by Jon Land
Greeting his followers, the flock that worshipped and revered him, was nonetheless difficult with each passing minute that could see the first crackle of gunfire. Arno hoped the attack, and its far more brutal counter on the part of his men, would not come until all those attending the service were safely settled in the meeting hall within cinder-block walls reinforced with steel sheeting. For the spillover, the service was being piped into the cafeteria as well as every room in the complex outfitted for television via wireless technology, if that didn’t beat all.
Arno wondered what his father would make of all this, how far Malcolm had advanced his dream. But that thought spurred others of the great man’s ultimate downfall at the hands of a traitor and his own lecherous desires.
* * *
He’d long known the truth behind Max Arno’s descent into the church basement on Danny Killane’s trail; he’d seen it in his father’s eyes when they fell on the boy up in the front rows reserved for special invitees. But he’d managed to resist accepting that truth until that boy, now a stench-riddled human excrement of an adult, returned to his life.
The force of that reality should have made it easier for Arno to clip off the tip of the Masters boy’s finger out of spite and rage. But then he’d met the kid’s big dark eyes, same color as the hair that swam past his shoulders. Something stirred inside Arno, a longing buried deep enough to push back with a gush of self-hatred and guilt. He saw him through his father’s eyes and the boy became Daniel Killane at the age of sixteen. Past and present swirled together, merging, the son struck by the same predilections as the father, now threatening to become the ruin of both of them.
“Mal?” Jed Kean’s voice had shocked him back to the present and shook his eyes off the boy. “Why don’t you let me do it?”
“No,” Arno shot back at him, “this one’s mine.”
And he’d held the boy’s eyes as he fitted the clippers into place and drove the blades together with a squeeze of his hand. The sound was like that of a branch giving way, a single crackle as the clippers bit through bone. The boy winced and clenched his teeth, but didn’t cry out as heavy tears rolled down both his cheeks. He kept staring at Arno, never looking down at his finger, and Arno couldn’t remember a pair of darker eyes ever in his life, filled not with terror but an unbridled hatred.
In the end he’d finally left the room utterly unnerved and unable to get Cort Wesley Masters’s son out of his head. Was this how his father had regarded young Danny Killane? Was the Arno line doomed by a sinful nature that threatened to overcome the just ends both father and son had sought?
Malcolm Arno had drank himself to sleep that night, awaking the next morning with nothing more than a foggy recollection that made denial all the easier to bear.
* * *
“Everthing’s set,” Kean said, having come up alongside him without Arno noticing, on the steps of the meeting hall.
“You going to the service, Jed?”
“I’m going wherever you go.”
Kean’s already big torso had been made even thicker by the Kevlar vest he wore under his jacket. He had an M16 slung around his shoulder, none of those passing by them paying it much heed, even on Easter Sunday, since guns here were as common as dog leashes in the outside world.
Arno swept his gaze about the towers and walls where armed men viewed the perimeter through night vision goggles and telescopic scopes. Sixty of his best, all military with actual combat experience, were concealed by the camouflage of ground and brush cover outside the wall. The pattern of their concentration was meant to quell the expected invasion by funneling the attackers into a narrow corridor so the anticipated cross fire could better chew them up. Might all be over so fast that those enjoying their Easter service would never know the difference. All the gates had been closed, barred, and reinforced, along with all other points of entry to guard against any of the attackers somehow making it through or around the laid ambush.
“I think my father was a weak man, Kean. I think he gave into temptation and let it destroy him.” Arno held the big man’s stare longer than he’d intended to. “I’ve never shared that with a single soul.”
“I appreciate the honor.”
“We must be strong where he was weak. We must protect all we have built.”
Kean nodded, while beyond him long lines of Patriot Sun members continued to stream into the meeting hall.
“I’m giving the sermon myself tonight, Jed. The topic is how bones heal stronger after they’re broken, a lesson I’ve applied to my own life. Appreciate your opinion when I’m done.”
“Be my pleasure.”
“And this Texas Ranger’s got no real evidence that boy is on the premises, other than the word of a drunk,” Arno said, feeling that same stirring again. “So however this goes I want him disposed of with the rest of the trash by morning.”
“That’d be my pleasure too,” Kean nodded.
104
MIDLAND, TEXAS; EASTER SUNDAY
Malcolm Arno took to the pulpit at one in the morning sharp after a lavish introduction from the old priest who’d baptized him and presided over the funeral of his father. A smattering of applause filled the meeting hall at that, neither dignified nor appropriate for the occasion, but he enjoyed hearing it nonetheless.
There wasn’t a seat open before him, the overflow pressed up against every wall leaving only the doorways free. Barely room to breathe, much less move. But the cool breeze easing in through the open windows made the packed confines tolerable, even pleasant. Jed Kean stood in clear view just to his side on floor level, facing the audience with the curled cord of his plastic earpiece worn as unobtrusively as possible.
Arno felt his emotions rising to a crescendo even before he began his sermon. Just gazing out at the wide-eyed faces that had come because they shared his beliefs and his dream filled him with satisfaction. These were the people with whom he’d be celebrating the transitional events of the coming months, transitional because America could never think of itself the same way once his masses rose to take back what was theirs. Arno didn’t care whether it was called a civil war, a revolution, or whatever else. To him it was a moment in time that would mark the passing of one age to another. In this moment of triumph, he grasped how far he’d come, how far beyond the Church of the Redeemer he had taken his movement. And then he knew what he had to tell these people, beginning his sermon to them by utterly diverting from his planned remarks.
“You are not zealots, or cultists, or dwellers on the fringe,” he spoke into the microphone. “You are Americans in search of an America thought gone forever, stripped from us by those who fail to appreciate or grasp the core values on which this country was built. They drown us in debt and turn freedom into a punch line, a talking point to be hoisted up the flagpole when it suits their needs so they can face and salute it even as they turn their backs on those like you and me. But that cannot be allowed to continue. That cannot—”
Thwamp …
Arno stopped suddenly, the sound that reached him from outside not right, a trip wire triggered in his mind. Could have been anything, most likely the product of his overly amplified senses honed to a razor’s edge by the excitement and unique circumstances. He felt he had won, even though he couldn’t define his own victory.
Thwamp … thwamp … thwamp …
There it was again, the sounds like the first patter of heavy rain atop a roof.
“That cannot be allowed to debunk or debase the true America or the true Americans who reside within.” Arno had forced himself to continue, stealing glances through whatever windows he could find as he rotated his gaze. But he couldn’t see anything amiss. Maybe it was just rain. Maybe the cold front had brought the residue of a storm with it. “In 1836 proud Texans fought for their liberty and their rights inside an old fort called the Alamo. We are the modern version of those settlers, and our task is just as hard, the stand we’re making here equally vital. Us, and the millions of others who think as we d
o, have drawn a line in the sand this government, its offshoots, and sycophants must not cross, because if they do…”
Arno paused again, the audience likely believing it was for effect when the truth was something had skirted across his field of vision through one of the windows. A figure dashing through the night, hunched with arms extended and something dark clutched in its grasp. Could have been one of the men Jed Kean had posted around the meeting hall. If so, though, where in hell was he running?
“If they do,” Arno resumed, looking down to see if Kean was holding a hand to his ear to better listen to a message, but he wasn’t, “they will be met with a fire and fury like none they’ve ever seen. I speak not of them just breaching our walls, but of them breaching our values and the country they have forsaken that we continue to hold close in our hearts.”
And then he heard it, a series of quick popping sounds like the kind of firecrackers children set off on the Fourth of July. A soft, uneasy murmur spread through the clutter of bodies squeezed into the meeting hall. Arno figured he’d better get talking again, until he realized the source of the discomfort was not his silence or the crackling noises outside. It was a figure standing in the center aisle, halfway between him and the door, halfway between heaven and hell. A figure wearing a pistol holstered on her hip and a Stetson tight over her balled-up hair.
The figure of Caitlin Strong.
105
MIDLAND, TEXAS; EASTER SUNDAY
“You’re taking a terrible risk here,” Caitlin had told Danny Killane two days before. “I’m not going to lie to you about that.”
“I don’t care about my own life no more, Ranger. I belong in the sewers I tend.”
“Through no fault of your own. If anyone got dealt a bad hand, it was you. I won’t have this added to that lousy draw.”
“I’m not doing this for you,” Killane told her. “I’m doing it for me.”
And that solidified the plan Caitlin and Cort Wesley laid out for Guillermo Paz: the satellite scans of the property had revealed not only the underground bunkers and firing ranges, but also a network of warrens that could only be escape tunnels. Just as Arno’s father had laid beneath the Church of the Redeemer grounds in far less elaborate fashion.
The plan was for Killane to tell Arno of a multipronged frontal assault undertaken by a veritable army. In fact, Paz had brought only fifteen men north of the border with him because that was all he figured he’d need under the circumstances.
The only thing missing from the satellite scans was the actual entry points to the underground tunnels, but these Cort Wesley had found the same way he’d excelled at uncovering rabbit and prairie dog burrows when out hunting as a boy. Almost always alone to escape his father who was normally out all night. Reeking of booze when he came home and made even more violent by the hangover when he woke up. Cort Wesley wanted more than anything to be a better father to his boys, making the most of the opportunity that had thrust them into his life.
He led Caitlin, Paz, and Paz’s men into the network of bunkers beneath the Patriot Sun complex, wearing a flak jacket and carrying an M16 supplied by the colonel. Caitlin opted against both, having her reasons.
The lighting along the underground corridors was dull and hazy, shed by lighting somehow wired into the ceiling. They passed under the meeting hall just before the service got under way, emerging up through a trio of buildings emptied by the mass gathering. Malcolm Arno had not yet begun to speak when Paz led his men into position and Cort Wesley slid through the night toward an outlying building where Danny Killane had told them Dylan was being held.
Caitlin, meanwhile, waited for Paz’s men to gun down the guards around the meeting hall with quick four-shot bursts rendered silent by the sound suppressors affixed to their barrels. These men and the rest would now move onto the next phase of the colonel’s plan, while Caitlin sliced through the night toward the building entrance. Waiting until the next round of gunfire began before simply pushing the double doors open and stepping inside.
106
MIDLAND, TEXAS; EASTER SUNDAY
“Malcolm Arno, I am placing you under arrest for the kidnapping of Dylan Torres.”
Arno couldn’t believe what he was seeing, hearing. Time wound backward, history repeating itself. Another Arno being taken down by another Strong.
Not this time, goddamnit!
He saw Jed Kean jerk his M16 into firing position, a blur of motion partially concealed by his great coat. In his mind he saw Kean gunning down Caitlin Strong, already concocting a rationale about a rogue Ranger operating on her own. But his eyes registered Caitlin Strong’s gun clearing its holster and blowing fire from its barrel before Kean managed to pull his M16’s trigger.
Her bullet slammed into his Kevlar vest and punched him backward into the pulpit, M16 barrel tilted low toward the floor.
“Don’t do it,” the Ranger said when she saw it starting to come up again.
Kean tried anyway, leveling his assault rifle back into firing position. Caitlin shot him in the wrist and he dropped to the floor with the M16 shed from his shoulder.
* * *
“Now come with me quietly, sir, so no one else gets hurt.”
Amid the cries of shock and confusion that followed, Caitlin stopped fifteen feet from Malcolm Arno. She looked at him the very same way her father had looked at his from across a parking lot twenty years before. Another pair of gunmen, wielding assault rifles, lunged out into the aisle behind her. She turned and met their stares impassively, her SIG held in as unthreatening a fashion as she could manage.
“You boys wanna drop those or you’ll die for sure.”
The men looked at each other, both dropping their rifles and raising their hands into the air. Caitlin swung back toward the pulpit, glimpsed Arno ducking through a curtain. Her ears were stung by screams of panic that erupted after the spray of gunfire began to flow nonstop outside. She could hear it in the corner of her mind, picturing Paz’s soldiers taking out the guards watching the front of the complex and posted all over the grounds.
Thanks to Danny Killane, the bulk of Arno’s forces had indeed clustered beyond the gates and walls. Waiting in vain to ambush the invaders they had every reason to believe would be attacking in traditional fashion. Now Paz’s men would claim the superior defensive positions that would allow them to cut down Arno’s soldiers at will from the gated wall and towers.
Caitlin surged through the curtain with both hands on her SIG, half expecting Arno to be laying in wait. But he wasn’t and had left nothing in his wake, besides an emergency exit door opened to let in the cool of the night.
107
MIDLAND, TEXAS; EASTER SUNDAY
The sewer stench hit Cort Wesley as soon as he drew to within sixty feet of the unfinished building, the remaining distance to be covered in the great wide open. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t stop. The time for subterfuge was done.
It was time for guns.
In that moment, as the M16, with a second magazine duct-taped to the first, started to dance in his grasp, Cort Wesley felt he was back in southern Iraq mowing down Republican Guardsmen in complete violation of his orders. Watching them fall like digital characters in one of his son Luke’s video games, figuring if he could save even one life from the betrayal by the U.S. government it would be worth the price he’d have to pay.
He couldn’t leave these people, not after prepping them for a revolution that never came. Then the Republican Guard had come with a convoy of men and vehicles that stretched as far as the eye could see to quell the uprising. Did he expect to kill all of them? Did he intend to let them kill him as punishment for his country’s reprehensible act of betrayal?
In the end, Cort Wesley fought as long as his ammo lasted before moving off to the forward position he was supposed to withdraw to hours before. The other Special Ops personnel said nothing to him at all, just as they said nothing to their superiors about what he’d done. Not that it mattered. Cort Wesley knew he was finished wit
h Uncle Sam, having come to feel that a government that couldn’t keep its word wasn’t worth fighting for.
But getting his son back was. The M16 felt comfortable in his grasp, in spite of the fact he hadn’t done much shooting with one since leaving the service. All the soldiers Paz had brought along were needed to secure the main area of the complex, leaving Cort Wesley on his own. Not that that bothered him; it was what he wanted, to find Dylan and put an end to this himself.
The first enemy fire reached him as soft spits in the night, the reports drowned out by the louder exchanges coming from the main area. It was accompanied by the brief flares of muzzle fire behind bullets chasing his slithery form moving in a zigzag. Cort Wesley thought he heard the familiar rat-tat-tat of a minigun well behind him, could only hope it was friendly fire courtesy of Paz’s men taking the towers as planned.
He heard the hiss of bullets whipping past him, thought he could feel their heat scratching at his face as well. He didn’t return the fire until he had a sure bead on the shooters’ positions both outside the unfinished building and from behind window shells within it. He set the M16 on full auto, not about to chance shooting on the run to single or even four-shot bursts.