Michael Connelly - The Black Ice

“I know what you’re saying,” Corvo said. “But don’t worry about it. We got a plan for that. Only things you have to worry about are your own ass and your partner’s. You better watch him good. And you better get some coffee. It’s going to be a long night.”

Bosch rejoined Aguila, who was standing at the workbench where the coffee had been set up. They nodded at some of the agents who were milling about the bench but the gestures were rarely returned. They were the invited uninvited. From where they stood, they could see into a suite of offices off the aircraft bays. There were several Mexicans in green uniforms sitting at desks and tables, drinking coffee and waiting.

“Militia,” Aguila said. “From Mexico City. Is there no one in Mexicali that the DEA trusts?”

“Well, after tonight, they’ll trust you.”

Bosch lit a cigarette to go with the coffee and took an expansive look around the hangar.

“What do you think?” he said to Aguila.

“I think the pope of Mexicali is going to have a wake-up call tonight.”

“Looks that way.”

They moved away from the coffee bench to let others have at it and leaned against a nearby counter to watch the raid equipment being prepared. Bosch looked over toward the back of the hangar and saw Ramos standing with a group of men wearing bulky black jumpsuits. Harry walked over and saw that the men were wearing Nomex fire-retardant suits beneath the jumpsuits. Some of them were smearing bootblack around their eyes and then pulling on black ski masks. The CLET squad. They couldn’t wait to get in the air, to get going. Bosch could almost smell their adrenaline.

There were twelve of them. They were reaching into black trunks and laying out the equipment they would need for the night’s mission. Bosch saw Kevlar helmets and vests, sound-disorientation grenades. Holstered already on one man’s hip was a 9mm P-226 with an extended magazine. That would just be for backup, he guessed. He could see the barrel of a long gun protruding from one of the trunks. Ramos noticed him then and reached into the trunk and brought the weapon over. There was a strange leer spreading on his face.

“Check this shit out,” Ramos said. “Colt only makes ’em for the DEA, man. The RO636. It’s a suppressed version of the standard nine submachine. Uses one-forty-seven-grain subsonic hollow points. You know what one of them will do? It’ll go through three bodies before it even thinks about slowing down.

“It’s got a suppressed silencer. Means no muzzle flash. These guys are always jumping labs. You get ether fumes and the muzzle flash could set it off. Boom-you land about two blocks away. But not with these. No muzzle flash. It’s beautiful. I wish I was going 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 EnviroBreed compound across the highway.

Next, Ramos tacked up another blowup, this one detailing about a quarter of the ranch-ranging from the population center to the breeding center/EnviroBreed compound area. This shot was close enough that tiny figures could be seen on the roofs of the bunker building. In the scrubland behind the buildings there were black figures against the light brown and green earth. The bulls. Bosch wondered which one of them was El Temblar. He could hear one of the militia officers translating the meeting for a group of the guardsmen gathered around him.

“Okay, these photos are about thirty hours old,” Ramos said. “We had NASA do a fly-over in a U-thirty-four. We also had them shoot heat resonance strips and that’s where this gets good. The reds you see are the hot spots.”

He tacked a new blowup next to the other. This was a computer-generated graphic that had red squares-the buildings-against a sea of blues and greens. There were small dots of red outside the square and Bosch assumed these were the bulls.

“These photos were taken at the same second yesterday,” Ramos said. “By jumping back and forth between the graphic and the live shot we can pinpoint certain anomalies. These squares become the buildings and most of these smaller red blotches become the bulls.”

He used the yardstick to refer back and forth between the two blowups. Bosch realized that there were more red spots on the graphic than there were bulls on the photo.

“Now these marks do not correspond with animals on the photo,” Ramos said. “What they do correspond with is the feed boxes.”

With Corvo’s help they pinned up two more enlargements. These were the closest shots so far. Bosch could clearly make out the tin roof of a small shed. There was a black steer standing near it. In the corresponding graphic, both the steer and the shed were bright red.

“These basically are little shelters to keep rain off the hay and feed for the livestock. NASA says these shelters would emit some residual heat that the resonance photos would pick up. But NASA said it clearly would not be what we are seeing here. So, what we think this means is that these feed boxes are decoys. We think they are exhaust vents for an underground complex. We believe there is some kind of entrance somewhere in the population center structures that leads to the underground lab back here.”

He let it sink in for a few moments. Nobody asked any questions.

“Also,” he said, “there is a-we have information from a confidential informant that there is a tunnel system. We believe it runs from the breeding center here to this complex-a business called EnviroBreed-here. We believe it has allowed Zorrillo to circumvent surveillance and is one of the possible means of moving product from the ranch to the border.”

Ramos went on to detail the raid. The plan was to strike at midnight. The Mexican militia would have a two-part responsibility. A single unmarked car would be sent to the ranch gate, swerving as if driven by a drunk on the gravel road. Using this ruse, the three guardsmen in the car would take custody of the two gate sentries. After that, half of the remaining militia would move down the ranch road to the population center while the other half would advance to the EnviroBreed compound, surround it and await developments on the ranch.

“The success of the operation largely relies on the two men on the gate being taken before issuing a warning to the PC,” Corvo said. His first words during the briefing. “If we fail that, we lose the element of surprise.”