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

by Land, Jon

  * * *

  Inside the super-sized shanty, the two gunmen poised by the window slats heard the rattle of tin cans jarred suddenly into motion, the trip wire to which they were tied jerked by a foot.

  The gunmen jammed the barrels of their assault rifles through the slats, fabric brushed aside behind a torrent of wild and indiscriminate fire more unleashed than truly aimed. Three more gunmen joined them and then a fourth, their barrages lighting up the hillside with muzzle flashes and filling the air with gun smoke that wafted upward in thin clouds.

  The darkness beyond gave up nothing, the men relying on the fury and spread of their bullets to cut down the man or men who had tripped their primitive defense system. Each emptied his entire magazine, the spent ones thumping to the floor an instant ahead of the clacking sounds of fresh ones being jammed home. The gunmen ready to unleash fresh barrages when Cort Wesley rose behind them.

  * * *

  Paz found the self-generating electrical substation well camouflaged inside the rhino enclosure, sliding past a magnificent male that regarded him with tired-looking eyes. The animal lifted its head slightly and snorted, but made no move to do anything, letting Paz pass unmolested. He met its eyes briefly, wanting to know its strength, its thinking, finding only acknowledgment of his presence.

  The power station hummed softly, likely fueled by propane tanks buried underground and shielded by a metallic coating that no doubt hid its heat signature from the satellites orbiting overhead. It was bigger than Paz had expected, the size of a large car, but with different modules climbing to differing heights all camouflaged by brush planted toward that end.

  Paz marked the generator with a laser and touched a button on a satellite relay clipped to his belt to send the proper signal to the fighter jets circling overhead. Moments later, a series of poofs sounded and the black rain of carbon filaments wafted down from the sky. The moon cast just enough of the night in a soft hue to distinguish the black mist he had glimpsed in his dreams descending in clouds that looked like thick swarms of insects.

  What had the priest called it?

  Redemption.

  Paz heard a rustling in the enclosure’s grass and swung to find Locaro standing twenty feet behind him, machete clutched by his side.

  * * *

  “On my signal,” Ana Guajardo told David and John, ready to give the order to activate the plan that would plunge America into darkness.

  Her trained “pilots” were in place across America, just waiting for her signal to take off en masse and rain carbon filament down on nearly two thousand power plants. The transformers she controlled would soon overload and short circuit, irrevocably destroyed. But her worm would first enter the grid systems through the back doors they provided, everything timed out to the last second.

  Guajardo moved closer to her software experts, wanting to see the fateful strokes on their keyboards.

  And that’s when all the power in the complex died.

  * * *

  Caitlin double-checked that she had planted the explosive pack even with the door latch, just as Cort Wesley had instructed, and then eased the compression fuse into place.

  “Just depress the trigger, cover your ears, and be somewhere else,” he’d said.

  Which was exactly what she did, the charge igniting with a loud poof! that rocketed the heavy door inward, exactly as Cort Wesley had promised.

  Then the walls began to shake, the roof over her quaking, Caitlin quickly realizing something much bigger than the charge she’d just triggered was to blame.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley took the gunmen in three-shot bursts, spraying his fire left to right, then back again. The world turning an eerie shade of orange before his night-vision goggles as frothy blood bursts erupted from the holes his 7.62mm fire punched in the men holding his son hostage.

  Outside, he’d extricated his boot from the wire just short of tripping it and stripped down a clothesline suspended between two trees. Still-rank, damp clothes toppled off as he strung the clothesline to the tripwire and held it in his grasp while working his way around to the shanty’s opposite side.

  Once at the door there, he yanked on the clothesline to trip the tin cans strung to the wire and burst through as soon as the gunmen opened fire. He’d reached them in the front room, just as they ejected their spent magazines, a few not even managing to get the fresh ones jammed home before he opened fire.

  They were nothing to Cort Wesley, the stench and ugliness of the slum itself transposed onto them. He felt no more in killing them than he had gunning down targets in the amusement park shooting gallery with Luke just six nights before.

  Luke was being held somewhere else in the shanty, and Cort Wesley was now free to find him as the final body fell, scattering spent shells across the clapboard floor.

  * * *

  “What’s happening?” Guajardo managed in the dull haze of emergency lighting.

  “We’ve lost power!” from John.

  “Everything’s shutting down!” from David. “Communications uplinks are gone!”

  Frozen behind their keyboards and lifeless screens, the world having seized up solid before them.

  “Do something!” ordered Ana Guajardo in the last moment before explosions rocked the bunker.

  107

  LOS MOCHIS, MEXICO

  Caitlin didn’t know if the shelling was the product of another of Jones’s betrayals or, more likely, President Villarreal’s forces launching an all-out attack on the compound ahead of schedule. She felt debris from the cavern roof rain down upon her, realizing the integrity of the entire structure could be compromised by the blasts.

  Retracing her path backward now was a fool’s errand at best, suicide at worst. So, wasting no more time, she ducked through the heavy door she’d blown and entered Ana Callas Guajardo’s bunker.

  * * *

  The walls were crumbling; the walls were coming down.

  Ana Guajardo’s world was collapsing around her, a shrill alarm blaring through the darkness broken only by the spill of emergency vapor lights cutting through the haze. Panic had erupted, the explosions sending her people fleeing, loyalty and purpose lost along with hope.

  It was the Texas Ranger, Caitlin Strong, it had to be!

  Ana couldn’t resist baiting her, feeling herself so superior and powerful as to be immune to any potential response. She had as much as told the Ranger what was to come, reinforcing her own words with a phone call after she realized how foolishly she’d acted. Now, to see all her work squandered, years of planning to vanquish her hatred and avenge her world lost, because of belief in the infallibility of her own convictions.

  With the power gone and the bunker collapsing, Guajardo had no choice but to join the flow of her people in escape and regroup, salvage what she could from all this. She was almost to the door leading into the underground cave when she remembered her father.

  “We must go back!” she said, stopping in her tracks. “My father!”

  Uribe and Vasquez stopped too, but made no move to follow as Guajardo started to back up.

  “Fools!” she spat at them. “You’ll die for this! Do you hear me, you’ll die!”

  In that moment more of the ceiling gave way. When the dust cloud cleared, the two men had already moved on and Guajardo retraced her steps to find her father poised in the middle of the hallway. And in the dull haze shed by the emergency lighting through the debris cloud, she saw Caitlin Strong standing behind his wheelchair.

  “I have a warrant for your arrest, ma’am, and I’m taking you back to Texas.”

  * * *

  The black chalky dust continued to rain down from the sky even as explosions nearby rocked the ground and lit up the night. Locaro had drawn within ten feet, close enough for Paz to see blood running down the side of his face where his ear had been shot off and just the distance he could cover with his machete before Paz could draw and fire his pistol.

  Locaro’s eyes glistened in the moonlight as more bl
ack chalk dust fluttered to the ground between them and more sparks flew out of the generator before flames replaced them in the air. Those eyes wanted Paz to go for his gun, those eyes begged for him to do it.

  But Paz went for his knife instead, all twelve deadly inches of it. It was the very knife taken off the first man he killed for murdering the priest. Paz had waited years for that opportunity and had kept the knife as both souvenir and reminder of how resolve and hate could quickly turn a boy into a man.

  Locaro wheeled in, looping his machete around and downward. It sizzled through the air in a blinding arc, Paz just managing to sidestep the blow but missing with a slash of his knife. Locaro spun, continuing around in one fluid motion before Paz could respond. Paz arched his spine, midsection tucked inward so the machete tip sliced through his shirt and grazed his flesh. He felt the thin soak of blood and stinging pain, a flash erupting before him, beyond which Paz thought he caught a glimpse of his dead mother smiling.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley dipped and darted down narrow halls lined with small, tightly congested rooms inside the cobbled-together shacks.

  A figure lurched out on his left.

  Pffffffffffft!

  Another on his right.

  Pffffffffffft!

  Two directly before him.

  Pffffffffffft! Pffffffffffft!

  “Nice shooting, bubba,” he thought he heard Leroy Epps say as one final door appeared at the end of the plywood floor, Cort Wesley’s heart hammering as he moved toward it.

  * * *

  Ana Guajardo stood her ground, eyes locked on the pistol Caitlin Strong aimed her way.

  “You’re wasting your time,” she managed, as more explosions rocked the bunker, sending chunks of the dirt and shale above showering downward through holes punched in the ceiling. “I’ll never stand trial—in either country.”

  “You killed five children with your own hand,” Caitlin told her from behind the wheelchair. “That means you’re going to jail. Where you stand trial, that’s not up to me.”

  Guajardo gazed about her.

  “It’s just us now, ma’am,” Caitlin said and raised her SIG Sauer higher. “Looking at you is like looking at the pictures of the mother of the nephews you tried to kill, your twin sister. But the truth is you look nothing like her because all you know is hate and it’s turned you ugly.”

  Ana Guajardo shook her head in disbelief, as if opening her eyes and seeing Caitlin standing there for the first time. “You really expect me to just walk out of here with you, in handcuffs?”

  Caitlin tightened her grip on the SIG. “The alternative’s worse, ma’am. But if it means anything, I understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “All that hatred you got bottled up inside you.”

  “Save it, Ranger. You haven’t got a chance going up against me.”

  But Caitlin ignored her taunt. “Goes back to the day your brother, Locaro, killed that rapist on the McClellan farm in the Rio Grande Valley when you were seven.”

  “It was a long time ago. I’m way past that.”

  “No, ma’am, you only think you are. See, your memory got it all wrong, like some kind of defense mechanism. It wasn’t your mother Locaro saved that day.” Caitlin held Guajardo’s stare before continuing. “It was you.”

  * * *

  Paz recovered his senses as quickly as he lost them, the initial shock from the wound dissipating. Locaro moved in sync with him, denying him the distance he needed to draw his gun while seeming to relish the thought he might try anyway. That made Paz realize Locaro had trained too much of his attention on his holstered pistol, so he led with his knife away from where Locaro was focused.

  The boldness of the move, the mere thought that Paz would tempt the reach of his machete, surprised Locaro enough to open his side for the thrust. Though he tried to twist at the last moment, Paz’s blade still jabbed home between the ribs at mid-torso.

  Locaro hunched and tucked that whole side in close instinctively, robbing him of dexterity as well as swiftness. Enraged, he bit down the pain and launched himself on Paz with a relentless series of sweeping strikes with his machete, all of which whisked close enough for Paz to feel the cut of air behind them. The last miss caused Locaro’s rib muscles to lock up, his balance stripped as he whirled past Paz, who seized the opportunity to finally draw his pistol.

  He opened fire, a trio of bullets finding Locaro’s side and back before Locaro wheeled, machete coming around with him. It clanged against the steel of Paz’s pistol and sent it flying, one last shot flying errant.

  Bellowing, Locaro launched himself at Paz, machete looking like a loosed propeller blade spinning through the air. Then, at the last, when Paz was ready to duck beneath it, Locaro lashed out with one booted foot and then the other. Paz lost his footing, thrown backward with the ground coming up fast and Locaro rushing straight for him.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley kicked in the door at the end of the hall, sending it rocketing backward in a cloud of dust and splinters to reveal a man holding Luke on either side, fear bleeding from their eyes.

  “Deja caer tu arma! Deja caer tu arma!” one wailed, ordering him to drop his gun.

  Cort Wesley met Luke’s gaze, saw not just hope there but also relief and certainty, certainty that his father was going to save him. Then surprise when Cort Wesley dropped his assault rifle to the floor.

  “You boys ever ride a roller coaster?” he asked Luke’s two captors in English. “Know what happens when you gotta puke?”

  He looked at Luke as he said that. The boy’s eyes widened with realization and then tightened with resolve an instant before he jerked his head downward, bending over at the waist. Cort Wesley drew his Glock in the same instant, firing twice, a bullet lodged in the foreheads of both men, who stood there for an instant with pistols frozen where Luke’s head had just been before crumpling to the floor.

  * * *

  “You were the one who was raped that day,” Caitlin continued.

  Ana Guajardo had frozen, locked up solid, everything inside—from her breath, to her heartbeat, to her blood—seeming to stop. Suddenly she saw the same picture that had haunted her dreams for as long as she could remember, only now the terrified seven-year-old was looking up at the new work foreman who smelled like piss gyrating over her. Shoving himself inside her until the terrible pain made her bite down on her tongue. She remembered gagging, her breath stolen when the blood splattered her, feeling like rainwater against her skin. More of it showered down, spraying her face, arms, and raggedy shirt pulled up almost to her neck, Locaro’s machete a blur in the air over her. Watching him kill the man who’d hurt her so badly, spilled off her now and being hacked to pieces by her ten-year-old brother. Locaro finally turning toward her, barely breathing hard, covered in blood himself. Smiling.

  “You know it’s the truth, señora, I can see it in your eyes,” Caitlin told her. “Almost makes me feel bad for you, because it explains what killed you inside and left you with nothing even remotely approaching a feeling. No child should have to suffer like that, but that must’ve slipped your mind last week in Willow Creek. That’s why you were able to kill those children the way you did, because you can’t feel. But I wonder if you’ll feel the needle going into your arm or the noose snapping your neck.”

  Ana Guajardo hadn’t moved or reacted, still didn’t seem to be breathing, the dull emergency lighting losing her to the shadows. “It takes one to know one, because we’re the same, you and I,” she managed finally, summoning the hate she knew so well. “Tell me you don’t look in the mirror and see my face looking back at you, Ranger.”

  “All I know is I’m looking at a monster right now. And I’m gonna make you pay for what you’ve done.”

  With that Guajardo stooped to retrieve an assault rifle that must have been shed by one of her men in his rush to flee.

  “Not today,” she said calmly.

  * * *

  Paz hurled his knife from th
e ground, propped up on his back. It lodged in Locaro’s shoulder, stopping him in his tracks five feet away, machete locked into position overhead.

  Locaro jerked the blade out and tossed it aside. “You can’t kill me, India chusma,” he grunted, almost grinning.

  A dark blur of motion caught Paz’s eye behind Locaro, accompanied by a heavy pounding that left the ground quaking and rumbling beneath both of them.

  “I don’t have to.”

  Paz watched the charging male rhino gore Locaro from behind with its horn and then jerk him upward, spearing him deeper until the horn emerged through the thrashing Locaro’s chest, dragging blood and gore with it. The massive animal continued to twist him from side to side before tossing his still writhing body to the ground and prancing proudly off.

  * * *

  Caitlin held her gaze on Ana Guajardo, focusing on the woman’s finger as it stopped just short of the assault rifle’s trigger.

  “Your rapist is already dead, ma’am. You can’t kill him again, no matter what you do to me or anyone else.”

  Guajardo’s eyes widened, then narrowed hatefully, the assault rifle stiff in her grasp.

  “I’m not a child, and this isn’t Willow Creek,” Caitlin told her.

  Guajardo’s expression grew strangely placid and sure. “All the same to me.”

  She jerked the assault rifle upward, finger finding the trigger just as Caitlin dropped down behind the cover of her father’s wheelchair. Guajardo hesitated before firing.

  Not long, but enough.

  Caitlin fired four times from her crouch, two hits to Guajardo’s chest and one to her head to go with the single miss before Guajardo ever pulled the trigger.

  “I’m nothing like you,” she said, more falling chunks of the ceiling entombing Ana Callas Guajardo in rubble as Caitlin rushed for the exit.

  * * *

  Paz was waiting when she emerged, the Mexican army already scouring the grounds to round up Guajardo’s fleeing troops. The shelling had ended, the remnants of the bunker likely entombed by now with all evidence of Ana Guajardo’s plot lost forever.