Strong Enough to Die: A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  She looked at Cort Wesley, then his sons. “I guess the same can be said for just about anyone.”

  Guillermo Paz was standing in Discovery Green, a safe distance from the MacArthur-Rain building, when a series of crackling rumbles shook the world. Paz knew that meant the truck packed with the deadly combination of fertilizer and ammonium nitrate had ignited right on schedule inside the building’s underground garage. He’d mixed it in Pablo Asuna’s repair shop, finding that strangely appropriate.

  The rumbling took on the din of a giant bass drum pounding at the rear of the band, growing quickly into a quake Paz could feel at his very core. Then, as he watched, the entire shape of the MacArthur-Rain building collapsed, picking up speed as it crumpled and sending a mammoth gray cloud coursing outward in all directions.

  “Elogiar Dios.” Paz smiled. “Praise God.”

  “I just need a minute.”

  Before joining Cort Wesley and his boys in the rear of the limousine, Caitlin stood alone and let her gaze wander up the cemetery’s sloping tree line to a set of flowering cottonwoods that blew rhythmically in the breeze. Amid that grove, just for an instant, she thought she saw the shapes of her father and granddad standing casually alongside each other between two of the trees. Her granddad had his Samuel Colt pistol dangling from a holster on his hip while Jim Strong leaned against a tree with a matchstick wedged in his mouth and purpose plain in his eyes.

  Then the breeze shifted and they were gone.

  Read on for a preview of

  Strong at the Break

  A Caitlin Strong Novel

  Jon Land

  Available in June 2011 by Tom Doherty Associates

  A Forge Hardcover ISBN 978-0-7653-32337-8

  Copyright © 2011 by Jon Land

  1

  Quebec; The Present

  * * *

  Copyright © 2011 by Jon Land

  * * *

  From the street the house looked like those nestled around it in the suburban neighborhood dominated by snow cover that had at last started to melt. A Mc-Mansion with gables, faux brick, and lots of fancy windows that could have been lifted up and dropped just about anywhere. The leaves had long deserted the tree branches, eliminating any privacy for each two-acre spread had the neighbors been around to notice. Problem was the neighborhood, part of a new plot of palatial-style homes, had been erected at the peak of a housing boom now gone bust, so less than a third were occupied.

  Caitlin Strand a Royal Canadian Mountie named Pierre Beauchamp were part of a six-person squad rotating shifts in teams of two inside an unsold home diagonally across from the designated 18 Specter, the marijuana grow house they’d been eyeballing for three weeks now. She’d come up here after being selected for a joint U.S. and Canadian drug task force looking into the ever-increasing rash of drug smuggling across a fifteen-mile stretch of St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation land that straddled the border.

  Beauchamp lowered his binoculars and made some notes on his pad, while Caitlin looked at him instead of raising hers back up.

  “Something wrong, Ranger?”

  “Not unless you count the fact I got no idea what we’re trying to accomplish here.”

  “Get the lay of the land. Isn’t that it?”

  “Seems to me,” Caitlin told the Mountie, “that the DEA got that in hand already. You boys too.”

  “It’s task force business now. We need to build a case for a full-on strike.”

  “You telling me the Mounties couldn’t have done that already, on their own?”

  “Not without alerting parties on the other side of the border, who’d respond by dropping their game off the radar, eh? When we hit them, the effort’s got to be coordinated and sudden. That doesn’t mean two law enforcement bodies working in tandem, it means two countries. And that, Ranger Strong, is never a simple prospect.”

  “So we’ve got to tell both sides what they know already.”

  Beauchamp shrugged. “Put simply, yes.”

  “I guess I’m just not cut out for this sort of game,” Caitlin said and sighed.

  The thunk of car doors slamming froze Beau champ’s response before he could utter it. Both he and Caitlin had their binoculars pressed back against their eyes in the next instant, watching six big men in black tops, black fatigue pants, and army boots approach the grow house from a dark SUV lugging assault rifles and what looked like gasoline cans.

  “Uh-oh,” said Beauchamp.

  “Hells Angels?” asked Caitlin, following a bald pair of black-garbed figures who looked like twins.

  “Yup.”

  “What exactly are they doing here now, while there’s people and drugs still inside?”

  The Mountie moved his gaze back to her, his expression flatter than she’d seen in the three weeks they’d been working together. “Only one thing I can think of.”

  2

  Mohawk Indian Reservation;

  Three Weeks Earlier

  The DEA’s lead agent, Frank Gage, drove Caitlin out to the St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation first thing when she reached St. Lawrence County in upstate New York, her unpacked bags stowed in her motel room. They turned off Route 37 down a bumpy road formed of cracked pavement lost to the snow the farther they drew into the woods. March was the absolute dead of winter in these parts, and Caitlin had never seen so much snow and ice in her entire life, enough of it to make the trees sag under its weight.

  “Peak of the season, this road’s got more snow than you can imagine,” he said, finally snailing his car to a halt in a clearing that opened into a picturesque, white-encrusted scene of a frozen river that somewhere contained the border between the United States and Canada.

  Caitlin followed Gage out of the car and down a slight embankment atop snow that crunched underfoot before hardening into ice. Her boots had the wrong tread for this kind of ground and she found herself slipping, unsure exactly of where the land ended and frozen water began beneath them.

  “Welcome to the source of our problems, Ranger,” Gage told her.

  “Where’s the border exactly?”

  “There isn’t one. That’s the problem,” he said, pointing across the vast whiteness to the woods on the other side. “That’s Canada over there, but it’s also part of the Mohawk Reservation on their side of the border too.”

  Caitlin followed Gage’s gaze and spotted an old Indian man cutting a hole in the ice. He had a fishing pole resting on a foldout chair behind him; if he was aware of their presence, he chose not to acknowledge it.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Old tribal cop. A legend in these parts who hates the druggers almost as much as he hates us. Comes pretty much every day to catch his dinner. Locals say he might be as much as a hundred years old.”

  Caitlin watched the old man plop down in his chair and ready his pole over the perfectly circular hole he’d fashioned in the ice.

  “That all makes this a virtual sovereign nation the Canadian authorities are reluctant to violate even more than we are,” Gage said, picking up where he left off before Caitlin had been distracted by the old Indian. He turned toward her, breath misting in front of his face. “More drugs come into the country over this and other frozen rivers, what we call ‘ice bridges,’ than any other spot in the country.”

  “Excluding Mexico.”

  “No, Ranger, not excluding Mexico at all, no offense to you.”

  “None taken,” Caitlin said, trying to make sense of what the DEA man was telling her.

  “We estimate fifty-five billion dollars a year in drugs now comes in through Canada. Compare that with forty-five, maybe fifty, through Mexico.”

  “You telling me we been fighting the war on drugs in the wrong place?”

  “I’m telling you that over the past five years or so a new front’s opened up in that war and you’re looking at it. Starts with the grow houses, pharma and meth labs organized throughout Quebec and parts of British Columbia by the Hells Angels.”

  “Same biker gan
g we got?”

  “They operate on both sides of the border. An elaborate network of fully franchised businessmen backed up by the usual armed sons of bitches riding Harleys. Angels are responsible for manufacture and shipment across Mohawk land here with the Natives’ full blessing, since plenty of them end up as major distributors of the product themselves. I’ll show you the homes of some of the biggest suppliers later. Goddamn mansions sitting just down the road from shacks generally unfit for human habitation. Tribal dealers use runners to sell their product to networks loyal to Russian organized crime throughout New York, Ohio, and Michigan. And that’s just for starters since it doesn’t even include the truckloads bound for other suppliers.”

  “You’ve sold me on the severity of the problem,” Caitlin told him, feeling the wind sift through her hair. The air was bitingly cold, the bright sun offering a mea sure of respite, though not very much. “But I don’t really see how the Texas Rangers can help you solve it, sir.”

  “Rangers can’t; you can.”

  “Come again?”

  “You’ve become a real authority on the subject, Ranger Strong.”

  “Not by choice, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “All the same, you’ve been fighting your own war on drugs for more than two years now.”

  “Sure, back where it’s smuggled in through tunnels dug out of the desert floor or old irrigation lines. Where I come from, we still got drug mules carrying product in rucksacks or on the backs of donkeys.”

  “While up here,” picked up Gage, “it’s driven by the truckload across frozen rivers by men who speak French instead of Spanish. You can see what I’m getting at.”

  “Not really, sir, no.”

  “Problem’s the same; only the language and geography’s different.”

  “I speak Spanish, not French.”

  Gage gave her a longer look this time. His thinning hair blew about in the stiff breeze, exposing a swatch of bald patches. He smoothed it back into place as best he could, but then a fresh thrust of wind tousled it once more.

  “Only language drug people speak is money. Accents don’t matter a whole hell of a lot to them. Where we’re at now is the planning stage. Trying to handle this piecemeal’s gotten us nowhere. What the task force is putting together is an overall strategy, kind of a master plan.”

  Gage had continued to kick at the gathered snow, revealing a deep symmetrical, crisscrossing pattern cut in the ice. Caitlin followed the pattern farther out onto the ice, convincing herself it ran from one side of this frozen swatch of the St. Lawrence River all the way across to the other.

  “What is it?” Gage asked her.

  “These trucks of yours carry enough weight to need snow chains?”

  “Never thought about it.”

  Caitlin rose from her crouch, brushing the snow from her gloves. “You should, sir. What we got here looks to be big freight jobs running on double tires with only the outer ones chained. You’re talking about some haul if it’s drugs they’re carrying in those cargo bays.”

  Gage finally looked up from the chain marks and studied Caitlin for what seemed like a long time, long enough for her to note his cheeks had gone cherry red in the cold while his nose remained milky pale, like his whole face was out of sync.

  “I’m operating on a shoestring here,” he told her. “Six agents, some locals and state cops out of New York, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a tribal policeman, and now you.”

  “Well, now that makes me feel a whole lot better.”

  “It’s like this,” Agent Cage explained. “The growers buy homes at foreclosure sales mostly across Quebec and British Columbia as well as outside Toronto and other venues. They pretty much gut the interiors to turn them into grow houses for an especially potent strain of marijuana known as BC Bud. The head growers get all the soil laid down, seeds planted, lighting and environment set up and turn things over to immigrants to handle the tender loving care.”

  “Did you say immigrants?”

  “I did indeed, Ranger. Chinese mostly, totally beholden to the druggers for their very lives after being smuggled out of their home countries. A separate syndicate charges a fee to get the immigrants into Canada and then turns them over to the druggers to work off the rest with a ticket to the good old USA when the time comes. Poor bastards can see the American Dream across the border and will do pretty much anything they’re told.”

  “My granddad arrested plenty of Mexican runners in the thirties bringing marijuana and black tar heroin across the border for pretty much the same reason.”

  “Hard-core druggers have certainly made a life’s work out of feeding on desperation, haven’t they? By the time their pigeons realize they’ve signed on to a sham, fear keeps them in line.” Gage shook his head, thin wisps of hair shifting with it. “Not much changes.”

  Caitlin looked toward the vast expanse of land across the frozen river that looked postcard pretty and very small in the distance, thinking about another front opened in a war they were already losing. “In this case, it just gets worse.”

  3

  Quebec; The Present

  “What do you mean?” Caitlin asked Beauchamp, watching the black-garbed figures heading up the walk to the front door, three of them lugging the gasoline cans.

  “Didn’t Agent Gage explain what the Angels do to the houses once they’re done with them, once the mold sets in?”

  “Burn them to the ground. Only this house hasn’t been harvested. No mold yet, nothing like that. And there’s still people inside.”

  “Meaning…”

  “Jesus Christ,” realized Caitlin, binoculars still glued to her eyes, “they’re on to us.”

  “It does seem that way, eh?”

  Caitlin moved closer to the window in response. “How many immigrants we got in that house?”

  Beauchamp checked his notebook, flipping back a few pages. “Seven, by my count. I recognized two of the Hells Angels, the big bald ones with those arrow tattoos painted on their skulls: the LaChance brothers. They’re from your side of the border in Michigan but wanted for murder in Canada too.”

  Caitlin lowered her binoculars and watched the Mountie fumble for his cell phone. “Then how ’bout we go arrest them?”

  But Beauchamp had the phone at his ear. “We gotta call Gage first. See how he wants this handled.”

  Caitlin was already on her feet, pushing the blood back into her legs, taking her mind to a distant, yet familiar place. “Only one way it can be handled, Mountie.”

  “He’s not answering.” Beauchamp’s eyes flared in the room’s thin, ambient light. “I’ve heard the Rangers are the next best thing to Mounties.”

  “Funny,” said Caitlin, “I’ve heard almost the same thing.”

  Standing now, Caitlin pressed her binoculars back against her eyes and focused on the grow house. She caught splotchy glimpses of some of the Angels spreading the gasoline about, dousing everything in their paths. There were glimpses too of the biggest ones, the American LaChance brothers, smacking a few of the Chinese around, ignoring their protestations since clearly they held no more value than the lumber and furnishings about to go up in an inferno.

  “They’re gonna burn those Chinese along with everything else,” Caitlin said and pushed back her jacket to expose her holstered SIG Sauer nine-millimeter pistol.

  “Then what are we waiting for?” Beauchamp asked her, pocketing his phone and ripping out his pistol in its place.