Abuse of Power - Michael Savage [4]
Jack nodded. The commander wasn’t talking out of his ass. In his nearly forty years, he had known soldiers, cops, pilots who had the Spidey sense he was talking about, an instinct for things that were slightly off center. During a visit to southern China, Jack had seen a demonstration in which a blindfolded Shaolin kung fu master defeated two much younger men because he felt what they were about to do. When Jack asked the sensei, through an interpreter, how he did that, the man replied with a smile, “The gray hair.”
Experience. There was nothing like it.
* * *
As Drabinsky pulled up to the nearest barricade, Jack raised the Steiner Marine Binoculars he’d brought. It was an ugly, surreal, yet strangely tranquil sight.
Big flatbed-mounted spotlights towered twenty feet on either end of the street and illuminated the scene. The bread truck lay angled toward the sidewalk. It rested against a streetlight, half of one of its panels caved in. Bisecting it was an overturned Land Rover, its roof crumpled under its weight.
The street was empty, the cops maintaining a by-the-book two-block radius from the site. All the buildings and stores in a one-block radius had been evacuated, though most were empty already due to the hour.
Twenty-seven-year-old Maxine Cole showed up while her boss was still studying the scene. Her press pass was swung onto her back—where the camera wouldn’t hide it—and her video camera was already hoisted onto a shoulder, floodlight on. Of Somali descent, she was a tall, city-born triathlete and one of the best hose-n-go shooters Jack had ever known. She wet-kissed everything with her camera, missed nothing, and made editing a breeze.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Cops at the outside barrier didn’t want to let me through. I tried calling you but couldn’t get a signal.”
Jack lowered the field glasses. “They’ve activated a cell phone jammer. Standard precaution.”
“Oh. Right. Duh,” she said as she shot.
Jack gestured toward the overturned vehicles nearly a block away. “The money shot is at the rear of that Land Rover. Can you manage it?”
“Not from this angle.”
He turned to Drabinsky. “Can we go closer?”
“Only if you’re suicidal. We’re sending in the BDR.”
As if on cue, the rear doors of a newly arrived van flew open and one of Drabinsky’s men climbed out, put down a ramp, and started playing with the joystick in his hands. Jack saw a bright white light, heard a soft electronic whir as the bomb disposal robot glided out of the van and down the ramp toward the blacktop, looking like a RoboCop prototype on steroids.
Max got some footage of it making its descent. “So what’s the story here? Somebody said something about a carjacking.”
“Carjacking that went a little south,” Jack told her.
“The perp?”
“Some fool EMTs went in and got him,” Drabinsky said. He had been pacing back and forth, eyeballing the crash. “They’ve got him at General. I don’t know anything else. One of the medics also tried to pull the tag number off the Rover, but it was buried in the bread truck.”
“They get anything at all from the car?” Max asked. Her questions weren’t just for her own information; she was running sound and the bites were often invaluable.
“You mean about the owner?” Drabinsky asked.
“That—or anything else.”
He shrugged. “If they have, no one’s told me. We’re just the garbage collectors. Last to know unless it blows, as we say.”
“Charming,” Max said.
Drabinsky gestured to a portable computer stand where a laptop had been set up. They walked over, Max following everything through the eye of her camera. The screen showed the view from a small video camera mounted on the robot.
“We use the robot to tell us what we’re up against. If it’s the real deal, we either blow it or I go in with the suit to disarm the thing.”
“What’s the deciding factor?”
“Size. We’d just as soon not take out half a city block if we can help it. If that thing is too big to blow, I have to break out my suit and get all