“Police! Freeze!” Patrick turned. Two plainclothes cops with gold badges hanging from their necks were taking cover just outside the back door, aiming what looked like very large automatic pistols at him. “Hands up! Turn and face the wall! Now!”
Patrick ran a system self-test. Battery levels were still in the green, but down to less than two hours’ endurance. He had only had the suit on for less than an hour-must be a problem with the power-reserve indicators. Taking all those gun blasts certainly didn’t help. He could probably withstand these cops emptying their guns on him, but he couldn’t take the chance of more cops showing up and his power draining down into the reserves or to emergency levels. He would then have no choice but to surrender.
“I’m unarmed,” Patrick told the cops. He raised his hands, palms out, so they could see they were empty. “I’m leaving now. Don’t shoot me. I might hurt you if you shoot, and I don’t want to hurt the police.”
“Shut up, turn, and face the wall!” one of the cops yelled. Patrick started walking out the door, hands raised.
“Oh shit,” the second cop muttered, “he’s not going to stop. I heard gunshots in there-do we shoot this asshole?”
“He doesn’t have a gun, dammit,” said the first cop. “I don’t see any weapons.” He shouted again for the guy to freeze, but he kept on coming.
“Fuck,” said his partner, holstering his weapon. He shouted, “Cover me!” and ran full speed into Patrick like a charging linebacker.
The first cop heard a dull clunk when the two bodies collided. The guy was knocked backward into the wall by the flying tackle, but his buddy lay facedown on the floor and wasn’t moving. The guy simply got on his feet, took a second, as if regaining his balance, raised his hands again, and started for the door, careful not to step on the unconscious cop.
“Freeze!” the first cop shouted again, aiming his 9-millimeter SIG. “Stop right there or I’ll shoot!” He had made the decision to shoot; his partner was down. At Patrick’s next step, he fired three rounds-two in the chest, one in the head. He heard the scream as Patrick collapsed on his back.
The cop grabbed his portable radio and keyed the mike with a shaking hand, keeping his gun aimed. “KMA, Sam One-Niner, shots fired, officer down, officer down, one suspect down, send cover and an ambu-”
He broke off in midword, gaping as the guy in the helmet crawled to his feet, held on to the wall for support for a moment, then walked toward the door.
This time the shot hit somewhere in the torso, but after reeling back against the wall as before, the guy pulled himself up, pushed the cop out of the way, and stumbled out into the alley. The arm that shoved him felt like a steel bar, but by now he was so stunned, the guy could’ve used a feather.
“Mother of God!” the cop muttered. He followed the guy outside, his smoking pistol still leveled at him, but a small crowd had formed out in the alley, so he had to lower the gun and decock it. The crowd let the guy trot past them and down the alley, his gait improving with every step until he was sprinting by the time he vanished out of sight.
Torn between pursuit and his downed partner, the cop retrieved his radio and mashed the mike button: “KMA, Sam One-Niner, the 245 suspect…” Shit, how in hell was this going to sound on the radio? He’d just reported that the suspect was down-now he was running down the street?… “Suspect is on foot heading west down the alley behind the Bobby John Club, heading toward Fairfield Street. All units be advised, the 245 suspect is wearing a black leather jacket, dark coveralls, some kind of backpack, and a full-face motorcycle helmet. Suspect… shit, suspect does not appear to be armed but should be considered dangerous.”
At Del Paso Boulevard, Patrick ran left onto Fairfield Street. Using the thrusters in his boots, he leaped to the second-story roof of an abandoned printing shop, then paused to do another system self-test. Battery levels were already in the emergency reserve range. The emergency reserves were for escaping and survival, not for fighting. If he encountered any police now, he’d have no choice but to surrender.
Patrick called up and interrogated the discrete global positioning satellite search function on the heads-up display inside his helmet. A tiny red blip appeared, with a direction and range to the target. The red blip was Jon Masters, riding inside a specially equipped AMC Hummer they were using as a mobile support vehicle. Both Patrick’s suit and the Hummer carried satellite navigation transponders, for each of them to see and track the other’s location. Masters was now less than two-tenths of a mile away, cruising around the target area and trying to look as inconspicuous as a six-thousand-pound Hummer wagon could look on a city street in the middle of the night.
Using the thrusters, Patrick hopped from roof to roof along Fairfield and Forrest streets until he got to Arden Way. He waited on the roof of an apartment building until he saw the Hummer moving closer. Then he leaped off the roof, landing on a patch of lawn-right beside a startled guy just getting out of his car in the parking lot not forty feet away. Patrick ignored him. Fifteen seconds later, when the thrusters had recharged, he made another leap across the parking lot and lit down a few feet away from the Hummer as it slowly cruised down Arden Way. He pulled open the door as it stopped; then Jon hit the gas and sped away as fast as the big all-terrain vehicle could take them.
After they crossed the river and headed down Sixteenth Street south toward the downtown area, Jon finally asked, “How did it go?”
“Great! It went great!” Patrick said, removing the helmet. Remembering his awful visage when he had taken off the helmet after the demonstration, Jon had been afraid of what he might see this time, but Patrick looked pretty normal. “Everything worked great!”
They had installed a portable gasoline-powered generator in the back of the Hummer, and Patrick started it up with a push of a button, then brought a cable around and plugged it into a receptacle on a bottom corner of his backpack. Although he couldn’t monitor the power levels without the helmet on, he knew from testing that it would take thirty to sixty minutes to recharge the backpack power unit.
“We’re done for the night, right?” Jon asked hopefully. “You got what you were looking for?”
“Hell no-we do it the way we planned!” Patrick answered. “I got a lot of good information, but I need more. The next stop might give us the rest of what we need to bust these guys.”
“There seemed to be a lot of cops around…”
“We’ll do it the way we planned, Jon,” Patrick repeated. “We’ll go to a wider radius to keep this vehicle away from the next location. If all else fails, I’ll meet you at Sac Executive Airport, at our rendezvous point. I can hide in the hangar or up on the tower.”
Jon fell silent. It had to be played out…
Rosalee Subdivision,
Elder Creek neighborhood,
Sacramento, California
A short time later
Sometimes it took days to find the best location for parking a surveillance van. Ideally, the crew wanted a spot a block or so down the street from the target address, close enough to see and photograph everyone entering or leaving the premises with a medium telephoto lens or to look inside an open garage, but not so close as to attract attention to itself or the target. Even in better neighborhoods, the van had to be moved periodically so it didn’t attract attention or become a target for thieves or vandals.
Although it only involved sitting, waiting, watching, and listening, doing a surveillance was tough, uncomfortable, tiring work. Depending on the neighborhood and the nature of the operation, the cops doing the surveillance could sometimes switch with other officers for food or relief breaks. But a lot of times they were stuck inside the van for the entire eight-hour shift, forced to use “piddle packs,” portable toilets, garbage bags, or soft drink cans to do their thing.