Strong Rain Falling: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Caitlin Strong Novels)

by Land, Jon

  “Spot on.”

  “So what am I missing here?” he asked her, face taut with exasperation.

  “Something you need to do for me, Jones,” Caitlin told him. “Something you’ve done before.”

  102

  JUÁREZ, MEXICO

  Cort Wesley moved with the night. He was no stranger to the cartel-dominated streets of Juárez, but had never actually been to the colonias, slums that were home to thousands of peasants impoverished by a combination of the drug trade and the nearby factories that had basically enslaved them. The colonias lay literally in the shadow of the sprawling complexes boasting names like Delphi, RCA, and Hyundai. As he hid between two collapsed structures waiting for night to come, Cort Wesley had spotted any number of buses dropping off workers for the day shift and picking up those who would take their place in the factories overnight.

  According to Juárez cartel head Alejandro Rojas, Luke was being held on a hillside of ramshackle structures in the Anapra slum by former prisoners from Cereso Prison both loyal to and terrified of Locaro. Rojas had no idea of their number, only their location on stench-riddled land built over an abandoned landfill. As night fell around him, Cort Wesley had continued to survey the squalor dominated by abandoned or burned-out cars and endless piles of trash rife with dogs and small pigs that were the only things moving by the time he slid out into the darkness. He passed a row of black crosses memorializing schoolchildren who’d been gunned down just a few months before while waiting for their bus, and angled for the hillside.

  Minutes later Cort Wesley was skulking up the slight slope of the cluttered slum, squeezing through the narrow gaps between huts made of sheet metal and wood scraps with interior walls formed of corrugated cardboard duct-taped to salvaged plywood and rotted lumber. There was no power, no running water or utilities whatsoever. The ground layered over the old Anapra landfill was parched and dead, more scrub than soil. Clotheslines bent under the weight of clothes strung over them. Junk that looked like it had sprouted from the ground, seeded by the trash collected below, lay everywhere in the form of goods first salvaged and then rejected for being in too poor a condition to use even here.

  Cort Wesley had an approximate location for where Luke was being held and nothing more. He’d geared up in the same fashion as he had for night raids back in the Gulf War, the biggest difference being the utterly flat land outside of Baghdad and the lack of any smell at all. He carried the Special Forces M1A4 version of the M16 with a cut-down stock, a sound suppressor, and a pair of magazines rigged together to allow for sixty shots instead of thirty with one simple flip. He wore a killing knife on one side of his belt and a holstered Glock on the other, the ammo vest worn over his flak jacket holding both smoke and fragmentary grenades. The air was thick, stale, and reminded him of the smell coming from the cesspools he’d pumped one summer as a teenager.

  Cort Wesley stopped and rested his shoulders against an abandoned shanty to settle his breath. He’d avoided the rut-strewn roads formed of flattened mud to stay clear of any vehicles or gunmen. Slums like this were peaceful enough during the day, but dominated by armed roving gangs who ruled the streets at night. Last thing he needed was to find himself up close and personal with one of those before he found Luke.

  “Here we are again, bubba,” said Leroy Epps, leaning right alongside him. “Business as usual.”

  “You bring a gun?”

  “Nope, just a good word.”

  “Rather have an extra hand.”

  “This one’s on you, and that’s just the way you want it. In your mind, you can’t provide for your boys with your wallet, try a currency you’re better with.”

  “Bullets?”

  “If they was dollars, bubba, you’d be a rich man for sure. Meantime, you let me work on the cash issues. I got things covered there and that’s a promise.”

  “Thanks, champ.”

  “Forget the thanks. Just kill some of those hombres for me tonight.”

  Then he was gone and Cort Wesley started on again.

  103

  LOS MOCHIS, MEXICO

  Ana Guajardo grasped the handles of her father’s wheelchair and eased him along one of the hallways inside her underground bunker leading toward the control room. She’d wanted him here so any part of him that clung to conscious thought might witness these final hours leading up to the fateful moment when things would turn for once and for good. How wonderful it would be to see Mexico and the United States flip-flop in terms of technological superiority—the ultimate irony, in fact. All at the hand of a woman born to a migrant farmworker who’d grown up picking fruit.

  The very definition of the American Dream.

  Guajardo knew her father had disapproved of her hatred for the United States. So bringing him here was not about celebration so much as victory. From the day of his plunge off that fourth-story balcony, she only hoped that he’d live long enough to see her bring down the country to which he was so beholden. Ultimate vindication that her beliefs had triumphed over his, vindication of the vision she had enacted. Ana wanted him to see it, wanted him to know, so he could die with that implanted in his mind.

  Retribution indeed.

  The bunker’s main control room looked more like something out of NASA, with electronic, interactive maps filling wall-mounted massive flat-screen televisions. Those maps were connected to computers that would automatically update the power supply status across the United States. The monitors shared the walls with other smaller flat screens tuned to various American cable channels. As long as those stations had sufficient power to continue broadcasting, she’d be able to follow the fall of America in real time, even as the maps would show her a moment-by-moment depiction of the actual progression of the country going dark.

  “I don’t believe you’ve met my father,” Guajardo said to John and David, her code writers, who were in the midst of their final preparations to push the worm into power grids covering the entire country. “Father, these are the young men I was telling you about.”

  John and David both nodded toward Enrique Cantú politely, no idea how to respond to the old man who sat in his wheelchair with drool piling up on his chin and dripping slowly to his shirt. Happy to turn back to their consoles.

  “And look who’s here to see you, Father,” Ana said, turning the chair so her father could see Locaro.

  The old man passed some gas, the one person in the room not revolted by the sight of the scab-riddled depression in the side of Locaro’s head where his ear had been shot off.

  “I am not his son,” Locaro said from his post in the room where Ana had placed him to make sure nothing went awry. “He is not my father. He is a shell, a vessel, that you keep alive with feeding tubes and false hope. You should have let me smother him.”

  Ana almost told him why she hadn’t.

  Locaro could have gone on, could have mentioned the years he had spent in Cereso, confessing to the crime to spare his sister the same fate. But he left things at that because all else, that which had come before, was gone now. There was no looking back, only ahead to an entirely new world, one where America’s influence and manipulation would be lost. A world of chaos in which he would thrive.

  “How long?” Ana Guajardo asked the young men back working feverishly at the head of the room, as bulbs representing America flashed on the display monitors.

  “Thirty minutes until showtime,” said John. “That’s when we send the signal to the remote pilots to push their birds into the air. Once that’s done, we activate the worm and watch the transformers blow as the system begins to overload. Then it’s curtains—literally.”

  “The dark ages reborn,” added David.

  “You’re both very good at what you do,” Ana told them.

  “With what you’re paying us,” said John, “we better be.”

  104

  LOS MOCHIS, MEXICO

  Caitlin and Paz moved through the darkness toward the game preserve. The special model Blackhawk would remain beh
ind, waiting. The pilot would lift off only if Guajardo’s forces appeared before they returned. Meanwhile, the Mexican army would be lying in wait, certain to make an utter mess of things if Caitlin didn’t stop Guajardo before they stormed the area.

  Caitlin followed an actual map to a brush-covered entrance of the underground cave connected to the bunker where she felt certain Ana Callas Guajardo was now preparing to trigger her attack. She looked at Paz, the nod they shared saying more than any words before he disappeared into the night, leaving Caitlin to ease the brush aside to lower herself into the entrance to the cave.

  * * *

  Moving about without detection, especially in the dark, was a skill Paz had mastered as a boy when he needed to steal food for his brothers and sisters and escape the gangs who wished to enlist him in their ranks. To this day, he wondered if the bruja vision and foresight he’d inherited from his mother also enabled him to move like a ghost, a fantasma, immune to detection.

  But for Paz tonight was not just about the guards he needed to kill and power supply he needed to mark. Tonight was about finishing Locaro, as he should have back in San Antonio. Only then would he have atoned for his failure and misjudgment back at the high school. He had gone there that night for himself. But he was here tonight for something else entirely, something that suited him far better:

  His Texas Ranger.

  * * *

  Caitlin followed the river, more certain than ever that the other end of the underground cave would finish where Ana Guajardo’s bunker began.

  The sights her flashlight revealed on this path, winding its way along the river, were nothing short of spectacular. The stalactites looked like daggers of varying sizes sticking out of the cave ceiling. The feel was that of traversing a crystal palace inlaid amid still water that had a greenish tint and was rimmed by white deposits that looked something like snow.

  She was well more than a hundred feet into the cave when she realized there was illumination springing from something other than her flashlight. Closer inspection revealed a series of battery-operated lanterns hanging from the walls, making it clear this was indeed to be used as an escape route from Guajardo’s underground bunker in the event of an emergency.

  Though the lanterns themselves gave off a single curtain of ambient light, they blended with the shading of rock formations and irregularly spaced hanging stalactites to create a dull blue hue over the water to go with the greenish tint. Caitlin continued to weave her way along the narrow path that followed the twists and bends of the underground river, radiant hues of blue and green bouncing off the water’s surface. The underground cave was laced with a musky odor due to the thick moist air trapped within it, something like damp towels soaking up a basement spill, musty and spoiled.

  Before long she’d come to the end of the path. Before long she’d find the underground bunker.

  Caitlin shuddered, thinking of the terrible truth Cort Wesley had learned from Jan McClellan-Townsend about Ana Callas Guajardo, something the woman had likely blocked from her own memory. It made perfect sense, the final piece in a puzzle that explained her obsession with attacking the United States.

  Up ahead, Caitlin’s flashlight illuminated something shiny amid the rough darkness of the cavern. A door, she realized, leading into the bunker from where Guajardo was about to launch her attack.

  105

  JUÁREZ, MEXICO

  Finding the shanty where Luke was being held, on the sloped rise riddled with raw sewage running downhill, proved more challenging than Cort Wesley had been expecting. For security, and privacy, shanty dwellers had done their best to wall off their dilapidated homes with makeshift fencing formed of a combination of salvaged Sheetrock, cinder blocks, corrugated tin left over from what passed as roofs, and rusted barrels. That turned the slum into a maze to be negotiated in zigs and zags, sometimes running up against buildings so tightly congested that there was no way to negotiate a route between them.

  At this late hour, Cort Wesley had encountered no resistance or human obstacle at all. Besides sound and flickering lantern light coming from inside the shacks, the only residents he’d glimpsed were moving to or from their outhouses, which were little more than a hole dug in the ground surrounded by a curtain strung between two trees. That is, until he detected a light emanating from behind the tallest assemblage of fencing he’d come upon yet.

  Reaching a barrier composed of warped sheets of tin that looked affixed together, Cort Wesley’s portable GPS unit told him he was somewhere very close to the location provided by Alejandro Rojas. He calmed himself enough to see if he could actually sense his younger son beyond, if some paternal bond might provide the absolute confirmation he needed.

  Short of that, he thought maybe the ghost of Leroy Epps might show up to point the way, since walls and fences far thicker than these had no effect on his vision. But Leroy was nowhere to be seen and Cort Wesley had given up looking after hearing the rustling hum of an electric generator. It was the only one he’d come upon so far in his winding trek up the slope of the covered landfill, confirmation enough that he’d found his son.

  Cort Wesley eased a pair of night-vision goggles from a slot in his vest and looped them around his head, tightening the strap the way he would the more mundane sport variety. This version was still in the developmental stage, meaning no one other than men like Jones knew of their existence or had access to them. The goggles provided both enhanced peripheral vision and substantially increased comfort as well as functionality, compared to older models with which he was more familiar.

  Next, he found a seam in the tin fencing that had been weakly soldered and effortlessly cut through it with the same Special Forces knife he’d used back in the Gulf War. Squeezing through the gap, Cort Wesley found himself in a sloped yard sectioned off from others by barricades of debris in the form of rusted bicycles, old pushcarts, and wheelbarrows missing their wheels and handles. The stench-riddled air told him a curtained-off cubicle contained the outhouse and, not far from that, his night-vision goggles allowed him to discern a small gasoline generator attached to a long orange extension cord that was partially buried in the ground.

  Cort Wesley slinked forward, hunched low now with silenced assault rifle trained before him. There were no guards outside, but shadowy movement was clear within the shanty itself. His now clear view revealed it to be an amalgamation of three or four separate structures, distinguished by varied shades of roofing, somehow linked together to form easily the largest structure he’d come upon yet in the hillside slum.

  Certain now he’d found Luke’s location, Cort Wesley trained his eyes on the thinly covered slat-holes that passed for windows. As he angled his assault rifle higher, his boot snared on something; looking down, he saw a trip wire even with his foot just about to snap.

  * * *

  Grasping the handles of her father’s wheelchair, Ana Guajardo swept her gaze about the various maps depicting the United States. She pictured all the lights on the biggest projected map going dark. It would not happen at once, but over the course of hours, even a day, for the entire effect to take hold. Once begun, the process would spread geometrically, as the failsafe measures built into the system, designed to pull power from where it was needed the least to where it was needed the most, failed miserably. Meanwhile, the rain of carbon filaments from her radio-controlled monster-scale planes detonated directly over their targets would ravage the infrastructure of the most vital power-generating plants and distribution-switching facilities.

  Her greatest victory at hand, Ana turned to her brother but found him stiff and distracted, hardly in a celebratory mood.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked him. “Locaro?”

  He snapped alert, cold dark eyes finding her gaze, his ridged face looking waxy in the ambient underground lighting. “Not all the guard posts are checking in.”

  “Interference, maybe.”

  Locaro picked at the scabbing where his ear had been, his fingers coming away wet with fresh
blood. “That’s what I’m afraid of, mi hermanita.”

  * * *

  Guillermo Paz barely registered the kills, the number as meaningless as the lives of the men he’d ended. They were nothing to him, soulless creatures no different from ants to be crushed underfoot. With each snap of a neck or twist of a blade through bone and cartilage, though, he felt the Ranger was that much safer, her path to victory that much easier thanks to him.

  His vast size and bulk through space lacking sufficient cover should have rendered a stealthy approach an exercise in futility. Yet Paz stalked his prey with ease; even when they seemed to be looking straight at him there was no acknowledgment whatsoever of his presence or existence.

  Paz began to wonder in earnest if perhaps the tales told him by his mother had more credence than he let himself believe. Beyond the visions he was convinced were true, maybe there was something to be said for some to have been blessed with phantom-like abilities, to be both man and fantasma at the same time.

  Paz approached the next guard from the rear, his massive hands swallowing the man’s head in the last moment before a crack that sounded like a thunderclap resonated through the air. Then he moved on, sensing a presence on the vast grounds around him, as cold and unfeeling as any he’d ever encountered.

  “Locaro,” Paz said, under his breath.

  106

  LOS MOCHIS, MEXICO

  Caitlin reached the door, SIG in one hand and flashlight in the other. Careful to steady her feet, she located the latch and pulled. Not surprised it was locked, Caitlin eased the explosive charge from her small shoulder pack, recalling Cort Wesley’s instructions on exactly how to use it.