Demolition Man Read online

  John Spartan had almost stopped Simon Phoenix in 1997.

  As San Angeles burned around them, he cornered Phoenix in the master criminal's fortress-and collared him as the place exploded. That made Spartan a hero-except in the eyes of the law that he broke to get his man. And that law put him on ice along with his fiendish foe.

  Now the forces of the law had activated Spartan again. Again he wore a police uniform. Again he was the only one who could stop Phoenix, even if he had to ignore all orders, infuriate all superiors, and defy all the power of city hall.

  1

  Like signs of doom written on the sky, vast clouds of thick black smoke lay low and threatening, tunneled into the atmosphere from the angry orange flames of the burning city.

  The city of Los Angeles was out of control.

  The famous riot of 1992 was followed three years later, in the hot, murderous summer of 1995, by a bigger, more violent urban rebellion. The first riot lasted for just three days. The second would burn furiously for three weeks. Whole sections of the city were destroyed, hundreds of buildings left ruined, and thousands of people lost their lives.

  The National Guard had not been force enough to restore order. By the time it was over, troops of the regular army, marines, and air force would be called in to reconquer the streets and control the skies.

  In the city that was home to the movie industry- an industry addicted to the making of sequels-the riot of 1995 acquired a set of Roman numerals. It became known as Riot II.

  In the months that followed, the Los Angeles Police Department ceased to be a peace-keeping agency and became instead a paramilitary force, an urban army larger and better armed than that of some sovereign nations. It was no surprise, then, that the next disturbance, in the summer of 1996, was more than a riot-it was a civil war.

  Whole sections of the city became the private fiefdoms of war lords and their followers. The richer sections of the city were armed camps. The police no longer patrolled-they mounted campaigns; criminals did not commit crimes-they launched counteroffensives.

  The conflict started in July of that year, and it had been going on ever since. Despite the intensity of the hostility, the strife came to be known by an old-fashioned name, nostalgia for a more conventional chaos. Everyone called it Riot III.

  Helicopters beat through the dark sky, agile attack craft, thrashing above the riot-torn city, spewing tracer fire at nothing in particular on the ground. The thousands of heavy rounds were meant to pin down and isolate the marauders in the burning sections of downtown-containment action, the LAPD called it.

  Once the attack squads had done their work, the specialists made their move, zeroing in on the latest and most serious hot spot requiring their unique and lethal skills.

  The specialists traveled in style, roaring through the smoke-streaked sky in a heavily armed chopper, the biggest, blackest machine in the LAPD air force-a modified Sikorsky Blackhawk UH 60.

  The helicopter was armed with 2 GE .50-caliber machine guns and wing pods carrying sixteen Hell-fire missiles, not to mention a set of self-defense Stinger missiles to counter any really serious threat from the ground. More primitive dangers-mere bullets-were taken into account, too. The underside of the mammoth machine was heavily armored with thick sets of Kevlar matting, as if the belly of the machine was encased in a giant bulletproof vest.

  The Blackhawk carried no registration numbers, no insignia, except for four gold letters on the black steel skin: LAPD. Two sets of powerful rotors hammered the air, driving the machine fast, as if the crew couldn't wait to find themselves in harm's way.

  They didn't have to wait too long. A long rip of bullets fired from the ground tore along the undercarriage and spattered themselves flat against the steel plating on the port side.

  Lieutenant Zachary Lamb, the pilot, and Schmidt, his copilot, reacted to the sudden attack, jinking the heavy machine to port and gaining a hundred feet.

  Lamb shook his head. "Remember when they used to let commercial airliners land in this town? Never again! You can bet on that."

  Schmidt nodded. "Yeah. The good old days-and they're gone for good."

  A gunman on the roof of an abandoned office tower fired a half clip of 9-millimeter rounds at the passing aircraft-it was nothing personal, and he had nothing to gain by downing the chopper. He fired at it because it was there.

  The bullets rattled along the side of the Blackhawk, and Schmidt immediately scoped the gunman on his look-down video screen.

  "You want to have a chat with that guy?" His gloved hands felt for the triggers of the right side 7.62 M60s.

  Lamb shook his head. "Naww. He didn't mean it-you could tell his heart wasn't in it. What's the point?"

  "I don't understand where we're going and why the hell we're bothering anyhow ..."

  "Paycheck?" suggested Lamb.

  A third person joined them on the flight deck.

  "You're doing a good deed," said John Spartan. He was a tall, compactly muscled man, dressed in a black body suit overlain with a leather flack jacket, every pocket stuffed with equipment. Sewn into the collar of his vest was a small microphone that kept him in radio contact with the Los Angeles Police Department communications net.

  "Maybe you got a better reason than that, Spartan. One that makes a little more sense."

  "A maniac hijacked thirty people off a municipal bus," said Spartan. "How's that? I think that's a pretty good reason. Don't you?"

  If Lieutenant Lamb had his doubts about Spartan's reason for the coming mission, he didn't let on. Instead, he just jerked a gloved hand at the porthole.

  "You looked at the neighborhood, Chief? Nasty."

  Spartan peered down at the maelstrom of fire and smoke that burned in the ravaged city and nodded to himself. "I've got a real bad hunch about who the maniac is and where the hostages are being held."

  "You want to share it with us, Spartan?" asked Lamb. Like most pilots he had an aversion to flying blind. He always liked to know where he was going and why.

  In this case, however, it was not a where or a why that had sent his heavily armed chopper aloft. It was a who.

  "I'm looking for Phoenix," said Spartan. "Simon Phoenix."

  In this case, Lamb realized that ignorance might have been better for his state of mind. He settled down in his seat and hunched over the controls, as if to make himself a smaller, less vulnerable target.

  "I really might have been happier if I didn't know that," he grumbled.

  "Oh man,'' groaned Schmidt, peering through the forward screen. "There it is."

  Way up ahead, all three men could see that they were closing fast on a single square city block-a block that appeared to be in flames. Rising from the fiery center was a fortress, a walled enclosure that looked like something out of the Middle Ages, a bastion constructed from the refuse of the late twentieth-century American city: a sturdy brick warehouse girded in steel and encircled by a high wall made by the carcasses of abandoned cars piled fifty feet high.

  Spartan gazed at the stronghold for a long moment, then moved to the back of the chopper, pushing back the sliding door on the side of craft and thrusting his head out into the slipstream of hot, smoky air. He looked downward for a moment, examining the terrain and judging the altitude, then stepped back into the payload of the aircraft and strapped himself into a harness.

  Schmidt turned in his seat. "Hey, Spartan!"

  The big cop was muscling a heavy canvas bag toward the open door. "What?"

  "How come they call you Demolition Man?" He flashed a grin at Spartan. "Are you with the bomb squad or what?"

  Spartan was too busy to give any kind of answer to that question. Lieutenant Lamb responded for his friend.

  "He just ..
." Lamb shrugged. "Spartan just demolishes things."

  John Spartan was set by the door now, gear and harness at the ready. He was in position, but the chopper wasn't, allowing him a more detailed answer to Schmidt's question.

  "I do my job," he said, leaning into the cockpit. "Shit happens . . . Get me a thermo, will ya?"

  The pilot punched a few buttons on the console in front of him, and the heat-sensitive cameras mounted in the nose of the helicopter scanned the fortress. The video scopes were sophisticated enough to filter out the peripheral heat of the fiery building and zoned in on the interior of the structure.

  In a matter of seconds a schematic of the whole building filtered up onto the liquid crystal display screen in the center of the cabin instrument panel.

  "Remember, John," Lamb cautioned, "we're just sightseeing. That's all."

  Spartan just grunted and stared at the thermo scene on the screen.

  The radio crackled into life. "Tactical Hover Command One! Tactical Hover Command One! Come in. You are definitely in unauthorized air space, guys."

  All three men ignored the warnings from the communication center at the LAPD air base. Schmidt concentrated on flying the craft, while Lamb and Spartan studied the thermal layout of the fortress.

  "I register movement on . . . four, five . . . seven people," said Lamb. "There's no way there's thirty people in that building, Spartan. No way. Six on the perimeter, one in the middle. No hostages. No problem. Let's go home."

  There was a note of relief in Lieutenant Lamb's voice, and he hoped that Spartan could hear it-and agree that it wasn't worth risking three necks to bag a handful of hard cases in a building no one really gave a damn about anyway.

  Spartan wasn't so convinced. He tapped an area in the lower part of the screen. "Enhance that, would you? Can you get a read on it?"

  To the naked eye there was nothing there. A pile of broken-down machinery, the rusting corpses of old cars covered by a large dirty tarp.

  But the thermal eye saw through the debris, picking up the warm engine, drive train, and exhaust system of a sixty-foot municipal bus hastily hidden in the tangle of rubble. Spartan could even make out faint outlines of the bus's seats and frame.

  "There it is," he said grimly. "That's the bus. And if the bus has been stashed here ..." Neither Lamb nor Schmidt needed to hear the end of Spartan's deductive reasoning.

  "Oh boy," moaned Schmidt.

  John Spartan took a deep breath and worked his arms above his head, loosening his shoulders, first the left, then the right. Then he checked the guns on his hips-first the left, then the right, two heavy Ruger Redhawk handguns, both modified to carry sixteen-shot clips. If he went for them both at once, he could cross draw them with lightning speed and put thirty-two slugs in a target in a split second.

  A voice from the radio console filled the flight deck. "Spartan, this is Healy. We've tracked your movements, and the LAPD is forbidding you to make a move. You are not to do one thing that might endanger those passengers."

  Spartan glanced forward at the fortress, an ugly inferno. It seemed to him that the passengers had already been endangered-if they were still alive, that is.

  The voice on the radio-Commander Healy, head of the Los Angeles Police Department Tactical Wing and Spartan's superior officer-was growing angrier.

  "Spartan! Answer me!" John Spartan could imagine what his chief looked like right at that moment. He probably had a strangle lock on the mike and his face was bright crimson.

  "Do you hear me, Spartan?"

  Spartan reached forward and snapped off the radio. "No," he said. Calmly, he went back to checking the equipment stuffed into his flak vest.

  It was Lamb's turn to try and impose some discipline on his fellow policeman. He half turned in his seat and confronted Spartan face to face. "I ain't landing this thing," he said firmly. "You hear me?"

  "I hear you," murmured Spartan. "Did you hear me asking you to put down?"

  "And I'm gonna make sure that you are not gonna go crossing direct district command."

  Spartan just shrugged and returned to his pre-operation checklist.

  "And I am not going to watch you get your ass shot off," said Lamb grimly.

  Spartan looked the pilot in the eye. "Who said that was going to happen?"

  "You're facing Simon Phoenix alone, aren't you?" replied Lamb evenly.

  The ghost of a smile crossed Spartan's lips. "Hey, Lamb, thanks for the pep talk. Just get me in for a closer look, that's all."

  Lamb turned to face forward and cut the chopper's height by a couple of hundred feet. "Close enough?"

  Spartan nodded. "That's good."

  He returned to the open door and pulled a coiled rope from the canvas bag. Stenciled along the thick line were four letters: LAFD-Los Angeles Fire Department.

  Lamb looked confused. "Isn't that thing s'posed to be used for getting people out of burning buildings?"

  Spartan smiled while he hooked the lifeline to his chest harness and then clipped a carabineer clasp to the big eyebolt by the door of the chopper.

  He nodded. "Yeah, that's what they're used for-generally."

  The chopper was hovering over the fortress, and it rocked and bucked as waves of hot air slammed into the undercarriage of the aircraft. The rotors beat flat on scalding air, the engine straining to keep up the lift.

  Spartan peered out into the fire storm-and it began to dawn on Lieutenant Lamb just what kind of lunacy his passenger was contemplating.

  "Shit, John," Lamb stammered. "You aren't. . . you have got to be kidding me . . ."

  This time Spartan grinned. "Send a maniac to catch one. Hang around, will ya?"

  And with that, Spartan jumped from the helicopter, free-falling into the inferno.

  2

  Silently, John Spartan plummeted three hundred feet, a stomach-wrenching free-fall. As the downward force of gravity met the upward pull of the helicopter, Spartan stopped dead in the air just ten feet above the top floor of the building. He snatched a bowie knife from his belt and slashed the cord above his head, dropped noiselessly to the tar roof, rolled, and came up with a gun locked in each fist.

  There was a lookout on the roof, standing a few yards to the right, and Spartan was on him in a split second, slamming into the big man. His left hand came up, and he hit the side of the lookout's head with the full force of the six-pound tempered steel revolver. The bad guy never knew what hit him, and he dropped to the floor without a whimper.

  Spartan sensed another man, this one to his left, so he ducked, rolled fast across the tar paper roof, and came up swinging. A fast, steel reinforced, left-right combination put the second lookout's lights out in less than a second.

  Spartan wasn't even breathing hard-not yet anyway.

  He dropped to one knee and listened for footsteps, his eyes scanning the desolate roofscape for the slightest movement. There was no sound save for the crackling of the fires on the ground and the clatter of the chopper now riding seven hundred and fifty feet above him. If Phoenix knew Spartan had dropped in, he gave no sign of it.

  John Spartan holstered his guns. Then he dashed silently for the hatch that opened into the stairwell of the old building, pulling the rusty metal cover from its hinges. He shimmied down the steel ladder, then plunged the last few feet to the floor, stopping to check once again for the enemy.

  As far as Spartan could tell, the interior of the fortress was devoid of people, but the vast space was far from empty. Stacked from floor to ceiling stood crates of weapons, M 70 machine gun-grenade launchers looted from a National Guard armory somewhere in the Southlands. There were boxes and boxes of ammunition, enough bullets and grenades to supply an entire infantry brigade for a month's worth of heavy fighting.

  In addition to weaponry, Spartan saw that Phoenix had collected tons of luxury goods looted from the rich enclaves of Beverly Hills and Westwood in the first few days of Riot III. Spartan gazed at the boxes of pillaged electronics equipment, jewelry, and liquor and d
ecided there and then that Phoenix would not live to enjoy his ill-gotten booty.

  There was a sound of a footfall deep in the warehouse, and Spartan darted toward it, crouching low and tensing like a piece of sprung steel. He paused at the intersection of two avenues of packing crates and peered around the corner.

  The guard was right in front of him, and Spartan looked at the man's broad back and bull neck, planning his attack. John Spartan leaped, launching himself from the concrete floor, the full weight of his body slamming into the guard. The man flew forward and smacked his head on the sharp corner of one of the heavy wooden packing crates. Then Spartan pounded the man's bloody forehead against the cold, unforgiving concrete.

  The guard went out like a snuffed candle-and he lay so still, so inert that it was obvious that he was not going to be getting up again for a long, long time.

  But Spartan had company . . .

  Another large lookout dove at Spartan from behind, but he hardly made contact before Spartan used the man's considerable momentum to fling him-splat!-into the wall. Spartan fell on him and landed a flurry of rib-shattering blows. The guard's eyes turned up in his head, and he passed out from the sudden onslaught of shock and pain.

  Spartan ran for the stairwell, but the instant he burst through the door, he had to throw himself flat as a series of machine-gun bullets ripped the concrete wall just above his head, showering him with cinder-block chips. The two revolvers roared, the explosions deafening in the enclosed space. All four bullets found their target, slamming into the chest of the guard. The machine-gun fire stopped abruptly.

  "So much for my warm welcome," growled Spartan. He was on his way to the center of the building, the nerve center of the criminal complex.

  He knew that the gunfire would rouse the whole building, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had made as many silent kills as he could, now it was time for some violent gunplay rock and roll.

  It was time to get going, to get on with the business of rescuing the hostages-and eradicating Simon Phoenix. A few more guards stood between Spartan and his quarry, but the judicious use of fists and fire power took care of them.