The San Francisco police succeeded in breaking one gang of Death's Angels. With the closing of the Zebra case, they solved fourteen murders of whites. But the police never brought to justice the other gangs murdering whites in other parts of California. Investigators never resolved the scores of other murders in California.
Shabaka took no comfort in that failure of law enforcement. Fearing informers, he fled to Algeria to join the surviving Black Panthers in exile.
There, he avoided the other North American black expatriates or as they came to call themselves, the New Afrikan Freedom Fighters. He learned Arabic, the language of the slavers who had decimated the nations of Africa to supply slaves to Arabia and the European colonies, and Russian, the language of history's most powerful slave state.
The Soviet KGB had already bought control of the Palestinian and Pan-Arabic movements. Shabaka saw the Soviet weapons and munitions supplied to the Arabs and knew where to seek support in his continuing war against North American whites. Though white themselves, Soviets listened to Shabaka's racist diatribes against whites and nodded their approval.
They saw him as a weapon to throw against the world's most successful revolution. With a thousand terror-warriors like Shabaka, the Soviets could rape the hope of an egalitarian United States. With the horror of a black-extremist race war racking Americans, counterterror and counteratrocity whites against blacks, whites against Meso and South Americans, whites against any non-European foreigners became certainties. And every incident of white backlash would be featured in the KGB's worldwide media machine as horrors, thus winning a propaganda victory for the Soviet monsters who armed and dispatched the terrorists.
As he had no outstanding indictments, Shabaka risked traveling between the United States and Algeria. He arranged for the smuggling of weapons and money to the Black Liberation Army, a gang of heroin and cocaine addicts seeking revenge for their years in prison through the assassinations of police and federal officers.
It was Shabaka, in the early years of the eighties, who found Mario Silva, the son of Batista fascists, who had sold himself to the new general who ruled Cuba. For a million dollars a year, Silva provided Shabaka with the pick of the black and Chicano teenage offenders in LAYAC's youth programs. He told Silva that he trained the young men and women for the "Revolution." Shabaka kept his operation separate from all other LAYAC concerns. He pretended to be only an aging revolutionary black lawyer who took time off from his legal practice to help juvenile delinquents.
But Silva had learned of the weapon shipments. He claimed a few of the automatic rifles and grenades for his own enforcers and allowed Shabaka to keep all the others. They maintained a good working relationship.
When Shabaka learned of Silva's involvement in the KGB plot to depopulate Los Angeles with binary nerve gas, he began to admire the Cuban to a certain extent. But he never told Silva about his new deal, never mentioned the sponsors who were now backing him to establish a terror center in the United States. Unlimited funds from the Soviets and Libya had produced a drug never before known to the drug subculture. The extremely addicting drug had the effect of instantly creating a psychopath who felt no pain or remorse or human limitations, who would strike at any nearby target. His qualifications had earned Shabaka the privilege of launching an army of devil zombies to attack North American whites.
Shabaka's killers remained secret, insulated from all possible betrayal.
Then came the phone call. Against Silva's orders, without Shabaka's knowledge, one of Silva's lieutenants had given an automatic rifle to a gang of punks. The capture of the rifle meant that a law-enforcement task force would investigate the entire LAYAC structure.
As the end of Shabaka's operation neared, he had no regrets. He had trained a hundred black and Chicano punks. He had indoctrinated them in the hatred and murder of whites. Though he now could not train the thousand he wanted, the experiment had succeeded. He had sent out the three kill-squads to test the combination of drugs and indoctrination. The test had been a complete success.
Now, he would release all one hundred of the chemically enraged zombie warriors. As the terror seized Los Angeles, he would escape.
10
Neon gave life to a night without laughter or joy. Lyons cruised through East Los Angeles, surveying the dark, silent residential streets, the shops on the deserted boulevards.
Families did not brave the streets. No one sat at the tables of restaurants and cafes. A theater had turned off its marquee lights. Supermarkets had closed their doors.
Few cars moved on the streets, only cruising gang cars and infrequent police black-and-whites on patrol.
Groups of Chicano punks loitered on street corners. Latin disco rhythms and loud voices came from oversized portable stereos. Others stood near the open doors of their cars, their auto stereos blasting. The groups stared at the passing Ford, eyes on every street squinting to look inside the dark interior of the car.
As they approached the LAYAC address, Lyons knew that any one of the hundred gang punks could be a loco with a concealed walkie-talkie or a dime for a pay phone. Gang boys could be watching from the rooftops of the apartments.
Flor rode beside Lyons. In the back seat of the rented car, Towers worked a cassette player. The voices from the Parker Center interrogation room filled the interior of the car.
"The blacks and vatos are soldiers, right, for enforcing dope deals? So when they wanted the rifle, I traded it..."
"You mean the Colt Automatic Rifle," a police interrogator interrupted.
"Yeah. The little machine gun. They gave me a kilo of coke for it."
"A kilo? What're you talking about?"
"Yeah. A kilo. They ripped it off some rich lawyer in Beverly Hills."
"The punks didn't want it?"
"Nah, man, they said it was nothing..."
Towers punched the stop button. "You hear that? The punks didn't want the cocaine. Listen to this"
The recorded voice of Ruiz continued. "They were high on something else."
"What? Heroin?"
"They didn't act stoned. They acted insane."
"That's one interesting part," Towers told them, clicking off the player again. "After he traded the rifle for the cocaine, he arranged a phony burglary of the warehouse to suggest that the punks stole the rifle. But that was set for tonight. The FBI traced the rifle too quick. And then someone in the Bureau leaked it to that crazy Communist television station. And the boss of LAYAC, this Silva guy, found out about it and went after our boy Ruiz."
Lyons thought for a moment. He glanced in the rearview mirror to see the lights of the car that Blancanales drove. As Lyons eased through a slow left-hand turn on the deserted avenue, he asked Towers, "Why did Ruiz have the rifle in the first place?"
"He said there was a 'heat wave,' " Towers answered. "Right after that problem with the gas, remember? If you know what I mean?"
"Flor was in on that," Lyons told him. "You can talk about it."
"Good. Trying to keep all that classified info and authorization and clearance jazz straight makes my head spin. Right after your people wiped out that gang, the Feds put LAYAC under the microscope."