Strong from the Heart--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  “That’s right,” Young Roger nodded. “Cyanide enters water, soil, or air as a result of both natural processes and industrial activities. In manufacturing, cyanide is used to make paper, textiles, and plastics. You can find it in the chemicals used to develop photographs, not to mention the fact that cyanide salts are used in metallurgy for electroplating and metal cleaning. Cyanide gas is also used to exterminate pests and vermin in ships and buildings, but only by professionals with the training to understand the precise amounts required.”

  “Nice answer, Rog,” Caitlin said, “but not to the question I was asking.”

  “Try this then,” Whatley interjected. “Cyanide is also vital in the process of removing gold from its ore.”

  Caitlin looked around the table, finding everyone else except Young Roger as perplexed as she was. “What am I missing here, Doc?”

  “We need to go back a ways in history to answer that question, Ranger,” Doc Whatley interjected, taking the floor fully. “All the way back to William Ray Strong and Pancho Villa…”

  91

  MEXICO; 1898

  “Don’t make me regret not delivering you to Presidio to stand trial, Pancho,” William Ray said, firing at a pair of Wong’s men who were coming straight for them, knocking both off their saddles.

  “How about you let me take you to where Wong has those kids stashed first?” Villa asked him.

  * * *

  That turned out to be back north, toward the border. They were accompanied by the same gunmen who’d torn up Felipe Wong’s camp. William Ray’s initial thinking was it had been a rescue mission for Villa, undertaken by the bandits he’d been riding with after fleeing a murder charge. But reflecting on the way they shot and rode left him pegging them more as soldiers—or at least as men who knew their way around the gunfights more typically associated with combat.

  “Think I get it now, Pancho,” he said to the young man riding next to him. “One of the men with us now was following you the whole time, waiting for you to smoke out Wong’s camp so these boys could make their move.”

  “You tell a great story, Ranger,” Villa said, keeping his gaze fixed forward.

  “I’m not finished telling it yet. When I started on this new thinking, I figured it must be about the poppies. But that didn’t make no sense, because what good would a bunch of red flowers do gunmen like these? That got me figuring your whole ruse was about something else for sure: guns. I saw these boys toting crates full of rifles and more on their horses. You had wagons stationed somewhere nearby, the kind with those thick wheels that can handle mountain terrain, lugged by mules. Right or wrong?”

  Villa grinned. “Why bother? You already know the answer.”

  “So what’s a gang of bandits need with that kind of firepower?”

  “‘Bandits,’” Villa echoed, breaking out into a chuckle and then a laugh.

  “Something funny about that?”

  “You were hot as blazes before. Now you’re cold as ice.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “These men aren’t bandits by trade. The bandits I’ve done my share of running with are led by Ignacio Parra. Maybe you’ve heard of him.”

  “There’s wanted posters of him posted all over Texas, if he ever ventures across the border from his base in Durango.” William Ray cocked his gaze at the cluster of two dozen or so gunmen riding north behind them. “So who are these boys, amigo, if not bandits?”

  “They’re soldiers, and we’re preparing for war.”

  “Against who?” William Ray asked him.

  “Porfirio Diaz.”

  “The president of Mexico?”

  Villa squinted into the sun. “I know you Americans revere his efforts to modernize Mexico, prepare it for the coming twentieth century. But what he’s really done is line his own pockets and rebuild the military to wipe out anyone who challenges his rule. The poor see him for exactly what he is: a tyrant who has plunged already desperate Mexican farmers and laborers into poverty. He’s taken their land and enslaved them for meager wages that make it impossible for them to become anything but criminals, fighting for the opportunity to sell the opium and heroin produced by the likes of Felipe Wong.”

  “And yet Wong and those other Chinamen are operating right out in the open, where everybody can see them.”

  Villa was still looking at William Ray. “Of course. Because Porfirio Diaz is in business with them. The money they pay in bribes goes straight into his pocket, to be funneled to pay tribute to the provincial governors and others he needs to control to solidify his hold on power.”

  William Ray took off his Stetson, the burn of the sun enough to make him replace it immediately. “Doesn’t sound like those guns you clipped from Felipe Wong are gonna do you much good, son.”

  “Revolution is inevitable. And when it comes, when the opportunity arises, we’ll be ready. You’re right about firepower, Ranger. Diaz has centralized the military under his total control. So, yes, we need to be patient, even if it takes until he’s finally out of the picture to restore hope to the people.”

  “Spoken like a true revolutionary, Pancho.”

  “I’ve studied how Texas revolted with Mexico.”

  “And I ended up the bait for the trap you needed to set for Wong. I delivered you right to him—your plan all along, I’m guessing. You want to thank me? Tell me about what Wong put those kids he stole to work doing.”

  “They’re not the only innocents he’s enslaved, Ranger. There are hundreds of others, maybe even thousands, doing his bidding.”

  “I’m going to ask you again, Pancho,” William Ray said. “What’s this bidding they’re doing for him?”

  “It’s better if you see for yourself.”

  * * *

  Just as the sun began to cool, William Ray Strong and Pancho Villa climbed a hillside overlooking a work site dominated by tunnels and pits dug into the ground. Villa had been true to his word, and the Ranger spotted what could well have been the kids from Camino Pass lugging water buckets hanging from boards laid over their shoulders. They were bent over, struggling to stay upright. Chinese work foremen wielding bullwhips supervised the process, readying their whips any time a single drop was spilled. More of the kids were digging with shovels, while others cleared stone and rock from the ground to find reasonably soft earth through which to dig. There were adults about, as well—all Mexican, as near as William Ray could tell—who’d been similarly enslaved, or put to work for the lowest wages imaginable.

  The workers had unearthed an underground stream that bubbled up to the surface from the pits dug amid it. A host of workers continued to dig trenches to rout the water in a crisscrossing design that made the camp look like the inside of an anthill. And there appeared to be some method to the madness, as another group of workers, soaked in water and clay-colored mud, sifted pails and deep-bottomed plates through whatever residue the waters had brought with them from below.

  Looking down on that scene, the Ranger knew that whatever Felipe Wong was digging for was at the behest of, or at least with the cooperation of, the Mexican president. That made it easy to see why Pancho Villa felt revolution was the only card the Mexican peasant class had to play.

  “You know the problem with revolutions, amigo?” William Ray challenged Villa. “Too often, the poor forget to show up.”

  “That won’t be the case here, Ranger.”

  “How you know that, exactly?”

  “Because they’re going to have leaders.”

  “Well, the battle Texas fought for independence mostly started in the early 1830s, but it didn’t end in victory until Sam Houston bested Santa Anna in April of 1836 at the Battle of San Jacinto. You’re gonna need as much patience as bullets.”

  William Ray turned the binoculars on a pair of raised mounds of earth, hollowed out in the center, the likes of which he’d never seen before. He figured they must have been the brainchild of the likes of Felipe Wong, the concept brought here all the way from China, alon
g with those poppy seeds.

  Each of those raised mounds featured a Gatling gun poking up over the earthen walls and aimed directly at the center of the camp to discourage any potential rebellion by the workers, along with any assault from the outside. As far as the Ranger could tell from this distance, though, these weren’t ordinary Gatlings; they were the next-generation gun, which had been produced exclusively for the U.S. Army.

  Already a formidable and fearsome weapon, the Gatling had been improved and adapted to take the new thirty-caliber smokeless cartridge and featured six barrels instead of the original five, but William Ray had heard they were working on a model that had ten instead. He’d also heard that Dr. Gatling himself was adapting this model so it could be powered by electric motor, with a belt to drive the crank. William Ray tried very hard not to picture what a weapon like that could do to men charging bravely forward with no more than rifles or pistols in their grasp.

  “Those Gatlings aren’t here just to keep the peace, amigo. They’re also here to make sure nobody strays too close to whatever they’re digging for.”

  Pancho Villa ignored his point and gazed down on the work camp with the naked eye. “If we’re going to rescue those children, Ranger, we’ll need to find a way to take the guns out.”

  “And what do you get for your part in that, amigo?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I get the Gatlings, once you figure out a way to stop the gunners from mowing my men down.”

  “You let me think on that.” William Ray lowered the binoculars so he could look Villa in the eye. “Right now I want to know what’s so important here for Wong to have a pair of Gatling guns to make sure nobody gets in and nobody gets out.”

  “Gold, Ranger,” Villa said, taking the binoculars from William Ray’s grasp. “Felipe Wong is mining for gold.”

  92

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “Gold? Now I’ve heard everything,” Tepper said, when Doc Whatley finished his tale. “But I thought we were talking about how hydrogen cyanide ended up in those empty pipes that normally feed Camino Pass its water.”

  “We still are, Captain,” Whatley told him. “Isn’t that right, Roger?”

  Young Roger nodded, his long hair flopping up and down. “It sure is. Cyanide, especially back then, was crucial to the process of extracting the gold from the ore contained in gravel. It was a painstaking process, but remarkably effective for the time.”

  Caitlin was starting to get the gist of where they were going with this. “How far was this gold mine from Camino Pass?”

  Whatley seemed to be running the math in his head. “Best guess, as few as fifty miles or as many as a hundred.”

  “A long way for cyanide to travel, if that’s where you’re going with this, Doc.”

  “Ranger?” prompted Young Roger, waiting for her to turn toward him before continuing. “I believe I’ve identified any number of comparable mines from the same general period, some much larger and deeper than this one, far closer to Camino Pass then and now.”

  “But nobody’s working them anymore, Rog.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said, addressing the entire table. “There must’ve been a sizable vein that pretty much rimmed this town on all sides from maybe a mile out. The seismic studies I was able to access indicate as many as fifty gold mines were active at various times in the general area, with varying results.”

  “And I’m guessing they all used cyanide,” Caitlin said, “which means we’re talking about an incredible amount of poison potentially collecting in the ground.”

  “The process is called gold cyanidation,” Young Roger nodded, “a hydrometallurgical technique for extracting gold from ore.”

  “Sounds pretty advanced for 1898, from a technological standpoint,” noted Captain Tepper.

  “The beginnings actually date all the way back to 1783, but it was the slowing of gold mining in South Africa in the 1880s that proved to be the game changer. Turned out, the newer deposits being uncovered were something called pyritic ore, which resisted all attempts to extract the gold, until scientists led by John Stewart MacArthur figured out that by suspending the crushed ore in a cyanide solution, a separation of up to ninety-six percent pure gold was possible.”

  Jones whistled. “Beats my government pension, kid.”

  “Of course,” Cort Wesley picked up from there, “back then, I don’t think anybody figured what they were doing had the potential to wipe out an entire town.”

  Young Roger nodded. “The nature of tragedy, remember? The concentration of mines around Camino Pass is unprecedented. All those mines had closed down before a single resident who died five nights ago was even born. But pockets of cyanide deposits remained, more than enough to leach into the underground streams, bubbling up occasionally into the groundwater.”

  “Groundwater’s not what killed all those folks,” Tepper reminded. “You already told us that.”

  “I did, indeed. See, back then, there was no EPA or environmental safeguards of any kind, pretty much. And the predominant method of extracting gold from ore was known as ‘heap leaching,’ in which cyanide solution was sprayed over huge heaps of crushed ore spread atop giant collection pads. The cyanide dissolved the gold from the ore into the solution as it trickled through the heap. The pad collected the now metal-impregnated solution, which was stripped of gold and resprayed on the heap until the ore was depleted.”

  “How much cyanide are we talking about here?” Caitlin asked him.

  “In 1982, at the Zortman-Landusky mine in Montana, fifty-two thousand gallons of cyanide solution poisoned the aquifer that supplies fresh drinking water to the town of Zortman. The accident was discovered when an employee of the mine, who knew they were using cyanide, detected the smell in his tap water.”

  “Did you say fifty-two thousand gallons?” Tepper asked, scratching at his scalp with one hand and holding a pen like a cigarette in the other, to the point where Caitlin thought he might take a match to it.

  Young Roger nodded again. “I did, sir, and I use that example in particular because it’s the closest we’ve got to a precedent for what happened in Camino Pass.”

  “What if Zortman’s water had been shut off when that worker smelled cyanide coming from his tap?” Caitlin asked him.

  “If the concentration was anything close to Camino Pass, he would’ve been dead before he sounded the alarm and the overall results would have been the same. And that near disaster in Montana was hardly isolated. Among just the ones we know about, there was the Kyrgyzstan Kumtor mine in 1998, the Aural mine in Romania in 2000, and the Proyecto Magistral mine in Mexico in 2014. Again, none of the conditions encountered in Camino Pass were in evidence for any of those. You might say that, up until last week, anyone living close to a gold mine has been dodging one big bullet that finally hit the bull’s-eye in Camino Pass.”

  Captain Tepper kept starting to raise the pen to his mouth before remembering that it wasn’t a cigarette. “So, son, altogether, how much cyanide would we be talking about with regards to that network of mines enclosing the town?”

  “Conservatively, as much as five hundred thousand gallons.”

  Tepper’s mouth dropped. The cigarette pen dropped from his hand.

  “That figure,” Doc Whatley picked up, “is a rough estimate based on the concentration of cyanide in the blood of the Camino Pass victims. Roger and I believe the variances were due to how far, exactly, each victim was from a water faucet. The cyanide gas originated at the source of the town’s water supply, flowed up through the empty pipes, and permeated the air.”

  “In other words,” Tepper said, finding his voice again, “we got one hell of a mess on our hands. But how is it this poison remained deadly for so long?”

  “Cyanide doesn’t break down or degrade like other chemicals or toxins,” Whatley explained.

  “And there’s ample precedent for that, too,” Young Roger added. “Cyanide spills into groundwater can persist for long periods of time and contaminat
e aquifers. Groundwater contaminated with cyanide can also pollute neighboring streams. For example, at the Beal Mountain Mine in Montana, which closed in 1998, so much cyanide seeped into the groundwater feeding neighboring trout streams that the toxicity levels were still in the red years and years after the mine closed.”

  “There’s something we’re missing here,” Caitlin interjected. “Sure, disasters like Camino Pass do happen spontaneously sometimes. But I’m not one to accept that at face value.”

  “What else you got, Ranger?” Jones asked her.

  “I’m not sure. But there must’ve been some kind of inciting incident, something that somehow freed up a massive pocket of that hydrogen cyanide gas to push upward into the homes of all those folks. I’m not sold on the fact it was random, an unlucky stroke of fortune. Somebody caused this to happen—not advertently, but they caused it all the same.” Caitlin thought for a moment, something seeming to occur to her. “You have people you can still call to get satellite footage of the area encompassing that town?” she asked Jones.

  “I still have friends and associates at Homeland who feel I got royally screwed and who should be able to serve our cause in any way they can.”

  “So you can retake your seat at the table next to them.”

  “And so long as it serves your cause, you’d be fine with that,” Jones challenged. “What is it exactly you want to eyeball, Ranger?”

  Before Caitlin could answer, the conference room door burst open and a parade of men wearing Windbreakers marked FEDERAL MARSHAL stormed inside, guns waving.

  93

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “Federal marshals!” a voice boomed. “Nobody move, and keep your hands where I can see them!”

  D. W. Tepper looked at the man and finally wedged the pen into his mouth, as if it were a cigarette. “You’re kidding, right? I believe you must’ve kicked in the wrong door.”

  “Sir, I have a court order here for you to vacate the premises and turn over all evidence pertaining to the investigation into the deaths in Camino Pass immediately!” the lead marshal bellowed, sounding like he’d practiced the words in front of a mirror.