The Tin Man

by Dale Brown

  “What the hell was that crawling around on my back?” Patrick said as he shot over to his wife and son.

  “My little Rover,” Briggs said. “He comes complete with an explosives-detection sensor.” He held up a tiny device the size of a small mouse, trailing a length of thread-thin optic cable. “Rover” had a pinhole camera and microphone, and had little legs so it could crawl up furniture and even walls. “Sorry, but I had to take the chance.”

  Patrick raced over to Wendy and the baby, heard the soft sound of their breathing, and began to gently pull off the duct tape. He realized that it was tomato sauce covering them. “Jesus, it’s not blood, thank God!” he cried to Briggs. “That bastard is a fucking monster! What was it he planted on my back?”

  “This,” Hal replied grimly. He held up a hand-lettered note that read, DON’T FORGET OUR DEAL, GENERAL, and then-oh God!-a tiny baby index finger. It looked as if it had been cut free with a pair of scissors.

  “No!” Patrick shouted, frantically feeling Bradley’s little hands for the wound, tears flooding his eyes.

  “Patrick! Patrick, it’s all right!” Briggs shouted. “It’s fake! It’s plastic!” The baby’s hands were fine. “My God, what a son of a bitch.”

  Patrick pulled off the last of the duct tape, freeing his still-sleeping wife and child. Moments later, after a quick check to make sure they hadn’t been booby-trapped or wired with a tracking or eavesdropping device, he carried them in his arms out of the grisly apartment and into a waiting car, Briggs and the two Madcap Magician commandos with them.

  The car sped toward Sacramento-Mather Jetport. “We’ll have you airborne and out of here in ten minutes, Patrick,” Briggs told him.

  “Change the plane’s routing,” Patrick said, his arm tight around his wife and child.

  “Change it? To where?”

  “Arkansas,” Patrick said. “I want Wendy, Paul, and Bradley out of this state. As far away and as fast as possible.”

  Briggs nodded. “You got it, Patrick.” He couldn’t blame Patrick one bit for wanting to get his family as far away as he could from the madness and mayhem in Sacramento.

  Behind Toby’s Market, E Street,

  Rio Linda, California

  that night

  It was the only all-night convenience store for miles around. Despite being in one of the highest-crime-rate areas in all of northern California, however, Toby’s Market had experienced virtually no robberies or burglaries in over twenty years. The reason was simple: No one in his right mind would dare mess with a Satan’s Brotherhood establishment.

  Behind the store and down a hundred-yard-long dirt driveway was a small, scruffy farm, with a ramshackle five-room house, several large storage sheds, and a small barn scattered around the property. Even though the market was in the middle of a semirural residential neighborhood, bikers could drive up to the market, grab a six-pack or bottle, then discreetly drive around back to the house without being noticed-assuming anyone even bothered to take notice. That night, more than a hundred motorcycles and another two dozen cars were parked around the farm behind the market. A special meeting of the Rio Linda chapter of the Satan’s Brotherhood Motorcycle Club was under way.

  Almost two hundred members, pledge members, and guests of the Brotherhood gathered in the barn and looked on as the big German ex-commando explained the operation of the portable hydrogenator in halting English. The device was disguised as a typical covered eight-foot U-Haul trailer, complete with an authentic paint job and logos. A gasoline-powered generator had been detached from the trailer and set up thirty feet away.

  “Is very simple,” the soldier explained. “You not touch any chemicals. You attach chemical tanks here and here… attach power plug here…” He worked the controls as he explained the hookup procedures, while a dozen senior Brotherhood members, highly experienced in cooking methamphetamine, stood right beside him watching every step. They would be the ones who would teach the other chapter members how to use the device. They marveled at its cleanliness, efficiency, and safety.

  An hour later the tank was opened up, and the specialists examined the result of the first stage of the process. Inside the mixing tank were more than thirty pounds of clean, pure chloropseudoephedrine. “Is ready for hydrogenation,” the Aryan Brigade soldier said. “We leave inside. No touch, no filter, no dry. The machine, it do everything.” The Brotherhood cookers couldn’t believe it-thirty pounds of absolutely pure chloropseudoephedrine in the tank ready for hydrogenation, and they didn’t have to race against deadly sulfur dioxide or risk being burned by hydrochloric-acid gas. There was no smell, no residue outside the tank, nothing. The waste byproducts of the first reaction were collected inside a separate tank, ready for burial.

  Even as the second step of the process was begun, discussions started about how the batch was going to be distributed, how much would go to each designated member, and how the money was going to be paid. Thirty pounds of almost-ready methamphetamine was worth between two and three hundred thousand dollars, maybe more, and every one of the members and pledges was arguing about getting his fair share-plenty of customers were out there waiting. As the hydrogenator was being sealed up and pressurized, money was already being collected.

  “I wait here,” the German commando said. “We inspect product together. I am responsible for unit until you pay.”

  “We want you to wait outside, Himmler,” said the president of the Brotherhood chapter. “We don’t need you listening in on our distribution plans.”

  “Ich gehe nicht! I not leave until product is inspected!”

  “You leave now because I tell you to leave!” the biker ordered. The unarmed German had no option. They gave him a bottle of whiskey and the woman of his choice to keep him company, then escorted him to the propane-refill station in front of Toby’s and told him to wait until summoned. A Brotherhood pledge was assigned to guard him.

  While the commando and his guard took a seat on a picnic bench behind the propane tank, the biker woman went into Toby’s to pee, buy a pack of cigarettes, and chat with the clerk. She was gone no more than ten minutes, but when she came back, she found the Brotherhood pledge dead and the German gone. In panic, she dashed back to the barn to tell the Brotherhood members.

  Just as she reached the barn, the world dissolved into a ball of blue-yellow fire and a searing blast of heat that she felt for a fraction of a second before she was vaporized. The mile-wide fireball consumed the barn, the farmhouse, Toby’s Market, the propane tank, and thirty houses and businesses surrounding the blast site. The column of fire stretched two thousand feet up into the night sky. The concussion shattered windows and awoke people from their sleep for miles around.

  But that was not the only such blast. Throughout the night, in sites all over the state of California, enormous mushroom-cloud-like fireballs erupted without warning. In locations as far north as Chico, as far south as Los Angeles, as far east as Death Valley, and as far west as Oakland and San Francisco, huge explosions ripped the night sky, instantly killing hordes of drug cookers and dealers and not only wiping out members of the Satan’s Brotherhood, but devastating other biker gangs as well. In several areas, the methamphetamine hydrogenators were located in the basements of apartment complexes and in the middle of crowded urban areas. Hundreds of innocent bystanders and residents died in the blasts.

  In a few short hours, the Satan’s Brotherhood Motorcycle Club, as well as much of the membership of several other biker gangs and many Mexican and Asian methamphetamine gangs, had virtually ceased to exist.

  Chapter Three

  Sacramento Convention Center, J Street,

  Sacramento, California

  Saturday, 7 March 1998, 0708 FT

  In times of emergency anywhere in the city or county, the Sacramento Convention Center in the heart of the city was transformed into a crisis command center. In a matter of hours, telephone and radio networks were set up in several of the hospitality suites, with the brain trusts of the city a
nd county administration in a command suite and other staff and support agencies in the others, all of them connected by phone, runners, and the Central Dispatch communications center. As the crisis grew, additional suites were commandeered. All the rooms were tied in to the various safety, maintenance, welfare, and administration offices throughout the county, each with its own command center in place. Representatives from outside state and federal agencies also came to the command suite as summoned.

  The mayor of the city of Sacramento, Edward Servantez, strode into the side entrance of the convention center, escorted by a plainclothes police officer who had been assigned to him, as to most other major city officials, after the Sacramento Live! shooting. Servantez, a short, dark, handsome lawyer and former state legislator in his late fifties, was accustomed to starting his day early. Accompanying him this morning was one of his aides; the chief of police, Arthur Barona; and the city manager.

  Servantez was in his third and last term as mayor of Sacramento, and as such he had been through several crisis-management-team exercises and a few real ones, mostly for natural disasters such as the devastating floods of 1986 and 1997. But no matter how many times he and his staff practiced or implemented the crisis-management plan, it always seemed to turn into a barely controlled bedlam. During the exercises, the staff would often call time-outs to discuss what they were doing wrong and how to get back on track, but it never helped. And during real emergencies, of course, there was no such thing as a time-out.

  Servantez removed his jacket, loosened his tie, and took his seat at the center of the head table, situated on a raised platform at the rear of the suite. To his right were the other city representatives-the deputy mayor, city manager, city attorney, fire chief, director of public works, city council representative, and Barona. To his left were the chairman of the county board of supervisors, Madeleine Adams; the sheriff and undersheriff; the district attorney; the county fire chief; and the county commissioner for public works. Places were also reserved at the head table for representatives from the California Office of Emergency Services, the governor’s office, the California Highway Patrol, the National Guard, the state attorney general, the FBI, and other state and federal agencies. A briefer’s podium, rear-projection screen, and PA system were set up opposite the head table. There were two tables of staff members to the right of the table, and a communication center and refreshment table on the left.

  All the necessary players were now present, so Servantez said to Chairman Adams, “Let’s get started, shall we? Can we please get a situation and update briefing?”

  “Yes, Mr Mayor.” She nodded to the Sacramento County undersheriff and he stepped up to the lectern. A map of Sacramento, El Dorado, Placer, and Yolo counties came up on the large rear-projection screen. “At ten-thirty-seven last night an explosion and fire was reported in the area around E Street and Market in Rio Linda,” the undersheriff began. “The first fire units on the scene reported several homes and businesses on fire or heavily damaged by an explosion, and the call was upgraded to four alarms. Four square city blocks were affected by the blast. Upon further investigation, firefighters discovered remnants of precursor chemicals used in the manufacture of methamphetamines…”

  “Precursor chemicals?” the city public works director asked. “What’s that?”

  “In simple terms, they’re the intermediate chemicals that are produced before making the final product,” the undersheriff explained. “It’s a felony to make or possess these precursor chemicals, just as it is to make or possess meth itself.

  “The fire captain called in both county HAZMAT teams and sheriff’s narcotics investigators, who took command of the scene,” the undersheriff went on. “The death toll appears to be quite high: Investigators estimate over a hundred deaths and several dozen injuries as a result of this one blast.”

  “Are you suggesting this was basically a narcotics case?” Mayor Servantez interjected. “That’s a staggering loss of life.”

  Captain Tom Chandler of the police department’s Special Investigations Division stepped up to the lectern to respond. “No, Mr Mayor; we don’t believe so, because approximately twenty minutes later, a similar large-scale explosion occurred in the Oak Park section of the city. It was of comparable intensity, destroying homes within one block of the blast and damaging every structure within four square blocks. The casualty count was similarly high-in this case, over one hundred and forty deaths and almost a hundred injuries. Then there was another explosion in the Northgate and Levee Road section of the city just a few minutes later. This one occurred in a storage room under a multifamily apartment building. The death toll is expected to exceed two hundred.”

  “My God,” Servantez breathed, shaken by the numbers. “What do we have here? A serial bomber?”

  “Perhaps, sir,” Chandler replied, “but it doesn’t quite fit the pattern. The blasts were close together time-wise but spread out in terms of distance. Serial bombers, even a group of bombers, usually strike targets close together but spread out time-wise.”

  “Then what? A gang war? Clumsy drug chemists?”

  “Perhaps all of the above, Mr Mayor,” Chandler replied. “These were not the only explosions that occurred last night. In all, there were four blasts in the city, six in the county, and seven more in El Dorado, Placer, and Yolo counties. Similar explosions have been reported in San Francisco, Oakland, Stockton, Bakersfield, and Los Angeles-a total of almost thirty powerful explosions, with death tolls ranging from a few dozen to over three hundred, and extensive injuries.”

  “So what the hell have you found out?”

  “All of the explosions have two things in common: traces of methamphetamine precursor chemicals found at the blast scene, and a large number of gang members at each location, usually members of biker gangs,” Chandler said. “The large numbers of gang members indicate a gang chapter meeting, maybe even an instructional meeting on how to cook methamphetamines. The pattern of the deaths at each location suggests that there was very little or no warning, possibly ruling out intentional explosions or an attack by outside forces. Those killed in the blasts seemed to be very close to the blast center, as if observing or guarding the site.

  “At the very least, it appears likely that everyone at the blast scenes wanted to be there-these do not seem to be executions or assassinations,” Chandler concluded. “And while this or any other particular blast could have been a booby trap or experiment gone wrong, the similarity to other explosions throughout the state does seem to rule out an accident. One or two such blasts in one night could be a coincidence. Almost thirty of them, even if spread out in terms of distance, is no coincidence.”

  “We’ve had meth-lab explosions in the past,” the county fire chief pointed out. “But compared to any others, these blasts are enormous.”

  “That’s right,” Chandler said. “A regular-size meth-lab explosion might substantially damage or set fire to a two-bedroom house or typical barn, or destroy a storage shed. These explosions destroyed entire city blocks, perhaps eighteen homes, and damaged many more. This means that the labs in question are many times larger than the usual labs we’ve seen. Plus, there are a lot more of them. So someone is making large meth-labs, big enough to destroy or damage almost two dozen homes at a time but disguised well enough to escape notice. It’s a very serious development. We’re wondering how many labs like these didn’t blow up.”

  “Any estimate on how much meth these labs can make?” the mayor asked.

  “Hard to say, sir,” Chandler said. “We’re guessing as much as twenty pounds or even more-that’s at least a quarter of a million dollars’ worth at a time. The power of the explosions suggests that the meth cookers are using hydrogen gas as part of the cooking process, which is highly explosive when mixed with oxygen. A small meth lab might use a few cubic feet of hydrogen pressurized to thirty or forty psi-pounds per square inch. These labs must have been using perhaps two or three hundred times that amount. And the quality of the drug
produced by the hydrogenation method is very good-the product can be cut several times to increase its value and distribution tremendously.”

  “So what’s the situation now?” the county commissioner asked.

  “Critical,” the undersheriff replied. “We’ve called for this crisis team because our resources, both city and county, are stretched beyond the limit. Both the city and the county have split up our narcotics-investigation teams and made them primaries on pieced-together narcotics-investigation teams, augmented by other detectives and patrol officers. We’re using firemen and reservists to secure crime scenes, and because every blast scene involves hazardous materials, these untrained personnel are in great danger. We can’t borrow Narcotics officers from neighboring counties because most of them are involved with investigating their own meth-lab explosions. And all of the area hospitals are clogged with casualties. We’ve got a real emergency situation here, Mr Mayor, Madam Chairman.”

  Adams spread her hands and looked at the city officials to her right. “It sounds to me like we need some help in handling the emergency,” she said. “Undersheriff Wilkins, what are you specifically requesting?”

  “We need immediate help in securing and investigating the crime scenes and getting as many of our cops back on patrol as possible,” the undersheriff replied. “Since the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement is likely to be busy investigating all the lab explosions statewide, we should request immediate support from the Drug Enforcement Agency, the FBI, and Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms-and we should ask the governor to mobilize the National Guard. We’re requesting that the Infrastructure Protection and Security Plan be implemented immediately, and we simply don’t have the manpower. All of our communications and utilities could be shut down.”