Strong As Steel

by Jon Land

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  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.

  —MARGE PIERCY

  PROLOGUE

  O God, whose end is justice,

  Whose strength is all our stay,

  Be near and bless my mission

  As I go forth today.

  Let wisdom guide my actions,

  Let courage fill my heart,

  And help me, Lord, in every hour

  To do a Ranger’s part.

  Protect when danger threatens,

  Sustain when trails are rough,

  Help me to keep my standard high

  And smile at each rebuff.

  When night comes down upon me,

  I pray thee, Lord, be nigh,

  Whither on lonely scout

  Or camped under the Texas sky.

  Keep me, O God, in life

  And when my days shall end,

  Forgive my sins and take me in,

  For Jesus’ sake, Amen.

  —Texas Ranger’s Prayer Captain Pierre Bernard Hill Chaplin of the Texas Rangers

  PORT OF ORDU, TURKEY; 1959

  The liman reisi of the Port of Ordu watched the freighter crest the currents, alerted to its presence by the captain of a passing ship who reported it seemed to be floundering and he couldn’t see anyone at their posts on the bridge. As far as the liman risi could tell, the freighter was gaining speed instead of reducing it as the ship approached its apportioned pier. He stopped short of sounding the alarm because he recognized her as the Dolunay, captained by Aykan Talu, one of the most experienced in the region. No doubt Talu had yet to slow his engines to better negotiate the unusually stiff currents a larger freighter would have sliced through in effortless fashion.

  When he was still picking up speed a quarter mile out, though, the harbormaster blew the klaxon three times, paused, and then blew it three more. Within seconds, a pair of Turkish Coastal Patrol boats were speeding into this channel of the Black Sea, drawing close enough to the Dolunay to signal her to hold back and throttle down. Not exactly routine, but not necessarily cause for alarm, either, with an experienced captain like Talu at the helm.

  Until the first patrol boat to reach the Dolunay tried to hail the ship.

  “She’s not responding,” the captain reported, struggling not to sound panicked. “Repeat, she’s not responding. No sight of crew members on deck, no evidence of—”

  The captain’s voice cut off so abruptly that the harbormaster thought it must be some kind of malfunction.

  “Coastal Patrol,” he said into his walkie-talkie, held now in a hand that had gone clammy, “please repeat. I say again, Coastal Patrol, please repeat.”

  But there was nothing to repeat. What the liman reisi of the Port of Ordu heard next from the captain were words spoken for the first time.

  “I see bodies! The deck is littered with them!”

  The harbormaster wanted to ask Coastal Patrol to repeat that, but there was no need. He’d heard the words clearly enough, and there was no mistaking their portent.

  “She’s not responding, not slowing! They must all be dead, the entire crew. We need a tug! We need a tug fast!”

  But Coastal Patrol knew as well as the harbormaster that no tug could reach the Dolunay in time to turn her, not when she was this close to port and, actually, was gaining speed.

  “Do you copy?” the captain demanded through the walkie-talkie’s speaker. “Repeat, do you copy?”

  The liman reisi of the Port of Ordu did, but he had never felt more helpless, enduring the next agonizing moments before the freighter and all her tonnage slammed into the pier that had been evacuated by his advance warning. The old floating wood system folded up like playing cards, spewing shards and splinters in all directions. Momentum swung the Dolunay to starboard, obliterating rows of smaller fishing vessels that had just returned from the sea and showering the docks with their catch.

  The repeated impacts seemed on the verge of toppling the freighter over, but she had maintained ballast to keep her upright. The harbormaster watched with breath held as something else pitched over the Dolunay’s decks to join the dead fish: bodies, at least a dozen of them, dropping like anchors into the sea and shoved toward land by the ship’s forward momentum.

  The liman reisi had heard of such seafaring legends before, ghost ships roaming the seas and somehow finding themselves back to some port. But this was no legend, no ghost ship.

  The Dolunay barreled on, its nose plowing through both the cushioned and the concrete safety barriers before claiming the land for its own.

  “The entire crew is dead!” the harbormaster heard in his head, unsure whether it was through the walkie-talkie or the product of his own terrified thoughts. “They’re all dead!”

  MEXICO CITY, MEXICO; 1964

  It sounded like firecrackers.

  Halfway up the church aisle, beneath the dim spill of light, that’s what the little girl thought.

  Firecrackers …

  It was a wedding, after all, her own parents’ wedding. A time to celebrate, and people celebrated with firecrackers all the time. The little girl kept right on walking, holding tight to the cushion bearing the ring that her father would place over her mother’s finger, just as they’d rehearsed. He imagined this was the way it was for all parents who didn’t get married until they had a child, so that child could tote the ring up the aisle.

  The little girl clung to the small cushion with all her strength to avoid dropping it; her father would be very disappointed if she dropped it, and Alejandro Diaz was a very scary man when he was angry. But she had the sense that many of the men who worked for her father were scared of him all the time, not knowing Alejandro Diaz as the man still fond of singing his daughter to sleep at night.

  So, even when the well-dressed lot on both sides of the center aisle began to scream and run, even when some of them began to fall and the firecrackers continued to sound, the little girl kept trudging up the aisle, her face squeezed tight in determination.

  Look at me, Papa! Look at me!

  But Alejandro Diaz couldn’t look at her, because he was looking at her mother, who was clutched in his arms, something they hadn’t rehearsed. Her mother’s brilliant white dress was speckled with red.

  Blood. Leaking out of her right there on the church altar, beneath Jesus Himself suspended from a cross.

  The little girl knew Jesus was a good man, the son of Go
d Himself, so how could He let something like this happen?

  She was still tightly clutching the cushion, a fluffy white pillow really, when the next crackle of firecrackers blew red, chalky mist out of her father’s ear. Alejandro Diaz jerked to that side, as if yanked by a rope. Then his head snapped sideways at the next crackle, which blew him backward through a funnel of his own blood.

  The little girl thought she’d dropped the cushion and let the ring fall, but when she looked down she was still holding it before her, as people she didn’t know rushed up and down the aisle screaming.

  Crack, crack, crack!

  Their motions seemed to reflect the sound, almost like they were dancing to its staccato music. They had rehearsed the dancing part, too, with the little girl’s shiny shoes perched atop her father’s boots. But she wasn’t going to be dancing with him now.

  She wasn’t going to be dancing with him ever.

  The firecrackers continued to pop, pop, pop. The wedding guests continued to run and scream and bleed, a few coughing blood from their mouths, while others were doubled over in the pews, looking like they were sleeping. The little girl stood suspended amid the carnage, as if she weren’t there at all.

  Her mother wasn’t moving.

  Her father wasn’t moving.

  The little girl thought he was looking at her, and she wanted to hold up the cushion for him to see that she hadn’t dropped the ring. But his eyes stayed open, didn’t close, just beneath the feet of the man named Jesus Christ, son of God, who looked down upon the scene with despair stretched over His features.

  The little girl wanted to scream, wanted to run, wanted to cry. But instead she stood in the aisle beneath the altar, with her gaze fastened on those sad eyes of Jesus Christ, who looked as weak and helpless as she was.

  FORT STOCKTON, TEXAS; 1994

  Jim Strong climbed out of his truck, next to the open freight car that had been secured by local sheriff’s deputies, his Texas Ranger badge gleaming in the spill of the full moon.

  “Never seen nothing like this, Ranger,” Sheriff Arthur “Dabs” Dabney said over the wind whistling through the West Texas scrub brush, as he approached Jim. “Not now, not ever.”

  Jim had once heard that Dabney’s stomach could block out the moon, and the longtime Pecos County sheriff liked to boast that he’d lost five hundred pounds—fifty pounds, ten different times. From the looks of things, Dabney had abandoned even the pretext of that effort. His gait was more a lumber as he strode across a parched patch of land toward Jim.

  “Whole crew, is it?”

  Dabney took off his hat and put it right back on. “All five. Conductor, engineer, two brakemen, and a fireman. All murdered and dumped off the train like they were bags of laundry. I got what’s left of ’em covered up on the other side of the train, along with a pair of bonus bodies.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “A couple of men we can’t identify. Mexicans, by all accounts—cartel, from their scars and tats. Both wearing guns they never got to use.”

  “Show me.”

  * * *

  Dabney’s assessment was pretty much spot-on, at least in stating the obvious. And he was just smart enough to let his evaluation stop there.

  Jim circled around the bodies, letting his mind ponder the rest. Whoever had killed the crew had been lying in wait and had made sure to position the bodies so they’d be out of view of anyone passing by the station. “Professional” was the word that came to mind next. The way the bodies of the train crew had fallen, it looked to Jim as if they’d been lined up before being summarily executed. As for the Mexicans, packing shiny pearl-handled .45-caliber pistols, their gravel-streaked clothes indicated they’d likely been shot elsewhere and dragged here to join the others.

  “How many shooters you reckon we’re looking at, Ranger?” Dabney asked him.

  “One.”

  “Come again?”

  “Wounds on the crew members are identical, two shots each, both to the head from behind. Angle of the wounds on these last two tell me they’d started to turn, after the first three had been shot.”

  “And the Mexicans?”

  “Both shot twice in the face. He must’ve come up on them fast, before they had a chance to go for their guns.”

  “One guy,” Dabney repeated, shaking his head and scratching at his scalp at the same time. “I can’t wait to see what you make of what I need to show you next, Ranger.”

  * * *

  Jim fell into step behind the Pecos County sheriff, moving toward the one freight car with its sliding door open. Beyond the train and the tracks, the Fort Stockton station comprised a dozen bays outfitted with doors that slid upward like those in garages. Set close to the tracks behind the great steel behemoth to allow for easy loading or unloading. The recent signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, better known as NAFTA, had proven a boon for freight depots like this, the surge in activity leading to a need for additional operating hours and the workers to man them.

  Jim had been informed that this particular train had originated somewhere up north and was supposed to terminate in Chihuahua, Mexico. The manifest listed nothing to load or off-load here in Fort Stockton, no stop at the depot even scheduled.

  “You wanna tell me what’s waiting for us in that car?”

  “Three more bodies, Ranger,” Dabney told him. “But damned if I can figure out what killed them.”

  * * *

  Jim Strong peeled back the tarpaulins the deputies had used to cover the bodies inside the open freight car. The faces looked uniformly flat and even, no pain or emotion showing anywhere. Nor were there any wounds Jim could find—knife, gun, or anything else. Their skulls were all intact, meaning nobody had taken them out with a baseball bat, club, or two-by-four, either. Finding a single dead body in such a state would’ve left Jim curious; finding three left him mystified. And they weren’t Mexicans, suggesting a connection with whomever had killed the train’s crew and two Mexicans.

  “You found them like this?” he asked Dabney. “None of your men touched nothing?”

  “No, sir. We’re not all yokels in these parts, you know. All we did was make sure they’d gone to the great beyond is all, so we’d know whether to call for an ambulance or coroner.”

  “He on the way?”

  “Tied up at a traffic accident on the interstate.”

  “No matter. We got us a medical examiner in San Antonio who’s as good as any. We can arrange to get all ten bodies to him.”

  Dabney ran his gaze over the three clustered about the empty freight car floor. “You got any initial notions, Ranger?”

  Jim followed the sheriff’s gaze back to the bodies. “Looks like they all dropped to the floor of their own volition to take a nap.”

  Needing some air, Jim poked his head out the open freight car door. The train beyond, property of the Kansas City, Mexico, and Orient Railroad, stretched as far as Jim could see to the south and almost that far to the north.

  “You get ahold of the actual freight manifest while I was driving here, Dabs?”

  “What for? The car’s empty. Believe we’re looking at those murderous hobos been killing up a storm. That’s what we’re looking at, if you ask me. Shot up the five members of the crew and then moved on to the Mexicans and these boys.”

  Jim knew Dabney was referring to the Freight Train Riders of America, a loose assemblage of generally nomadic criminals reputed to be responsible for a spate of murders from coast to coast.

  “What did they use to kill them?” Jim asked, glancing toward the trio of bodies again. “Harsh language? Why not shoot them, like the others?”

  Dabney’s only answer was a shrug. Jim moved back to the nearest body and got his mini Maglite out to give it a closer look. Not Mexican, for sure, and, in Jim’s mind, not from Texas, either. The bodies had a strangely uniform look to them, virtual carbon copies. All three of them were dressed in black, wearing tactical pants that were popular among trained professio
nals with or without military service on their résumés. A few years back, Jim had been called to a bar that had been busted up by some mercenaries he proceeded to bust himself. That was as close as he could come to figuring how to describe these three men. The fact that they weren’t armed suggested otherwise, though, especially given the seven bodies stacked on the other side of the train.

  “I don’t think you answered my question, Dabs,” Jim said, looking up from his closer inspection of the nearest body.

  “What question was that, Ranger?”

  “The one about the shipping manifest.”

  Dabney puckered his lips, then blew some breath out through them. “I even put my evidence gloves on before I started flipping pages. Followed official procedure and all that.”

  “Welcome to the twentieth century, Sheriff. Now tell me what you found on those pages.”

  “This is car one-thirty-eight. Empty, as in no cargo.”

  Jim weighed the ramifications of that. He didn’t like being this far from his normal jurisdiction around San Antonio, because it was too far away from his daughter, Caitlin, to suit his taste. She was closing in on fourteen now, too much of her own mind, and growing up so fast that Jim had gotten to wondering when the day would come that he’d blink and she’d be gone. He didn’t want to lose a single minute with her, and he considered himself blessed for all the years he’d been able to leave her in the care of his own father. The legendary Earl Strong had liked nothing better than to regale her with tales of his own days as a Texas Ranger, never sparing a single detail, even when it came soaked in blood. His father was four years gone now, having slipped away during an afternoon nap while Caitlin, fortunately, was at school.

  “Empty, eh?” Jim said to Dabney, and swept the beam of his Maglite across the freight car’s floor. “Tell me what you see, Sheriff.”