by Jon Land
“Well, three of them anyway,” Tepper tried to joke.
“Six grandchildren?”
“Seventh on the way. What’s your point?”
“Stall Austin, ’cause if anybody tries to bring Cort Wesley Masters in before he gets his boy back, they won’t be seeing their kids or grandchildren ever again.”
35
SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT
Outside, Caitlin steadied herself with several deep breaths before climbing back behind the wheel of her rental car. The interior was stifling, but still smelled of commercial solvent and air freshener, so she opted to drive to the Intrepid Center for Heroes with the windows down. The sky was black and moonless, the air flush with the smell of ozone from an approaching thunderstorm. Heat lightning flashed in her rearview mirror, seeming to chase her down the road.
Caitlin wanted to tell Mark John Serles face-to-face she couldn’t help him, that the army shenanigans he was alleging fell out of even the Ranger purview and jurisdiction. She wasn’t buying into his story to begin with, figuring all he’d experienced left him seeing shadows even when there was no light to cast them. Her brief experience as a mental health therapist had left her well acquainted with the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, one of which was an overriding sense of paranoia that could lead to a delusional, if not pathological, sense that the world was out to get those afflicted with it. Caitlin figured she might also want to speak to his treating physician at the Intrepid to cue him in on her suspicions. The prosthetic legs that would help the kid walk again in no time were nothing if they ended up bringing him to the wrong place.
Once again, her Ranger ID got her onto the grounds of Fort Sam Houston without delay and she parked in one of the lots adjacent to the center, announcing herself to the receptionist at the front desk with Stetson held respectfully by her side.
“I’d like to see a patient named Mark Serles if I could, ma’am. I believe he’s a sergeant.”
“Would this be an official visit, Ranger?” the woman asked her.
“He asked me to follow up something on his behalf and I’m here to report on that to him.”
“One moment, please,” the woman said, tapping out instructions into her computer. When these didn’t yield what she was looking for, she tapped out some more. “If you could wait just a few more moments, Ranger.”
“Of course,” Caitlin said, catching a nervous edge in the woman’s voice.
She watched a boy who looked not much older than Dylan emerge through the automatic doors, his running shorts and shirt soaked with sweat from a jog he’d completed in the cool of the night on a pair of prosthetic legs replaced below the knee. He walked past her, smiling with nary a limp. A private in uniform who was little more than a boy too, meanwhile, worked a series of quarters adroitly into a lobby vending machine with one of two prosthetic arms finished in handlike pincers.
The boy caught Caitlin looking at him and smiled too. “Can I get you something, ma’am? I’ve got a few extra quarters here.”
“No,” Caitlin said, embarrassed at being caught staring. “But I wanted to thank you all the same.”
The boy seemed to understand what she was getting at and nodded, eyes lingering briefly on her badge and Stetson before taking his leave.
“Ranger?”
Caitlin hadn’t even noticed the man in a doctor’s lab coat coming up alongside her.
“I’m Dr. Gilroy, one of the administrators.”
Caitlin’s eyes darted up from the nametag pinned to his lapel. “You’d be army, then.”
“Yes, ma’am. A bird colonel.”
“You do great work here, Colonel,” Caitlin told him. “However often you hear that, it’s not enough.”
“And it means something every time.” Gilroy’s expression grew taut, the congeniality lost in the furrows suddenly sprouting across his brow. “But do you mind if we speak privately.”
“Not at all.”
Gilroy led her to a lobby wall set back from a seating area between a pair of towering indoor plants that bled water from their pots. “You’re here about Sergeant Mark Serles.”
“I am, sir.”
“Could you tell me in reference to what?”
“He asked me to check something out for him and I’m here to report on my findings.”
“In your capacity as a Texas Ranger?”
Something in Gilroy’s tone was beginning to scratch at Caitlin. “That’s correct, sir.”
“Would you mind telling me what this pertains to?”
“I don’t expect you’d violate doctor-patient privilege, Colonel.”
“Never.”
“Then understand I can’t do the same when it’s regarding an active Ranger investigation.”
“Active investigation?”
“Became that as soon as Sergeant Serles made his call to the local company headquarters. Now, if you could just let me talk to him, I’m sure we can get this cleared up and me out of your hair real—”
“I can’t do that, Ranger.”
“Pardon me, sir?”
“You can’t speak to Sergeant Serles because he was transferred from the center.”
36
SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT
More scratching and something that felt like a dull thud hit Caitlin in the stomach. “When did this happen exactly?”
Caitlin watched Gilroy consult his steel clipboard, lifting the top open. “Earlier today. This morning.”
“You had to check your papers to tell me that?”
“You asked.”
“Just seems like something you’d know without needing to look.”
“We have a lot of patients here, Ranger.”
“But how many of them get transferred, Doctor?” Caitlin continued. “This is a private hospital, isn’t it?”
“It was built with privately donated money, but it’s a military facility from an administrative and management standpoint,” Gilroy said testily, crossing his arms around his steel clipboard.
“Forgive me, sir. My point was our troops come to the Intrepid because you’re the best at what you do; in fact, in some cases, the only ones who do what you do.”
“True enough, thank you.”
Caitlin let Gilroy see the concern in her stare. “Then where exactly was Sergeant Serles, a double amputee, transferred?”
“I can’t say.”
Caitlin felt her muscles growing taut, her skin starting to feel like somebody had slathered Ben-Gay all over it. “Can’t or won’t, sir?”
“Ranger, what happens inside these walls happens under military jurisdiction.”
“Like a kid who got his legs blown off getting pushed out your doors before he could walk through them.”
“If you’d like to speak to Sergeant Serles’s commanding officer—”
“I’d like to speak to Sergeant Serles.”
Gilroy nodded grudgingly. “Very well, then. If you’d accompany me to my office, there are a few forms to fill out.”
He put his hand on Caitlin’s shoulder to guide her toward the elevators and she shook him off, stiffening even more. “You’re not from Texas, are you, Colonel?”
“Very few of us are.”
“Then you probably don’t realize a Ranger’s jurisdiction pays no heed to borders and the like. My granddad chased more than his share of bandits and rustlers into Mexico and my dad made plenty of trips onto army bases to arrest soldiers for what they’d done off them. Where are you from, sir?”
“Florida.”
“Well, Sergeant Serles is from right here in San Antonio and that counts for something too.”
Gilroy was starting to look impatient. “Not to the army it doesn’t.”
“Why was Sergeant Serles transferred, Colonel?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.”
“Doesn’t say on that clipboard of yours?”
“The information’s classified.”
“Then you do know.”
Gilroy didn’t say a
nything.
“Who classified it?” Caitlin asked him.
“It’s routine procedure with enlisted personnel,” Gilroy tried, hoping it would work.
“Nothing routine about getting your legs blown off by an IED or the runaround from somebody who is supposed to care.”
Gilroy backed off, as if suddenly aware of the SIG holstered on Caitlin’s hip. “MPs are en route, Ranger. Do I have to have them escort you off the premises?”
“Not if you just tell me where I can find Sergeant Serles, Colonel.”
An elevator door opened and a pair of uniformed MPs, a woman and a man each wearing a sidearm, emerged and headed straight for them.
“You can’t tell me where this boy is,” Caitlin said to Gilroy.
“I believe I’ve made that clear already.”
“Then who can? Since you lack the authority, tell me who’s got it.”
“Ranger, you’ve gotten all the information you need from me.”
Caitlin let the MPs see her looking at them, as she backpedaled for the door. “Yeah, Sergeant Serles is army all right and what happened to him in Iraq may have been way out of our jurisdiction for sure. But he’s a Texas boy, born and bred, and when a Texan calls the Rangers for help, we come and keep on a-coming until the job’s done. So, Colonel, if you happen to have a change of heart on the subject over to our way of thinking, you know where to find me.”
“I do, ma’am.”
“And if anything happens to that kid before I talk to him again, I’ll figure out where to find you. That clear enough, sir?”
Gilroy mocked a salute. “Crystal, Ranger.”
“Long as we understand each other,” Caitlin told him, easing her way through the door with eyes never leaving the MPs.
37
SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT
Caitlin’s blood was still boiling when she pulled out of the parking lot and felt her rental car thump over a speed bump en route off the grounds and into the night. Last thing she needed now was another issue heaped atop her already full plate, but here it was. And she was too exhausted and her thought process too numb to fully consider the ramifications of the now missing Mark John Serles.
What if his story was true?
The question was as impossible to ignore as the answer was increasingly clear. Serles’s mysterious “transfer” could only be rooted in the legitimacy of his claims of murdered soldiers and contractors in Iraq for reasons cloaked in shadows and subterfuge.
For now. Because part of the source of Caitlin’s anger and frustration lay in the circumstances that had forced her to delay looking into the claims Mark Serles had raised in his story. Maybe if she had acted immediately, maybe if she had offered some kind of protection …
Maybe.
Back on I-37, going south down the Pan Am Expressway, Caitlin’s mind had started to drift toward possible next steps when the thunderstorm she’d been expecting sprang up, drenching the night and battling the attempt of the wipers to clear the windshield. She slowed her speed, the storm violent enough to make her consider pulling over for a time just before she saw a car parked at an odd angle in the freeway’s breakdown lane. The driver’s door was open to the blowing storm with no driver in sight.
Caitlin pulled the rental up a safe distance behind the car and popped on her flashers too, hoping they would make at least some dent in the storm. She yanked her arms into the jacket she’d tossed into the car’s backseat and climbed out with hood pulled up over her head.
She’d just cleared the car’s front fender when her spine tingled, something Mark Serles had told her making her slow.
“Strange in itself, since the insurgents had started setting their IEDs in parked cars a while back, more effective that way…”
Memory of those words froze her altogether for just a moment before she began backpedaling. Caitlin had just cleared the front fender of the rental car when a bright flash split the night a split second before a wave of superheated air blew her into the blackness.
38
MIDLAND, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
“Thank you for coming, gentlemen,” Malcolm Arno said, as he stepped onto the stage of the complex’s meeting hall, into the spill of hot white lights that blinded him to his audience.
No matter. He didn’t need to see their faces as he spoke; he knew who they were and multiple greetings had already been exchanged.
“We’re all here today because we share the same vision of what America needs to be and where it’s gone wrong. Lots of you figure this is something new and different. I’m here to tell you it’s not. I’m here to tell you it’s been building for a lot of years, from back when I witnessed it firsthand.”
A soft murmur spread through the assembled crowd. They were all intimately acquainted with the Texas Ranger raid on Max Arno’s Church of the Redeemer and the shootout that had claimed his life days later. Just as they were acquainted with pretty much every incursion by the government into the lives of private citizens, raising a fury that had reached an apotheosis in the time of the current administration.
“There was a time,” Malcolm Arno continued, “when what happened at the Church of the Redeemer was a rallying cry for what the country was heading toward. Trouble was not enough heeded that call, and look where that got us. The government has invaded every phase of our lives, and if we don’t draw a line in the sand here and now, we won’t even have lives left. I called you all here today because it’s time to say ‘No more!’ No more to a godless administration that treats individual liberties like postage stamps. I watched my father die in a parking lot, sat on the gravel next to him while he took his last breath, and I’m here to tell you what I see going on in this country today leaves me with the same empty feeling in my gut.
“But you know something? My father, for all his charisma and brilliance, had things wrong. Sermons and good intentions are nothing compared to bullets and state-of-the-art weaponry. The Texas Rangers took the Church of the Redeemer compound because they wielded pistols, twelve-gauges, and assault rifles. I learned convictions don’t carry as far as bullets in making your point and preventing others from stopping you.”
The crowd applauded that, a few whistles and hoots of approval thrown in for good measure.
“Washington has to be stopped, plain and simple. Otherwise, my father died for nothing. I still have the shirt I wore that day, all splattered with blood. It’s moth-eaten and frayed now, the stains more black than red. Those stains seem to get smaller every time I take that shirt from my closet and hold it up to the light to remind myself. I’ll still remember what happened when they’re gone altogether, but what about everyone else? The government relies on the fact that we’ll talk a lot but not really act. Well, I stand before you today to say that is no longer the case.”
The assembled crowd lurched to their collective feet in a rousing ovation that almost embarrassed Arno in its visceral intensity. There were the Brothers of the Revolution, Fathers of the New America, the Sons of the Confederacy forming a twisted family of lost values and fears of massive gun confiscations and secret work camps where those who didn’t toe the government line would ultimately end up.
There were the Disciples of Freedom, the Children of Anarchy, the Soldiers of Christ, the True United States, the Army of Tomorrow. All with massive mailing lists and a huge presence on the Web, culled from the rural South, population-starved West, and restless Heartland that together formed the moral center of the country. Both its compass and a mirror to hold up during those times when the liberals made headway with false promises and actions fueled by lies building toward a world where the government ran everything.
“Gentlemen,” Arno continued to the faceless assemblage before him, concentrated in only the first three rows of the hall, “we are all soldiers in a war we must win if this country is to survive.” Channeling his father now, feeling the great man inside, inspiring him, as his voice rose to a near bellow. “So many don’t mind being under the thumb of the government f
or what they eat, pump, drink, smoke. Taxes keep rising and where does the money go? They tell us they’re gonna fix health care and one morning we’ll wake up to see them taking over the hospitals and choosing our doctors for us and when we die. My father had had enough twenty years ago, and those twenty years have brought us further down a road to hell itself.”
“I say we fry that nigger once and for all!” a Southern drawl voiced.
“I say we should just kill the lot of them while we still have guns to do it,” a raspy voice chimed in, to which several others added their assent.
“Guns are no longer our problem, my friends.”
“Easy for you to say, living here in a goddamn fortress,” a voice blared, “built with your daddy’s dollars.”
Arno stepped out from behind the podium. “The government took every asset my father and his church ever had. Confiscated it all, even the land and the wood his church was built from after they demolished it. But provenance saw fit to deliver fresh revenue onto my cause and such provenance allows me to share my spoils with you.”
“You lost me, Reverend.”
“I’m no man of God, my friend. To dare call myself one would be to blaspheme my father’s memory and hold myself to an image I can’t possibly fulfill. No, violence was against his and any church’s teachings. But violence is what we need here and now to reclaim what’s ours and reclaim it fast.”
The thunderous applause that followed those remarks made Arno think the very walls of the meeting hall were shaking.
“Let me explain,” Malcolm Arno continued, seizing the moment to move deeper into the spill of the lights. “You have the desire to wage the war we need, to put a stop to the government steamrolling over our rights and our very being. It’s the proper tools you lack, but I’m here to tell you I can change that.”
Murmurs slithered through the crowd before him. Arno had purposely timed this speech for after a dinner in which moderate levels of alcohol had been consumed. Enough to get his guests’ dander up without turning them into an unruly mob. He needed them with relatively clear heads tonight, needed to send them back to the memberships of the movements and militias they represented to share his vision and his promise. Keep telling their followers what to think after Arno told them what to think. Moments like this left him feeling most like his father, channeling the holy preacher born of tent revival meetings and healing ceremonies to which the faithful flocked.