by Jon Land
“Ayuh,” acknowledged Krayman softly. “I enjoyed it too.”
“Revenge, Mr. Krayman?”
“Justice, friend, something you should know about better than most if I read you right.”
“I wasn’t criticizing.”
“What else did that reporter lady tell you ’bout me?”
“General features like height, the color of your eyes, and, of course, the fact that you were born in Maine. You came back here to hide from them, but you wanted to watch, to monitor their actions. An inlet across from Horse Neck Island couldn’t have been a random choice.”
Krayman’s blank expression confirmed all of Blaine’s words. “At first all I wanted was to stay dead. I thought maybe Dolorman and Hollins had done me a favor. I didn’t know about Hollins at first, but I had my suspicions and over the years, well, I had plenty of time to figure everything out. Thing of it was, here I sat with everything behind me. …” Suddenly his eyes sharpened. “But I couldn’t let go, friend, not then.”
“And what about now?”
“You want me to go back to civilization with you?”
Blaine nodded. “You’re the only man who can expose Omega’s existence once and for all and begin the process of destroying its remnants. You’re the only man no one can argue with on the subject … since the operation was yours originally.”
“Not the way Dolorman and Hollins envisioned it. I realized that in time. But they decided to get me out of the way ’fore I could do anything about it.”
“Dolorman’s dead. Hollins too.”
“So am I, friend, and that’s still the way I want to keep it. Don’t you think I coulda gone back and told the world the truth if I’d wanted? Well, I didn’t. I just wanted to stay dead. I’d had enough.” A pause. “I still have.”
“I’m not going to argue the merits of society with you, Mr. Krayman. I’ve seen enough to know that your position is justified. But speaking of the world, it would be a hell of a lot worse off with Omega still threatening it.”
“Do you really believe that, friend?”
“Absolutely. The world’s not perfect and neither is the country. As a matter of fact, lots of it stinks. But we can’t let the Dolormans and the Hollinses feed off the rot.”
“I guess you’ll expose me if I don’t turn myself in,” Krayman said, scratching at his beard stubble.
Blaine shook his head. “No, Mr. Krayman, the decision’s yours. You saved my life and I owe you for that.”
“Lord in heaven, an honorable man. … Where were you fifteen years ago?”
“Killing people somewhere in Indochina. Things haven’t changed much since.”
“No,” Krayman said reflectively, “I suppose they haven’t. You’ve been fighting a lot of wars, friend.”
“No, just one big one. A lot of people say it’s futile. I say, what isn’t? The world’s a lousy place by nature, but things tend to get even worse when men like Hollins gain control. It’s out there for them to grab and there aren’t many of us left to keep their fingers off it.”
Randall Krayman slapped his thighs and stood up. He gazed at the sun, treating his leathery flesh to its warmth.
“You got a car, friend?”
“Gassed up and ready.”
“You think I oughta shave?”
McCracken shook his head slowly. “The stubble becomes you.”
“Well,” said Randall Krayman, “just give me a few minutes to pack my things.” Then, with his stare fixed on nothing in particular, “I don’t suppose I’ll be coming back here again.” They started walking toward the shack. The snow on the roof was beginning to melt. “Tell me, friend, what have I missed these past five years?”
“Not much,” Blaine smiled, “not much at all.”
A Biography of Jon Land
Since his first book was published in 1983, Jon Land has written twenty-eight novels, seventeen of which have appeared on national bestseller lists. He wrote techno thrillers before Tom Clancy put them in vogue, and his strong prose, easy characterization, and commitment to technical accuracy have made him a pillar of the genre.
Land spent his college years at Brown University, where he convinced the faculty to let him attempt writing a thriller as his senior honors thesis. Four years later, his first novel, The Doomsday Spiral, appeared in print. In the last years of the Cold War, he found a place writing chilling portrayals of threats to the United States, and of the men and women who operated undercover and outside the law to maintain our security. His most successful of those novels were the nine starring Blaine McCracken, a rogue CIA agent and former Green Beret with the skills of James Bond but none of the Englishman’s tact.
In 1998 Land published the first novel in his Ben and Danielle series, comprised of fast-paced thrillers whose heroes, a Detroit cop and an Israeli detective, work together to protect the Holy Land, falling in love in the process. He has written seven of these so far. The most recent, The Last Prophecy, was released in 2004.
Recently, RT Book Reviews gave Land a special prize for pioneering genre fiction, and his short story “Killing Time” was shortlisted for the 2010 Dagger Award for best short fiction. Land is currently writing his fourth novel to feature Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong—a female hero in a genre which, Land has said, has too few of them. The first three books in the series—Strong Enough to Die (2009), Strong Justice (2010), and Strong at the Break (2011)—have all garnered critical praise with Strong Justice being named a Top Thriller of the Year by Library Journal and runner-up for Best Novel of the Year by the New England Book Festival. His first nonfiction book, Betrayal, tells the story of a deputy FBI chief attempting to bring down Boston crime lord Whitey Bulger, and will be released in 2011.
Land currently lives in Providence, not far from his alma mater.
Land (left) interviewing then–teen idol Leif Garrett (center) in April of 1978 at the dawn of Land’s writing career.
Land (second from left) at Maine’s Ogunquit Beach during the summer of 1984, while he was a counselor at Camp Samoset II. He spent a total of twenty-six summers at the camp.
Land with street kids in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which he visited in 1987 as part of his research for The Omicron Legion (1991).
Land on the beach in Matunuck, Rhode Island, in 2003.
In front of the “process trailer” on the set of Dirty Deeds, the first movie that he scripted, which was released in 2005. The film starred Milo Ventimiglia and Lacey Chabert.
Land pictured in 2007 with Fabrizio Boccardi, the Italian investor and entrepreneur who was the inspiration for his book The Seven Sins, which was published in 2008.
Land emceeing the Brunch and Bullets Luncheon to benefit Reading Is Fundamental at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel in the spring of 2007.
Land and his classmates and fraternity brothers celebrating their thirtieth class reunion during Brown University’s Commencement Weekend in 2009. He was a member of the Delta Phi fraternity.
In the fall of 2010, Land attended the first ever Brown University night football game, which he coordinated in his position as Vice President of the Brown Football Association. Brown beat rival Harvard 29-14.
Land’s most recent publicity shot, taken in late 2010, when he was having, he says, a good hair day.
Acknowledgments
For technical assistance along the way I am greatly indebted to Alfred Souza, John Signore, and Bill Krieger.
Thanks to Richard Levy for assistance with the selection and capabilities of various armaments, and to Shihan John Saviano for help with the choreography of numerous fight scenes.
For creative support well beyond the call of duty, my heartfelt appreciation to Ann Maurer and the miraculous Toni Mendez, and, of course, Dr. Morton Korn, who makes his fifth consecutive appearance on this page of my books.
I am also blessed with a brilliant editor, Daniel Zitin, and a truly supportive team at Fawcett.
Mention must be made as well of a superb article by Lee Dembart* and an excel
lent book by Richard S. Lewis**, both of which provided invaluable information.
And last my deepest thanks to Emery Pineo who gives of himself so generously to his students and has also been generous enough to share his brilliance with me.
*Discover, November 1984, pp. 90-92.
**The Voyages of Columbia, Columbia University Press, 1984.
A Sneak Peek at Strong at the Break
Turn the page for a sneak peek at Jon Land’s new book Strong at the Break, coming in 2011
Chapter 1
Quebec; the present
FROM THE STREET THE house looked like any other nestled around it in the suburban neighborhood dominated by snow cover that had at last started to melt. A McMansion with gables, faux brick and lots of fancy windows that could have been lifted up and dropped just about anywhere. The leaves had long deserted the tree branches, eliminating any privacy for each two-acre spread had the typical neighbors been around to notice. Problem was the neighborhood, part of a new plot of palatial-style homes, had been erected at the peak of a housing boom now gone bust, so less than a third were occupied.
Caitlin Strong and a Royal Canadian Mountie named Pierre Beauchamp were part of a six-person squad rotating shifts in teams of two inside an unsold home diagonally across from the designated 18 Specter, the marijuana grow house they’d been eyeballing for three weeks now. She’d come up here after being selected for a joint U.S. and Canadian Drug Task Force looking into the ever-increasing rash of drug smuggling across a fifteen-mile stretch of St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation land that straddled the border.
Beauchamp lowered his binoculars and made some notes on his pad, while Caitlin looked at him instead of raising hers back up.
“Something wrong, Ranger?”
“Not unless you count the fact I got no idea what we’re trying to accomplish here.”
“Get the lay of the land. Isn’t that it?”
“Seems to me,” Caitlin told the Mountie, “that the DEA got that in hand already. You boys too.”
“It’s Task Force business now. We need to build a case for a full-on strike.”
“You telling me the Mounties couldn’t have done that already, on their own?”
“Not without alerting parties on the other side of border who’d respond by dropping their game off the radar, eh? When we hit them, the effort’s got to be coordinated and sudden. That doesn’t mean two law enforcement bodies working in tandem, it means two countries. And that, Ranger Strong, is never a simple prospect.”
“So we’ve got to tell both sides what they know already.”
Beauchamp shrugged. “Put simply, yes.”
“I guess I’m just not cut out for this sort of game,” Caitlin said and sighed.
The thunk of car doors slamming froze Beauchamp’s response before he could utter it. Both he and Caitlin had their binoculars pressed back against their eyes in the next instant, watching five big men in black tops, black fatigue pants and army boots approach the grow house from a dark SUV lugging assault rifles and what looked like gasoline cans.
“Uh-oh,” said Beauchamp.
“Hells Angels?” asked Caitlin, following a bald pair of black-garbed figures who looked like twins.
“Yup.”
“What exactly they doing here now, while there’s people and drugs still inside?”
The Mountie moved his gaze back to her, his expression flatter than she’d seen in the three weeks they’d been working together. “Only one thing I can think of.”
Chapter 2
Mohawk Indian Reservation; three weeks earlier
THE DEA’S LEAD AGENT, Frank Gage, drove Caitlin out to the St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation first thing when she reached St. Lawrence County in upstate New York, her unpacked bags stowed in her motel room. They turned off Route 37 down a bumpy road formed of cracked pavement lost to the snow the further they drew into the woods. March was the absolute dead of winter in these parts, and Caitlin had never seen so much snow and ice in her entire life, enough of it to make the trees sag under its weight.
“Peak of the season, this road’s got more snow than you can imagine,” he said, finally snailing his car to a halt in a clearing that opened into a picturesque, white-encrusted scene of a frozen river that somewhere contained the border between the United States and Canada.
Caitlin followed Gage out of the car and down a slight embankment atop snow that crunched underfoot before hardening into ice. Her boots had the wrong tread for this kind of ground and she found herself slipping, unsure exactly of where the land ended and frozen water began beneath them.
“Welcome to the source of our problems, Ranger,” Gage told her.
“Where’s the border exactly?”
“There isn’t one. That’s the problem,” he said, pointing across the vast whiteness to the woods on the other side. “That’s Canada over there, but it’s also part of the Mohawk Reservation on their side of the border too.”
Caitlin followed Gage’s gaze and spotted an old Indian man cutting a hole in the ice. He had a fishing pole resting on a foldout chair behind him and, if he was aware of their presence, chose not to acknowledge it.
“Who’s that?”
“Old tribal cop. A legend in these parts who hates the druggers almost as much as he hates us. Comes pretty much every day to catch his dinner. Locals say he might be as much as a hundred years old.”
Caitlin watched the old man plop down in his chair and ready his pole over the perfectly circular hole he’d fashioned in the ice.
“That all makes this a virtual sovereign nation the Canadian authorities are reluctant to violate even more than we are,” Gage said, picking up where he left off before Caitlin had been distracted by the old Indian. He turned toward her, breath misting in front of his face. “More drugs come into the country over this and other frozen rivers, what we call ‘ice bridges,’ than any other spot in the country.”
“Excluding Mexico.”
“No, Ranger, not excluding Mexico at all, no offense to you.”
“None taken,” Caitlin said, trying to make sense of what the DEA man was telling her.
“We estimate fifty-five billion dollars a year in drugs now comes in through Canada. Compare that with forty-five, maybe fifty, through Mexico.”
“You telling me we been fighting the war on drugs in the wrong place?”
“I’m telling you a new front’s opened up in that war over the past five years or so and you’re looking at it. Starts with the grow houses, pharma and meth labs organized throughout Quebec and parts of British Colombia by the Hells Angels.”
“Same biker gang we got?”
“They operate on both sides of the border. An elaborate network of fully franchised businessmen backed up by the usual armed sons of bitches riding Harleys. Angels are responsible for manufacture and shipment across Mohawk land here with the Natives’ full blessing, since plenty of them end up as major distributors of the product themselves. I’ll show you some of the homes of biggest suppliers later. Goddamn mansions sitting just down the road from shacks generally unfit for human habitation. Tribal dealers use runners to sell their product to networks loyal to Russian organized crime throughout New York, Ohio, and Michigan. And that’s just for starters since it doesn’t even include the truck loads bound for other suppliers.”
“You’ve sold me on the severity of the problem,” Caitlin told him, feeling the wind sift through her hair. The air was bitingly cold, the bright sun offering a measure of respite, though not very much. “But I don’t really see how the Texas Rangers can help you solve it, sir.”
“Rangers can’t; you can.”
“Come again?”
“You’ve become a real authority on the subject, Ranger Strong.”
“Not by choice, I’ll tell you that much.”
“All the same, you’ve been fighting your own war on drugs for more than two years now.”
“Sure, back where it’s smuggled in through tunnels dug out of th
e desert floor or old irrigation lines. Where I come from, we still got drug mules carrying product in rucksacks or on the backs of donkeys.”
“While up here,” picked up Gage, “it’s driven by the truckload across frozen rivers by men who speak French instead of Spanish. You can see what I’m getting at.”
“Not really, sir, no.”
“Problem’s the same; only the language and geography’s different.”
“I speak Spanish, not French.”
Gage gave her a longer look this time. His thinning hair blew about in the stiff breeze, exposing a swatch of bald patches. He smoothed it back into place as best he could, but then a fresh thrust of wind tousled it once more.
“Only language drug people speak is money. Accents don’t matter a whole hell of a lot to them. Where we’re at now is the planning stage. Trying to handle this piece meal’s gotten us nowhere. What the Task Force is putting together is an overall strategy, kind of a master plan.”
Gage had continued to kick at the gathered snow, revealing a deep symmetrical, crisscrossing pattern cut in the ice. Caitlin followed the pattern further out onto the ice, convincing herself it ran from one side of this frozen swatch of the St. Lawrence River all the way across to the other.
“What is it?” Gage asked her.
“These trucks of yours carry enough weight to need snow chains?”
“Never thought about it.”
Caitlin rose from her crouch, brushing the snow from her gloves. “You should, sir. What we got here looks to be big freight jobs running on double tires with only the outer ones chained. You’re talking about some haul, if it’s drugs they’re carrying in those cargo bays.”
Gage finally looked up from the chain marks and studied Caitlin for what seemed like a long time, long enough for her to note his cheeks had gone cherry red in the cold while his nose remained milky pale, like his whole face was out of sync.
