Free Above the Law by J. F. Freedman

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 forest. 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