Strong Justice

by Jon Land

  104

  JUÁREZ; THE PRESENT

  “This used to be a diaper factory,” Fernando Leyva told Colonel Montoya inside the warehouse on the outskirts of Juárez. “The disposable kind.”

  Montoya continued to walk about the sprawling confines, trailed by both Leyva and Vincente Carillo Guzman, head of the Sinaloa cartel, and their ever-present armed guards. Meanwhile, more of Leyva’s people were supervising the transfer of the contents of the dump trucks into tankers for concealment as well as to better safeguard the soil layered with uranium in transit.

  “The scientists who’ll be assembling the dirty bombs are already waiting for the shipment to arrive in Colombia from the port of Lazaro Cardenas,” Montoya told them both. “Their most complex task will be extracting the uranium salt from the soil. From there, the creation of the bombs will be simple.”

  “What’s your brother doing here?” Leyva asked, tilting his gaze toward a darkened corner where Macerio was currently easing a line into a fresh IV bag. He had shed his familiar toupee, his skull darkened by a fresh growth of stubble. He glanced over suddenly, as if aware they were speaking of him.

  “He is capable of things others aren’t.”

  “As are your own soldiers,” Guzman picked up, shifting his gaze to the fifty men who’d accompanied the general to the warehouse; all brutal and murderous Zetas, the best trained in the Mexican army.

  All but a half dozen of them were dressed in civilian clothes, looking like Mexican tourists or businessmen come to sample the wares of the United States. At present they were moving about a series of tables, selecting from an assortment of laptops, PDAs, identification papers, and light weapons—all of which would accompany them across the border as the first wave in the guerrilla war that would bring America to its knees. Montoya needed to see it all for himself, be there when the invasion began this very night.

  “My brother is different,” he told the cartel leaders. “I wouldn’t trade any ten of my Zetas for him.”

  The colonel didn’t bother to add how uncomfortable he felt outside the jungles of the Yucatán. Even having Macerio by his side at last couldn’t totally relieve that. He thought of all his brother had done for him over the years, not the least of which was the path of blood he continued to leave along the border with Texas. No one had ever made the connection that his victims were actually sacrifices, ch’ab’, to the Mayan cause, a line of demarcation that someday no American would dare cross.

  At that moment, a loud rapping fell on the sealed factory doors. Leyva and Guzman exchanged a nervous glance, while Montoya’s Zetas readied whatever weapons they could lay their hands on.

  Macerio slid forward from the corner, holding no weapon at all. He moved to the heavy sliding door and slung it open to reveal Father Juan Alejandro Pena standing there. The priest stumbled in, panting and gasping for breath. Rancid perspiration that stank like raw onions soaked through his shirt.

  “¡Está de vuelta!” Father Pena managed finally, hands on his knees.

  “Who’s back?” Macerio asked him.

  “¡El gigante!” And when that provoked no response from anyone, Pena added, “Ángel de la Guarda.”

  “What guardian angel?” Montoya demanded, starting forward. “What are you talking about?”

  “The man who has killed many of our men in the barrio bajos. The man the local peasants believe was sent here by God to protect them.” Pena finally managed to straighten up, more of the vile onion stench wafting off him. “He is back, señor.”

  Montoya turned to his brother. “Take charge of the tankers. Get them to Lazaro Cardenas.” Then he swung back around to face the priest. “Now, tell me where we can find this Ángel de la Guarda.”

  105

  JUÁREZ; THE PRESENT

  Caitlin and Cort Wesley found Guillermo Paz seated at a corner table of El Herradero de Soto Restaurant surrounded by chips, pork skins, red salsa, and pico de gallo. The restaurant overlooked the main square on Avenue Juárez diagonally across from Mission de Guadalupe.

  “I ordered extra, in case you were hungry,” he told them, munching on a pork skin. “We have time.”

  The exterior of the V-shaped El Herradero was finished in mauve stucco, with an extended portico and hardwood door adorned by a dozen individual windowpanes. Brick-lined walls dominated the interior, the restaurant’s lighting dim even in daylight over bare slate-colored tables.

  “Change in plans, Colonel,” Caitlin said, sliding into the booth across from him, while Cort Wesley remained standing.

  “You’re not hungry?” Paz asked him.

  “We don’t have any backup,” Caitlin continued. “No gunships, no commandos sliding down from the sky to help finish this.”

  “No surprise.”

  “Doesn’t seem to bother you,” Cort Wesley noted.

  “I expected as much. Your grandfather fought his last great battle here,” Paz said to Caitlin.

  “I know, at Sauer and Company.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t be, Colonel.”

  “It’s right across the street, the Casa Sauer Building now. Not much more than a strip mall. You can see the names of the stores on the overhang.”

  Caitlin gazed out the nearest window through the late afternoon’s fading light. The sky had taken on an angry red color, the promise of a storm held in the dark clouds converging on the last of the day’s light. With the heat having been bled from the air at last, people spilled out into the street and sidewalks, congregating in small groups amid the continual choke of traffic. Between the time the sun gave up its hold and the fall of night brought out the gangs, there were precious few moments to enjoy the outdoors. The square itself was lined with all manner of shops from electronics stores, to bodegas, to tattoo parlors, to drug dispensaries catering to an American clientele with cut-rate prices and offerings not available just steps away across the border.

  “Did anyone ever tell you how that battle ended?” Paz raised between bites.

  “Colonel,” Caitlin started, not bothering to hide her impatience, while Cort Wesley held his steel-like gaze out the windows as if expecting an attack any moment.

  “I told you, we’ve got plenty of time.” Paz swabbed the rest of his plate clean with a tortilla and dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin. “We were talking about your grandfather.”

  Caitlin fidgeted anxiously. “He won. Shot up every bottle in the place and burned all the drugs is what I heard.”

  “There’s more,” Paz told her. “He and the other Rangers gunned down the narcotrafficante and their mules, all right. Problem was the dynamite he laid in the basement to destroy the opium they’d stockpiled never ignited. Your grandfather would’ve gone back inside to finish the job, but he had three wounded Rangers and he figured their lives were more important than destroying those drugs. I bet that stayed with him for a while, leaving the job unfinished. All those drugs he didn’t destroy making their way across the border.”

  Caitlin’s gaze joined Cort Wesley’s out the windows, looking for what she couldn’t say.

  Paz checked his watch. “Earl Strong left Juárez with a tommy gun in one hand and an unconscious Ranger over the other shoulder. I heard he carried that wounded man all the way across the border smoking a cigar the whole time.” Paz leaned back, fixed on Caitlin as if Cort Wesley wasn’t even there. “They still talk about Earl Strong in Juárez, the most famous el Rinche of them all.”

  “And so ends the story,” Caitlin said, letting her gaze drift out the window.

  “No,” Paz told her, “it doesn’t.”

  106

  SAN ANTONIO; 1979

  Caitlin’s mother had just put her to bed when the gunmen came. Her husband, Jim Strong, was away as usual, but had warned her this day may come. He’d told her about how his father had waged war with Mexican drug runners south of the border and how they’d vowed revenge after he and the Rangers had dealt them a setback from which it would take them years to reco
ver.

  Jim Strong talked about his father spending many a night on the front porch when the weather was good, and by an inside window when it wasn’t, waiting for the night he knew was coming. Jim himself had done the same often enough, never once believing the Mexicans had given up just because Earl finally retired. He’d almost quit the Rangers on numerous occasions because he hated leaving his family alone for nights at a time. But he hated the thought of not being a Ranger even more, so kept to his work and called as often as he could.

  A storm had taken out the phones the night the men finally came, but a phone wouldn’t have done much good anyway. The windows of the one-story house exploded in a cacophony of fire that seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. Caitlin’s mother dropped to the floor and crawled into Caitlin’s room, pulling her terrified daughter from under her covers and pushing her beneath the bed.

  “Mommy,” she protested, when her mother began to ease herself away.

  “Hush, baby. I’ll be right back. You just stay put. Don’t move for nothing or nobody, you hear?”

  Four-year-old Caitlin felt herself nod. Then her mother was gone and the house fell into an almost interminable silence until the gunfire resumed with even more fury than before.

  The shattering of her own window sent Caitlin scurrying out from under the bed. First pressed against the wall and then padding softly toward the den where her father watched television with his feet propped up on an overstuffed recliner when he was home.

  She had peeked around the corner, just as the front door burst open ahead of a trio of dark, ugly men who pulled her mother’s hair and pushed her to the floor. Caitlin would have screamed if she’d found the breath. As it was she simply slid down the wall and sat slumped there when a brief flurry of gunfire returned, followed by nothing except the rain and cold flooding the house to mix with the bitter sulfur stench of gun smoke and rank sweat left behind by her mother’s killers.

  107

  JUÁREZ; THE PRESENT

  Caitlin sat in silence, listening to the rhythmic pounding of her own heart. She felt Cort Wesley reach over and close his hand atop hers. It was warm and strong to the touch, but hardly reassuring.

  “The police found you outside in the rain under a cottonwood tree, covered in your mother’s blood,” Paz continued. “You were in shock and had no memory of anything. So your father and grandfather resolved never to tell you the truth of what had happened that night. They thought it would be a blessing for you to believe your mother got sick instead. Maybe they were right.”

  “Captain Tepper told you this.”

  “He thought it was time you heard the truth.”

  Caitlin tried to figure out what she felt, divided between shock and understanding since Paz had explained her very nature in a few brief moments. Everything that had never made sense to her before suddenly did. But she took no solace in that.

  “My grandfather moved in with us right after my mom was killed,” Caitlin said, her voice drifting. “Until the day he died, I can’t remember a time he wasn’t around me.”

  “To protect you for sure,” said Cort Wesley. “A man like Earl Strong would never let the same thing happen again.”

  Caitlin looked back toward Paz. “Was it really about vengeance, Colonel?”

  “The Mexicans who did battle with your grandfather in this very square would never have forgotten the harm he did them. And neither would their sons and grandsons.” Paz turned his gaze toward the window overlooking the ancient square. “Some of their descendants are probably out there now and you’re going to get your chance to do battle with them, to finish what your grandfather started.”

  As if on cue, six cargo vans pulled into the square on Avenue Juárez and double-parked one behind the other. Caitlin and Cort Wesley watched the traffic that had been crawling along came to a complete stop, as van doors slid open allowing gunmen dressed as civilians, but armed with all manner of assault rifles, to spill out in constant streams into the square concentrating on El Herradero de Soto Restaurant. It reminded Caitlin of circus cars where the clowns just kept emerging.

  “Zetas,” she said just loud enough for Paz and Cort Wesley to hear.

  “How did they find us?” Caitlin asked, joining Cort Wesley on his feet.

  “I made sure they knew you were coming,” Paz told her. “Had a coward who calls himself a priest pass the word.”

  Cort Wesley lowered himself over Paz, face starting to twitch, the veins in his forearms pulsing. “Are you out of your frigging mind?”

  Paz grinned and reached under the table, his hand emerging with an M16 he handed up to him. “Yours to do with as you please.”

  Cort Wesley took the M16 and jacked it into firing position.

  “The priest I told you about is from Mission de Guadalupe up the street,” Paz continued. “A few of the townspeople I spoke with told me he has been bought off by the narcotrafficante, that they use the basement of his church to store their guns and ammunition and occasionally their drugs.”

  Cort Wesley posted himself against a wall so he could peer out into the street beyond.

  Paz held his gaze on Caitlin. “Just like the narcotrafficante your grandfather chased down here used the Sauer Building.

  “They’re surrounding us,” said Cort Wesley, ready with his M16.

  “Your grandfather was no expert with dynamite,” Paz said to Caitlin, removing his cell phone from his pocket and pressing out a number without raising the device to his ear. “That’s why he didn’t realize the fuse he set was probably damp from the journey and couldn’t hold a flame. Explosives are tricky to work with.”

  “I think I just spotted Montoya himself,” Caitlin said, still peering out the window, recalling the picture Jones had e-mailed to her BlackBerry.

  As if on cue, across the square Mission de Guadalupe exploded in an orange ball of flame that blew outward from its core. Cort Wesley twisted from the window and dove under the nearest table an instant before the blast’s percussion shattered the glass lining the east side of the restaurant. The patrons still able rushed about in all directions, settling in a panicked charge for the door.

  Then something like an earthquake shook the very ground. Caitlin figured another explosion must be coming until a mass scream erupted outside, loud enough to rise over the crackling flames and panic beyond. She watched as a nonstop flood of armed men dressed shabbily in near rags poured into the square in a constant stream. They carried pistols, assault rifles, and submachine guns she recognized as absolute top-of-the-line. The kind of guns the cartels were known to import from the United States and had likely been stored in the church basement until Paz appropriated them. But the weapons looked utterly wrong in the peasants’ hands, a fact further borne out when they began firing wildly into the air to accompany their bellows.

  The last of the sun dropped behind the mountains, allowing dusk to settle over Juárez.

  “Right on time,” said Paz.

  108

  JUÁREZ; THE PRESENT

  Colonel Montoya couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The peasants he had long discounted and ignored in his plans for Mexico’s future were converging from all angles into the square. The odds of the battle he had insisted on leading personally had changed in one explosive instant. All along he’d been certain he was Chahuku, the Bringer of Thunder from Mayan mythology. Now it seemed he’d had that all wrong. Chahuku was someone else entirely, this Ángel de la Guarda, and the thunder he brought was raging all around Montoya in the old city square.

  “I warned you about him!” Fernando Leyva screamed over the cacophony of gunfire, Vincente Carillo Guzman having already fled with his men. “I warned you!”

  “Just as I warned you not to come,” Montoya sneered at him. “But you insisted, said men here would cower at the sight of you. Are they cowering now?” He shook his head, snarling. “Just tell me when you see this guardian angel.”

  “No one ever sees him until they’re dead.”

  “No
t tonight,” Montoya said, as his Zetas opened fire into the crowd surging toward them.

  Caitlin watched Cort Wesley lurch back to his feet, M16 tight in his grasp.

  Paz handed her one as well. “They come from the barrio bajos, the peasants the narcotrafficante and other vermin terrorize for sport,” he told her, grasping a pair of M4A1 assault rifles, a shortened version of the M16 with a collapsible stock favored by the Special Forces. “I am quite well known to them.”

  “Ángel de la Guarda,” Caitlin said, looking him right in the eye.

  Paz held her stare. “I’m impressed, Ranger.”

  “You’re not the only one who does their homework, Colonel.”

  More gunfire erupted in the square, the people of the barrio bajos firing wildly into the space previously ruled by the Zetas who’d emerged from the cargo vans. Their random fire blew out store windows on both sides of the street. Caitlin could see how unfamiliar the weapons were in their grasp, just as she could see the rage brimming in their eyes. These were men who’d spent their entire lifetimes in poverty, servitude, and fear, their lives too long dependent on those who would just as soon see them dead. She knew each and every one of them had lost a friend or loved one to the intractable violence that had consumed Juárez, perpetuated by the drug cartels controlled now by Colonel Montoya.

  Both Caitlin and Cort Wesley had started for the door to join the battle when Paz blocked their path.

  “The people of the barrio bajos are shooting at anyone with guns.”

  “That street’ll look like a slaughterhouse when the Zetas are done with them.”

  Paz started toward the rear of the restaurant. “Come with me.”

  . . .

  Montoya opened up with his assault rifle, spraying bullets into a throng of peasants who seemed to dance before crumpling under his fire. The Mayan tradition of leadership was defined by the great warrior kings who led their troops personally in battle. The gun jerked in his hands, the smell of sulfur and gun oil thick in his nostrils, even as gunfire deafened his ears to all other sounds.