Strong Justice

by Jon Land

  His great battlefield sense told him his superbly trained commandoes would triumph over this ragtag group of wild men. Even now his Zetas were taking cover from which to fire, leaving Montoya leading a small group hoping to stem the raging assault long enough for the rest of his men to gain the ground needed to turn the tide. Once that happened the peasants would flee, cowards to the core with their advantage of surprise gone.

  He could have used his brother Macerio now. But the tankers needed protection too. The tankers were everything.

  Montoya turned left, then right, jacking another magazine into place without missing a beat as bodies continued to crumple everywhere around him.

  The narrow stairwell spilled out onto the roof, providing a clear view of the people of the barrio bajos falling to the suddenly concentrated fire of the Zetas. Montoya’s men had managed to find cover within shattered storefronts and behind buildings, easily cutting down the peasants who were lost for a response with the surprise of their attack squandered.

  “Don’t think we came this far just to watch,” said Cort Wesley.

  And he opened fire on a concentration of Zetas nestled in an alley across the street, shooting high to kick chips of brick and stone into their faces to push them to their feet before mowing them down. Caitlin added her fire, swiftly finding a rhythm to the M16 thanks to several range sessions with one over the past year just in case she’d ever need to wield one again. She heard the squelching crackle of Paz’s fire and glimpsed him firing in two different directions at the same time, his arms akimbo, more of the Zetas falling to his gunfire or diving for cover to avoid it.

  Through the endless barrage, Caitlin was vaguely conscious of the rapidly descending night being brightened by the glow from the flaming Mission de Guadalupe. The fire cast shadows through the square that trapped both gunmen and peasants alike in their grasp. And thick smoke had begun wafting over the square in waves that blocked the view of the warring factions from her rooftop perspective.

  Cort Wesley’s and Caitlin’s stares met. They shared the slightest of smiles.

  “Cover us, Colonel,” Caitlin told Paz.

  109

  JUÁREZ; THE PRESENT

  Montoya felt the tide turn all right, but in the wrong direction. The peasants had not fled for their lives as he’d expected, choosing to stay and fight as if this were their land to defend. Worse, his and Fernando Leyva’s men were being cut down in spite of the superior positions they’d gained, as if the enemy had found the sense to claim the high ground. The angle of fire drew his eyes to a rooftop where a massive figure fired downward with twin rifles that looked like toys in his grasp.

  Ángel de la Guarda . . .

  He was real, after all, the Chahuku behind the trap the colonel and his men had walked straight into. Instinct and duty told Montoya to make his way toward the rooftop and confront the man who had baited him into this. But he could not, under any circumstances, risk letting his greater plans for Mexico dissolve and disappear here. Not with the means to launch his guerrilla war heading toward Lorenzo Cardenas even as the battle raged. Sometimes even the greatest commanders know that the best means to assure ultimate victory was a temporary retreat. The first wave of incursion into America’s cities would be delayed, that’s all, his plans reoriented as a result.

  Montoya had never retreated in his life, not from any challenge, and doing it now proved surprisingly hard. But the Mayan warrior kings of the past had not ruled an empire for a millennium without facing such difficult choices and placing the needs of their people above their own.

  So Montoya gnashed his teeth and pulled back deeper into the darkness and smoke, hating to leave the spill of blood and fall of bodies behind. He tore his uniform top off to reveal a plain white T-shirt beneath it. An instant later he had crossed through the jagged line of peasants still stubbornly firing wild volleys and disappeared into the night.

  Caitlin felt the smoke in her lungs as soon as she and Cort Wesley emerged through the restaurant’s rear door. She remembered sneaking a puff of her grandfather’s cigar one day, inhaling a deep drag and gagging up the smoke while he snoozed in a chair. Her throat had felt as if she’d swallowed scalding water and her lungs burned with every breath for days afterward. Strange how she had forgotten all about that until now, until the burn returned and left her fighting back the same kind of retch.

  She discarded the M16 and drew her SIG as they neared the building, the coarse smoke stinging her eyes now. Then she felt Cort Wesley throw himself into her and up against the side of the building lined with cracked windows that had managed to hold fast to their frames.

  “The Zetas are moving for the vans,” he whispered. “Turning tail to run.”

  “Any sign of Montoya?”

  “It’s a goddamn blur out there. Got an idea, Ranger. Just hold on here.”

  “Where are—” Caitlin started, but he was already gone.

  Cort Wesley figured the Zetas couldn’t see him any better than he could see them, or even discern whose side he was on, given all but a few were dressed in civilian clothes. He charged into the square among the former members of the Mexican Special Forces, pretending to fire at the congestion of peasants still rushing about. Then, suddenly, he turned his weapon on the nearest Zetas and mowed them down before ducking into the thick smoke for cover.

  From there, he opened fire into their vans. Shooting at tires and glass, and blasting away at the engines and gas tanks. His ears bubbled from the nonstop barrage. He thought he sensed the heat of return fire sizzling past him, but it could just as easily been flaming embers fanned by the wind.

  The smoke stole the world before him until a bright shaft of light sliced through it, pouring daytime brightness onto the scene while a whirring sound pushed at the periphery of his hearing.

  Caitlin watched the helicopter hovering overhead, a newsman wearing a harness leaning out the open side with camera pinned to his shoulder. The chopper’s rotor wash whipped the smoke about, enough breaks in it for her to recognize the call letters of an El Paso television station come to cover the battle obliterating the old center of the city.

  She could no longer see Cort Wesley amid the spreading smoke, had no idea how many of the enemy he had downed or if any of the Zetas’ return fire had found him. She didn’t dare risk a shot at shapes and shadows out of fear they might have belonged to the peasant army stirred and armed by Guillermo Paz, or even Cort Wesley himself.

  Then a trio of men she recognized as Zetas from the now disabled cargo vans stormed her way, firing wildly back into the smoke. Caitlin steadied her SIG and reeled off six shots in rapid succession, two per each, all three downed before they even saw her. Head shots in case they were wearing body armor under their shapeless civilian clothes.

  She heard a staccato burst of automatic fire that sounded clearer and closer than the others, followed almost immediately by screaming. Caitlin pressed her back against the raised wood structure bracketing the nearest set of window frames. She peered inside El Herradero Restaurant to see two gunmen rounding up customers stranded there by the battle to use as hostages. Then she glimpsed the face of a third man she recognized as Fernando Leyva, head of the Juárez drug cartel.

  Inside the restaurant, a man tried to intervene when one of the gunmen threw his wife against a wall and Leyva shot him in the face. He’d been shot himself as a younger man and even now Caitlin could see through the angry snarl how one side of his face drooped lower than the other. The two gunmen jerked a family of five to their feet from behind a toppled table, sticking their rifles into the children’s faces to make the parents cooperate.

  The hovering chopper’s spotlight rotated into the restaurant, splaying fissures of broken light across the scene, enough for Caitlin to register the fear on the faces of the gathered hostages. In that moment the colored world seemed to fade to black and white, taking on the grainy texture of the old photographs picturing Earl Strong with pearl-handled Colts dangling from his waist. She felt she was
back in 1934, fighting alongside her grandfather in this very square against a different enemy.

  What would Earl Strong have done?

  The question had barely left her thoughts when Caitlin threw herself into the side windows of the restaurant, cracked in spiderweb fashion by the percussion of the blast that had leveled Mission de Guadalupe. She hit them on a side angle, feeling splinters from the shattered wood frames pricking at her skin and conscious of glass slivers digging into her scalp when she hit the floor.

  Caitlin didn’t know how she found the sense or aim to fire, or what moved her to risk shots that just as easily could have claimed captives as captors. She could have sworn she heard her grandfather’s voice, no longer cracking with the strain of age, directing her fire at the two gunmen, one hurled over a table and the other blown into a wall by her bullets. And when she rolled onto her stomach, for a moment, just a moment, Caitlin thought she glimpsed Earl Strong standing over her, firing with pearl-handled Colts clutched in either hand.

  “Get the boss man, Ranger!”

  And then she was firing anew at the shape of Fernando Leyva surging for the door just before its remnants burst inward behind a booted kick from Cort Wesley. Impossible to tell whether it was her fire or his that dropped Leyva, the hate on his face freezing under the spill of the funnel-shaped light shed by the news chopper until his features disintegrated in the hail of bullets.

  The chopper hovered lower, its spotlight cast over the bodies littering the square while the congested buildings of more modern Juárez twinkled in the near distance. This part of the city had been locked in a different time, perhaps so the ghosts of the past could walk its streets with their kin from the present. The sounds of gunfire had ended, ceding Juárez to the thumping rotor wash and stubborn crackling of the flames still feasting on Mission de Guadalupe.

  Caitlin and Cort Wesley emerged from the restaurant, to find Guillermo Paz waving his arms to signal the news chopper to land in an open section of the street adjoining the shotup forms of the cargo vans. Probably believing he was a federalé or Mexican army regular, the chopper complied.

  “Looks like we’re going for a ride,” Cort Wesley said to Caitlin, her hair tossed about by the rotor wash.

  110

  JUÁREZ; THE PRESENT

  The cabin made for a tight fit, as the helicopter lifted off again, the reporter promised the story of his life in return for his help. Caitlin and Cort Wesley fitted the spare sets of headphones over their ears, leaving Paz to listen and speak above the vibration and sounds that reminded Caitlin of an air hammer left to its own devices.

  “Take us over Route two,” Cort Wesley told the pilot. “Straightest route to the deep-water ports on the Pacific,” he added to Paz and Caitlin. “That’s where they’ll be taking the contents of those dump trucks for sure.”

  “Doesn’t figure they’d risk driving heavy loads across the desert,” she agreed.

  “No chance they were figuring on us either.” Cort Wesley looked about the chopper’s interior, face wrinkled in a frown. “We’d be sitting pretty for sure, if this was one of those gunships that never showed.”

  “It is now,” said Paz, his voice slicing through the engine roar, grenade held in either hand.

  Before Macerio, the lights of the convoy bracketed by armed Humvees operated by more of his brother’s Zeta commandos cut a narrow ribbon from the night west down Mexico’s Route 2. The entire contents of the six dump trucks had been transferred into four massive tankers labeled DANGER— HAZARDOUS WASTE to assure the convoy a smooth ride undeterred by hijackers or law enforcement personnel.

  Their freighter was already docked at Lazaro Cardenas to take the tankers to Bogotá by sea. Marcerio worried for the fate of his brother, the mission lost without him. But he had to have faith, faith that the blood trail he had laid across the land over so many years would satisfy the angry Mayan gods enough to keep both of them safe long enough to achieve their destiny.

  Macerio had just felt a strange sense of certainty about the future, when he heard the heavy sounds of a helicopter overhead.

  “There!”

  Paz tapped the pilot on the shoulder and gestured down at the convoy of tankers speeding along the narrow black strip across the Mexican wilderness heading west. The lights of nearby towns dotted the distance, creating the effect of a vast tunnel carved through the center of them. Paz had grenades clipped to his belt, in addition to the pistols and spare magazines wedged into the slots of his ammo vest. A human armory was what he looked like and it seemed to suit him well, as he cracked the side door open. Cool night air rushed in, buffeting the cabin.

  “Zeta gunner on the lead Humvee’s swinging toward us,” said Cort Wesley, maneuvering to find a fire angle for his M16.

  “Not for long,” said Paz, leaning farther out into the night.

  Macerio could see nothing of the chopper’s interior through the night, but knew Ángel de la Guarda was on board nonetheless. A coldness rooted deep in his core told him this was an enemy unlike any he’d faced before, one whose blood would not be so easy to shed, if he bled at all.

  He raised the walkie-talkie linking him to the other vehicles in the convoy to his lips. “Shoot them down,” he ordered the Zetas in the Humvees.

  . . .

  The chopper had just drawn even with the lead tanker marked as toxic waste transport when the first rounds from the M60 clanged into its fuselage, a few stray shells ricocheting about the cabin. Paz lost grasp of a grenade he’d readied just before he pulled the pin and it skittered across the cabin floor. He scrabbled for it, as Cort Wesley managed to free his harness and then moved to help Caitlin free hers. He took her down to the cabin floor, more fire whizzing over their heads.

  Caitlin watched Paz grab hold of his grenade just before it rolled out the door, daring the M60 fire as he measured off his toss.

  “Now, Paz!” Cort Wesley yelled. “Do it!”

  Paz tossed the grenade out into the night. He knew in the next instant his toss was slightly off, swept off target by the wind, so he followed with a second immediately, as the M60 continued to spit fire their way.

  Paz watched the second grenade skitter across the mount and disappear.

  Then he closed his eyes.

  Macerio saw the first grenade bang off the lead Humvee’s hood, no time to rejoice before a second dropped straight into the gun mount. He watched the machine gunner flail desperately for it, thought he could see the terror and panic in the man’s eyes.

  “Slow down!” he ordered the driver of his tanker. “¡Desaceleración!”

  Macerio heard the hiss of the brakes being applied, bracing for possible impact with the next closest tanker that may not have been able to respond as quickly. The big vehicle buckled slightly, listing badly from side to side, the distance growing between it and the lead Humvee in the last moment before the Humvee exploded.

  Caitlin watched the blast launch the Humvee six feet into the air, before spinning it around and dropping its mangled carcass back on the highway, spewing rubber and metal. The lead tanker slammed into it, further dissolving its remnants and scattering them in all directions. She watched the tanker’s tires lock up, the vehicle still moving as the cab portion angled sideways leaving the tanker to chase it into a wild jackknife.

  The tanker spun around on an axis created by the cab, whipsawing toward the trailing trucks that careened into one another in desperate attempts to avoid it. The screech of metal impacting against metal came accompanied by showers of white-hot sparks that disappeared into the night as quickly as they’d flashed.

  Caitlin saw the tankers spinning wildly across the road, one kicking up huge plumes of dust as it settled to a halt, only to be obliterated by another tanker whose panicked driver must have jammed the brakes instead of pumping them. A third sliced that one clean in half and rolled over atop its carcass, its wheels still turning as if to ride the air, leaving only the lead tanker still upright, though twisted across the highway.

&
nbsp; The trailing Humvee, meanwhile, skidded off the road and flipped when its tires ground into the desert floor. But it somehow landed back upright, its M60’s trigger jammed backward from the impact, a wild, churning spray of bullets fired upward.

  The chopper’s occupants all felt it list suddenly one way, then the other, evidence of the tail rotor catching part of the barrage. The pilot managed to angle the chopper away from the careening tankers, the desert floor beyond the freeway coming up fast.

  Caitlin and Cort Wesley braced themselves for impact, while Guillermo Paz remained frozen in the open doorway, peering into the night beyond him.

  Through it all, Macerio had the sense to realize that his tanker remarkably, miraculously, had remained standing. His shoulder and neck hurt from the harsh restraint of the safety harness during its spinning trip across the highway. He tried not to think of the other three tankers that had no doubt perished behind him. There was still this one, however damaged, still enough uranium to be sifted from the gravel to make several dirty bombs capable of spewing poison through Washington, New York, Los Angeles, maybe more.

  “Drive!” he ordered the man behind the wheel, still trembling so hard he could barely grip the wheel. “Drive!”

  “Where are you going?” the man asked, as Macerio took an assault rifle in hand and threw open the door.

  “To clear the way for you.”

  Caitlin smelled gasoline, felt the heat of flames building around her in the cabin. The drop had rattled her insides, leaving her feeling like her teeth had been pushed back into her jaw. The chopper had landed on its side, leaving her leg pinned under a sheered strip of metal beneath the pilot’s collapsed seat. He and the cameraman had been thrown from the cockpit on impact and lay barely stirring atop the rough ground surface nearby.