Strong Vengeance

by Jon Land

  She thought it would be easy to simply watch this play out from the shade but felt a gnawing in her stomach as the other Rangers, led by Lieutenants Steve Berry and Jim Rollins, continued their approach.

  “I think we should take the boys away on a trip,” Cort Wesley said, his voice almost in a whisper. “Maybe Disney World or something.”

  Much to her own surprise, Caitlin found herself easily distracted by his suggestion. “I’d like that,” she said, just as the freight train began to roll.

  * * *

  “Dispatch,” yelled Tepper into his walkie-talkie, “this is Ranger One! What the hell is going on?”

  “Engineer is ignoring our order to pull brake. Repeat, engineer is—”

  “I heard you, goddamnit! And you’re gonna be one engineer poorer for the effort!” Caitlin watched Tepper switch to another channel. “This is Ranger One, boys. You have the go.”

  And with that the Rangers and members of the SWAT team opened fire on the now moving train, pouring a nonstop fusillade toward the cab that blew out glass and pockmarked steel. But the freight rolled on, smashing through the extended pickup parked on the tracks and picking up speed as its fifty-car length wound out of the yard and toward the center of San Antonio.

  “Too bad we can’t shoot out the tires,” Captain Tepper was saying.

  But Caitlin’s attention had already strayed to the police helicopter hovering overhead. “Get that down here!”

  Tepper didn’t hesitate, giving the appropriate order as Captain Alonzo drew up next to him.

  “That’s my chopper!” she barked in response.

  “Not today, ma’am.”

  * * *

  “I’ll thank you not to call me that.”

  “What?” Tepper asked her, the lowering chopper’s roar beginning to drown out all other sounds.

  “Ma’am. It’s ‘captain,’ just like you.”

  “Okay, Captain. Now I’d appreciate you standing down so the Rangers can save some lives here.”

  Spoken as Caitlin and Cort Wesley moved out into the dust and debris spray of the descending chopper’s rotor wash.

  “No, no way!” Alonzo roared. “Those two are not authorized to board any police vehicle, no matter who’s in charge!”

  Tepper stuck a Marlboro Light in his mouth. “Well Captain, unless you got someone on your team capable of dropping out of a helicopter onto a freight train moving at forty miles per hour, I’d suggest you let us run the show.”

  * * *

  The police chopper with Caitlin and Cort Wesley on board quickly drew even with the freight, holding position in the air a few cars behind its cab.

  “If the cars were wired, I figure whoever’s driving that thing would’ve blown them already,” Cort Wesley said into his headset.

  “Too much security in the yard to wire the cars,” Caitlin followed. “They must have wired the track somewhere down the line.”

  “Driver’s on a suicide mission, Ranger.”

  “That surprise you?”

  Cort Wesley stripped off his headset. “It’s time we stopped him.”

  * * *

  Caitlin helped Cort Wesley out the chopper’s open side door, and he lowered himself onto its landing pod. His weight and the stiff wind buckled the chopper, dragging it over to the right on an angle so steep he thought it might go down. But the pilot quickly compensated, leaving Cort Wesley dangling with his feet ten feet over a freight car two back from the cab.

  “I don’t stop him this way, you’re gonna have to find another!” he yelled up to Caitlin.

  “We’ll grab his attention in the meantime!”

  Caitlin held on to him with her eyes, her face angled outside the door so the last of the day’s hot air hit her like a blast from a steam oven. Then she watched as Cort Wesley looked down one last time to measure his drop and opened his hand, plunging to the freight car directly beneath them.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley tucked his legs at just the right time, landing upon the car with his feet perfectly balanced. The harsh wind that came with traveling at forty miles per hour atop a train nearly knocked him to the tracks below. But Cort Wesley regained his balance by overcompensating in the other direction and then held fast to his footing as he started across the top of this freight car for the next.

  * * *

  “Get us up in front of it!” Caitlin ordered the police chopper pilot.

  She knew freight cars offered no passage to the engine cab, which meant Cort Wesley would have to find a way to breach it from the outside. All well and good, except for the fact that newer engines like this were built to preclude precisely this eventuality. The locks and doors were reinforced and the engineer drove the train from what was essentially an armored cubicle. Even shooting him might prove no use at all since he’d likely tied his hand somehow to the throttle to make sure the freight would keep going even if he were killed. She wasn’t sure about that, but didn’t dare take the chance so long as Cort Wesley offered a better alternative.

  The chopper dropped nose first directly before the window of the cab shattered by the Rangers’ fusillade back in the yard. Caitlin figured they were a few miles at most from the point of a potential blast’s optimal deadly effects where the track bed was likely rigged with powerful explosives. They’d be planted underground, invisible from any angle and wired not just to derail the train but blow up its deadly contents.

  “You read me, Ranger?” she heard Tepper call over her discarded headset.

  “Right here, Captain,” she said, fitting it back into place. “We’re in front of the cab now. Cort Wesley’s almost there from above.”

  “Houston, Dallas, and Austin confirm their trains in hand and under control. Engineers all under arrest.”

  “You tell them we’ll be joining them shortly.”

  * * *

  Cort Wesley used a ladder to climb down the front-most freight car onto the steel connector between it and the cab, confronting all at once the enormity of the task remaining before him. No way he could gain access to the cab without announcing his presence, just as there was no doubt the engineer would be armed in anticipation of precisely that eventuality.

  He again considered alternate means to bring the train to a halt. Derailing it, even if he could manage that, was hardly an option given that it could produce the very result he was desperately trying to avoid. Which left, which left …

  Which left what?

  If he could reach the engine itself …

  But even if he could, how could he cut or shoot through tempered steel to bring a ten-thousand-horsepower behemoth with all kinds of redundant backup systems to a halt? The answer was simple: he couldn’t.

  But the engine was the key. Stop it and the contents of the fifty freight cars it was pulling would be rendered effectively harmless. Or …

  Or …

  Cort Wesley realized what he had to do in that moment.

  * * *

  Caitlin knew they were running out of time, even before she heard the cop sniper riding next to the pilot speak in her headset.

  “One mile before the train hits San Antonio center, Ranger. What’s the play?”

  Caitlin figured that gave Cort Wesley a minute, maybe ninety seconds tops. He was nowhere in sight now, only the engineer in view as a dim spec propped low in the cab. She wasn’t sure the sniper could hit him in these conditions with the best system on Earth.

  “Get ready on your rifle,” she said anyway, figuring that might be the only chance they had.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley studied the coupling attachment assembly connecting the engine to the long line of cars pulled behind it. The device was the most modern available, constructed to give on even the sharpest turns and cornering, while also built to detach much easier than older models to avoid a whipsaw effect in the event of a derailment. But that made Cort Wesley’s task to accomplish that very thing manually no easier since sabotage had been figured into the same equation.

 
No other choice he could see, though, and angled himself toward the ladder.

  * * *

  “Three quarters of a mile, Ranger,” the pilot was saying. “If we’re gonna take that shot, it better be now!”

  Caitlin moved up closer to the San Antonio police sniper. “You heard the man.”

  “Doesn’t change the fact that I don’t have a shot. Engineer’s still ducked low beneath the controls.”

  “Then shoot them. Shoot the hell out of them.”

  The sniper opened fire, his shots coming in quick bursts that sent sparks flying throughout the cab. Caitlin thought she could see wisps of smoke trailing them, hoping that meant they’d hit something vital. But the freight continued to barrel along, Cort Wesley still nowhere to be seen.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley first tried stamping down with both feet to dislodge the back fifty cars from the engine. When this produced no result whatsoever, he steadied his thinking enough to recall the time his father stole an entire train car with Cort Wesley by his side, along with a brakeman serving as the inside man on the job. Of course, that car had been part of a train parked in a yard, but the principle should be the same, meaning that the coupling was most vulnerable to detachment when the assembly was stretched taut. He recalled how he and his father had absurdly planted their shoulders against the car frame while the brakeman simply knocked out the bolt.

  But this train’s connections were hydraulic, filled with a thick noxious fluid that flowed like blood, leaks to be feared above all else.

  Of course!

  Cort Wesley cursed himself for not having thought of this before, hoping there was still time as he eased the Glock from his belt and aimed it down at the jockeying hydraulic line that created the tight connection between cars. He fired five times, enough to send jets of the black fluid spewing from the hose, weakening it enough so that the hose snapped under a bit of weight Cort Wesley laid upon it with his boot. More hydraulic fluid belched outward, eliminating any give in the coupling.

  He stepped down upon it, angled so he could cant his body forward with his hands holding fast to the rungs of the ladder of the lead car. Then he started bouncing up and down, nothing happening at all until the coupling popped free in a single thrust that left him holding fast to the engine still barreling along.

  He started swaying his body from side to side, picking up enough momentum to carry him clear of the tracks when he let go, hitting the track shoulder hard and rolling down an embankment as the engine thundered on all by itself.

  * * *

  He did it! Caitlin realized, the engine racing under the helicopter almost even with San Antonio center. Cort Wesley did it!

  “Now get us out of here!” she called to the pilot.

  He gave the throttle all it would take, soaring over the slowing assemblage of cars Cort Wesley had detached, as the engine rumbled on. It had just banked into a slight turn between industrial buildings not more than a mile down wind from the famed Alamo when the track beneath it erupted in a fiery blast that coughed the engine fifty feet into the air. Next came a domino-like burst of secondary explosions of equal magnitude rippling backward along the track bed. Through the resulting curtain of smoke and fire, Caitlin glimpsed the engine twist in the air and plunge back to the ground nose first in flaming husks of mangled steel.

  Cort Wesley waved, signaling he was okay when the chopper flew over him. The roar of sirens blazed fast down the streets adjoining the tracks and he moved out to meet them, as the cars holding the barrels of promised death ground slowly to a halt a good quarter mile from the line of flames and mangled track bed.

  * * *

  “Four for four, Ranger!” Tepper said, hugging Caitlin after she’d bounded off the police chopper. “Looks like you saved the goddamn world again!”

  “It was Cort Wesley alone this time, Captain,” she told him.

  “SAPD just picked him up. Soon as he gets back here, first round’s on me.”

  “Better hold on that, Captain,” said Young Roger, approaching with BlackBerry clutched in hand. “We’ve got a problem.”

  “Son, your brains are determined to be the death of me. Are those four freight trains secure or not?”

  “They are, sir, along with five thousand fifty-five-gallon steel drums. I got the final manifests right here.”

  Caitlin felt her stomach sink. “But Braga said…”

  The look on both Young Roger’s and Tepper’s faces told her she didn’t have to finish the thought.

  “Right,” said Young Roger. “At least five thousand of those barrels filled with radioactive waste are still unaccounted for.”

  94

  NORTHERN GULF STREAM, THE PRESENT

  The sun was sinking toward the horizon when the helicopter landed on the helipad of the abandoned Mariah. Sam Harrabi climbed out, keeping his head ducked low like he saw in the movies, to find Anwar al-Awlaki waiting, a grim but resolute look stretched over his features. The cleric embraced him tightly, while a number of men Harrabi had never seen before hung back in the shadows. He could see others, similarly unfamiliar, patrolling the decks, as if on guard duty.

  “The news is bad, my brother,” al-Awlaki reported. “The trains were stopped, five thousand of the blessed barrels recovered.”

  “But how could…” Harrabi left his question unfinished and al-Awlaki didn’t seem to be of a mind to answer it anyway.

  “It’s a blessing we planned our strike from two fronts, my brother,” al-Awlaki said instead. The cleric smelled of sweet talcum powder and Harrabi noticed he had started growing his beard back. “Now the attack we launch from these waters grows more vital. Our presence here assures we will yet have something to celebrate for all of eternity.”

  “Yet you take a great risk by returning to this rig, sayyid.”

  “Perhaps, but I choose to see the unfortunate circumstances that brought us here in the first place as a sign from God. It’s the last place they’d ever think to look for us and high tide is just past dawn. Plenty of time to enjoy the interlude ahead of the chaos that is coming.”

  As the group’s chief engineer, much of the operation’s responsibility had fallen into Harrabi’s hands. Every time his resolve started to weaken, he’d sit at his beautiful Layla’s bedside and recall how blessed their life together had been before that night in Wolfsboro, Tennessee. Harrabi could only hope the pain this part of the plan promised to spread would somehow mitigate his own.

  “Now,” al-Awlaki continued, steering him toward the command center, “let us prepare to do right by your wife and sons. Let us prepare to make history.”

  95

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  “Go back to where this all started,” Caitlin said finally, trying to make sense of what Young Roger had just told them.

  “That oil rig,” said Tepper

  “Specifically those barrels Young Roger spotted on the video feed, Captain. They were there in one portion of the feed, gone in a later one.”

  “That much I already know.”

  “We can pretty much figure that finding those barrels was the reason why all those workers were murdered, and that al-Awlaki’s terrorists were responsible.”

  “Point made,” Tepper said, drawing closer to her. “Where you going with this?”

  “The rig workers were murdered because al-Awlaki couldn’t risk them alerting the Coast Guard or anybody else about what they’d found, couldn’t take the chance those barrels would be pulled up and maybe set the stage for the rest of the five thousand or so to be uncovered too.”

  Tepper took off his Stetson and ran a hand through his hair that was flattened on the sides. “Hurricane Caitlin blew right by me this time.”

  “The plan wasn’t just to blow Braga’s radioactive waste after it was loaded onto those freight trains,” she told them all. “The plan was to also ignite half the barrels in the waters of the Gulf.”

  “Oh boy,” muttered Young Roger.

  “You got something to say,
son?” Tepper prodded.

  Young Roger cleared his throat. “I don’t think you’re gonna like it very much, Captain.”

  “Son, I’m the last Texas Ranger to actually be hit by an Indian’s arrow with the scar to prove it. If I can handle pulling that head out and stitching myself up, I think I can handle just about anything.”

  Young Roger nodded, his face twisted tight in what looked like pain as well. “Our problems aren’t going to end in the Gulf, sir. What we’re really talking about here are five thousand separate dirty bombs. Now, high explosives inflict damage with rapidly expanding, superheated gas. Dirty bombs use that gas expansion as a means of propelling radioactive material over a wide area as a destructive force in its own right. When the explosive goes off, the radioactive material spreads in a sort of dust cloud carried by the wind that reaches a wider area than the explosion itself.”

  “No wind underwater,” Tepper pointed out.

  “No, water has currents instead. And igniting that many barrels around high tide would maximize the wash of the deadly toxins inland to eventually soak through into the ecosystem, poisoning the ground and drinking water. Not a piece of fish, shrimp, or oyster would remain unaffected.”

  “I’m getting indigestion just listening to this, son.”

  “It gets worse, Captain. The infected waters would follow the currents toward Florida and then up the East Coast of the country, tracing the same lines as migrating fish.”

  “Any chance you’re wrong about this?”

  “Yes, sir; it could be even worse,” Young Roger said, jogging his BlackBerry to its calculator function.

  96

  NORTHERN GULF STREAM, THE PRESENT

  Harrabi had personally devised specially constructed shaped charges to work underwater. The real challenge lay in devising an equally sure means to transmit the remote detonation signal over such a wide area up to seven hundred feet below the water’s surface. The energy of standard radio signals would be weakened and rendered ultimately ineffectual by the seawater. And infrared signals would be either swiftly absorbed or diffused by mud and other debris.