TOE POPPER
A Novel By
Jonny Tangerine
Copyright © 2009 All rights reserved.
Indirect tactics, efficiently applied, are inexhaustible as Heaven and Earth, unending as the flow of rivers and streams; like the sun and moon, they end but to begin anew; like the four seasons, they pass away to return once more.
-- Sun Tzu, The Art of War
In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.
-- Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future
TOE POPPER. 1
ZUMA BEACH, MALIBU -- MONDAY -- 7:00 AM.. 5
BATTAMBANG PROVINCE, CAMBODIA -- 6:00 AM.. 7
ZUMA BEACH, MALIBU – 7:09 AM.. 9
BATTAMBANG PROVINCE, CAMBODIA -- 6:09 AM.. 11
11000 WILSHIRE BOULEVARD, LOS ANGELES -- 8:00 AM.. 13
BATTAMBANG PROVINCE, CAMBODIA -- 6:13 A.M. 15
COSTA MESA, CA – MONDAY – 9:55 A.M. 17
BEACH BOMBS KILL THREE IN MALIBU. 18
BATTAMBANG PROVINCE, CAMBODIA – 6:55 A.M. 20
PIER “F” -- LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA -- 2:00 A.M. 23
UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 8026. 24
FOREST LAWN CEMETERY, HOLLYWOOD – 1:01 A.M. 27
PEPPERDINE UNIVERSITY, MALIBU – 1:01 A.M. 28
FOREST LAWN CEMETERY, HOLLYWOOD – 1:31 A.M. 30
PEPPERDINE UNIVERSITY, MALIBU – 1:31 A.M. 31
FOREST LAWN CEMETERY, HOLLYWOOD – 2:31 A.M. 33
LE HOTEL SOFITEL, LOS ANGELES – 6:00 A.M. 36
11000 WILSHIRE BOULEVARD – 11:05 A.M. 37
WESTWOOD BOULEVARD, LOS ANGELES – 11:35 A.M. 39
11000 WILSHIRE BOULEVARD – 12:05 P.M. 41
TASK FORCE CONFERENCE ROOM – 2:07 P.M. 42
TONLE SAP RESTAURANT – SANTA ANA, CA – 2:05 PM.. 46
11000 WILSHIRE BOULEVARD – 4:30 P.M. 48
RICHARD NIXON LIBRARY AND BIRTHPLACE. 51
YORBA LINDA, CA – 4:01 P.M. 51
HOTEL SOFITEL – 5:05 P.M. 53
RICHARD NIXON LIBRARY AND BIRTHPLACE – 4:45 P.M. 56
THE BEVERLY CENTER – 5:30 P.M. 57
WOODLAND HILLS, CA – 6:05 P.M. 59
RICHARD NIXON LIBRARY AND BIRTHPLACE – 6:45 P.M. 61
BEVERLY CENTER – 7:09 P.M. 63
RICHARD NIXON LIBRARY AND BIRTHPLACE – 11:59 P.M. 64
FATBURGER – 1:01 A.M. 69
NEWPORT BEACH – 4:04 AM.. 73
WOODLAND HILLS – 6:00 A.M. 75
HOTEL SOFITEL – 7:18 A.M. 77
WILL ROGERS STATE BEACH – 6:17 A.M. 80
HIGHWAY 1 – 9:30 AM.. 85
FOREST LAWN CEMETERY – 10:01 AM.. 88
EL SEGUNDO – 10:01 AM.. 89
FOREST LAWN CEMETERY - 10:02 AM.. 90
ZUMA BEACH 10:15 AM.. 93
NIXON LIBRARY – 10:05 AM.. 94
FOREST LAWN CEMETERY -11:10 AM.. 95
NIXON LIBRARY - 12:35 PM.. 97
INTERSTATE HIGHWAY NUMBER 5 – 4:49 PM.. 103
TONLE SAP RESTAURANT – 5:19 P.M. 104
FORD EXPLORER – HAPPY HOUR. 105
COMMERCE CASINO – 9:07 P.M. 107
NEWPORT BEACH – 9:07 P.M. 110
PEPPERDINE UNIVERSITY – 9:07 PM.. 112
COMMERCE CASINO – 10:55 P.M. 114
11000 WILSHIRE BLVD. – 11:00 P.M. 117
ANAHEIM, CA - MIDNIGHT. 119
11000 WILSHIRE BOULEVARD - 11:30 P.M. 121
COMMERCE CASINO PARKING LOT – 1:00 A.M. 123
FONTANA GREASE SERVICE TRUCK – 2:05 A.M. 124
HOTEL SOFITEL – 3:03 A.M. 126
FORD CROWN VICTORIA - 3:29 A.M. 127
WILL ROGERS STATE BEACH – 5:05 am.. 131
WEST COVINA, CA – 5:27 AM.. 132
VENICE BEACH – 8:57 AM.. 134
PEPPERDINE UNIVERSITY 9:15 A.M. 135
USC MEDICAL CENTER – 6:00 P.M. 137
LEXUS COACH EDITION – 6:30 P.M. 139
THE CHEESECAKE FACTORY, WOODLAND HILLS – 7:44 PM.. 142
NORWALK – 7:54 P.M. 144
CHEESECAKE FACTORY –8:05 P.M. 146
MERCEDES – 10:05 P.M. 151
WOODLAND HILLS – 10:15 P.M. 152
WOODLAND HILLS – 11:15 P.M. 155
WOODLAND HILLS – 11:30 P.M. 156
WOODLAND HILLS – 11:30 P.M. 157
WOODLAND HILLS – 6:59 A.M. 159
NEWPORT BEACH – 9:35 A.M. 162
MERCEDES – 9:37 A.M. 163
LEXUS – 9:37 A.M. 165
WOODLAND HILLS – 10:05 A.M. 166
COSTA MESA – 10:00 A.M. 167
NEWPORT BEACH – 11:00 A.M. 170
LEXUS – 11:00 A.M. 171
CATHERINE’S BACKYARD – 11:55 A.M. 172
JOHN WAYNE AIRPORT – 12:15 P.M. 173
405 NORTH – 12:45 P.M. 174
DASSAULT FALCON 900EX. 175
HOTEL SOFITEL – 2:01 P.M. 176
WOODLAND HILLS – 3:00 P.M. 177
ELYSIAN PARK – JULY FOURTH – 10:22 AM.. 180
KANEOHE MARINE CORPS AIR STATION, OAHU, HAWAII 183
ZUMA BEACH, MALIBU -- MONDAY -- 7:00 AM
Sam the Beach Farmer was an urban legend in Southern California -- the beachcomber with a metal detector who made his living off of loose change, lost wedding bands, and forgotten watches. He had once been a fifth generation hay and bean farmer in South Dakota who dreamed incessantly of early retirement in a warmer climate. Droughts, cut worms, pesticide burn, floods, October ice storms and sandy soil had always conspired to keep the dream just out of reach. But on February 27th, 1988, the night after his fifty-fifth birthday, things finally changed. His wife left him and moved to Key West with the owner of the local Buick dealership. Before the ground had a chance to thaw, Sam signed his frozen farm over to the bank and packed up his pick-up shell. Thoughtfully, his wife had left behind the Hills Brothers Coffee can that contained their life savings. Sam headed for retirement on the West Coast with a nest egg of $374 and a rusty half-ton truckload of faith.
After three long days on the road, Sam arrived in California and drove straight through Los Angeles to the beach at Santa Monica. As soon as he leapt out of his truck and heard the percussion of Pacific waves, he knew he had finally found the place his soul had always thirsted for. He ran out across the sand and stripped down to his shorts. Without pausing, he stormed into the chilly surf and tasted salt water for the first time in his life.
When Sam returned to his truck, he realized that somewhere out on that vast stretch of coastal desert, he had lost his keys. Being the self-reliant, practical man that he was, and never having heard of triple-A, Sam walked two miles to a sporting goods store and purchased the right tool for the job – his first metal detector.
On his very first day he found nine quarters, three dimes, seven nickels, a mechanical pencil, and six sets of car keys, including, of course, his own. Sam had also stumbled upon…his destiny. Conditioned as he was by a lifetime of farming, the beachcombing work provided the perfect outlet for some his strongest habits and interests: independent outdoor work, constant scrutiny of weather reports, walking in perfectly straight rows, yield forecasting, and making a living where others saw only impossibly hard work. He had charts for the tides, a system for figuring out the movement of crowds, special event calendars, and even statistics on which beaches had the most careless patrons.
Today, Sam paced his measured steps across the furrows of Zuma. A combination pro volleyball tournament and Bonita Beach Balm bikini pageant had drawn over four thousand spectators yesterday. The event had been co-sponsored by Babylon Beer. If absent-minded beach goers were the seeds, alcohol was the fertilizer. This morning’s harvest had great potent
ial.
Bridget snapped open the kryptonite padlock that secured the door of her lifeguard tower. She had already biked twenty-six miles this morning. For a tri-athlete training for the Iron Man, it was barely a warm-up. If she felt any fatigue, it was mental. She had rescued three swimmers during yesterday’s Bonita Girl madness. Two drunk and panicked city college students in a rip current, and one seven year old girl who had been knocked unconscious by a reckless boogie boarder. She could feel the blistering heat of yesterday still radiating up from the sand. It promised another long and chaotic day. She clicked on the Motorola two-way and stepped out onto the deck. She spied Sam in front of her tower and waved.
“Morning, Sam!”
Sam smiled and waved back, the knock-off Rolex Submariner he had found two years ago sparkled in the sun. When his route intersected the tower, he would stop and chat. Bridget had been a lifeguard for over three years and they were old friends. They liked to joke about who had the cushier job.
Sam turned back to the task at hand, stepping forward exactly thirty-six inches while simultaneously sweeping his detector paddle over the sand in a perfect 120-degree arc. A tone sounded in his headphones. Faint, indicating, perhaps, a dime. Sam used a sifting scoop that he had designed and constructed himself. It consisted of a stainless steel silverware holder from a commercial dishwasher, filed down sharp around the top lip, and a brass window handle that he had welded to the side. He leaned over and thrust it into the spot that had generated the tone. Approximately two cups of sand drained quickly out of the bottom like a broken hourglass; revealing…a Babylon Beer bottle cap. Sam shook his head slightly and dropped the cap into the no-value pouch on his belt. He kept the false positives so that he wouldn’t waste energy on them again. He took a second step and immediately heard a new tone – louder, slightly urgent. His face brightened. Sam leaned over and thrust the sifter into – A BLINDING EXPLOSION.
“Sam!”
Bridget vaulted from her tower and sprinted toward the shrapneled horror. Seven steps from her friend a second CRIPPLING BLAST tossed her into the air like a puppet.
She lay shredded, but still conscious. She looked down and saw that most of her left leg was missing. She recognized her posterior cruciate ligament dangling from the end of her femur. The Motorola, a link to instant help, lay beside her, but she found she could not make her arms move. As Bridget felt herself sliding quickly into a dark pool of frigid shock, her radio came to life with the cheerful voice of the morning dispatcher.
“Happy Memorial Day, campers! Weatherman says we could see triple digits again today, so stay on your toes – we’re expecting record crowds…”
BATTAMBANG PROVINCE, CAMBODIA -- 6:00 AM
Major Joel Lane, U.S. Army Special Forces Advisor assigned to the U.N. Mine Education Project, coughed himself awake. He felt the familiar lead-weighted headache that accompanied all of his mornings now that he was a regular user. He had left his oil lamp burning all night, and the smoke from that, coupled with the sticky residue of burned opium, created a thick batch of phlegm in his throat. He enjoyed the lamp though, it helped keep the bugs away, and the glow was a comforting beacon when he slipped out of his spectacular dreams.
This morning, in his last dream, Lane had been visited by the familiar image of his dead fiancée, Aimee. In the dream, he and Aimee were swinging together in a small town park. The grass was a vivid carpet of technicolor green, and the swing set poles striped red and white like fairytale candy canes. They were totally absorbed in a competition to see who could swing higher, laughing and pumping, thrilled by the intense lower tickle created by every pass. Aimee leaned her head back, Joel copied her and the tickle traveled down his inverted body into his scalp. It turned suddenly cold and their giggles were instantly transformed into puffs of white steam. They kept swinging, higher and higher, chasing their happy clouds into the cerulean sky that raced by above.
Many who knew of Major Lane’s growing addiction assumed it was a response to haunting images of his lover’s death. But it wasn’t that. She did appear often in his dreams, but it was always soothing and pleasant. She didn’t make him feel sad because he couldn’t tell anymore if he was seeing true memories of her or only dreams of dreams.
The real image that the drug protected him from was something he never talked about, but was always ready to spring onto his brainscreen: the elephant. On the day after the transitional U.N. peacekeeping force pulled out, he was drinking with a group of fellow Advisors from New Zealand in a small outdoor bar on the outskirts of Paillin. They were celebrating the culmination of what everyone knew was a fragile and probably self-deluding peace agreement. They felt the shockwave of the explosion in the ground a split second after they heard it. They all knew immediately that it hadn’t been an ordinary Type 72 or POMZ stake mine. They jumped into their blue and white Rover and drove cautiously to the scene. It had happened only a few hundred yards away on a narrow path that branched off the main dirt road – a logging trail that had been marked as mined by the U.N., but was bizarrely, and typically, still used. A thirty-one year old working elephant had encountered an anti-tank mine. When they arrived, the elephant was slumped forward in a vermilion pool of blood. The mine had sheared off both front legs and severed three feet off his trunk. Miraculously, his driver, his mahout, was barely nicked. His lifelong companion had absorbed all of the blast. The mahout crouched beside his giant friend, crying, trying to comfort him as he wheezed out his last breaths. The elephant opened his eyes and stared at Major Joel Lane. On this day, it was as if Joel could both hear and fully comprehend the low frequency language of the elephants. He was sent a message, a question, a vibration that penetrated through every bone in his skeleton: What have you done, human, with my world?
Joel Lane didn’t sleep for three days. On the fourth day, one of the Kiwi’s brought him a pipe. It had been intended as a temporary solution. In Cambodia, he was certainly not the only victim of the unforeseen consequences of temporary solutions.
He heard shouting outside his bungalow. Lieutenant Atiur Rahman, his Bangladeshi aide, knocked furiously on the flimsy door.
“Major Lane. Major Lane! There is bacca in E-4. Bacca in E-4!”
The U.N. had attempted to create, via a grid system, a typical Western quadratic order for their environment. It helped maintain the illusion of control. “Bacca in E-4” meant simply that there was, for some reason, a baby in an uncleared minefield.
Major Lane grabbed his shoulder holster off the chair and blew out the oil lamp. It was time to start the day.
ZUMA BEACH, MALIBU – 7:09 AM
The first emergency personnel to respond to the report of an explosion were California Highway Patrol Officers Matt Dolan and Mark Park. A morning rollerblader had heard the first explosion and seen the second. He had bladed down the Strand, the concrete sidewalk that ran the length of the beach, to a payphone and called 911. The CHP officers were only a minute away on the Pacific Coast Highway, nearing the end of their twelve to eight shift.
Officer Park pulled their Mustang Interceptor into the parking lot behind Tower Five. Officer Dolan, a ten-year veteran, still considered his Korean American partner a rookie even though he had two years of service in. A large part of being a Highway Patrolman was developing your armor, a thick emotional skin built up by seeing horror after horror on the road. In Officer Dolan’s mind, Park spent too much time on speed citation patrols. His armor still seemed paper-thin.
They jogged across the sand in the direction of what were obviously twisted bodies. Officer Dolan arrived first and knelt beside Bridget. He suspected, even before he felt for a pulse. She had the unmistakable color of a body that had, in police parlance, “bled out.”
Officer Park peered down at Sam.
“Jesus. What happened to this guy’s head?”
Officer Dolan was a Military Police reservist, and a veteran of Desert Storm. In the first Gulf War, 30% of all allied casualties had been caused by landmines or, in Army slang, toe pop
pers. There had been a training video. Looking over at the condition of Sam the Beach Farmer, Officer Dolan felt a creeping recognition.
“I’m getting a weird feeling here, partner.”
The abandoned Motorola crackled.
“Tower Five. Tower Five. Bridget are you there? Talk to me Tower Five.”
Officer Park turned his head away from the gruesome scene. A shiny object caught his eye. He was automatically attracted, and took a step towards it.
“Man, I think the guy’s watch is all the way over here.”
“Park, I don’t think you should be walking around too much…”
A blue flashing light was coming down the surf line. The dispatcher had sent a lifeguard unit to investigate. Officer Dolan reached for the Motorola. He was going to call them off, just in case.
“Mark, seriously…”
Officer Park’s third step brought his weight down on the pressure plate of a four- layer cake of death. Stacking mines was a tactic invented by the Chinese, the original creators of explosives. It was a simple, but devastating extension of a basic idea. Every minefield should have a finale. There was a THUNDEROUS FLASH. And Officer Park disappeared into a pink mist that slowly drifted inland.
BATTAMBANG PROVINCE, CAMBODIA -- 6:09 AM
Major Lane and Lieutenant Rahman arrived and found a small crowd gathered against the two-string barbwired fence that formed the border of E-4. The fence enclosed a fallow field that had been long overgrown with four-foot savannah grass. A crude, hand-lettered sign hanging from the top wire displayed a skull and cross-bones and read: DANGER: AREA HEAVENLY MINED. Like the English menus in Phnom Penh that offered “Chow Man Noodle” and “Chicken Flied Stake”, it contained an element of subtle comic truth.
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