Even though no Nakamura-owned commercial or private aircraft were allowed to land in Los Angeles–area airports, John Wayne Airport had for years been a negotiated exception. This Friday evening a modified FedEx A310/360 Nakamura courier-freight flight from Tokyo, with a stopover in Hawaii, had landed, refueled, and was awaiting a scheduled 7 p.m. takeoff, bound for Denver.
At five minutes before seven, the captain of the Nakamura aircraft requested a change in their flight plan to accommodate an 8 p.m. takeoff time. Tower personnel at John Wayne Airport forwarded the request to both the civilian Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale and the temporary Los Angeles Military Region Air Traffic Control located at the former Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, which was currently being operated as regional control center by the California Air National Guard for the duration of the military emergency. Both centers agreed to the one-hour delay. Along with that permission came the notice that military air traffic over the combat area currently centered on Lake Elsinore some fifty miles east of John Wayne Airport was so intense—and the evening military traffic out of LAX so busy—that all westbound commercial traffic from John Wayne was required to fly west out over the Pacific, northwest along the coast to a designated turning point near Morro Bay, and only then turn east by northeast, resuming their usual flight lanes to Denver at a point north and east of Las Vegas. All pilots were notified to refigure their fuel requirements accordingly.
The crew of the Nakamura aircraft was also notified that there would be no further delays granted this Friday night since, under local wartime regulations, John Wayne Airport would be shutting down for the night at 8:15 p.m. PDST.
At three minutes before 8 p.m., the Nakamura A310/360 started its engines and began taxiing to its takeoff position on Runway 19R. It had tested both engines and had requested final permission for takeoff when suddenly a California Highway Patrol cruiser pulled out onto the runway ahead of it, all of the police cruiser’s bubble lights flashing.
The A310/360 received permission to taxi onto the apron, although it was informed that it would have to be airborne in less than fifteen minutes or spend the night at John Wayne. It did not shut down its engines. Ground crews arrived in an old Ford electric pickup with Wollard Truck Model TLPH252 passenger stairs mounted on it and the aircraft opened its left front door. The CHP cruiser approached and stopped, its lights quit flashing, and Nick Bottom got out and came around to the driver’s side to talk to the newly appointed chief Ambrose at the wheel.
“Thanks, Chief,” said Nick, shaking the heavyset trooper’s hand.
“I’ll always be Dale to you, Nick,” said Ambrose. “I hope you find your boy.” The CHP vehicle drove off the tarmac as Nick climbed the steps to the aircraft. He favored his right side because of the injured ribs there.
THREE HOURS EARLIER, ADVISOR Daichi Omura had said to him, “If you go back to Denver, Bottom-san, you will die.”
“I have to go back, Omura-sama.”
“Hideki Sato will be waiting for you on the aircraft at John Wayne Airport, Bottom-san. You will never be out of his custody again for the short remnant of your life… if you try to go back.”
Nick had shaken his head and sipped the very fine single-malt Scotch Omura had provided. “I don’t think so, Omura-sama. Sato’s in Washington with Mr. Nakamura. They weren’t scheduled to get back to Denver until Saturday… tomorrow sometime. Plus, this flight’s coming from Tokyo via Hawaii. Mr. Nakamura himself told me that they didn’t have any flights going west from Denver to Los Angeles–area airports.”
“Sato will have to be there,” grunted the old man.
“Why is that, Omura-sama?”
“Because if you do not show up at John Wayne Airport tonight, Security Chief Sato’s job—Colonel Sato’s job—will be to enter the firestorm that is Los Angeles—my domain, Bottom-san—and find you, dead or alive. I understand Hiroshi Nakamura well enough to know this for a certainty. He will not let you escape if he can help it. Not now.”
Nick had shaken his head at that, but the words chilled him.
A CREW MEMBER BUTTONED up the hatch behind him as Nick stepped into a luxuriously appointed cabin just aft of the flight deck. The swiveling leather seats at the windows, deep-cushioned couches, and 3DHD flatscreens on the bulkheads would have been at home in a billionaire’s executive jet, but this space was larger.
Sato was seated and buckled in at one of the starboard leather seats that had a low table in front of it. He did not rise as Nick entered but gestured to the chair opposite him.
Nick settled gingerly into the full-grain leather seat and buckled his seat belt. Cabin lights dimmed as the A310/360 returned to the head of the runway and tested its engines again at full throttle. The pilot said something over the intercom in Japanese and the big aircraft hurtled down the runway, lifted off into the night, and banked steeply to the left, coming around to a west-by-northwest course out over the ocean.
Nick looked at his watch. It was 8:14 p.m. PDST.
THE FIRST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS— just getting into the city from the untowered landing field out east of the I-15—had been the most dangerous. But after surviving the slums and exodus of half a million panicked spanics and the gangs behind them, Nick was finally shot on a quiet side street in San Marino near Pasadena, in one of the most upper-class suburbs L.A. could offer.
It was more than fifty miles by car from this hillbilly Flabob Airport to his father-in-law’s neighborhood near Echo Park just northwest of the huge Homeland Security holding pen at Dodger Stadium. Using surface streets and alleys to keep out of the way of the fighting and massive evacuation, it was—Nick saw on the GPS mapping function of his phone—more than sixty miles with most of the route winding up through Ontario, Claremont, or Pomona, and down through south Pasadena. If he had to do it on foot, Nick thought, he might as well have started walking from Las Vegas. So the first thing he did was to steal an electric moped from a spanic kid who was just trying to flee the chaos behind his family, packed into an overloaded gelding SUV. Nick would have stolen the SUV, but the father—seeing the man with a gun emerge from the darkness—floored the rattling wreck of a vehicle, getting every dying amp he could from it while leaving his teenage son on the moped to a gunman’s mercy.
Nick used the Glock to wave the weeping kid off the moped, untied and tossed the bundled luggage to the now-howling teenager, and drove away without feeling the slightest hint of guilt. The father and family would return for the kid, even if they had to lash him to the roof rack with the rest of their belongings.
Probably.
The primitive display showed that the moped had been recently charged and had a range of two hundred miles. Nick told his phone to plot a bicycle-friendly trip to Echo Park and was informed that it would take him five and a half hours, but Nick knew that if he had to dodge fighters and fleeing civilians all the way, the trip would take at least twice as long.
Nick didn’t have the time for this shit. He knew now that he should have pulled his Glock on the pilot as they approached L.A. and demanded that the coward land them at some civilaviation field much closer to his destination—or even someplace like the Brookside Golf Course in Pasadena.
Cursing his own stupidity, Nick squatted on the undersized moped and goosed the little machine to its full speed of thirty miles per hour. Somehow the fact that the moped gave forth only a low electrical hum made it seem to go even slower.
To the west, northwest, and southwest, as Nick left the empty, dark airport grounds, all of Los Angeles looked as if it were on fire. Scores of helicopter gunships and TV news choppers flitted in front of the orange glow like bats fleeing a burning belfry. Ancient California Air National Guard A10 jet ground-support bombers were making runs on targets somewhere in Chino. The sound of the distant explosions arrived long after the tiny flashes.
For the first three hours of his circuitous route west toward the city, no one shot at him. He’d brought a ball cap that he tugged low so his ethnicity wasn?
??t obvious in the dark, and there was something about a grown man on a kid’s battery-powered moped—perhaps it was the knees higher than the handlebars—that made him a nonthreatening figure.
Even though it was after midnight, the freeways and surface streets were filled with fleeing civilians. Nick realized that he was seeing the tail end of several days of evacuation from L.A.—mostly from East L.A.—of hundreds of thousands of spanics, both residents who’d been there for many decades and hordes of the new immigrants who’d come north on the wave of reconquista victories. Nick caught only a few glimpses of the remnants of that Nuevo Mexican military force—clusters of battered Hummers forcing their way through the mobs of civilians in the night and the occasional N.M. helicopter roaring low above the freeways in an attempt to escape that was every bit as panicked and purposeless as the east and southeast surge of civilians.
Nick kept his phone GPS—he’d long ago named her Betty—constantly updating his route to keep him out of the path of these refugees, and Betty’s sexy voice whispered through his earbud to lead him down alleys across Claremont and Glendora, along empty bikepaths through Monrovia and Arcadia—most of the explosions and fighting seemed to be going on south of his route—and across the empty campus and soccer fields of Citrus College. The moped was happier on sidewalks than it was on streets.
Except for the military aircraft, there was no sign yet of the anglo military as the stars began to disappear behind him to the brightening east and the birds began to make their usual pre-sunrise clatter. Back in Glen Aven and southern Ontario, Nick had caught just enough glimpses of the shooting going on in the valley to the south to be sure that it was Aryan Brotherhood paramilitary, motorcycle gangs, Vietnamese and Chinese gangs from farther west and north, Mulholland mercenaries in armored Jeeps, and thousands of rioters from South Central L.A. whose parents and grandparents might have taken part in the Florence and Normandie fun forty years earlier. Leonard had described the ancient history of those riots to his daughter, and Dara, once calling the outbursts “the beginning of the modern era,” had passed on his account to Nick.
The gangs were looting and terrorizing the last of the refugees, but Nick saw enough to know that their primary goal was to burn down everything south of the Ventura Freeway and north of the Santa Ana Freeway. They appeared to be succeeding.
Nick had brought two water bottles and as many food bars as he’d been able to stuff in his jacket pockets and he sipped and munched as he drove west. The mobs of refugees were gone by the time he approached San Marino, the occasional police or anglo military presence visible only on primary roads and the entrance to freeways. As Nick headed west paralleling California Boulevard just north of the Huntington Botanical Gardens—the upscale neighborhoods were absolutely dark, their power obviously cut, as he wound along Betty’s chosen bikepaths and side streets—he congratulated himself on getting past the worst of it and essentially being home free.
Several shots hammered the predawn grayness. Nick felt a bullet bite the back of his left calf muscle even as a second slug killed the moped’s battery-driven motor.
Nick dumped the little bike on its side and rolled toward the gutter and a line of Dumpsters there as half a dozen more shots rang out. He scrabbled on all fours into a darker alley, ran half a block knowing that he was leaving a blood trail, and then crouched behind another Dumpster to check the damage.
The bullet had taken a lot of skin and some solid flesh but no real muscle. But it hurt like hell. Nick hiked up his pant leg and tied the wound off with a clean white handkerchief. He waited in the dark, Glock in hand, hoping that it was a random shot—or that, if they wanted the moped for some reason, his assailants would call it a morning when they saw they’d destroyed the little machine.
No such luck. They stalked him for the next half hour.
There were three of them—the big, stupid-sounding guy whom Nick thought of as the Linebacker, an older, skinny guy with the rifle whom he thought of as the Quarterback since he seemed to be literally calling the shots, and a greasy-haired teenager whom he thought of as Billy because he reminded Nick of the character Billy Clanton played by the young Dennis Hopper in the 1957 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
Nick hobbled south through front yards, dodging from tree to tree and wall to wall, with his three shooters following on foot. All three of them fired at him as he dodged and weaved across Orlando Road, hurtling a low fence and crashing his way into the 120 or so acres of the botanical gardens. The hunters each carried a backpack full of ammunition and seemed intent on firing it all off.
Nick had no idea what these idiots wanted of him… other than to make him dead. His best guess was that they had been playing cowboy for the duration of the Los Angeles fighting, raiding East L.A. neighborhoods at night just for the fun of killing someone. And they’d obviously gotten addicted to the killing. He had no other explanation for why they’d fired at him in quiet San Marino.
Nick had Betty bring up a map of the botanical gardens, but he’d been here about five years ago with his father-in-law, who’d had some academic business at the research library here. It was the week that Nick had brought Val out to live with Leonard. He could find his way to the library, but the historic structure was near the center of this large urban mix of forests, flower gardens, formal Japanese gardens, and meadows, and although there might be security guards at the library, Nick didn’t want to get them involved.
The shooting trio had RadioShack walkie-talkies but kept shouting back and forth to one another. This was great sport to them and they’d obviously been drinking or using drugs. It became clear that they weren’t comfortable stalking someone in these manicured woods and meadows—they’d probably spent a good part of the last week shooting people in urban settings—but then, Nick wasn’t comfortable being stalked in the woods either. He would have preferred an alley.
He soon realized that they were making noise and firing at random in order to herd him to their left, toward Oxford Road bordering the gardens to the east. Nick didn’t want to go back east. He had business to the west and south.
It was starting to get light in earnest now. He had to get this over with.
He’d come into an area where a Doric-columned circular mausoleum stood in the middle of a clearing. Nick hobbled as quickly as he could across the clearing but his trackers still had time to get off two shots. One tugged at his jacket and then he was in the trees and panting to catch his breath. He’d seen the muzzle flashes and knew that the hunters were directly across the clearing from him. He shouted, “What do you want from me?”
“Everything you got, pal,” shouted one of the men. The other two giggled.
“Let’s meet in the middle and settle this,” shouted Nick. He ducked low and began running as quickly as he could through the thick undergrowth, no longer heading away from the shooters, circling the clearing back to the west, in their direction. There was a park road only a few meters to the north and he knew they’d also want to use the maximum amount of cover as they attempted to flank him.
Nearing the west end of the circular clearing, Nick stopped, knelt, and slipped in a fresh magazine of ammo. He crouched low and chambered the first round as silently as he could.
All three men came out into the clearing, crouching and silent. They were moving too quickly for Nick to get a clean shot at all of them at once. Counting on the fact that they were amateurs—no matter how many men and women they’d killed in recent days—Nick shouted, “Hey!”
Soldiers, mercenaries, or professional killers would have kept moving, throwing themselves in different directions. These three amateurs froze, turned, and opened fire. Even the Quarterback had a pistol in his right hand—while he carried the rifle in his left—and was joining in the shooting.
Two slugs caught Nick in his lower right side, not penetrating the Kevlar-3 he wore under his shirt, but cracking some ribs, knocking the wind out of him, and spinning him around. He knelt in a combat firing crouch, ignored the fusillade of
bullets ripping branches just over his head, and fired eight times.
All three men went down hard. After a minute, seeing everyone’s hands empty in the increasing light of dawn, Nick crabwalked toward them, gun raised and steady in both hands.
He’d somehow managed to miss the great bulk of the Linebacker except for one high center-mass shot, but that had pulped the big man’s heart. Blood had exploded from the man’s mouth, ears, and eyes. He’d been dead before he hit the ground.
The Quarterback had taken two of Nick’s slugs center mass but it had been the third shot—a round, bloodless hole in the precise center of the ferret-faced man’s upper lip—that had done the job.
Billy Clanton had also absorbed three slugs but was still alive, writhing and curling in pain.
Nick kicked all the visible weapons into the bushes and crouched over the teenager.
“Help me, mister, please, help me, I hurt… oh, Jesus God, Jesus, it hurts… help me, please, for the love of Christ, mister, please…”
Nick studied the wounds. None was fatal in and of itself, but the boy would bleed out soon enough if he didn’t get medical attention. Nick was sure there’d be a medical station at the California Institute of Technology just a few blocks to the northwest.
“Where’s your car?” asked Nick, bending low so that he was hissing almost into the boy’s ear. “Where are the keys to your car?”