Strong Cold Dead

by Jon Land

  “All well and good,” Jones noted. “But in case we’re forgetting, those folks in Hoover’s Cooking weren’t killed by accidental leaching. They were murdered, and in case you didn’t read the report, no trace of any such toxin was found in the remains of their food—either what was left on their plates or inside their stomachs.”

  “That’s because it was gone,” Caitlin interjected.

  “Ranger,” said Captain Tepper, holding his box of Marlboro reds in his lap, “if I weren’t strapped into this damn thing, I’d come over there and shake some sense into you.”

  “Hear me out on this, Captain. It’s the only thing that makes any sense, the only explanation for how the waitstaff in Hoover’s was killed too, even though they didn’t eat or drink anything during the same period.”

  “Christ on a crutch. So what killed them?”

  “Smell,” Young Roger answered, before Caitlin could. “The neurotoxin entered the body through the nasal cavity, just like it did to those Inuit in 1930.” He paused to let that sink in, then went on. “More specifically, through the paranasal sinuses. I’d recommend the CDC teams on the ground now perform detailed examinations of those sinuses in the remains of the victims, along with the throat, larynx, and primary nasal passages, in search of any abnormalities in the form of lesions or even the slightest tissue damage. I expect they’ll find enough—at least something that proves we’re looking at a weapon spread through smell.”

  Caitlin turned back toward Tepper. “Go back to the days Jack Strong got himself involved with the same reservation, D.W. All those men who got torn apart in those hotel rooms were already dead, or totally incapacitated, when they were attacked. That’s how it all happened so fast; that’s why they never even screamed. The Comanche were trying to scare John D. Rockefeller off by perpetuating the myth of a monster spawned by nature, some otherworldly force rising when necessary to protect them. But that monster was no more than warriors turned into violent killing machines after ingesting a particularly potent strain of peyote. That’s what those manacles I found in the cave were for, to keep the warriors restrained until the effects of the drug finally wore off.”

  “You’re saying they brought their mythical killer back when the need arose,” said Jones, “only this time thanks to Cray Rawls instead of John D. Rockefeller.”

  “I believe so, yes. And I asked Young Roger here to look into the possibility of smell as a weapon, even before I had any inkling about this corn fungus. This ringing any bells with you, Jones? Because the military’s had a program in it for decades.”

  “Sure,” Jones cut in, “under nonlethal weapons development. Last time I checked, though, what we’re facing here is pretty damn lethal.”

  “On that subject,” began Young Roger, “in 2007, a fireball hurtled out of the sky and blasted a forty-foot crater in Peru. The crater filled with boiling liquid and a noxious gas poured out that sent dozens of people to the hospital. Some of them suffered temporary paralysis and nerve damage. It was determined that whatever leaked out of that crater affected their nervous systems. Sound familiar?”

  “Any of them die, kid?”

  “Not a one,” Young Roger told Jones. “But you ever hear of an Israeli company called Odortec?”

  Jones stiffened. “That’s classified.”

  “Not here, it’s not,” said Tepper. “Keep talking, son.”

  “Odortec has been specializing in scent-based weapons of the nonlethal variety for law enforcement for years. Word is they’ve expanded their horizons considerably as of late.”

  “Word from where?” Jones challenged.

  “The Deep Web. Would you like me to cite the specifics?” Young Roger asked him.

  “Homeland’s connected to this company … have I got that right, Jones?” Caitlin challenged.

  “I’m taking the Fifth,” he said, still glaring at Young Roger.

  “The fact that the toxin disappears when the smell does makes it close to the perfect weapon,” Young Roger said, addressing all of them. “No trace elements, no residue, minimal collateral damage, and no way to trace anything to potential perpetrators.”

  “I imagine that would make aroma the perfect means of delivery,” Caitlin ventured. “Right, Jones? An untraceable weapon of mass destruction.”

  “You said it,” Jones conceded. “I didn’t.”

  “You might as well have,” Caitlin told him. “Man oh man, where does it stop?”

  “It doesn’t, Ranger. You want to talk to me about new avenues in lethal weapons development, fine, let’s have that conversation. Right now, people scream when we use drones; they scream when we launch raids; they scream when we take out a wedding party to take out a dozen militants who’d cut the heads off their own children.”

  “Something I’m trying to get straight here,” Captain Tepper said, his words aimed squarely at Young Roger. “These two incidents, the one up in Canada a long way back and now the one down here at Hoover’s—it wasn’t eating the food that did the deed; it was smelling it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But in both cases the food had to be cooked … have I got that right, son?”

  “As rain, Captain. An aquifer on that reservation created a super-deadly strain of corn fungus, but not until heat was added to the equation. Kind of like a final catalyst.”

  “Any kind of heat?”

  “I suppose. Why?”

  “Because,” Caitlin answered, before Tepper could, her gaze fixed on Jones, “what would happen, exactly, if somebody blew up a whole bunch of that toxic cuitlacoche?”

  96

  BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS

  Cort Wesley studied the bloodied piece of paper that Ela had given Dylan.

  “Ten red Xs,” Dylan said, following his eyes, standing over Ela Nocona’s body, which was now covered with an extra tarpaulin. “I think it’s a map. I think they’re bombs.”

  “Safe assumption.” Cort Wesley nodded, without looking up.

  “Ela said something about backpacks. She stopped her cousins from using whatever was inside them, but then the killers showed up. She said they spoke Arabic.”

  “Arabic,” Cort Wesley repeated, drawing out the syllables.

  “You have any idea what that’s a map of … where in Houston?”

  Cort Wesley folded it back up. “I think I do, son. Now let’s see if we can get there in time.”

  * * *

  Cort Wesley climbed the ladder back into the shed first, lending Dylan a hand the final stretch of the way.

  “You need to call Caitlin, Dad.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  Cort Wesley opened the shed door all the way, revealing what looked like a wizened corpse standing before them, holding an ancient double-barreled shotgun.

  “This is as far you go,” said White Eagle.

  97

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  Both Black Hawks landed at the Grand Prairie Armed Forces Reserve Complex on Mountain Creek Lake in southwest Dallas, a fifteen-minute drive from Klyde Warren Park.

  “We got drones up and active over the target zone,” Jones reported, eyes fixed on a tablet, after they piled into a pair of massive SUVs.

  “What about intelligence as to who Cross and company might be meeting there?” Caitlin asked him.

  “We’re running every picture of every person who entered the country flying international in the past forty-eight hours. Problem we’re facing is that plenty of these ISIS fighters aren’t in any databases, and if the mother ship in Syria did send a team here, you can bet it would consist of those not on our radar.”

  “What about running a cross-match on all known leaders?”

  “Those deployments at Quantico have served you well, Ranger.”

  “Just answer the question, Jones.”

  “Nothing, so far, from our facial recognition software. We get a hit out of Klyde Warren Park, it’ll trigger an alarm you’ll hear from coast to coast.”

  “Is that supposed to make
me breathe easier?”

  Jones looked up from his tablet. “Right now, we’re not just the front line on this, we’re the only line. Washington only wants to know what it wants to know. No Black Hawks were requisitioned out of Martindale. We never landed at Grand Prairie, and the SUVS we’re riding in don’t have tags that match up with any existing registration. For all intents and purposes, we’re not here now and whatever ends up going down in Klyde Warren Park will lead absolutely nowhere.”

  “Just the way you like it, Jones.”

  “Not a question of like; it’s a question of need. If we show up and find Zurif, Saflin, and a geek with the secrets of the universe, it’s going to get messy. We show up and find ISIS making a field trip, it’s going to get even messier. Right up your alley,” Jones said, just as his tablet made a pinging sound. He zoomed in on what the drones circling overhead had locked onto below, in Klyde Warren Park. “Looks like we’ve got a firm location.”

  He angled the tablet screen so Caitlin could see the frozen image of three figures seated at a picnic table, all immediately recognizable.

  “What about the fourth guy?” she asked Jones.

  PART TEN

  Charlie Miller was one of the first Rangers to see the value of the Colt 1911 pistol as a peace officer’s weapon. However, Miller had a severe dislike for the grip safety on the pistol. His solution was to tie the grip safety down with a length of rawhide. He also carried his pistol with a round in the chamber and the hammer on half cock (a practice that is definitely not recommended). To make matters even more interesting, Miller disdained the use of a holster and generally just carried the .45 auto shoved down in the front of his pants. In later years, his big belly pretty well made this a concealed-carry technique.

  —Sheriff Jim Wilson, “Texas Ranger Tales” http://sheriffjimwilson.com/2011/10/14/texas-ranger-tales

  98

  KLYDE WARREN PARK, DALLAS, TEXAS

  The SUVs were able to make spaces for themselves in a rear corner of a parking lot on the northbound Woodall Rodgers Freeway access road, normally reserved for the park’s Savor restaurant. They had no staging area per se and had to rely on the cover of the SUVs for their final weapons check and prep.

  “What’d you tell the Dallas cops?” Caitlin asked Jones.

  “What they need to know: nothing.”

  “Come again?”

  “You want to run the risk of them doing something stupid?”

  “We could use the backup if this goes bad, Jones. To help with the evacuation, if nothing else.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement,” he said, and turned away.

  The logistics necessitated that Paz and his men use only light weaponry, including submachine guns tucked under light jackets that fell just below their waists. Even without flak jackets, which Guillermo Paz never allowed his men to wear, that was sure to draw some attention to them. A necessary trade-off, and one that Jones was willing to accept, given that their targets were stationary and confined.

  Both the sprawl and the clutter bred by the carnival would work in their favor, offering additional camouflage for Paz’s men. Jones never questioned Paz on how he handled such matters, just pointed the big man in a direction and let him off his leash.

  “I hope you’re reading this right,” Caitlin said to him.

  “Just keep your nose out of it, Ranger.”

  “Be glad to, Jones, after you tell me why they’re meeting where thousands of people can see them?”

  “Good question. Got an answer?”

  “Only that maybe it was the fourth man’s idea,” Caitlin ventured, an instant before Jones’s iPad began chiming.

  * * *

  Daniel Cross had laid it all out for Hatim Abd al-Aziz. How he could make the weapon work in either an open or a confined space. How much it would take, and how long to handle the logistics. The ISIS commander drank his words in, almost giddy at the prospects and enamored by the supply his men would soon be returning to the Indian reservation to collect.

  Al-Aziz seemed to bow his head slightly. “You said you were not a Muslim.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Perhaps not in this life. But in another you were a soldier of God, likely fighting by my side then as you are now. Perhaps then, too, you bestowed a great gift upon our movement, to enable us to realize God’s will. Tell me how it will happen. Tell me the instruments by which His plan will be realized.”

  “Extreme temperatures, like when the stuff is cooked, release the aroma. That aroma indicates the neurotoxin has been activated. If you can smell it, you’re dead.”

  “Extreme temperatures,” al-Aziz repeated. “That would, of course, include percussion, yes? I speak of spreading this toxin over a wider expanse through the use of explosives.”

  “For sure,” said Cross, nodding enthusiastically, “if the results of the testing I’ve done is any indication. One thing to keep in mind is that the effects last only as long, and reach as far, as the aroma. Once the smell dissipates, it’s over.”

  “But if such a blast were detonated over a city as crowded as, say, this place?” the ISIS commander wondered, spinning his gaze about Klyde Warren Park.

  “You’d have close to a one hundred percent mortality rate,” Daniel Cross told him, imagining just that, on these premises in the coming days.

  “One hundred percent.”

  “No survivors. None whatsoever.”

  “Bismillah,” al-Aziz said, closing his eyes. “In the name of Allah.”

  The park had continued to fill up around them, only narrow gaps left between the various rides, booths, and attractions of the carnival stretched across the rolling, flat lawn. The result was to compress the crowd tighter and tighter.

  If such a blast were detonated over a city …

  Cross imagined it happening here, instead. Thousands dead, literally within seconds. Falling as they stood.

  Wow, was all he could think.

  99

  BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS

  “You really going to shoot us, Chief?” Cort Wesley asked White Eagle, buying the time he needed to ease Dylan all the way behind him. “Go ahead. We’ll say hello to your granddaughter, or whatever she is, for you.”

  Doubt crossed White Eagle’s expression, not fitting him right.

  “She’s dead down there,” Cort Wesley continued. “Her cousins, too. Killed by human monsters I intend to hunt down, if you’ll stand aside and get out of my way.”

  The old man remained rigidly planted in place, but his expression wavered, its confidence gone.

  “You don’t think I could take that gun away from you or shoot you dead right now? But I’m not going to do that, because it would be too easy. You put your crazy thoughts inside that girl’s head and never bothered to rein her in when she went too far.”

  The shotgun began trembling in White Eagle’s grasp.

  “You goaded her and those boys into pretending this was still the nineteenth century. You got them killed, old man. I don’t care if you’re a hundred and fifty years old or a thousand. You’re a self-centered asshole who didn’t take care of the people who needed him.”

  “Where is she?” White Eagle stammered.

  “Just inside the chamber where you stored your killing concoction those dead kids were going to unleash on Houston, until Ela stopped them. But she couldn’t stop ISIS, so get out of my way and let me do it.”

  The shotgun barrel dropped toward the ground, as if suddenly weighed down. Cort Wesley started to advance, but White Eagle latched a bony grip onto his arm, holding him briefly in place. White Eagle’s expression crinkled into a patchwork quilt of hatred and disgust, segmented by the way the sunlight framed it.

  “Nothing else has worked,” the old man insisted. “For almost two centuries, nothing else has worked. The defilers and spoilers of the land must be shown the error of their ways. They would build and build and build, until our way of life is gone. I stopped Rockefeller then. I’ll stop these men now.”
>
  Cort Wesley shrugged off his grasp. “Yeah, keep telling yourself that.”

  He started on again, angling Dylan before him in case White Eagle had a mind to use the shotgun.

  “Ela’s map, that part of Houston,” the boy said. “You recognize it, right, Dad?”

  “Yes, son, I believe I do.”

  100

  DALLAS, TEXAS; KLYDE WARREN PARK

  “Stand down! Stand down!” Jones ordered Paz and his men, who’d moved into flanking positions around the picnic table. “We’ve identified the fourth bogey! Repeat, we have ID on the fourth bogey!”

  Caitlin and Jones had accessed the park off Olive Street and had appropriated an information kiosk next to Moody Plaza to set up a command center. Captain Tepper and Pierre Beauchamp, meanwhile, had hung back, near the exit closest to the picnic table in question, off Pearl Street and not far from the St. Paul DART station. If any of the targets fled, the thinking went, it would be in that direction.

  Caitlin gazed at the flashing red box enclosing the fourth man at the picnic table. “Friend of yours?”

  “The fucking Antichrist has joined the party. Head of ISIS’s military operations. As in top dog. As in Hatim Abd al-Aziz, beheader in chief.”

  Caitlin hitched her light windbreaker back to expose her SIG Sauer. “Man like that wouldn’t have come alone.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know, Ranger. Colonel Paz, do you read me?” Jones said into his throat mic.

  “We’ve identified six men already,” Paz reported into their ears, “all heavily armed. My men are moving on them now. And I know this al-Aziz. He’s an ethnic Chechen, raised in Turkey, who trained with my secret police in Venezuela. As brutal as they come, and always travels in the company of a man known only as Seyyef.”

  “The name never crossed my desk,” Jones said.