by Jon Land
“Come on, Ranger,” said a voice that might have been her father’s.
Then a hand was tugging at her, but Caitlin resisted, the way she’d done as a little girl when her father had tried to rouse her in the predawn hours to go fishing in a pond surrounded on all sides by the prettiest flowers she’d ever seen.
“Caitlin,” the voice said again.
She finally pushed herself alert, snapping her thoughts back into place and feeling disappointed that her clearing vision revealed Cort Wesley Masters in her sights instead of Jim Strong.
He coughed out some smoke, as he tried to free her. “I can’t budge this damn thing.”
“Let me,” Guillermo Paz said, leaning back inside the chopper. His left arm hung lower than his right and his face was a patchwork of scratches and cuts. “You go after the last tanker.”
Cort Wesley resisted.
“Go,” Caitlin told him. “Finish this.”
He touched her cheek, then pulled himself toward the door, squeezing past Paz. When he was gone, Paz leaned his upper body all the way inside, trying to wedge Caitlin free, bending the steel wedged over her foot back before her eyes. The exertion squeezed his features taut, Caitlin wiggling her foot from side to side in an attempt to shimmy it out to no avail. Flames poked through tears in the crashed chopper’s carcass, licking at her one exposed boot Twisting sideways, she caught a flash of movement outside.
“Colonel!”
Paz lurched all the way inside the toppled cabin, pushing Caitlin low beneath a burst of bullets that clanged off steel, close enough to her to feel their gush of heat. She heard heavy footsteps, then a shadow fell over the cabin as a figure wide enough to block out the moon leaned inside the chopper.
Macerio!
Caitlin went for her pistol, couldn’t find it. An assault rifle was angling toward her when Paz lashed out with a kick that sent Macerio sprawling, following him into the night as the smoke and flames continued to build around her.
111
MEXICO; THE PRESENT
Cort Wesley managed to grab hold of the smashed-up tanker’s rear-mounted ladder just as the driver got the vehicle righted and started it on again down the freeway. He hoisted himself upon its top, finding handholds in the ridged depressions designating one tank compartment from another. The tanker’s gears ground, balking as the driver tried to accelerate. Finally the transmission caught and the tanker began to pick up speed into the empty night ahead.
Cort Wesley felt the wind force pushing up against him and held on as best he could, willing to sacrifice purchase for pace to reach the cab before the truck’s increasing speed would render the task impossible. The best he could do was keep stretching one hand before the other, pulling himself forward.
Macerio hit the ground hard. His head smacked gravel, disorienting him and stealing away his grasp on his rifle. His knee was throbbing in pain again, the whole leg stiffening. But he found his rifle, just as a huge shape lurched toward him, silhouetted by moonlight.
Ángel de la Guarda . . .
He had to be a Mayan; no other explanation sufficed. Macerio felt they were battling for a heritage, a people. And in that moment he saw the giant as the last thing standing between him and the successful completion of the line of blood he was drawing across the border. Defeat the giant and nothing could stop him. Defeat the giant and his sacrifices would continue unabated, invincibility his at last.
Paz saw Macerio resteady his grip on his rifle and kicked it from his grasp, a harmless volley sent echoing into the night. Macerio caught his next kick out of midair, twisting and shoving the leg backward in one violent notion.
Ignoring the pain in his knee, Macerio lurched back to his feet, smoke from the burning helicopter wafting over both of them. He caught Ángel de la Guarda glancing back inside it and chose that moment to attack, his charge slowed by his stiffening leg.
Paz twisted aside at the last instant, springing his trap and adding his own force to Macerio’s momentum. Macerio slammed hard against the helicopter’s burning fuselage. His skull whiplashed backward, denting the steel. Paz watched his eyes go glassy and jammed a hand onto Macerio’s throat, squeezing as Macerio extended an arm downward for his waist.
Caitlin was stretching her hand toward her lost SIG Sauer pistol, almost there when Macerio freed the knife from the sheath on his belt.
Cort Wesley walked the top of the tanker like a tightrope. His father had made him take a job as an off-loader one summer as a boy, so riding trucks like this was nothing new for him. Except those had been parked in depots instead of speeding along a highway.
He dropped down from the tanker onto the roof of the cab, his boots clacking against metal. His knees buckled, then found balance with his arms swaying to the sides, leaving him with the feeling he was surfing the air.
Then he was on his stomach, clinging to the roof with one hand while the other snaked through the driver’s side window and latched onto the driver’s hair.
Paz glimpsed the knife slashing toward him. He managed to arch his midsection backward, the slash gashing him along the surface. He dug his hand tighter into Macerio’s throat, heard him gurgling for breath but not seeming to weaken yet. Another swipe of the knife caught Paz on the side and a third dug into his shoulder.
Feeling the chopper’s carcass ready to blow at any moment, he thrust his left hand back inside the cabin in search of Caitlin Strong’s wedged foot. Her form was nearly lost to the building smoke. He was holding his breath against it now, feeling blindly for the last of the steel trapping her amid the flames.
“My gun!” she wheezed, starting to gag on the smoke.
Macerio’s knife slashed across Paz’s chest, shredding muscle. His already damaged arm, the one inside the cabin, went numb, but Paz’s fingers managed to scrape across the Ranger’s SIG and push it toward her.
Macerio started his knife forward, slowed by his dwindling breath just enough to give Caitlin the time to grab and right her pistol.
Paz felt the muscle layered around Macerio’s throat finally slacken to a roaring BANG! BANG! BANG! that obliterated his face and skull. Macerio’s blade stopped just short of its thrust’s end, still somehow jabbing at Paz as what was left of him sank to the ground, his IV bag popping on impact.
The world dimming, Paz held to enough presence of mind to jam his other hand into the smoke, holding his breath and feeling the singe of flames as he grabbed hold of Caitlin Strong and hoisted her out into the night.
Cort Wesley felt his fingers close on hair wet with a combination of sweat and hair gel. He lacked the leverage to do anything but hold fast until he could lean his other hand in. One of his legs slipped off the roof, but his second hand locked on the tanker’s steering wheel an instant before he would have dropped to the highway below.
His eyes met the driver’s hateful gaze, glimpsed the gun in his hand and jerked the wheel hard in toward him. The tanker’s sudden veer stole the driver’s aim and the shot flew harmlessly into the night while the blast’s echo rocked Cort Wesley’s eardrums.
Cort Wesley could feel the tanker list heavily, could see the driver fighting to resteady his pistol on him, and jerked the wheel as far down as his meager leverage allowed. The tanker seemed to slip sideways, actually straddling the highway for a brief time, then crossing the median on only half its wheels, before tumbling over and throwing Cort Wesley outward into the night.
Paz dragged Caitlin free of the chopper in the last instant before it exploded. He collapsed to the ground, allowing the flames’ glow to illuminate the figure of Cort Wesley Masters, framed by the toppled tankers strewn across the highway, jogging toward them.
Caitlin coughed the smoke from her lungs and climbed to her feet, staggering out to meet him.
“I believe we’re finished here, Ranger,” Cort Wesley said between labored breaths. “Where’s Paz?”
“Right over—”
Caitlin stopped when a sweep of her eyes showed Guillermo Paz nowhere to be found.
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112
JUÁREZ; THE PRESENT
The federalés stationed in the city of Juárez went at Caitlin and Cort Wesley together in a conference room that stank of stale coffee and strong, hand-rolled cigarettes.
“Your government can protest all it wants, but we can keep you here as long as we like,” a major who said his name was Batista threatened. “Just tell us about this big man who’s been terrorizing Juárez.”
“Terrorizing?” Caitlin repeated. “Is that what you call saving peasants from the drug dealers and mules your office has been protecting?”
Batista got right in her face, close enough for Caitlin to smell the peppers and onions on his breath. “If you cooperate with us now, I will forget that you said that.”
“Don’t bother,” Cort Wesley told him.
“Was I speaking to you?”
“Look, you and I both know you’re corrupt as they come. You’d sell your mother out for a dollar.”
“I was thinking a peso,” Caitlin added, “and his country for plenty less.”
“I’ve shot gringos for less,” Batista fumed.
“How about Texas Rangers?”
Batista ignored her and sat down across from Cort Wesley, straddling a chair. “I know you’ve done time in jail, but don’t believe you’d fare too well in one of our Mexican prisons.” His eyes moved to Caitlin. “Neither of you.”
“Look, Captain,” she started, trying to sound more conciliatory, “you’re likely right that there’s not much our government can do about our current predicament down here. But the Texas Rangers aren’t a part of that government. You wanna hold us for no good reason and risk them coming down here to stage their own kind of intervention, be my guest. Times have changed, sir, but the Rangers haven’t.”
“I am not scared of el Rinche,” Batista said, even though it was clear from the beads of sweat that had formed over his upper lip and sudden shifting of his eyes that he was.
“You’ll be the first one they gun down, Captain. Tends to make subordinates more cooperative.”
“Just tell me about the big man, Ángel de la Guarda.”
“Nothing to tell.”
“I hear there’s a price on his head in Venezuela and three other countries,” said Cort Wesley. “That’s not why you’re so interested in him, is it?” He stood up slowly, as if to dare Batista or the other officers to stop him. “Now, if you don’t mind, the Ranger here and I gotta be getting home. I got two boys need tending to and if I leave now I can make them scrambled eggs for breakfast. I don’t and we’ll scramble yours instead.”
Batista rose and backed away from the table, comfortable shooting distance if it came to that. “You will not return to my country again, either of you. If you do, you will find me far less hospitable the next time.”
Cort Wesley waited until Caitlin pushed her chair back, then started for the door just ahead of her.
“Been nice knowing you, Major,” she said. “You ever get to San Antonio, look me up. I’m not hard to find.”
EPILOGUE
The fundamental fact is that the present-day Ranger has no frontier upon which to paint a heroic picture of daring and courage. The Ranger of the old order belonged to a primitive and highly individualistic society which offered him great opportunities. The modern, complex society has reduced his proportions, but it has not changed his nature.
—Walter Prescott Webb, The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense
PEARSALL, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
There was a reception at the ranch for those who’d attended the funeral of Clinton Samuels, and when these few had gone, Caitlin and Cort Wesley sat at the oak butcher-block table with Bo Dean Perry and Terrell Scuggs. Luke Torres clung to his father’s shoulder while Dylan sat moping in an easy chair, sullen over Maria Lopez being taken into custody by immigration officials so she could be returned to her family in Mexico.
“Say,” Bo Dean Perry said to Caitlin, angling his wheelchair toward her, “I ever tell you ’bout the time your granddad tried to teach me how to draw?”
Caitlin had called Marianna Silvaro on her way to the ranch.
“Congratulations on your promotion to supervisor,” Caitlin greeted.
“Tell me something, Ranger,” Silvaro said from the office she’d moved into that very morning. “Do I have you to thank for this?”
“You have no one to thank other than yourself, ma’am. You were passed over for less-qualified applicants three times. The fourth being your last shot, I’d say justice was done.”
“So there’s no quid pro quo?”
“Ma’am?”
“I’m talking about the sons of Cort Wesley Masters.”
“I’m confident the right thing’ll end up getting done,” said Caitlin.
“I turned over all my cases to the woman replacing me. The Masters file wasn’t included. Investigation’s been closed.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Nothing to thank me for, Ranger. Just doing my job, like you.”
“Anyway,” Bo Dean Perry continued, “I didn’t listen much to old Earl, being a stubborn young man, ’cause who needed to quick draw even in those days. Earl said I was missing the point. Well, about a year later, I was drawing my gun during a prison riot when the damn thing went off and winged me in the foot. I was so embarrassed I told folks I’d dropped a rock on it. Didn’t bother listening to your granddad saying the draw’s not about the speed, it’s about process and technique. Hell, my foot still hurts most times when it rains.”
Caitlin smiled. “You check in on D. W. Tepper?”
Terrell Scuggs, decked out in cowboy boots and old-style western holster as always, nodded. “Says he’ll be back to work in no time and the doctors can’t wait to be rid of him. Told me to tell you he’s sorry, and that you’d know what he was referencing.”
“He’s got nothing to apologize for,” Caitlin insisted, her voice sounding sadder than she’d intended. She wanted desperately to remember the night her mother had been killed, because until she did, it would feel unreal no matter how much she knew it to be true. But she also knew the terrible truth would no longer haunt her sleep, the nightmares replaced by the sad reality of that night years before that had left her soaked in blood and rain under a cottonwood tree.
“Well, lemme tell you something, missie,” said Bo Dean Perry, “this Colonel Montoya’s boys ever come back to Texas, they’re gonna be chewing on the barrel of my Remington for breakfast and gulping down their own brains.”
“I don’t believe we’ll be facing that problem,” Caitlin told him. “I told Hollis Tyree the man responsible for the deaths of his children was still out there. Told him we can’t get him and the Mexican government is still too frightened to try.”
“What you suppose he’ll do about that?”
. . .
Colonel Renaldo Montoya stood in the ruins of the Mayan temple, using a soft brush to clear away dust and dirt from the final drawing on the temple walls. He hoped it might yield some clue as to what had gone wrong, maybe provide a reason as to why. He still believed in his destiny, although now a different path was clearly required for him to achieve it.
In the wake of the End Times, the message from his Mayan ancestors was that a single man would lead the transition back to light once darkness consumed the world. His mistake had been to forge an alliance with the drug cartels whose priorities had muddled his own. Their dirty bombs would have been counterproductive, leading to a cataclysmic response in kind that could topple him from the very power he was prepared to seize. Much better to simply send his soldiers into the cities to wreak havoc in keeping with his original plan for a guerrilla war America was ill prepared to fight. They would blame the very same drug cartels and, from the presidential palace once his coup was complete, Montoya would pretend to crush them, only to continue his murderous rampage.
Montoya stepped back from the cleared final drawing to better regard it. But his eyes seemed to deceive him, the picture
revealed making no sense at all:
What looked like a giant bird of prey, blood dripping from its beak and talons, descended on the same bullheaded figure who’d been on the verge of a great triumph over the vast army to the north in the previous drawings. Though a believer in mut, omens, Montoya could make no sense of what the surrounding glyphs called a pip.
Then he heard a crackling roar overhead, realizing in that moment that he wasn’t Chahuku at all, nor was the big man the peasants called Ángel de la Guarda. Montoya stepped outside the temple just as the real bringer of thunder soared overhead in the form of a steel bird of prey, lightning spit from its underside. He’d gotten the End Times wrong; they had come early, now.
Montoya followed the missiles’ sizzling descent, then closed his eyes to meet his ancestors in the last moment before a surge of heat nearly knocked him off his feet and the jungle exploded around him.
. . .
Caitlin walked with Cort Wesley along the rim of the saw grass. The fields looked finely mowed and plowed, the smell of old fertilizer replaced by the fresh scents of mesquite and pear cactus the cool wind had blown in.
Caitlin stopped and brushed the hair from her face. “What’d you tell Dylan about Maria?”
“That I’d drive him to Mexico to visit myself whenever he gets it in his mind.”
“Being that he’d find his own way down there otherwise.”
“Yeah, he’s my son, all right. And stop changing the subject.”
“Didn’t know this conversation had one.”
Cort Wesley picked up a strand of saw grass and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. “You don’t remember watching your mother get gunned down.”
“I think I’ve seen it in those nightmares, but the only thing that sticks in them is waking up in the storm.”
