by Dale Brown
operation could unravel very quickly. The police
will not rest until the ones responsible for killing
their own are found and punished--or eliminated."
Bennie nodded that he understood. "Okay, Colonel
, okay. No way they'll connect me with you," he
assured Townsend. The guy was like a chess master,
Bennie thought, always thinking several moves
ahead. "And I'll get to work right away."
"Very good," Townsend said. "We'll get you your
chemicals so you can start producing as soon as possible
."
Bennie had that same damn sensation again-the
feeling of a long, slow slide into doom. Dealing with
a guy like Townsend had to be like dealing with the
devil himself. But the money-Jesus, with most all
of the Satan's Brotherhood out of the way, it would
be raining and pouring meth money. And the level
of fear would be so high that no one, not even the
Mexicans, would dare get into the meth trade in
California for a few months at least. Bennie would
be raking in money. And clearly Townsend and his
army weren't interested in cooking.
Bennie held out his hand. "You got a deal, Colonel
," he said.
Townsend smiled that awful smile again, holding
up the Calico as he switched it to his left hand so
Bennie could not fail to see it-and shook Bennie's
hand. "Very good. Let's get to work, shall we?"
As Bennie moved off to supervise the startup of
his new lab, Reingruber came over to Townsend. "I
am weary of these greedy idiots, Herr Oberst. We
risk all we have to transport some chemicals so we
can make a few dollars, when the real money is sitting
there waiting for us to take it."
"Patience, Major," Townsend replied. "The city
is not yet in a sufficient panic for our purposes.
Continue to monitor the target and report if there is
any movement. If the local authorities do not act a
bit more decisively soon, we may need to implement
Phase Three of our plan. But I have a suspicion
that, as the Americans are so fond of saying,
'The shit will hit the fan' by itself very soon."
SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS DIVISION
HEADQUARTERS,
BERCUT DRIVE, SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA
MONDAY, 16 MARCH 1998, 0802 PT
C
aptain Tom Chandler stepped into the conference
room a few minutes after the morning
briefing began and took a seat in a corner. Shielding
his face behind his FBI National Academy coffee
mug, he surveyed the division members present and
his heart sank.
His guys and gals looked whipped. After ten days
of twelve-hour shifts, weekends included, they were
ashen and exhausted. Everyone was chugging coffee
to try to stay awake. Personnel assigned to SID
could dress casually-it was an all-undercover
unit-but most of them looked as if they had been
sleeping in their clothes, which was probably not far
from the truth. Hats, apparently hiding unwashed
hair, were everywhere.
The lieutenant in charge of operations, Deanna
Wyler, was giving the morning briefing. She normally
dressed like a high-powered executive around
the office, emulating the captain; but today she
wore black BDU's, a rangemaster's cap, and combat
boots, and had her sidearm strapped to her waist
with a black web belt. Wyler, who was normally
responsible for administration, training, and liaison
with other divisions in the department, had probably
been to more crime scenes and labs in the past
week than she had in the entire six months before.
Chandler had heard through the rumor mill that
Wyler was a couple of months pregnant. Selfishly,
he had not ordered her to stay away from labs or
explosion scenes because he desperately needed the
manpower out on the street. She hadn't told him
she was pregnant, so officially she wasn't-which
meant that in effect, she was accepting part of the
responsibility for any damage, illness, or birth defects
. .
Fuck that, Chandler yelled at himself. if anything
happened to that child because it was exposed in
utero to any drugs or precursor chemicals at one of
those lab scenes, it would haunt him for the rest of
his life. He would never ever forgive himself.
"We have the preliminary investigation report on
the explosions ready to go to City Hall and the
chief's office," Wyler began, distributing folders to
each officer with the investigation summaries.
"What we had was a total of twenty-five meth-lab
explosions, all occurring within eight hours of one
another. The labs all appear to be similar: They
were all thionyl chloride hydrogenation reactors,
approximately twenty to forty gallons' capacity
each."
"Twenty to forty gallons?" someone exclaimed.
"You mean liters, don't you?"
"I mean gallons," Wyler repeated. "We're talking
a thionyl chloride reactor capable of producing close
to forty pounds of pure crystal meth at a time."
That was probably the one piece of news that could
animate this bone-tired audience. The thought of a
single lab making that much methamphetamine
was astounding all by itself-to think that there
were twenty-five of them set up out there at one
time, and possibly more, was almost too much to
believe.
"Want some more unbelievable stuff?" Wyler
went on. "How about very few signs of precursor
chemical stores? No chemical dumps, no storage
sheds full of chemicals, no hijacked trucks nearby.
When those labs went up, the explosion took out all
but traces of precursor chemicals. Now with that
much pressurized hydrogen in the reactor, you
know the fireball it produces is going to be big and
hot. But in the past we've always found huge dumps
full of precursors nearby, and an aboveground explosion
wouldn't wipe out a below-ground dump or
burial site. Some of the sites had chemical dumps
nearby, but they hadn't been recently used.
"Now, either the cooks were extraordinarily neat
and tidy and cleaned up their precursors before
starting to cook-very unlikely-or the chemicals
came with the labs," Wyler said. "We did find remnants
of trailers and hitches and stuff like that at a
few of the sites, but that's not uncommon and we
didn't think much of it at the time. We think it's a
vital clue now. We now feel we're talking about a
large, portable, self-contained reactor unit, mounted
on a trailer and possibly disguised as a U-Haul or a
home-built trailer.//
Wyler let that information sink in a moment,
then continued: "Now, as to the victims. With the
exception of a relatively small but nonetheless unfortunate
number of civilian casualties, it looks like
the right folks got dead in those explosions. Get
of the fatalities were Satan's Brotherhood
members or associates. Over a thousand identified
casualties. And all these DOA's were found well
outside ground zero of the blasts, farther than fifty
yards or so. That means anyone within fifty yards
was probably Crispy Critters the nanosecond that
lab went up. Although we'll probably have no way
of knowing for sure for several months, if ever, it's
safe to say that most of the Brotherhood members
were closer than fifty yards to ground zero, and that
the current Brotherhood death toll is just a fraction
of the actual number. We could be talking about
three, four, even five thousand casualties, guysmaybe
up to eighty percent of the total known
Satan's Brotherhood membership in the state of
California."
"Hol-ee shit," someone exclaimed.
"Well, what are we sitting around here for?" said
someone else, exchanging high fives with the detectives
around him. "Let's get the hell out of here and
go to Sammy's for some breakfast. Or better yet, I
think I saw McLanahan's open for the graveyard
shift. Let's go and get us a few pops and celebrate
Tom Chandler rose -to his feet. "Seventy-three
children were killed in those explosions-you want i
to invite the parents of those kids to McLanahan's
to celebrate with you?" he asked. The celebrating
agents fell silent. "Whoever did this didn't kill all
those Brotherhood bikers for our benefit-whatever
they got planned for this city has got to be far worse
than what the Brotherhood could do to us. Keep
your damn minds on the task at hand: Let's find
whoever did this and put his ass in jail, soonest."
"We didn't mean any disrespect, Captain," one of
the sergeants said. "But we been workin' twelve-,
sixteen-, some of us even twenty-hour shifts. We're I
burned out."
"The chief is counting on us to get a handle on
this," Chandler said. I
A moan of resignation went up from the cops in
the conference room. Police Chief Barona was currently
in Washington, D.C., testifying to some Senate
subcommittee on law enforcement about the
need for more federal funding for law-enforcement
programs for cities, citing the statewide meth-lab
explosions as perfect examples of a crime rate almost
out of control. If he did get any funding, it
would probably be for yet another federal grant research
study or education program, not for more
cops. And it was a sure bet that the chief wasn't
manning a command post or sifting through bags of
body parts at three A.M. looking for clues.
"All right, that's enough of the whining," Chandler
said. "You'll all have one hour for Code Seven
after this meeting-and I mean one hour, not an
hour and a half, and not at home either-and then I
want your butts back out on the street. Start hitting
up your informants
"The Cl's have scattered, Captain," one of the
officers said. "The streets are empty."
"I don't need excuses, I need results," Chandler
said irritably. "Find out where your CI's have gone
and go talk to them. Bump up the cash offers, but
get some solid info from your informants. And update
me on the status of your surveillance operations
. Obviously the Brotherhood surveillance ops
went bye-bye, but find out which surveillance jobs
are still standing, and why. If a Brotherhood lab site
or hangout or a lab site in a Brotherhood area of
town didn't blow up, I want a surveillance set up
there.
"Don't forget to call up BNE and any of the surrounding
agencies and get the flow of informat on
going again. I know there's been no exchange of information
while the crime-scene investigations
were being conducted, but now that agencies are
wrapping up the crime scenes and starting the investigations
, I want that information now. Everyone
got that?" Nods all around. "Anything for me?"
"Yeah," said one of the sergeants. "There's a rumor
going around that overtime is being cut. What's
the story, Captain?"
Chandler took a deep breath, then looked directly
at his troops. "Rumor looks like it'll be true this
time. We blew through the first two quarters' overtime
budget like it was nobody's business, and
emergency procedures went into effect. Starting tomorrow
, mandatory flex time up to forty hours,
then mandatory comp time. No overtime will be
authorized beyond that, so don't ask and don't put it
on your time cards. All personnel may have to go on
staggered twelve-hour shifts if this keeps up much
longer. Until further notice."
"No overtime!" the cops wailed, almost in unison
. "The sheriff's department gets feds to help
them with their investigation, and we get sixteenhour
shifts with no overtime? That sucks, Captain
!"
"Listen, everybody has to sacrifice until we get a
handle on whoever planned these meth-lab booby
traps," Chandler said wearily. "This is an emergency
situation. Update your surveillances, beat the
bushes for your CI's, gather some tight info ' and
make some arrests. Pronto." He knew it was not
much of a pep talk, but right now Thomas Chandler
wasn't feeling too peppy himself. "Anything else for
me?" There were no replies this time, just exasperated
expressions. Chandler turned and left, feeling
the icy pinpricks of his troops' anger jabbing at his
back.
Deanna Wyler rubbed her eyes as she waited for
the muttering to die down. "Okay, listen up," she
said, opening up her notes. "I looked through all
your recent surveillance reports and cross-checked
them with the locations of those lab explosions.
Two glaring holes: the new Rosalee suspected lab,
and the Bobby John Club. Intelligence has filled in a
couple of holes for us and I think it's time to revisit
those two locations. if someone was going to target
Brotherhood labs or hangouts, I'd have thought it
would've been those two places. Both are still standing
, right?" The sergeants nodded.
"I know we had a surveillance set up on the
Rosalee location before, but we terminated it before
the explosions because we needed the manpower
elsewhere and because we were starting to see more
normal activity there-kids, yard work, pet dogs
that weren't guard dogs, et cetera. Intelligence says
there's a pit bull in the yard again, and they haven't
seen the kids that were playing there. They may be
cooking and dealing again. Restart that surveillance
again tonight.
"Let's restart surveillance on the Bobby John
Club too," Wyler went on. "We stopped it after that
weird bar-fight incident where someone set off a gas
> grenade, because the place has been nearly deserted.
But informants tell us it's open for business again.
I'd think that any surviving Brotherhood members
would steer way clear of it in case whoever set up
the booby-trapped portable labs goes hunting for
survivors, but no one ever gave the Brotherhood a
lot of credit for brains. I want to know who goes in
and out of there; I want to know which Brotherhood
members are still breathing, and I want them
brought in for questioning.
"I don't think we'll have any trouble getting
wiretap warrants, so write 'em up and I'll help you
get them signed," Wyler said. "I've got some retired
folks and some volunteers who are going to come in
and help us write up warrants and help around the
office too, and we've even got retired judges resworn
in and volunteering to sign warrants. So at least a
little help is on the way."
Wyler then stepped closer to the table and laid
her best warning glare on them all. "One more
thing, guys and gals: Stop the hangdog pooroverworked-me
bullshit. I'm sure the captain will
be happy to compare duty hours with yours any day,
and he doesn't get flex time, CTO, or overtime, and
he doesn't have a union to go cry to if he works too
hard. We're all tired. The whole city, the whole
fucking county is tired. Think about the innocent
victims killed or hurt in those explosions the next
time you start bellyaching about getting time and a
half, CTO, or flex time, while those poor folks are
out burying their children and sleeping in a shelter
or on the street because their apartment complex
was destroyed.
"If you still feel like you're being abused and mis-
treated, just let me know and I'll be happy to reassign
you to Patrol, where I'm sure you'll feel more
appreciated. Manning a checkpoint in Oak Park or
guarding an explosion site in Alkali Flats on foot at
three in the morning might appeal to you. Does everyone
get my drift?" There was no response-nor
would one have been tolerated. "Sergeants, I want
to see your surveillance operations plans on my
desk by two. Everyone: Remember why you chose
to put on a badge, and remember your -city is in
trouble. Now get the hell out of here."
BOBBY JOHN CLUB
DEL PASO BOULEVARD,