Dark Dragons (17 page)

Delbert won a court-ordered ticket into St. Michael’s
Reformatory, and as far as Darren knew, he was still there mopping floors,
staring at Rorschachs, and attending group therapy sessions.  Denise’s
upper-crust parents had a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon reconstruct their
daughter’s face, and she wound up sucking her supper through a straw for the
next five weeks.  Now all of the girls at school would smirk to one
another whenever “Dentures Denise” walked by.
 Verdugo Valley High
had notched up another victory.

Darren opened his eyes and watched Tony’s Dragonstar slowly
pass to starboard in front of him.  He and Jorge were joking about
something over the comm.

Denise Garvey did not deserve the retribution she
received.  What she should have had coming was a clever insult, or worst,
a harmless slap upside the head.  Tony’s toast to the Del was not to laud
the unforgivable violence he had unleashed but to remember what the school,
clueless parents and an obtuse mass media extolling pimple cream and six-pack
abs had done to him.  Most importantly, it was in recognition of a
cautionary tale——don’t let them get you.  Don’t let them use you as an
avenging angel of vengeance on a gullible girl who was just trying to impress
her friends and fit in herself.

Don’t let the fuckers win.

*

They were at twenty thousand feet, heading northwest toward
the Pacific at a sluggish twelve hundred knots.  On his visor, he could see
over a hundred green blips on the aerial mass displacement sensor.  He
selected one bogey, and the synthetic-aperture laser-radar tagged it as a 747
airliner at thirty thousand, heading east at 520 knots.  He chose
another——a squadron of F-15 Eagles flying at twenty thousand at 470 knots over
Nevada.

The clouds over Santa Barbara suddenly unveiled the Pacific,
the sky full of pink and orange radiance.  He spotted countless ships on
his Forward-Looking targeting scopes traveling so painfully slow compared to
him.

Darren checked their position on the IN map.  The
computer cataloged their fighters as four yellow dots with adjacent flight data
approaching the Pacific Ocean north of Santa Barbara where the land jutted into
the sea at Point Conception.

‘Okay, guys, let’s drop the throttles.’

Darren thought-powered his fighter up to full speed and
dropped every last ton of thrust out of the atmospheric drives.  A
momentary pang of fright burst through him when his fighter vaulted forward
into MACH 16 overkill, the anti-graviton emitter growling behind him.  He
felt his body forced back into the seat slightly as the anti-g force fields in
the cockpit allowed a little “feel.”

‘Whoa!’

His memory quickly went back ten years ago, sitting in the
passenger seat of his dad’s beloved 1970 Mustang Boss 429 at the corner of
Woodward and Twelve Mile, eleven o’clock at night and not a cop around. 
“I
am the night rider!” his dad shouts when the light goes green.  The duel
650-cfm, 4-barrel carburetors on the Tunnel Ram high-rise engage, kicking the
Ford big-block monster below.  The entire car is screaming, vibrating; the
sound in Darren’s ears is violent, and his eight year-old heart loves it.
 
He had his “speed cherry” popped that night by 540 horsepowers, and he had not
since experienced that sexual-like thrill of terror and exhilaration until now.

The Pacific Ocean blurred underneath, and the clouds above
and beneath him became undistinguishable streaks of white and gray. 
Hawaii zipped past in a flash, and he banked the Dragonstar to port, heading
210 degrees for the Kiribati Islands.  His friends were hundreds of miles
behind him, but he didn’t care, enjoying his own world now, closed off from the
one rushing past him outside the cockpit.  It was rather quiet inside,
except for the steady drone from the fighter’s AG emitter projector.

He shivered from the feelings that came to him again, as if
the icy air outside his fighter had found its way into his suit.  He felt
unstoppable, god-like. 
You could take over the world with one of these
things.  You could kill high school thugs with one of these things.
 
Darren smiled at the image of Marcus’s petrified face in his gun sights, but
quickly remembered D.B. and Denise Garvey.  Still . . . he savored dark
images.

We could . . . you know . . . practice.

*

It had taken him just under three minutes to jaunt four
thousand miles.  Fiji Island approached on his Forward-Looking screen, and
he spotted a multitude of military aircraft swarming around Japan and Korea on
the long-range AMDS sensor, all blind to his presence.  Darren could sneak
up on anyone of them, two of them, ten of them, and blot them out of the sky in
two seconds without conscience or guilt.

Darren rolled his fighter on its axis, spun twenty times,
and ditched the machine toward the surface.  The altimeter dropped like a
rock in unison, and he felt the quick jolt of g-forces hammer him before the
cockpit centrifugal compensator could sense the overload and counteract. 
Darren quickly thought-pitched the fighter to starboard, and the machine turned
on a sharp right-angle over fifteen thousand knots.

The ocean rapidly came up to greet him.  He clinched
his fists around the hand braces and thought the interceptor to level
out.  The fighter pulled up just a hair-second before it could plunge into
the water like some monster pelican and skimmed the wave tops, zigzagging back
and forth at twelve thousand knots.  Tiny tropical islands and countless
ships of various shapes and sizes rushed past him so fast he could only see them
on the targeting scopes.

Finally, he reduced speed to two thousand knots and
activated the auto-pilot.  He slid his helmet visor back and massaged his
eyes, trying to rub some reason back into his brain perhaps.  What
happened to the real world he had just left?

Suddenly, Nate’s fighter zipped across the canopy, and he
waved his wings.  ‘Death from above!’ he shouted in that strange,
computer-processed voice, so loud it hurt Darren’s ears.

Tony and Jorge appeared on Darren’s port side.  The
others were shouting at each other, whooping it up like football players before
the big game, laughing and daring any enemy to come after them . . . teenage
gods with newfound power casting thunderbolts upon the world.

Darren wasn’t really paying attention to their cocky banter. 
His glass usually half-empty, he instead entertained thoughts of uncertain,
fractured time . . . far in the past, thousands of years ago to a planet, much
like Earth, with two suns. 
Why couldn’t the Xrel defeat the Vorvons
with their superior Dragonstars and proton destroyers?   Now there’s
four of us against——what?——five thousand . . . five million?

Then to the present.  Were they really trained for
combat?  Hypnotized know-how couldn’t be the same as actual combat
training.  Could it?  Darren certainly felt that he could fight
SOF-style, close-quarters fighting.  Vibro-knives and all.  He
understood the mechanics of countless move-and-fire team formations, firing
stances, hand-to-hand sparring, hallway coverage, room-to-room movements. 
He knew the vulnerable locations of Vorvon anatomy——although he only possessed
a hazy vision of what a Vorvon looked like——and where to strike first, where to
sink the blade or place the killing round of a single laser blast.  Even
the basics of small unit leadership and team development were now lucid
principals which Darren would have never understood or practiced before. 
Could all of this hypnotized crap really produce a futuristic, small-unit
killing force assembled to defend Earth from millions of alien invaders?

Darren brought himself out of his thoughts and back to his
Dragonstar’s sensors.  The four of them were cruising west, 134,000 feet
above Russia at 1,200 knots.  Tony, Jorge and Nate were quiet now. 
Gone were the shouts and cat-calls of cocky defiance earlier, the boys now
perhaps lost in their own thoughts of the inevitable.  Reality strikes
again.  Darren closed his eyes and listened to the warbling low drone of
the anti-graviton emitter as the propulsive machine pushed his fighter across
the sky, felt the computer’s signals in his nerves, even “see” an Airbus A340
jetliner behind a thundercloud two hundred miles at his nine o’clock.

‘Anything yet?’ Tony asked.

‘No, just a lot of stuff in German, Italian and Russian,’
Nate replied.

Darren opened his eyes.  ‘What are you guys
doing?’  Apparently not thinking of pessimistic thoughts of combat and the
fact that they would be outnumbered four-to-who-knows-how-many?

‘I thought you were listening, too,’ Tony said.

‘For what?’

‘Police scanners,’ Nate said.  ‘Tony wants to play
crime fighter.’

Darren wanted to protest but kept his mouth shut.

‘I think that’s French,’ Tony said.  ‘Darren, your old
lady taught you French . . . what’s that guy saying?’

Darren listened for a bit.  ‘It’s just a cop calling in
a licence plate on a drunk driver.’

‘Screw this.  Let’s head home and listen for some
Yankee cop chatter,’ Tony said.

‘What exactly are you listening for?’ Darren asked.

‘Anything.  Armed carjackings.  Rapes in
progress.  Kiddie lemonade stands without permits . . . who cares? 
Crimes of the highest order.’

‘Good luck.’

‘What we need are some real bad asses,’ Tony said. 
‘Some hard hittin’ bruisers you only see in the movies.  Someone who’ll
give us a challenge.’

‘Yeah right,’ Darren said.  ‘Where are we going to find
these bad asses?  What are the odds of some ‘crime of the highest order’
happening right now?’

*

Ex-
Major Duke Patterson——former Delta Force trooper
still burning after a two-year stretch at Fort Leavenworth for raping a 14
year-old Afghani girl in front of her Taliban father——burst through the bank’s
front door and fired a burst of ear-splitting gunfire into the ceiling. 
His five squad mates quickly followed him in, their own H&K UMP9 submachine
guns waving.

“Okay, mother fuckers, everybody hit the mother fuckin’
floor!  This is a mother fuckin’ robbery of the first mother fuckin’
magnitude!”

Saturday, May15

10:51 AM.

They weren’t here for the bank’s
operating
money.  That cash would certainly contain “bait bills”——money with
recorded serial numbers that could be tied to a robbery.  They also had to
deal with the specter of tracking devices or dye packs embedded within the cash
bundles——electronic transponders hidden near the entrance would arm the packs
during the getaway and set them to explode thirty seconds later.  Screw
that noise, Patterson thought.  They had no time for
that
cash.

They weren’t here for the negotiable bonds certainly locked
away in the vault’s safe deposit boxes either.  Those were numbered and
could be traced.  Diamonds and rare coins, original artworks and gold, or
whatever valuable locked away by the bank’s customers could be laid off through
a fence but only garner a measly 15 or 20 percent.  That shit wasn’t worth
the job either.

What they
had
come for were the six duffle bags in
three safe deposit boxes containing $47 million dollars in laundered opium
money that used to belong to an Afghan warlord now pushing up poppies in a
shallow grave south of Lashkar Gah.

Patterson counted seven customers inside Chinatown’s largest
bank, First China National: three girls working the tellers and the bank’s lone
security guard, all of them Chinese-American locals.  Number of employees
in the back: unknown.

“Get your gook asses on the floor!” Patterson screamed.
“Now!”

He didn’t have to repeat his demand.  Everyone complied
quickly, one lady crying, another screaming.  Shit . . . to the left, a
kid probably twelve or so, standing with his Oriental eyes as large as saucers,
his mother trying desperately to pull him down.

“Cameras!”  Patterson said.

Two 35-mm surveillance cameras in the lobby were quickly
deactivated with submachine gunfire as well as the one behind the teller
counter.

“Mr. Six, secure the rear!” Patterson shouted.

Sergeant, or
ex-
Sergeant, Billy Hoyle quickly vaulted
over the teller door to scan for more employees in the back and to secure the
one-way fire exit in the rear of the bank next to the drive-thru.  Seconds
later, a muted cry from the offices in back told Patterson that Hoyle had
succeeded in finding more employees.

Ex-Sgt. George Mayfair quickly flex-cuffed the security
guard’s wrists, a Chinese kid probably working part-time and wondering why he
had been picked to work the Short Saturday shift.  A dark and spreading
dark spot around the crotch of the kid’s pants began to appear.

“Mr. Two, you’re on crowd control and collect cell phones!”
Patterson shouted.  “Mr. Four’s at the door!  Mr. Five, Mr. Three,
you’re on me!”

10:52:47 AM

Patterson and Mr. Five, a.k.a. ex-Sergeant Steve Arnold,
both fired a couple of bursts of gunfire into the teller door’s lock and Mr.
Three, a great demolition man by the name of  Ron Fowler, kicked open the
door.  All of the hostages began howling, some in broken English laced
with rapid Chinese.  The vault was situated in the southeast corner behind
the teller counters, east of the drive-thru teller window and collection of
cubicles, offices and conference rooms which lay on the bank’s west side. 
Patterson was almost drooling.

Billy Hoyle had found three more employees in the back and
had them spread eagle on the floor between the teller counter and the short
corridor leading to the offices, his German submachine gun moving from hostage
to hostage.  “Ima kill me a gook, Mr. One!  Who shall it be?”