The Black Ice

29

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.

“ETA two minutes,” a voice said in his ear. The pilot.

Bosch took the Kevlar vest he held in his lap and slipped it underneath him, onto the seat. A protection against ground fire. He saw Aguila do the same thing with the DEA loaner.

The Lynx began a sharp descent and the voice in his ears said, “Here we go.” Bosch snapped the night vision apparatus down and looked into the lenses. The earth moved quickly below, a yellow river of scrub brush and little else. They passed over a road and then a turnoff. The helicopter banked in the direction of the turn. He saw a car, a pickup truck and a Jeep stopped on the road and then several other vehicles moving on the dirt road, yellow clouds of dust billowing behind them. The militia was in and speeding toward the population center. The battle had been engaged.

“Looks like our friends have already taken care of one of the patrol Jeeps,” Corvo’s voice said in Bosch’s earpiece.

“That’s a ten-four,” came a returning voice, apparently from one of the other choppers.

The Lynx overtook the militia vehicles. Bosch was staring at open road in the night-vision scope. The craft’s descent continued and then leveled off at what Bosch estimated was an elevation of about three hundred yards. In the yellow vision field he could now see the hacienda and the front of the bunker. He saw the other two helicopters, looking like black dragonflies, set down on their assigned sides of the house. Then he felt the Lynx pull up slightly as if hovering on an air pocket.

“One down!” a voice shouted in the headset.

“Two down!” came another.

Men in black began spilling from the side doors of the landed craft. One group of six went immediately to the front of the hacienda. The six-man group from the other helicopter moved toward the bunker building. Militia cars now began pulling into the field of view. Bosch saw more figures leap from the helicopters. That would be Ramos and the backup.

It all appeared surrealistic in the scope to Bosch. The yellow tint. The tiny figures. It seemed like a badly filmed and edited movie.

“Switching to ground com,” Corvo said.

Bosch heard the click as the frequencies were switched. Almost immediately he began to pick up radio chatter and the heavy breathing of men running. Then there was a loud banging sound, but Bosch could tell it was not weapon fire. It was the ram used to open the door. Over the air there were now panicked shouts of “Policia!DEA!” Corvo’s voice cut through a momentary lull in the shouting.

“Ground One, talk to me. What have we got? Let’s talk to the mothership.”

There was some static and then Ramos’s voice came back.

“We have entry at Point A. We have-I’m going-”

Ramos was cut off. Point A was the hacienda. The plan had been to hit the hacienda and the bunker, Point B, at once.

“Ground Two, do we have entry yet at Point B?” Corvo asked.

No answer. It was a few long moments of silence and then Ramos came back up on the air.

“Air Leader, can’t tell on Ground Two at this time. Target team has approached entry point and we-”

Before the transmission was cut off, Bosch heard the unmistakable sound of automatic gunfire. He felt adrenaline begin to flood his body. Yet he could do nothing but sit and listen to the dead radio air and watch the murky yellow night vision display. He saw what he believed were muzzle flashes from the front of the bunker. Then Ramos came back up on the air.

“We’re hot! We’re hot!”

The helicopter lurched as the pilot took them up higher. As the craft rose, the night scope offered a larger view of the scene below. The entire PC became visible. Now Bosch could see figures on the roof of the bunker, moving toward the front of the structure. He pushed the switch on the side of his helmet and said into the mouthpiece, “Corvo, they’ve got people on the roof. Warn them.”

“Stay off!” Corvo shouted. Then to below, he radioed, “Ground Two, Ground Two, you have weapons on the roof of the bunker. Count two positions approaching northside, copy?”

Bosch could hear no shooting over the sound of the rotor but he could see the muzzle flash from automatic weapons from two locations at the front of the bunker. He saw sporadic flashes from the vehicles but the militia was pinned down. He heard a radio transmission open and heard the sound of fire but then it was closed and no one had spoken.

“Ground Two, copy?” Corvo said into the voice. There was just the initial strain of panic in his voice. There was no reply. “Ground Two, do you copy?”

A hard-breathing voice came back. “Ground Two. Yeah. We’re pinned down in the Point B entry. We’re in a crossfire here. Would like some help.”

“Ground One, report,” Corvo barked.

There was a long moment of silence. Then Ramos came on the air. His words were partially obscured by gunfire.

“Here. We’ve… the house,… have three suspects down. No others present. Looks like they’re… fucking bunker.”

“Get to the bunker. Two needs backup.”

“-that way.”

Bosch noticed how the voices on the radio were higher and more urgent. The code words and formal language had been stripped away. Fear did that. He had seen it in the war. He’d seen it on the streets when he was in uniform. Fear, though always unspoken, nevertheless stripped men of their carefully orchestrated poses. The adrenaline roars and the throat gurgles with fear like a backed-up drain. Sheer desire for survival takes over. It sharpens the mind, pares away all the bullshit. A once-modulated reference to Point B becomes the almost hysterical expletive.

From four hundred yards up and looking down through the night scope, Bosch could also see the flaw in the plan. The DEA agents had hoped to outrun the militia in their helicopters, charge the population center and secure things before the ground troops arrived. But that hadn’t happened. The militia was there and now one of the CLET groups was pinned down between the militia and the people in the bunker.

There was a sudden increase in the shooting from the bunker. Bosch could tell this by the flaring of repeated muzzle flashes. Then on the scope he saw a Jeep suddenly begin speeding from the back of the bunker. It smashed through a gate in the wall that surrounded the compound and began moving across the scrubland in a southeasterly direction. Bosch pushed his transmit button again.

“Corvo, we have a runner. Jeep heading southeast.”

“Have to let him go for now. It’s going to shit down there and I can’t move anybody. Stay off the fucking line.”

The Jeep was now well out of the scope’s field of vision. He flipped the lenses up off his face and looked out the window. There was nothing. Only darkness. The Jeep was running without lights. He thought of the barn and stables out near the highway. That was where the runner was going.

“Ramos,” Corvo said over the radio. “Do you want lights?”

No return.

“Ground One?… Ground Two, do you want lights?”

“… ights would be good but you’d be a sit…,” the Ground Two voice said. “Better hold it a few until we… eaned up.”

“That’s a copy. Ramos are you copying?”

There was no answer.

The shooting ended quickly after that. The pope’s guardians put down their weapons after apparently determining that their odds of survival in a prolonged firefight were not good.

“Air Leader, give us that light now,” Ramos radioed from below, the tone of his voice back to being calmly modulated and confident.

Three powerful beams from the belly of the Lynx then illuminated the ground below. Men with hands laced together on the tops of their heads were walking out of the bunker and into the hands of the militia. There were at least a dozen. Bosch saw one of the CLETs drag a body out of the bunker and leave it on the ground outside.

“We’re secure down here,” Ramos radioed.

Corvo signaled with his thumb to the pilot and the craft began to descend. Bosch felt tension drift out of him as they went down. In thirty seconds they were on the ground next to one of the other helicopters.

In the yard in front of the bunker, the prisoners were kneeling while some of the militia officers used plastic disposable handcuffs to bind their wrists. Others were making a stack of confiscated weapons. There were a couple of Uzis and AK-47s but mostly shotguns and M-16s. Ramos was standing with the militia captain, who had his radio to his ear.

Bosch did not see a recognizable face among the prisoners. He left Aguila and went to Ramos.

“Where’s Zorrillo?”

Ramos held up his hand in a do-not-disturb gesture and didn’t answer. He was looking at the captain. Corvo walked up then, too. There was a report over the captain’s radio and then he looked at Ramos and said, “Nada.”

“Okay, nothing’s happening at EnviroBreed,” Ramos said. “Nobody in or out since this went down here. The militia is maintaining a watch over there.”

Ramos saw Corvo and in a lower voice, meant just for him, said, “We’ve got a problem. We’ve lost one.”

“Yeah, we saw him,” Bosch said. “He was in the Jeep and headed southeast out of-”

He stopped when he realized what Ramos had meant.

“Who’d we lose?” Corvo asked.

“Kirth, one of the CLETs. But that’s not the whole problem.”

Bosch stepped back from the two men. He knew he had no place in this.

“What the fuck do you mean?” Corvo said.

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

The two agents headed off around the hacienda. Bosch trailed at a discreet distance behind. A covered porch ran the length of the rear of the house. Ramos crossed it to an open door. A CLET agent, his mask pulled up to expose his blood- and sweat-streaked face, was on the floor three feet inside the door. It looked to Bosch like four rounds: two in the upper chest, just above the vest, and two in the neck. A nice tight pattern, all of them through-and-through wounds. Blood was still leaking out from beneath the body into a pool. The dead agent’s eyes and mouth were open. He had died quickly.

Bosch could see the problem. It was friendly fire. Kirth had been hit with fire from one of the 636s. The wounds were too big, too devastating and bunched too close together to have come from the weapons stacked near the prisoners.

“Looks like he came running out this back door when he heard the shooting,” Ramos was saying. “Ground Two was already in a crossfire. Someone from Two’s unit must have opened on the door, hit Kirth here.”

“God damn it!” Corvo yelled. Then in a lower voice, he said, “All right, come over here, Ramos.”

They huddled together and this time Bosch could not hear what was said but didn’t have to. He knew what they would do. Careers were at stake here.

“Got it,” Ramos said, returning to a normal voice and breaking away from Corvo.

“Good,” Corvo said. “When you are done with that, I want you to get to a secure line and call L.A.Operations. We are going to need Public Info Officers down here and up there to work on this ASAP. The media is going to be crawling all over this. From all over.”

“You got it.”

Corvo started to go into the house but came back.

“Another thing, keep the Mexicans away from this.”

He meant the militia. Ramos nodded and then Corvo stalked off. Ramos looked over at Bosch standing in the shadows of the porch. A silent acknowledgement passed between them. Bosch knew that the media would be told that Kirth had been fatally wounded by Zorrillo’s men. Nobody would say anything about friendly fire.

“You got a problem?” Ramos said.

“I don’t have a problem with anything.”

“Good. Then I’m not going to have to worry about you. Right, Bosch?”

Bosch stepped to the door.

“Ramos, where’s Zorrillo?”

“We’re still searching. Still a lot of space in these buildings to cover. All I can tell you is we’ve cleared the hacienda and he isn’t here. Only three inside are dead and he ain’t one of them. So no one’s talking. But your cop killer’s in there, Bosch. The man with the tears.”

Bosch silently stepped around Ramos and the body and into the hacienda. He was careful not to step into the blood. As he passed, he looked down into the dead man’s eyes. They were already filming and looked like chips of dirty ice.

He followed a hallway to the front of the house, where he heard voices from a doorway at the bottom of the stairs in the front entry. As he approached he could see the room beyond was an office. There was a large polished wood desk, its center drawer open. Behind the desk was a wall of bookshelves.

Inside the room were Corvo and one of the CLET agents. And two bodies. One was on the floor next to an overturned couch. The other was in a chair near the room’s only window, off to the right of the desk.

“C’mon in here, Bosch,” Corvo said. “We can probably use your expertise here.”

The body in the chair held Bosch’s attention. The man’s expensive black leather jacket was open, revealing a gun still holstered on the belt. It was Grena, though this was not easy at first to tell because a bullet fired into the police captain’s right temple had obliterated much of the face when it exited beneath the left eye. Blood had flowed down both shoulders and ruined the jacket.

Bosch pulled his eyes away and looked at the man on the floor. One leg was over the back of the couch, which had been knocked backwards. He had at least five holes in his chest that Bosch could make out in the blood. The three teardrops tattooed on the cheek were also unmistakable. Arpis. The man he had seen at Poe’s. There was a chrome-plated forty-five on the floor next to his right leg.

“That your man?” Corvo asked.

“One of ’em, yeah.”

“Good. Don’t have to worry about him, then.”

“The other one is SJP. He’s a captain named Grena.”

“Yeah, I just pulled the ID out of his pocket. He also had six grand in his wallet. Not bad, since SJP captains make about three hundred bucks a week. Take a look over here.”

He moved to the other side of the desk. Bosch followed and saw that the rug had been folded back, exposing a floor safe about the size of a hotel refrigerator. Its thick steel door was propped open and the interior was empty.

“This is how it was found when the CLETs came in. What do you think? These stiffs don’t look too old. I think we got here just a little late for the show, huh?”

Bosch studied the scene for a few moments.

“Hard to say. Looks like the end of a business deal. Maybe Grena got greedy. Asked for more than he deserved. Maybe he was making some kind of play with Zorrillo, some kind of scam, and it went to shit. I saw him a few hours ago at the bullfight.”

“Yeah, what did he say? That he was heading over to the pope’s for a shot?”

Corvo didn’t laugh and neither did Bosch.

“No, he just told me to get out of town.”

“So, who shot him?”

“Looks like a forty-five to me. Just guessing. That would make Arpis over here a likely candidate.”

“Then who shot Arpis?”

“Got me. But if I was guessing, it looks like Zorrillo or whoever was behind the desk pulls a gun out of the drawer there and starts popping him right here in front of the desk. He goes backwards and over the couch.”

“Why would he shoot him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Zorrillo didn’t like what he did to Grena. Maybe Zorrillo was starting to get scared of him. Maybe Arpis made the same play Grena did. Could’ve been a lot of things. We’ll never know. I thought Ramos said it was three bodies.”

“Across the hall.”

Bosch crossed the hall into a long and wide living room. It had deep-pile, white shag carpet and a white piano. There was a painting of Elvis on the wall above a white leather couch. The rug was stained with blood from the third man, who was lying in front of the couch. It was Dance. Bosch recognized him from the mug shot even with the bullet wound in his forehead and the blond hair now dyed black. The practiced sulk had been replaced on his face with a look of wonder. His eyes were open and almost seemed to be looking up at the hole in his forehead.

Corvo walked in behind him.

“What do you think?”

“I think it looks like the pope had to get out of here in a hurry. And he didn’t want to leave these three behind to talk about it… Shit, I don’t know, Corvo.”

Corvo raised the hand-held radio to his mouth.

“Search teams,” he said. “Status.”

“Search Leader here. We’ve got the underground lab. Entrance is through the bunker structure. It’s major. We have product sitting in the drying pans. Multiweight. We’re home. We’re gold.”

“What about the priority suspect?”

“Negative at this time. No suspects in the lab.”

“Shit,” Corvo said after signing off. He rubbed the edge of the Motorola against the scar on his cheek as he thought about what to do next.

“The Jeep,” Bosch said. “We have to go after it.”

“If he’s heading to EnviroBreed, the militia is there waiting. At the moment, I can’t cut people loose to go running around the ranch. It’s six thousand fucking acres.”

“I’ll go.”

“Wait a minute, Bosch. This is not your action.”

“Fuck it, Corvo. I’m going.”