“What the heck is going on? Did you guys knock out the power?” yelled the Mainichi front gate guard. He had come out of the guard shack and called out to a worker in a white hard hat who looked like he was from the power company, although it was hard to see in the dark, with the only light coming from the moon and stars.
Smiling as big as ever, Dennis Kedrov walked up to the guard on the other side of the massive steel gate.
“The phone is out, the radio won’t work, and my cell phone exploded,” said the guard in disbelief.
“Some kind of super blackout,” said Dennis, looking closely at the gate. “Don’t think your electric gate is going to open anytime soon, either.”
“How will I get home?”
Dennis then casually shot the guard three times in the chest. “Don’t think you’re going home, except to see Jesus.”
Dennis signaled with a flashlight to the men who had just driven the lowboy trailer up to Mainichi, and the D10 bulldozer roared to life. The tracked dozer drove off the trailer, pivoted, and quickly bore down on Mainichi’s front gate. With it’s scoop lifted to use as a battering ram, the bulldozer, whose engine produced 700 horsepower, easily knocked down the gate and drove on toward the building itself.
Dennis’s men swarmed in, flanking the bulldozer, as other men drove down the dark street in both directions and blocked it with their big bucket trucks.
A guard stepped out of Mainichi’s front door and stood still, shocked by the sight of the dozer closing in. He reached for his weapon but was cut down before he could remove it from his holster.
Dennis spoke into his two-way radio over the roar of the dozer’s engine. “Camel, this is Tiger, copy.”
“Tiger, scratch two inside.”
“Camel, scratch two outside. So three more inside.”
“Hit the first waypoint; I’m clear,” said Jerry.
The bulldozer operator had a GPS unit taped to the windshield. Jerry had long ago provided GPS waypoints—very specific saved coordinates—so the D10 made for the first waypoint and drove right through the reinforced wall of Mainichi Auction House.
“Scratch two more inside,” came the radio traffic from Jerry in the building.
“Roger. One remaining inside,” said Dennis.
“The Sandia bomb landed in the vacant lot just behind Mainichi. I’m still reading the GPS signal,” said Jen into her headset as she monitored developments from her post inside the hangar at McCarran Airport. “Could the bomb have survived impact?”
Kit and Yulana both wore headsets in the MD 530F, as they cautiously approached the target area. “That’s possible, Jen. Intact, unexploded bombs that have been dropped from airplanes during past wars are uncovered fairly frequently. Buzz, are you copying this traffic?”
“Affirmative,” said Buzz
“Before you and Angel leave the area, try to get the remnants of the device,” said Kit.
“We’ll try,” said Buzz into a handheld radio, as he slowed the pickup truck on West Post Road. “We’re coming up on a roadblock.”
Angel swept the area ahead of them using the scope on an M4 rifle. “I’m counting three armed men next to the truck.”
Kit used forward-looking infrared optics to scan the Mainichi compound as he hovered the helicopter. “Jen, call Metro PD and tell them a bulldozer is knocking down the walls to the building right now,” said Kit. “Buzz, take out that roadblock; I’ll get the roadblock at the other end of the street.”
“Look!” said Yulana. “There’s another helicopter.”
“We got a bird touching down inside the fence at Mainichi. I’ll bet it’s Popov, here to take the loot,” said Kit as he nosed the copter in for a landing between one of the truck blockades and the Mainichi building.
CHAPTER 38
Buzz crouched, hiding in the truck bed, as Angel drove the battered old truck with salsa music blaring from the radio right up to the bucket truck blocking the road. Popov’s men shined lights into his eyes and yelled, “Go back!”
Angel smiled and waved and blabbered on in rapid-fire Puerto Rican Spanish. He stopped the truck and slowly got out, making sure to keep his hands visible to them but without drawing attention to that fact.
“I must to go clean!” said Angel with a thick accent. “I good clean for my boss!”
The Russians didn’t have orders to kill people, just not to let them pass. The burly leader stepped forward, hiding a gun under his jacket. “Come back in one hour. Big problem here right now.”
“One hour?” asked Angel, looking to the faces of the three men he clocked at the blockade. “Okay, I go back.” As Angel turned from them, the Russians relaxed.
But Angel had a gun under his jacket, too, and he simultaneously pulled it and spun, and in less than two seconds, literally, he had shot all three men in the head.
Buzz popped up from the truck bed with an M4 to cover Angel, but he’d gotten them all.
“Good shooting, as usual, mijo. Grab the keys from the truck and let’s go!”
Angel pulled the keys from the ignition of the bucket truck and then climbed into the pickup, as Buzz slowly rolled past and onward toward Mainichi Auction House.
A hundred yards away, Buzz stopped the truck, and he and Angel moved forward on opposite sides of the street. They immediately came under fire from thugs guarding the front gate area.
Just as Popov got out of the R66, Dennis realized his men were engaging targets on the street, so he ran to his boss.
“Viktor, it seems there’s another player at the roulette table tonight. Please take cover.”
Popov looked over with a scowl. “Bennings.”
“I would think so.”
“Where are the diamonds?”
“Give me sixty seconds.” Dennis sprinted in through the huge, gaping hole in the building’s wall and disappeared into the dark cavern.
Dennis held a small night-vision monocular to his eye as he ran. He followed the booming thunder of the D10 smashing steel and concrete, but he already knew where it was going; he’d memorized the blueprints and waypoints for the attack. He rounded a corner and came upon the dozer as it smashed through another wall.
“Stop!” yelled Jerry to the driver. “That’s good!”
Using a gargantuan bulldozer to access the diamonds was kind of an on-steroids version of a smash-and-grab jewelry store heist. Jerry and several thugs lit up the large private vault with portable lights and quickly went to work emptying dozens of slide-out, velvet-lined trays of fine diamonds from a standing cabinet. They dumped the contents of each tray into a black valise on a table as Dennis watched.
In seconds the job was finished. Dennis stepped forward, closed the valise, and handed it to one of the thugs. “Run fast and get this to Viktor. All of you go with him!”
Dennis motioned for the dozer operator to come down from the cab. “Follow them!”
“What about me?” asked Jerry, the inside man.
“A one-million-dollar bonus. Ride with me in the bulldozer, you can—”
“Jerry!” called a voice from the darkness.
As Jerry and Dennis turned, three shots rang out, all hitting Jerry in the chest. Dennis emptied his gun at a dark form, which then fell into a pool of light.
“You didn’t scratch the last guard, Jerry.”
Jerry lay on the dust-covered floor, gasping for breath. Dennis stood over him and reloaded his gun. “You could have had a million dollars, my friend.” Dennis then put two rounds into Jerry’s head.
Dennis climbed into the cab of the idling D10, grabbed the controls, pivoted the beast, and powered it right through a wall.