Vertical Coffin s-4

by Stephen J. Cannell

  As we rode toward the desert, I was feeling very alone in the crowded state-of-the-art SRT truck. I knew I had been going through a simultaneous process of growth and degeneration. I was slowly exposing the vulnerable parts of myself, taking the chance that the people I cherished the most wouldn't hate me for those weaknesses. While this helped me in my personal life and on the job, I no longer saw the landing lights, unsure of why I was even on the mission or if I would ever find the answers. Then along comes this one moment of moral certainty. Find Vincent Smiley and make the sonofabitch pay. As if his destruction would somehow restore order to my fractured value system.

  Jo Brickhouse and I were coming from the same place emotionally. The order we both craved from police work had only produced confusion and disillusionment. But she was lying in a hospital close to death as a result of my bad police work, and I was in this SWAT truck roaring across the desert to avenge a shattered sense of justice, telling myself I was doing this for Jo, a woman I hadn't even liked a few days ago and had badly mis-evaluated, and for Emo, a man I'd admired but hadn't spent that much time with.

  Was this just a big, ugly piece of street theater? Was I making a splashy move to convince myself I was still relevant? Could I put an end to my moral slide by stepping on the back of Vincent Smiley's neck and jamming his face in the dirt? Would that restore my values, make my work seem worthwhile again?

  Even as I raced toward the Chocolate Mountains to apprehend him, I couldn't forget the look of hatred in that Compton grandmother's eyes. What the hell was I really looking for?

  We turned off the interstate past Palm Springs at Indio, traveling south, toward the Salton Sea. Nacho Rosano stood, bracing himself in the jouncing truck, and started going through drawers, passing out communications equipment.

  "Since we don't share a frequency, let's all use one of these." He handed each of us a small radio transmitter with an LCD faceplate, and pointed to the small screen. "That's a GPS. If you get lost, it'll tell you where you are, within half a meter." After he showed us how to operate it, I loaded it into my vest.

  I had my cell phone on and checked the battery. It was at three-quarters, but there was no signal out here.

  It was after 10 p. M. by the time we took State Highway 111 to the Salton Sea Recreation Area, then continued south. After about half an hour Grundy pulled to a stop, set the brake and came back into the rear of the truck. He filled the door to the driver's compartment, his crewcut tickling the ceiling.

  "Okay, we're outside of Niland," he said, looking right at me.

  I opened the map book. "Go on up Coachella Canal Road to Camp Billy Machen. The Chocolate Mountains are on the left. There should be a parking area at that old camp. There's no more road, so we hike into the mountains from there."

  "Okay. Everybody saddle up now," Grundy said. "Smiley had an AK up at Hidden Ranch and he knew how to use it. I don't wanta be climbing out of this truck, hooking our shit together, while this jerk-off is up in the trees somewhere picking us off with three-oh-eights."

  Everybody started buckling up vests and chambering weapons. Then Grundy went back up to the front, put the truck in gear, and we were rolling again. Scott and Nacho gave Sonny and me a short course in mountain climbing, showing us the belt harness and how to use the carabiners.

  "You're gonna feel like you want to climb using your arms," Scott said. "But that's a huge mistake. Use your legs. Your glutes are much bigger muscles than your biceps. Your glutes won't tire. Most newbies try and pull themselves up. You do that, you'll burn out in less than an hour."

  "In a lead climb," Nacho said, "a leader and a second go up first, set the protection, get to the top, tie off, and then bring the rest of the team up. Last up are the belay monkeys; that's you two. We change lead and seconds after each leg of the climb. Each leg is called a pitch. A pitch is a section of the climb that is slightly shorter than the rope. The ropes we use are a hundred meters long."

  I remembered Marion Bell saying that some of the climbs in Monument Valley were thirty pitches.

  "The first climber, or leader, wedges a piece of protection into the rock halfway up the first pitch," Nacho was saying. "We mostly use SLCDs, which are spring-loading camming devices."

  He held one up. It matched the printed picture Smiley left in his garage.

  "An SLCD can fit in a crevice and attaches to the rope with carabiners. We can use it for protection or for handholds on sheer cliffs. If somebody falls, the idea is the protection should catch and hold him until the rest of us can reel him back up. If the lead climber sets this thing too far down, then a fall will zipper out the protection and we're all toast. The last man on the climb is called the belayer. He holds the rope steady until the lead climbers make it to the top of the pitch. Once the lead and second have tied everything off and the others are secure up top, we pull the belay monkeys up and start all over again."

  Sonny and I glanced at each other. It sounded doable.

  We were all rigged and ready to go when the truck pulled into a parking area at the old Camp Billy Machen.

  Scott Cook opened the door and we stepped out into the darkness. The temperature was forty degrees and dropping. We were standing in the parking lot feeling exposed under a slim slice of desert moon.

  Parked ten feet away, next to a weathered maintenance shed, was Vincent Smiley's black Dodge Ram 2500 pickup. It looked evil and predatory, sitting up high with its Bigfoot suspension on huge, tractor-sized tires. We approached slowly and looked inside. There was an empty box of.308s down in the floor well.

  "Looks like he's locked and loaded," Grundy said, pointing at the cartridge box. "Let's decommission this truck."

  He and Nacho shinnied under the Dodge and checked the engine compartment for boobie traps. "Looks clear," Grundy shouted, and they both rolled back out.

  Scott Cook popped the hood and removed the positive battery cable. "Souvenir," he said and handed it to me.

  I put it into my pack.

  "Now let's go get this guy," Rick Manos growled.

  We all turned and walked through a gate marked "Gas Line Road," and started the long trek across the sandy desert toward the dark brown Chocolate Mountains.

  Chapter 45

  THE ALPINE START

  We hiked in the freezing desert until midnight, picking our way across dry, sandy gullies and parched ground. Unseen cacti tugged at the bloused ankles of our jumpsuits. About a mile out we crossed a small trickling stream in a gully. In the damp sand were footprints. We all kneeled down and looked at them. Nobody had to mention that the cross-hatched sole prints came from Danner Terra Force jump boots. We continued on, then finally bivouacked at a little past midnight.

  I lay on my side in the still warm sand and prayed I wasn't parked over a scorpion nest. Almost before my head hit the crook of my arm I was asleep. I was so tired I didn't dream. Before I knew it, someone was shaking me.

  "Okay, we're heading out," Scott Cook said. I rolled over and looked at my watch: 4 a. M. "We need to get a jump on it," he added.

  By sunup we were four miles north in the foothills, working our way up through the crevices and canyons. I won't say it was easy, but for the first hour of the climb we had no need for ropes, carabiners, or harnesses. Then we reached the first huge rock, fifty feet high with no way around it. We had to go up and over, a feat Nacho called "bouldering."

  Before we started Gordon Grundy took out his binoculars and, using the first rays of morning light, focused them on the face of the giant rock, looking for the best ascent.

  "There's something there," he said. "Halfway up, somebody left a piton jammed in the rock."

  I took the binoculars and focused them on the metal spike. It had been pounded into the face of the boulder, and had a carabiner hanging off the threaded end.

  "Probably part of his protection," Grundy said. "He had to leave it behind because he's climbing alone and couldn't yank it free."

  "Time for some white courage," Scott Cook said. "Let's chalk
up." The SWAT members all dug into their haul bags and broke out tin shakers full of powdered chalk. They chalked their hands like gymnasts, sharing it with Sonny and me. Then we faced the first part of the climb.

  The initial boulder was surprisingly easy. We were warned again by Grundy and Cook not to pull ourselves up by our arms. The problem was, pushing up with my legs felt dangerous, as if I would fall backward off the mountain. The leg climbing technique fought all my instincts. Grundy did the first lead climb, with Nacho as his second. He put in the protection halfway up the pitch, pounding in a spike with his belt hammer, testing it by hanging from it, using all of his weight. Then he and Nacho went the rest of the way up to the top of the rock. The climbers following scrambled up using nubbins for footholds, taking advantage of the tiny flutes and chimneys, jamming the toes of their hiking boots into crevices for traction before finally reaching the top of the first boulder.

  Nacho yelled, "Off belay!" which was Sonny's and my signal to climb up and join them.

  Lopez went up first. I was last. My job was to yank out our protection and bring it up with me. It was a rush, making that first pitch, hanging from my harness a thousand feet up. My heart pounded while my eyes swept the landscape below. As I passed Smiley's piton, I looked carefully at it. Stenciled on the side it said mountaineer. It had come from one of the boxes in his garage.

  When I finally got to the top I was expecting a lot of praise, but nobody said anything, except Nacho. "Stop using your arms," he growled. Then they all turned and started the next pitch, with Scott Cook taking over as climb leader and Rick Manos as his second.

  By ten o'clock I was so wiped out that I was unable to go much further. I had spaghetti arms from pulling myself up. Sonny Lopez was in the exact same condition.

  Nacho said, "I told you to use your legs. Your arms won't hold up on a long climb like this."

  "I warned you guys if this happened I was gonna leave you," Grundy said. "You're gonna have to get down on your own. Here's the spare key to the SWAT truck," he said, handing it to me.

  "You're not leaving me," I said.

  "This was your call," Grundy responded. "The deal was, you could go as long as you didn't slow us down. This guy is just up ahead. He's killed three cops and put a fourth in ICU. We're gonna get him, but not with you two holding us back. The last two pitches, you guys barely made it."

  "We'll be along in a minute," Sonny said as the two SWAT teams turned away and took off up the next boulder. Sonny and I lay on our backs on a narrow ledge, out of breath, and watched them climb away from us. Despite the fact that the sun was out, at this altitude it was still cold. Scott and Gordon had left us some rock pitons, carabiners, and two lengths of rope for our descent.

  "Let's go on up," I said, pulling myself to my feet and moving to follow. "I'm not being left behind."

  I approached the boulder and tried to do a solo lead climb, scaling the rock, going up about ten feet, pounding in some protection with my belt hammer. But I was shot. My arms were shaking from the effort.

  "Whatta you stopping for?" Sonny said sourly as he watched me, still on his back. I was dangling ten feet up.

  Then suddenly I lost my handhold and fell, zippering out my poorly set piton. As I landed I felt a rib crack. I lay on my side moaning in pain.

  "That was encouraging," Sonny said, his face strained with exhaustion. "I especially liked the eekie little scream."

  "Let's get off this damn mountain," I said angrily.

  Climbing down was easier, but not a complete snap. We had to tie off and belay from above. We didn't get back to the foothills until almost two in the afternoon. I was monitoring the small radio Nacho had given me and could hear the two SWAT units talking to each other as they neared the SEAL camp at Silver Pass. Once we reached level ground, Sonny and I started the long, hot hike back to Camp Billy Machen. The temperature had soared on the desert floor, so we stripped off our Tac vests in the dry hundred-degree heat and carried them.

  By five o'clock we were almost there. I triggered the radio. "This is Scully. We're one or two klicks from the Billy Machen camp." Scott Cook came right back on the radio.

  "We just left that SEAL camp at Silver Pass. The place was empty, no sign of him. No tackle, foot, or rope marks on the climbing faces. You want my take, this guy hasn't been up here."

  "But we saw his piton," I said.

  "Roger that, but he's not on this side of the mountain. We're gonna check the back side, but if he's not over there. I think we've been messed with."

  I clicked the transmit button twice to indicate I understood.

  Sonny and I didn't say anything but we were both walking faster, now afraid that Smiley had for some reason lured us out toward the Chocolate Mountains, then doubled back.

  We got to the end of the Gas Line Road and pushed open the gate. The black Dodge was gone. Somehow he'd rewired the battery system. I wondered where he'd found a cable way out here. Then I looked over at our SWAT truck. The hood was up.

  Spray painted on the side in black paint was a message:

  nice try assholes.

  Chapter 46

  CACTUS WEST

  The back of the SWAT truck, where the spare ordnance was kept, had inch-thick metal doors with a bolt lock, impossible to penetrate. But Smiley had pulled the engine alarm wires and opened the hood. The emergency alarm had probably brayed until the system's battery went dead. As we approached, I could see that our battery cable was missing.

  I reached into my pack and pulled out the one that Grundy had given me, then opened the truck with the spare key and found a toolbox in the back. Sonny went to work reattaching the positive cable to the engine battery.

  "Yeah, nice try, asshole," he said softly as he finished. We opened the driver's side door on the truck. Sonny slid one of the keys into the ignition and started the engine, then backed the truck out while I walked over to where Smiley's Dodge Ram had been parked when we pulled in. I knelt down and studied the tracks in the gravel, as Sonny rolled up and stopped the SWAT truck behind me.

  I pointed to a service road, "Cochise read many signs. Track many assholes."

  Sonny grunted, and was already talking on the radio by the time I had the passenger door open. "You guys, he's down here. He got his truck going and went west, down the service road. We're tracking him in the SWAT truck. What's your ETA the parking lot?"

  "We're losing light up here. It's gonna be slow going down at night. We can't get back there until around twenty-two thirty," Scott Cook said.

  Not till 10:30 p. M. I looked over at Sonny and he said, "Looks like it's up to the dumb-ass arm-climbers to fix this mess."

  We put our SWAT Tac vests back on, then drove along the fenced perimeter of camp Billy Machen. It had once been a tent city, but now all that was left were some poured concrete pads. It looked completely deserted. We kept going until we hit the Niland Blythe Road, which wasn't really a road, as much as a narrow dirt trail. Sonny slowed the truck to a stop and we looked to the left out across open desert. We were trying to decide which way to go, when I thought I saw something flash way out in the distance.

  "What's that?" I pointed toward the spot.

  We focused on the dark landscape, working on our night vision. After a minute it flashed again.

  "See if they've got any infrared stuff back there," Sonny said.

  "Good idea." I ducked through the opening into the back of the truck and started reading the labels on the equipment drawers, finally spotting one marked: light-gathering scopes.

  Inside was a single pair of heavy-duty infrared binoculars. I brought them forward, then settled back into the seat, turned them on, and focused them through the windshield, toward the spot where the flash of light had been.

  As they heated up, the picture first turned green, then slowly brightened. I was looking at the same landscape, only now I could see details, almost as if it were daylight. Something was racing around on the desert floor at least two miles away. It was still too far away to
tell if it was Smiley's black truck.

  "Something's out there. Some kind of vehicle," I said.

  Sonny turned the wheel toward the spot and drove up the dirt road, heading deeper into the desert valley full of Joshua trees and cacti. Suddenly, the road veered right and we were running beside a ten-foot-high industrial-strength chain-link fence. Every quarter mile or so there was a large painted sign:

  chocolate mountain aerial gunnery range danger explosives!

  keep out!

  by order of the U. S. Government

  Then under that:

  peligro — explosivos! prohiba la entrada!

  por orden de la gobierna de los ustados unidos

  Sonny had his eyes on the rutted road, trying to keep from breaking an axle, when I reached over and turned off his headlights.

  "What're you doing?" he barked. "Can't see."

  "I have a feeling we're gonna end up going in there." I pointed at the range. "I don't think we oughta be advertising our location."

  Sonny grunted, but made no move to turn the lights back on.

  We were soon passing what appeared to be a massive automobile graveyard. Bombed out wrecks, old county and state vehicles, yellow bulldozers, garbage trucks, and decommissioned road-maintenance equipment loomed behind the chain-link. Most of them were scorched by fire or blown to bits, some barely recognizable, others had signs painted on the sides in large white letters: Armored Column, Russian T-62 Tank, SAM Missile.

  "What the hell is all this about?" Sonny said, slowing to look as we passed.

  "I've heard about this place. Navy and Marine pilots fly practice sorties against all this old junk."

  "Is it safe for us to go in there?" Sonny said, suddenly apprehensive.

  "If that's where Smiley is, we got no choice."

  Then I remembered the slip of paper I'd found out by his trash. I dug it out of my pocket and opened it up. "Pull over for a minute."