Wildcase - [Rail Black 02]
Page 21
The Kingdom Starr complex was several miles past the main hub of the old airbase and connected to its northern reaches by a maze of newly laid taxiway. Everything was enclosed by a fifteen-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire, which seemed more appropriate for hardened cons than rogue prairie dogs. Kingdom Starr was its own city, which I guesstimated was something on the order of ten square miles.
A mile from the gatehouse, the road rose slightly, allowing me enough of an overview to count seventeen one-story buildings, the smallest the size of a supermarket. Another dozen taller structures with slightly rounded roofs stood to the rear, probably hangars. It reminded me of a motion picture studio except that it was too far from Nobu.
Northcutt had underreported the 747s in residence. Fifteen were in line on the taxiway heading out to take off, and roughly twice that number sat on designated aprons being loaded by conveyors and refueled by service crews. The aircraft were immaculate, shiny aluminum set off by snow-white tails emblazoned with a large, five-point, cerulean blue star. Inside the star and slightly off center right, was a delicate white script
Kingdom Starr
Allowing for planes in the hangars undergoing maintenance and others airborne or on the ground around the world, Markus Kingdom’s business had grown considerably since my days in the army. I remembered hearing that a good operator never has more than 10 percent of his fleet out of the earning stream, so they were running at least hundred aircraft. And if Markus was as sharp as I expected, probably double that.
“I like his logo,” Birdy said, “but what’s Trippe?” She pronounced it Trippy.
I looked where she was pointing. The lead 747 was just making the turn onto the runway. Under the pilot’s window was stenciled
Kingdom of Trippe
“It’s a person, and the ‘e’ is silent. Markus is apparently honoring his old boss, Juan Trippe, the visionary behind Pan American. The best airline that ever flew. We can also thank Juan for the 747. He challenged Boeing to design it, then ordered twenty-five without even telling his board.”
“Ballsy.”
“It’s what we’re losing in this country. My father called it the Three C’s. Conceit, commitment and courage. The conceit to believe your vision is the right one; the commitment to drive everyone toward it; and the courage run over anybody who gets in your way. We’ve gone from men like that to having our best and brightest hunched over a computer stealing music.”
“Then the best of those become lawyers.”
“I sense a scar.”
“When it gets to be a scar, I’ll give you a call. Right now, I’m just trying to keep the scab on. You’re not a big fan of teamwork, I see.”
“For execution of a plan, yes. But breakthroughs don’t happen that way. Force a dreamer into a partnership, and you kill the dream. What if you had to win a vote every time you worked out a horse?”
“It would confuse the horse and eventually ruin him.”
“Exactly what happens with ideas. Show me a teacher who forces her brilliant students to work with lesser lights, and I’ll show you a socialist. The gray people will do anything to tamp down excellence because it might take a direction they can’t control.”
“I never thought about it before, but you’re exactly right.” She began reading the names of some of the other planes in line. “Kingdom of Paris, Kingdom of Madagascar. So what’s that all about?”
“More Pan Am. Mr. Trippe designated his flagship aircraft as Clippers. Clipper Midnight Sun . . . Clipper Pacific Trader. When you boarded one, you became royalty.”
“Oh, my God, I just remembered the nose of that plane at Lockerbie. Clipper Maid of the Seas. How dreadfully sad.”
“No, sad is for accidents. That was terrorism. Fuck The Hague and European justice. Two hundred and seventy innocent people and a company died that night.”
Birdy looked at me. “You’re one of the most thoughtful people I’ve ever met—not to mention opinionated.”
“There were lots of books in the library at home. But I didn’t get to all of them. Eventually, I’ll disappoint you.”
“And I’ll be sure to point it out when you do.” She smiled. “I wonder why Mr. Kingdom went to prison.”
I did too.
* * * *
The wide, spacious entrance to Kingdom Starr was configured around a horseshoe-shaped park, complete with wooden benches and picnic tables shaded by wide palms. Surrounded by so much brown, its lush green was jarring, but it looked more like a movie set than something in regular use.
Fifty yards in, two art deco guard booths flanked a black steel rolling gate. Next to one booth were several white-lined parking spaces, empty except for a lone black Denali with smoked glass. I slowed and turned into the drive. As I passed the Denali, I noticed its plate. KS-771. Interesting car, interesting prefix.
The booth windows were mirrored, most likely to mitigate the hot afternoon sun. It also left you to guess whether you were approaching a retired crossing guard or a squad of Rangers. As it turned out, it was neither. I should have anticipated Northcutt would have called ahead.
A narrow-faced man in his fifties sporting a pencil-thin moustache and a knockoff Armani slid open the guardhouse door and smiled an ex-cop smile. “Good afternoon, Mr. Black. What can I do for you?” His suit jacket was unbuttoned, and he put his hands on his hips so I wouldn’t miss the shoulder holster.
I tried to look past him to see if he was alone, but his wide stance blocked my view. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name, Sergeant,” I said.
He gave me the dead eyes and half smirk that all too often come prepackaged with years of badge-lugging. “It was lieutenant, but we won’t be spending enough time together that we need to get acquainted. As I was saying, what can I do for you?”
Sometimes it pays to be composed, and sometimes it’s interesting to ruffle a feather or two. I jerked my head in Birdy’s direction. “This is Captain Nash, LAPD Internal Affairs. She’s here to search your car.”
Spit flew out of his mouth. “What the fuck for?”
So much for Jack Webb cool. “It was seen fleeing the scene of an assault on a police officer. When the reverend remembered you folks have a KS on your plates.”
“Goddamn that fat fuck! He didn’t say anything about...” I watched him as he finally arrived at the party. His eyes went from dead to red. “Lotta assholes who thought they were funny don’t laugh at nothing no more.”
“Impressive command of the language. I’m betting Markie doesn’t invite you to the club.”
He’d laced himself back up, “Fuck you, Black. And it’s Mr. Kingdom to you. You drove all the way out here for squat. Your dago friend was only supposed to get stuck a little and told to mind his own business. The cutter got a little carried away and got his knuckles rapped. Dion’s in the loop now. He’ll probably find a little something extra in his Christmas stocking.”
“If I were you, I’d still sleep with an eye open for a while,” I said.
“What for? Fat Cat? Don’t make me laugh. That fuckin’ kabong’s still trying to figure out toilet paper. We’re through here, asshole. Mr. Kingdom’s out of the country, so you and whoever the cunt is can turn around and head back to Beverly Hills.”
Birdy didn’t much like the sound of that and let loose with a, “Motherfucker.”
Now that we all had names, I said, “Know where I can find Melvin Crowe.”
It took him a second. “If you mean Cheater, word is he split for the coast. Probably a good idea. Sooner or later, somebody was gonna put a full clip in that Chink.”
“Hard to believe. A guy like that and a detective for a brother.”
“What makes you so sure they’re all that different?”
It looked like this guy and Wes didn’t spend quality time. “You the one Cheater roughed up out here?”
He scoffed. “I can only fuckin’ wish he comes at me.”
“When Kingdom gets back, tell him there were a couple of extra bodie
s at the Brando place.” I paused. “And they’re still there.”
I saw him run through a mental checklist before he answered. “I got no idea what you’re talking about, but so fuckin’ what?”
When there’s a corpse involved, you don’t ask questions, you get as far from it as possible. Unless, of course, you’re wondering if it can be connected to you—or, in this case, somebody you work for. “Because I’m pretty sure one is going to have his brother-in-law’s DNA on it?”
“Cheater’s?”
“Maybe, but I’m betting Wes.”
“You said two bodies.”
“I did. And the second is even better. I won’t spoil the surprise.”
As Lieutenant Armani started to say something, I hit my window button and cut him off. I put the Ram in reverse and backed up.
The lieutenant stepped out of the booth and followed me, shouting something that sounded like, “Come back here, cocksucker.”
* * * *
19
Japanese Mountains and a Tiny Dancer
DECEMBER 17, 1944
SOUTH CHINA SEA
SIXTY-ONE MILES SOUTHWEST OF HONG KONG
The Resurrection Bay was a small speck in a big ocean. For the last twenty minutes, Fabian had been checking his watch with increasing unease. They were half an hour outside their window, and he knew he had no right to expect to see the carrier. But suddenly, there she was. Now, no one aboard the PT would know that he would have taken them back to Hong Kong. It wasn’t a decision he would have made for himself, but he didn’t have the right to condemn everyone else to a watery grave.
They had left the flare gun with Big Jim, but Fabian had stood watch on that bridge countless times. Somebody could see them; they just needed to be looking.
They were.
It took less than twenty minutes to winch the weakened pilots onto the third deck of the Bay. The baby had gone up in the first sling, cradled by Luli. The ship’s medical staff was waiting, but the pilots wouldn’t talk to them until they were satisfied that the kid was taken care of. Fabian sent Pags up, then caught the sling two seamen threw to him.
As he climbed into it and gave a thumbs-up, he glanced back at the PT and, for the first time, realized there were ten inches of water covering its floorboards. He looked at his feet. His uniform had mostly dried, but he was soaking wet below the knees and couldn’t feel his toes. Whatever debriefing was coming, it was going to have to wait for the longest, hottest shower anybody’d ever taken.
The first low rumble reached him just as he came even with the deck. Nobody else seemed to notice, so he dismissed it as fatigue. And then it got louder. He looked up, but there was too much steel between him and the sky to see anything. What he did notice, however, were that the rescued pilots, medical staff and several sailors were now shielding their eyes and squinting directly into the sun. With all that blue up there, what were the odds that an innocent aircraft was somehow coincidentally above them? As he slipped out of the sling and landed on the deck, he answered his own question. Zero.
Like all military men, Fabian had studied the silhouettes of enemy planes and memorized sound recordings of their engines. Because he was a carrier officer, he concentrated on the light, fast, maneuverable fighters and dive bombers that the Bay was most likely to encounter—planes whose engines made high-pitched whines that he could identify in less than a second. What he heard now was more like approaching thunder from a large, deadly storm.
In a throwback to the time of shoguns, when massing armies used to parade in front of one another before battle, some Japanese naval air commanders maintained a habit of overflying their target once before commencing an attack. Whatever impact this may have had on the sword-wielding samurai of the Middle Ages, the only effect it had on twentieth-century Americans was to give them extra time to lock in on their targets.
But this morning, more than a few sailors stopped what they were doing when they saw what was coming. Approaching at staggered altitudes were least sixty heavy bombers, escorted by wave upon wave of fighters. And then came something no training film had ever covered. Two, dark green, six-engine behemoths that were so large and flying so slowly that their staying airborne seemed to defy logic.
The most advanced aircraft in the Imperial arsenal, Mt. Fuji bombers, had been designed to lay waste to the U.S. mainland. But having never gained a land foothold far enough east to launch them, the only two in existence had lain in mothballs—until now. Carrying fifty thousand pounds of bombs and fitted with four 20mm cannons that fired two thousand rounds a minute, sending them against a single ship said more about the current state of the Japanese war machine than all of the Allied intelligence gatherers combined.
Certainly, no one in American Naval Operations had ever war-gamed this kind of firepower directed at one ship—especially not a carrier with none of its planes in the air. Strategically, it was even embarrassing for the Japanese, but that was small consolation to the men aboard the Resurrection Bay as they watched the twin, 350,000-pound purveyors of death lumber relentlessly toward them.
The first wave of bombs fell so thickly that they actually flashed shadows across the big ship’s deck, reminding Fabian less of battle than of a late-afternoon California sun strobing through a eucalyptus windbreak. As loud as the first explosions were, he didn’t hear them as much as absorb them. The roiling, unstable water followed by a deep, agonizing, TNT moan that made him sick to his stomach.
The Bay did a three-axis bend, yaw and lurch as concussions hit her from all sides, then plunged into a canyon suddenly created by a mountain of seawater being thrown skyward. Ships twice the length of a football field aren’t supposed to be able to make quick turns, but Captain Hackin had apparently read a different manual. As Fabian sprinted along the flight deck toward the bridge, he heard the engines come to full power, and felt the Bay jerk once to port, then almost immediately rotate back. As it did, it fell again, nose down, into another hole, and as steady as Fabian’s sea legs were, he lost his balance and didn’t stop rolling until the ship reached the depression’s trough.
In decades to come, he would remember it as the fall that saved his life, but at the time, all he knew was that his right leg was broken, and his shoes were gone. Then, just as suddenly as the attack had begun, it stopped. From where he lay, he could see the heavy bombers receding in the distance and beginning a long, slow turn that would return them to the killing ground.
The silence was quickly replaced by the earth-shaking reverberations of the approaching Mt. Fujis. They were so low, he could actually see their cannons spit and their bellies slowly open. Fabian watched, mesmerized, as row upon row of bombs walked a path up the carrier’s wake until they began tearing through the fantail and mangling the planes tethered there.
As they advanced, a large chunk of the starboard side simply disappeared. Then there was a horrible, grinding scream as one of the Bay’s two drive shafts seized, and the remaining screw, still at full power, torqued the ship into a hard right turn. Finally, a five-hundred-pound bomb penetrated the deck, found the aviation fuel storage tank, and the entire bridge superstructure catapulted into the air before slamming back and tumbling across the deck.
Suddenly, the entire world was engulfed inflame.
Fabian staggered to his feet and headed back the way he had come. He passed the charred remains of scores of men who would never again have a beer in Honolulu and saw three gunners, all on fire, pitch themselves over the side. Grimacing with each step, he descended back to the third deck, where the winch and sling sat just as he had left them. Here, there were more bodies, their faces contorted and blood streaming from their mouths and ears, victims of concussion. Most of the rescued pilots, including Tully, were among them, as was the medical team.
Fabian looked over the rail. He expected to see large numbers of sailors in the water, but there were only a few, and they were facedown. Despite the chaos of the last few minutes, the PT still bumped alongside, its thin line having re
mained attached to the Bay. Seeing how far the starboard hull had already risen, Fabian knew they were taking on water, and the list would only increase. Coupled with the severe right turn, the carrier was, in effect, circling a giant drain.
The line to the PT was already taut. Very soon, it would snap. If Fabian was going to go, it had to be now, and with no one to operate the winch, he was going to have to jump far enough ahead of the smaller craft that he had a chance to catch it as it went by. He only hoped that if he made it, he’d be able to climb aboard with a leg that had gone completely numb.
The Bay suddenly made a terrible sound, as if she knew she was about to die, and rolled even further. Then her remaining drive shaft tore itself loose. The power was now off, but the momentum of a city block of steel pushed her along as if nothing had happened. And the heavy bombers returned.