by Jon Land
Screams continued to split the still night air, Charlie Charles’s traps working as well as his skill with a bow. Caitlin continued to struggle to get herself out from beneath the bulbous frame pinning her in place. But she couldn’t find enough traction on the ice to change her position or push the biker off and ended up doing her best to shimmy free as his blood pooled around her, mixing with the spilled gasoline.
Ten feet away she saw Cort Wesley finally gain the upper hand, LaChance’s grasp on him slackening after taking blows to his face with the shotgun’s butt. Even through the dark, she could see Cort Wesley’s eyes inflamed with rage, certain to batter the kidnapper of his boy to pulp if she didn’t intervene.
Caitlin thought she could hear the sickening thwack of bone mashing, a sound curiously like that of stepping on a fallen ice cube. LaChance keeled over backward to the ice, Cort Wesley on him in an instant, continuing to hammer away with the shotgun butt that was now cracked and coated with a thick wash of gore. She fought to free herself from the dead man still pinning her, wanting to stop Cort Wesley from murdering this man and finding himself tumbling into a pit of violence and despair even Dylan’s return might not be able to vanquish.
Caitlin finally slipped free of the body, the ice at once frigid beneath her again as she scrabbled sideways, struggling to regain her footing.
“Cort Wes—”
Her call was interrupted by the clacking of gunfire and the sight of the Hells Angels who’d managed to avoid Charlie Charles’s traps approaching the ice with weapons firing away in their direction. Their bullets pinged off the ice, narrowly missing the stream of gasoline spreading across it like spilled milk on a tile floor.
Where was the old Indian, the arrows that were supposed to cover this precise contingency?
“Cort Wesley!”
He looked up from the pulp LaChance’s face had been reduced to, just as flecks of ice exploded around him from the shooters slipping and siding toward them across the ice. Caitlin continued scrambling for the pistol she’d dropped on LaChance’s command, Cort Wesley righting the shotgun on the advancing bikers and racking a shell into the chamber.
Not much good the twelve-gauge was going to do from this distance against eight, maybe ten Hells Angels. But Cort Wesley fired it anyway, barrel angled downward for the ice instead of the advancing shooters.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Caitlin wasn’t sure which of the shots ignited the gasoline; maybe a lethal combination of the heat and spark generated from all three. Either way the flames caught and spread as fast as they could devour the gasoline spilled from the truck’s massive tank.
The flames were waist high by the time they reached the bikers, fresh screams erupting that were worse than any of the others had been. Some tried to make it back to shore. Others rolled over the fuel-splattered ice in a futile attempt to put out the fire that was eating them alive.
Caitlin wanted to clamp her hands over her ears, wanted to be somewhere far from this place, away from ice and drugs and death. The stench of burning flesh, hair, and clothes, claimed the air, the noxious odor of the burned-up gasoline all but gone. As the bikers dropped in the spasms and throes of death, she imagined their blood boiling inside their ravaged skin, felt her mind ravaged by a degree of prolonged violence worse than any gunfight she’d ever experienced. She realized she’d actually found her gun and had taken it in hand with no one left to shoot at, something that suddenly seemed surprisingly civilized compared to what she’d just been party to.
She wanted to vomit again, just as she had when disgust forced her onto the shoulder of the four-lane beyond Malcolm Arno’s complex. It was the sight of Cort Wesley that stopped her. Standing tall and erect over LaChance’s still form, silhouetted by the orange glow of the flames that seemed afraid to consume him. Shotgun still in hand, he looked past Caitlin toward the burning bodies along the shore and lingering screams deeper in the woods. He stood like a silent sentinel—emotionless, more statue than man. She stared at him and wondered if this was the man he’d been before his sons came into his life, the man who’d done things in Iraq he still couldn’t talk about. He’d come home to work as a mob enforcer laying waste to the Mexican gangs who ended up seizing the drug trade a few years later anyway. Wondered if this was the man he’d stay if Dylan were lost to him forever.
But Caitlin glimpsed hope in Cort Wesley in the form of the revulsion that twisted and turned itself onto his expression after he finally acknowledged the smells that had almost sickened her. He became man again, the machine vanquished and the man recalling the small package LaChance had tossed him before blood trumped the night.
Caitlin watched him pluck it from the ice and unwrap it, watched him shudder violently, the pain and desperation stretched across his features sucking the hope from the world, as the last of the screaming finally faded in the night.
97
MOHAWK INDIAN RESERVATION; THE PRESENT
Caitlin found her legs again and moved to him. Cort Wesley didn’t look up, didn’t seem to even be present until he extended the unwrapped package to her as if it contained something fragile.
“It’s Dylan’s. I know it,” she heard him say just as she took the package and regarded the tip of a finger inside, nail and all, looking more like a movie prop than something real.
“We’re going home, Cort Wesley. Call in every Ranger we can.” Her voice sounded like someone else’s. She knew she was speaking but didn’t remember forming the words. She coughed from the stench in the air flooding her lungs, as if the whole world had gone sour. “Just like my father did when he raided the Church of the Redeemer.”
* * *
“I broke my leg, you can believe that,” Charlie Charles said after they found him shivering amid the frosted brush into which he’d managed to crawl. “Sorry I wasn’t as much good to you as I should have been.”
They covered him with their coats to ward off shock and exposure.
“We’ve gotta go, Charlie,” Caitlin told him.
“Far as I’m concerned you were never here.”
Cort Wesley seemed to be studying the horizon for the sight of flashing lights, while Caitlin’s gaze turned on the smoldering flames finally giving up their hold on the night that still smelled of death.
“Gonna be tough to explain all this,” she said to the old Indian.
Charlie Charles forced out a smile through his chattering teeth. “I’ll tell them it was the spirits of my ancestors rising up to fight by my side one last time.”
“You figure they’ll buy it?”
The old Indian shrugged halfheartedly. “When you’re as old as me, people don’t listen much to what you have to say anyway.”
* * *
“You’ve got your gunfighter, Jones,” Caitlin said to the man in Washington as soon as she and Cort Wesley were on the road heading toward Albany International Airport a hundred and fifty miles away, the Reservation and all it had wrought shrinking behind them.
“What made you change your mind, Ranger?”
“Malcolm Arno is a turd that needs flushing. Let’s leave it at that.”
She could picture Jones smiling smugly on the other end of the line. “Whatever you say.”
“You get those satellite imaging reports back yet?”
“Got the shots, and the bill, right here. This was a seven-figure recon job, all the retasking I had to pull off.”
“We get our money’s worth?”
“The outlaw was spot on, Ranger. There’s a whole warren of underground bunkers, a few the size of football fields, running beneath Arno’s land.”
“Why the fake grass?”
“I was getting to that. Thermal dynamics in the satellite shots reveal a heat signature that would make it impossible to grow normal grass over what they’re doing down there.”
“Don’t tell me, some kind of shooting.”
“Constantly, as in all the time. Shooting up a storm. Heavy, heavy training by the look of things.”
“Looks like you were right about that war Arno’s fixing to fight.”
“Just like I was right about the gunfighter who can stop it. Problem is, Arno’s not fixing to fight it, he’s fixing to lead it. Those weapons you found inside that truck? Picture them distributed to right-wing hate groups from coast-to-coast.”
“A weapon for every wacko.”
“A billion bucks’ worth buys you a lot of heartache, even with inflation. That’s why it’s a good thing we’ve got a gunfighter on the job now.”
“I could use those satellite feeds.”
“They can’t be e-mailed but I can messenger the spreads to you via private jet.”
“Bit pricier than FedEx, isn’t it?”
“You’re about to wage a war, Ranger. I think I can justify the expense.”
“You being straight with me, Jones?”
“About what?”
“About no bomb that’s gonna mysteriously fall on Arno’s complex. No mysterious accidental launching of a cruise missile.”
“That’s a good idea. You just think of it?”
“Arno’s holding Cort Wesley Masters’s son in there. Sent us a tip of the boy’s goddamn finger to prove it.”
“Then the cruise missile’s already en route.”
“Come again?”
“You, Ranger, and there’s absolutely no stopping it.”
* * *
Caitlin’s next call was to D. W. Tepper. “Captain, I—”
“Don’t say a word, don’t say a goddamn word.”
She could feel the anger and resignation in his voice, words pushed out between drags on a cigarette carving an indentation into his fingers he was squeezing it so hard.
“We’re dealing with a shit storm of epic proportions,” Tepper continued. “A Category Five by the name of Caitlin.”
“I’m on my way back now, Captain. I can be in the office by noon maybe.”
“Forget the office. Shit Storm Caitlin might as well have swept it away as far as you’re concerned. We gotta meet somewhere else.”
“Name the place.”
“How about the Alamo? Can’t think of anywhere more fitting under the circumstances.”
PART TEN
HOUSTON—Special teams of Texas Rangers will be deployed to the Texas-Mexico border to deal with increasing violence because the federal government has failed to address growing problems there, Governor Rick Perry said Thursday.
“It is an expansive effort with the Rangers playing a more high-profile role than they’ve ever played before,” Perry said of the Department of Public Safety’s elite investigative unit.
—The Associated Press, September 11, 2009
98
CENTRAL MEXICO; THE PRESENT
“You’re going to be getting a call,” the man told Guillermo Paz over his satellite phone.
“I know.”
“You have our blessing, Colonel.”
“I don’t recall asking for it.”
“I’d like to get you the specs of the site. Where should I send the messenger?”
“Out here?” Paz asked him, mystified. “Don’t bother, I don’t need them.”
“Don’t need them?”
“I saw this place in a dream. I know what must be done.”
“In a dream,” the American repeated.
“You don’t believe in such things?”
“Mister, I try to believe in life and death, but death keeps getting in the way.”
There was a pause, Paz listening to the man breathe against the backdrop of a mechanical whirring sound, as if he were on a treadmill or something.
“Sandoval complained about what you did to those safe houses.”
“Safe houses,” Paz repeated. “That’s what he called them?”
“Look, unofficially I applaud your work. It’s just that this isn’t a well-funded operation, everything sub rosa.”
“Sub rosa?”
“Under the radar, Colonel, and the payoffs to keep those houses operational financed a good portion of your weapons.”
“Tell me which weapons, so I can destroy them right now.”
“Colonel—”
“I won’t fight a war for you on the blood of children, Señor Smith.”
“I told you, my name’s Jones. And this particular war wasn’t in the original plans.”
“Not yours, perhaps.”
“Who’s then?”
“You’re not a believer, so why should I bother with an explanation? Our fates are entwined because of Caitlin Strong. You should have known it would come to this.”
Another pause came. More whirring that slowed finally and then cut off, the American’s breathing finally sounding normal.
“And I’m glad it has, Colonel. This is a more important war, much more.”
“All wars are important to the people who fight them,” Paz reminded.
“Especially when you win,” said Jones.
99
SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT
Tepper was already standing in the Alamo chapel in front of one of the display cases when Caitlin entered through the heavy double doors of the famed facade.
“I thought I warned you about Malcolm Arno having friends in higher places than we can reach.”
“Must’ve slipped my mind.”
“Well, slip it back in. He claims you threatened him with bodily harm and conducted an illegal search and seizure.”
“He’s lying.”
“The threats are on tape.”
“Made by him toward me.”
“Not according to the governor’s office, Department of Public Safety’s Office of Professional Responsibility, the Midland police, the FBI, and the federal marshals who took the computers out of our office this morning.”
“What?”
“Shit Storm Caitlin, remember? They’re looking for evidence of abuse and conspiracy against Arno and the Patriot Sun.”
The Alamo Chapel, the one structure to actually survive Santa Ana’s assault mostly intact, had been converted into a museumlike shrine to the famed battle when fewer than two hundred defenders had managed to hold back an army of four thousand for thirteen days. Various display cases dotted a floor that stretched sixty yards from front to back. Plaques memorializing various participants in the battle and portraits of the defenders, along with scenes frozen from the battle, hung upon the stone walls.
The reconditioned building was, of course, far stronger structurally than its predecessor. Instead of adobe, it was built of concrete and stone with a yellowed stucco finish eerily close to that of the original. The building’s remaining windows, seven in all including the three in the alcove wings, were simple yet majestic and let just enough light in to bring the interior to life without creating the kind of glow that would have detracted from the reverence. Besides the sun, the shrine’s sole lighting came from a trio of dangling, period-accurate chandeliers.
As always when she visited the Alamo, Caitlin found herself reconstituting the battle in her brain, inserting herself into it with a 7.62mm minigun to mow Santa Ana’s troops down as they laid siege. There were fortified rooms in three of the chapel’s four corners, one of which had been the hiding place of the women and children who lived to tell the original tale of what had transpired, spread through the generations since.
“You seen the paper since you landed?” Tepper asked her, swinging away from the display case featuring one of Jim Bowie’s original knives that bore his name, although not one of those actually recovered from the premises.
As Caitlin suspected, he’d been smoking up a storm, evidenced by the brown stains painted on his fingers and nails along with the smells of nicotine and tar clinging to his person like a shroud. But he looked more alive somehow, his eyes bursting with vitality and anger.
“No.”
“Don’t look. We’re on the front page and not in a flattering light either. They’re calling this a near Waco. They’re calling you a trigger-happy loose cannon who’s got Arno
in her sights to settle old scores.”
“It was my father killed his, not the other way around.”
“Media has a way of twisting things, don’t it?”
“Goddamnit it, D.W.…”
“Have you ever once heard the word ‘patience’?”
“It’s somewhere in my vocabulary.”
“Not lately. You need to stay out of this until I can get things properly sorted out.”
“I can’t.”
“Did I just hear you say that?”
“Arno’s holding Dylan Masters hostage at the Patriot Sun. While things get sorted out, the sick son of a bitch could be trimming off more of the boy’s body parts.”
“Will you do as I say just this once, Caitlin, for God’s sake?”
“I’m telling you Malcolm Arno’s just like his father, D.W. Crazy as the day is long with an army of followers who think just like him and can’t wait to turn their insanity and hatred into a shooting war.”
“Well, Ranger, some of those followers come with titles like ‘senator’ and ‘congressman’ in front of their names, and Arno’s got all of them raising holy hell. Haven’t you been watching the news?”
“I’ve been a little busy.”
“Right, that was the last call I took before coming here, something about you blowing up the whole Mohawk Indian Reservation.”
“Not exactly.”
“Then try this: obstruction of justice, trespassing, civil rights violations, unlawful entry, unlawful search and seizure, unlawful possession and discharge of a weapon, kidnapping.”
“Kidnapping?”
“Then there’s a hundred-year-old Indian who claims the ghosts of his ancestors killed a dozen Hells Angels and put maybe two dozen more in the hospital. One of the dead ones happens to go by the name of LaChance, although there wasn’t much recognizable left of him. Any of this sound familiar?”
“Some.”
“Tribal chief ID’ed you, Caitlin. Said you extorted him into giving you what you wanted.”