The Black Ice

30

Bosch came out of the house looking in the dim light for Aguila and finally saw him standing near the prisoners and the militia. Bosch realized he probably felt more like an outsider here than Harry did himself.

“I am going after the Jeep we saw. I think it was Zorrillo.”

“I am ready,” the Mexican said.

Before they could move Corvo came running up. But it was not to stop them.

“Bosch, I’ve got Ramos in the chopper. It’s all I can spare.”

The silence that followed was punctuated by the sound from the other side of the hacienda of the helicopter’s rotor beginning to turn.

“Go!” Corvo yelled. “Or he’ll go without you.”

They ran around the building and climbed back into their spots in the Lynx. Ramos was in the cockpit with the pilot. The craft abruptly lifted off and Bosch forgot about the seatbelt. He was too busy putting on his helmet and night-vision equipment.

There was nothing in the scope yet. No Jeep. No runner. They were heading southwest from the ranch’s population center. As he watched the yellow land go by in the night-vision lenses, Harry realized he still hadn’t informed Aguila of his captain’s demise. When we are done here, he decided.

In two minutes they came upon the Jeep. It was parked in a copse of eucalyptus trees and tall brush. A tumbleweed as big as a truck had blown up against it or been put up against it as a meager disguise. The vehicle was about fifty yards from the corrals and barn. The pilot put on the spots and the Lynx began circling. There was no sign of the driver, the runner. Zorrillo. Looking between the front seats, Bosch saw Ramos give the pilot the thumbs down sign and the craft began its descent. The lights were cut off and until Harry’s eyes adjusted, it felt like they were dropping through the depths of a black hole.

He finally felt the impact of the ground and his muscles relaxed slightly. He heard the engine cut and there was just the chirping and whupping sound of the free-turning rotor winding down. Through the window Bosch could see the western side of the barn. There were no doors or windows on this exposure and he was thinking that they could approach with reasonable cover when he heard Ramos yell.

“What the-hold on!”

There was a hard impact and the helicopter lurched violently and began sliding. Bosch looked out his window and could only see that they were being pushed sideways. The Jeep. Someone had been hidden in the Jeep. The Lynx’s landing rails finally caught on something in the earth and the craft tipped over. Bosch covered his face and ducked when he saw the still spinning rotor start biting into the ground and splintering. Then he felt Aguila’s weight crash down on him and heard yelling in the cockpit that he could not decipher.

The helicopter rocked in this position for only a few seconds before there was another loud impact, this time from the front. Bosch heard tearing metal and shattering glass and gunfire.

Then it was gone. Bosch could feel the vibration in the ground dissipating as the Jeep sped away.

“I think I got him!” Ramos yelled. “Did you see that?”

All Bosch could think of was their vulnerability. The next hit would probably be from behind where they could not see to shoot. He tried to reach his Smith but his arms were trapped under Aguila. The Mexican detective finally began to crawl off him and they both tentatively moved into crouches in the now sideways compartment. Bosch reached up and tried the door, which was now above them. It slid about halfway open before catching on something, a torn piece of metal. They took off their helmets and Bosch went out first. Then Aguila handed him the bullet-proof vests. Bosch didn’t know why but took them. Aguila followed him out.

The smell of fuel was in the air. They moved to the crushed front of the helicopter where Ramos, gun in one hand, was trying to slide through the hole where the front window used to be.

“Help him,” Bosch said. “I’ll cover.”

He pulled his gun and turned in a full circle but saw no one. Then he saw the Jeep, parked where he had seen it from the air, the tumbleweed still pressed against it. This made no sense to Bosch. Unless-

“The pilot is trapped,” Aguila said.

Harry looked into the cockpit. Ramos was shining a flashlight on the pilot, whose blond mustache was inked with blood. There was a deep slash on the bridge of his nose. His eyes were wide and Bosch could see the flight control apparatus was crushed in on his legs.

“Where’s the radio?” Bosch said. “We’ve got to get help out here.”

Ramos stuck his upper body back through the cockpit window and came back out with the hand-held radio.

“Corvo, Corvo, come up, we’ve got an emergency here.” While waiting for a response, Ramos said to Bosch, “Do you believe this shit? That fucking monster comes outta nowhere. I didn’t know what the-”

“What’s happening?” Corvo’s voice came back on the radio.

“We’ve got a situation here. We need a medevac out here. Tools. The Lynx is wrecked. Corcoran is pinned inside. Has injuries.”

“-cation of the crash?”

“It’s not a crash, man. A goddamn bull attacked it on the ground. It’s wrecked and we can’t get Corcoran out. Our location is one hundred yards northeast of the breeding center, the barn.”

“Stay there. Help’s on the way.”

Ramos clipped the radio to his belt, held the flashlight under his arm and reloaded his handgun.

“Let’s each take a side of a triangle, the chopper in the middle and watch for this thing. I know I hit it but it didn’t show a thing.”

“No,” Bosch said. “Ramos, you and Aguila take sides of it and wait for help. I’m going to clear the barn. Zorrillo’s getting-”

“No, no, no, we don’t do it like that, Bosch. You aren’t calling any of the shots here. We wait here and when help-”

He stopped in midsentence and made a full turn. Then Bosch realized he heard it, too. Or, rather, felt it. A rhythmic vibration in the ground, growing stronger. It was impossible to place the direction. He watched Ramos turn in circles with the flashlight. He heard Aguila say, “El Temblar.”

“What?” Ramos yelled. “What?”

And then the bull appeared at the edge of vision. A huge black beast, it came at them undeterred by their number. This was his turf to defend. The bull seemed to Bosch in that moment to have come from within the darkness, an apparition of death, its head down and jagged horns up. It was less than thirty feet away when it locked on a specific target. Bosch.

In one hand he held the Smith. In the other the vest, with the wordPOLICE on it in reflective yellow tape. In the seconds he had left he realized the tape had caught the beast’s attention and singled him out. He also came to the conclusion that his gun was useless. He could not fell the animal with bullets. It was too big and powerful. It would take a perfect shot on a moving target. Wounding it, as Ramos had, would not stop it.

He dropped the gun and held the vest up.

Bosch heard yelling and shooting from his right side. It was Ramos. But the bull stayed on him. As it came closer he swept the vest to his right, its yellow letters catching the light of the moon. He let it go as the animal closed in. The bull, like a blur of black in darkness, hit the vest before it left his hand. Bosch tried to jump out of the way but one of the massive shoulders of the animal brushed him and sent him tumbling.

From the ground he looked up to see the animal cut to its left like a gifted athlete and close in on Ramos. The agent was still firing and Bosch could see the reflection of the moon off the shells as they were ejected from his gun. But the bullets did not stop the beast’s charge. They did not even slow it. Bosch heard the gun’s ejector go dry and Ramos was pulling the trigger on an empty chamber. His last cry was unintelligible. The bull hit him low in the legs and then raised its brutish and bloodied neck up, ejecting him into the air. Ramos seemed to tumble in slow motion before coming down headfirst and unmoving.

The bull tried to stop its charge but momentum and damage from bullets finally left it unable to control its huge weight. Its head dipped and it cartwheeled onto its back. It righted itself and prepared for another charge. Bosch crawled to his gun, picked it up and aimed. But the animal’s front legs faltered and it went down. Then it slowly turned onto its side and lay unmoving, save for the hesitant rise and fall of its chest. Then that stopped, too.

Aguila and Bosch took off for Ramos at the same time. They huddled over him but did not move him. He was on his back and his eyes were still open and caked with dirt. His head lolled at an unnatural angle. His neck appeared to have been cleanly broken in the fall. In the distance they could hear the sound of one of the Hueys flying their way. Bosch stood up and could see its spotlight sweeping over the scrubland, looking for them.

“I’m going to the tunnel,” Bosch said. “When they land, come in with backup.”

“No,” Aguila said. “I’m going with you.”

He said it in a way that invited no debate. He leaned down and took the radio off Ramos’s belt and picked up the flashlight. He gave the radio to Bosch.

“Tell them we are both going.”

Bosch radioed Corvo.

“Where’s Ramos?”

“We just lost Ramos. Me and Aguila are going to the tunnel. Alert the militia at EnviroBreed that we are coming through. We don’t want to get shot.”

He turned the radio off before Corvo could reply and dropped it on the ground next to the dead DEA agent. The other helicopter was almost on them now. They ran to the barn, their weapons held up and ready, and moved slowly around the outside until they were at the front and could see the bay door had been slid open. Wide enough for a man to pass through.

They went through and crouched in the darkness. Aguila began to sweep the flashlight’s beam around. It was a cavernous barn with stalls running along both sides to the back. There were crates used for trucking bulls to arenas stacked in the back along with towers made of bales of hay. Bosch saw a line of overhead lights running down the center of the building. He looked around and found the switch near the bay door.

Once the interior was lighted they moved down the aisle between the rows of stalls, Bosch taking the right and Aguila the left. The stalls were all empty, the bulls set free to roam the ranch. It was when they reached the back that they saw the opening to the tunnel.

A forklift was parked in the corner, holding a pallet of hay bales four feet off the ground. There was a four-foot-wide hole in the concrete floor where the pallet had sat. Zorrillo, or whoever the runner had been, had used the forklift to lift the pallet but there had been no one to drop it back down to hide his escape.

Bosch crouched down and moved to the edge of the hole and looked down. He saw a ladder leading about twelve feet down to a lighted passageway. He looked up at Aguila.

“Ready?”

The Mexican nodded.

Bosch went first. He climbed a few steps down the ladder and then dropped the rest of the way, bringing up his gun and ready to shoot. But there was no one in the tunnel as far as he could see. It wasn’t even like a tunnel. It was more of a hallway. It was tall enough to stand in and an electrical conduit ran along the ceiling feeding lights in steel cages every twenty feet. There was a slight curve to the left and so he could not see where it ended. He moved into the passageway and Aguila dropped down behind him.

“Okay,” Bosch whispered. “Let’s stay to the right. If there is shooting, I’ll go low and you go high.”

Aguila nodded and they began to move quickly through the tunnel. Bosch, trying to figure his bearings, believed they were heading east and slightly north. They covered the ground to the curve quickly and then pressed themselves hard against the wall as they moved into the second leg of the passage.

Bosch realized that the bend in the passage was too wide for them to still be on line with EnviroBreed. He stared down the last segment of the tunnel and saw that it was clear. He could see the exit ladder maybe fifty yards ahead. And he knew they were going somewhere other than EnviroBreed. He wished he hadn’t left the radio with Ramos’s body.

“Shit,” Harry whispered.

“What?” Aguila whispered back.

“Nothing. C’mon.”

They began to move again, covering the first twenty-five yards quickly and then slowing to a cautious and quieter approach to the exit ladder. Aguila switched to the right wall and they came upon the opening at the same time, both with guns extended upward, sweat getting in their eyes.

There was no light from the opening above them. Bosch took the flashlight from Aguila and put its beam through the hole. He could see exposed wooden rafters of a low ceiling in the room above. No one looked down at them. No one shot at them. No one did a thing. Harry listened for any sound but heard nothing. He nodded to Aguila to cover and holstered his gun. He started climbing the ladder, one hand holding the flashlight.

He was scared. In Vietnam, leaving one of Charlie’s tunnels always meant the end of fear. It was like being born again; you were leaving the darkness for safety and the hands of comrades. Out of the black and into the blue. But not this time; this time was the opposite.

When he reached the top, before rising through the opening, he flashed the beam around again but saw nothing. Then, like a turtle, he slowly moved his head out of the opening. The first thing he noticed in the beam was the sawdust everywhere on the floor. He climbed farther out, taking in the rest of the surroundings. It was some kind of storage room. There were steel shelves stocked with saw blades, boxes of sanding belts for industrial machinery. There were some hand tools and carpentry saws. One group of shelves were stacked with wooden dowel pegs, with different sizes on different shelves. Bosch immediately thought of the pegs attached to the baling wire that had been used to kill Kapps and Porter.

He moved fully into the room now and signaled to Aguila that it was safe to come up. Then Harry approached the storage room’s door.

It was unlocked and it opened into a huge warehouse with lines of machinery and work benches on one side and the completed product-unfinished furniture, tables, chairs, chests of drawers-stacked on the other. Light came from a single bulb that hung from a cross support beam. It was the night-light. Aguila came up behind him then. They were in Mexitec, Bosch knew.

At the far end of the warehouse were sets of double doors. One of these was open and they moved to it quickly. It led to a loading-dock area that was off the back alley Bosch had walked through the night before. There was a puddle at the bottom of the parking bay and he saw wet tire tracks leading into the alley. There was no one in sight. Zorrillo was long gone.

“Two tunnels,” Bosch said, unable to hide the dejection in his voice.

“Two tunnels,” Corvo said. “Ramos’s informant fucked us.”

Bosch and Aguila were sitting on chairs of unfinished pine watching Corvo pacing and looking like shit, like a man in charge of an operation that had lost two men, a helicopter and its main target. It had been nearly two hours since they had come up through the tunnel.

“How d’you mean?” Bosch asked.

“I mean the CI had to have known about the second tunnel. How’s he know about one and not the other? He set us up. He left Zorrillo the escape route. If I knew who he was I’d charge him with accessory in the death of a federal agent.”

“You don’t know?”

“Ramos didn’t register this one with me. Hadn’t gotten around to it.”

Bosch breathed a little easier.

“I can’t fucking believe this,” Corvo was saying. “I might as well never go back. I’m done, man. Done… Least you got your cop killer, Bosch. I got a shit sandwich.”

“Have you put out a Telex?” Bosch said to change the subject.

“Already out. To all stations, all law enforcement agencies. But it doesn’t matter. He’s long gone. He’ll probably go to the interior, lie low for a year and then start over. Right where he left off. Probably Michoacan, maybe farther down.”

“Maybe he went north,” Bosch said.

“No way he’d try to cross. He knows if we get him up there, he’ll never see daylight again. He went south, where’s he’s safe.”

There were several other agents in the factory with clipboards, cataloging and searching. They had found a machine that hollowed out table legs so that they could be filled with contraband, recapped and sent across the border. Earlier they had found the second tunnel opening in the barn and followed it through to EnviroBreed. There had been no explosives on the trapdoor and they had gone in. The place was empty except for the two dogs outside. They killed them.

The operation had closed down a major smuggling network. Agents had left for Calexico to arrest the head of EnviroBreed, Ely. There were fourteen arrests made on the ranch. Others would follow. But all of that wasn’t enough for Corvo or anybody. Not when agents were dead and Zorrillo was in the wind. Corvo had been wrong if he thought Bosch would be satisfied that Arpis was dead. Bosch wanted Zorrillo, too. He was the man who had called the hits.

Bosch got up so he wouldn’t have to witness the agent’s anguish anymore. He had enough of his own. Aguila must have felt the same. He, too, stood and began to walk listlessly around the machines and the furniture. Basically, they were waiting for one of the militia cars to take them back to the airport to Bosch’s car. The DEA would be here until well after sunup. But Bosch and Aguila were finished.

Harry watched Aguila go back into the storage room and approach the tunnel entrance. He had told him about Grena and the Mexican had simply nodded. He hadn’t shown a thing. Now Aguila dropped to his haunches and seemed to be studying the floor, as if the sawdust were a spread of tea leaves in which he could read Zorrillo’s location.

After a few moments, he said, “The pope has new boots.”

Bosch walked over and Aguila pointed to the footprints in the sawdust. There was one that was not from Aguila’s or Bosch’s shoes. It was very clear in the dust and Harry recognized the elongated heel of a bulldog boot. Inside it was the letter “S” formed by a curving snake. The edges of the print were sharp in the dust, the head of the snake clearly imprinted.

Aguila had been right. The pope had new boots.