Riding the Snake (1998)

by Stephen Cannell

  Rick Verba was the lowest-ranking official in the room, but it was hard to argue against common sense, so that's what they did.

  Wheeler and Tanisha moved slowly in the inky blackness. They were holding hands because the tunnel was curved pipe, full of slippery algae and moss. Occasionally, one of them would stumble and have to rely on the other for balance.

  Then Wheeler heard splashing in the pipe in front of them. He squeezed Tanisha's hand to get her to stop moving.

  Sure enough, somebody was close to them in the tunnel. The sloshing sound of footsteps cut through the darkness. Wheeler couldn't risk turning on the flashlight; he had to assume it was a man and that the man was armed. He stood with Tanisha in the darkness, tucking the light into his back pocket to free his right hand. He reached into his waistband to check the .44. He had the thirty-ought-six shark rifle slung over his back on the sling. He silently pulled it off and held the barrel in front of him, aiming toward the sound. It was inky black, but he could hear breathing now, mixed with the footsteps. The man was just a few feet away. Wheeler could taste stomach acid in his mouth.

  Then he heard Tanisha grunt as somebody crashed into her. Wheeler could feel motion as air stirred by his left arm. Tanisha went down with a cry. Wheeler heard a brief struggle as Tanisha and the intruder splashed around in the dark. He couldn't see, but moved blindly toward the sounds of the struggle, his outstretched arms waving in the air trying to feel them. Tanisha screamed, but the scream was cut off by a gurgling sound as water filled her mouth.

  Wheeler was grabbing helplessly in front of him in the dark, trying to find the intruder. He could hear Tanisha gagging and choking, but he still couldn't find her in the pitch black. Finally, he remembered the flashlight, grabbed it, and turned it on.

  They were about ten feet away from him. A young Chinese man was on top of her, pushing her head down into two feet of brackish water. Wheeler tried to chamber the rifle, but in his haste, it slipped in his wet hands and dropped into the water. Dry Dragon turned to look at him, his eyes demonic in the dim beam of the flashlight. Then he let go of Tanisha, pulled his 7.65mm automatic, and fired it once at Wheeler.

  The sound in the tunnel was deafening. The bullet whizzed by Wheeler's ear. He jerked back and lost hold of the flashlight. It splashed as it hit the water and sank. It was still lit and put a watery glow on the tunnel walls, dimly illuminating all of them.

  Wheeler got the S&W .44 out and was pointing it at the dim outline of the Chinese teenager. Panicked and disoriented by the watery blackness, Dry Dragon fired wildly again, and Wheeler's ears echoed with the concussion. The bullet chipped the tunnel near his head, flinging concrete particles into his face and neck. Wheeler drew aim, praying Tanisha would not rise up into his line of fire. He pulled the trigger. The gun barked just as the flashlight flickered out, and they were again in pitch blackness. Then he heard footsteps running toward himSuddenly, a body hit him on the shoulder, brushing past on his way up the tunnel. Wheeler was knocked down on one knee. He spun in the direction of the disoriented fleeing man and fired twice at the splashing sound in the darkness. He heard his bullets hit the concrete and whine away. He listened for a grunt or the sound of a body falling in the water. He heard neither. Then he edged slowly back to Tanisha.

  "Tisha," he whispered in the dark. "Tisha, you okay?"

  He heard her cough deeply next to him, and then retch and spit. "Tastes like shit," she said, as she heaved up more brackish water, clearing it out of her lungs.

  "You okay?" Wheeler said, finally touching her shoulder with his hand in the darkness.

  "If you don't count drinking a quart of sewage. You get him?"

  "I don't think so."

  He helped her to her feet, and they stood there for a long moment and listened to silence so profound it roared in their ears.

  The planes had stopped taking off, and all they could hear now was their own breathing.

  "You got the rifle?" she whispered.

  "Dropped it."

  "Turn on the flash. Look for it. Maybe the cartridges are still dry."

  "Dropped the flashlight."

  "Good going."

  "I never claimed I'd be good at this," he said, "just available."

  "Let's go," she said, and again they held hands in the darkness. With their matched .44s out in front of them, they walked slowly and as quietly as possible up the tunnel.

  Fu Hai heard the gunfire. It sounded like distant fireworks in the tunnel. He crouched low in the darkness, clutching the unlit flashlight in one hand and the gun Dry Dragon had given him in the other. The Snake Riders were in a panic, all talking at once. Fu Hai crouched even lower, cradling the deadly Russian machine pistol in his arms. Then, more to calm himself than the others, he started to sing a very popular Chinese song about persimmons that every child in China knew, regardless of dialect. One by one they joined in, until all of them were crouched around him, squatting, with their buttocks in the water. The children miraculously stopped crying. As they huddled in the flickering candlelight singing softly, Fu Hai wondered what he should do next.

  Willy was in the back of the SWAT van as it sped Code Three down the Santa Monica Freeway. He sat quietly on a wooden bench opposite four stern-faced young men in SWAT uniforms and tried hard to remain impassive. He looked neither right nor left, up nor down. He sat restfully and waited.

  Willy knew that the first stop on his way to victory was this ride to the airport. They wanted to keep their options open. If in failure they didn't intend to let him go, they would have left him downtown.

  The SWAT truck stopped after thirty minutes. He heard low conversation, and then he felt the van moving again. Soon they came to another stop and the door to the back was opened. He could see the tail of his jet behind the young uniformed police lieutenant who looked into the back of the van.

  "Sorry it's so hot back here. I'll keep the engine running and the air on," he said to the guards with Willy, then closed the door and bolted it.

  The Stupid Dragon had carried the Smart Monkey back from a certain death at the bottom of the sea, and had brought him up on dry land. The LAPD was about to put Willy safely back up on the highest limb of his willow tree.

  Time was running out. The flimsy constraints of order in the Situation Room were beginning to break down. What had started as a jurisdictional squabble had degenerated into open warfare. They had divided up into two groups. The "Turn Willy Loose" faction consisted of the Mayor of Los Angeles, the Governor of California, and L. A. Police Chief Carl Leddiker--the hometowners. They saw Willy's life as meaningless when measured against their civic responsibility and the destruction of the airport by nuclear explosion. The "Keep Willy Here" contingent consisted of all the Feds, who the hometowners said intended to sky out of L. A. as soon as it was over and leave the shit-digging and body-bagging to the locals.

  The geek from FEMA never said anything. He kept his head down, working on fallout patterns, weather charts, and wind graphs.

  "I'm taking authority for letting him go," the Governor said. "I don't give a shit what the federal government thinks." The Governor had just arrived ten minutes ago and was turning the tide. "We put him on his plane and cut him loose. He's just one life. One person. I have a potential disaster here. Hundreds or even thousands of deaths. Who knows how many more will die from radiation? We'll go after him later. He can't hide."

  "Who says he can't hide?" St. John said. "He'll disappear just like those two fucks Megrahi and Fhimah, who blew up the Lockerbie flight. Can't hide, my ass. Those two rag-heads are in Libya right now, flipping us off."

  "Put Wo Lap Ling on his plane. Get him out of here," the Governor instructed the L. A. Chief of Police.

  Chief Leddiker moved into a perimeter office, snapped up a phone, and started dialing.

  "I won't allow this," Lew Fisher of the State Department said.

  "How're you gonna stop it?" the Governor shot back. "The police and National Guard are under my command. It's gonna take y
ou forty-eight hours to nationalize the Guard. You don't have forty-eight hours. You're fucked, Mr. Fisher."

  "Is that true, General?" Fisher asked. "Does it take forty-eight hours?"

  They all turned to look for General Robert Clark, but Kicker Clark had slipped out of the room three minutes before.

  The back of the SWAT van was opened and Willy stepped out into the sunshine. He moved with newly recovered dignity across the tarmac to the boarding ramp of his Falcon, strolling as if it was Sunday afternoon in the park. His pilots were both former German fighter pilots. Willy had always used Germans to fly him, because of twin German traits he viewed as essential for airplane pilots: anal meticulousness and rigid control. Once Willy was aboard, the pilots closed the door. In a few minutes they had the three jet engines wound up and were taxiing off the ramp, away from the Executive Jet Terminal. They crossed Service Road E and turned right on Taxiway C. Then the pilots hurried the big three-engine jet along, past the Department of Airports maintenance yard, where the NEST team had gathered, past the four C-141s with no tail markings, past the LAX Sky Lounge perched like a giant concrete spider in the airport's center parking lot.

  Willy was standing in the doorway to the cockpit. "I would appreciate it if we can depart as quickly as possible," he said, not wanting to appear frightened or anxious, but not wanting to remain in Los Angeles a second longer than necessary.

  The chief pilot was named Gunter Hagen. He nodded to his copilot, and they added ten percent more power. The jet moved faster, passing the empty United and Continental terminals. It rushed across the Sepulveda Boulevard overpass into the international section of LAX, past Air France and Singapore Air, past JAL and Indonesian Airlines. The airport was almost completely deserted. No planes were parked at the ramps. Except for Willy's Falcon jet, only one other vehicle was moving on the field.

  Willy looked down and saw that a military jeep with four soldiers was racing along with them, just under the wing. "As soon as possible," he said to his pilots.

  Now Gunter was at the end of the runway, and he pressed the yoke mike. "Dis is eight six eight Charlie Papa, requesting runway two four nine left."

  "I don't think, under the circumstances, it's necessary to obtain permission," Willy urged. "We should leave now."

  "JaGunter said, and he taxied the big jet onto runway 249-L and looked at his copilot, who nodded and pushed the three throttles forward slowly.

  The sleek Falcon jet thundered away from the trailing jeep, blowing dust and gravel into the faces of the soldiers. It was airborne halfway down the runway, then climbed steeply into the sky, all three powerful engines trailing exhaust and reverberated sound.

  Wheeler and Tanisha heard the jet take off. It was the first jet they'd heard in almost half an hour. They stopped in the blackness and listened as it thundered down the runway, shaking the tunnel with distant sound and vibration. The noise abruptly abated as soon as the jet was off the ground. Suddenly it was quiet again. Slowly, Wheeler and Tanisha continued up the tunnel.

  They began to hear hushed singing. It was in Chinese and coming from up ahead. A few yards farther on, Wheeler could see dim light flickering on the wall, and then his foot brushed against something submerged in the water at his feet. "Hold on," he whispered. He reached down into the water with his hand and felt for what his foot had hit. Something mossy and stringy floated in the dirty sewage. He pulled at it but it wouldn't move. He reached down with both hands and felt around in the inky black water. It was then he realized what he had found.

  He had both his hands on the submerged head of Dry Dragon.

  "Shit," he whispered, "I guess I hit that guy after all."

  Tanisha reached down and helped him sit the dead Chinese gangster up as water drained out of his open mouth. They could barely see him in the distant flickering light. Wheeler managed to pull the body over to the side of the tunnel, and they left him there. Then he took Tanisha's hand and they continued on.

  The tunnel was bending right, and as they moved along, they could see flickering candlelight coming from a spot just ahead. Wheeler and Tanisha stopped, stood very still, and listened. They could hear the singing very clearly now. The song was simple in melody and very sweet. In the small amount of light that leaked back at them from the candles, they could see each other clearly. Wheeler took the first two fingers of his hand and pointed them at his eyes, then up the tunnel, indicating he would go up and look. She nodded, then he moved very slowly toward the light, trying hard not to make a sound, or slip and splash water. He hugged the far wall as he crept up on them. His hand was gripped tight around the checked walnut handle of the S&W .44. If the Snake Riders were near the candles, then, he reasoned, this position on the far side of the wall would give him the best early view. He would be on the edge of the light and hard to see. It should give him an advantage.

  Slowly, Wheeler snuck up on them. He raised the cocked Magnum and pointed it out in front of him. Then he saw them: hundreds of people in a widened intersection where four drainage pipes came together. They were huddled knee-deep in the water. The babies were not crying now. He could see that these people were scrawny and undernourished. Their filthy hair hung down in their faces.

  Then a man not far from him got up and started walking toward Wheeler. Wheeler was afraid to move for fear of splashing water and making noise. He didn't think the man had seen him, but still, the Chinese man kept coming straight at him, his head down. Then, when he was only a few yards from Wheeler, he reached down into his pants, pulled out his penis, and started to urinate into the water. When he finished, he suddenly looked up. . . . They were staring directly into each other's eyes.

  The man shouted and all hell broke loose.

  Willy was watching his pilots carefully. He had not moved from the doorway of the cockpit.

  They were almost out of U. S. airspace when the copilot pointed out his side window at something off the right wingtip. Willy looked out the window of his Falcon jet, and there, tailing them a few hundred feet to the right, was an American F-16. Gunter twisted his head and looked to his left.

  "Von ovah heah, too," he said, and Willy looked out the other side of the plane at a second American fighter jet on the left side.

  "I was going to call and tell them where it was," Willy said. "I told them. They had the polygraph. It was not a lie."

  And Willy had intended to do just that. It made no sense for him to blow up LAX with a nuclear weapon once he was free. Such an act of terrorism would make him the most sought-after criminal in the world. The first terrorist to explode a nuclear device in a Western city would be marked and dead in a year. This is why Willy fully intended to tell them where the bomb was, but the inferior men he was dealing with had not trusted him, had not given his plan a chance to work.

  "Call them, tell them." His voice had ceased to be calm. "Tell them if they don't turn back I will not tell them where the bomb is. They are running out of time. It is less than forty minutes until it detonates," Willy said, glancing at his watch, sounding more and more like an inferior man.

  Willy felt his vicious tiger stir. He was losing control of the terrifying beast.

  Gunter picked up the mike and relayed the message.

  A few minutes later he got his answer. It was short and to the point. "Fuck you, Charlie," General Clark said, from the pilot's seat of the lead F-16. Then he switched his radio over and went plane-to-plane. "This is Kicker to Killshot," he said to his wingman. "The bogie is about to leave U. S. airspace. He's a terrorist making a run for it. I gotta splash this dink on our side of the line, so he just became an upgrade. We now have a hot target. Follow me in."

  General Clark kicked his F-16 over into a right roll, looped quickly around, and came back up on the tail of the Falcon, closing in from behind. Killshot did the same.

  Gunter craned his neck to try and see the two jets behind him.

  "I told them I would radio the location. I told them," Willy whined.

  "I think dey vant to
shoot us down," Gunter said.

  General Clark let a Sidewinder go. The missile streaked across four hundred yards of cold Pacific sky and directly up the right-engine tailpipe on the Falcon. Willy felt the impact. The plane lurched, throwing him down onto his knees on the beige carpet of the jet. A second later the missile exploded, and the plane disintegrated, blowing Willy and his two pilots into a fine mist.

  When the debris hit the ocean, there were only a few pieces larger than a phone booth.

  Fu Hai heard the Snake Rider scream, turned toward the sound, and saw the shadowy figure of Wheeler Cassidy standing on the periphery of his group, gun in hand. Fu Hai had fired without aiming in the Red Flower Pavilion, and he had paid the price when he had been wounded. This time he pulled the machine pistol up and aimed carefully. The gun spit out a stream of Russian lead.

  The bullets ricocheted in the tunnel. One hit Wheeler in the right side of his chest and took him down hard. He had the Magnum .44 cocked in his right hand, and he squeezed off four blind shots as he fell. Wheeler heard Fu Hai scream going down, then heard splashing water as he landed. Wheeler was now sitting on the floor of the concrete drainpipe, cold, brackish water swirling over his lap. He looked at his chest and saw heavy arterial blood oozing down his shirt.

  "This ain't good," he said to himself. Then Tanisha was kneeling over him. "Make sure he's dead," Wheeler groaned. "He's got a machine gun. Be careful--may be other guards."

  She looked down at Wheeler's wound, and her heart froze with dread. Could this be happening? Could she have found her soul mate only to lose him in this dark underground sewer? "Hurry," Wheeler whispered through gritted teeth.

  Tanisha stumbled up, her mind and senses reeling. She moved toward the huddled Chinese immigrants, hesitating at the edge of the group. They glared at her. She saw no other guards. Just frightened, wretched immigrants. When she moved forward they parted to let her pass. She waded through them to the spot where Fu Hai was lying and kneeled. He had two bullets in him, one in his chest, one in his neck. His eyes were open, but they were beginning to look distant and afraid. Tanisha bent over him, grabbed his wrist, and took his pulse.