Michael Connelly (94 page)

“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 jump-suits. 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 in 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 Enviro-Breed 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 across 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.”

Ramos had that leering smile on his face again. He winked at Bosch and then walked away.

The Lynx was crossing over the carpet of Mexicali’s lights, heading southwest toward the dark shape of the Cucapah Mountains.
The ride was smoother and quieter than anything he remembered from Vietnam or his dreams after.

Bosch was in the rear compartment huddled next to the left window. The cold night air was somehow getting in through a vent
somewhere. Aguila was on the seat next to him. And in the forward compartment were Corvo and the pilot. Corvo was Air Leader,
handling communications and directions on the ranch assault. Ramos was Ground One, in charge on the surface. Looking into
the forward compartment, Bosch could see the dim reflection of the cockpit’s green dials on the visor of Corvo’s helmet.

The helmets of all four of the men in the chopper were connected through electronic umbilical cords to a center console port.
The helmets had air-to-ground and on-board radio two-way and night-vision capabilities.

After they had flown for fifteen minutes the lights through the windows became fewer. Without the glare of the brightness
from below, Harry could make out the silhouette of one of the other helicopters about two hundred yards to the left side.
The other black ship would be on the right side. They were flying in formation.