Dark Dragons (18 page)

“I’ll pick one for you later,” Patterson said smiling. 
Hoyle was playing the Kill Crazy Sidekick to a tee just like he had been
ordered.  “Steadfast, now.”

The vault door was open as it should have been during
business hours, but the Plexiglas “day gate” was not.  Patterson knew that
the only employees with keys to the gate were the bank manager, the assistant
manager and the customer services manager.  “Assistant Manager Cindy
Hong!” he shouted.  “
Front and center!”

Hoyle practically pulled the screaming woman off the floor
by her hair.  “Here’s a name tag that says
Cindy Hong, ASM
,” Hoyle
growled.   Black streams of mascara oozed down the woman’s
face.  She was biting her bottom lip.

“Your day gate key, please,” Patterson said calmly.

Cindy Hong simply looked up at him in an almost catatonic
state, mumbling something under her breath.  She was now drawing blood
from her lip.

“Give me the fucking key, bitch!”
  Patterson
roared, his mouth an inch from her face.

She let out a sort of grunt, her eyes slowly crossed, and
Cindy Hong went limp like a fish.  She fell forward against Patterson who
let her drop to the floor.

“You gotta be kidding me!” he said, looking around at his
comrades.  He bent down and went through her skirt pockets.  Nothing.

“Where’s the key?” Hoyle asked.

“Rip her clothes off!” Fowler said.  “She’s probably
got it hid.”

“Leave her alone!” one of the male employees shouted from
the floor.

Hoyle placed a boot on the man’s neck.  “Quiet, you.”

Patterson tore Cindy’s shirt off and every button went
flying.  Then he pulled her skirt down to her knees. 
“Where’s the
gotdamn key?”

There came a sudden movement on the corner of Patterson’s
eye.  He turned to see the prone Chinese man quickly knock Hoyle’s boot
away and smash his balled fist up into Hoyle’s testicles.  Hoyle responded
to the man’s defiance with a loud, three-round crack of 9mm fire into his
chest.

Screams.  Shouting.  Patterson could hear the
little boy in the lobby crying.  The Duke closed his eyes momentarily,
trying to absorb what had just happened.  Now they were murderers——not
folk hero bank robbers who got away with $47 million and bested the LAPD. 
Now it was San Quentin and the needle if caught. 
Christ, Billy.

Hoyle staggered back like a dazed quarterback pancaked by a
defensive tackle, his eyes squinted into narrow slits. 
“Oooooh.”

“Pull yourself together, Mr. Six!” Patterson shouted.

Hoyle let out a guttural moan and then nodded at his
commanding officer.  “I’m okay.”

“Mr. One, I spot something silver,” Arnold said, and bent
down to seize Cindy Hong’s fist.

“You gotta be kidding me?  It was in her hand all
along?”

Arnold pried out a long key with a magnetic strip on its
shank and gave it to Patterson.

“Finally.”

*

The vault of the First China National Bank was a concrete and
steel impregnable beast known in the business as a Class 1A commercial vault,
constructed from the densest military-grade concrete and 3/4-inch rebar. 
The manufacturer made the vault door out of four inch steel with a copper layer
sandwiched inside to diffuse the heat from cutting torches.  Its walls and
ceiling measured twelve inches thick and the floor eighteen inches. 
Embedded throughout was a one-inch continuous layer of carburized steel plating
to foil any attempt to cut, drill, or jackhammer in.   As a final
thumbing of the nose to any potential robber, electronic sensors resembling
window screen would trip the 211 silent alarm if penetrated or if they detected
noise from an industrial drill or rising temperatures from a torch or burn
bar.  The gearbox containing the locking bolts inside the vault door would
also sound the alarm if tampered.

Patterson and Crew had to forget the daring Saturday night
burglary.  The only way into this $1.1 million box had to be during
business hours when the vault was open.

An average bank vault contained hundreds of safe deposit
boxes of various sizes from that of a shoe box to an airport baggage locker big
enough to fit a large person.  The locks to these industrial-size safe
deposit boxes would require a considerable time to drill through, longer than
the required two minute safe period which was the average time it took for the
first cop to come squealing to a halt outside the bank.  If the robbers
hadn’t left the bank after two minutes, they were in the danger zone, and then
it was all about SWAT snipers, hostage negotiations, and the headaches that
came thereafter.

But there were too many alarm buttons to keep this bank
caper off the LAPD’s radar.  Patterson and Crew knew about the
“pagers”——remote silent alarm activators every employee had clipped to their
belt or stashed in their pockets that worked exactly like the buttons under the
teller counters.  There were also too many bystanders outside with cell
phones who witnessed armed men in gas masks storm through the door, so it was a
damned certainty the cops already knew an armed robbery was in progress. 
They
expected
the LAPD to show.

And they had a plan for that, too.

Patterson unlocked the Plexiglas day gate to the open vault,
and Fowler and Arnold followed him in.  He flung open the stainless steel
gate to the safe deposit box room, and they dropped the duffle bags each had
been carrying.  Inside were industrial cordless drills and a loose
assortment of cobalt metal-boring bits.  Their targets were the three large
safe deposit boxes on the floor encased in the wall: #34, #35 and #36.

Patterson looked at his watch. 
10:53 AM.
 
Shit
.  “We’re at two minutes! 
Mr. Two and Mr. Four are now on SWAT watch!”  Then he turned his attention
to the task at hand.  “I got number thirty-four.  Five, you got
thirty-five.  Three, you got thirty-six.  Let’s go!”

*

Darren was listening to the steady drone of the Dragonstar’s
anti-graviton emitter, a rather soothing sound during cruise mode, and thinking
of a hot make out with Vanessa Vasquez on a beach in the Maldives when Tony
rudely interrupted the imagery.

‘
Jackpot!
  Bank robbers, no shit! 
Sub-channel sixteen-seven!  Get on it!’

Darren thought-triggered his fighter’s comm system and tuned
to sixteen-seven, a rather garbled transmission coming from what sounded like a
cop in his squad car.

“. . . advised, Unit Four, needs assistance!  We
have a 211 in progress at the First China National Bank at Hill and
College!  We have shots fired!  Code Three!  Shots fired! 
Submachine guns!”

A lady’s voice: “All units, officer requesting assistance at
Hill and College at the First China National Bank.  Two-eleven in
progress.  Shots have been fired with submachine guns.”

“Fifteen-oh-ten, requesting SWAT, Code Three!”

Another cop:
“You better get a Tac Alert here, submachine
gunfire coming from inside the bank!”

“Tac Alert is being declared.  RA is en route, SWAT is
being notified for airlift.”

‘Goddamn, listen to that!’ Tony cried.

Darren could practically hear Tony bouncing up and down in
his seat.

‘Where is this?’ Darren asked.

‘The hometown, baby.  Some bank in Chinatown!’

Darren remembered reading somewhere that there were around
3,500 banks throughout the L.A. metro area, which held the regretful reputation
as the Bank Robbery Capital of the World.  Great.  Tony got the Shit
Storm he had been praying for.  And a bank robbery to boot.

“Fifteen-oh-four, we got three black-and-whites on
location!  We’re being pinned down by submachine gunfire!  We’re
gonna need a CP established farther away!  We still got traffic coming
through!”

“We need a supervisor out here NOW!”

“Be advised, supervisor en route.  All units, be
advised that there is still traffic moving around the location.”

“Fifteen-oh-ten, there are at least three suspects inside
the bank, one outside shooting randomly with a submachine gun, all wearing body
armor and gas masks!”

“All units, three confirmed suspects and one outside the
bank with a submachine gun.  Suspects are wearing body armor and gas
masks.  ASTRO units are inbound, SWAT en route.”

‘Okay, fearless leader, what’s the plan?’ Tony asked.

‘What?’
  Darren shouted.  ‘You
asshole!  You’re the one who sniffed out this ‘basic training,’ you figure
it out!’

‘Okay, I say we go invisible.  Fighters and all.  We
do a plop-and-drop, put the fighter’s on remote and send them out of visible
range, say, seventy thousand feet, so they don’t have to waste energy running
invisibility.  We stay ghosts and find a way into the bank that doesn’t
attract attention.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then it’s up to you to figure out the close-quarter combat
shit, that’s what.’

Darren closed his eyes, his attention tuned back to the
soothing hum of the anti-graviton emitter.  He couldn’t see the outcome to
this.  Improvised action and hostage rescue?  Them?  Darren had
no doubt about their close quarter combat “training”——they had plenty of
hypnotized conditioning stored to memory that would please the most demanding
SEAL or Green Beret commander——but was that enough?  Tony was right about
them needing practice, but Jesus, a bank robbery?
  No, screw that crap.

‘We’re not getting involved.  We’re going to sit back
and observe the SWAT teams.  We can learn a lot just from watching.’

‘C’mon, Darren, you know there’s hostages,’ Tony said. 
‘We’re invisible ghosts!  Futuristic war gods of the ninth
dimension.  We can sneak in and literally walk up to a bad guy and bring
his ass down with a head shot.  Badda bing, it’s over.’

‘We’re not going in with guns blazing like Yosemite
Sam!  We don’t know the bank’s lay out.  We don’t know jack about the
bank robbers, or if they’re hopped up on meth and got booby-traps set up and
hostages duct-taped to the front windows.’

‘Darren, you know how this bank robbery stuff plays
out.  It could go on for hours with the negotiations, trading hostages for
pizzas and cigarettes, and all that back-and-forth shit . . .  and you
want us to just sit back and wait for the bad guys to get religion and come out
with their hands up?  What kind of close-quarter ass-kicking is that?’

They were above Arizona now, heading west and descending
slowly.  They would be over L.A. in twenty seconds.  Darren was
suddenly feeling cold.  ‘Alright, we obviously can’t make decisions until
we enter the bank.  As soon as we achieve situational awareness, I’ll make
my decision concerning possible action. 
Clear?
’

‘Yes, sir.’ Tony replied.  Nate and Jorge, as usual,
said nothing.

Definitely cold now.  Darren now knew the outcome to
this.  He didn’t have to know the bank’s lay out or if the robbers were wearing
ladies underwear.  Tony——who once took on half the football team because
they made fun of his tattoos, who once jumped on the hood of a moving car,
whose quick mouth always landed him in detention, the Video Game Loose Cannon
who could never finish a level because he always rushed his actions and got
killed——desired nothing more than to walk into a bank robbery-turned-hostage
barricade and start shooting.

Darren thought of the unthinkable.  Of Tony accidently
squeezing the trigger on a hostage or a SWAT officer storming through the front
door . . . and Darren pulling his own trigger on Tony to stop him.

*

The guys descended on downtown L.A. with their cloaks
running, and the first thing Darren noticed were several news helicopters
hovering over Chinatown and a pair of LAPD Astar choppers providing aerial
recon.  He had the others hang back at one thousand feet while he swooped
down a bit further to get a better look.  Invisible and silent, his
Dragonstar dipped below a KTLA news chopper and pulled up twenty feet above the
bank’s parking lot.

He scanned his surroundings. 
Four SWAT snipers
visible.  Black and white patrol cars on every corner, sides turned toward
the bank, uniformed cops strategically positioned behind the engine blocks with
AR15’s pointed at the bank.  Broken glass and bullet holes
everywhere.  Lots of cops hanging out in front of the Fortunate Dragon
restaurant down the street——where they look like they set up a command
post.  Several black Ford Explorers everywhere——probably SWAT transports. 
An armored L.A. County Sheriff LAV with a top-mounted .50-caliber machine gun
parked in the intersection.  No bad guys outside shooting at the
cops.  Looks like the drive-thru teller window has been shot out——possible
entry point there.
  ‘Set ’em down, guys,’ he ordered.  ‘Me first,
Jorge, Tony and Nate.  Form up and drop.  Go, ready.’

Darren quickly lowered his Dragonstar ten feet off the deck,
activated his suit’s own invisibility cloak and popped the windshield.  He
sent a thought-command to the auto-pilot, instructing the fighter to ascend to
seventy thousand feet in five seconds, deactivate its invisibility and await
further instructions.

He shut down the thought-unit which readjusted his brain to
“real time”——he felt ringing in his ears, and the world around him appeared to
stutter like a film——and everything slowed down.  The sensation of the
real world felt bogged down and heavy, the air thick.

Darren unplugged himself, grabbed his pulse rifle from the
compartment above the seat, and jumped out of the cockpit.  The bright sun
overhead hammered his suit’s cloak, the receptors howling under the
stress.  He had to find cover in three minutes, or he would be in a world
of visible shit.  He looked up at the blue ultrasonic image of his
Dragonstar quickly rising into the black sky and Jorge’s fighter replacing its
position ten feet above the parking lot.  Another chopper roared overhead.