Darwin's Blade (39 page)

Detective Ventura hung tough, but Detective Fairchild folded. He not only admitted that Ventura had gotten him involved in the cover-up of the murder of Richard Kodiak, but said that it was Ventura who had traced Donald Borden's and Gennie Smiley's whereabouts in the Bay Area, and fingered them both to Trace's Russians for the professional double taps to the head. According to Detective Fairchild, Ventura had even bragged that “for another twenty thousand I would have dumped the fucking bodies myself, and done a better job of it than those assholes.” Fairchild admitted in a signed deposition that Ventura had referred to Dallas Trace as “the goose who was going to lay them both a lot of golden eggs” and that further dealings with the fraud Alliance had been planned. Fairchild said that Ventura had threatened to murder
him
if he opened his mouth about the conspiracy.

Both police officers were taken into custody. Fairchild negotiated a deal with the district attorney for leniency in exchange for turning state's evidence. Neither the FBI nor the LAPD made any announcement of the arrests—the men were being kept in an FBI safe house in Malibu for extensive interrogation—and anyone calling the precinct and asking for either detective was told that they were “working undercover and unavailable” while the phone calls were traced. Two of the calls came from Trace's American bodyguards, and one of them was traced to the Russians' Santa Anita house.

Syd expressed her concern about Dar's safety to him during the five days before the projected arrests of the main players, but Dar had answered easily—“What's to be afraid of? The FBI are all over the Russians, Trace's American thugs are being followed…I'm safer than ever before.” Syd was too busy preparing for the raids to spend time at the cabin with Dar, but she did not seem reassured.

That Monday before the raids, Dar and Lawrence had also rigged fiber-optic cameras in the cabin. Dar chose two positions, both on the south interior wall, so that the two lenses would cover everything in the large, single-room cabin except the closets and the one bathroom.

Dar used his key to unlock the hidden trapdoor, led Lawrence down the steep stairs, and then unlocked the door to the storeroom.

“Holy shit,” said Lawrence, “trapdoors, secret rooms…You a spy, Dar? A spook?”

“No,” said Dar, embarrassed that he had kept this place a secret. “I just needed a safe place to store some stuff. You understand.”

“Not really,” said Lawrence. He looked around the room again. “My God, it looks like the last scene in that first Indiana Jones movie…that big warehouse full of crates. You got a sled named Rosebud in here somewhere?”

“No,” said Dar quietly. “I had to burn that one winter when I ran out of firewood.” He led his friend through the corridors between crates and showed him the padlocked air-vent grille. “If you ever need to get out of here, just unlock this and crawl, Larry. It's about two hundred feet to that old gold mine I told you about once. It eventually comes out in the steep gully east of here.”

Lawrence shook his head. “I don't think it'd do me any good.”

“There are extra keys upstairs,” said Dar. “Keys for the trapdoor, the door to this room, and the grille padlocks…They're in a leather case under the ice tray in the fridge.”

Lawrence shook his head again. “OK, but that's not what I meant. I just don't think I'd fit in that particular air shaft.”

Dar looked at the vent, then looked at Lawrence, and nodded. “Well, if you were ever trapped down here when things were…unpleasant…upstairs, just bolt the steel door and stay here. The room's shielded and fireproof and the air is drawn in from the cave, so even if the cabin burns down above you, this place would be safe.”

“Uh-huh,” said Lawrence, obviously unconvinced. “Trudy and I are going to be at our condo in Palm Springs the rest of this week,” he said. “Unless you need me here, I mean.”

Dar shook his head. “No. And be careful in Palm Springs until we hear that Trace and the Russians and all the rest are behind bars.”

Lawrence only grunted and patted the pistol in his shoulder holster.

They hooked the two fiber-optic cables and their transmitter to the cabin's power supply, and then to the auxiliary generator as backup. Then they ran antenna wire up through the wall and onto the roof of the cabin. After that, they hiked downhill from the cabin—keeping the cabin between them and the viewing field of the Czech video camera up the hill—and set up the second outdoor camera in the burned-out stump of a huge old Douglas fir just where the grassy, open hillside began. Then Lawrence returned to the cabin while Dar took the receiver/monitor—concealed in his tan rucksack—and hiked several hundred yards up the hill.

“Got a picture?” came Lawrence's voice over the cell phone.

“Yes,” said Dar. He switched back and forth between cameras two and three. The wide-angle lenses each gave a bug-eyed view of the room, but every part of the cabin except the bathroom and the inside of the closets was clearly visible on the tiny monitor screen. These lenses had no pan or zoom controls, but were effective in very low light conditions.

“Now I know what you're up to,” said Lawrence on the phone.

“You do?”

“Yeah,” said the private investigator/adjuster. “You're planning a huge orgy up here and you want to get it all on tape.”

Dar tried camera four. It panned up and down the slope, showing the entire approach to the south side of the cabin. With the wide-angle lens he could see miles across the valley to the south and zoom in on objects up to a hundred yards away.

On the same Thursday morning that saw the arrest of Dallas Trace, Attorney William Rogers—the East L.A. lawyer who had helped Father Martin create the Helpers of the Helpless—was pulled over to the side of the road on his way to work. As the attorney stepped out of his vehicle, joking with the state patrol officers in their CHP car about not seeing the stop sign, FBI agents, sheriff's deputies, and LAPD officers converged on the site.

Rogers was handcuffed, read his rights, and loaded into one of the cars. Syd was told by the agent in charge that Rogers began weeping and demanding to call his wife, Maria. The agents did not tell the attorney that his wife had been arrested moments before at her office headquarters for the Helpers of the Helpless.

In hospitals all over Southern California, local police and FBI agents accompanied by INS officials began their sweep, interrogating and eventually arresting more than sixty Helpers from a group of more than a thousand detained. All hospitals and medical centers in California barred their doors to the Helpers that same day. In the files at Maria Rogers's Helpers of the Helpless Headquarters in East Los Angeles, the names of more than a hundred insurance-fraud cappers, doctors, attorneys, and facilitators were gathered.

Dar sited the fifth video camera on his property on Tuesday. For several hours he hiked the hundreds of acres of property he knew so well. Finally he decided on the best sniper nest above the cabin—a small, level, grassy area shielded by low boulders on two sides and by huge boulders behind it. Lying there with his old M40 Sniper Rifle and Redfield scope, Dar found that the range—a little under two hundred yards—was almost as perfect as the view. There were clear shots between the scattered trees of the cabin, the entrance to the cabin, and the parking area west of the cabin. The roost was protected by the overhang of rock ledges behind it and by steep slopes on either side. It was perfect; too perfect.

Dar went looking for a less obvious site. He found it less than seventy yards to the northwest of the first one. This second site was also tucked against large boulders, but offered only a narrow gap between slabs of rocks, the shooting site overgrown with prickly bushes, in which a sniper and his spotter could both lie prone. The site was higher than the first and offered a slightly better view while being even harder to approach from any angle without exposure. The extra seventy yards or so of range would not be a problem for the kind of modernized
Dragunov
SVD sniper rifle used to kill Tom Santana and the three FBI agents.

It took Dar almost three hours to retreat from the site without leaving any footprints, hike all the way around the ridge to the steep rear approach to the boulders of the ridgeline, and free-climb the near-vertical rock wall more than a hundred feet to a point on the larger boulder above the second sniper's nest. There he had to secure a Perlon climbing rope around a boulder in order to rappel down the steep arc of the rock face to a shrub-filled ledge where he could set up the video camera, conceal it, its battery, and its transmitter with the waterproof camouflage tarp, and then hide the long broadcast antenna by running it up cracks in the rock face to the summit.

Dar then returned to the cabin and tested the monitor. The picture was not as clear as the transmission from the other four cameras, but he could clearly see the second sniper's nest from above and zoom in on the original site he had found lower down.

Dar spent the rest of the morning hiking the rocky ridges and steep ravines to the northeast of the two sites he had found. He was not satisfied until nearly noon.

Syd explained that the FBI's primary concern was the Russians. They had shown their ruthlessness and their ability to kill at long range. Several FBI tactical team world-class snipers and assault experts were flown in from Quantico. At night, with no muss or fuss, eight of the surrounding houses in the Santa Anita hills above Sierra Madre Boulevard were evacuated and taken over as observation or command and control centers for Special Agent Warren's task force.

Every movement the Russians made was followed—tail cars and lead cars changing off, helicopters at 8,000 feet watching through powerful optics—and by the time the five Russians drove their two Mercedeses back to the ranch house on Wednesday evening, the tac-team had grown to sixty-two. By this time, FBI snipers in ghillie suits had laboriously crawled to within 150 yards of the house on all sides.

The FBI shooters were armed with the most modern equipment available—modified De Lisle Mark 5 sniper rifles firing 7.62 mm rounds in either standard or subsonic combinations. The rifles were descended from Dar's venerable Remington 700 bolt-action model, but had evolved about as far as space shuttle pilots had from the first African australopithecine hominids. The weapons utilized heavy match barrels with integral suppressors—“silencers” to the layman—which, when combined with subsonic ammunition, allowed for accuracy at ranges of more than two hundred yards. The rifles made no sound, not even the smack of a bullet breaking the sound barrier.

Mounted on each De Lisle Mark 5 was a single, lightweight, integrated sight which combined a powerful telescopic sight with an image-intensifying night sight, an infrared range finder, and a thermal imager. The FBI snipers could kill at two hundred yards in the rain on a starless night through light fog or smoke.

The rest of the FBI assault teams were outfitted with Kevlar helmets, full body armor, gas masks, infrared goggles, fully suppressed submachine guns with laser sights, .45-caliber fully automatic pistols, and stun grenades known in the trade as “flash bangs.” For the 5:00
A.M.
assault on Thursday, the lead team would go in behind a barrage of tear gas projectiles fired through all the windows and use a man-carried hydraulic battering ram to take down the front door. Then the first three tac teams would enter the building by all available first-floor windows and doors. Waiting in the garage of the nearest house was a fully armored tactical assault vehicle with its own battering ram. Five helicopters were tasked to the assault, and each of them carried master marksmen. Two of the helicopters were equipped to drop men on lines for rapid assault from the air.

“Hardly seems like a fair fight,” Syd Olson suggested to Special Agent in Charge Warren on Wednesday afternoon.

Warren had given her the slightest of smiles. “If it becomes anything near a fair fight,” he said, “I deserve to be fired.”

Syd had nodded and called Dar at his condo to see how he was doing.

Dar was doing fine by Wednesday afternoon. He had used the morning to catch up on work in his warehouse apartment—documenting the fatal Gomez swoop-and-squat and preparing a computer-animated reenactment of Attorney Esposito's death by scissors lift. He chatted with Syd a few minutes, telling her that he was going up to his cabin to get a good night's sleep while she and her colleagues did all the hard work the next day. He asked her to be careful, promised to see her on Thursday, and wished her luck.

Dar had spent all of the previous afternoon and evening zeroing his two weapons. Using the ravine to the east of the cabin—it was sixty feet wide where the gold mine opened into it, narrowing to less than twenty feet in width up the hill parallel to where Dar had found the potential sniper roosts—he fired off several hundred rounds of ammunition from both his old M40 bolt-action and the loaner Light Fifty.

Dar used a new purchase—a $3,295 pair of new Leica Geovid BDII range-finding binoculars—to double-check the range with the Leica's built-in laser range finder as he set out targets at distances of 100 yards, 300 yards, 650 yards, and 1,000 yards. Dar was capable of thinking in meters, but like most old-time snipers, he did range-finding calculations in yards. He was pleased that his visual estimates of target distance in each case fell within five feet of the laser's readout. The Leica's range finder itself was guaranteed to be accurate to within three feet at 1,100 yards.

Although Dar had fired the M40—the old modified Remington 700 hunting rifle—occasionally on shooting ranges in the past few years, he still had to reacquaint himself with the weapon. When he had been trained as a young Marine, it was discovered that Dar had 20/10 vision, which meant simply that what was perfectly clear for a person with 20/20 vision at one hundred yards was just as clear to Dar at two hundred yards. Even before Dar had decided for certain on becoming an outcast through advanced sniper training, he had qualified as an “expert rifleman” at Parris Island boot camp. In the time-honored tradition of the Corps, riflemen could qualify in three categories—marksman, sharpshooter, and—very, very rarely—expert rifleman. Dar had qualified as expert rifleman on Record Day with 317 points out of a possible 330, a distinction that was rare enough that his commanding officer had told him that only a dozen Marines had equaled it going back to World War II. The first 317 score had been made by a Marine who went on to be a famous writer and biographer.