Strong Cold Dead

by Jon Land

  “For security reasons, the coach and I both felt we should confiscate the cell phones of all the players. Keep a lid on this until we got a handle on things, avoid a panic or overreaction.”

  “And how you doing with that?”

  “Hoping that you can do better.”

  Cort Wesley rose, his spine and knees cracking audibly. “Then let’s go have a talk with Luke.”

  38

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Cort Wesley said to Julia De Cantis, when they reached Luke’s room. “I can take things from here.”

  De Cantis had arranged for a uniformed Houston policeman to guard the building entrance and had posted a school security guard outside Luke’s door. The guard gave ground, pulling his chair out of the way, and De Cantis backed off as well when Cort Wesley knocked lightly on the door.

  “It’s me, son. Open up.”

  The door creaked open a moment later, Luke standing behind it. Cort Wesley hugged him tight and waited for his son to break the embrace, the boy’s eyes welling with tears he tried to sniffle away.

  “Tell me what happened, son.”

  They sat down atop Luke’s ruffled bed covers as the door behind them closed all the way.

  “There were two of them,” Luke started, blowing the hair from his face, just as his older brother was prone to doing. “I came out of the men’s room and they grabbed me.”

  “Grabbed you,” Cort Wesley repeated.

  “Took me out a side exit and pushed me into an SUV just outside the door. Big, with its windows blacked out. One of them drove out of the parking lot before one of the doors was even closed.”

  “What’d they want, son?”

  “You. It was about you.”

  “How’s that exactly?”

  Luke blew more air from his mouth, but there was no hair to ruffle this time. “They said for you to stop making trouble, that this was a warning.” He swallowed hard. “That you needed to get your son in line and that you’d know what they were talking about.”

  “Dylan,” Cort Wesley figured.

  “They didn’t mention any names. I think they were hired hands, the kind of thugs like you see in the movies.”

  “What about an Indian reservation? They mention anything about that?”

  “Indian reservation?”

  “I’ll take that as a no. What else did they say?”

  “Not much.”

  “Give me every word.”

  Luke swallowed hard. “They said to tell you, next time I wouldn’t come back whole.”

  “Exact words?”

  “Pretty close, Dad. One of them had a knife.”

  “You forget to mention that before?”

  “I was focusing on what they said, like you asked.”

  “I get it.”

  “When the one said I wouldn’t be coming back whole, he poked me with the tip,” Luke went on, pointing a finger at his lap. “Here. I think he knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That I’m, you know…’Cause he said he’d cut mine off so I could be the girl I was.”

  “He said that?” Cort Wesley managed, trying to steady the quivers that had started in his hands and then spread tension up his forearms.

  “I told him to go fuck himself.”

  Cort Wesley almost laughed, easing his tension. “You didn’t.”

  “I did. He said he’d rather fuck me.”

  Cort Wesley felt the tension returning.

  “He said he’d done kids like me in prison,” Luke continued. “Exact words.”

  “You never saw either of these guys before?”

  “I would’ve told you if I had.”

  “What about the SUV? You get a license plate, anything like that?”

  Luke frowned and shook his head. “I screwed up there. Too scared to think straight. It was a Cadillac Escalade, I think. Smelled brand new inside, but also like paint.”

  “Paint?”

  “You know, like from an auto body shop, like it had just come out of one or something.” Luke’s expression changed. “What’s this have to do with Dylan, with an Indian reservation?”

  “What do you think?”

  “A girl?”

  “It’s always a girl with your brother,” Cort Wesley said, immediately regretting he’d put it that way.

  “You don’t have to do that, Dad.”

  “Do what?”

  “Worry about choosing your words. I’m not fragile. I don’t break so easy.”

  Cort Wesley squeezed his son’s shoulder. “Well, that’s a relief … You really told the guy to go fuck himself?”

  “Yup.”

  “How’d that feel?”

  “Fucking great.”

  Cort Wesley rose from the twin bed, its old springs creaking. He waited until Luke joined him on his feet.

  “I think I’ll tell the son of a bitch that, once I find him.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Luke said.

  “Which question is that?”

  “What this Indian reservation has to do with me getting jacked from a McDonald’s.”

  “Long story. Let’s just say your brother’s latest girlfriend is a Native American who doesn’t take kindly to having her land spoiled by oil drillers.”

  “That’s a new one, anyway.”

  “It sure is,” Cort Wesley said, something clicking in his mind.

  Doesn’t take kindly to having her land spoiled by oil drillers …

  And then he realized what it was, something he should have realized as soon as he arrived at the reservation the day before.

  “What is it, Dad?” Luke asked him. “You got that look.”

  Cort Wesley shared a smile with his son, started for the door, then stopped and looked back at him. “The head of your school happened to mention your rooming situation for next year has been resolved.”

  “Really?” Luke beamed. “How’d you manage that? You didn’t have to beat anybody up, did you?”

  “No, but that’s coming,” Cort Wesley told him, taking out his phone to call Caitlin with the news about what he’d just realized.

  Before he could dial, though, he saw a half dozen missed calls from her, and one text that read, 9-1-1.

  39

  AUSTIN, TEXAS

  “They’re expecting me,” Caitlin Strong said to one of the two Austin policemen manning the checkpoint at the intersection of Manor Road and Comal Street, beneath a blistering late-afternoon sun that made her squint from the reflection off his sunglasses.

  She handed over her ID, realizing that this whole section of the city had been cordoned off, from the LBJ Presidential Library to the north, off of I-35, to where Manor met Alexander Avenue, to the east. She might have used the term quarantined instead, except that, according to what Captain Tepper had been able to piece together, authorities were in the process of evacuating the area to a one-square-mile radius. Strangely, a lone cloud had settled over the block beyond, leaving it as an ink splotch of darkness enclosed by blazing sunlight on all sides.

  Caitlin watched one of the patrolmen get on his radio with her ID in hand, to make sure she was cleared by higher authorities to proceed. Right now that higher authority was Homeland Security, in the form of none other than her old friend Jones, who, just like a bottle top, kept sticking to her boot and scratching everything it touched. Beyond that, she didn’t know much, other than that around twenty people were dead inside Hoover’s Cooking, a down-home family restaurant squeezed into the Manor Road Plaza, under that lone cloud.

  “You’re free to pass, Ranger,” the Austin cop told her, handing Caitlin back her ID. “Give the devil our regards.”

  A second checkpoint had been set up a block down from Manor Road Plaza, close enough for Caitlin to glimpse what looked like plastic sheeting layered over the whole of the building that contained Hoover’s Cooking. From her classes at Quantico, Caitlin knew this was the standard procedure when some form of contagion was suspected. In this
case, because an active ISIS cell was already being investigated, authorities at Homeland Security were naturally assuming the worst.

  What extraordinarily few people, outside of those with specialized training, knew was that Homeland had furnished all cities above a certain size with a biohazard kit. The so-called kit was actually the size of a small trailer and normally was parked innocuously in the municipality’s impound lot or storage garage, where it would attract little or no attention. The kit contained plastic sheeting like that which Caitlin saw already in place around Hoover’s Cooking, along with protective hazmat suits for supplementary local personnel and a long, cylindrical tube, inflated with air, that looked like a portable airport Jetway. It, too, was already in place at Hoover’s Cooking, wobbling slightly in the breeze.

  A city the size of Austin would have a designated team of police and fire personnel trained as first responders. These people would get the proper protective precautions in place to, at the very least, isolate and contain the damage as much as possible. Minutes mattered a whole lot, seconds almost as much. Even a one-hour delay in enacting the proper procedures could cost tens of thousands of lives, according to Caitlin’s instructors at Quantico, and she was of no mind to dispute their estimates at this point.

  She parked her Explorer in a makeshift lot of other first responders’ vehicles and was waved through to a third checkpoint. This one was erected behind layered strips of hazard tape. Hazmat suits hung from hangers on portable racks inside the kind of tent people rent for backyard parties. Caitlin found Jones, already draped in one, waiting for her at the front flap of the tent, looking truly scared and uncertain for the first time she could ever remember.

  “The shit has really hit the fan this time,” he greeted her. “Why am I not surprised you’re right in the middle of things as usual?”

  “Come again, Jones?”

  “Your old friend Daniel Cross, Ranger … The kid you took under your wing, remember? This is exactly what he promised ISIS he could pull off.”

  40

  RAS AL-MAA VILLAGE, IRAQ

  “I have decided to be merciful to you today,” Hatim Abd al-Aziz, supreme military commander of ISIS, announced to the villagers gathered in the dusty central square, which smelled of goat shit. “I have decided not to repay your disrespect in kind.”

  He continued walking amid the rows of men, women, and children, even as more villagers who’d been found hiding, and children whose parents had stashed them beneath blankets or within crawl spaces, were herded into the square. Al-Aziz stopped and patted the head of an especially frightened-looking boy.

  “They’ve told you stories about me, child, haven’t they? Made up tales of the evil monster who came here once before and killed the men who would not swear allegiance to the caliphate and pledge their faith to Allah. They told you how I cut off their heads and made their families witness the act, how I gouged out the eyes of any who tried to close them.

  “Can you believe they would say such things about me, Seyyef?” al-Aziz asked the towering figure who walked in his shadow.

  Seyyef gave no reply other than a grunt and a shrug. He wore black combat fatigues that made him seem even larger, but no mask, because he’d been unable to find one large enough to fit over his simian-like skull. His cheekbones were ridged and elongated, beneath a forehead that protruded so much it seemed packed with putty. His face and head were so absurdly large that his eyes looked tiny by comparison, giving the giant a perpetually blank stare that made him appear utterly thoughtless.

  “The truth is,” al-Aziz continued to the villagers, “I did none of those things. God did them, with me serving merely as His vessel, stripped of my own will in lieu of a higher power’s. I live to serve Him. That is where we differ, you and I. I live to serve God, while you would besmirch His name and disrespect His greatness with your blasphemy and disloyalty.”

  Al-Aziz couldn’t tell how many of the villagers grasped his words, but soon they’d all understand the intent that had brought him back here, the example that needed to be set.

  “I gave you a chance the last time I came, in spite of all your indiscretions. I warned that if you continued serving as a way station and support center for the forces of the West, I would send all of you to the realms of hell, instead of just your leaders. But even that, I fear, will not be enough to turn you from the darkness to the light we are shining on the new world. What sets the caliphate apart is our belief that there can be no compromise. Conquering the world starts with a single village, for that world can be no stronger than the weakest link, represented by that village and all the others.”

  He stopped and patted another child’s head. She shrank back from his touch, clutching her mother, leaving al-Aziz wishing he could wipe the unclean stink of her off his hand. Around him, the sense of fear and desperation rode the air like a cloud, a fine mist of hopelessness sprayed by the weak willed and weak minded. Somewhere near the back of the dusty square, a young child was shrieking. Others, more children and adults, were choking back sobs or wiping their eyes free of tears.

  “Today this village ceases to exist,” he resumed, walking on. “Today we burn your homes, your crops, your animals, your possessions. Today we take everything that defines you in the evil you have chosen embrace instead of giving yourself to the one true God. But He is a merciful God and has willed me to treat you in that vein. The last time I came here, I took the heads of twenty men identified as leaders. Today, being merciful and compassionate, I will take none. I will spare your lives and let you remain in your homes.”

  Al-Aziz paused just long enough to give the villagers of Ras al-Maa a semblance of hope. Then he snatched the gift back from them.

  “On one condition,” al-Aziz continued. “Each parent must take the life of their oldest child. Refuse, and your entire family dies.”

  The villagers’ hope vanquished with the stiff wind that blew through the square, whipping the dust into miniature funnel clouds. The villagers dropped to their knees, begging, pleading, screeching, sobbing. The sounds were so joyous to his ears that al-Aziz could barely contain himself from smiling.

  “You pray to a God who does not hear you,” he said, his voice rising above their desperate cries. “He does not hear you because He is not here to listen. Only I am here. And when you pray, it should be to me, for the power of the one true God I serve as proxy for.”

  Al-Aziz stopped again to better enjoy the sounds of his majesty. A teenage boy, brandishing a knife he’d hidden under his shirt, tried to rush him, only to be snatched from the ground by Seyyef and held dangling in the air until the giant crushed the boy’s throat and discarded his limp form back to the dusty ground.

  “A village must pay for the indiscretions of each part as if he was acting for the whole. Because no one stopped the charge of this one, my terms have changed: each family will take the lives of their two oldest children, instead of one. Dishonor me again and it becomes three. We will begin now, one family at a time, so others may watch and heed the lessons of the indiscretions that necessitated me coming back here today. I trust I shall not have to come back a third time.”

  Seyyef approached and handed al-Aziz the satellite phone he’d left with the giant for safekeeping.

  “Yes?” the ISIS commander greeted, listening to the report from Syria, feeling his spirits perk up even more. “And this has been confirmed?… No, I’ll want to handle it personally. Initiate the travel protocols for my men and I, and alert the proper contacts in the United States to prepare. Where again, exactly?… “Texas,” al-Aziz repeated, after the voice told him.

  41

  AUSTIN, TEXAS

  Caitlin had suited up in full hazmat gear for drills but never for real, and she was amazed at how different everything felt. The suit was bulkier, hotter. The helmet tended to fog up worse than she recalled, and the portable oxygen supply was heavier. As soon as she stepped outside the command and control tent, the sun, which had chased off that lone dark cloud, felt like
it was melting the suit’s space-age material into her skin. Approaching the wobbly tube attached to the covered entrance of Hoover’s Cooking felt like scuba diving on land, right down to the peculiar buzz she felt in her ear from the air pushing through the tank into her lungs.

  “Can you hear me?” she heard Jones ask through her helmet’s built-in microphone.

  “Loud and clear.”

  “I’ve been inside already, Ranger, so I can give you the lay of the land and the chronology, as best as we’ve been able to reconstruct. Zero hour was right around one hundred and sixty-seven minutes ago and counting. We know that because that’s when a regular who’d come in for lunch rushed outside, puking his guts out, after finding what you’re about to see.”

  She looked at him through her mask. His face was absent of smirk and snarl for the first time she could remember.

  “Austin authorities pushed the appropriate panic button,” Jones continued. “Most of the cavalry’s still en route, but they got the containment procedures enacted faster than any drill ever conducted for a city this size, including getting the man who dialed nine-one-one into isolation. I’m starting to love Texas almost as much as I hate it.”

  “We’re real good with disasters, Jones,” Caitlin told him, nodding inside her helmet. “Far too much practice, unfortunately.”

  “Nothing that prepared you for what you’re about to see, Ranger. You can count on that.”

  Passing through the tube en route to the thick plastic sheeting separating Hoover’s Cooking from the outside world was like some crazy Disney World ride played out for real. Caitlin half expected mechanical or animated creatures to jump out or launch an attack on her from outside the tube.

  “The victims were all eating lunch,” she heard Jones say in her helmet. “Various stages of their meals.”

  “So they didn’t die at the same time, in the same moment?” Caitlin asked, her voice echoing in her ears.

  “Pretty damn close. Within seconds of each other, as near as we can tell. Suggests something airborne, doesn’t it, Ranger?”