Private L.A. (13 page)

My instinct was to swim straight to him, to get him down and in the water. But I held on to my reeling sea sled and shouted into the microphone, “Del Rio burned and injured on pylon below explosion. Probable spinal injury. Rankin, report. Do you see anyone coming from your position? Chief Fescoe?”

But there was no answer, only the soaring chatter of the L.A. sheriff, police, and fire departments being summoned to the scene. Then the Kid came on, choked up. “It’s Bud, Jack. I saw him thrown off the roof. I think he’s—”

In my peripheral vision, I caught a large, swift, dark blur, like some huge bird swooping out of the night just northwest of the pier. He rode a short, stubby black surfboard. He’d kicked his feet into bindings of some sort and was dressed much as I was, head to toe in a black wet suit.

But instead of a lineman’s belt, he wore a full harness that connected him to a taut black sail about six feet by four that bellied out like a spinnaker in front of him. I figured he was traveling forty, maybe fifty miles an hour, some kind of kiteboarding genius; he knifed into the light surrounding the pier, spotted the dry bags, tacked hard toward them, leaned into his harness, and snatched the first bag up. He blew south into the smoke before I could utter a word.

“Pickup!” I shouted at last, scrambling to get aboard the Sea-Doo.

I was straddling the sled, hitting the start, when the second kiteboarder appeared from the northwest and snagged the second dry bag in a move as brilliant as the first rider’s.

The Sea-Doo roared to life. I tugged a knife from a calf sheath, cut the mooring line, drifted, and then hit the throttle. In a split second the sled gathered power, blew seawater through its turbine, and leaped from beneath the pylons like a bucking horse freed of a chute.

THE SEA-DOO LAUNCHED
off the first roller at an odd angle, which caused it to cant hard left and down, the turbine whining against the air. Throwing my weight the exact opposite way, I managed to level it before skipping up the face of the coming wave and out into the air again.

I’d ridden a similar sled chasing the three sisters who’d gone on a killing spree at the London Olympics four months before. But then I’d been out on the Thames, a tidal river, not in this chaos of waves that surrounded the pier.

The kiteboarders had danced across swells. I crashed through them past the pier, glancing at the scorched, smoking breach on its southern flank and the blown-out windows at Ruby’s Diner. “This is Morgan,” I shouted. “Two of them riding black kiteboards, bearing southwest of the pier. In pursuit. Need support.”

“We are one minute out, Morgan,” came the voice of one of the sheriff’s helicopter pilots.

“Baywatch vessels converging on your position,” came a second voice. “Time of intercept two minutes ten.”

Del Rio had had powerful search lamps mounted on the handlebars of the Sea-Doo. I flipped them on the second I broke free of the halo of light surrounding the pier.
Rick’s back’s broken
, I thought as I disappeared into the darkness.

I’d called in Del Rio’s condition and position. But there was nothing more I could do for him other than make sure the people behind the killings, the extortion, and now this bombing were made to pay.

I kept the throttle wide open, peering along the brilliant beam of light that shot almost a quarter mile out in front of me. Had they stayed on this same bearing? Or had they tacked? And if they had tacked, were they heading inland, or farther out to sea? Was there a boat waiting for them? A vehicle? Where …?

The beam picked up a shadow ahead of me in the waves. It was moving to my left, heading east for shore about two hundred and fifty yards out. I arced after the shadow, found the waves at my back, and surfed down them so fast that it felt like flight.

At one hundred and fifty yards I caught one of the kiteboarders fully in my beam, his back to me. He was cutting across the face of the swells. I could see the dry bag lashed there beside him on the board.

He looked over his shoulder, back at my light, and for a second I was sure he was going to draw a weapon and open fire. Instead, he tacked hard, came about, came right at me as fast as I was bearing down on him. It was a game of chicken I felt sure I’d win. The Sea-Doo weighed more than four hundred and fifty pounds. I doubted the board and kite weighed more than thirty.

I could hear intensifying chatter on the radio inside my wet suit hood. There were fatalities back on the pier. I also could hear the choppers closing now. Their searchlights joined mine, throwing a near-blinding glare on the kiteboarder, who never hesitated and never slowed.

At thirty-five yards, I ducked down, preparing myself for impact.

At twenty-five yards, a wave came between us. I lost him for a second.

At ten yards, he reappeared, launched off the crest, soared up and over me at least three stories, dangling below the kite, as calm as a bird.

THE MOVE FLOORED
me. I’d seen kiteboarders in action before, but this guy was a superstar.

I down-throttled, drifted the Sea-Doo one hundred and eighty degrees, and accelerated, following the beams of the helicopters playing on the boarder. He’d landed and was speeding out to sea.

“This is the L.A. Sheriff’s Department!” one of the pilots barked out of a loudspeaker. “Drop your kite.”

The boarder never slowed, but I was gaining ground again. Fifty yards separated us when the other kiteboarder appeared out of nowhere, launching from a wave to my left, and tried to take my head off with the steel fin that jutted from the bottom of his board. I ducked and almost dumped the sled but managed to keep it upright, right there on the verge of disaster.

I’d had enough by that point, and I had immunity, so I tore open the shoulder holster, freed the Glock, and went back after the first boarder, mindful that the second might reappear at any moment. These people had caused mass death. I would not hesitate to shoot one of them, aim for the legs, break them down for capture. But then I remembered what else was in the dry bags.

“This is Morgan,” I shouted. “Tell Kloppenberg to blow the tanks. Repeat, tell Sci to blow the tanks.”

Before there was any response, the second kiteboarder flew through the air and landed in front of me, skimmed up beside his partner, both heading straight up the face of the oncoming, cresting wave, a ten-footer easy.

I instantly realized I’d probably be thrown into a backflip if I stayed on their course, and I cut the sled left where the shoulder of the wave wasn’t breaking yet, watching the two kiteboarders reach the crest. The helicopter search lamps were on them when they exploded off the wave and out into space, sailing on their kites, thirty, maybe forty feet in the air.

Right at the apex of their flight, Sci triggered the CO
₂
tanks.

They released with such force that the dry bags instantly inflated, straining against the cords that held them to the boards. The sudden change in aerodynamics threw both kiteboarders out of control.

The gusting wind caught the kites at the same time the dry bags burst, throwing a small amount of currency and a large amount of cut newspaper out into the sky like so much confetti. The boarders went flipping through the night, board over kite, somersaulting until the blade wash of one of the helicopters caught and hurled them like rag dolls straight down, twenty feet, through the swirling paper bills.

They crashed hard against the sea.

I sped up, sure now that I was looking for bodies, injured or dead. I spotted the first one facedown, partially covered by his kite. One of the Baywatch boats was on the scene now, heading for the other kiteboarder.

I grabbed mine by the back of his harness and yanked him up out of the water alongside the Sea-Doo. He hung there a second, then started choking and hacking. After several moments, he looked up at me in a daze.

“What the fuck, dude?” he moaned. “Blowing us out of the sky was definitely not part of the script.”

AT TEN O’CLOCK
that evening, forty minutes after I’d pulled one of the kiteboarders from the sea, county lifeguards and fire-fighters began to hoist the backboard and litter bearing Rick Del Rio up over the south railing of the Huntington Beach Pier, twenty yards east of where the bomb had detonated.

The smoke was gone, doused by the rain and fire hoses, but a harsh, charred chemical stench hung in the air as investigators worked to cordon off the area and document the carnage the explosion had wrought. Media helicopters circled the pier, filming the aftermath for the eleven o’clock news.

Six people were dead, including my surveillance specialist Bud Rankin, who’d been nearly decapitated by flying chunks of cement. The other five were an entire young family from Oxnard, the Deloits, husband, wife, and three kids under the age of ten. They’d been inside the diner at a table by the window having ice cream sundaes.

Another ten were injured, including Chief Mickey Fescoe, who’d been briefly knocked unconscious and had suffered cheek and arm lacerations. But he’d refused to be taken to the hospital and had just started toward me with a stone-faced Sheriff Lou Cammarata when Del Rio’s litter appeared at the railing.

“Morgan,” Cammarata growled at me.

I held up a finger and went to Del Rio’s side.

His face was burned, contused. He was in a lot of pain but alert. He focused on me immediately.

“You good?” I asked, feeling the enormity of the moment now. Del Rio was more a brother to me than my own brother. We’d been through hell together many times and had always survived and recovered. But he’d had a feeling about this gig. He’d tried to stop me from taking it on. The idea that now he might be paralyzed was almost more than I could take.

He shook his head stoically. “Nothing from the waist down, Jack.”

I felt my stomach drop forty stories. “Nothing yet,” I said. “Stay positive.”

“Kind of hard when you’ve been on the wrong end of a yo-yo,” he replied. “You get them?”

“Yes and no. I’ll explain later. I’ll see you at the hospital. Semper Fi.”

He nodded, said with little conviction, “Hoorah, Jack.”

Two EMTs lifted Del Rio onto a gurney and slid him into the rear of the latest ambulance to back down the pier. The doors closed and he was gone.

“Morgan, you’ve ruined us,” Sheriff Cammarata said in my ear.

I pivoted to find him glaring at me. “And how have I done that?”

He gestured angrily back toward shore. “The other end of this pier is lousy with media. They’re everywhere overhead. They’re going to find out what happened and …” He looked like he wanted to throttle me. I understood why.

Cammarata was up for reelection in less than week. And Fescoe worked at the whim of the mayor. The chief was studying me as if trying to decide whether I was somebody to be saved or tossed to the wolves.

Struggling to keep my own anger under control, I said, “I don’t have immunity from the fact that I lost a man and may have seen the crippling of another. But no one, including you, Sheriff, or you, Chief, anticipated a bomb. Why would we have? This was supposed to be an extortion pickup, and No Prisoners turned it into an attack. Up front, he decided that the money was not going to be in those bags. Up front, he planned to kill as many as he could.”

“How the hell do you know that, Jack?” Fescoe demanded.

“ONE OF THE
kiteboarders stayed conscious aboard the Baywatch boat that brought us in,” I said. “I questioned him until he was put in an ambulance.”

“What’s the story?” the sheriff demanded.

I told them what I knew. Danny Stern and Willis Allen were boyhood friends, originally from Hood River, Oregon, and now lived on the Big Island of Hawaii. They’d each won major kiteboarding competitions in the past two years and had appeared in several extreme-sport films.

Two months ago a man named Richard North had called Stern. North said he was a producer of action films who’d seen footage of Stern and Allen kiteboarding off Oahu. He said he wanted them to perform a stunt for a movie he was making. The fee was fifty thousand dollars apiece.

“North directed them to a website that seemed legit, so they accepted,” I told Fescoe and Cammarata. “Stern said North bought airline tickets, flew them over five days ago, met them at LAX. He described North as a big man with long blond hair, beard, and sunglasses.”

“No Prisoners,” Fescoe said.

I nodded. “He was driving a late-model BMW. He brought them here and gave them three pages of a script for a film called
Take No Prisoners.
In the script, dry bags containing money are dropped off the pier as part of a ransom deal. Then there’s a diversionary explosion. In come the two kiteboarders. North told them to snag the bags and then improvise from there.”

Cammarata’s scowl deepened. “What do you mean, improvise?”

“North said he wanted their moves to unfold instinctively and raw after the pickup, like on a reality-television show,” I replied. “Stern said he and Allen both knew they’d be chased after grabbing the bags. Their job was to evade capture as long as possible.”

“Which means you’re right, Jack,” Fescoe said. “No Prisoners, or North, or whatever he calls himself, had no intention of accepting the extortion payment.”

“I suspect he thought you’d do just what you did: pack the bags with a lot more newspaper than hundred-dollar bills.”

“But he couldn’t have
known
that,” Cammarata protested.

“Does it matter? He obviously believed it and acted accordingly.”

Both men fell silent, brooding on what I’d told them.

“In any case, it’s all out of our hands now. FBI and ATF agents will be taking control,” I said. “The scenario has gone beyond what any of us could be expected to handle.”

“Bullshit,” Cammarata said. “The Feds may come in. They may offer expertise. But this is my county.”

“And my city,” Fescoe said. “Yours too, Jack.”

“I’ll think on that,” I said. “Right now, I’m heading to UCLA Medical Center to find out if my best friend will ever walk again.”