Strong to the Bone--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  That closer inspection confirmed the presence of an incalculable number of bundles of cash, in denominations of twenty-, fifty-, and hundred-dollar bills, tightly wrapped in plastic sized to fit the pallets on which they’d been stacked and fastened tight. Again, he couldn’t even begin to comprehend how much all of this amounted to. But, like the pills, it had to stretch into the millions or tens of millions, at the very least.

  No wonder Armand Fisker needed his own town from which to operate the international drug ring founded by his father, Cliven, from the very prison where Boone Masters had killed him in the shower. Guns, drugs, and cash—an unholy trinity that probably made Armand Fisker the most powerful criminal in the country, if not the entire world.

  It was clear now to Cort Wesley why Jones had approved and offered intelligence on this operation aimed at bringing down Fisker, once and for all. He was half-surprised Jones hadn’t shown up himself in body armor, packing an M4. He also had to figure Jones knew more about Fisker and the extent of his capabilities and intentions than he was saying. Setting all that aside, though, he couldn’t care less about the motivations of others, because this was personal for him. Fisker had crossed a line you just don’t cross, and neither one of his sons was going to be safe so long as Fisker was alive.

  “My men are setting the charges, outlaw,” Paz said, suddenly alongside him, following his gaze. “We need to be ready to head to the surface.”

  Cort Wesley gave the shelves another look before turning to Paz. “There’s something else we need to do first, Colonel.”

  98

  ELK GROVE, TEXAS

  As a young man, Armand Fisker had once robbed a bank, the ink bomb planted inside among the bills exploding when he opened the bag, rendering the haul useless. He’d burned all those bills in a rusty trash can in his backyard instead of spending them, struck by the unique smell of burning cash. Sweet and sour at the same time, and noxious enough to make his eyes water. Fisker passed it off as a combination of the special ink and paper used to mint currency, holding memory of that particular scent ever since.

  And now he smelled it again, infinitely stronger, carried up into the building on the smoke rising through the floorboards. Up from the storage chamber constructed beneath a hefty chunk of Elk Grove’s main artery that was centered under this very building.

  My money’s burning!

  Panic seized Fisker in its grasp. He had no idea what was going on, or who was responsible, but his mind settled on Cort Wesley Masters and the bitch Texas Ranger.

  Before him, his six international partners were milling about, their concern flashing over expressions suddenly piqued in suspicion and befuddlement.

  “What’s happening?” one of them asked.

  Fisker ignored the question and moved to the wall-mounted fire alarm. He triggered it, unleashing the rhythmic, alternating squeal that would rally his troops across Elk Grove in a long-prepared, emergency attack response.

  They’re burning my money!

  Thinking that ratcheted up the effects of the chain mail tightening around his insides. Whoever was here, Masters and the Ranger or somebody else, this was no simple frontal assault. It was special ops all the way, with rock-solid military-level intelligence behind it to boot. Some kind of sanctioned operation undertaken on behalf of an agency his actions had clearly run afoul of.

  Fisker chased consideration of the thought he may have brought all this on himself from his mind, and grabbed an M16 from a closet instead. He swung back toward the milling figures atop the platform, babbling to each other about what might be happening.

  “Help yourself,” he said to them, leaving the closet door open, before he surged out of the room for the stairs.

  99

  ELK GROVE, TEXAS

  There was no sign of the invaders on the main drag beyond the former Elk Grove town hall that was already filling with the members of his organization, summoned by the alarm Fisker had triggered. Many more of them were spilling out of homes and buildings, armed to the teeth with weapons of all varieties proudly showcased. A bevy of motorcycles churned about the hard-packed road, joined almost immediately by fortified pickup trucks turned into miniature tanks and packing 7.62mm mini-guns bolted to their trucks’ steel beds.

  The noxious smoke wafted about the street in thin plumes, the white mist cutting through the night air like a knife, as more of his cash went up in flames belowground. If this was meant as a trap, Masters was going to be sadly disappointed at Fisker’s refusal to take the bait. He’d soon have more money, tons and tons of it, and the opportunity to kill Cort Wesley Masters was worth every bill that was burning.

  “Whoever it is must still be in the storage holds,” he told a gathering of his heavily armed, most trusted cadre who’d rushed to his side, out of breath. “We move now, we can trap them down there, turn the whole street into a shooting gallery. So get your men together, and let’s…”

  Fisker stopped when a series of spits flared beneath him. He felt each like a hollow kick from the inside of his gut. He heard a rumbling, then felt the ground quake around him, portions of it cracking, splitting, and lifting up.

  Before him, as Fisker watched with his breath lodged in his throat, the buildings centered around Elk Grove’s main drag and central square shook, shifted, and began to sink into the ground.

  100

  WACO, TEXAS

  “You sure about this, Ranger?” David Skoll said to Caitlin, sounding like he was taunting her.

  Caitlin whipped out a pair of flex cuffs. “Turn around please, sir.”

  Skoll didn’t turn around. Instead, he smirked, his long hair making him look like a teenager trapped in a man’s body.

  “You were a lousy piece of ass.”

  “Say that again?”

  “You slept through almost the whole thing. Where’s the fun in that?”

  Caitlin felt as if someone had touched a match to the surface of her skin. “You really want to make me more pissed off than I already am? Give me an excuse to shoot you and figure things out later?”

  Skoll took a step back from her, and then another. “Industrial accidents happen all the time.”

  “Do they now?”

  He continued, as if Caitlin hadn’t said anything at all. “You never should have entered this facility unauthorized and unattended.”

  Caitlin whipped out her SIG. “No more pleasantries, Mr. Skoll. Put your hands in the air.”

  “Whatever you say, Ranger,” he said, smirking again.

  Caitlin saw he was holding what looked like a pen in his hand. She didn’t give it another thought until light flared from its tip, aimed straight at her.

  “Boom,” he said, looking past her.

  Caitlin wheeled around to follow his line of sight, just as one of the massive robots came barreling straight for her.

  101

  ELK GROVE, TEXAS

  Armand Fisker thought he was dreaming, the sight of the buildings along the main drag that he’d had meticulously restored crumbling into the ground far too incredible to be real. Only when he realized he’d been holding his breath, and started gasping for air already choked with clouds of grit and dirt, did he know for sure that he was awake.

  The crackling, blistering, ear-numbing sounds of the buildings collapsing echoed in his mind, clinging to his thoughts. It was like a big branch cracking amplified by a million, a rolling cloud of thunder consuming everything he’d spent years building.

  The town hall …

  His thoughts veered that way in concert with his gaze, trying to see what was left through the thickening clouds. What remained lay in a cluttered heap of wood and debris, no signs of life at all, which meant no signs of his associates from those six countries, save for half of the placard marked GERMANY, blown out of the refuse toward him.

  As a man used to power and getting his way, the sense of failure, of defeat, was something utterly foreign to Fisker. Coming so close to his son’s death only magnified that unfamiliar feeling
of weakness and vulnerability, the shock having bled even the rage and hatred from him to the point that he almost forgot about the scent of his burning money filling the air. That is, until the smells of lumber and dirt replaced it with the rumbling collapse of the buildings around him.

  Fisker needed to rally his men, needed to rally them now. And he was moving to do just that, when the armored personnel carriers he’d bought at a virtual heavy arms fire sale sped through the debris-riddled clouds, surging toward him from the far end of the central square.

  102

  ELK GROVE, TEXAS

  Cort Wesley felt the gunner manning the M60 machine gun in his APC open up at the congestion of gunmen, trucks, and motorcycles clustered in what had been the town square when this had still been a town, until just moments ago. Blood sprayed into the air, swallowed almost immediately by the thick clouds that had risen out of the debris of the collapsed buildings. Bikes that had already thrown their riders spun through the air before crashing back down in the path of the APCs to be shoved aside or crushed under the vehicles’ huge wheels.

  Cort Wesley caught sight of Guillermo Paz driving an APC alongside his, both vehicles’ gunners firing in almost eerie synchronicity. The clacking of rounds drowned out the pinging sounds of expended shells clanging off steel, and Cort Wesley’s heightened vision recorded one, and then a second mini-gun opening up with its furious, spinning spray of fire.

  He felt the big bullets clanging off his vehicle that featured maybe a ton of extra steel for protection. The gunners manning the M60s answered the fire of the mini-guns long enough for more of Paz’s men wielding handheld rocket launchers to pop out of the turrets and fire.

  The first blast launched one of the pickup trucks airborne. The second sent one rolling, unchecked, down the street where it took out any number of motorcycles, unoccupied as well as manned. The riders who’d abandoned their bikes rushed in all directions, clacking off fire wildly back toward the line of APCs.

  Cort Wesley figured they’d be seeking cover behind which to continue the battle. Instead, though, he saw most of the bikers keep right on running, past the debris fields left by the collapsed buildings, varying levels of which still poked over the surface, spouting flames and smoke. Retreating, fleeing, quitting—whatever you wanted to call it—they were gone.

  Clearing the street for just him and Armand Fisker.

  * * *

  Guillermo Paz had seen it all before. How men who fancied themselves tough guys, who spent hours and hours pumping iron and shooting up target ranges, wilted in the face of real combat. Big, strong men who knew their way around a bull’s-eye that couldn’t shoot back. Quite adept at using their weapons to intimidate those already cowering in their path, or waging war when vastly superior numbers and arms made them brave. Put them in a real shooting war like this, though, and the truth of their natures and their competence came through.

  By the time Paz lurched out of the APC he was driving, with twin, custom-fitted M4s in hand, the bulk of the enemy had fled into the lowlands toward the hills overlooking Elk Grove. Their initial strategy of claiming the high ground to rain down fire from rooftops and upper-story windows had died when the ground swallowed the buildings they were using. The aim of the gunmen who remained at street level, amid the blowing clouds of flaming debris and ash embers, was typical of those unaccustomed to being fired back upon. Categorized by thoughtless jerks of their triggers that did no more than let the bullets fly in the hope a target might stray into one.

  Paz shot the gunmen in the midst of that motion. He was dressed totally in black, including gloves and a long coat draped over the best body armor Homeland Security money could buy, rendering him invisible in the night. He watched the eyes of the men he killed gape, as if trying to discern his shape, their dying thought being they’d been killed by a shape, a shadow more than a man.

  He felt a pair of thumps against the body armor covering his side, aimed the M4 in that arm toward a building that had sunk into the ground, with only its peaked roof remaining above the surface. When the gunman spun out a second time, Paz hit him with the M4’s fury, in the same moment he sprayed fire with the M4 in his other hand toward a gunman who’d fired at him from behind a rooftop exhaust baffle that now rested on ground level.

  By then, only sporadic fire remained, almost all of it coming from his men. The night grew strangely quiet in the intervals between the echoing shots, Paz able to hear the whisk of the breeze blowing the last remnants of Elk Grove past him.

  103

  WACO, TEXAS

  Caitlin realized the light she’d glimpsed must’ve been a laser, tagging her for the robot, identifying her as a target.

  Caitlin thought she heard David Skoll laughing, no longer in view when she drew her SIG and opened fire on the machine wheeling straight toward her, arm appendages stretched forward like daggers. Her bullets clanged off its steel frame, drawing sparks as her ricochets pinged in all directions. With just four bullets left in this magazine, she focused on the thing’s head.

  A bulb, simulating a robot eyeball, exploded, and coarse black smoke began to rise from the oblong skull itself. The robot wobbled a bit, but surged on toward her, Caitlin backpedaling as she jammed a fresh magazine home. She had just opened fire anew when she heard a fresh whirring sound and swung right to see a second robot coming her way from that direction, too.

  They were close enough for Caitlin to smell something like motor oil mixed with burned wires. Still brandishing her pistol, she leaped atop a passing conveyor belt moving in the direction in which Skoll had fled. The whirring sound got louder in the same moment the motor oil scent grew pungent enough to scratch at her throat. Then a shadow of misplaced motion left her diving to the conveyor belt, landing faceup and already steadying her gun on the robot looming over her.

  But its pincerlike hand extremity inadvertently smacked her wrist and separated Caitlin from the pistol that clattered to the floor. She tried to push herself back from its grasp, but its heavy steel casing had pinned one of her boots in place. That kept her in the thing’s range and allowed it to fasten its pincers on her throat, jerking Caitlin to her feet.

  She felt the pincers closing off her air, strong enough to do unspeakable, fatal damage. Caitlin groped wildly, hoping to latch onto some part of the robot with which she might neutralize it. Nothing, though, came within her reach and she flailed wildly at the air, finally managing to get a hand under as close to a chin as the thing had.

  Trying to move that was like trying to lift a car by its bumper. No progress at all, Caitlin’s lungs thirsting, feeling the first signs of light-headedness take hold. She heard the crackle of glass breaking as bottles jammed on the cluttered conveyor backed up and crashed to the floor, the scent of some alcohol-rich concoction pouring into her nostrils.

  Alcohol …

  With her consciousness ebbing, Caitlin dipped as low as her knees allowed, reaching for one of those bottles but her grasp coming up just short. She tried lowering farther, felt the pressure increase on her throat, but kept going, the tips of her fingers scraping across the yet-to-be-capped top of one bottle and then another. A twist to the right brought her the extra inches she needed and she snatched one of the bottles up with the world before her turning opaque and foggy.

  Caitlin somehow managed to maintain the presence of mind to extend the bottle up and out as far as she could, needing to toss instead of pour the contents into the flashing lights she took for the robot’s circuit board. Nothing happened the moment the liquid splashed into place and dripped through. But then Caitlin heard a sizzling sound and smoke began to pour from the area where she’d doused the thing.

  The robot jerked her spasmodically and then hurled her through the air, the action more reflexive than planned. Caitlin landed on a pile of boxes tipped from a different section of the assembly line, the thing righting itself enough to roll toward her, its arm extremities jerking about wildly, its head extension twitching and shaking. She got her bearings and
groped about the smooth tile for her SIG, remembering it had clattered to the floor somewhere in the area.

  Caitlin’s grasp locked on it, just as the robot’s shadow crossed over her. She opened fire, aiming high for the machine’s shoulder area, severing wires that flapped like spaghetti as the thing’s pincers locked in place. It continued stretching down toward her, second pincer assembly snapping out at her, when Caitlin lurched to a crouch from which she jammed the barrel of her SIG under the robot’s head, fired, and kept firing.

  The initial reverberations of the blasts were deafening; Caitlin couldn’t even hear the last two shots that finally blew the robot’s head from its metallic neck. A dark, viscous liquid burst out instead of blood, showering Caitlin and filling her nostrils with the pungent oil stench. Then the machine seized up, humming like a disc drive when it slowed to a stop.

  She leaped back atop the conveyor belt, which came to an end at a series of boxes that had backed up on the line, spilling off in heaps to the side, piling high into a mound. Caitlin pushed herself off the belt in a single, fluid motion, boots hitting the floor just as the mound of boxes blew apart behind the force of a third robot. It slammed into her, nearly crushing Caitlin’s foot under its wheels before one of its pincer assemblies closed on her hair and jerked her into the air.

  She thought she heard David Skoll laughing again, the mere thought of him more than enough to take her mind off everything except the pistol she stuck into what must be either a socket of some kind or some sort of vent for the heat the things gave off. Whatever it was, the SIG’s barrel made for a neat fit, and she fired the last of her bullets from this magazine downward. The robot’s works fried so suddenly that it seemed to spasm before locking up, flinging Caitlin through the air.