dale and I gave a thumbs up and we were off, lumbering into the sky in a running takeoff. The Little Bird’s engine screamed and we cleared the parking lot fence by only a couple of feet.
Jack gained altitude slowly and pointed the nose of the helo west. I tried to look out at the horizon and not at the ground rushing by beneath my boots. I tried to decide if I would feel better if the Little Bird was higher in the sky or not.
Henry’s voice crackled over the ra
dio. “I’m on the phone with a Portland Police watch commander. He’s confused as fuck and it doesn’t sound like he believes me.”
“Jesus. Was he asleep when somebody tried to blow up the reservoir? How about the FBI?”
“I’m going to try them next. Casey is on the phone with Zoo security. That’s not going real well either.”
Now that we were maybe a thousand feet over the city, Jack leveled off and poured on the power. We were about fifteen miles as the crow, or the Little Bird, flew from the zoo. The Little Bird could go well over a hundred miles an hour, and it felt like Jack had the throttles nailed. My eyes burned and stung in the wind, and I belatedly remembered the goggles on top of my helmet.
We screamed over the river and Jack gained a little more altitude as we headed for the west hills. The Oregon Zoo was sixty acres shoehorned into the west hills of Portland adjacent to Forest Park. It was really a bad place for a major tourist attraction. The terrain limited how big the zoo could grow, and made access difficult. It had been years since I’d been to the zoo. People never got murdered there, so I’d not had any reason to go. The last time I’d been had been over a decade ago, with a woman I’d been dating.
“We need a plan,” I said. “Dale needs to be the primary shooter. This place is going to be packed with innocent people and if we do any shooting it needs to be surgical. We’ll reconnoiter by air, and see if we need to find a place for Jack to set us down.”
“Concur,” Dalton said.
Dale gave me a thumbs up. On the ride over, he’d already fed a handful of match grade rounds into the magazine of the bull barreled .308 rifle he cradled in his lap. Now he flipped open the scope caps and looked through the lens. The rifle he was toting was old school, a bolt action when most people favored a semi-automatic, but it was a precision instrument. Out to several hundred meters, he could not only hit a head sized target but pick which eye the bullet would enter.
I found myself hoping Zach had been wrong, that this was all a false alarm and we were all going to look like a bunch of idiots hanging out in our helicopter over the zoo. This was a nightmare scenario. Trying to sort out and engage a bunch of hostile targets in the throngs of parents and children at the zoo was doomed to failure.
I pushed all doubts out of my mind. I checked my carbine to make sure a round was in the chamber, and looked through the electronic sight to make sure the dot was showing. I let the stubby little rifle hang off the strap around my neck, and checked my pistol. Everything was good to go.
We flew over Highway 26, Jack gaining altitude to match the slope of the hill.
“We’ll be over the zoo in 30 seconds. Should pop out over the elephant exhibit,” Jack said over the intercom. Instead of following the highway as it turned south, Jack flew due west, taking us over some trees so low the rotor wash made the tops of the branches blow around. Then we were over a giant, sandy enclosure and I saw an elephant run under the skids.
Ahead of us was the amphitheater. On the big lawn in front of it were hundreds of kids with their parents, sitting on blankets with their picnic baskets. Every head in the place was pointed in our direction and I saw all sorts of cameras and cell phones pointed in our direction.
“People on the roof of the cafe,” Alex said. She sounded calm.
Jack had settled into a hover over the elephant enclosure. All of the elephants had run over to the other end and had formed a line facing us. I leaned forward so I could see out past the nose of the helicopter. I could see people walking around on the roof of the cafe a hundred or so yards distant.
“Jack, can you do a pedal turn so Dale can get his scope on them.”
It wouldn’t do to blow away a bunch of maintenance guys working on the HVAC system. From this distance, I could see a handful of men with white shirts walking around. A couple of them had black bags.
Jack pivoted the helicopter to the left, so the side Dale and I were sitting on faced the cafe. Dale raised the rifle to his eye.
“Guy with an AK-47,” Dale said over the intercom. “He’s pointing it at the crowd.”
I opened my mouth to tell him to shoot when he pulled the trigger. A figure on the roof dropped like a rag doll. Dale rode the recoil and worked the bolt to chamber a new round.
A saw a winking yellow light from the roof, a muzzle flash.
“Incoming,” Jack said, and juked the helicopter around. All hope that this was a false alarm had vanished.
At least they were shooting at us, and not the kids.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The Little Bird lurched to the side as Jack threw the stick over. We lost a little altitude and for a second I thought we were going to plunge into the elephant enclosure, then Jack leveled out and we were actually flying sideways towards the cafe.
“Dale,” Jack said over the intercom.
The cafe was now less than 100 yards away. That was a chip shot for Dale. We were close enough now that I could see the men scrambling off the roof, save one, who stood out in the open, cranking off rounds with his AK. Dale’s bolt gun spoke again and the muzzle flash winked out.
“I don’t have a shot on the rest,” Dale said.
Dale was being judicious about pulling the trigger. Unlike a shooting range, where there was a nice dirt berm to catch bullets, if we missed here there was a good chance a stray bullet would find its way into an innocent person. Even if we hit a hostile, the bullet could pass through his body and hit somebody on the other side. This was like the mass shooting at the mall, only worse. That time I’d only had to deal with one shooter.
“Best place to put you guys down is going to be on the roof of the building,” Jack said.
“Copy,” I said. “Set us down there.”
There was also an excellent chance that we would roll right in on some asshole shooting at us from a concealed position, but this might just be the day we all got to be dead heroes. I had a brief image of a bunch of rifle bullets tearing into Alex’s body, then pushed it out of my mind.
“Want me to stay and provide top cover?” Dale asked, as mildly as if he were asking me if I wanted to play a round of golf.
“Yes,” I said. His talents were best used from an elevated position. Even from the roof of the cafe, his line of sight would be limited compared to what it would be buzzing around in the Little Bird.
“Unbuckle my kit from the back seat,” Alex said.
“What?” I said as I craned my neck forward, trying to see ahead of us.
“They’re going to shoot people,” Alex said. “I’m going to help.”
The likelihood that we would kill all the shooters before they hurt innocent people was zero. Telling her to wait in the helo would be stupid, both because she could help people and because there was no way she would listen to me.
A guy in a white waiter’s outfit popped out from a corner of a building, cranked a couple of rounds off at us, and popped back, quicker than I could react. I raised my carbine, but all that was under the red dot was a scared looking woman clutching a small child. I jerked the muzzle off of her and tried to look everywhere at once.
The roof of the cafe was a convoluted mess, with a couple of tall spires that were supposed to look like the thatched roof of a grass hut, and a big glass dome that was the top of an aviary. Jack threaded through all that and brought the helo to a stop with one skid on a big metal air handler unit. There was an outdoor seating area below us, and a couple of umbrellas blew over.
I reached back, unclipped Alex’s medical kit, and then jumped off the skid. I forgot to take the headphones off first, and nearly fell when I hit the limit of the cord. I pulled them off and Dale reeled them in. I made sure the ear-piece for my handheld radio was still in place, then I took a knee and looked around.
The lawn below was bedlam. People were running in every direction, grabbing their kids and leaving behind coolers, picnic baskets, and strollers. As the Little Bird gained altitude, I heard a couple of gunshots.
“Can anyone see that?” I yelled
. I was looking for a way down. If I shinnied over the edge and hung, I would be able to drop down onto the dining area, but I would be dreadfully exposed while I did it.
“Can’t see it,” Dalton yelled. He and Eddie were both trying to simultaneously look around and stay low while Alex struggled into the heavy backpack.
“We need to get off this roof. Cover me,” I said.
Dalton nodded. He ran over and knelt on the edge of the roof next to me, rifle barrel pointing out. I swallowed hard and made myself dangle my legs over the edge, then hang from my fingers, expecting a bullet between the shoulder blades all the while. I dropped and landed semi-gracefully, considering the all the gear I was wearing.
I shook myself off and knelt behind an overturned table. It wouldn’t stop a bullet but it would at least be concealment. I gave a thumbs up and heard Dalton yell “moving” before he landed behind me.
I heard the rhythmic thumping of Dale’s bolt gun over the sound of the Little Bird’s engines.
“There are two white guys in the service road behind the cafe trying to get into a truck,” Dale said over the radio. “We didn’t hit them, but they ran into the crowd. Pretty sure one of them was Todd.”
Eddie came down next, landing with surprising grace for such a big guy. Alex was smart. She took off the bag she’d just struggled into, dropped it to Eddie, then came down herself.
A fusillade of shots sounded from around the corner, and there was more screaming.
“Let’s go,” I said.
I got up and ran for the stairs that would take us down to street level. There was no time to come up with any real plan other than follow the sound of gunfire and hope to get there before too many people died.
We charged down the stairs, trying to point guns and see in all directions. Alex was carrying the most brutal load. She didn’t have flashbangs and other tactical gear on her vest, but the heavy medical kit more than made up for it. She’d also never trained in how to perform in an active shooter response cell, but apparently common sense went a long way. She moved with us and kept her stubby little carbine pointed in the directions nobody else was covering.
