Strong As Steel

by Jon Land

  Him.

  The Order.

  Molinari slid along the mission wall, just coming upon a jagged opening carved by time, when he spotted a huge figure dashing through the desert, heading straight for the flames burning out of a pit that might lead to hell itself. At first, he thought it was an illusion, an apparition.

  Then he saw something covered in white clutched beneath the figure’s arm, about the size of—

  Molinari lit out into a dead sprint before even completing that thought, all his plans threatened, the great battle he thought himself to be on the verge of winning yet to be fought.

  * * *

  Paz felt a coldness slice through the blistering heat of the desert, an icicle jabbing at his neck and letting its chill leak downward. He knew pursuit was coming, coming fast, even before he felt the disturbance in the ground at his feet. It was a disruption he couldn’t define or explain but likened to the feeling of trying to traverse a rope bridge only to have someone else step out upon it, behind him, and worsen the wobble.

  He felt that pursuit closing, the bulk of the bone box and the awkwardness of carrying it making it impossible to gather any more speed. In his mind, he saw a man with no face, not even any eyes, nose, or mouth, coming fast in his wake. Saw him even as the gunshots began to ring out behind him.

  * * *

  Half the men who’d climbed the wall to add their guns to the battle, three of the six, had fallen to the onslaught. Two more, whom Cort Wesley hadn’t noticed before, had joined Nola Delgado on the other side, one of them dropping to the torrent of fire as well. Nola glanced at him through the wafting char smoke, her face empty and devoid of any emotion or feeling.

  Initially, they’d managed to hold the gunmen laying siege to the mission at bay, forcing them to advance only in fits and starts. In between, the high-ground fire kept them pinned, pushed them to the ground in the meager cover provided by stray rock formations, boulders, and arroyos carved out of the desert floor.

  But now they were advancing, and advancing fast—faster, the closer they got. Coming within easy range of the—

  The mission wall shook under the impact of the first rocket-propelled grenade, a huge plume of stone and mortar coughed into the air. The next RPG blew a hole straight through the wall on Nola Delgado’s side, sending the last man lending his fire to hers plunging thirty feet. But Nola didn’t so much as waver, never missing a beat as she exchanged a spent magazine for a fresh one.

  For his part, Cort Wesley sighted in on a pair of figures firing the grenade launchers from prone positions on the desert floor. He could barely see them, and, without a scope, two hundred yards with an M4 might as well have been a mile. He’d wielded a sniper rifle plenty often in his time, most recently while leading the rescue of Guillermo Paz from the gallows in Venezuela. But nobody had been firing back at him then, giving him all the time he needed to sight, hold, and shoot.

  Still, from two hundred yards he wouldn’t have to worry about wind or air density or anything like that. Just sight, hold, and shoot.

  Cort Wesley sighted on the figure holding the RPG launcher, who’d propped himself over a slight rise, torso angled over it.

  Then he pawed the trigger.

  Held.

  Fired.

  * * *

  “Get your people out of here, Aidman!” Caitlin told the son of the man her father had met here twenty-five years ago. “Get them out of here now!”

  Where her father had been forced to bluff his attackers with water, she had the benefit of two propane tanks that might actually help her prevail, or at least buy the time Guillermo Paz needed to rid the world of the deadly contents of that ossuary forever.

  * * *

  Molinari fired a burst into the sun, visualizing the bullets exploding from the barrel and moving on a direct course toward the huge figure running through the desert—dead on target, the superheated shells dancing in the air before tumbling in his wake.

  The figure continued running, the limestone box cradled beneath his arm.

  Molinari fired another burst, watched flecks of ground, stone, and gravel coughed into the air not just behind but also in front of the figure, as if his bullets were passing straight through.

  What is this? What is happening?

  * * *

  Paz felt portions of the ground kicked up around him, capturing him briefly in the cloudbursts they created, fissures carved out of the air. He thought he may have felt a few ding his Kevlar body armor, like a thump, thump, thump that made his spine arch as he ran.

  He didn’t fear the bullets, nor the faceless figure firing them. The bullets couldn’t hurt him and neither could the man.

  Paz kept running, not just toward the sun but into it, the shroud of superheated cosmic gases protecting him from the bullets, melting them before they could find his flesh. Soft spits digging divots out of the earth all around him, their hushed ratcheting overcome by the pounding of footsteps in his wake.

  * * *

  It took eight single shots squeezed off one after the other, but misty fountains of blood erupted from the skulls of the men lying prone with rocket launchers angled upward. He saw them twitch, their hold on their weapons lost. Cort Wesley managed the task with his left arm just fine.

  But the damage was already done, the mission’s heavy gates breached, just like those at the Alamo nearly two centuries before.

  Out of ammo, Cort Wesley grabbed a weapon from the grip of one of the dead squatters who’d fought on this wall for the semblance of the home he’d built here. Cort Wesley had aimed it downward, toward the first of the enemy gunmen to surge through the breached gate, when he spotted Nola Delgado, el Barquero, on ground level now, shooting them as they came.

  In that moment she looked just like Caitlin, might have been Caitlin, standing in a shooter’s stance square in the open, impervious to the desperate hail of bullets whizzing past her. It was like watching a crazed dance routine, both horrific and beautiful at the same time, Cort Wesley thought, as he opened up from the wall, adding his fire to hers.

  98

  SPINNAKER FALLS, TEXAS

  Amid the gunfire raging just beyond in the courtyard, Caitlin used the butt of her SIG to knock the spigots off the dual propane tanks loaded in the truck bed. She could see partially buried hoses running from the tanks outward, supplying a modicum of power that had helped make this old mission into a livable place, where many were now dying.

  A pair of those hoses dangled free, Caitlin’s nostrils assaulted by the powerful odor of propane. A drone had crashed nearby, its explosive charge intact. The device, modeled after a traditional grenade except oblong in shape, looked like a black Easter egg. Nothing fancy, just detonation on impact once triggered.

  Caitlin could feel the flow of the gas wafting over the courtyard as her half sister stood like a living statue in the center of it all, shooting nonstop.

  * * *

  Paz could feel the faceless man gaining, closer on his heels now. The coarse smoke rising from the trench fire was thicker and darker here, making it hurt to breathe and filling his lungs with acrid heat.

  Paz was fifteen feet from the edge of the pit when he stopped and twisted in the same impossible motion, as if he’d gone straight from A to F, skipping all the letters in between. The bone box was in his grasp, and then it wasn’t. Instead, it was speeding through the air, straight toward the faceless man, who froze and dropped the weapon he’d been about to open up with again.

  He tried to catch the ossuary but only managed a meager deflection, enough to create a slight cushioning of its fall, so it teetered only slightly when it landed, before seeming to right itself.

  Paz pounced, before the faceless man could make another move. He was not used to an adversary of nearly equal size and strength. The two giants slammed into each other like a pair of eighteen-wheelers in a head-on freeway crash, whipsawing about with hands as their only weapons. Twisting, flailing, groping in a blurred dervish of motion that left neither with th
e advantage.

  Paz felt himself stumble in a spot where the ground fell off, the scorched land angling lower as it got closer to the flames spouting from the trench as if they were angry with the world. Those flames illuminated the big figure before him, revealing what looked like an ACE bandage wrapped around his face, exposing only his eyes, his nostrils, and a slit from the mouth, smelling of rot and mold and dead skin, darkened in splotches by sweat over the cheeks.

  Paz tried to keep sight of his hands, but the figure kept them whirling in a blur, Paz struck repeatedly by blows he never even glimpsed. He felt the world go soft and cushiony beneath his feet, the desert floor seeming to sink under his and his attacker’s vast weight. He managed to deflect one blow and countered with one to the face beneath the mask, feeling bone crunch and recede on impact.

  Paz’s next glimpse of the man revealed what looked like a dent in his mask, a depression left by whatever bones he’d shattered in the man’s face, enough to down any other man he’d ever encountered. His own face was numb from the beating he’d taken, and Paz feinted next with his right hand and tried to sweep the masked figure’s feet out with a sweep of his right leg. Paz felt one leg waver and the other buckle, but the masked figure never went down, never even lost his balance. He unleashed a furious flurry of blows in response, staggering Paz and forcing him backward toward the lip of the burning hole in the ground.

  Paz wondered if their dual destiny was to tumble over into the fires of hell itself, if his priest’s death had somehow been a harbinger of this very moment. Father Boylston going up while he went down. He was searching for something to tip those scales, to keep him from the darkness so that he might remain in the light, when he thought he heard his priest speak to him in his mind.

  “So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God.”

  * * *

  Cort Wesley leaped the final ten feet from the ladder to the ground, one assault rifle in hand and the last one he’d been able to salvage slung behind him. He added his fire to Nola Delgado’s, the two of them engaged in a bizarre pirouette on the courtyard grounds riddled with bodies and debris.

  There were no forms, no textures, no shapes—just blurs of motion to fire toward. The wave had at last ceased pouring through the jagged remnants of the mission gate, when he thought he heard his own name splinter the ratcheting gunfire.

  * * *

  “Cort Wesley!” Caitlin cried out again, getting his attention this time.

  She flashed the oblong-shaped explosive she’d plucked from one of the downed drones, hoped he’d see it gleam through the swirling clouds of dust and muck from the trench fire blowing downwind.

  She could tell, from one brief look, that he recognized what she was holding, grasped the meaning and intent in her eyes. He seemed to sniff the air as, still firing, he moved for Nola.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley smelled the propane on the air, the stench almost overpowering, as he drew even with Nola and grabbed her by the arm. He dragged her away toward the chapel, toward Caitlin Strong, her Texas Ranger half sister. Opposite sides of the same sharp-edged coin.

  Then Caitlin flung the explosive shaped like a big egg into the air.

  * * *

  “I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

  Those words, spoken by his priest, from his favorite prophet, Isaiah, resounded in Paz’s mind. Filled him not just with assurance but also with purpose.

  And a plan. Father Boylston was serving it up to him, providing the wisdom for what he must do, from Proverbs.

  “Whoever hates disguises himself with his lips and harbors deceit in his heart. Though his hatred be covered with deception, his wickedness will be exposed in the assembly.”

  Exposed.…

  Amid the battering he’d taken at the hands of the faceless man who matched his strength, amid the pain and rich taste of blood, Paz followed his priest’s direction. He jerked his right hand upward as they grappled, grasping the moist, rancid fabric stretched over this demon’s face, and pulled. Then he pulled again, with all his strength.

  The shredded mask came away in his grasp, holding much of the man’s face within it. The sight of the pulpy remains, exposed bone and gristle, stole Paz’s breath, as the demon’s scream split the black air that enveloped him like a shroud.

  Paz felt the ossuary in his grasp in the next moment, not exactly sure how it had gotten there. Then it was airborne, hurtling through the air, deep into the thickest, blackest patch of smoke rising from the pit.

  Toward the flames.

  “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

  Paz heard the man with no face scream even as his massive frame soared past him, airborne, launching himself through the air to catch the box before it dropped. And his grasp somehow did close on ancient limestone, capturing it in his hands the size of meat slabs in what had all the makings of a looming miracle.

  But no miracle followed. The man with no face could no more float in the air than walk on the water, and Paz watched as he dragged the box with him down into the depths of hell itself.

  * * *

  The explosion sounded as Caitlin, Nola, and Cort Wesley clung to the side of the chapel, protected by its shroud, downwind from the blast that turned the courtyard into a fountain of flame.

  Cort Wesley had closed his arms around both Caitlin and Nola, his own back bearing the brunt of the shock wave, his knees buckling. The wave of heat seared Caitlin’s skin and clothes, made her feel she was on fire too, even as she glimpsed the still-standing skeletons of the enemy gunmen who’d been incinerated in the blast. Then she realized she was breathing freely, realized she was whole, even with her clothes and hair stinging to the touch.

  Caitlin tried to speak and then realized she couldn’t hear her own voice, hell itself having stopped just short of the mission chapel walls.

  99

  MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

  “This used to be the church where my parents were murdered,” Luna Diaz Delgado told Caitlin, as workmen cleared the debris around them. “I burned it to the ground last week, but I can still smell the blood. Can you smell it too?”

  Caitlin ignored the vulnerability, the plaintiveness in the Red Widow’s voice. “No, ma’am, I can’t. But I understand, because violence sticks to us like cooking onions to a wool sweater. You can’t wash that smell out, no matter how much you try.”

  “I think I get the point.”

  “I wasn’t really trying to make one.”

  “You saved my life. That’s a debt I can never repay.”

  “Yes, you can,” Caitlin told her. “I want to talk about my sister.”

  “Half sister,” the Red Widow corrected.

  “Still flesh and blood, ma’am.”

  “More mine than yours.”

  “She’s my father’s daughter, just like I am.”

  “You planning on celebrating Christmas with the legendary el Barquero or arresting her?”

  “El Barquero isn’t my sister.”

  “Are you capable of distinguishing between the two?”

  Caitlin kicked at the ash and charred wood. For some reason, she hadn’t been able to smell much since the explosion at the old Spanish mission two days before, but her hearing was almost all the way back, and that made for a fair trade.

  “I’m not sure,” she said.

  Luna smiled sadly, picked up a blackened husk of wood, and snapped it in two. “You’re both the same, exactly like your father. Speaking of which…”

  The Red Widow eased from her pocket the locket Jim Strong had given her.

  “This belongs to you,” she said, holding it out for Caitlin to take.

  But Caitlin left it there. “My father wanted you to have it, señora.”

  Luna made no move to pull it back. “That doesn’t seem right.”

  “It did to him at the time, and that’s all that matters. He gave you the locket and you gave him a daughter he never knew he had.”
r />   “She saved your life, Tejano. Twice. You should leave things there.”

  “If you know her, and we really are the same, you know I can’t do that.”

  Luna frowned. “I suppose I do.”

  “And she may have saved my life twice, but she took advantage of a boy who’s as close as I’ve got to a son just to get close to me.”

  “What do you want, Ranger? Spell it out for me.”

  Caitlin looked at Luna Diaz Delgado, imagining her father doing the very same thing twenty-five years before. “Tell Nola I want to see her.”

  * * *

  They met at the same cantina where Caitlin had fled with the Red Widow after the gun battle at the Policia Federal barracks. Looking at the younger woman coming through the door was like looking at herself when she’d just graduated college.

  Instead of the business-casual outfit she’d worn when they’d had dinner on the Riverwalk, Nola wore brown leather pants that looked glued to her skin, their sheen dulled by a dry coating of dust, which she brushed off before taking the seat across from Caitlin.

  “I never met our father,” Nola said tersely, laying her gun on the table.

  Caitlin laid her SIG next to it. “I’ve got no jurisdiction down here.”

  Nola looked as if she found that funny. “I know all about you, Caitlin Strong. Hope you don’t expect that to make me feel safe.”

  “If you know so much about me, then you know you should feel safe, especially with your gun on the table.”

  “One of them anyway.” She smirked. “I assume the same holds true for you.”

  Caitlin shook her head. “One’s all I need.”

  “Back at that mission—”

  “Save it, please.”