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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. “Thiswill 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.”

CHAPTER ONE
SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA
FRIDAY, 19 DECEMBER 1997, 2146 PT
    P atrick Shane McLanahan stood at the head of the long table and raised his glass of Cuvée Dom Pérignon. “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