“Better get Ramos,” Bosch said. “If my partner goes, I go. Then where’s the integrity of the operation’s security?”
He looked over at Aguila, who was standing stiffly with the three other agents around him like bouncers ready to toss somebody out of a nightclub on the Sunset Strip.
“Think about it,” Bosch continued. “Anybody who’s come this far has to go the distance. Otherwise, you got someone outside the circle. Out there and unaccounted for. Go ask Ramos.”
Clipboard hesitated again, then told everybody to stay cool and took a radio from the pocket of his jacket. He radioed to someone called Staff Leader that there was a problem in the lot. Then everybody stood around for a few moments in silence. Bosch looked over at Aguila and when their eyes met he winked. Then he saw Ramos and Corvo, the agent from L.A., walking briskly toward them.
“What’s this shit, Bosch,” Ramos started before he got to the car. “Do you know what you’ve done? You’ve compromised the whole fucking operation. I gave explicit instru—”
“He’s my partner on this, Ramos. He knows what I know. We are together on this. If he’s out, then so am I. And when we leave, I go across the border. To L.A. I don’t know where he goes. How will that hold with your theory on who can be trusted?”
In the light from the hangar, Bosch could see the pulse beating in an artery on Ramos’s neck.
“See,” Bosch said, “if you let him leave, you are trusting him. So, if you trust him, you might as well let him stay.”
“Fuck you, Bosch.”
Corvo put his hand on Ramos’s arm and stepped forward.
“Bosch, if he fucks up or this operation in any way becomes compromised, I will make it known. You know what I mean? It’ll be known in L.A. that you brought this guy in.”
He made a signal across the car to the others and they stepped away from Aguila. The moonlight reflected on Corvo’s face and Bosch saw the scar that split his beard on the right side. He wondered how many times the DEA agent would be telling the story of the knife fight tonight.
“And another thing,” Ramos threw in. “He goes in naked. We only have one more vest. That’s for your ass, Bosch. So if he gets hit, it’s on you.”
“Right,” Bosch said. “I get it. No matter what goes wrong, it’s my ass. I got it. I also have a vest in my trunk. He can use yours. I like my own.”
“Briefing’s at twenty-two hundred,” Ramos said as he walked back toward the hangar.
Corvo followed and Bosch and Aguila fell in behind him. The other agents brought up the rear. Inside the cavernous hangar Bosch saw there were three black helicopters sitting side by side in the bay area. There were several men, most in black jumpsuits, milling about and drinking coffee from white cups. Two of the helicopters were wide-bodied personnel transport craft. Bosch recognized them. They were UH-1Ns. Hueys. The distinctive whop-whop of their rotors would forever be the sound of Vietnam to him. The third craft was smaller and sleeker. It looked like a craft manufactured for commercial use, like a news or police chopper, but it had been converted into a gunship. Bosch recognized the gun turret mounted on the right side of the copter’s body. Beneath the cockpit another mount held an array of equipment, including a spotlight and night-vision sensor. The men in the black jumpsuits were stripping the white numbers and letters off the tail sections of the craft. They were preparing for a total blackout, a night assault.
Bosch noticed Corvo come up next to him.
“We call it the Lynx,” he said, nodding to the smallest of the three craft. “Mostly use ’em in Central and South America ops, but we snagged this one on its way down. It’s for night work. You’ve got total night vision set up—infrared, heat-pattern displays. It will be the in-air command post tonight.”
Bosch just nodded. He was not as impressed with the hardware as Corvo was. The DEA supervisor seemed more animated than during their meeting at the Code 7. His dark eyes were darting around the hangar, taking it all in. Bosch realized that he probably missed fieldwork. He was stuck in L.A. while guys like Ramos got to play the war games.
“And that’s where you’re going to be, you and your partner,” Corvo said, nodding at the Lynx. “With me. Nice and safe. Observers.”
“You in charge of this show, or is Ramos?”
“I’m in charge.”
“Hope so.” Then, looking at the war chopper, Bosch said, “Tell me something, Corvo, we want Zorrillo alive, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, then, when we get him, what’s the plan? He’s a Mexican citizen. You can’t take him over the border. You just going to give him to the Mexicans? He’ll be running the penitentiary they put him in within a month. That is, if they put him in a pen.”
It was a problem every cop in southern California had come up against. Mexico refused to extradite its citizens to the United States for crimes committed there. But it would prosecute them at home. The problem was that it was well known that the country’s biggest drug dealers turned penitentiary stays into hotel visits. Women, drugs, alcohol and other comforts could be had as long as the money was paid. One story was that a convicted drug lord had actually taken over the warden’s office and residence at a prison in Juarez. He had paid the warden $100,000 for the privilege, about four times what the warden made in a year. Now the warden was an inmate at the prison.
“I know what you’re saying,” Corvo said. “But don’t worry about it. We got a plan for that. Only things you have to worry about are your own ass and your partner’s. You better watch him good. And you better get some coffee. It’s going to be a long night.”
Bosch rejoined Aguila, who was standing at the workbench where the coffee had been set up. They nodded at some of the agents who were milling about the bench but the gestures were rarely returned. They were the invited uninvited. From where they stood, they could see into a suite of offices off the aircraft bays. There were several Mexicans in green uniforms sitting at desks and tables, drinking coffee and waiting.
“Militia,” Aguila said. “From Mexico City. Is there no one in Mexicali that the DEA trusts?”
“Well, after tonight, they’ll trust you.”
Bosch lit a cigarette to go with the coffee and took an expansive look around the hangar.
“What do you think?” he said to Aguila.
“I think the pope of Mexicali is going to have a wake-up call tonight.”
“Looks that way.”
They moved away from the coffee bench to let others have at it and leaned against a nearby counter to watch the raid equipment being prepared. Bosch looked over toward the back of the hangar and saw Ramos standing with a group of men wearing bulky black jumpsuits. Harry walked over and saw that the men were wearing Nomex fire-retardant suits beneath the jumpsuits. Some of them were smearing bootblack around their eyes and then pulling on black ski masks. The CLET squad. They couldn’t wait to get in the air, to get going. Bosch could almost smell their adrenaline.
There were twelve of them. They were reaching into black trunks and laying out the equipment they would need for the night’s mission. Bosch saw Kevlar helmets and vests, sound-disorientation grenades. Holstered already on one man’s hip was a 9mm P-226 with an extended magazine. That would just be for backup, he guessed. He could see the barrel of a long gun protruding from one of the trunks. Ramos noticed him then and reached into the trunk and brought the weapon over. There was a strange leer spreading on his face.
“Check this shit out,” Ramos said. “Colt only makes ’em for the DEA, man. The RO636. It’s a suppressed version of the standard nine submachine. Uses one-forty-seven-grain subsonic hollow points. You know what one of them will do? It’ll go through three bodies before it even thinks about slowing down.
“It’s got a suppressed silencer. Means no muzzle flash. These guys are always jumping labs. You get ether fumes and the muzzle flash could set it off. Boom—you land about two blocks away. But not with these. No muzzle flash. It’s beautiful. I wish I was going i
n with one of these tonight.”
Ramos was holding and ogling the weapon like a mother with her first baby.
“You were in Vietnam, weren’t you, Bosch?” Ramos asked.
Bosch just nodded.
“I could tell. Something about you. I always can tell.” Ramos handed the gun back to its owner. There was still an odd smile on his face. “I was too young for Nam and too old for Iraq. Ain’t that a pisser?”
• • •
The raid briefing did not start until nearly ten-thirty. Ramos and Corvo gathered all the agents, the militia officers and Bosch and Aguila in front of a large bulletin board on which a blowup of an aerial photo of Zorrillo’s ranch had been tacked. Bosch could see that the ranch contained vast areas of open, unused land. The pope had found security in space. To the west of his property were the Cucapah Mountains, a natural boundary, while in the other directions he had created a buffer zone of thousands of acres of scrubland.
Ramos and Corvo stood on either side of the bulletin board and Ramos conducted the meeting. By using a yardstick as a pointer he delineated the boundaries of the ranch and identified what he called the population center—a large, walled compound that included a hacienda, ranch house and adjoining bunker-type building. He then circled the breeding corrals and barn located about a mile from the population center along the perimeter of the ranch that fronted Val Verde Highway
. He also pointed out the EnviroBreed compound across the highway.
Next, Ramos tacked up another blowup, this one detailing about a quarter of the ranch—ranging from the population center to the breeding center/EnviroBreed compound area. This shot was close enough that tiny figures could be seen on the roofs of the bunker building. In the scrubland behind the buildings there were black figures against the light brown and green earth. The bulls. Bosch wondered which one of them was El Temblar. He could hear one of the militia officers translating the meeting for a group of the guardsmen gathered around him.
“Okay, these photos are about thirty hours old,” Ramos said. “We had NASA do a fly-over in a U-thirty-four. We also had them shoot heat resonance strips and that’s where this gets good. The reds you see are the hot spots.”
He tacked a new blowup next to the other. This was a computer-generated graphic that had red squares—the buildings—against a sea of blues and greens. There were small dots of red outside the square and Bosch assumed these were the bulls.
“These photos were taken at the same second yesterday,” Ramos said. “By jumping back and forth between the graphic and the live shot we can pinpoint certain anomalies. These squares become the buildings and most of these smaller red blotches become the bulls.”
He used the yardstick to refer back and forth between the two blowups. Bosch realized that there were more red spots on the graphic than there were bulls on the photo.
“Now these marks do not correspond with animals on the photo,” Ramos said. “What they do correspond with is the feed boxes.”
With Corvo’s help they pinned up two more enlargements. These were the closest shots so far. Bosch could clearly make out the tin roof of a small shed. There was a black steer standing near it. In the corresponding graphic, both the steer and the shed were bright red.
“These basically are little shelters to keep rain off the hay and feed for the livestock. NASA says these shelters would emit some residual heat that the resonance photos would pick up. But NASA said it clearly would not be what we are seeing here. So, what we think this means is that these feed boxes are decoys. We think they are exhaust vents for an underground complex. We believe there is some kind of entrance somewhere in the population center structures that leads to the underground lab back here.”
He let it sink in for a few moments. Nobody asked any questions.
“Also,” he said, “there is a—we have information from a confidential informant that there is a tunnel system. We believe it runs from the breeding center here to this complex—a business called EnviroBreed—here. We believe it has allowed Zorrillo to circumvent surveillance and is one of the possible means of moving product from the ranch to the border.”
Ramos went on to detail the raid. The plan was to strike at midnight. The Mexican militia would have a two-part responsibility. A single unmarked car would be sent to the ranch gate, swerving as if driven by a drunk on the gravel road. Using this ruse, the three guardsmen in the car would take custody of the two gate sentries. After that, half of the remaining militia would move down the ranch road to the population center while the other half would advance to the EnviroBreed compound, surround it and await developments on the ranch.
“The success of the operation largely relies on the two men on the gate being taken before issuing a warning to the PC,” Corvo said. His first words during the briefing. “If we fail that, we lose the element of surprise.”
After the ground attack was underway, the three air squads would come. The two transport craft would put down on the north and east sides of the PC to drop the CLET team. The CLETs would perform initial entry to all structures. The third helicopter, the Lynx, would remain airborne and act as a flying command post.
Lastly, Ramos said, the ranch had two rovers, two-man Jeep patrols. Ramos said they followed no set patrol or pattern and they would be impossible to pinpoint until the raid began.
“They are the wild cards,” Ramos said. “That is what we have a mobile air command for. They warn us when the Jeeps are spotted coming in or the Lynx will just take them out.”
Ramos was pacing back and forth in front of the bulletin board, swinging the yardstick. Bosch could tell he liked this, the feeling of being in charge of something. Maybe it made up for Vietnam or Iraq.
“Okay, gentlemen, I’ve got a few more things here,” Ramos said as he pinned another photo up. “Our target is the ranch. We have search warrants for drugs. If we find manufacturing apparatus we are gold. If we find narcotics we are gold. But the thing we really want is this man here.”
The photo was a blowup from the mug book Bosch had looked at that morning.
“This is our main man,” Ramos said. “Humberto Zorrillo. The pope of Mexicali. If we don’t get him, this whole operation goes down the tubes. He’s the mastermind. He’s the one we want.
“It might interest you to know that in addition to his activities related to narcotics, he is a suspect in the killing of two L.A. cops, not to mention a couple other killings up there in the last month or so. This is a man who doesn’t think twice about it. If he doesn’t do it himself, he has plenty of people working for him who will. He’s dangerous. Anybody we encounter on the ranch has to be considered armed and dangerous. Questions?”
One of the militia asked a question in Spanish.
“Good question,” Ramos replied. “We are not going into EnviroBreed initially because of two reasons. One, our prime target is the ranch and we would have to initially deploy more resources to EnviroBreed if we were to make simultaneous entry to the compound and the ranch. Secondly, our CI indicates the tunnel on that side may be rigged. Booby-trapped. We don’t want to chance it. When we get the ranch secured, we’ll go in then or we’ll follow the tunnel over.”
He waited for more questions. There were none. The men in front of him were shifting their weight from foot to foot or chewing their nails or flicking their thumbs on their knees. The adrenaline rush was just beginning to kick. Bosch had seen it before, in Vietnam and since. So he approached his own rising excitement with an uneasy sense of dread.
“All right then!” Ramos yelled. “I want everybody locked and loaded in one hour. At midnight we jam!”
The gathering broke up with some adolescent howls from the younger agents. Bosch moved toward Ramos as he was taking the photos off the board.
“Sounds like a plan, man.”
“Yeah. Just hope it goes down close to the way we said it. They never go down exactly right.”
“Right. Corvo told me you’ve got another plan. The one to get Zorrillo acro
ss the border.”
“Yeah, we’ve got something cooked up.”
“You gonna tell me?”
He turned around from the board, all the photos in a nice stack in his hands.
“Yeah, I’ll tell you. You’ll like this, Bosch, since it will get him up to L.A. to face trial on your guys. What’s going to happen is that after the little fuck is captured he will resist arrest and injure himself. Probably facial injuries and they are going to look worse than they really are. But we will want to get him immediate medical attention. The DEA will offer the use of one of the helicopters. The commander of the militia unit will gratefully accept. But, you see, the pilot will become confused and mistake the lights of Imperial County Memorial Hospital on the other side of the border with the Mexicali General Clinic, which is just on this side of the border. When the chopper lands at the wrong hospital and Zorrillo gets off on the wrong side of the border, he will be subject to arrest and the American justice system. Tough break for him. We might have to put a notice of reprimand in the pilot’s personnel file.”