Strong Vengeance

by Jon Land

  “Sayyid,” Harrabi started.

  “Do you swear?”

  “I … swear.”

  With that, a series of soft spits sounded, their echoes sounding like coughs in the wind. Harrabi flinched, watching the border patrol agent closest to them fall, the one near the truck already lying still beside the truck’s passenger-side front tire.

  The cleric never turned to look, never reacted, never acknowledged the approach of his bodyguards who appeared out of the night. He left his hands on Harrabi’s shoulders, continuing.

  “Then know that you now stand with God to join us in this battle to vanquish our greatest of enemies. May you and all who follow be blessed in that pursuit. May you join me and more of your brothers in bringing about the death of the Great Satan, deceiver to the world and destroyer of all that is holy.” The cleric eased his hands away and backed off. “Now rise, my brother.”

  Harrabi pushed himself back to his feet, the gravel sticking to his pants at the knees as the cleric’s bodyguards dragged the bodies of the border patrol agents back toward their SUVs. He realized he was trembling and canted his body so the great man wouldn’t notice.

  The cleric followed his gaze. “This is just the beginning, my brother. In a week’s time, many more thousands, hundreds of thousands, will join them at our hands.”

  “Āmin,” said Harrabi.

  7

  GULF WATERS OFF THE COAST OF TEXAS, THE PRESENT

  “What the hell’s that, Caitlin?” Dylan Torres asked from the stern of their charter boat.

  The orange raft was drifting straight for the fishing boat she’d chartered earlier that morning out of Baffin Bay. There was no passenger in view, which did nothing to ease the odd feeling that had raised her neck hackles and left her reaching for the pistol she’d been trying to discipline herself not to carry all the time.

  Caitlin Strong felt something scratch at her spine, the sweat pasting the cotton shirt to her back going cold in an instant. Around her the Gulf waters looked like ridged blue glass, the bright sunlight starting to bake the air against the sea breeze’s concerted effort to temper the heat. With the sun sitting free of clouds right now, she had to cup her hand at her brow to better follow the approaching raft.

  “Caitlin?” Dylan, son of the imprisoned Cort Wesley Masters, prodded. He was seventeen, dark wavy hair still worn long enough to make him look like some kind of brooding rock star. Except he had what Caitlin’s dad and granddad had called “gunman’s eyes”—eyes that didn’t always jibe well with the rest of him.

  “Must’ve broke loose from that jack-up oil rig off to the east there,” said Captain Bob, baling hook already in hand. “We’d best reel her in.”

  “Emergency rafts and life pods can’t break loose,” said Cort Wesley’s now thirteen-year-old son, Luke. “They gotta be launched.”

  “Well, maybe it got launched by accident,” Dylan snickered.

  “No way,” Luke insisted

  “The boy’s right,” added Captain Bob, making Caitlin’s heart flutter a bit.

  * * *

  Caitlin didn’t know Captain Bob’s last name, but he had a prison tattoo inked during a stretch in Huntsville and had let his stare linger in recognition on her signature scrawled at the bottom of the registration form a few hours earlier. Caitlin’s own father, Jim Strong, had taken her to fish Baffin Bay many times, sometimes with her grandfather Earl before the great man’s passing in 1990. They’d roomed at the very same Cast ’n Stay Lodge and eaten at the King’s Inn, just as she, Dylan, and Luke had the night before.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” Captain Bob asked, as he readied the baling hook to reach out for the runaway raft.

  “Can’t say I do, sir.”

  “Your father used to hire me every time he came down here. You were just a little girl back then. Believe I remember your granddad too. Texas Ranger legends for sure, but out here they were just men, holding a rod and reel instead of a gun. Believe they liked it that way.”

  Caitlin looked at Captain Bob, searching her memory to no avail.

  “Your dad once caught a speckled trout that weighed damn near twenty-five pounds. You remember that?”

  “I’m the one who hooked it. Wore me out trying to reel the damn thing in,” she said, smiling nostalgically at the memory.

  Caitlin had hoped the fishing trip would at least distract Dylan and Luke from the fact that no amount of cajoling or influence with the Mexican authorities had gained them visitation rights to see their father. Leaving her gun behind, if nothing else, gave her reason for insisting the boys do the same with their cell phones. Nothing to spoil their trip together.

  Until now.

  * * *

  “That rig’s called the Mariah,” Luke said from the gunwale, staring off toward the oil rig that wasn’t much more than a spec set on the water from this distance.

  “Say what?” Dylan snapped.

  “The rig. It’s called the Mariah. I looked it up before we came down here.”

  “You looked it up?”

  “Yeah. What’s wrong with that?”

  Dylan snickered and blew air through his pursed lips, scowling as if he’d suddenly realized how far away he was from the teenage world he’d constructed for himself.

  “Jack-up rigs like the Mariah operate in shallow water, up to seven hundred feet or so,” Luke continued. “They’re cool.”

  “Cool?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dylan just shook his head and turned away.

  A thin cloud formation slid over the sun, a narrow enough gap created to cast a spotlight-like shimmer downward that captured the raft in its glow. Captain Bob leaned over the deck rail, baling hook extending forward until the shaft of light caught a shape flattened out on the raft floor amid a thin pool of bobbing water.

  “Oh my Lord,” he uttered, as Caitlin again felt for the pistol she wasn’t carrying.

  8

  NORTHERN GULF STREAM, THE PRESENT

  The man’s body lay twisted at an odd angle on the floor of the raft, arms and legs splayed in opposite directions and shoulders propped up against its starboard sill alongside the tiny outboard engine. One of his hands seemed to still cling to a plastic hold not far from the outboard’s control arm he had likely held fast to until his strength had given out. The pooling water Caitlin had first taken for muck-strewn she now saw was actually streaked with thickening ribbons of blood. MARIAH was emblazoned in phosphorescent letters on both sides of the raft.

  “Shit,” said Dylan, as the escape raft plopped up against the charter boat. “Man’s dead for sure.”

  “Back up a bit,” Caitlin told him.

  “Huh?”

  “And take your brother,” she added with Luke pushing his torso over the gunwale to better see the body. Caitlin turned to Captain Bob. “Call the Coast Guard.”

  “Gonna be a while before we see them show in these parts.”

  “How about the local sheriff?”

  “These waters are outside his jurisdiction, Rangers’ too.”

  “Don’t think he cares too much about jurisdiction right now,” Caitlin said, eyeing the corpse.

  A blue jumpsuit, zippered high to the neck and stained with grease, fit the man snugly. Caitlin figured him for six-foot-two or-three with thick arms and hands marred by chipped skin and callus. One eye hung open, the other a mere slit encased by purplish bruising. The raft bobbed in the currents, making it seem as though he were trying to lift himself from the rust-colored pool of water lapping over his legs.

  Caitlin’s gaze rose from the corpse and drifted a good mile out to the shape of the Mariah, nothing more than a husk of steel from this distance.

  “Coast Guard’s en route,” Captain Bob reported, back at her side. “But it’s gonna be awhile on account, it turns out, a couple of drunk college kids fell off a party boat last night. Bodies could be all the way to Florida by now.”

  Caitlin’s eyes gestured toward the Mariah. “Can you radio the rig
?”

  “I’ll sure try but I got no clue as to the frequency.”

  “Call the Coast Guard again. They’ll have it. You inform them you had a Texas Ranger on board?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Now be a good time to do that too.” Caitlin held her gaze on the jack-up, as Captain Bob slid back to the bridge. “Luke, how many men you say work a rig like that?”

  “A couple dozen,” the boy said, “give or take a few.”

  “Uh-uh,” from Dylan.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The rig that spilled all that oil into the Gulf had over a hundred.”

  “The Horizon was a deepwater rig that can drill down as much as five miles or so,” Luke elaborated. “This one’s smaller and is made for shallow water, like I said before if you bothered to listen.”

  “Think you’re smart, don’t you?”

  “’Cause I am,” Luke shot back.

  “Jeez,” Dylan said, drawing close to Caitlin again. “I know what you’re thinking, Caitlin.”

  “What am I thinking?”

  “What about the other twenty-three.”

  “Pretty much, son, yeah.”

  She’d been on the bigger deepwater rigs twice, representing the Rangers on tours conducted for the Texas Department of Public Safety. The purpose of the tours was always to show off how safe the rigs were with all their redundant safety features. They reminded Caitlin of giant erector sets built on the sea, heavy with steel atop decks so crammed with equipment and rigging it was difficult to move. The rigs she’d been on had fully equipped gyms, movie theaters, recreation rooms, and prefabricated housing units all watched over by sentinel-like oil derricks that towered toward the sky. She remembered being brought onto the rig from a Coast Guard cutter in a basket swaying in the wind beneath a massive crane. Coming from law enforcement, what interested her most was the absence of alcohol, the greatest cause of violence among hardscrabble men she’d had to face down in bars on more occasions than she cared to remember. Made her realize how far away from all that she’d felt these last few months. Like she was a different person altogether and not one she knew very well.

  Caitlin also recalled how the oil companies’ PR people had stressed the evacuation procedures in the event of a catastrophic emergency, showcasing the array of rafts and what they called the life pods Luke had just referenced. Releasing them from their moorings in the event of such an emergency required a series of steps that made for a complex task in itself and one not to be taken lightly, much less by a single man.

  “You’re gonna check the rig out, aren’t you?” Dylan asked her.

  Instead of responding, Caitlin slipped out of her boots and rolled the cuffs up on her jeans as far as they would go. Captain Bob had wedged the baling hook between the deck rail and gunwale to keep the raft in place against the fishing boat’s hull.

  “Hold her steady now,” Caitlin told Dylan, as she eased herself over the rail and dropped down into the pooling, blood-rich water.

  9

  NORTHERN GULF STREAM, THE PRESENT

  Caitlin landed with a plop, the raft’s floor spongy beneath her feet as she moved toward the rear where the body lay near the outboard engine. The raft listed from side to side with each step, driven by a sea that appeared dark and menacing around the craft but crystal blue just beyond with the sun’s rays making the chop look like giant snakes massing below the surface.

  “I can’t raise anybody on the rig,” Captain Bob called down to her. “Nobody’s answering my calls.”

  She was conscious of him, Luke, and Dylan all watching her as she reached the body and did a cursory inspection, careful not to disturb anything that might compromise the potential crime scene. Bruising was evident across the man’s hands, fingers, and knuckles, evidence of an altercation that must have occurred in the moments prior to him fleeing the rig. Up close, the area around his closed eye had swelled to a level that suggested blunt force trauma. Impossible to tell at this stage what exactly had caused it, but such a blow wouldn’t have been enough to kill a man of his size and strength.

  Caitlin ran her eyes down from his face along his torso, stopping at a darker spot near his thorax where his blue jumpsuit seemed to bunch up, turning in on itself. Gazing closer she saw the material had peeled away in a roughly circular pattern consistent with a gunshot wound. Caitlin flapped the lopping water away, then watched it pool back in a slight vortex over the spot she’d detected.

  A bullet hole for sure, located not far from several blotchy orange stains.

  She wasn’t about to disturb the body further by easing it over to check for more wounds. This was enough for now, though it suggested nothing about what had led to a gunfight on board a jack-up oil rig that wasn’t responding to calls. Depending on exactly how long the raft had been drifting in the Gulf’s currents, the man could have been shot over an hour ago or even significantly longer. Plenty of time for the Coast Guard to respond with crash boats and choppers, no matter how many college kids had gone missing from a booze charter. That seemed to indicate the rig hadn’t issued a distress call.

  And now nobody on the Mariah was answering the radio.

  “How long the Coast Guard say they’d be?” Caitlin called up to Captain Bob.

  “They didn’t.”

  She considered calling Captain Tepper but wasn’t exactly sure what to tell him or what he could empower her to do. “Help me up,” she said, wading back toward the charter boat and taking both Captain Bob’s and Dylan’s extended hands to help hoist her back on board.

  “You want me to call the sheriff now?” Captain Bob asked her.

  “He got a boat?”

  “Couple of skiffs and a whaler.”

  “So nothing that can get out here anytime soon.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Caitlin looked out toward the Mariah, shielding her eyes from the sun. “Then I guess it’s up to us.” She caught Captain Bob shaking his head and resumed, “Something wrong, sir?”

  “Nope, nothing,” he said, a smile dropping from his face as quickly as it had appeared. “You’re just like your dad and granddad, that’s all.”

  “How’s that?”

  Captain Bob’s eyes aimed past her back toward the body bobbing in rhythm with the raft atop the sea’s surface. “We got a dead body and can’t raise another living soul on that rig out there.”

  “So?”

  “So what if whoever’s responsible is still on board?”

  10

  NORTHERN GULF STREAM, THE PRESENT

  Caitlin’s nerves started jangling when they drew close enough to the Mariah for its shadows to catch their charter boat in their grasp. Up close, the rig looked like some kind of alien robot that had just raised itself out of the sea on three legs to take over the world.

  “Know why they call it a jack-up?” Luke asked, hand clenched warmly on her shoulder.

  “No, son, I don’t.”

  “I do,” Luke beamed, while nearby Dylan chortled and rolled his eyes. “Rig like this isn’t much more than a floating barge. Some have to be towed while others, like the Mariah, are self-propelled. Either way, once they get to their chosen location, the legs are jacked down onto the seafloor. Then the weight of the barge and additional ballast water are used to drive the legs securely into the bottom to keep the rig steady. Then a jacking system raises the entire barge and drilling structure above the water, creating what’s called an air gap. That way the waves and currents pass under the actual structure, and that’s why they call it a jack-up rig.”

  Caitlin felt Captain Bob slow the charter boat to a crawl as it neared a support leg outfitted with a steel ladder that climbed all the way to the rig’s deck. The big deepwater rigs she’d been on had no such ladders, but she thought she recalled their installation being mandated for emergency use in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The shadows cast by the Mariah had swallowed all of their fishing boat by then. The currents felt stronger this much farther out, as if ang
ry over having this iron interloper invade their world. Caitlin had seen no trace of movement on the rig as they drew nearer and could see no trace of it now.

  “You finished?” Dylan chided his brother.

  “Matter of fact, I am.”

  “Good thing.”

  Caitlin regarded the boys, both of them looking more like their father each day in different ways. Or maybe the resemblance was more an illusion she cast upon herself to ease the pain over missing Cort Wesley Masters. She never thought she could miss anyone so much, and being with his boys, looking after them like she was, was the only thing that soothed the sense of emptiness she felt.

  The house she’d grown up in outside San Antonio had recently been put up for sale, and for reasons she didn’t fully grasp Caitlin had offered the asking price. Why do that if Cort Wesley and his sons represented home to her? It was as if she had a foot in two worlds that could only exist side by side and not independent of each other.

  “Now let’s get the two of you below,” Caitlin said to Luke and Dylan, as their fishing boat nuzzled up against the Mariah.

  11

  NORTHERN GULF WATERS, THE PRESENT

  “You going up alone?” Dylan asked, after Caitlin had practically dragged him down into the cabin. “I’ll go with you if you want.”

  “I appreciate the offer but, no,” she said, tightening her gaze on him. “But I will take that pistol you got stowed in your backpack.”

  Dylan stiffened, his expression freezing in place. “How’d you know?”

  “I didn’t, not for sure anyway. Now hand it over.”

  Dylan frowned and blew the air from his face. He tanned easily and a few days in the sun brought out the Latino features he got from his mother. Caitlin watched muscles not unlike his father’s, only smaller, ripple under his sleeveless shirt as he fished through his backpack and emerged with his father’s .40 caliber Glock.

  “Last thing I promised my dad was that I’d protect you and Luke,” he said, handing it to her.