Tin Man Read online

  PROLOGUE

  PORTOLA, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 1997

  Those in the business call it the pour-and-run

  method, and it is one of the most dangerous and

  explosive chemical processes ever practiced.

  But Bennie the Chef was the master of this dangerous

  arcane art:

  In a large glass tub, Bennie mixed seventeen

  pounds of ephedrine---crushed over-the-counter diet

  pills dissolved in chloroform-with a toxic, corrosive

  chemical liquid called thionyl chloride. The

  combination immediately produced toxic sulfur

  dioxide, corrosive hydrogen chloride gas, and a substance

  called I-phenyl-i-chloro-2-methylaminopropane

  or chloropseudoephedrine for short. They call

  it pour-and-run because even in the open air only a

  full-body antiexposure suit and an industrialstrength

  ventilator or positive-flow breathing system

  will save anyone within fifty yards from being

  asphyxiated by the sulfur dioxide fumes or severely

  burned by caustic acid. Bennie never used any of

  this gear, so it became a test to see if he could run at

  least half the length of a football field while holding

  his breath. He ran the race with a towel over his

  face, because if the hydrogen chloride gas touches

  any wat r, even t e tiny its o moisture in t e eyes

  or nostrils, it instantly produces hydrochloric acid

  so corrosive that it will eat away an eyeball in seconds

  If he survived the test, he'd be several thousand

  dollars richer. If not, he'd be alive just long enough

  to taste the blood in his throat as his lungs dissolved

  , like a sheet of paper thrown into a fire.

  Fifty-year-old Bennie, withered and emaciatedlooking

  , was nearly exhausted after his dash to the

  edge of the trees-but he made it. His mixing tub

  was under a lean-to facing into the wind, and he

  could see the poisonous gas streaming out from the

  tub and collecting under the shelter. Ten minutes

  later, it was safe to approach the tub, and he began

  stirring the mixture.

  His two guards, both tall, beefy, bearded men

  with long hair, huge beer bellies, Doc Martens asskicker

  boots, and black leather vests, could never

  hope to make the run, so they were already a safe

  distance away, smoking dope and drinking beer.

  Both were full-fledged Satan's Brotherhood motorcycle

  gang members, wearing their "colors"-the

  leather vests with the Brotherhood logo and the

  upper rocker that read "Brotherhood" and the bottom

  rocker that read "Oakland" on the back, and

  Satan's Brotherhood tattoos on their left arms. Most

  of the gang members were among the most dangerous

  of America's outlaw bikers, the ones rejected or

  stripped of their membership in other gangs such as

  the Hells Angels or the Outlaw Bikers or the Brothers

  . They were avowed racists, even neo-Nazi; although

  they dealt drugs to all races and ran black,

  Asian, and Hispanic women in their whorehouses

  and strip clubs, they never associated with anyone

  other than other whites. There were more Satan's

  Brotherhood members in the United States than

  Hells Angels or any other biker gang, but fewer

  of them in prison. The reason for this was simple:

  They vowed never to be taken alive by the police.

  When Bennie finished stirring the mixture, precipitating

  the chloropseudoephedrine in the bottom

  of the glass tub, he moved on to the second, even

  more dangerous step. In a large steel tank he mixed

  the chloropseudoephedrine with a metallic catalyst

  called palladium black and a powerful solvent

  called hexane, then capped the tank and pressurized

  it with pure, highly explosive hydrogen gas. The hydrogen

  would bond with the chloropseudoephedrine

  to form a shiny white crystalline powder called

  methamphetamine, more commonly referred to as

  speed, crank, or meth. In a single day a skilled meth

  "cooker" like Bennie could produce about twentytwo

  pounds of methamphetamine worth four to six

  thousand dollars a pound in its unadulterated

  form-assuming he survived the cooking process.

  The Brotherhood sold it by the pound to wholesalers

  all across the United States, using gang members

  who carried it on their bikes, or "mules" who traveled

  with the bikers but didn't ride motorcycles or

  hang out with the pack.

  Methamphetamine, born of so many dangerous

  and toxic chemicals that it is impossible to believe

  it could ever be safely handled, is one of the nation's

  fastest-growing abused drugs. By the time it has

  been cut with pyridoxine, or vitamin B6, available at

  any health-food store, its street value has jumped to

  ten to twelve thousand dollars a pound. Ingestedusually

  mixed with coffee or booze-or snorted, it

  produces a gradual high and a sense of heightened

  energy, sexual potency, and awareness that lasts

  anywhere from two to twelve hours, followed by a

  very relaxed weariness that continues for one to

  three days. if smoked or injected, the stimulant effect

  is sharper and more pronounced, producing the

  i/rush" that gives the user a sense of enormous

  power, limitless energy, and a feeling of complete

  invulnerability. The Brotherhood and other outlaw

  motorcycle gangs had gotten very rich selling the

  drug in the western United States.

  Bennie used just over two thousand dollars'

  worth of chemicals in this batch. Most of them are

  controlled substances in the state of California but

  readily available in Mexico or other states. Ephedrine

  , the main component, was the easiest to get.

  Mexican factories would ship a ton of diet pills, or

  even truckloads of the ephedrine itself, if - he

  requested it. If the DEA, the federal Drug Enforcement

  Administration, or the BNE, California's Bureau

  of Narcotics Enforcement, started to nose

  around, Bennie simply switched sources, There

  were mail-order companies in the U.S. that would

  ship a hundred cases of diet pills to the Brotherhood

  every week-and for twenty bucks, kids would steal

  several pounds of diet pills off store shelves in a

  matter of seconds. In a pinch, in place of ephedrine

  Bennie could also use phenylalanine, an amino acid

  sold wholesale in health-food stores at two hundred

  bucks for forty pounds. He had even synthesized

  chloropseudoephedrine from mahuang roots sold in

  Chinese grocery stores; and he was also adept at

  manufacturing phenyl-2-propanone,'a compound

  similar to ephedrine, from noncontrolled chemicals.

  These could be used to produce a large quantity of

  lower-quality meth if other ingredients were hard to

  get. But t
hey rarely were, and the meth business

  was thriving.

  Bennie made it through this "cookout," but his

  body, including his eyes and lungs, bore the scars of

  countless cookouts that had gone horribly wrong.

  Inhaling just a whiff of thionyl chloride can destroy

  lung tissue, and a drop of it can eat a pea-sized hole

  in a hand or finger. Ephedrine can cause severe

  weight loss, heart arrhythmia, or tremors. Chloroform

  is a known carcinogen. But Bennie never

  thought about the hazards. He just thought about

  the money.

  Bennie was a survivor. He had been cooking

  meth ever since he and a classmate mixed up a

  batch while working summer jobs as janitors in a

  chemistry lab at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley

  back in 1973. The batches they made in

  the lab's big Florence flasks and Graham condensers

  were only a few ounces, but enough for Bennie and

  his friends to party with for a couple of weeks. A

  tiny hit of crank, less than the size of a fingernail,

  produced mild LSD-like hallucinations, with the

  added bonus of creating the "pecker of power," a

  hard-on that lasted for hours. With a little crank

  secretly mixed in her cocktail, his date for the evening

  would sometimes turn into a sex-starved creature

  whose wild-animal lust could pull a ten-man

  "train" all night.

  Bennie left Berkeley in 1974, but not because he

  got caught cooking meth in the school's labs-in

  fact, Bennie's younger professors and graduate assistants

  were some of his best customers. He had been

  working on his bachelor's degree in philosophy on

  and off for almost six years, but he was offered a job

  far more lucrative thanteaching or writing: cooking

  meth for the Oakland chapter of Satan's Brotherhood

  . Within three years, he had supervised the

  construction of eleven major meth labs from Oregon

  to Nevada to Bakersfield, and taught nearly half

  the Brotherhood in northern California how to cook

  meth. He was almost single-handedly responsible

  for filling the Brotherhood's legal war chests with

  enough money to pay an army of lawyers to fend off

  dozens of racketeering indictments all throughout

  the 1980's.

  Now, more than twenty years and countless

  batches later, Bennie still had the knowledge, the

  patience, the touch-and, more importantly, he

  could still run-and he was still the best there was

  at the meth-cooking game. Besides, meth-especially

  American-made meth, as opposed to cheaper

  Mexican meth-had never been more valuable than

  it was today, so it was a thriving business. Bennie

  was in it to stay.

  He carefully checked that all of the fittings and

  hatches on his reactor were secure-introducing oxygen

  through the tiniest leak anywhere in the hydrogen

  gas line to the pressurized reactor tank can

  produce an explosion and fireball that would look

  like a small thermonuclear mushroom cloud. Then

  he checked the pressure inside the reactor. Still

  dropping which meant that the chloropseudoephedrine

  was still accepting hydrogen. Another

  hour or so, and it would be done. Another few hours

  to wash the meth with ether, then dry it in a dryer

  made from a few janitor's buckets and mop squeegees

  , and he'd have collected about a hundred and

  twenty thousand dollars' worth of crank. His two

  bikers were nowhere to be seen-probably sleeping

  off the beer-so he stepped away from the hydrogenator

  toward the tree line for a smoke break.

  The key to the all-important second step, the hydrogenation

  process, was the reactor. A commercial

  Parr half-quart catalytic hydrogenator with heating

  mantle and agitator cost nearly two thousand dollars

  and would produce only about a pound of meth;

  worse, it looked like lab equipment, which, always

  caught the attention of the cops. So Bennie built his

  own meth lab, designed specifically to be portable,

  not look like a meth lab, and be capable of producing

  far more meth than commercial reactor units.

  The big-time portable meth lab that Bennie had

  towed out to one of the remote West Coast Satan's

  Brotherhood ranches scattered throughout California

  was the best one he'd ever built. The core of the

  operation was its forty-gallon hydrogenation reactor

  , made from an old steel coffee roaster, powered

  by a big gasoline electrical generator and steam

  pressurization/vacuum device. It was mounted on a

  trailer and camouflaged with tar to make it look

  like an asphalt spreader, a disguise guaranteed not

  to attract any close inspection or curious sniffing. It

  was several times larger and much better than a

  Parr reactor, worth almost fifty thousand dollars. It

  was his pride and . . .

  "Hello."

  Bennie whirled. The two men were standing behind

  him, no more than ten yards away, maybe

  closer. Jesus, Bennie thought grimly, they move as

  quietly as jungle cats! The first guy was youngish,

  lean, and blond, with an patch over one eye but the

  other a bright shining blue, wearing a long black

  leather coat. The second guy was huge, like a pro

  football linebacker, dark-haired and powerfullooking

  , standing in a definite cover position a few

  paces behind and to the left of the first . . .

  That meant that the gun would come out of the

  first guy's right pocket or out from under the right

  side of his coat, while the second guy would cover

  the left side. Bennie had been around trained

  gunmen-mostly cops-long enough to know how

  they stood when entering a dangerous situation.

  Bennie was wearing his black leather vest, the

  one with the Red Bat logo and the black-and-red

  bottom rocker that said "Oakland" on the back, the

  symbols of a Satan's Brotherhood candidate. He

  didn't ride a bike so would never be a full-fledged

  Brother, but to most folks it looked like he was

  wearing no-shit Brotherhood colors. He hoped these

  guys would see the symbols and get the message:

  Clear out right now.

  "Hello, sir," said the man again. "If Imight have

  a moment of your time?" The accent had a definite

  British cast, the voice slightly sterner now, a bit

  more steel in it, not quite official like a cop but

  definitely authoritative, maybe military.

  "You're on private property," Bennie said in his

  gruffest, unfriendliest voice, mimicking the Brothers

  he had known from all over the world. Where

  the hell were his two guards? Why didn't they wake

  up from their stupor and come running at the sound

  of his angry tone? "Get the fuck on outta here before

  ther e's trouble.//

  The - man in the lead held up his hands, palms

  facing outward, but Bennie noticed that the cover

  man never moved. Yeah, the Brit's gesture was

&
nbsp; meant to be conciliatory, but Bennie looked into his

  eye and saw nothing but danger. This was not a man

  accustomed to conciliation, let alone surrender.

  "We don't want any trouble," the Brit said apologetically

  . "We're here because I have a business

  proposition for you, one that I'm sure you will find

  most rewarding."

  "Who are you?"

  "Forgive me, Mr. Reynolds." Oh shit, Bennie

  thought, he knows my name, my real name! "I neglected

  to introduce' myself. My name is Gregory

  Townsend."

  Old Bennie, who had worked closely with some

  of the meanest and most psychotic bikers in the

  world for over twenty years, swallowed a gasp of

  fear. A couple of years before, the United States had

  been in the grip of something even more terrifying

  than today's threat of nuclear war with China or

  North Korea: An ex-Belgian commando turned international

  arms smuggler named Henri Cazaux

  had been flying around the country, dropping high

  explosives or crashing airliners into several of the

  largest airports in the United States. The U.S. military

  was called in and had set up an extensive air

  defense network of radar planes, fighter jets, and

  surface-to-air missiles to try to stop him.

  Cazaux had seemed invincible, unstoppable, until

  his body turned up in a West Virginia dump, with

  seven Black Talons fired into it from very close

  range, the superexpanding bullets shredding his

  body as if his insides had been chopped up in a

  blender. No other clues werefound. The book was

  thankfully closed on Henri Cazaux and his reign of

  terror against the United States of America.

  Speculation was rampant about the identity of

  Cazaux's killer-an FBI hit man, the U.S. Marshals

  Service's Fugitive Investigative Strike Team, even

  secret CIA counterespionage groups. But the most

  likely trigger man was the highest-ranking surviving

  member of Cazaux's gang: his chief of plans and

  operations and trusted second in command, Gregory

  Townsend-a former British SAS commando

  and a fixture on Interpol's most-wanted-criminal

  list for many years. And now the motherfucker

  himself was standing right in front of him.

  Don't look nervous! Bennie begged himself. Stay

  cool. "So you're Townsend? Bullshit. I heard he was

  dead, along with his psycho boss, Cazaux. Killed by