“All right, all right, I’m in. I don’t know how in hell you expect you and a hundred hired guns to go up against five thousand Brothers, but I’m in.” Bennie turned toward the biker leg-breakers: “Hey, you guys, put ‘ em down. These guys are…”

It lasted only a few seconds, but Bennie saw it all as if in slow motion:

Sure as shit, the bikers pulled their weapons, one a shotgun, the other a pistol. Never mind that Bennie was standing in their line of fire, the assholes! And they were pretty far away for a gunfight, well over thirty yards. If they thought at all, they were probably thinking that they could scare the intruders off with a shotgun blast into the ground or a few pistol rounds over their heads.

The German had the bikers zeroed in long before they leveled their guns. He withdrew a small machine pistol from his coat and pulled the trigger three times. The first three-round burst missed, but it caused both guys to freeze-not flee, not run for cover, not dive for the ground, just freeze. They made easy targets then, and the next two bursts did not miss. The biker with the shotgun pulled the trigger on his weapon seconds before his lifeless body pitched over backward and hit the ground.

The echoes of the brief gun battle were still ringing in Bennie’s ears when he opened his eyes and saw Reingruber trot over to the bikers to check whether they were still breathing. Apparently one still was; he was dispatched with a single bullet to the brain. Then the German put a single round into the other one just for insurance. “Sie sind tot, Herr Oberst,” Reingruber said.

“Sehr gut, Major,” Townsend said wearily. “I hoped that could be avoided.” He had never reached for his own weapon, Bennie noticed. “Now, then, Mr Reynolds, I suggest we get our fat friends there out of sight before any curious spectators arrive.” A stunned Bennie didn’t say a word as he was led over to the gruesome sight. Reingruber’s rounds were all neatly centered in each biker’s torso, the spread no more than three or four inches. “I have some men on patrol in the woods,” said Townsend, withdrawing a walkie-talkie from his jacket. “I’ll send them in to…”

“Wait!” Bennie yelled. He whirled toward his trailer hydrogenator unit, his eyes bugging out, and grabbed Townsend’s left arm. “Gas! I smell gas! That shotgun blast must’ve put a hole in the hydrogenator! Run for your goddamn lives!”

The three men ran upwind of the meth cooker until Bennie could run no more. He collapsed behind a tree some two hundred yards away from the hydrogenator. Townsend and Reingruber weren’t even winded.

Townsend spat an order in German into his walkie-talkie, warning his other men to stay away from the hydrogenator and take cover, but to keep it in sight at all times. Then he turned back to Bennie. “That was quite a little jog, Mr Reynolds. What in bloody hell was it all about?”

All three of them were behind sturdy oak trees, but the blast still knocked them off their feet. They felt the searing heat as the hydrogen fireball swept above them. Then they looked up. The grass and the trees around them had been blackened by the intense heat and the fireball-even the hair on the back of Reingruber’s head was singed. The truck, the hydrogenator unit, and the two bikers were indistinguishable black lumps in the middle of the charred field. Every standing object for two hundred feet around the hydrogenator had been leveled, even trees with trunks up to three inches in diameter.

“Well then,” said Townsend as he picked himself up off the ground and surveyed the blast area. “This will be a good place for the helicopter to pick us up.”

“Jeez, my cooker!” Bennie shouted. “That was my best portable fucking lab, man! That was fifty, sixty grand, up in smoke! My truck, my chemicals, the product!…”

“We will have to get you some more working capital, won’t we, Mr Reynolds?” Townsend said, as if he had decided to order a nice bottle of wine. “We should start with at least one million dollars. That should get you under way building the first ten reactors we need, plus provide us with sufficient operating funds.”

“How in hell are you gonna get a million dollars, Townsend?” Bennie shouted. This was crazy. “You gonna cook up enough speed to raise that kind of cash? It’ll take you years, man.”

A helicopter appeared out of nowhere over the trees, swooping down over the blast area in front of them. Townsend waited until the racket died down. “We will be back in operation within a month, Mr Reynolds,” he replied crisply. “And you will address me as Colonel or Oberst from now on. I run my organization like a military unit, and even my civilian subordinates must comply. Now, the fewer questions you ask from now on, the better. Follow Major Reingruber aboard that helicopter, find a seat, strap yourself in, and keep your damn mouth shut.”

Sacramento, California

Friday, 19 December 1997, 2146 FT

Patrick Shane McLanahan stood at the head of the long table and raised his glass of Cuvйe Dom Pйrignon. “A toast.”

He waited patiently as the sexy young waitress, Donna, finished filling all the glasses-she was spending a lot of time at the other end of the table with his brother, Paul, he observed with a smile. When everybody was ready, he continued, “Ladies and gentlemen, please raise your glasses to our honored graduate, my little brother, Paul.” There was a rustle of laughter around the long linen-covered table at Biba’s Trattoria in downtown Sacramento. Patrick’s “little” brother, Paul, had seven inches and thirty pounds on him.

The brothers were as different as could be, on the inside as well as the outside. Patrick was of just below average height, thick and muscular, fair-haired, a masculine and worldly version of their soft-spoken, sensitive mother. Patrick had graduated from California State University at Sacramento with a degree in engineering and a commission in the United States Air Force, then was lucky enough to stay in Sacramento for the next eight years, becoming a navigator student, B-52 Stratofortress navigator, radar navigator-bombardier, and instructor radar navigator.

After winning his second consecutive Fairchild Trophy in annual “Giant Voice” Air Force bombing competitions, confirming his reputation as the best bombardier in the US Air Force, Patrick was selected for a special assignment as a flight-test engineer at a secret Air Force base in central Nevada-and then virtually disappeared. Everyone assumed he had been assigned to test top-secret warplanes at the Air Force’s super-secret air base in the deserts of central Nevada, called the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, or HAWC, better known by its unclassified nickname, Dreamland. No one really knew exactly what he was up to, where he was assigned, or what he did to get promoted from captain to lieutenant colonel in such a short period of time.

Then, just as suddenly, he was retired and back in Sacramento tending bar at the family pub with his new wife, Wendy, a civilian electronics engineer who had been seriously injured in an aircraft accident-again, there was very little explanation. No one knew exactly what had happened to Patrick or Wendy, or why two such successful and rewarding careers suddenly ended. Patrick said little about it to anyone.

But then, Patrick preferred not to talk about himself or call attention to himself in any way. He was a loner, a book-worm, and the “go-to” guy everyone wanted on their team, but who never would have been chosen as team captain. He even preferred solo sports and pastimes, like weight lifting, cycling, and reading. Although he was a fit and hearty forty-year-old, he could not bowl a strike or hit a softball to save his life.