Darwin's Blade

22 “V is for Vincible”

Dar was invited to be in on the arrests, but he declined. He had work to do. He heard the details later.

In England, Syd explained later, the police prefer to wait for a suspect to enter his or her home before making an arrest. There is less chance of violence and of innocent bystanders being hurt that way. In America, of course, exactly the opposite is true. A home, all too frequently in America, is an arsenal and fortress. American cops prefer to make arrests in semipublic but controlled places, where the suspect can be—at the very least—outgunned. The exception in this case was to be the ranch house where the five Russians—including Zuker and Yaponchik—were known to be hiding out and where the FBI wanted to hit them with surprise and overwhelming force.

The FBI claimed precedence and jurisdiction on the Thursday morning raids, and because of the death of three of their agents, no one argued. Los Angeles–based Special Agent in Charge Howard Faber personally led the tactical team of eighteen helmeted, Kevlar-vested, submachine-guntoting special agents into the Century City tower at 6:48 A.M. Pacific time. SAC James Warren would have liked to have been there, but he had taken charge of the stakeout and raid on the Russian mafia men’s isolated ranch house near the Santa Anita Racetrack. Chief Investigator Sydney Olson, also decked out in a Kevlar vest labeled “FBI” in bright yellow, was second in command to SAC Faber on the Trace assault. Like the others, she carried a Heckler & Koch MP-10 submachine gun.

Dallas Trace was on the air live, his CNN Objection Sustained program airing at its usual 10:00 A.M. Eastern time. Special Agent in Charge Faber and each of his tactical team leaders carried a tiny TV monitor and they watched as the show’s titles rolled, the intro music ended, and the New York anchor—another ex–defense lawyer—announced the day’s topic and welcomed her friend and colleague from California, famous defense counselor Dallas Trace. The silver-haired attorney was at his usual post at his desk, slouched back in his leather chair, wearing his usual buffalo-hide leather vest, the windows behind him showing a smoggy early L.A. morning.

Ten of the FBI tactical team agents swept through the offices, herding early-bird legal secretaries, young lawyers, secretaries, and receptionists out of their rooms and cubicles, corralling them in the outer reception room where two agents in black Kevlar stood guard. Having secured the hallways and offices, two of the agents then kicked open the door to the conference room that served as the “greenroom” during the television broadcasts. Three of Counselor Trace’s four American bodyguards were sitting in there, watching the monitor, drinking coffee, and wolfing down donuts. They looked at the tactical team in openmouthed surprise and then they were down on the floor, hands behind their heads, being brusquely frisked by the FBI team members. Each of the bodyguards was carrying at least one firearm, and the biggest and meanest of the bunch was carrying a second pistol in his back belt and a tiny revolver in an ankle holster. Two of the three also carried long-bladed folding knives that were illegal for street use.

Watching their portable monitor, sure that none of the disturbance had been heard in Trace’s office, Faber, three of his agents with H&K MP-10s, and Syd waited just outside the lawyer’s office.

Dallas Trace was just drawling, “…an’ if ah had been the defense attorney for these poor, prosecuted, persecuted, and harried parents—who are obviously innocent of theah daughtah’s tragic death—I would be bringing lawsuits against the city of—” when the FBI kicked in the door and the four agents and Syd came in with guns drawn.

The two cameramen and the single sound man looked to their floor producer for guidance. The producer hesitated two microseconds and then she gave the finger-spinning gesture for “keep rolling.” Dallas Trace merely looked up at the intruders with his mouth wide open.

“Counselor Dallas Trace, you are under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to defraud,” said Special Agent in Charge Faber. “Stand up.”

Trace continued sitting. He tried to speak, obviously finding it difficult to switch gears from the mythical lawsuit he was about to announce for the poor, persecuted, and prosecuted parents of the murdered child, but before he could make a sound, two of the FBI men in black grabbed the attorney’s arms and dragged him to his feet. His arms were pinned behind him, and Syd snapped on the cuffs.

After what probably had been the longest period of speechlessness in Dallas Trace’s adult life, he found his voice—in fact, he roared. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Do you have any goddamn idea who I am?”

“Defense Attorney Dallas Trace,” Special Agent in Charge Faber said again. “And you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent—”

“Silent my ass!” screamed Dallas Trace, his western drawl magically replaced by a nasal New Jersey accent. “Tell that sow-bitch to get those cuffs off me.”

Later polling showed that it was this comment, aired live on a popular CNN program, that most alienated potential female jurors.

“Anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of law,” continued SAC Faber as the two men in black Kevlar stripped the lawyer of his lavalier microphone, belt-pack, and wiring, and then guided Trace out from behind his desk. “You have the right to an attorney—”

“I am an attorney, you dipshit!” shouted Dallas Trace, spittle flying. “I am the foremost defense attorney in the United States of—”

“If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you,” continued Faber, calmly, as the five of them—three agents, Trace, and Syd—shoved past the goggling floor producer. Both cameramen were grinning broadly as they panned the lenses around to the door where the other tactical-team agents waited with their weapons at parade rest.

Dallas Trace looked back over his shoulder at the cameras. “Greta!” he cried, calling to his New York CNN cohost. “You saw this. You saw what they did to me…”

And then Trace was gone.

The line producer lunged for the still live lavalier mike and thrust it in Syd’s face.

“Why this outrageous arrest in the middle of—” began the producer, before Syd interrupted with, “No comment.” She and the two agents walked out the door.

On that same Thursday morning, six FBI men and five Sherman Oaks plainclothes officers raided Dallas Trace’s home. There was no resistance. The bodyguard who had been left behind to guard Mrs. Trace happened to be in bed with her at the time the black-garbed FBI tactical team kicked open the bedroom door.

The bodyguard disentangled himself from Destiny Trace’s enveloping and unyielding legs, rolled over, looked at his shoulder holster and pistol on the chair twenty feet away, looked into four suppressed H&K muzzles with laser sights dancing small red dots across his forehead, and held up his hands.

Mrs. Trace sat up in bed, apparently resisting any impulse to cover her bare breasts. One of the FBI men’s attention must have strayed for an instant, because a laser dot flickered across Mrs. Trace’s bouncing breasts, before returning to the bodyguard’s forehead.

Destiny Trace frowned, pursed her lips, and looked at the hulking man in bed with her, looked at the crowding FBI agents in their storm-trooper helmets, goggles, and flak jackets, looked at the Sherman Oaks detectives in their Kevlar vests, frowned again and suddenly shouted, “Help! Rape! Thank God you’re here, Officers…This man was assaulting me!”

The Monday before the Thursday raids, Lawrence spent most of the day helping Dar set up the new surveillance cameras.

“This is costing you a shitload—with overnight delivery and everything,” volunteered Lawrence as they carried the first video unit, its battery, cables, and waterproof camouflage tarp from the Trooper into the trees along the road to the cabin. “If you’d given me a couple of weeks, I could have saved you about a thousand bucks on this stuff.”

“I won’t need it in a couple of weeks,” said Dar.

They positioned the first camera in a tree along the side of the gravel driveway about one half kilometer from the cabin. It was a sophisticated video unit—not much larger than a paperback book—with zoom lenses and a remote controlled motor that allowed it to pan and swivel. Thin cables ran to its own triple-lithium battery pack and the tiny transmitter, which were both easily concealed in the base of the rottedout birch. The remote controlled camera had two lenses: one for daylight use and the other for electronic light amplification after dark. It and the other gear had indeed cost Dar a metaphorical shitload.

When the camera was properly situated, Dar drove up to the cabin and sat in his Land Cruiser while he used the remote unit to swivel, pan, zoom, and switch lenses. He practiced turning the unit on and off. He checked the reception on his portable receiving and control unit with its three-inch black-and-white monitor. Then he called Lawrence on his cell phone.

“Works fine, Larry.”

“Lawrence.”

“Come on up to the cabin and I’ll fix us some coffee before we mount the other cameras. Also, I’ll show you something I found in the woods.”

After coffee, Dar left the boxed video equipment in the cabin and took Lawrence for a stroll. They headed east toward the sheep wagon but then cut uphill from the trail, through boulders, toward the high ridge above the cabin. From there they bushwhacked downhill until they came to a Douglas fir about thirty meters above the cabin itself. Dar silently pointed to a bulky video camera set in a camouflaged nook in the tree. The camera’s lens was aimed at the cabin.

Lawrence said nothing, but inspected the thing as carefully as a munitions expert would inspect a land mine. Finally Lawrence said, “No microphone. No pan or scan or zoom or night-vision capability. It’s just a fixed lens—wide angle—but it gives a good view of your parking area and cabin entrance. Plus, it has one hell of a strong battery, an extra-long-play recorder, almost certainly a time-stamp feature, and the whip antenna is way the hell up there. Whoever’s monitoring you can call up several days worth of video and fast-forward through it to see who’s in the cabin and when they arrived.”

“Yeah,” said Dar.

“With that powerful a transmitter and the antenna way up there, it could be broadcast for several miles,” said Lawrence.

“Yeah,” agreed Dar.

Lawrence crawled up the sap-covered lower trunk and inspected the instrument again. “It’s not FBI technology, Dar. Foreign…Czech, I think…crude but tough. My guess is that it’s transmitting on a PAL format.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Dar.

“The Russians?” said Lawrence.

“Almost certainly,” said Dar.

“Want me to disable it?”

“I want them to know where I am,” said Dar. “I just wanted to show this to you so that we don’t reveal anything about our work while we’re in front of this lens.”

“Are there others?” asked Lawrence, squinting suspiciously into the dappled daylight of the forest.

“None that I’ve found.”

“I’ll take a look for you,” said Lawrence.

“I’d appreciate that, Larry.” Dar had great respect for his electronic surveillance expertise.

“Lawrence,” said Lawrence, sliding back down the tree like a noisy bear.

Tony Constanza had sung like a canary after coming out of sedation for surgery on the previous Saturday afternoon. Even though his hospital room was guarded by half a dozen FBI agents, he was obviously terrified that the Organizatsiya hit men would come after him as soon as they learned that he was alive. Constanza must have figured that his best chance was to squeal and to squeal quickly, before Yaponchik, Zuker, and the others discovered where he was being guarded. He obviously had a healthy respect for their lethal capabilities. He also had some enthusiasm for being in the Witness Protection Program and living—he was quite specific about this—in Bozeman, Montana.

Constanza said that he didn’t know exactly where the Russians were holed up, but that it was “like a ranch house, you know, all by itself, somewhere out beyond Santa Anita Racetrack somewhere past Sierra Madre Boulevard…up in the brown hills there with all that tumbleweed shit.” The FBI had already received such an address from an anonymous mailing—it was the address of one of the phone numbers that Dar had seen Dallas Trace dial during his overnight surveillance of Trace’s house. Now the FBI’s own surveillance pinpointed the house and confirmed the presence of the five Russians.

SAC James Warren assigned twenty-three FBI agents to carry out constant surveillance on the location—a Mediterranean-style ranch house set half a mile from its nearest neighbor—from that Saturday evening. He told Sydney Olson that he would have preferred to move in immediately, but that it would take several days to obtain search and arrest warrants for the others now being incriminated by Constanza, and any premature arrest of the Russians would have tipped everyone else. In the meantime, every move the Russians made was being followed carefully by FBI agents in vans, via undercover roles as phone-company and street-repair people, by video surveillance, and by helicopter. The phone line into the house was not only tapped, it was trapped. Warren had twenty more agents with tactical assault training available at a minute’s notice. Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank, and LAPD SWAT teams were volunteering to help, even though they knew no details of the operation.

The first arrests took place Sunday morning when LAPD Detectives Fairchild and Ventura were called into separate offices by Internal Affairs Division, told to surrender their shields, weapons, clips, and IDs, and told that they were to be formally charged with accessory to fraud and conspiracy to murder the four FBI agents. Ventura was informed that IAD and the FBI knew about the secret transfer of funds to his newly established offshore accounts—installments of $85,000, $15,000, and $23,000. No bank transfers had been found in Detective Fairchild’s name, but the officer was informed that the investigation was still ongoing. Both detectives were interrogated.

Detective Ventura hung tough, but Detective Fairchild folded. He not only admitted that Ventura had gotten him involved in the cover-up of the murder of Richard Kodiak, but said that it was Ventura who had traced Donald Borden’s and Gennie Smiley’s whereabouts in the Bay Area, and fingered them both to Trace’s Russians for the professional double taps to the head. According to Detective Fairchild, Ventura had even bragged that “for another twenty thousand I would have dumped the fucking bodies myself, and done a better job of it than those assholes.” Fairchild admitted in a signed deposition that Ventura had referred to Dallas Trace as “the goose who was going to lay them both a lot of golden eggs” and that further dealings with the fraud Alliance had been planned. Fairchild said that Ventura had threatened to murder him if he opened his mouth about the conspiracy.

Both police officers were taken into custody. Fairchild negotiated a deal with the district attorney for leniency in exchange for turning state’s evidence. Neither the FBI nor the LAPD made any announcement of the arrests—the men were being kept in an FBI safe house in Malibu for extensive interrogation—and anyone calling the precinct and asking for either detective was told that they were “working undercover and unavailable” while the phone calls were traced. Two of the calls came from Trace’s American bodyguards, and one of them was traced to the Russians’ Santa Anita house.

Syd expressed her concern about Dar’s safety to him during the five days before the projected arrests of the main players, but Dar had answered easily—“What’s to be afraid of? The FBI are all over the Russians, Trace’s American thugs are being followed…I’m safer than ever before.” Syd was too busy preparing for the raids to spend time at the cabin with Dar, but she did not seem reassured.

That Monday before the raids, Dar and Lawrence had also rigged fiber-optic cameras in the cabin. Dar chose two positions, both on the south interior wall, so that the two lenses would cover everything in the large, single-room cabin except the closets and the one bathroom.

Dar used his key to unlock the hidden trapdoor, led Lawrence down the steep stairs, and then unlocked the door to the storeroom.

“Holy shit,” said Lawrence, “trapdoors, secret rooms…You a spy, Dar? A spook?”

“No,” said Dar, embarrassed that he had kept this place a secret. “I just needed a safe place to store some stuff. You understand.”

“Not really,” said Lawrence. He looked around the room again. “My God, it looks like the last scene in that first Indiana Jones movie…that big warehouse full of crates. You got a sled named Rosebud in here somewhere?”

“No,” said Dar quietly. “I had to burn that one winter when I ran out of firewood.” He led his friend through the corridors between crates and showed him the padlocked air-vent grille. “If you ever need to get out of here, just unlock this and crawl, Larry. It’s about two hundred feet to that old gold mine I told you about once. It eventually comes out in the steep gully east of here.”

Lawrence shook his head. “I don’t think it’d do me any good.”

“There are extra keys upstairs,” said Dar. “Keys for the trapdoor, the door to this room, and the grille padlocks…They’re in a leather case under the ice tray in the fridge.”

Lawrence shook his head again. “OK, but that’s not what I meant. I just don’t think I’d fit in that particular air shaft.”

Dar looked at the vent, then looked at Lawrence, and nodded. “Well, if you were ever trapped down here when things were…unpleasant…upstairs, just bolt the steel door and stay here. The room’s shielded and fireproof and the air is drawn in from the cave, so even if the cabin burns down above you, this place would be safe.”

“Uh-huh,” said Lawrence, obviously unconvinced. “Trudy and I are going to be at our condo in Palm Springs the rest of this week,” he said. “Unless you need me here, I mean.”

Dar shook his head. “No. And be careful in Palm Springs until we hear that Trace and the Russians and all the rest are behind bars.”

Lawrence only grunted and patted the pistol in his shoulder holster.

They hooked the two fiber-optic cables and their transmitter to the cabin’s power supply, and then to the auxiliary generator as backup. Then they ran antenna wire up through the wall and onto the roof of the cabin. After that, they hiked downhill from the cabin—keeping the cabin between them and the viewing field of the Czech video camera up the hill—and set up the second outdoor camera in the burned-out stump of a huge old Douglas fir just where the grassy, open hillside began. Then Lawrence returned to the cabin while Dar took the receiver/monitor—concealed in his tan rucksack—and hiked several hundred yards up the hill.

“Got a picture?” came Lawrence’s voice over the cell phone.

“Yes,” said Dar. He switched back and forth between cameras two and three. The wide-angle lenses each gave a bugeyed view of the room, but every part of the cabin except the bathroom and the inside of the closets was clearly visible on the tiny monitor screen. These lenses had no pan or zoom controls, but were effective in very low light conditions.

“Now I know what you’re up to,” said Lawrence on the phone.

“You do?”

“Yeah,” said the private investigator/adjuster. “You’re planning a huge orgy up here and you want to get it all on tape.”

Dar tried camera four. It panned up and down the slope, showing the entire approach to the south side of the cabin. With the wide-angle lens he could see miles across the valley to the south and zoom in on objects up to a hundred yards away.

On the same Thursday morning that saw the arrest of Dallas Trace, Attorney William Rogers—the East L.A. lawyer who had helped Father Martin create the Helpers of the Helpless—was pulled over to the side of the road on his way to work. As the attorney stepped out of his vehicle, joking with the state patrol officers in their CHP car about not seeing the stop sign, FBI agents, sheriff’s deputies, and LAPD officers converged on the site.

Rogers was handcuffed, read his rights, and loaded into one of the cars. Syd was told by the agent in charge that Rogers began weeping and demanding to call his wife, Maria. The agents did not tell the attorney that his wife had been arrested moments before at her office headquarters for the Helpers of the Helpless.

In hospitals all over Southern California, local police and FBI agents accompanied by INS officials began their sweep, interrogating and eventually arresting more than sixty Helpers from a group of more than a thousand detained. All hospitals and medical centers in California barred their doors to the Helpers that same day. In the files at Maria Rogers’s Helpers of the Helpless Headquarters in East Los Angeles, the names of more than a hundred insurance-fraud cappers, doctors, attorneys, and facilitators were gathered.

Dar sited the fifth video camera on his property on Tuesday. For several hours he hiked the hundreds of acres of property he knew so well. Finally he decided on the best sniper nest above the cabin—a small, level, grassy area shielded by low boulders on two sides and by huge boulders behind it. Lying there with his old M40 Sniper Rifle and Redfield scope, Dar found that the range—a little under two hundred yards—was almost as perfect as the view. There were clear shots between the scattered trees of the cabin, the entrance to the cabin, and the parking area west of the cabin. The roost was protected by the overhang of rock ledges behind it and by steep slopes on either side. It was perfect; too perfect.

Dar went looking for a less obvious site. He found it less than seventy yards to the northwest of the first one. This second site was also tucked against large boulders, but offered only a narrow gap between slabs of rocks, the shooting site overgrown with prickly bushes, in which a sniper and his spotter could both lie prone. The site was higher than the first and offered a slightly better view while being even harder to approach from any angle without exposure. The extra seventy yards or so of range would not be a problem for the kind of modernized Dragunov SVD sniper rifle used to kill Tom Santana and the three FBI agents.

It took Dar almost three hours to retreat from the site without leaving any footprints, hike all the way around the ridge to the steep rear approach to the boulders of the ridgeline, and free-climb the near-vertical rock wall more than a hundred feet to a point on the larger boulder above the second sniper’s nest. There he had to secure a Perlon climbing rope around a boulder in order to rappel down the steep arc of the rock face to a shrub-filled ledge where he could set up the video camera, conceal it, its battery, and its transmitter with the waterproof camouflage tarp, and then hide the long broadcast antenna by running it up cracks in the rock face to the summit.

Dar then returned to the cabin and tested the monitor. The picture was not as clear as the transmission from the other four cameras, but he could clearly see the second sniper’s nest from above and zoom in on the original site he had found lower down.

Dar spent the rest of the morning hiking the rocky ridges and steep ravines to the northeast of the two sites he had found. He was not satisfied until nearly noon.

Syd explained that the FBI’s primary concern was the Russians. They had shown their ruthlessness and their ability to kill at long range. Several FBI tactical team world-class snipers and assault experts were flown in from Quantico. At night, with no muss or fuss, eight of the surrounding houses in the Santa Anita hills above Sierra Madre Boulevard were evacuated and taken over as observation or command and control centers for Special Agent Warren’s task force.

Every movement the Russians made was followed—tail cars and lead cars changing off, helicopters at 8,000 feet watching through powerful optics—and by the time the five Russians drove their two Mercedeses back to the ranch house on Wednesday evening, the tac-team had grown to sixty-two. By this time, FBI snipers in ghillie suits had laboriously crawled to within 150 yards of the house on all sides.

The FBI shooters were armed with the most modern equipment available—modified De Lisle Mark 5 sniper rifles firing 7.62 mm rounds in either standard or subsonic combinations. The rifles were descended from Dar’s venerable Remington 700 bolt-action model, but had evolved about as far as space shuttle pilots had from the first African australopithecine hominids. The weapons utilized heavy match barrels with integral suppressors—“silencers” to the layman—which, when combined with subsonic ammunition, allowed for accuracy at ranges of more than two hundred yards. The rifles made no sound, not even the smack of a bullet breaking the sound barrier.

Mounted on each De Lisle Mark 5 was a single, lightweight, integrated sight which combined a powerful telescopic sight with an image-intensifying night sight, an infrared range finder, and a thermal imager. The FBI snipers could kill at two hundred yards in the rain on a starless night through light fog or smoke.

The rest of the FBI assault teams were outfitted with Kevlar helmets, full body armor, gas masks, infrared goggles, fully suppressed submachine guns with laser sights, .45-caliber fully automatic pistols, and stun grenades known in the trade as “flash bangs.” For the 5:00 A.M. assault on Thursday, the lead team would go in behind a barrage of tear gas projectiles fired through all the windows and use a man-carried hydraulic battering ram to take down the front door. Then the first three tac teams would enter the building by all available first-floor windows and doors. Waiting in the garage of the nearest house was a fully armored tactical assault vehicle with its own battering ram. Five helicopters were tasked to the assault, and each of them carried master marksmen. Two of the helicopters were equipped to drop men on lines for rapid assault from the air.

“Hardly seems like a fair fight,” Syd Olson suggested to Special Agent in Charge Warren on Wednesday afternoon.

Warren had given her the slightest of smiles. “If it becomes anything near a fair fight,” he said, “I deserve to be fired.”

Syd had nodded and called Dar at his condo to see how he was doing.

Dar was doing fine by Wednesday afternoon. He had used the morning to catch up on work in his warehouse apartment—documenting the fatal Gomez swoop-and-squat and preparing a computer-animated reenactment of Attorney Esposito’s death by scissors lift. He chatted with Syd a few minutes, telling her that he was going up to his cabin to get a good night’s sleep while she and her colleagues did all the hard work the next day. He asked her to be careful, promised to see her on Thursday, and wished her luck.

Dar had spent all of the previous afternoon and evening zeroing his two weapons. Using the ravine to the east of the cabin—it was sixty feet wide where the gold mine opened into it, narrowing to less than twenty feet in width up the hill parallel to where Dar had found the potential sniper roosts—he fired off several hundred rounds of ammunition from both his old M40 bolt-action and the loaner Light Fifty.

Dar used a new purchase—a $3,295 pair of new Leica Geovid BDII range-finding binoculars—to double-check the range with the Leica’s built-in laser range finder as he set out targets at distances of 100 yards, 300 yards, 650 yards, and 1,000 yards. Dar was capable of thinking in meters, but like most old-time snipers, he did range-finding calculations in yards. He was pleased that his visual estimates of target distance in each case fell within five feet of the laser’s readout. The Leica’s range finder itself was guaranteed to be accurate to within three feet at 1,100 yards.

Although Dar had fired the M40—the old modified Remington 700 hunting rifle—occasionally on shooting ranges in the past few years, he still had to reacquaint himself with the weapon. When he had been trained as a young Marine, it was discovered that Dar had 20/10 vision, which meant simply that what was perfectly clear for a person with 20/20 vision at one hundred yards was just as clear to Dar at two hundred yards. Even before Dar had decided for certain on becoming an outcast through advanced sniper training, he had qualified as an “expert rifleman” at Parris Island boot camp. In the time-honored tradition of the Corps, riflemen could qualify in three categories—marksman, sharpshooter, and—very, very rarely—expert rifleman. Dar had qualified as expert rifleman on Record Day with 317 points out of a possible 330, a distinction that was rare enough that his commanding officer had told him that only a dozen Marines had equaled it going back to World War II. The first 317 score had been made by a Marine who went on to be a famous writer and biographer.

The qualities that went into superb marksmanship included the control of breathing that was so important, extraordinary eyesight, patience, the ability to fire a weapon from several positions, and the ability to factor in distance, gravity, wind, and the weapon’s unique quirks with every shot. Another important—and underrated—requirement was cleverness with adjusting the rifle’s sling, a skill difficult to teach but which had come naturally to young Dar. Now, almost thirty years later, Dar knew that his eyesight had deteriorated to a mere 20/20 for distance shooting, but the comfort with the weapon, the ability to adjust the sling properly without thinking about it, the sense of proper range and ability to zero the weapon, the ability to fire easily and accurately from a prone, kneeling, sitting, and standing position—all these remained.

Dar took great care that Tuesday afternoon to zero the M40. His modified Redfield scope was fitted with mil-dot reticles as well as elevation and windage turrets. He adjusted the elevation turret according to the different ranges he was firing, and clicked the windage turret left to right to compensate for the lateral effects of wind on the bullet. The “zero” of the weapon was simply the setting required to put a shot exactly on target center at any given range with no wind blowing. Here the ravine came in handy because it blocked the prevailing winds from the west and allowed Dar to zero the weapon at all distances during lulls when there was no breeze whatsoever.

During advanced sniper training at Quantico and again in Vietnam, Dar had set his own accuracy requirements. Firing match-grade ammunition such as he was using now, Dar was not satisfied unless he could group his shots within a diameter of 20 millimeters at a range of one hundred yards, 125 millimeters at six hundred yards, and 300 millimeters—regularly—at one thousand yards. The final goal was not as generous as it sounded, Dar knew, because it took a bullet fired from his M40 approximately one second to travel six hundred yards, but a full two seconds to travel one thousand yards. Two seconds is an eternity in ballistics. Wind variations come into play over such a huge amount of time, and if the target is moving…forget it.

Dar spent five hours on Tuesday firing the M40 from all four positions—prone, sitting, kneeling, and standing. He would assume the position, feeling the sling snug tight and right, the stock tight against his cheek, a “spot weld” of contact between his cheek and his thumb on the small of the wooden stock, trigger finger positioned on the trigger with no contact with the side of the stock, his breathing so calm as to be imperceptible. And then he would close his eyes for several seconds. If, when he opened his eyes, the crosshairs in the scope were still precisely on his previous aiming point, he knew that he had obtained a so-called natural point of aim.

The hardest thing for Dar to recapture was trigger control. This had come natural to him in the Marines, but he knew from firing-range practice that he had to work to find it now. Trigger control was nothing more complicated than taking up the slack at precisely the correct point in his breathing cycle while he fine-tuned his aim, then squeezing the trigger the extra millimeter needed without moving the rifle in any way. It was not complicated, but it took mental focus, muscle control, and breathing control.

Having zeroed the M40, Dar took targets down into the open field below the cabin and fired scores of rounds in actual wind conditions. Tuesday was a windy day, and in a steady 15-mph wind, the 7.62 mm bullet would drift 4.5 inches off target at two hundred yards, a disturbing 20 inches off target zero at six hundred yards, and a ridiculous 48 inches off target at six hundred yards. Of course, the wind was almost never steady.

Dar knew that the new generation of snipers went into battle with pocket calculators or—in the more sophisticated weapon systems—minicomputers in the actual scope with electronic wind sensors attached.

Dar thought that this was a waste of human brainpower and basic senses. He had been well trained to gauge the wind. Less than 3 mph and one can hardly tell if the wind is blowing, but smoke drifts. Gusts of 5 to 8 mph will keep tree leaves in a constant motion, and Dar had long since learned the sound of different wind values in the ponderosa pines and Douglas firs that surrounded his cabin. Any wind between 8 and 12 mph kicks up dust and grit, blows loose leaves, and can be seen in swirls and dust devils. Between 12 and 15 mph the tiny birch trees in the field would be constantly swaying.

Dar had instinctively known, even as a young Marine sniper trainee, that the wind’s speed is only a small part of the equation. The wind direction must also be properly sensed and factored in. Any wind blowing at right angles to his direction of fire—from eight-, nine-, ten-, and two-, three-, four-o’clock positions—was a full-value wind. Any oblique wind—one, five, seven, eleven o’clock—would be accorded only half value, so a 7-mph breeze from his nine-o’clock position would be rated as a 3.5-mph wind when he made his lateral adjustments to the scope. Finally, if the wind was blowing directly at his firing position or from the rear—six or twelve o’clock—Dar would factor in only minimal effect on the bullet: a slight drop in velocity firing into the wind; a corresponding rise in velocity with a tail wind. Being a sailplane pilot had honed his skill in sensing wind velocity and direction.

Once these factors of range and wind were taken into account—preferably in microseconds—then Dar just used the old Marine marksman formula of range, expressed in hundreds of yards, multiplied by wind velocity expressed in miles per hour, and divided by fifteen. Dar could perform this calculation instantly and instinctively even after all these years.

Lying and kneeling out in that long, grassy field all Tuesday afternoon, Dar kept the small video monitor tuned to camera one activated beside him—making sure that no one was driving up to the cabin while he was practicing. Sometimes wearing his ghillie suit, sometimes in his green slacks and field shirt, Dar fired at regular range targets and Paladin targets and concentrated on achieving m.o.a. and sub-m.o.a. groups. Even after he was achieving these groupings regularly—in slightly gusty conditions and at all of his preset ranges—Dar reminded himself of one crucial point.

These targets are only paper.

On Wednesday evening, just before dusk, all of the FBI men on the Russians’ ranch-house perimeter came to full alert. By this time, eight tactical team snipers in ghillie suits had wormed their way to within 150 yards of the house and all three sides of the property bordering the street. Three of the snipers were in the tall grass less than five yards from the manicured lawn.

At 4:30 P.M. the only telephone call of the day came in. It was trapped and played back on the FBI tape recorders.

Voice: Your dry cleaning is ready, Mr. Yale.

Voice thought to be Gregor Yaponchik: All right.

The FBI traced the call within seconds—it had come from a Pasadena dry-cleaning establishment. Warren had an agent call the place and ask if Mr. Yale’s dry-cleaning was ready yet. The manager said that it was and confirmed that he had just called to inform Mr. Yale of that. The manager apologized for not being able to deliver the dry cleaning, but explained that the unincorporated area north of Pasadena was outside their normal delivery area. The agent calling assured the manager that this was all right.

At 8:10 P.M. a white van pulled up and three Hispanic men in gray shirts and work pants got out. The van had a yard-service ad on its side and Special Agent in Charge Warren had his people on the phone within ten seconds, checking with the company to see if this was a legitimate visit. It certainly did not seem kosher at this hour.

It was. The yard-service people assured the special agents that this was the weekly service and that it had been held up because of van problems and “complexities” at the previous customer’s home. Syd later explained that Warren was tempted to tell the service company to call their people and to get them the hell out of there now, but the three yard men had already begun their work—mowing the yard, clipping the shrubs, and cutting up a small, dead tree—and the FBI man decided that it would draw less attention to let them finish. It was almost dark.

One of the workmen went to the front door, and agents in the house a quarter of a mile from the Russians’ place got a clear photograph of Pavel Zuker talking brusquely to the quickly nodding yard worker. Zuker closed the door and a second later the garage door went up. In the dim light the FBI people could make out heaps of leaf bags next to the two Mercedeses in the garage.

The workers were fast—racing true darkness—and they mowed the lawn in a rush, coming within feet of the facedown and flattened FBI snipers in the higher grass. Once, one of the yard men stopped his mower, picked up what looked like a metal horseshoe, and tossed it into the high grass beyond the yard, almost braining an FBI marksman.

It was almost full dark when the mowing and pruning was done, and the FBI watched carefully as the three workmen disappeared into the garage and reappeared a moment later, carrying the bulky leaf bags.

“Count them,” commanded SAC Warren over the radio link.

“The leaf bags?” said some unfortunate special agent.

“No, you moron, the workers. Make sure that only the three who went into that garage get into the van.”

“Roger that,” came the confirmation from observers and marksmen.

The three went in and came out, tossing the leaf bags in the back of the van and stowing other detritus. The porch light and small driveway lights came on automatically. Lights in the house switched on as the van drove away.

“Shall we intercept them?” asked the special agent at the outer perimeter.

“Negative,” said Warren. “Their boss said that they’re working overtime and they’re headed home from here. Let them go.”

The snipers in the grass and the observers in the houses and passing high-altitude helicopters switched to night vision. Everyone there would have preferred planning the assault for 3:30 A.M., when the Russians would be at their groggiest—or better yet, all asleep—but because of the timing of the other arrests, it had been decided that the assault could commence no earlier than five A.M. Warren and Syd and the others had decided that it would be worth the extra risk of a dawn assault just to make sure that Dallas Trace and the others targeted for arrest that morning heard nothing on the morning news.

Dar had also fired the Barrett Light Fifty for several hours into Tuesday evening. That was a fascinating experience. The rifle came with a bipod, but it was still a beast to manhandle around—weighing twenty-nine and a half pounds without the telescope and measuring an inch more than five feet long. A monster. Adding the M3a Ultra telescopic sight and a few cartridge boxes to the load reminded Dar that he had a bad back.

On Wednesday Dar did his work at the condo, talked to Syd briefly in late afternoon, took the Remington Model 870 shotgun out from under the bed, loaded it, filled his pocket with some extra shells, and carried his overnight bag to the Land Cruiser. He looked around carefully in the basement parking garage before walking to his vehicle. It would be embarrassing to go through all this preparation and then have a pissed-off Russian shoot him with a .22 pistol in his own parking garage.

None did.

Dar drove out through Wednesday traffic. He wanted to arrive at the cabin well before dark, and he did. Stopping on the long gravel driveway to the cabin, he activated the various video cameras one by one. Nothing on the road ahead. No one in the sniper points high above the cabin. No one immediately visible in the field below the cabin. No one in the cabin.

Dar drove the rest of the way, carried in his bags and some groceries, and made dinner. He thought about calling Syd, but knew that she would be busy at the tactical command center all that evening.

What the hell, he thought. I’ll hear about it on the radio tomorrow and read about it in the evening paper.

He sipped some coffee. I hope.

Somewhere around midnight, he double-checked that the cabin doors were locked and turned off the lights. A fire still burned in his fireplace, filling the warm room with flickering light, and he left a soft light on in the kitchen and another next to the bed.

Instead of going to bed, Dar took the shotgun and the receiver/monitor, moved the strip of carpet slightly, unlocked the trapdoor, and went down into his basement. The lights came on automatically. He left the shotgun propped up against the outer wall, unlocked the steel door, and crossed the storeroom to the ventilator grille. Unlocking the heavy padlock there, he inspected the dusty vent with his flashlight and then crawled on his elbows and knees the 220 feet—breathing much more heavily than he liked—until he came to the second grille. He unlocked it, slipped out into the old gold mine, and found his plastic-wrapped M40 rifle and the heavy rucksack right where he had left them the day before.

He pulled on the Marine-issue flak vest stored in the pack, hefted the heavy rucksack, and slung the rifle comfortably on his right shoulder. Water dripped in the old mine shaft. Puddles were everywhere and often six inches deep. Dar splashed through them, still using the flashlight for illumination. He was wearing waterproof hiking boots and his green slacks and camouflage field shirt loose over the heavy vest. On his web belt was the black-steel K-Bar knife in its scabbard. His cell phone was in his shirt pocket, but it was turned off.

Once he reached the entrance to the mine, he doused the flashlight and stowed it, pulling out the L.L. Bean night goggles. There was no moon and the ravine was filled with shadows, but Dar let his eyes adapt naturally and kept the night-vision goggles raised on his forehead as he found his way up the ravine, up the narrow path on the east face of the gully, and continued climbing toward his preselected spot.

It was a beautiful night—a few clouds, cooler than most summer nights, but perfect for a hike.

The FBI assault team battered down the front door of the Santa Anita ranch house at precisely 5:00 A.M. Agents fired tear-gas projectiles through all of the windows. Other agents at the door tossed flash bangs into the living room and lunged inside, laser beams stabbing for targets through the smoke.

Living room empty. Agents held ladders while other agents threw themselves through the bedroom windows as the FBI snipers covered them. No one in the bedrooms.

Special Agent Warren led the first assault team from room to room on the ground floor, and then up the stairway to the second floor. Two helicopters landed on the lawn while two more hovered overhead, brilliant searchlights shining down through the dissipating smoke and the brightening twilight. FBI men in the choppers fired more tear gas through the second-story windows.

No one on the second floor. No one in the kitchen. No one in the basement.

It was one of the last teams to reach the building who radioed in the report. Dead bodies in the garage.

Warren and a dozen others, everyone bulky in their body armor and helmets, goggles and gas masks dangling, converged there within twenty seconds.

The three dead Hispanic men were stripped to their underwear. Each had been shot once in the head.

“But only three got in the van last night…” began a young special agent.

“The goddamned leaf bags,” said Special Agent Warren.

“Shall we expand the perimeter?” asked a helmeted figure.

Warren sagged back against the doorframe, clicking the safety on his suppressed H&K MP-10. “They could be in Mexico by now,” he said dully.

Nonetheless, Warren was on the radio a second later, alerting headquarters, authorizing helicopter and ground searches for the yard-service van, confirming that the CHP, LAPD, and other agencies had to be briefed immediately, and authorizing a national manhunt.

A message was relayed from the Malibu safe house where Detectives Ventura and Fairchild were being kept. It seemed that Fairchild, who was cooperating with the investigators, had been allowed to go for a brief, escorted walk on the beach the previous afternoon. The FBI agents had not known that there was a pay phone just off the beach, but Fairchild had been allowed out of sight for several seconds to urinate in the bushes, and this morning one of the agents took a walk on the beach and found the phone. He immediately checked to see if there had been any outgoing calls from it.

There had. One of fifteen seconds’ duration had been made at 4:30 P.M. The call was to Detective Fairchild’s brother-in-law, who ran a dry-cleaning establishment in Pasadena.

“Damn,” said one of the agents.

“Damn, heck, and spit,” said another.

“Fuck me,” said Special Agent in Charge Warren, who had no immediate Bureau supervisors on the scene. “I bet Fairchild got more money than Ventura—he just hid it better.”

“Shall we tell Special Agent Faber and Investigator Olson about the Russians?” asked the primary dispatcher.

Warren looked at his watch. It was 5:22 A.M. The Dallas Trace assault was still more than ninety minutes away. “Faber and his people are in position and on radio silence,” he said. “I’ll call Cassio, the agent in charge of the Century City security perimeter covering the assault team’s backs, and tell him that we’re sending another dozen tac-team agents to reinforce him.”

“Do you think the Russians will try to rescue Dallas Trace?” asked a goggly agent next to Warren.

The special agent in charge actually laughed. “Not a chance in hell. These guys know that the balloon has gone up. They’re not going to drive from one ambush into another one. We’ll tell Faber and the rest of the assault team after they do their thing.” Warren’s voice lost all traces of humor then and he said something most un-Bureau-like. “And I want that LAPD cop—Fairchild—castrated.”

Syd received the page eight minutes after the FBI had driven Dallas Trace and his three bodyguards away in separate vehicles. She was standing on the street outside the Century City office tower, busy shaking the sweat out of her hair and ripping the Velcro tabs loose on her bulletproof vest, but she stopped everything when she saw the number on the pager.

Warren explained the situation in two sentences.

“Dar!” said Syd, looking at her watch.

“Investigator Olson,” said Special Agent Warren, “these Russians aren’t amateurs. They have a ten-hour head start on us. They’re not going to waste it on some stupid revenge attempt. They’re probably in Mexico by now.”

Whatever he said next was lost as Syd shouted, “Get two FBI choppers with tac teams out to Dar’s cabin—now!” and then flipped shut the phone, picked up her submachine gun, and ran full speed for her parked Taurus. She had no idea that her cell-phone transmission had been garbled and that Special Agent Warren had understood none of it.