Darwin's Blade (41 page)

It was a beautiful night—a few clouds, cooler than most summer nights, but perfect for a hike.

The FBI assault team battered down the front door of the Santa Anita ranch house at precisely 5:00
A.M.
Agents fired tear-gas projectiles through all of the windows. Other agents at the door tossed flash bangs into the living room and lunged inside, laser beams stabbing for targets through the smoke.

Living room empty. Agents held ladders while other agents threw themselves through the bedroom windows as the FBI snipers covered them. No one in the bedrooms.

Special Agent Warren led the first assault team from room to room on the ground floor, and then up the stairway to the second floor. Two helicopters landed on the lawn while two more hovered overhead, brilliant searchlights shining down through the dissipating smoke and the brightening twilight. FBI men in the choppers fired more tear gas through the second-story windows.

No one on the second floor. No one in the kitchen. No one in the basement.

It was one of the last teams to reach the building who radioed in the report. Dead bodies in the garage.

Warren and a dozen others, everyone bulky in their body armor and helmets, goggles and gas masks dangling, converged there within twenty seconds.

The three dead Hispanic men were stripped to their underwear. Each had been shot once in the head.

“But only three got in the van last night…” began a young special agent.

“The goddamned leaf bags,” said Special Agent Warren.

“Shall we expand the perimeter?” asked a helmeted figure.

Warren sagged back against the doorframe, clicking the safety on his suppressed H&K MP-10. “They could be in Mexico by now,” he said dully.

Nonetheless, Warren was on the radio a second later, alerting headquarters, authorizing helicopter and ground searches for the yard-service van, confirming that the CHP, LAPD, and other agencies had to be briefed immediately, and authorizing a national manhunt.

A message was relayed from the Malibu safe house where Detectives Ventura and Fairchild were being kept. It seemed that Fairchild, who was cooperating with the investigators, had been allowed to go for a brief, escorted walk on the beach the previous afternoon. The FBI agents had not known that there was a pay phone just off the beach, but Fairchild had been allowed out of sight for several seconds to urinate in the bushes, and this morning one of the agents took a walk on the beach and found the phone. He immediately checked to see if there had been any outgoing calls from it.

There had. One of fifteen seconds' duration had been made at 4:30
P.M.
The call was to Detective Fairchild's brother-in-law, who ran a dry-cleaning establishment in Pasadena.

“Damn,” said one of the agents.

“Damn, heck, and spit,” said another.

“Fuck me,” said Special Agent in Charge Warren, who had no immediate Bureau supervisors on the scene. “I bet Fairchild got more money than Ventura—he just hid it better.”

“Shall we tell Special Agent Faber and Investigator Olson about the Russians?” asked the primary dispatcher.

Warren looked at his watch. It was 5:22
A.M.
The Dallas Trace assault was still more than ninety minutes away. “Faber and his people are in position and on radio silence,” he said. “I'll call Cassio, the agent in charge of the Century City security perimeter covering the assault team's backs, and tell him that we're sending another dozen tac-team agents to reinforce him.”

“Do you think the Russians will try to rescue Dallas Trace?” asked a goggly agent next to Warren.

The special agent in charge actually laughed. “Not a chance in hell. These guys know that the balloon has gone up. They're not going to drive from one ambush into another one. We'll tell Faber and the rest of the assault team after they do their thing.” Warren's voice lost all traces of humor then and he said something most un-Bureau-like. “And I want that LAPD cop—Fairchild—castrated.”

Syd received the page eight minutes after the FBI had driven Dallas Trace and his three bodyguards away in separate vehicles. She was standing on the street outside the Century City office tower, busy shaking the sweat out of her hair and ripping the Velcro tabs loose on her bulletproof vest, but she stopped everything when she saw the number on the pager.

Warren explained the situation in two sentences.

“Dar!” said Syd, looking at her watch.

“Investigator Olson,” said Special Agent Warren, “these Russians aren't amateurs. They have a ten-hour head start on us. They're not going to waste it on some stupid revenge attempt. They're probably in Mexico by now.”

Whatever he said next was lost as Syd shouted, “Get two FBI choppers with tac teams out to Dar's cabin—
now!
” and then flipped shut the phone, picked up her submachine gun, and ran full speed for her parked Taurus. She had no idea that her cell-phone transmission had been garbled and that Special Agent Warren had understood none of it.

I
t seemed like a long night to Dar. He told himself that perhaps this was because he was not used to lying on a cold stone ledge all night waiting for a group of strangers to come try to kill him.
Nope,
he reassured himself,
that couldn't be the reason.

The position he had chosen was a rocky outcrop on the east side of the wooded ravine. The slabs of rock on which he lay were about 260 yards above the cabin—with a clear view of the parking area and entrance through gaps in the trees—and even more important, at approximately the same elevation as the two sniper's roosts he had identified to the west. The slab he had chosen—the very word
slab
disturbed him a bit—lay in a natural fissure in the rock with two shooting channels: one looking downhill toward the cabin and the parking area, and the other offering a small slot in the rocks that was perfect for direct fire against the sniper positions. The bad news was that the stones to the east and north of him were higher than his roost and angled downward, which would create a nasty ricochet problem if someone actually started shooting at him from either of the obvious sniper's roosts to the west. He hoped that it would not come to that.

Dar had stored the Barrett .50-caliber in the rock niche under a waterproof tarp, and now he was lying on that tarp, wishing he'd brought a closed-cell foam pad. The twenty-five-pound bulletproof vest he was wearing over his blouse was thicker than a police-issue Kevlar vest. It was modern Marine-issue and incorporated a thick ceramic chest protector that could stop a 7.62mm rifle bullet at medium range, but that also made it extra stiff and uncomfortable.
I'm getting old,
he thought.

The Barrett Light Fifty was on its bipod on the slightly down-tilting slab, leaving room next to his position for extra ammo, the Leica range-finding binoculars, and the receiver/monitor. His old M40 Sniper Rifle lay under camocover and waterproof plastic in the other gap to his right, ready to be used in an instant if he had to fire on the other sniper positions.

Dar figured that if the Russians did not come that night, they would not be coming at all.

His plan was relatively simple and it did not include any real heroics. If, by any chance, the Russians showed up at his cabin before the FBI nabbed them, Dar had his cell phone charged and programmed with Special Agent Warren's and Syd's numbers. Dar always thought of his cabin as being at the edge of the world out here, but the line-of-sight cell phone reception was excellent. This was, after all, Southern California. None of the people who had built expensive cabins out here to get away from it all could afford to be out of touch for even an hour.

Dar hoped that there would be no shooting—that he would just lie low in his duck blind while the Russians waited for him to come out of the cabin—until the FBI helicopters roared in with the real professionals. But if he was detected, he was ready to return fire and at least keep the Russians occupied until the cavalry arrived. His position was almost as strong defensively as the reactor at Dalat had been so many years ago—moated by the ravine, impossible to approach unseen from the west or south in the direction of the road and cabin, and difficult to climb to from the east. Dar had brought along his ghillie suit so that if the Russians' “return fire” got too nasty—and Dar considered
any
return fire nasty—he would slip into the camouflage suit and head for the fields below the tree line to the east. By the time the Russians reached this side of the ravine, Dar should be all but invisible below and the FBI should have arrived in force.

I'm absolutely paranoid,
thought Dar, soon after beginning his post-midnight vigil.
Why the hell would the Russians come after me again?

But in his heart, he knew why. Both Gregor Yaponchik and Pavel Zuker had been trained and had operated as snipers. Dar knew that of all the soldiers on earth, only snipers are specifically trained to stalk another individual. Marines and Army grunts might end up with small units stalking small units, or even a single enemy, but only the sniper is trained to use stealth, concealment, and ambush at long range to kill another specific individual. And always first on the sniper's kill list was the most dangerous threat—the enemy sniper.

Dar did not know if the Russians or their American employers had access to his Marine file, but he could not risk assuming they did
not
know he had been a sniper once. More than that, Yaponchik and Zuker had been tasked to kill him three times, and three times they had failed. If Dar knew anything about a sniper's mentality—and he did—he knew that someone like Yaponchik would have an intense feeling of frustration at leaving this particular job unfinished.

Dar remembered a cartoon he'd once seen of a king sitting on his throne.
I'm paranoid,
the king had thought.
But am I paranoid enough?

The night passed slowly. Making sure that there was no glow to reveal him, Dar switched the monitor from video camera to video camera, using the night lenses for the outdoor cameras. No movement on the road. No movement—or at least none detectable—in the broad fields down the hill from the cabin. No one at the sniper's nests three hundred yards opposite him. No uninvited guests in the cabin.

Dar found one channel of his brain mulling things over. He allowed it to mull as long as it did not disrupt his focus.

He thought about his years reading the Stoic philosophers. He knew that the average person thought of the Stoics—if he thought of them at all—as proponents of a “stiff upper lip” and “don't whine” philosophy. But the average person, Dar knew, was only half a bubble off moron-center.

He and Syd had talked about it. She understood the complexity of the Stoics' writings—Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. She understood dividing life between those things that one had no control over—and where the maximum courage was called for—and those elements that one could and should control, and in which caution was prudent. This had been part of Dar's life and thinking for so many years that he found it surprising that he was reviewing and critiquing it on this night of all nights.

No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such,
wrote Marcus Aurelius. Dar had tried to live this maxim.

What else had Marcus Aurelius taught? Dar's nearly photographic memory brought back a passage.
Let this always be plain to thee, that this piece of land is like any other; and that all things here are the same with things on the top of a mountain, or on the seashore, or wherever thou choosest to be. For thou wilt find just what Plato says, Dwelling within the walls of a city as in a shepherd's fold on a mountain.

Well, here he was dwelling literally within a fold on a mountain. But now he thought of the sentiment behind the statements—both Plato's and Marcus Aurelius's—and he knew in his heart that he did not agree with the core of it. After Barbara and the baby's death, Dar could no longer live in Colorado. It had taken a while to accept, but soon enough it had become that simple. This place—this mountain, this place near the seashore—had been a new beginning for Dar.

And now it had been violated. The Russians had tried to kill Syd and him not far from here, and they had taken pictures of him at this very place.

Dar felt no fury, no approaching
katalepsis.
He had damped his feelings down for so many years—turning to the humor found only in irony for his salvation—that he felt no anger controlling him now. But as he lay on the mountainside waiting—he had to admit that his
hope
was that the Russians might come for him. Despite all logic to the contrary, the hope burned in him like a cold fire.

Every time Dar had ever visited an accident scene, he had thought of Epictetus.
Tell me where I can escape death: discover for me the country, show me the men to whom I must go, whom death does not visit. Discover to me a charm against death. If I have not one, what do you wish me to do? I cannot escape from death, but shall I die lamenting and trembling?…Therefore if I am able to change externals according to my wish, I change them: but if I cannot, I am ready to tear the eyes out of him who hinders me.

Epictetus might have scorned the impulse, but Dar had to admit that he was quite ready to tear the eyes out of the Russians if they came at him again. Thinking this, he felt the long K-Bar knife in its sheath on his belt. He had spent an hour honing that knife the previous evening and another hour spraying and coating it, even though the thought of sliding cold steel into another human being's body made him want to throw up on the spot.

Some person asked, “How then shall every man among us perceive what is suitable to his character?” How, he replied, does the bull alone, when the lion has attacked, discover his own powers and put himself forward in defense of the whole herd?

Damn Epictetus anyway. Dar did not consider himself a brave man…nor a bull. And he had no herd to protect from the lion.

Syd,
came the thought, unbidden. But he had to smile at that. Even as he lay here, hiding in his nook in the rocks in the middle of the night, forty miles from the city and danger, Syd was preparing to assault the bad guys. It was she who was protecting the herd from the lion.

Dar spent the hours shifting to get comfortable, keeping watch through his goggles and monitor, listening to the breeze stir the pines (while instinctively estimating the wind velocity), and generally deconstructing the philosophy upon which he had based his entire life.

Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse,
Epictetus had taught. Having seen so many fresh corpses in his life, Dar could hardly argue. But during the last few weeks—during the moments with Syd—he had not felt so much the corpse animated by only a little spark of soul. He had to admit to himself…he had felt alive.

By 5:00
A.M.
, tired and sore but still wide-awake, Dar had reviewed all of his ontological and epistemological underpinnings and realized that he was an idiot.

Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break,
Epictetus had taught,
but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.

Well, fuck that,
thought Dar. Didn't Epictetus ever go to the seashore? Didn't he know that sooner or later every promontory gets battered down and washed away? Probably the Aegean did not have waves like the ones Dar watched every week at the edge of the Pacific. The sea always wins. Gravity always wins.

After more than ten years of trying to be a promontory, Dar was tired of it.

Predawn light crept over the hillside. Dar put away his night-vision goggles but kept toggling the camera views. The access road was empty. The cabin was empty. The field below was empty. The sniper sites were empty.

By 7:00
A.M.
, Dar felt a surge of relief mixed with a strange disappointment. The raids were all scheduled to have begun by now—Syd had told him that much—and he understood that the Russians were to be rounded up before the American civilians.

By 7:30
A.M.
, Dar was tempted to say the hell with it and just hike down the hill, prepare himself a big breakfast, call Syd, and get a few hours' sleep. He decided to wait a bit longer. Syd would still be busy now.

At 7:35
A.M.
, Camera One showed movement on the driveway. A huge, black Suburban with tinted windows moved slowly past the camera position, stopped, and then backed into the slight turnout across from the surveillance tree.

Five Russians got out. They all wore black sweaters and slacks, but Dar recognized Yaponchik and Zuker at once. The older Russian—he still reminded Dar of Max von Sydow—seemed almost sad as he handed out the weapons to the others. The three younger men headed down the road and out of immediate camera range carrying their AK-47 assault rifles. Even on the small video screen, Dar could see that they were also armed with knives and semiautomatic pistols on their belts.

Yaponchik and Zuker also had holstered sidearms, but they were the last to pull their weapons from the back of the van, two
Snayperskaya Vintovka Dragunova
—sniper rifles of the type that had killed Tom Santana and the three FBI agents.

Dar had to smile. Even with all their money, the Russians stuck with the weapons they knew best.
Sentimental,
he thought, feeling the wood stock of his own antediluvian sniper rifle. Dar saw that both weapons had ten-round detachable magazines and a combination flash suppressor and compensator to reduce muzzle jump and flash. He had noticed that the other three Russians' AK-47s were also fitted with suppressors. Evidently this group wanted to stop by, kill Dar Minor silently, and get on their way.

Dar knew that the SVD had some serious limitations as a sniper rifle. It was accurate enough out to a maximum range of six hundred meters, but at eight hundred meters, it had only a 50 percent chance of hitting a stationary, man-sized target. Theoretically, this gave Dar's longer-range M40 a great advantage. But unfortunately, it was only three hundred yards to the cabin and less than that between the two sniper roosts—his and the one Yaponchik and Zuker seemed headed for.

Dar used the cameras to watch the Russians deploy. One of the men with a submachine gun appeared on the southern slope below the cabin, crawling through the high grass. Two entered the woods above the cabin. Yaponchik and Zuker came into camera range high up on the hill…paused…and then selected the less obvious of the two sniper positions. Dar's video camera had a perfect view as the two older Russians settled into the tiny redoubt and ranged in their weapons and spotting gear.

Dar's heart was pounding wildly.
Time to call in the cavalry,
he thought. He pulled out his cell phone, checked that the charge was good—he had brought an extra battery—and lifted his thumb to punch Special Agent Warren's preprogrammed emergency number. That was when more movement on the video screen caught his eye.