The Tin Man

F
LIGHT OF THE
O
LD
D
OG
S
ILVER
T
OWER
D
AY OF THE
C
HEETAH
H
AMMERHEADS
S
KY
M
ASTERS
N
IGHT OF THE
H
AWK
C
HAINS OF
C
OMMAND
S
TORMING
H
EAVEN
S
HADOWS OF
S
TEEL
F
ATAL
T
ERRAIN
B
ATTLE
B
ORN
D
REAMLAND

This novel is dedicated to my wife, my confidante, my best friend, and my lover, Diane; to our son and first child, Hunter; and to my old buddy Saber.

The soul truly has no beginning and no end; I’m glad these three souls touched mine.

It is also dedicated to the memory of Sergeant George Sullivan, University of Nevada-Reno Police Department, brutally killed in the line of duty in January of 1998, and to all the other men and women who wear a badge and put their lives on the line to protect ours. Thank you for your service.

Very special thanks to my wife, retired Sacramento Police Department Narcotics lieutenant Diane Joel-son Brown, for her encouragement, support, and technical advice. This book would not have been possible without her patience, insight, and expertise. The mistakes are all mine, but the credit goes to her.

Thanks also to Lieutenant John Kane, disaster-preparedness expert, Sacramento Police Department; Lieutenant Leslie Brown, watch commander, North Patrol, Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department; Detective David Cropp, Narcotics investigator and expert, Sacramento Police Department; and Officer Vonda Walker and Corporal Paula Gow, Sacramento Police Department, for their technical assistance.

I also thank retired Sacramento Police Department officer and fellow pilot Bert Sousa for his help in profiling and helping to gather information on outlaw motorcycle gangs. A source of information on biker gangs, which Bert encouraged the author Yves Lavigne to write, was
Hells Angels: Into the Abyss
(New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996). Hells Angels is a registered trademark of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Corp.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons or events is purely coincidental and is a product of the author’s imagination. Although I endeavor to be as accurate as possible, the use of actual places and organizations is meant only to enhance the authenticity of the story. It is in no way intended to depict, represent, or describe any real-world person, organization, agency, or the procedures they follow.

Similarly, the information regarding the manufacture of methamphetamine has been included to enhance the authenticity of the story. The drugs produced, their by-products, and the compounds used in their manufacture described herein are deadly. Do not attempt to duplicate these procedures.

Your thoughts and opinions about this or any of my works are welcome! Please E-mail your comments to me at:
[email protected]

or visit my Web site on the Internet at:
http://www.Megafortress.com

Because of the tremendous number of messages I receive, it may take a while for me to reply, but I read every one. Thank you!

Dale Brown                     

Lake Tahoe, Nevada, USA

ARMORED-CAR KILLING PROBED

—San Francisco Examiner and AP, 11/26/97

San Ramon, Calif.—Oakland police investigating the shooting death of an armored-car guard and the disappearance of his partner—along with $300,000—searched a Sacramento motel early Wednesday and recovered “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” according to Sacramento police.

No one was in the room at the Motel 6 at Richards Boulevard and Jibboom Street in central Sacramento when officers served their search warrant at 3:30
A.M.

Authorities are searching for the missing guard Thomas Franklin Wheelock and consider him the “prime suspect” in the case.

Oakland police were not immediately available for comment on the motel search.

Investigators suspect the fatal shooting and apparent theft mark the latest case in a troubling new trend: security guards succumbing to the temptation of fast cash.

“To have that one person who you trust to back you up, turn around and take your life is a very scary thought,” said Dan Connolly, chairman of the Independent Car Operators Association. “It leads more and more to the adage that you trust no one in this business …”

4 SUSPECTED OF BREWING DRUG AT MOTEL

—Los Angeles Times, 11/15/97

Studio City, Calif.—Four people were arrested on suspicion of running a methamphetamine lab in a motel room by police who seized two gallons of ingredients and enough equipment to produce thousands of dollars worth of the drug, the Los Angeles Police Department said Friday.

… The LAPD’s Hazardous Materials section also responded to the scene because of the toxic chemicals used to produce methamphetamine. “This stuff is so toxic that it penetrates through the walls and carpets,” said Sgt. Michael Linder, one of the arresting officers.

… Small portable meth labs have become ubiquitous in Los Angeles.

… Larger-scale meth production is carried out in rural areas where producers can run electric generators and the noxious fumes can go undetected. “You have to be pretty brazen to cook in the city because the smell is so strong,” said Linder …

TRAFFICKERS HIRE FOREIGNERS TO TRAIN PRIVATE MILITIAS IN FACE OF REFORM EFFORTS, OFFICIALS SAY

—The Washington Post, 10/30/97

Mexican drug-trafficking organizations are hiring foreign mercenaries to strengthen their paramilitary forces, heightening the threat that traffickers pose to U.S. security interests, senior law-enforcement officials said yesterday.

… The Arellano Felix organization “maintains well-armed and well-trained security forces, described by Mexican enforcement authorities as paramilitary in nature, which include international mercenaries as advisers, trainers, and members …”

… Knowledgeable sources said the mercenaries are largely from Colombia, Britain, and Israel and are employed to train the militias in the use of more sophisticated explosives and combat techniques.

In the late 1980’s, the Medellín cocaine cartel in Colombia hired Israeli mercenaries to train its private army in the use of explosives. The rival Cab cartel then hired about a dozen British and South African mercenaries to kill the leaders of the Medellín organization …

LAW TARGETS METHAMPHETAMINE

—Sacramento Bee, 10/4/96

Washington—Taking direct aim at a problem hitting California, President Clinton on Thursday signed legislation increasing penalties for the manufacture of methamphetamine and placing new restrictions on the chemicals used to make the illegal drug.

In a White House Rose Garden signing ceremony, Clinton said the new law would stop what primarily is now a West Coast problem from becoming a nationwide epidemic.

“We have to stop meth before it becomes the crack [cocaine] of the 1990’s,” Clinton said of a drug that has caused emergency-room admissions to skyrocket in the Sacramento area in recent years. “This legislation gives us a chance to do it.”

Law-enforcement officials have identified methamphetamine as the fastest-growing drug problem in the country …

T
hose in the business call it the pour-and-run method, and it is one of the most dangerous and explosive chemical processes ever practiced. But Bennie the Chef was the master of this dangerous, arcane art:

In a large glass tub, Bennie mixed seventeen pounds of ephedrine—crushed over-the-counter diet pills dissolved in chloroform—with a toxic, corrosive chemical liquid called thionyl chloride. The combination immediately produced toxic sulfur dioxide, corrosive hydrogen chloride gas, and a substance called 1-phenyl-l-chloro-2-methylaminopropane, or chloropseudoephedrine for short. They call it pour-and-run because even in the open air only a full-body antiexposure suit and an industrial-strength ventilator or positive-flow breathing system will save anyone within fifty yards from being asphyxiated by the sulfur dioxide fumes or severely burned by caustic acid. Bennie never used any of this gear, so it became a test to see if he could run at least half the length of a football field while holding his breath. He ran the race with a towel over his face, because if the hydrogen chloride gas touches any water, even the tiny bits of moisture in the eyes or nostrils, it instantly produces hydrochloric acid
so corrosive that it will eat away an eyeball in seconds.

If he survived the test, he’d be several thousand dollars richer. If not, he’d be alive just long enough to taste the blood in his throat as his lungs dissolved, like a sheet of paper thrown into a fire.

Fifty-year-old Bennie, withered and emaciated-looking, was nearly exhausted after his dash to the edge of the trees—but he made it. His mixing tub was under a lean-to facing into the wind, and he could see the poisonous gas streaming out from the tub and collecting under the shelter. Ten minutes later, it was safe to approach the tub, and he began stirring the mixture.

His two guards, both tall, beefy, bearded men with long hair, huge beer bellies, Doc Martens ass-kicker boots, and black leather vests, could never hope to make the run, so they were already a safe distance away, smoking dope and drinking beer. Both were full-fledged Satan’s Brotherhood motorcycle gang members, wearing their “colors”—the leather vests with the Brotherhood logo and the upper rocker that read “Brotherhood” and the bottom rocker that read “Oakland” on the back, and Satan’s Brotherhood tattoos on their left arms. Most of the gang members were among the most dangerous of America’s outlaw bikers, the ones rejected
OI
stripped of their membership in other gangs such as the Hells Angels or the Outlaw Bikers or the Brothers. They were avowed racists, even neo-Nazi; although they dealt drugs to all races and ran black, Asian, and Hispanic women in their whorehouses and strip clubs, they never associated with anyone other than other whites. There were more Satan’s Brotherhood members in the United States than Hells Angels or any other biker gang, but fewer
of them in prison. The reason for this was simple: They vowed never to be taken alive by the police.

When Bennie finished stirring the mixture, precipitating the chloropseudoephedrine in the bottom of the glass tub, he moved on to the second, even more dangerous step. In a large steel tank he mixed the chloropseudoephedrine with a metallic catalyst called palladium black and a powerful solvent called hexane, then capped the tank and pressurized it with pure, highly explosive hydrogen gas. The hydrogen would bond with the chloropseudoephedrine to form a shiny white crystalline powder called methamphetamine, more commonly referred to as speed, crank, or meth. In a single day a skilled meth “cooker” like Bennie could produce about twenty-two pounds of methamphetamine worth four to six thousand dollars a pound in its unadulterated form—assuming he survived the cooking process. The Brotherhood sold it by the pound to wholesalers all across the United States, using gang members who carried it on their bikes, or “mules” who traveled with the bikers but didn’t ride motorcycles or hang out with the pack.

Methamphetamine, born of so many dangerous and toxic chemicals that it is impossible to believe it could ever be safely handled, is one of the nation’s fastest-growing abused drugs. By the time it has been cut with pyridoxine, or vitamin B
₆
, available at any health-food store, its street value has jumped to ten to twelve thousand dollars a pound. Ingested—usually mixed with coffee or booze—or snorted, it produces a gradual high and a sense of heightened energy, sexual potency, and awareness that lasts anywhere from two to twelve hours, followed by a very relaxed weariness that continues for one to three days. If smoked or injected, the stimulant effect is sharper and more pronounced, producing the
“rush” that gives the user a sense of enormous power, limitless energy, and a feeling of complete invulnerability. The Brotherhood and other outlaw motorcycle gangs had gotten very rich selling the drug in the western United States.

Bennie used just over two thousand dollars’ worth of chemicals in this batch. Most of them are controlled substances in the state of California but readily available in Mexico or other states. Ephedrine, the main component, was the easiest to get. Mexican factories would ship a ton of diet pills, or even truckloads of the ephedrine itself, if he requested it. If the DEA, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, or the BNE, California’s Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, started to nose around, Bennie simply switched sources. There were mail-order companies in the U.S. that would ship a hundred cases of diet pills to the Brotherhood every week—and for twenty bucks, kids would steal several pounds of diet pills off store shelves in a matter of seconds. In a pinch, in place of ephedrine Bennie could also use phenylalanine, an amino acid sold wholesale in health-food stores at two hundred bucks for forty pounds. He had even synthesized chloropseudoephedrine from mahuang roots sold in Chinese grocery stores; and he was also adept at manufacturing phenyl-2-propanone, a compound similar to ephedrine, from noncontrolled chemicals. These could be used to produce a large quantity of lower-quality meth if other ingredients were hard to get. But they rarely were, and the meth business was thriving.

Bennie made it through this “cookout,” but his body, including his eyes and lungs, bore the scars of countless cookouts that had gone horribly wrong. Inhaling just a whiff of thionyl chloride can destroy lung tissue, and a drop of it can eat a pea-sized hole
in a hand or finger. Ephedrine can cause severe weight loss, heart arrhythmia, or tremors. Chloroform is a known carcinogen. But Bennie never thought about the hazards. He just thought about the money.

Bennie was a survivor. He had been cooking meth ever since he and a classmate mixed up a batch while working summer jobs as janitors in a chemistry lab at the University of California-Berkeley back in 1973. The batches they made in the lab’s big Florence flasks and Graham condensers were only a few ounces, but enough for Bennie and his friends to party with for a couple of weeks. A tiny hit of crank, less than the size of a fingernail, produced mild LSD-like hallucinations, with the added bonus of creating the “pecker of power,” a hard-on that lasted for hours. With a little crank secretly mixed in her cocktail, his date for the evening would sometimes turn into a sex-starved creature whose wild-animal lust could pull a ten-man “train” all night.

Bennie left Berkeley in 1974, but not because he got caught cooking meth in the school’s labs—in fact, Bennie’s younger professors and graduate assistants were some of his best customers. He had been working on his bachelor’s degree in philosophy on and off for almost six years, but he was offered a job far more lucrative than teaching or writing: cooking meth for the Oakland chapter of Satan’s Brotherhood. Within three years, he had supervised the construction of eleven major meth labs from Oregon to Nevada to Bakersfield, and taught nearly half the Brotherhood in northern California how to cook meth. He was almost single-handedly responsible for filling the Brotherhood’s legal war chests with enough money to pay an army of lawyers to fend off
dozens of racketeering indictments all throughout the 1980’s.

Now, more than twenty years and countless batches later, Bennie still had the knowledge, the patience, the touch—and, more importantly, he could still run—and he was still the best there was at the meth-cooking game. Besides, meth—especially American-made meth, as opposed to cheaper Mexican meth—had never been more valuable than it was today, so it was a thriving business. Bennie was in it to stay.

He carefully checked that all of the fittings and hatches on his reactor were secure—introducing oxygen through the tiniest leak anywhere in the hydrogen gas line to the pressurized reactor tank can produce an explosion and fireball that would look like a small thermonuclear mushroom cloud. Then he checked the pressure inside the reactor. Still dropping, which meant that the chloropseudoephedrine was still accepting hydrogen. Another hour or so, and it would be done. Another few hours to wash the meth with ether, then dry it in a dryer made from a few janitor’s buckets and mop squeegees, and he’d have collected about a hundred and twenty thousand dollars’ worth of crank. His two bikers were nowhere to be seen—probably sleeping off the beer—so he stepped away from the hydrogenator toward the tree line for a smoke break.

The key to the all-important second step, the hydrogenation process, was the reactor. A commercial Parr half-quart catalytic hydrogenator with heating mantle and agitator cost nearly two thousand dollars and would produce only about a pound of meth; worse, it
looked
like lab equipment, which always caught the attention of the cops. So Bennie built his own meth lab, designed specifically to be portable,
not look like a meth lab, and be capable of producing far more meth than commercial reactor units.

The big-time portable meth lab that Bennie had towed out to one of the remote West Coast Satan’s Brotherhood ranches scattered throughout California was the best one he’d ever built. The core of the operation was its forty-gallon hydrogenation reactor, made from an old steel coffee roaster, powered by a big gasoline electrical generator and steam pressurization/vacuum device. It was mounted on a trailer and camouflaged with tar to make it look like an asphalt spreader, a disguise guaranteed not to attract any close inspection or curious sniffing. It was several times larger and much better than a Parr reactor, worth almost fifty thousand dollars. It was his pride and …

“Hello.”

Bennie whirled. The two men were standing behind him, no more than ten yards away, maybe closer. Jesus, Bennie thought grimly, they move as quietly as jungle cats! The first guy was youngish, lean, and blond, with an patch over one eye but the other a bright shining blue, wearing a long black leather coat. The second guy was huge, like a pro football linebacker, dark-haired and powerful-looking, standing in a definite cover position a few paces behind and to the left of the first …

That meant that the gun would come out of the first guy’s right pocket or out from under the right side of his coat, while the second guy would cover the left side. Bennie had been around trained gunmen—mostly cops—long enough to know how they stood when entering a dangerous situation.

Bennie was wearing his black leather vest, the one with the Red Bat logo and the black-and-red bottom rocker that said “Oakland” on the back, the symbols of a Satan’s Brotherhood candidate. He
didn’t ride a bike so would never be a full-fledged Brother, but to most folks it looked like he was wearing no-shit Brotherhood colors. He hoped these guys would see the symbols and get the message: Clear out right now.

“Hello, sir,” said the man again. “If I might have a moment of your time?” The accent had a definite British cast, the voice slightly sterner now, a bit more steel in it, not quite official like a cop but definitely authoritative, maybe military.

“You’re on private property,” Bennie said in his gruffest, unfriendliest voice, mimicking the Brothers he had known from all over the world. Where the hell were his two guards? Why didn’t they wake up from their stupor and come running at the sound of his angry tone? “Get the fuck on outta here before there’s trouble.”

The man in the lead held up his hands, palms facing outward, but Bennie noticed that the cover man never moved. Yeah, the Brit’s gesture was meant to be conciliatory, but Bennie looked into his eye and saw nothing but danger. This was not a man accustomed to conciliation, let alone surrender.

“We don’t want any trouble,” the Brit said apologetically. “We’re here because I have a business proposition for you, one that I’m sure you will find most rewarding.”

“Who are you?”

“Forgive me, Mr. Reynolds.” Oh shit, Bennie thought, he knows my name, my
real
name! “I neglected to introduce myself. My name is Gregory Townsend.”

Old Bennie, who had worked closely with some of the meanest and most psychotic bikers in the world for over twenty years, swallowed a gasp of fear. A couple of years before, the United States had been in the grip of something even more terrifying
than today’s threat of nuclear war with China or North Korea: An ex-Belgian commando turned international arms smuggler named Henri Cazaux had been flying around the country, dropping high explosives or crashing airliners into several of the largest airports in the United States. The U.S. military was called in and had set up an extensive air defense network of radar planes, fighter jets, and surface-to-air missiles to try to stop him.

Cazaux had seemed invincible, unstoppable, until his body turned up in a West Virginia dump, with seven Black Talons fired into it from very close range, the superexpanding bullets shredding his body as if his insides had been chopped up in a blender. No other clues were found. The book was thankfully closed on Henri Cazaux and his reign of terror against the United States of America.

Speculation was rampant about the identity of Cazaux’s killer—an FBI hit man, the U.S. Marshals Service’s Fugitive Investigative Strike Team, even secret CIA counterespionage groups. But the most likely trigger man was the highest-ranking surviving member of Cazaux’s gang: his chief of plans and operations and trusted second in command, Gregory Townsend—a former British SAS commando and a fixture on Interpol’s most-wanted-criminal list for many years. And now the motherfucker himself was standing right in front of him.