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Shear opened his phone and started scrolling through the pages of the PowerPoint.

“Show me the missiles,” Bosch said.

“Which ones?” Shear asked.

“The big ones.”

“Here.”

Shear held the phone up. The photo on the screen depicted one of the Hellfire air-to-ground missiles in a travel cradle inside a wooden crate. Bosch took the phone from him and turned it so the missile in the photo was viewed vertically, then held the phone out so the photo could be compared to the oxygen tanks against the wall. It took Shear only a moment to understand what the comparison meant.

“Holy shit,” he said. “I’m calling Cavanaugh.”

PART THREE

Hellfire

31

IT TOOK THE FBI, with help from US Customs and Border Protection, only two days to locate a cargo container packed with donated medical equipment being shipped to Kyiv, Ukraine, via Rotterdam, Germany. According to the bill of lading, the crates held surgical equipment, including four oxygen tanks matching the size and capacity of those examined during the search of the warehouse connected to Nikolai Novak and the Spolu. The Customs documentation stated that the supplies were donated by Los Angeles–area hospitals and medical groups to replace equipment lost during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The shipment was sponsored by a local charitable organization called RUN, which stood for “Rescue Ukraine Now.”

The empty oxygen tanks discovered during the warehouse search were left in place following the completion of the search so that Novak would not be alerted to the real investigation that was closing in on him. The Bureau’s source inside the Spolu got word to Agent Cavanaugh that Novak was angry about the search and concerned about the seizure of the brass pipe that Soto had found. The intel was that Novak appeared to be unaware of the ongoing search for the stolen missiles.

The good news about the discovery of the cargo container destined for Kyiv was that it had not yet left the Port of Los Angeles. It was currently located in a stack of cargo containers waiting for Customs inspections before being loaded by crane onto a ship called the Carpathian, which was scheduled to leave port in three days for the twenty-two-day journey to Rotterdam.

The bad news was that the task force investigators could not directly link the container and its contents to Novak or anyone associated with the Spolu. The documents RUN supplied showed that the equipment in the shipment came from many sources in the Los Angeles medical community. RUN did not record which item came from which company. The equipment had been donated over several months; the organization was waiting until there was enough to fill a standard shipping container. The RUN manifest described the oxygen tanks as size K steel cylinders being shipped empty, in accordance with federal hazmat regulations, and affixed with current DOT hydrostatic test labels, as required by Customs.

The task force suspected that these were not oxygen tanks but four of the stolen Hellfire missiles that had been painted and labeled as such, and the valves and pressure gauges from the tanks in the warehouse had been attached to further disguise them. Cutler and Cavanaugh, most likely with input from the highest reaches of the Justice Department, now had to decide when to move on that suspicion. The Customs inspection was scheduled to take place in two days, but there were many things at play in the decision-making.

Moving in now would ensure public safety but it would make it impossible to track the missiles to their ultimate buyer and intended user. In addition, the cargo manifest listed only four tanks, which would account for just half of the stolen Hellfire missiles and none of the Hydra rockets. It was unknown whether the other missiles had already been shipped in the same way or if the container going on the Carpathian was the first shipment and possibly a test run. Stopping the shipment now and seizing the missiles could make recovering the rest of the weapons even more difficult because the Spolu would obviously consider other methods and transit routes.

The fact that the suspected missiles were in a shipment going to Ukraine was yet another complicating factor. The task force mandate was to prevent the stolen missiles from falling into the hands of terrorists who might point them at US citizens or interests. But if the end user was the Ukraine armed forces or a group sympathetic to the country’s cause, then the urgency of the recovery efforts would certainly be diminished — at least in the view of those dictating priorities at Justice.

And this was where the Wonderland and Charles Lamb investigations came into play. If the shipment of missiles was stopped at the Port of Los Angeles and there was no way to connect them to Novak and the Spolu, then linking Novak to a series of murders might provide the only “trade equity,” as Cutler called it, with which to deal for the return of the other weapons.

In his long career in homicide, Bosch had always been averse to bargaining with killers. He saw no higher crime than murder and had been personally touched by it, so he often became angry or even physically ill when prosecutors floated deals to lesser participants in killings — the getaway drivers, the go-betweens on contract killings, and so on. When Eddie Nash finally took a deal on the federal fraud case, admitting his culpability in the Wonderland murders and getting a paltry three-year sentence in exchange, Bosch felt sick for days. It wasn’t even his case, but all he could think about was the first woman he had encountered in that house, lying on the floor, her head and face bashed to a pulp, blood on the ceiling and walls. There was no justice in a three-year sentence for the man who had ordered her murder.

Bosch hoped that Novak would not be able to bargain his way out of punishment now for what he did to that woman.

The decision on how to proceed came down two days after they had located the shipping container holding the medical equipment and supplies. In an order from Justice citing consideration of public safety, the task force was directed to move immediately and secure what missiles they could.

Going in with the scheduled Customs inspection allowed access to the cargo container without need for a court-approved search warrant. A cut-down FBI critical incident team of two bomb experts accompanied Cavanaugh, a Customs agent, and a representative from RUN to the cargo container for the inspection. The RUN rep removed the lock and seal and opened the double doors of the blue corrugated-steel container, then stepped back and let the four men enter. To avoid drawing unwanted attention to the operation, the rest of the critical incident unit was standing by outside the shipyard with bomb-removal equipment. Upon confirmation that the missiles had been located, they would aid in the removal of the weapons.

The feds tapped into the shipyard’s security cameras, and once again, Bosch and the remaining members of the task force, including Cutler, watched the events unfold on screens in the Roybal Building. The shipping container with RUN painted in white on both sides was the second in a four-container stack in the middle of sixteen rows of stacks waiting to be loaded onto the Carpathian. The container was lifted up by crane and placed on the tarmac in an open area of the shipyard. Angles from two cameras were on side-by-side screens in the task force room.

After unlocking the cargo container, the RUN rep walked to the shipyard office at the end of the wharf. Bosch assumed that she’d been dismissed because the federal agents did not want her to know if any weapons were discovered.

The communications feed became fuzzy as soon as the team entered what in effect was a steel box. Cavanaugh had been giving a play-by-play, but static quickly cut his reporting to only a few recognizable words here and there. The search was similar to the operation in the railyard in Prague, but this time one of the bomb experts chose to close the double doors of the cargo container, and that did not help communications.

“Why did they do that?” Cutler asked. “We’re not going to hear anything.”

“Just in case,” Agent Singer said.

“In case of what?” Cutler said. “You mean — ”

He was cut off by a sharp, high-pitched sound that pierced the static of the feed. Simultaneously on the screen, an explosion ripped through the cargo container, lifting it off the ground and breaking it in two. One of the video feeds was immediately knocked out; the other, farther away, displayed a massive fireball that erupted from the cargo container and grew upward and off the screen. One end of the broken container flipped upside down. Burning shrapnel from its torn steel shell flew in all directions.

“Oh my God!” Cutler whispered.