by Jon Land
The Ranger glimpsed a single rider who seemed to shed the flames and surge sideways off the trail, chancing a steep dive into an adjacent valley. He knew it was Felipe Wong even before the next wave of coarse smoke cleared to show that the man was nowhere in sight.
* * *
William Ray had insisted that Pancho Villa ride on without him, but there he was, when it was over, waiting with his men near the scab tree where the Ranger had hitched Jessabelle.
“Thought I told you to get riding.”
“I wanted to see this to the end, Ranger,” Villa told him, glancing at his men. “We decided to hang around in case you needed our help.”
“And now you got yourself a country to save. Let me tell you, amigo, from my experience, you got a ton of work ahead of you.”
Villa joined his men on horseback. “You may have dealt Felipe Wong a setback, Ranger,” Villa said, clearly aware that Wong had managed to survive, “but he’s got more gold mines, more poppy fields, and more Gatling guns, too.”
“That’s what Mexico needs you for,” William Ray told Pancho Villa. “To make the likes of Felipe Wong and his compadres realize their business isn’t welcome.”
Villa grinned, turning to look toward the north. “Be careful what you wish for; they may end up in Texas instead.”
William Ray looked back toward the smoke rising over the trail where he’d set his trap for Wong and blocking a measure of the sun, now burning high in the sky. “You happen to cross paths with him again, Pancho, you tell him I’ll be waiting.”
105
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“Wong lived to become Mexico’s biggest drug dealer of the time,” Jones finished. “As for Pancho Villa, I guess you could say ‘Better late than never’ when it came to his revolution.… Ranger?” he prompted, when Caitlin remained stoic and silent.
She rose from the chaise next to his, trying to stretch out the tightness that had settled in during Jones’s completion of the story. Her head felt like someone was trying to drill a hole in it from the inside out. Maybe she should have waited until all this was over and done to make the switch to aspirin. What difference would a couple more days make, anyway? Her hand dipped into her pocket and closed around the familiar shape of the pill bottle, but that’s where the bottle stayed.
“I need those plans for this underground railroad,” she told Jones, hoping the pain would subside on its own.
Jones looked up at her in the shade, the sun having moved on. “You don’t find the way things finished for William Ray Strong more than a little ironic, under the circumstances?”
“Why, because he burned a poppy field?”
“Because in the long run it didn’t matter, didn’t even make a dent in what was going down in Mexico even then. You really think you can win the war on drugs by taking down some corrupt politicians?”
“I’m not trying to win the whole war, Jones, just this particular battle. Eckles and company made the mistake of basing their operation in Texas. Would it bother you if I said I was just doing my job?”
“Not at all, except for the fact that it’s bullshit. You’re doing this for the same reason you always do: because it’s personal. Because drugs came close to hitting the Off switch on a boy you’ve spent the last ten years mothering. Even if those drugs in particular didn’t come from that underground plant, it’s a target you can hit, and I can’t remember the last time you missed the bull’s-eye, a gunfighter through and through.”
“My ancestors were the gunfighters, Jones.”
“Sure they were. Gunfighters for their times, just like you are for yours. And now you’ve got yourself a brand-new target.”
“That’s why I need those plans, so I know what I’m shooting at.”
Jones looked down, sighing deeply. “I can get you the plans for the underground railroad, Ranger, but I can’t get you an army, and you can’t rely on me to call in the cavalry this time.”
“You haven’t met my sister, Jones.”
Jones narrowed his gaze. “If this were the Old West, you and Masters would have your faces on wanted posters, with bounty hunters on your ass instead of federal marshals.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t turned me in for the reward money, by the way.”
“Don’t tempt me, Ranger. I could use the cash in case Homeland finally figures out they’re still paying for this place.”
Caitlin met his stare, suddenly having trouble sizing him up. “You want to come along for the ride, we’ll save you a seat, Jones.”
He took his love handles in either hand and shook them. “I think I better sit this one out, Ranger.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Just remember who was there for you when it counted, once you put these assholes out of business—or in the ground, whatever comes first.”
“Get ready to head back to Washington, Jones. Homeland Security will be calling before you know it.”
106
TEXAS-MEXICO BORDER
“How many people can you kill with this shit?” Yarek Bone asked Roland Fass, inside the underground facility’s cavernous storage chamber.
“One pill does the trick,” Fass told him, gazing around at the endless stacks of shiny steel drums. “Do the math.”
Bone joined his gaze. “How about I take one of these barrels instead of my fee?”
“You’ve already been paid.”
“True enough, but my men haven’t. We haven’t discussed the fee for their services.”
On Fass’s instructions, Bone had brought with him a dozen more members of his Fallen Timbers group to provide security until the massive shipment of the contaminated pills was safely on its way.
“Since we’re handling the loading chores, which I’ve got to figure brings its own share of danger,” Bone continued, “one of those barrels is the least you can do. Come on, Roland. It’ll save me the trouble of stealing it. My people have a lot of enemies whose names belong on those pills.”
“If I don’t see you do it, nobody will ever know.”
Bone smiled. “You know, you’re not as big of an asshole as I thought you were.”
The barrels needed to be loaded onto pallets and then moved a hundred yards to the tunnel, where a fully refurbished diesel-powered train was now operational again after all these years. From there, it would be a straight shot to the north, where the tracks terminated and the steel drums full of deadly tablets would be loaded onto waiting trucks. The instructions came down from Senator Eckles himself, the goal being to separate the contaminated lots from the rest of the batch while at the same time getting those two hundred million-plus deadly tablets someplace where Caitlin Strong and company would never find them. There was too much at stake now, Eckles knew, to leave them in place, even with the Texas Rangers removed from the scene for a while.
With everything running smoothly and on schedule, Yarek Bone and his Fallen Timbers fighters guarding against any potential attack or incursion, Fass called the senator to give him a progress report.
* * *
Eckles ended the call while Fass was still talking, having heard enough. He couldn’t stop picturing the chaos that dropping a hundred million or so pills on the streets of Moscow or Beijing would wreak, a society collapsing right in front of his eyes. And that was just for starters. Eckles looked forward to watching countries that were worth shit to him going to shit right before his eyes.
The pills contaminated with cyanide almost made him forget the remainder of the current stockpile, which ultimately would lead to upward of five billion dollars in profit. That money would help fund the manufacture of more pills, both standard opioids to put on the streets and the toxic ones reserved for America’s worst enemies, once they figured out how to replicate the process that had thus far developed all on its own.
Eckles’s group had certainly dodged a bullet here. He not only had arranged for transport of the contaminated pills for safekeeping but also had eliminated the Texas Rangers and their associates fro
m the equation. Maybe he’d invite Caitlin Strong to the White House, once he was president, and serve up a good old-fashioned Texas barbecue in honor of the Texas Rangers—for their failure to stop him from becoming the most powerful person in a world he had helped remake.
Wouldn’t that be something?
107
TEXAS-MEXICO BORDER
The map Jones came up with for the underground railroad as it had been constructed beneath Texas contained the structure’s original schematics, looking more like architectural or topographical layouts. And, sure enough, one of the massive command and control centers lay just a half mile to the south of Camino Pass, practically straddling the border. Caitlin had no corresponding map of Felipe Wong’s gold mines from back in her great-grandfather’s day, but the seam of ore that stitched its way along the border would’ve carried almost directly over the facility that the likes of Lee Eckles had turned into a drug factory.
According to the plans, one of the access points for that particular command and control center was located inside the mouth of a camouflaged man-made cave. After plenty of rummaging about, which left her wondering how accurate the map really was, she found a submarine-style hatch built into a set of carved earthen walls. The hatch opened onto a long, steep set of stairs that may have descended to hell itself for all she knew.
“Once we get down in the tunnel, Colonel, Nola and me will smoke them your way,” Caitlin told Paz. “Leave you and your men to take out the trash.”
Paz looked toward the men on either side of him, former members of the Venezuelan secret police, who’d stayed with him to work freelance, along with the two he’d left to guard Luke Torres.
Then his expression tightened. “I look forward to meeting Yarek Bone, Ranger. I look forward to meeting any man who shoots children in the back.”
Caitlin wondered what Bone, a man who had never met anyone even close to his match, would make of Colonel Guillermo Paz.
“You and your men follow us down and base yourselves here. Shoot anything we flush back your way, Colonel.” Then she moved to her ear the high-tech, military-grade prototype walkie-talkie that Jones had provided. “We’re headed down, Cort Wesley. Stand by.”
* * *
“We’re close,” Doyle Lodge said.
Cort Wesley was just pocketing the fancy walkie-talkie after talking to Caitlin, who was around a half mile away and about to descend into one of the tunnels that made up the underground railroad.
“I can feel it,” Lodge continued.
The old man been a demolition specialist during the Korean War, assigned to the Fifty-Ninth Bridge Company Combat Engineers. His job had been to build floating bridges for US and South Korean troops to cross the Imjin River, and then to blow the bridges up before the enemy could follow. Once deployed, his team would be transported into combat-infested areas ahead of the infantry and had to seek cover over and over again when enemy shelling drew close. The man, who went on to become a Texas Ranger, had used a crude form of plastic explosive that looked and felt just like Silly Putty, which he’d wire under the corners of the bridge, sometimes with enemy troops within earshot or even sight. Cort Wesley appreciated the fact that this meant Doyle Lodge was the last man across, after he’d set the explosives and rigged the detonator.
And that was what Lodge was doing now, planting and layering explosives with as much expertise as any Cort Wesley had seen during his own military service. In this case, that meant packing the plastic explosives in such a way that the unstable ground would collapse downward, forever entombing the drug manufacturing plant directly beneath them.
“How’d you get the explosives?” he asked the old man, who was toiling away without a drop of sweat showing anywhere on his face.
“They’re mine, son.”
“Come again?”
“Confiscated them from some drug lord and, wouldn’t you know it, I forgot to turn them in.”
“So how old does that make the stuff?”
“I don’t rightly remember. A few years, ten maybe.”
“You’ve been storing this plastique for ten years?”
“It was the tail end of my career. I was already old. Better make that twelve years, as a matter of fact.”
“This stuff better not come with an expiration date, Doyle.”
The old man looked up from his labors, finally dabbing the first specks of sweat from his brow. “No more than I do, son.”
108
TEXAS-MEXICO BORDER
The stairs ended in a tunnel that reminded Caitlin of something out of a science fiction movie. All sleek and shiny, dominated by a set of barely worn train tracks showing no rust. She pictured them curving beneath Ben Hargraves’s hometown to the west, where he’d heard the train’s grinding howl as a young boy—a ghost that was very much alive, as it turned out.
That town had been wiped out by a flash flood from the Rio Grande a few years back. Camino Pass, meanwhile, was located a mere half mile or so to the northeast, likely within spitting distance of the remnants of a host of Felipe Wong’s gold mines. Caitlin imagined all that cubic tonnage of hydrogen cyanide gas from those mines leaching into the aquifer supplying Camino Pass its water. She figured that all the construction work required to get Lee Eckles’s underground drug lab up and running must have somehow punched a hole in the earth’s crust, releasing the hydrogen cyanide gas, which ultimately made its way into the pipes serving Camino Pass. And when the town’s pipes went dry, that gas had seeped up and emerged through the water faucets to wipe out the entire town—except for Lennox Scully and Andrew Ortega.
There was another wild card here, though: the effects of the cyanide gas. Jones had told Caitlin he was after the means by which the cyanide had wiped out an entire town, in order to weaponize it. Now, she figured, he must suspect that someone associated with Lee Eckles had already figured that out and that the men she was after had found themselves with a weapon of mass destruction on their hands. Not a good thing for a cadre that had already shown no compunction about killing Americans with an endless flow of drugs. That meant the stakes were even higher than before—and they had been pretty high to begin with.
“How many you figure we’ll be facing, sis?” Nola wondered.
“You know Yarek Bone better than I do. Why don’t you tell me?”
“Those Fallen Timbers brutes follow him around like puppies.”
“In other words, Bone has an army at his disposal. You just answered your own question, Nola,” Caitlin told her.
“The more, the merrier,” her half sister came back, unruffled by the prospects.
* * *
The process of loading the first lot of steel drums onto the train cars was coming to an end. Four hours into the job, six entire freight cars, hitched to old diesel engines on either side, had been packed with steel drums containing the opioid pills contaminated with cyanide. That left another half to go, which would leave Fass in the company of these whack job Native American terrorists far longer than he would have preferred.
“We’re just about ready to roll with the first batch, kempai,” Bone said, suddenly by his side and towering over him.
“Kempai?”
“It’s a Shoshone word.”
“I thought you were Comanche.”
“I am, but my mother was Shoshone and the language is similar.” Bone turned his gaze on the ancient steel behemoth, its old idling engine snorting up a storm. “How far we have to go before we unload?”
“End of the line, fifty miles to the north. The trucks will be waiting.”
“They better be,” Bone said, glaring down at Fass.
“What’s kempai mean, by the way?”
“‘Gopher.’”
* * *
“What now?” Doyle Lodge asked Cort Wesley, having finished planting in the ground two hundred pounds of plastic explosives he’d been storing for safekeeping for some unknown period.
“We wait for Caitlin’s signal.”
“Then we scram
ble some eggs?”
“So to speak.”
“Means killing a bunch of folks.”
“Something neither of us is a stranger to.”
The old man’s gaze turned distant, as if the exertion and the heat had taken their toll on him. “In Korea, sometimes I imagined I could hear the boots of enemy soldiers clacking against the bridge plate sounding directly over me. Sometimes they drew so close I could almost look them in the eye. Sometimes their gunfire sounded as the bridge blew. I can’t even count how many times Chinese troops were shooting at us while we wired floating bridges to blow across the Imjin River. I remember a friend of mine named Ernie falling under one of our heavy transport vehicles when it overturned, his legs crushed as bullets whizzed around him with a bunch of us trying to pull him free. We managed to save his life and he was medevacked out. It was the last time I saw him, though I heard later he’d gotten hooked on pain meds and never really got off them.” His gaze sharpened again and retrained on Cort Wesley. “He was the first man I ever knew who became an addict—just a kid, really, like my boy and yours.”
Cort Wesley considered the contents of the mammoth facility he could only hope was directly beneath them. “We pull this off, Doyle, we’ll be keeping an awful lot of kids from following him.”
* * *
Guillermo Paz wished he could have stopped off at San Antonio’s famed San Fernando Cathedral, where Father Boylston had been headquartered, and seek the priest’s blessing for this mission, as he’d done with so many others. For a time, after his priest’s death, Paz had spoken out loud to him, but Paz abandoned the practice when Father Boylston showed no signs he was listening. Since the day that Paz’s eyes had met Caitlin Strong’s and his transformation had begun, he genuinely believed the feats he found himself performing on her behalf were the result of some cosmic bargain he’d made with God, with his priest serving as the conduit. Now, with that connection broken, he feared that God would no longer be watching over him to guide his efforts, no matter how holy this mission might be.