Strong As Steel

by Jon Land

  Almost killed by one rope, only to be saved by another.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley clambered down the big araguaney tree, dropping out of its protective canopy for the thinner brush on the ground fifty feet below. He knew this to be the country’s national tree, known for its resilience and lush appearance, especially after the annual rainy season. They normally didn’t grow to be this tall, and his original recon of the area had counted its presence as a fine omen.

  Climbing to his planned perch had been smooth and easy. The descent, on the other hand, made with his right arm stiff and numb, became a harrowing exercise that again brought him face-to-face with his age and mortality. Anyone who has used a sniper rifle in combat, forced to endure long stretches deployed in a single position, is no stranger to cramping. But that cramping had never lasted this long before, his right arm dangling heavy and useless when he finally reached the ground.

  Rifle slung over his shoulder and right arm stiff by his side, Cort Wesley found the wooded trail that led to the pickup point. He heard the rattle of big truck engines tearing forward, reinforcements called in by desperate reports emanating from the stockade grounds. He couldn’t yet see them through the foliage, but listening to their engines become louder left him backpedaling with a digital detonator in hand, working his left thumb, instead of his right, over a digital red button on the screen and touching it the same way he would to enter a digit on his cell phone. A moment’s hesitation followed and then …

  Boom!

  … as the explosives he’d laid at strategic intervals just under the dirt roadbed erupted, one after the other, to disable the convoy. The rendezvous point where the Black Hawk would be waiting lay in a clearing a quarter mile away, an easy trek from here, with pursuit cut off from the rear.

  Cort Wesley brought his right arm across his body with his left and propped his right hand against his belt, letting himself think of getting back home to his sons.

  PART TWO

  Desperately seeking to interest a hide-bound ordnance department in his revolving pistol, Samuel Colt approached [Samuel] Walker for an endorsement. Responding enthusiastically, the captain described how a handful of Rangers armed with the Paterson Colt had bested five times their number of Comanches at Walker Creek in 1844.… “With improvements,” Walker asserted, “I think they can be rendered the most perfect weapon in the World for light mounted troops.”

  —Robert M. Utley, Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers Oxford University Press, 2002

  7

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  “How’s your day going, Ranger?” Captain D. W. Tepper asked Caitlin, closing behind him the door to the empty office suite in which she’d been placed.

  “About the same as yours, I imagine,” she said, rising from the rolling desk chair that was the suite’s lone piece of furniture. “Better than Bub McNelly’s, in any event,” she added sadly.

  “Any relation?”

  “He sure acted like it in the end. He saved my life, Captain.”

  “Well,” Tepper said, taking off his Stetson to rub at the bare patches of scalp with the tips of his fingers, which were stained by cigarettes, “I’d like to know how a simple warrant service ended in a shooting war.”

  “This one wasn’t on me, Captain. Wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “And now we got thirteen civilians and one police officer dead. You figure McNelly knew something he kept from you?”

  Caitlin shook her head. “If he had any reason to suspect violence, he would’ve wanted more than a single Texas Ranger as backup.”

  Tepper pulled a fresh pack of Marlboro Reds from an inside jacket pocket and peeled back the plastic. He looked back toward Caitlin before tapping the first cigarette out.

  “This is neutral territory,” said the commander of Texas Ranger Company G, “so don’t even think of trying to stop me.”

  “The building has a no-smoking policy, Captain.”

  “That they do,” Tepper nodded, “but they also have a no-killing-civilians-on-the-premises policy. So I guess it’s a day for breaking the rules.”

  Four hours after the shooting had ended, Caitlin was still at the now completely evacuated Bank of America Plaza. A combination of federal and local authorities, their names and agencies lost in a blur, had stuck her in this stray desk chair in an empty office suite on a separate floor, where she’d answered the same questions repeatedly. Reciting over and over again the events that had followed the first shots fired inside Communications Technology Providers made them no easier to bear, given the fate of Captain Bub McNelly.

  He’d been pronounced dead on the scene, his body chewed up and spit out by the assault rifle fire that had poured into him. His legendary ancestral namesake had probably been in more than a hundred gunfights and had survived them all, while Captain Bub had perished in his very first, likely saving Caitlin’s life in the process.

  Caitlin knew military training when she saw it, and the four men she’d killed in the CTP offices upstairs clearly qualified there, meaning somebody had hired them to wipe out the workers of an information technology company. That seemed like going after a mosquito with a Magnum, which made no sense, until she considered the possibility that the timing, given the pending warrant service, was no coincidence.

  “You want to tell me what the Criminal Investigations Division was going after CTP for?”

  “Would if I could, Ranger,” Tepper said, readying a lighter he flashed before Caitlin. “Just bought this, too, so it’s still got a flint.”

  “For now,” said Caitlin, a light glimmer flashing in her eyes.

  “You wanna tell me who sends four gunmen straight out of central casting to take out a bunch of nerds who live on pizza and Red Bull?”

  “Been asking myself that for the past four hours. It would help if we took a closer look at that warrant and then spoke to McNelly’s superiors at CID.”

  “Already did that,” Tepper told her, through the smoke wafting between them. “They told me to eat shit. Figure of speech.” Tepper looked down, then up again. “I’ve known Bub McNelly since before I was a Ranger. Man had no business in a gunfight.”

  “So I told him. He didn’t want people to know he was descended from a famous man-killing Texas Ranger. Didn’t want his bar set that high.”

  “Or low, depending on your perspective.”

  Caitlin met his gaze. “He saved my life, D.W. We have to make sure that comes to something. What are the chances of Young Roger getting a look at whatever’s on all those computers?” Caitlin asked, referring to the genius who was the Rangers’ go-to guy on all things technology.

  “Since it was Rangers serving the warrant, I was thinking of taking possession of all the machines for safekeeping.”

  “That’s sure to piss off whoever was behind getting it written, Captain.”

  “That would be me,” said a voice from the doorway.

  8

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  “That’s no way to treat an old friend,” said the man Caitlin knew only as “Jones,” who stopped just short of the light pouring through the windows, more comfortable in the shadows.

  “I should have figured,” she said, shaking her head. “Makes clear why I was asked to come along for the ride.”

  “Serve a simple search warrant,” Jones acknowledged, nodding.

  “If it were that simple, you wouldn’t have needed me.”

  “I wanted to make sure it got done right.”

  “And look how that turned out. What was this Communications Technology Providers up to that left you playing me as a card, Jones?”

  “Long story.”

  “It always is.” Caitlin turned her attention back to D. W. Tepper. “Hey, Captain, do I have your permission to shoot this asshole?”

  “Looking to break your own daily shooting record, Ranger?” Jones smirked.

  “With you, it’d be a mercy killing.”

  Caitlin looked toward Tepper again and noti
ced that his attention was riveted on either an email or a text message that had just come in on his phone, announced with a typically annoying chime. She’d taught him to silence the sound, but he’d switched it back on after missing too many important messages.

  “Captain?”

  “What?” he asked absently, without looking up.

  “Something important there?”

  He lifted his eyes from the screen. “It may come as a surprise to you, Ranger, but life does go on in Texas, even when you’re not the center of it.”

  “Is it something about Cort Wesley?” she asked, suddenly fearing the worst about his sudden trip to Venezuela at the request of none other than Jones.

  “He’s good to go,” Jones said, when Tepper’s attention was claimed anew by whatever his cell phone was displaying. “Paz, too. Heading back home as we speak.”

  His mind still elsewhere, Tepper started for the door, as if the deaths of thirteen IT specialists and their four killers paled by comparison with something else.

  “Captain?”

  He swung back toward her, just short of the door. “Life goes on in Texas, even when you’re not the center of it.”

  “You already said that.”

  “Maybe I figured you weren’t listening, like always.”

  Caitlin could tell Tepper wasn’t just distracted but also suddenly anxious, even unsettled—rare for him, when it wasn’t her doing the unsettling. He stopped even with Jones on his way to the door.

  “Since this is your show, I don’t believe I’m needed here.” Tepper worked the knob but stopped short of exiting. “I’d leave the door open, if I were you, so somebody’ll hear your screams if things go bad.”

  “They already did,” Jones said to Tepper, waiting for him to take his leave. Then he closed the door and looked back at Caitlin.

  “I had no idea anything like this was going to happen, Ranger.”

  “You never do, Jones, but it always does. And what are you doing here, anyway? What’s Homeland’s stake in this? Or is that classified?”

  “Everything I do is classified. But let me put it this way: I’m here because CTP worked for me. Those poor bastards who got massacred upstairs were on my payroll.”

  9

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  Caitlin couldn’t say exactly what Jones did for Homeland Security, especially these days, and she doubted that anybody else could, either. He operated in the muck, among the dregs of society who were plotting to harm the country from the inside. Caitlin doubted he’d ever written a report or detailed the specifics of his operations in any way. He lived in the dark, calling on the likes of Guillermo Paz and the colonel’s henchmen to deal with matters always out of view of the light. When those matters brought him to Texas, which seemed to be every other day, he’d seek out Caitlin the way he might a former classmate.

  She’d first met him when his name was still Smith and he was attached to the American embassy in Bahrain. Enough of a relationship formed for the two of them to have remained in contact and to have actually worked together on several more occasions. Sometimes Jones surprised her, but mostly he could be relied on to live down to Caitlin’s expectations.

  The empty office suite’s dull lighting kept Jones’s face cloaked in the shadows where he was most comfortable. Caitlin tried to remember the color of his eyes but couldn’t, as if he’d been trained to never look at anyone long enough for anything to register. He was wearing a sport jacket over a button-down shirt and pressed trousers, making him seem like a high school teacher. He’d even let his hair grow out a bit, no longer fancying the tightly cropped, military-style haircut that had been one of his signatures for as long as she’d known him.

  Caitlin couldn’t say she was surprised that Communications Technology Providers was a Homeland-slash-Jones contractor. He operated so far beneath the radar as to sometimes need a backhoe to dig back to the surface.

  “You mean Homeland’s payroll,” she said to him.

  “So to speak,” Jones acknowledged, grudgingly.

  “Why do I think communications technologies has little to do with CTP’s actual job description?”

  “Because it’s got nothing to do with it. CTP is a private intelligence-gathering outfit.”

  Caitlin ran that through her mind. “You want to tell me what that means exactly, Jones?”

  “You think governments are the only ones who need a daily dose of intel? You know how many proxy wars American mercenaries are fighting right now around the world? You have any idea how many conglomerates need to know the threat levels where they’re building or expanding operations? When an oil company wants to do some digging, or some pharmaceutical outfit wants to build a new plant in a Third World country where they can pay workers pennies, who are they going to call to find out who’s who and what’s what?”

  “I’m guessing not Ghostbusters.”

  Jones nodded, as if he actually appreciated her quip. “You’re not too far off. CTP was the kind of company where you went to help stage zero-footprint operations.”

  “I’d ask you to repeat that term, but I know I still wouldn’t understand it.”

  “Pretty much means what it says, Ranger. ‘Zero footprint’ means no trace back, allows for plausible deniability if things don’t go as planned or there’s a mission breach somewhere along the way.”

  Caitlin felt herself nodding. “So CTP was providing the intel for work like the kind Paz and his men do for you.”

  Jones flashed that trademark smirk that made Caitlin want to take a hammer to his mouth. “What work would that be?”

  “I get the point. What I don’t get is why you wanted a warrant served on this private intel firm giving you that zero footprint, and why you arranged for me to serve it.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Not to me.”

  “CTP was up to something.”

  Now it was Caitlin who couldn’t confine her smirk. “Of course they were; they worked for you.”

  “I’m talking something else, something under my radar, which comes as close as can be to enemy action.”

  “You think bad guys hired them for some nefarious purpose?”

  Jones started to smirk again, but seemed to catch himself. “Nice word—‘nefarious.’”

  “Guess you inspire my vocabulary, Jones.”

  “And, yes, I think bad guys hired Communications Technology Providers for the kind of money that made it worth keeping quiet. I know this may come as a shock to you, Ranger, but I’m discreet about who I choose to do business with. Homeland giving me a free hand means not getting it chopped off. And if things went bad at CTP on my watch, they’d go bad for me, too.”

  “So the warrant was about learning what it was they were hiding from you.”

  Jones nodded. “And whether it might somehow be connected to any intelligence they’d assembled for Homeland. If that were the case, I figured they might put up the kind of fuss you, better than anyone, could diffuse.”

  “I’m going to take that as a compliment, even though you dropped me into a meat grinder.”

  “But not the meat grinder I was expecting.”

  Caitlin let the air settle between them. She thought she felt a breeze, but no windows were open. Then she tried to get a fix on Jones’s shifty eyes, but they kept avoiding her gaze.

  “You can see what I’m getting at here, Ranger.”

  “Not really.”

  “Whatever CTP was doing on the down low is what got them all killed.”

  “You thinking whoever sent those shooters got wind of the warrant?”

  “Makes this their unlucky day—perpetrating a mass murder at the same time America’s greatest gunfighter happened to be in the building.”

  “And who would that be?”

  Jones let that question hang in the air between them. “This is my operation now, Ranger. My people are en route to confiscate every hard drive, soft drive, thumb drive, and flash drive from CTP’s office. And that warrant you were a
bout to serve gives us permission to work the Cloud as well.”

  “How do you serve a warrant on the Cloud, Jones?” Caitlin asked him, wondering if the Ranger forensics teams could grab the computers before Jones’s team arrived.

  “Good question. I’ll let you know when somebody explains the answer to me. In the meantime, you’re free to go.”

  “There’s a line of officials still waiting to talk to me.”

  “Not anymore. Like I said, it’s my show now. That means I don’t need to hear any more from you at this point than I already know. Hope you don’t mind me keeping mention of your name out of this?”

  “You can do that?”

  “I’m Homeland Security, Ranger. That gives me license to take any names I want, kick any ass I want, part the seas, raise the dead, and stop the clocks.”

  “You forgot ‘walk on water,’” Caitlin told him.

  Jones glanced toward the now closed door through which D. W. Tepper had exited without explanation a few minutes before. “Since when does your captain leave an active crime scene?”

  “I’m guessing since he had somewhere more important he needed to be.”

  “Any idea where?” Jones asked her, a typical ring of suspicion lacing his voice.

  “No, but I intend to find out.”

  10

  SONORA, TEXAS

  Caitlin steered her SUV toward the portable construction lights illuminating a parched, desert-like swath of land about a two-hour drive from San Antonio, just off the 110 freeway. D. W. Tepper wasn’t answering his cell phone, so she had called Ranger Company G headquarters to find where he’d gone in such a rush from the aftermath of the multiple shooting in Dallas.

  “I’m not supposed to tell anyone where he is,” reported a retired Ranger named Revins, who served as dispatcher on a part-time basis. “He told me that especially meant you.”

  “I’ll never tell,” she promised.