Dark Dragons (19 page)

Darren quickly jogged toward the rear of the bank and the
shattered drive-thru window.  Once under the drive-thru roof and out of
the sunlight, his cloak gathered less power from the suit generator.  He
now had twelve minutes of invisibility remaining as long as he stayed out of
the sun.

Attached to his helmet, the three remote-controlled recon
camera scouts signaled that their tiny hover motors were primed.  Darren
told one to float through the broken window and take a peek inside.  Free
from the suit’s cloak, the tiny scout became visible, but Darren sent it
quickly through the window and up to the ceiling.  Darren’s “fly on the
wall” showed him everything.

Three bad guys in the lobby with twelve . . . thirteen .
. . fourteen hostages on the floor.  No——thirteen hostages.  One body
on the floor behind the teller counter, blood everywhere.

 “They cacked somebody already,” he whispered to his
squad.

His RCS slid across the ceiling to hit more angles. 
Nothing.  Panning right, Darren spotted the opening to the vault. 
The little scout darted to the floor and zipped forward.  Panning left
into the vault.  Nothing.  Moving forward.  The RCS went under a
metal cash cart along the right wall to scan the vault’s counting room across
the floor.  Still nothing.  Panning right——
bingo
——three more
bad guys in the safe deposit room with drills.  Darren had his scout leave
the vault and scan the bank’s west side.  Only offices and conference
rooms here, all empty.  After thirty seconds of scanning the interior,
Darren summoned his scout to hold position near the drive-thru window.  A
three-dimensional battle map of the bank appeared at the bottom of his visor.

“Six bad guys total.  Three in the lobby, three in the
vault.  Thirteen live hostages and one dead behind the teller
counter.  We’re going through the window and to the left into one of the
offices.  We’ll stack up there for a bit.  Jorge, you’re on me. 
Two by two.”

Darren and Jorge both leaped up into the window, sailed over
the counter and landed on the plush carpet, their weapons up and
sweeping.  Tony and Nate came through next.  The four of them slowly
walked to the area behind the teller counter and to the left toward the
collection of offices.  Darren could only see the 3D, ultrasonic image of
the body lying on the floor, so he summoned his RCS to get a real look.

The dead man’s brass ID said,
Michael Zyang, Home Equity
Financing.
  He was particularly small, even for a man of Oriental
descent.  Had he given the robbers shit, or was he just a weak-looking guy
who had incurred the robbers’ wrath precisely for that reason?

Darren realized he was gritting his teeth.  More
fucking bullies.

He pressed his pulse rifle tighter to him and moved up the
corridor away from the chaos in the lobby.  He had his RCS hover above the
door to provide a look out, and quietly closed the door.  The guys shut
off their invisibility.

Darren opened his visor and sucked in a large gulp of cool,
air conditioned air.

“Now what, Darren?” Nate asked.

Darren did not answer.  He leaned against the wall and
stared at the ceiling

*

Patterson’s drill bit suddenly went through.  He had
finally broken the cylinder bolt after five minutes and three cobalt bits.

“I smell green, boys!”

He dropped the drill, and a crowbar finished his work on
safe deposit box #34.  The Duke flung the door open and had to forcefully
drag the nylon duffle bag out with one boot against the wall——173 pounds to be
exact, he knew.  That’s how much $7.8  million in Ben Franklins
weighed.  He zipped the bag open and examined the fifty thousand dollar
bricks inside, each one shrunk wrapped and stamped with the seal of the Royal Bank
of Bahrain where the opium warlords of Afghanistan had originally deposited
them ten months earlier.  Still untraceable and clean as a virgin’s
honeypot.

“Margaritaville here we come!”
Patterson roared as he
wrestled the second bag to safety.

Fowler and Arnold yelped in victory.

*

The early-warning receivers began to beep for attention in
their earphones.

“Oh great, what’s this?” Darren wondered.

Everyone quickly highlighted the prompt on their helmet
visors and each obtained a live sub-space feed from both surveillance satellite
drones.  A green, rotating line-display of the solar system appeared along
with telemetry data in Xrel script.  The fifth orbital ring was blinking
yellow——Jupiter.  Darren zoomed in, and the gas giant planet’s transparent
computer image suddenly reared up to full magnification along with its family
of sixty-plus moons.  One of the moon orbits was flashing red . . .
Io.  Again, Darren zoomed in and saw several patches of indiscriminate
haze orbiting the moon. 
GAMMA-RAY
SIGNATURES PRESENT — IONIZED MEDIUM DETECTED.

“Anti-matter engines,” Darren said.  “Looks like the
Vorvons are orbiting Io.  Why, I don’t know.  And here we are playing
cops and robbers.  Let’s get out to the lobby, kick some ass, and get the
hell out of here.”

*

One of the phones on the teller counter began ringing. 
Mr. Four, aka ex-Sgt. Devon Washington, shouldered his German submachine gun
and calmly strode over.  His job now was to communicate with the police
negotiator in an agitated manner, despite his actual composure.  This
would let the SWAT commander know that they had kill-crazy psycho-gods on their
hands and a long
Dog Day Afternoon
lay ahead.  This incident had to
play out as long as possible for it all to work.

“Get into character, Mr. Four,” Hoyle said with a
grin.  “
‘Mother fucker this and mother fucker that
’ works pretty
good.”

“Don’t forget to ask for smokes,” Mayfair said.

Washington smiled and picked up the phone, his face going
rigid. 
“Yeah?”

“Kill ’em all!”
came a screaming voice from the other
end.  “Jesus commands thee to kill all the gooks!  All of ’em by
God!  Wipe the locusts from Canaan!  Cleanse the wicked gooks from——”

Washington hung up the phone and chuckled.

“What?” Hoyle asked.

“The cops haven’t isolated the bank’s phone service yet.”

“Prank call?”

Washington nodded.  “Probably some stoned redneck
sitting in front of his TV.”

Mayfair laughed.  “Cock in one hand, remote in the
other!”

*

“These guys are
too
calm, yo,” Nate whispered over
the comm, standing against the wall in the lobby.  “They act like
everything’s gonna be all right.”

“Like they know they’re going to get out of here with no
problem.” Tony agreed.  “I bet there’s loads of dirty cops outside who are
in on the score.  Some real movie-style shit’s gonna go down, you wait.”

“What do think they got planned, Darren?”

“Don’t know,” he replied.  He was too busy watching the
three guys in the vault cracking open the safe deposit boxes with his recon
scout.  Those bags looked heavy.  Just how were they going to get
them out?  A daring helicopter assault, maybe.  Whatever they had
planned, the hostages were likely going along for the getaway as human
shields.  Darren couldn’t see any other way for the bad guys to make this
all work.

“We’re so close, Darren,” Tony whispered.  “Fifteen
feet away and we can smoke these three in the lobby.”

“Hold your horses,” Darren replied.  The three robbers
in the vault began a slow procession into the area behind the teller counter,
dragging the duffle bags behind them.

“Mr. Two, Mr. Four and Mr. Six,” one of the robbers
shouted.  “Get them up!  Thirteen asses off the floor!”

“Darren?”
Tony said with unmistakable agitation.

Some of the hostages were crying, pleading.  One little
old Chinese lady held a picture of a woman out for the robbers to see, but her
unintelligible cries went unanswered.  The three guys ordered the hostages
behind the teller counter——and corralled them all into the vault.  The
other three robbers had dragged all six duffle bags into the hallway outside
the large conference room across from the office where the guys had sought
shelter.

“What’s going on?” Jorge asked.

One of the telephones behind the teller counter began to
ring.

“Mr. Four, you’re up,” one of the robbers, apparently the
leader, said.

“On it, major.”

Oops,
Darren thought. 
Thanks for that intel,
Mr. Four.

“These guys are military,” Nate said.  “Special ops, I
bet.”

The bad guys herded the last of the hostages into the vault,
and the massive stainless steel door slowly swung shut.  The turn wheel to
the locking bolts was spun, and the hostages were now locked inside.  No
human shields for the getaway.  How were the robbers getting out with six
duffle bags they could hardly lift?

Mr. Four picked up the phone.

*

“Keep dem SWAT ma’fuckas from tha bank, ya here?” 
Washington shouted real
gangsta
-style.

“I understand, no one’s going to harm you, alright?”

“Whadya want?”

“I want to talk, okay?  My name is Sergeant John
Randal.”

Washington paused on purpose for a few seconds, and then
said, “My name’s Lewis.”

“Okay, Lewis.  That’s good.  I just want to know
if everything is okay in there.  Is there anybody hurt?  I’d like
to——”

“Hurt?  Yeah, s’body hurt, man, we didn’ mean to. 
He shot up real bad.  Dead now.  We didn’ mean to!”

“How are
you
, Lewis?”

Textbook, Washington thought with a grin.  The cop
didn’t want to acknowledge that a murder had been committed.  Any mention
of a dead hostage would force hopelessness on the robbers, and negotiations
would just go south from there.  “I’m okay.  We’re okay.  We
just thought we’d be in and out.  Two minutes, you know.   In
and out, but things got fucked up an’——”

“It’s okay, man.”

“——didn’ go as plan, ya know.”

“Okay.  Lewis, I want to talk about the other people
inside.  The customers and employees.  Let’s talk about letting some of
them go, okay?”

“What for?”

“For anything you might need.”

Patterson gave Washington the rolling motion with his hand,
telling him to keep talking.  Meanwhile, the Duke pulled out a jam-proof
handheld radio from his flak jacket and pushed the
TRANSMIT
button.  A single VHF chirp went out.  Two seconds later, he received
a double-chirp.

“Mr. Seven says, ‘Fire in the hole,’”
he whispered to
his squad.

*

BOOM!

Darren felt the floor vibrate and the air in the bank push
outward.  One of the tall windows cracked.  Everyone aimed their
pulse rifles toward the robbers standing in the corridor outside the
offices.  But none of the robbers moved.

“You gotta be shittin’ me?” Darren said, looking at his RCS
image.

A three foot hole had opened in the conference room floor.

*

What the Army liked to call an M112 Composition C4 Block
Demolition Charge had done the trick.  Patterson peeled back a chunk of
torn carpet and peeked down the hole.  “Hello, Sergeant Davies.”

A skinny guy wearing khaki shorts and a Hawaiian aloha shirt
popped up like a bunny rabbit and smiled. “Hello, major.”

*

“What was that explosion, Lewis?  Is everything okay in
there?”

“Jus’ the vault man.  Safe deposit boxes.  Gotta
get ’em open somehow.”  Washington purposely paused again.  Then,
“Look, I gotta go help get the money out, an’ ’member, keep them SWAT away from
the bank.  My man is watchin’ both sides.”

“Lewis, don’t hang up, just——”

But Washington did just that.

Three seconds later, the phone began ringing again.

*

Patterson smiled and pulled Sgt. Davies out of the hole,
brushing dirt off his shoulders.  Over the past five nights, they had
tunneled in from the storm sewer system by cutting through the side of the pipe
and excavating forty feet to a point below the foundation concrete under the bank’s
conference room.  There were 1,500 miles of storm drains below the city of
Los Angeles ranging in size from twelve inch gutter pipes to huge culverts big
enough to swallow an MTA bus.  Separate from the sewer system, the storm
drain pipes currently had no more than a trickle of water during this dry month
of May.  So to dispose of the excavated earth, they had simply sandbagged
all of the dirt and built a dam upstream from the tunnel entrance.  When
the trickle of water became a two foot reservoir at the end of each night’s
dig, they hacked open each sandbag, and the rushing water simply carried the
dirt downstream.  Seven 4-wheel ATVs were waiting to be loaded inside the
Hill Street culvert.  The getaway van sat two miles away in an abandoned
warehouse parking lot in Lincoln Heights.

“Okay, Delta, we’re Charles Bronson in
The Great Escape
,”
Patterson said.

The phone was still ringing . . . and ringing. . . .

*

“Delta Force,” Tony said. 
“Counterterrorist-soldiers-turned-murdering bank robbers, and they’re getting
away.  Cops don’t have a clue.”

“They had to have heard that explosion,” Nate said.

“You heard that one robber.  Told the cop it was them
blowing up the vault.  I’m telling you, in fifteen minutes the SWAT teams
will be storming an empty bank with hostages locked in the vault, a dead body,
and a hole in the floor.  This sucks!”

Yet, there was a sense of alleviation in Darren’s
chest.  For some reason, he just wanted the robbers to go.  Michael
Zyang demanded justice, yes, but Darren had the itchiest feeling that they had
wandered into a disconcerting situation far above their level despite their
technological edge, and
they
weren’t ministers of justice and
punishment.  They weren’t cops. 
Practice?
 Shit. 
They didn’t need practice.  Why were they not beating hell-bent for
Jupiter right now where the real threat lay?  Why . . .
why has the
phone stop ringing?