The car sped toward Sacramento-Mather Jetport. “We’ll have you airborne and out of here in ten minutes, Patrick,” Briggs told him.
“Change the plane’s routing,” Patrick said, his arm tight around his wife and child.
“Change it? To where?”
“Arkansas,” Patrick said. “I want Wendy, Paul, and Bradley out of this state. As far away and as fast as possible.”
Briggs nodded. “You got it, Patrick.” He couldn’t blame Patrick one bit for wanting to get his family as far away as he could from the madness and mayhem in Sacramento.
Behind Toby’s Market, E Street,
Rio Linda, California
that night
It was the only all-night convenience store for miles around. Despite being in one of the highest-crime-rate areas in all of northern California, however, Toby’s Market had experienced virtually no robberies or burglaries in over twenty years. The reason was simple: No one in his right mind would dare mess with a Satan’s Brotherhood establishment.
Behind the store and down a hundred-yard-long dirt driveway was a small, scruffy farm, with a ramshackle five-room house, several large storage sheds, and a small barn scattered around the property. Even though the market was in the middle of a semirural residential neighborhood, bikers could drive up to the market, grab a six-pack or bottle, then discreetly drive around back to the house without being noticed-assuming anyone even bothered to take notice. That night, more than a hundred motorcycles and another two dozen cars were parked around the farm behind the market. A special meeting of the Rio Linda chapter of the Satan’s Brotherhood Motorcycle Club was under way.
Almost two hundred members, pledge members, and guests of the Brotherhood gathered in the barn and looked on as the big German ex-commando explained the operation of the portable hydrogenator in halting English. The device was disguised as a typical covered eight-foot U-Haul trailer, complete with an authentic paint job and logos. A gasoline-powered generator had been detached from the trailer and set up thirty feet away.
“Is very simple,” the soldier explained. “You not touch any chemicals. You attach chemical tanks here and here… attach power plug here…” He worked the controls as he explained the hookup procedures, while a dozen senior Brotherhood members, highly experienced in cooking methamphetamine, stood right beside him watching every step. They would be the ones who would teach the other chapter members how to use the device. They marveled at its cleanliness, efficiency, and safety.
An hour later the tank was opened up, and the specialists examined the result of the first stage of the process. Inside the mixing tank were more than thirty pounds of clean, pure chloropseudoephedrine. “Is ready for hydrogenation,” the Aryan Brigade soldier said. “We leave inside. No touch, no filter, no dry. The machine, it do everything.” The Brotherhood cookers couldn’t believe it-thirty pounds of absolutely pure chloropseudoephedrine in the tank ready for hydrogenation, and they didn’t have to race against deadly sulfur dioxide or risk being burned by hydrochloric-acid gas. There was no smell, no residue outside the tank, nothing. The waste byproducts of the first reaction were collected inside a separate tank, ready for burial.
Even as the second step of the process was begun, discussions started about how the batch was going to be distributed, how much would go to each designated member, and how the money was going to be paid. Thirty pounds of almost-ready methamphetamine was worth between two and three hundred thousand dollars, maybe more, and every one of the members and pledges was arguing about getting his fair share-plenty of customers were out there waiting. As the hydrogenator was being sealed up and pressurized, money was already being collected.
“I wait here,” the German commando said. “We inspect product together. I am responsible for unit until you pay.”
“We want you to wait outside, Himmler,” said the president of the Brotherhood chapter. “We don’t need you listening in on our distribution plans.”
“Ich gehe nicht! I not leave until product is inspected!”
“You leave now because I tell you to leave!” the biker ordered. The unarmed German had no option. They gave him a bottle of whiskey and the woman of his choice to keep him company, then escorted him to the propane-refill station in front of Toby’s and told him to wait until summoned. A Brotherhood pledge was assigned to guard him.
While the commando and his guard took a seat on a picnic bench behind the propane tank, the biker woman went into Toby’s to pee, buy a pack of cigarettes, and chat with the clerk. She was gone no more than ten minutes, but when she came back, she found the Brotherhood pledge dead and the German gone. In panic, she dashed back to the barn to tell the Brotherhood members.
Just as she reached the barn, the world dissolved into a ball of blue-yellow fire and a searing blast of heat that she felt for a fraction of a second before she was vaporized. The mile-wide fireball consumed the barn, the farmhouse, Toby’s Market, the propane tank, and thirty houses and businesses surrounding the blast site. The column of fire stretched two thousand feet up into the night sky. The concussion shattered windows and awoke people from their sleep for miles around.
But that was not the only such blast. Throughout the night, in sites all over the state of California, enormous mushroom-cloud-like fireballs erupted without warning. In locations as far north as Chico, as far south as Los Angeles, as far east as Death Valley, and as far west as Oakland and San Francisco, huge explosions ripped the night sky, instantly killing hordes of drug cookers and dealers and not only wiping out members of the Satan’s Brotherhood, but devastating other biker gangs as well. In several areas, the methamphetamine hydrogenators were located in the basements of apartment complexes and in the middle of crowded urban areas. Hundreds of innocent bystanders and residents died in the blasts.
In a few short hours, the Satan’s Brotherhood Motorcycle Club, as well as much of the membership of several other biker gangs and many Mexican and Asian methamphetamine gangs, had virtually ceased to exist.
Chapter Three
Sacramento Convention Center, J Street,
Sacramento, California
Saturday, 7 March 1998, 0708 FT
In times of emergency anywhere in the city or county, the Sacramento Convention Center in the heart of the city was transformed into a crisis command center. In a matter of hours, telephone and radio networks were set up in several of the hospitality suites, with the brain trusts of the city and county administration in a command suite and other staff and support agencies in the others, all of them connected by phone, runners, and the Central Dispatch communications center. As the crisis grew, additional suites were commandeered. All the rooms were tied in to the various safety, maintenance, welfare, and administration offices throughout the county, each with its own command center in place. Representatives from outside state and federal agencies also came to the command suite as summoned.
The mayor of the city of Sacramento, Edward Servantez, strode into the side entrance of the convention center, escorted by a plainclothes police officer who had been assigned to him, as to most other major city officials, after the Sacramento Live! shooting. Servantez, a short, dark, handsome lawyer and former state legislator in his late fifties, was accustomed to starting his day early. Accompanying him this morning was one of his aides; the chief of police, Arthur Barona; and the city manager.
Servantez was in his third and last term as mayor of Sacramento, and as such he had been through several crisis-management-team exercises and a few real ones, mostly for natural disasters such as the devastating floods of 1986 and 1997. But no matter how many times he and his staff practiced or implemented the crisis-management plan, it always seemed to turn into a barely controlled bedlam. During the exercises, the staff would often call time-outs to discuss what they were doing wrong and how to get back on track, but it never helped. And during real emergencies, of course, there was no such thing as a time-out.