The seals on the trailer were good. My new prize possession was sitting there all perky, barely a speck of sand on it. I jumped inside, ran my hand along the smooth gas tank, the worn leather seat.
“We’re going to have fun,” I told it. “We’ve earned it. By the way, your name is Marilyn, from you know who, and I am going to ride you hard.”
I closed the trailer up tight, got into the cab of the truck, and pulled out. Deedee, Wally, and Ray were standing in front, waving good-bye. I waved back. For a few moments I could see them in my side-view mirror, receding in the distance. Then I followed the curve of the road, and they were gone.
AMBUSH
THE OLD MAN STOOD apart from the others in a grove of old-growth California live oaks, smoking a hand-rolled. The only things here more ancient than me, he thought as he looked at them, their twisted limbs skeletal-like, black against the not-as-black sky of the night still two hours away from the beginnings of a crisp early autumn dawn. He squinted against the smoke as it curled up from the cigarette that was tucked into the corner of his mouth. His eyes, a startling desert-sky pale blue, were narrow anyway. He had been looking at things critically for over fifty years.
The location that he and the others in this raiding party had come to was a heavily wooded area of Muir County, the least-populated and poorest county in the state, situated in the far north, bordering Oregon, Nevada, and nowhere. Over thirty million people live in California, but less than twenty thousand of them live in Muir County, and that’s a generous census. It’s a vast place and difficult to get to. There are no interstate or federal highways running through it, and the county and state roads are poorly maintained; in winter, when there are storms every week, or during spring floods that originate from the rivers that flow down from the Sierras, access in and out can border on the impossible, except by private airplane—the nearest commercial airfield is in Reno, hours away. At any time during the year, you can be driving on one of the county roads and not encounter another car, or see another person, for several miles.
This is the unglamorous underside of rural America, as one finds in pockets of Mississippi or Arkansas and other benighted places; an overall feeling more like Appalachia than California. If you went up to some family sitting on their front porch, took their picture on black-and-white film, and then compared it, side by side, with a photo taken by Dorothea Lange in the 1930s, you’d see strong similarities.
Because of the inbredness of the area, there is a tremendous suspicion of outsiders. Still, it is America at the beginning of the new millennium, with cable television systems and satellite dishes and Internet providers.
A sizable segment of the population is Native American, scattered among four reservations. In recent years, particularly since the passage, in 1998, of Proposition Five, which legalized a myriad of types of gambling on Indian land with virtually no government control or oversight, the tribes have become militant regarding land-use issues, particularly gambling. There have been discussions amongst the various tribal heavies in the county about building a huge, multimillion-dollar resort to attract some of the money that flows into Tahoe, two hundred miles to the south, even though this is a remote area. If you build it, the feeling is, they will come. The gamblers.
There are no other minorities here to speak of. The last census did not list one African-American, and hardly any Latinos or Asians.
Over thirty percent of the permanent residents are on some form of welfare or government assistance. Despite the overall poverty, though, there are pockets of considerable money, based around mining, logging, and ranching operations. That’s the legal stuff. Then there are the illegal enterprises—marijuana growing, a huge industry, one of the largest farming industries in California, major meth labs, similar nefarious enterprises. The remoteness of the region lends itself to such clandestine activities.
This is the underbelly of the modern West: not the duded-up version, the West of the rugged and suspicious individual. There are no proponents of gun control around here, none that are vocal, anyway—these are fiercely independent people. Radical fringe groups abound, the kinds of groups you read about and see on television, hard-core fundamentalism crossed with hatred of anything smelling of government, where revelation is at hand and the fire next time is now.
The old man looked up at the sky, at the millions of stars clustering over his head.
His name was Tom Miller, and he had recently celebrated his seventy-ninth birthday. “Celebrated” is an ironic way of putting it; he had not celebrated anything, in the sense of a joyous occasion, for a long time. Even before his wife died, going on a decade now, he hadn’t celebrated. The closest he would come then was to take her out to dinner on her birthday. But that wasn’t a celebration, it was a ceremony, a ritual from the long-distant past, when there had been cause in his life for celebration.
Which is not to say he didn’t find pleasure in life. He loved his work. It brought him gratification, almost every day. But that wasn’t celebration, that was satisfaction. That he did a good job and knew it, and others knew it, too.
His job was sheriff of Muir County. Forever, it seemed like to most, but in truth, it had been the last thirty years. His story was one of triumph emerging phoenix-like from the ashes of personal tragedy and adversity. Forged from the ashes, because he had rebuilt his life himself, made it happen by hard, dogged work, self-belief, and mental toughness.
In 1949, freshly graduated from George Washington University Law School after serving with distinction as a marine lieutenant in the Pacific during World War II, Tom Miller joined the FBI. Right from the start he attracted Hoover’s eye. He was smart, he was tough, he was incorruptible, and most important, he was loyal. He rose through the ranks like a shot, so that by 1965 he was among the boss’s most trusted aides, one of a handful thought to be a candidate to succeed the little bulldog if and when he ever stepped down (or more likely, as actually happened, died). He loved Washington, the perks of his office, the closeness to power. Although they lived modestly on a middle-class civil-service salary, he and his wife, Dorothy, had a great life in the capital of the greatest country in the world.
And then it all fell apart, overnight. His son, James, his only child, an honors student at MIT, good athlete and musician, wonderful kid, defected to Canada rather than go to Vietnam.
Miller was contaminated. His chance at the big time in the Bureau was over.
He wasn’t fired—there were no grounds for it. Instead, he was exiled. Hoover sent Miller to head the most desolate, out-of-the-way field office that was available: the handful of small-population northern California counties, which included Muir County. He would work in the one-man office, in anonymity and disgrace, for the rest of his professional life.
But something unexpected happened. Miller discovered that he loved the place. The physicality, the enormity of it. The serenity. An urban person his entire life, he learned to fish and hunt, to enjoy long, peaceful hikes in the mountains, to sleep outdoors under a canopy of stars. To his great surprise, he had found his home.
The Bureau’s office was a wasteland. Boring, tedious, unnecessary. He endured it long enough to accumulate the minimum years of service that kicked in his pension; then he quit and ran for the sheriffs job. The reigning sheriff, a lazy, corrupt bastard who had lost contact with everyone, even the rich guys who ran things, never knew what hit him. Miller ran a vigorous, grassroots, door-to-door campaign, in two months putting twenty thousand miles on his car as he crisscrossed the county, meeting and greeting, listening to people’s concerns.
In June of 1969, Tom Miller was elected sheriff of Muir County, California. He’s been reelected seven times since. This is his county, which he runs with unchallenged authority.
But not tonight.
Tonight belonged to the feds, specifically the Drug Enforcement Administration. They were poised to storm a large, low-slung house in the middle of a compound that sprawled out over several acres in the wash below the fore
st. Ostensibly it was a hunting lodge built by an out-of-state millionaire (what the county was told when it and the adjacent airstrip were permitted and built). In reality, it was a safe house, a refuge for members of one of the biggest drug rings in the country. The men who came and went here with some regularity, about a dozen according to the DEA’s intelligence, were the nucleus of this criminal conspiracy.
The compound is an armed camp, but the men inside have come to assume that they’re safe, because they have taken great precautions to camouflage their being here. This place is too far out of the way to attract attention, and they keep a low profile. Everything comes in and out by airplane, via their own private runway, which is big enough to accommodate jets up to the size of a 737.
This bust had been almost a year in the making. It was going to be one of the biggest in the history of the DEA, a classic the world will be talking about for the ages. It would go like this: A Gulfstream 4 was coming in from Los Angeles with one hundred million dollars in cash, untraceable. Right behind it, a similar Gulfstream, carrying ten tons of Colombian cocaine, was going to fly in from Mexico. No flight plan, nothing on the screen. The coke was coming from this drug ring; the money from a former Iranian arms dealer who now lived in Los Angeles.
The way it was going to go down was, the money people would check out the cocaine, the dope people would check out the money, the pilots would switch airplanes, and then fly away. The entire transaction would take less than an hour.
There was only one problem with this well-oiled plan, which the dopers didn’t know. The Iranian arms dealer was really a federal agent, who’d been playing with federal money in the drug trade, two million so far in smaller buys. Now they were going for the whole enchilada, in one gigantic bite.
Off to the side, one of the agents, an imposing man who had the air of being a leader, talked on a cell phone. He was animated, upset. He listened, made a final comment, shut the phone down in disgust, then strode toward the others.
“Listen up now. This is serious, I shit you not.”
His name was Sterling Jerome. He headed up the DEA’s Western States Task Force. This was his baby—he’d been the money supplier, he was the man behind this entire operation. Now he was ready to move in for the kill.
Dozens of special agents experienced in operations like this one, who had been brought here from all over the country, gathered around him. All were dressed in black, down to black running shoes or hiking boots, black watch caps, and black windbreakers with the letters DEA stenciled on the backs, in Day-Glo orange, over their Kevlar vests. Each was armed with his own weapon—heavy-duty automatics, Sig Sauers, and Glocks.
Miller fieldstripped his smoke and joined his chief deputy, Wayne Bearpaw, a member of the White Horse Nation, the biggest tribe in the area. They stood outside the circle at some distance from the others.
No reporters were present. That the operation hadn’t leaked to the press was a miraculous feat in itself. Afterward, when it was all over and a success, they’d bring in the cameras. They’d been burned too many times with premature expectations.
Jerome was a mean man. Like many of his brother federal agents, he disdained local law enforcement people. His attitude had always been, I’ve got a job to do, so get the hell out of my way, amateur. His file had more reprimands than it should have, given his status in the department. But he got results.
Miller had known Jerome for years. There was no love lost between the two. Jerome was an arrogant prick in Miller’s opinion, an opinion shared by most local cops who have had the misfortune of dealing with him. He had a habit of taking actions in local jurisdictions without checking in first, a normal courtesy. Although this bust had been incubated for over a year, Miller hadn’t known anything about it until a couple hours ago, a bad breach of ethics. Not that Jerome gave a shit, the sheriff knew. Jerome preferred it that way.
“This isn’t Waco or Ruby Ridge, or any so-called Freeman group,” Jerome reminded his charges, some of them veterans of those fiascoes. “There are no women or children inside. This has nothing to do with religion or politics or strongly held cult beliefs or the moon being in Aquarius or any such bullshit. These men we’re about to take down are major criminals. Period.”
He paused, looked around. For a brief moment, he and Miller made eye contact. Jerome broke it off.
“They have a good security system, but they’ve become lax about paying close attention to it. It was shut down earlier tonight, but they don’t know that.” He looked behind him. “Our man here took care of that.”
Standing off to the side, apart from the group, was a rough-looking man who Miller knew was not officially part of the task force. His name was Luis Lopez; he was a member of the drug ring’s inner circle, now turned informant. Lopez had been sitting in a federal pen, awaiting trial on a murder charge that was going to put him away for the rest of his life, when he made Jerome an offer—drop the charge, and I’ll give you the operation. Jerome persuaded his superiors to make the deal (which included a quarter million in cash to Lopez and immunity from prosecution) and got into bed with the devil. They came up with a cover story for Lopez about having to drop the case for insufficient evidence and set him to work.
Lopez was high enough in this operation that he could come and go without arousing suspicion. He’d been on Jerome’s payroll for over a year, providing vital intelligence about the security, the number of men inside, all the information the task force needed to mount a successful attack. Lopez had been inside until late last night, when he’d snuck out, unnoticed, after disabling the alarm system. He had assured Jerome that the time was ripe to strike.
Miller knew of Lopez’s reputation, which was that the man was an unreliable liar. If this was his operation, he wouldn’t be using a scumbag like Lopez.
Jerome blew his nose. “This pollen’s killing me,” he said as an aside. Turning back to business: “They’re heavily armed, we know that, it’s to be expected; but we’re going to catch them flat-footed. They’ve been untouchables for so long they think they’re bulletproof.”
He glanced back at Lopez, who nodded. Then he reached into his briefcase and took out an FBI most-wanted poster.
“It isn’t a secret that the politicos back in Washington are getting anxious. They want a feather for their caps. We all do.” He brandished the poster. “And even more than shutting these bastards down, we want this man.” He looked at the poster himself “Reynaldo Juarez, born in Mexico, now naturalized, age approximately forty. He’s one of the worst characters you’re ever going to encounter. He’s also one of the great shadow figures of all time, a Howard Hughes of bad guys. He comes and goes like an ill wind, never sleeping in the same place more than a few days at a time. But he’s in there tonight, right now.” He pointed down to the compound. “We know that for an indisputable fact.”
He looked over his shoulder at Lopez, who nodded that this was so.
Given the source of Jerome’s information, Miller wasn’t convinced.
“We know he’s in there,” Jerome repeated defensively, as if to quell his own concerns that if this got fucked up, it would be the worst snafu in recent history. “If he wasn’t,” he added stoutly, “we wouldn’t be going in tonight.”
Good luck. Miller thought. If Lopez is your primary source, God help the United States of America. He glanced over at his deputy. Bearpaw shook his head—he was thinking the same thing.
“Unfortunately, we’ve just had a major fucking disaster.”
Miller’s ears pricked up.
“The airplanes aren’t coming in. Neither of them, ours or theirs. Everything’s fogged in, from Bakersfield clear to the Mexican border. The deal is off.”
Miller looked around. No one was moving; they were barely even breathing Now what? he thought.
“So here’s what’s going to happen.” Jerome paused. “We’re going to go in and take Juarez anyway. We have a legitimate reason to do so: there’s an outstanding reward on his head from the Mexica
n government for being involved in the murder of one of their federal agents. He escaped arrest down there, and no one’s been able to lay a glove on him, mainly because no one can pin him down. But we’ve done it. If we don’t take him now, we could lose him forever, which is not going to happen on my watch!”
Miller could feel the pit growing in his stomach. This was wrong; you do these things the right way, by the book. You don’t cowboy something this important. He was glad, now, that he wasn’t involved in this decision.
Jerome went on, “Here’s the ticklish part. We want him alive. The word’s come down from the powers that be. If he’s captured, he can detail myriad drug-smuggling and arms-running operations, stuff that’s going on all over the country; hell, all over the world. Dozens of operations we’ve been trying to break for years—he’s an important key to our doing that.”
Jerome’s gaze swept the assemblage. “When I say taking him alive is our supreme objective, ladies, that’s from Janet Reno’s mouth to your ears. That’s how serious this man is to the Justice Department. If this guy dies, they’ll hang the tail right on our asses. We’ll be fucking roadkill.”
He paused to let his words sink in. Even though these men were battle-tested veterans of the drug and arms wars, for many of them this would be the most important, blood-pounding encounter they would be involved in in their careers.
Jerome spread out a diagram of their target.
“We’ve gone over this, you have your own copies. The advance team goes in first, takes out any sentries they might have posted. Once they give us the all-clear, the rest of us go in. We overwhelm them—alive, let me once more stress that—and we are heroes to a grateful nation.”
Clenched fists all around. They could feel their blood pulsing harder.
Jerome folded up his diagram and looked at his watch. “Let’s coordinate. I’ve got three forty-one and thirty seconds.”
Above the Law Page 6