by Jon Land
Dane smirked, pretending not to be particularly bothered by that notion. But then the smirk slipped from his expression, which flattened to the point where his face suddenly looked frozen in a still shot.
“Anything you can do on my behalf with them, Ranger?” he asked her. “As a fellow Texan?”
“Help a man who beats his own son?”
Dane scowled, shaking his head. “We back to that again? You should’ve seen what my daddy did to me.”
“For different reasons, I suspect.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dane said, stiffening.
“Those pictures I saw of the damage you did to your boy didn’t include his face. But a few others I dug up did. I believe his name is Zach, isn’t it?”
98
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“Zach, as in…” Cort Wesley let his words tail off, still processing what Caitlin had just said.
“That’s right.”
“The kid who got lost in the woods with Luke!” Tepper realized, stopping just short of slapping himself in the head.
“Dane beat him because he was gay. The boy as much as told me so, without mentioning names.”
“Oh,” Tepper said, fidgeting a bit.
“Explains why Dane risked everything to save those kids in Armand Bayou. He knew his son was on that field trip,” Caitlin said, leaving it there. “Anyway, Dane’s fighting the warrant.”
“Well, Ranger, at least you didn’t shoot him.”
“That was my second choice, Captain. We can’t get him for the chemical plant fire and we probably can’t get him for the billions of dollars in damage his bugs did to the state. But New York can get him for killing that kid with his prosthetic leg. Kind of fitting, I guess.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because Dane Corp manufactures the plastic it was made out of.”
The three of them looked each other, struck by the twisted, macabre irony of that.
“And what exactly did Dane give you on Zhirnosky?” Tepper asked her.
“You owe me something first.”
“What’s that?”
“The rest of the story, Captain. What you and my dad did to those Russians who got Boone Masters killed.”
99
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS; 1983
Jim Strong stood over the bed of Boone Masters in San Antonio’s University Hospital.
“It’s blowing up a storm outside, Ranger,” Masters noted, gaze drifting to the window.
“Thanks to Hurricane Alicia, ready to make landfall around Houston.”
“Bitch of the bunch, it seems.” Masters turned from the window. “Thanks for getting me home,” he said, more of a message in his eyes than in his words.
“Least I could do.”
“Well, there’s something on top of that you can do, too. Nobody ever needs to hear about how all this went down, least of all my boy.”
“He won’t hear it from me, Mr. Masters.”
“Call me Boone … Jim.”
“Guess after stopping the Soviets in their tracks, we should be on a first-name basis.”
“For a time, anyway.” Masters’s expression sombered. “I’m not gonna ask you to look out after my boy.”
“I would, if you did.”
“I know that, but it’ll do more harm than good in my mind. I like the fact of him not thinking too fondly of me, so my being gone won’t cause more than a blip in his life. I’ve lived my life without regret, Jim, and I’d like Cort Wesley to do the same.”
Jim Strong shrugged. “Just because you lived it that way doesn’t make it right, Boone.”
“Best I can do, all the same.”
Masters’s gaze turned steely against the infamous criminal once more. “We didn’t get all of them, Ranger.”
“What happened to ‘Jim’?”
“Business is business and you need to finish this.”
D. W. Tepper stopped in the doorway, looking toward Jim Strong like Masters wasn’t even in the room. “We’ve got a lead.”
* * *
They literally raced the storm to Houston, heading north along an otherwise abandoned highway, while the lanes heading south were a parking lot of cars that had followed a late evacuation order. The rains and wind were already bad, and got steadily worse the closer they drew to the city, until the torrents came in sheets that seemed to pucker the windshield glass and freeze the wipers midsweep, time after time. The visibility had turned so bad it was like driving through the smoke of a brush fire.
Closer to Houston, D. W. Tepper’s truck was hammered by flying objects big and heavy enough to obliterate the fenders and hood and to smash the windshield to the point where the windswept rain hammered them in the cab, soaking both men clean through to the upholstery. Jim looked over then and spotted Tepper lighting a cigarette.
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“Always told you smoking would never kill me.”
“But you thought it’d be a bullet instead.”
“Nobody’s right all the time.”
In response to their all points bulletin, a report had come in from Hobby Airport in Houston about four Russian-speaking men buying plane tickets in cash. One of them matched the description of Anton Kasputin and, since the airport had been officially declared closed, he wasn’t going anywhere. Jim Strong had instructed Houston officials to stand down until his arrival, told them that this was Ranger jurisdiction.
“You want Kasputin for yourself,” Tepper concluded, voice a bit gnarled by the cigarette clenched between his lips as his hands hung on to the steering wheel for dear life.
“Least I can do for Boone Masters.”
“Old school never goes away, does it?”
Jim Strong looked across the soaked seat toward him, swiping a wet sleeve against his even wetter face. “We’re driving through a hurricane to get into a gunfight. You tell me, D.W.”
* * *
The normally bustling airport was eerie in its desolation, closed to air traffic but not shut down, due to the mass of travelers stranded there. The gates remained open and functional, but no planes were coming in, and almost all those that had been grounded had been flown out to airports further inland, to avoid being damaged.
Hobby’s naked exterior belied the congestion of the stranded inside. Hurricane Alicia was bearing down on the city with a force that could leave tens of billions of dollars of damage in its wake; the Lone Star State offered no protection against natural disasters.
D. W. Tepper parked his truck in a red zone and stepped out with Jim Strong into the teeth of the hurricane’s mounting winds, rain hammering them in waves that soaked through their rain slickers. On top of everything else, the storm had already produced a series of tornadoes, and more were expected. Toppled trash cans rolled down the airport access road, the lighter ones lifted airborne by the increasing gales, one missing Jim’s head by no more than in inch. Their former contents whipped about in a steady swirl, all manner of paper cups, plates, and food wrappers filling the air like snow. It was all the Rangers could do just to get inside the terminal through the still-functioning automatic sliding doors, even as a tornado warning alarm blared somewhere close by.
Jim Strong and D. W. Tepper shed their slickers, once inside, dropping them where they stood and spotting the airport security chief, who was waiting as instructed. He didn’t notice the Rangers right away because he’d been deluged by passengers on the verge of panic, looking for any reassurance they could find—probably that the whole terminal building wasn’t on the verge of blowing away itself. The sour smell of fear and anxiety hung in the air like dried sweat. The stranded passengers were pale, wide eyed, and not even seeming to blink, to the point where they looked like zombies.
The airport security chief, a tall, gaunt man with a thin mustache, finally spotted them and broke away from the crowd to approach.
“They’re on the Pan Am concourse, waiting for a flight to New York,” he reported. “I’ve got two of my
men watching from a distance, just like you said.”
“I said one man,” corrected Jim Strong, just before the shooting started.
* * *
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Jim Strong registered the tornado warning alarm blaring inside the airport now, as well Hurricane Alicia battering Hobby with such force that view beyond the wall-length windows was obliterated. Worse than night, because of the howling beyond and the occasional crash of something slamming up against the glass, as if hurled by some giant creature beyond. Thunder crackled. Lightning flared.
As he rushed down the Pan Am concourse toward the intermittent sounds of gunfire, Jim was also conscious of the world darkening beyond those windows. His ears had started popping and he felt a low rumble in the pit of his stomach. The drastic and sudden change in pressure told him a tornado must be bearing down on the airport now, certain to swallow up whatever aircraft remained on the tarmac, along with jetways, food trucks, and just about anything else that wasn’t bolted down.
He and Tepper rushed through a stampede of already-panicked would-be passengers now running for their lives.
“Son of a bitch, son of a bitch!” Tepper kept saying.
“I warned them, D.W. I warned them!” Jim followed, drawing closer to the clatter of gunfire.
He spotted Kasputin first. He and five of his thugs, as opposed to the three they were expecting, were holed up in a terminal bar, making full use of both the counter and toppled tables for cover. Two of the gunmen were squeezed between one of those tables and the window glass itself, which looked like it was melting from the waves of rain running down it. Jim Strong knew there was no sense in wasting bullets trying for an impossible shot, especially with innocent bystanders clinging to cover they might abandon at any moment, so he decided to flush the Russians out instead.
He put three bullets into the glass over and behind them.
The big .45 shells exploded with a deafening roar and sent the bulk of bystanders scurrying away, their footsteps echoing in hollow fashion against the concourse tile in the sudden silence that followed. The bullets blew right through glass that spiderwebbed and blew inward behind the force of the storm, exposing the terminal to Hurricane Alicia’s effects. Glasses, menus, mugs, plates, and all manner of silverware were hurled into the air, adding to the maelstrom and forcing the Rangers to duck or dodge to avoid being struck. But the storm’s onslaught and entry had the dual effect of forcing the first two Russian gunmen from their perch. Jim Strong and Tepper opened up together, the big bullets blowing the Russians’ bodies backwards until the wind pushed them back forward, ultimately holding them upright for a split second before catching them in a swirl that threw their corpses forward. Their blood whipped about with the loosed ice and contents of drinks abandoned on tabletops when the gunfight began.
An onslaught of fire erupted from behind the bar, forcing the Rangers behind the cover of toppled trash cans that had collected against a men’s room entrance across the way. Jim recovered his senses just in time to spot Kasputin himself leading his three remaining men out a door marked Emergency Exit Only, which led out onto the tarmac. An alarm immediately began to squeal in insane counterpoint as the Rangers fought the buffeting winds toward the same door, emerging just as an almost preternatural calm fell over the field, accompanied by a hint of sunshine.
“Holy shit,” Tepper muttered, “is that a…”
“Yup,” Jim Strong picked up, “a funnel cloud.”
* * *
The tornado bred by Hurricane Alicia seemed to grow and widen as it swooped down over the airport tarmac, sucking up everything in its path while coughing out tires, food wagons, stray luggage, and signs ripped right out of the ground. The door had slammed behind the Rangers, denying them any thought of reentering the terminal, while bullets smacked off the concrete facing behind them. The howl of the approaching tornado drowned out the sounds both of the gunshots and of their impacts, making Jim Strong feel he was acting out a scene in some nightmarish silent movie, even as the funnel cloud sliced across the patchwork of runways like a black vortex, swallowing everything before it.
The world seemed to vanish in the tornado’s wake, two of the Russian gunmen trying to flee its path too late. Jim Strong and D. W. Tepper watched the funnel draw the Russians in and spin them around, and then they were gone, as if merged into it and no longer visible. A final gunman had stayed with Kasputin, the two of them pinned against a toppled luggage cart, holding on to the restraining straps for dear life.
The Rangers approached, fighting the winds at the periphery of the funnel cloud, which kept twisting them one way and then back the other, firing shots silenced by the impossible crescendo of sound pitched enough to sting their ears. Jim realized he was having trouble finding breath amid the torrents of rain that seemed to provide no quarter for air.
Can you drown on land?
Crazy thought, he knew, but that’s what it felt like.
“Ranger!”
He heard a portion of Tepper’s desperate call and realized he was behind him, taking a firm hold of Jim’s clothes and trying to pull him back. But Jim was hearing none of it, with Kasputin right there in his sights, the grasp of his final gunman the only thing keeping Kasputin from being vacuumed up. Then the funnel cloud grabbed that gunman in its grasp and seemed to pick him up by the boot strings, whipping him about upside down before the darkness swallowed him altogether.
Jim found himself propped up against a terminal bulkhead door, Tepper tying himself to the latch with a belt. The slide of Jim’s .45 locked empty. Kasputin struggled to right his pistol on him while desperately clutching a strap with the other. Jim thought he recorded a final series of muzzle flashes before the pistol was lost to the vortex of wind sweeping it away. By then, Jim had gotten his own belt fastened tight through the latch, his body pressed up tight to the bulkhead door. He felt it rattle and buffet against him. He looked back toward Kasputin but could see nothing now, the world erased by the funnel cloud that was upon the terminal.
Jim Strong thought he might’ve been screaming, but he couldn’t hear himself, couldn’t hear anything. The tornado had stripped him of breath and pushed him into the air, the belt wrenching but holding. He saw D. W. Tepper’s belt snap, and he latched a hand to Tepper’s waistband and drew him in, with an arm tucked around his chest, battling the funnel cloud for him. He tried to find Kasputin through the black swirl, but it gave up nothing and seemed to be everywhere at once.
Jim pushed Tepper between him and the bulkhead door, pressing himself against it for dear life. The latch still wasn’t giving, so he stripped Tepper’s holstered .45 free and fired the final two rounds against it. Sparks flew, the wind swallowing everything, including his thoughts. But the latch gave and he jerked the bulkhead door open, feeling the sweep of the funnel cloud, just starting to tear both him and Tepper away, when Jim pushed both of them inside the terminal.
The door itself was torn free and whisked away as if weightless, leaving nothing beyond them but a swirling blackness that was everywhere at once. Jim forced his gaze through it, looking for Kasputin, but the Russian and everything around him looked to have been sucked up by the storm by the time the vortex finally cleared.
“We get him?” a still-dazed D. W. Tepper shouted from the floor, over the winds that continued to rage.
“Nope,” Jim Strong said, still gazing into the carnage the tornado had left behind on the tarmac. “Guess we didn’t have to.”
100
SAN ANTONIO
“Explains why Anton Kasputin needed to disappear, become another man entirely, after somehow surviving all that,” Caitlin said when Tepper had finished. A graveyard was an oddly appropriate place to hear the rest of the tale.
“In a hurricane yet,” Tepper followed, shaking his head. “Am I the only one who finds that about as fitting as it gets?”
“Might’ve been my father’s most famous gunfight, the day he shot it out with a tornado,” Caitlin said, recalling par
ts of the tale now. “But I never could pin him down on exactly who he was shooting it out with. Guess I know why, now.”
“It was hushed up all the way from the White House,” Tepper told her. “Whole story was concocted that held up well enough, and when men get swept up by a tornado, there’s not normally much evidence to process. What was left of their remains was found maybe ten miles away by a farmer, when he went to check on his herd, if you can believe that.”
Caitlin looked toward Cort Wesley. “After all this, I can believe anything.”
“It’s your turn now, Ranger,” Tepper said to her. “What exactly did Calum Dane tell you about Zhirnosky and how we can finish this once and for all?”
“Well, Captain, it involves a trip to Russia on Homeland Security’s dime. Jones is making the arrangements.”
“Russia got any idea what’s headed their way?”
“There’s one Russian in particular who does.…”
Before Caitlin could elaborate further, she spotted a dark-clad man heading toward them, skirting the grass in favor of the concrete walkway that sliced through the graveyard. All three whipped their guns out when he dipped a hand under his jacket, ready to shoot before the man took his next breath.
“Hold on! Hold on!” he cried out, terrified, jerking a pair of trembling hands into the air. “I’m just here to serve a subpoena! I’m not even armed!”
Tepper moved forward, still holding his .45 at the ready. He stripped a trifolded set of pages wrapped in a blue cover from the man’s inside jacket pocket and regarded them quickly.
“Looks like it’s for you, Ranger,” he said to Caitlin.
101
WASHINGTON, DC; TWO WEEKS LATER
“Raise your right hand, please,” Asa Fraley, chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said, his own hand in the air as he addressed Caitlin. “Do you swear the testimony you provide at this hearing shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God.”