Strong Light of Day (2 page)

Jim Strong jerked the bar's soda gun dispenser downward and jammed it into Masters's open mouth, which was still gasping for air. He hit a plunger, with no idea which of the available choices was now flooding down the outlaw's throat. Jim felt Masters give up his hold on the .45, thrashing wildly to work himself free, and finally managing to latch a hand onto the hose dangling downward from the bar works. Masters yanked and the hose came free, a fountain of soft drinks erupting from beneath the bar in a geyser and spraying into the smoky air.

He started punching at Jim, even as huge gulps of fluid mixed with spittle coughed from his mouth, further soaking his clothes. The Ranger punched right back, the two of them poised on the floor behind the bar, hammering each other silly, until Boone Masters's final strike died in midair and his arm flopped back to the floor. His gaze grew glassy, somewhere else entirely now, as Jim Strong cocked a fist for a final blow meant to avenge his busted nose.

Then the world before him froze up solid and Jim Strong collapsed atop Boone Masters, who'd preceded him into unconsciousness.

*   *   *

“You never did tell me what you came into the bar to talk about,” Boone Masters said from his gurney, alongside the one on which Jim Strong rested in the back of the ambulance summoned to take them both to the Southwest General Hospital. Normally, each would have gotten his own transport, but a pileup on the 410 had left emergency services short of vehicles.

“You busted my nose,” Jim said, feeling about the thick wad of bandages the paramedics had wrapped in place to stanch the bleeding.

“I did you a favor, on account of it already being bent to one side. Now you can get it fixed for free.”

“I'd like to fix you, same way they fix a pup before it knows any better.”

Masters continued to regard him, gaze lingering on the bandages crisscrossing the Ranger's face, stretched over his nose. “You come into that bar already fixing to clean my clock?”

“Nope. I come because I need your help,” Jim Strong told him, his voice nasally from his broken nose.

“My
help?
I know I got my bell rung pretty bad, but now I'm hearing things.”

“You heard right.”

“Help you, the
Texas Rangers?
”

“It's in your best interests.”

“How you figure that?”

“We may not have any of the same friends, Masters, but we got a few of the same enemies.”

“Who that be exactly?”

“The gang you use to move all that stolen merchandise through.”

“What stolen merchandise?”

Jim tried to sit up, but the IV the paramedic now seated on the ambulance's rear bench had hooked into him didn't have enough slack to allow the effort. “Let me put it this way: a few months back I heard a warehouse full of major appliances got boosted—funny thing, being those appliances had been boosted before that. Ironic, don't you think?”

“What's that mean?”

“What's what mean?”

“Ironic.”

“Couldn't tell you. Just that I know what it is when I hear it.” Jim let Masters see him staring at him through still-watery eyes. “Just like I know what I'm looking at now.”

“What's that?”

“A man I could put away for a stretch if I had a mind to, which I'll do if you don't have a mind to help me out with something.”

“You mean you'll try, Ranger, just like plenty others who weren't up to the task neither.”

“Then let's do this another way: How you think your boy Cort Wesley would do behind bars until his midtwenties, if he's lucky?”

Boone Masters stiffened. “Don't go there, Ranger.”

“You already did, when you made him an accomplice on your heists. Very considerate, to just have him stand lookout, but make sure you have him wear a mask next time. Turns out we can identify the boy clear as day, thanks to one of them newfangled video surveillance systems.”

Masters tried not to show how concerned that left him. “Hard being a single parent, ain't it?”

“We got that much in common, anyway—'long with something else.”

“And what would that be exactly?”

“The Russian mob. I intend to take them down, and you're going to help me. Otherwise, your boy's going away for a time.”

Now it was Boone Masters who tried to sit up, working to tear the IV from his arm until the paramedic, who'd played three years of college football, stopped him. “You're a real son of a bitch, Ranger, just like Teddy Roosevelt. You came into that bar to recruit me, the difference being you didn't buy me a drink.”

“Comes with the territory, Mr. Masters. And right now that territory is running Russian red. They're up to something a lot bigger than fencing major appliances. I believe they're fixing to kill a whole lot of Americans, and we just might be the only ones who can stop them.”

E
ASTERN
A
FGHANISTAN; 2002

“Empty,” Navy SEAL Lieutenant Mark Grasso said, standing just outside the cave entrance in the darkness that had fallen like a blanket over the area. One moment there was light draining from the sky and the next there wasn't. Grasso continued, not bothering to disguise the disgust in his voice. “Just like the whole nest of them.”

“It happens, Lieutenant,” said the big man who'd remained at the holding point until the all-clear sign was given. He looked more like a shadow silhouetted against the night, like some sort of holographic figure projected onto the scene instead of standing within it. “Get used to it.”

“What, you spooks fucking up? Sending us after ghosts over and over again with lousy intelligence?”

“You expect to turn over a rock and have Osama pop up with hands in the air? You sign up for this shit, you need to stop figuring the rules are yours to make up. We're playing by the rules of others, Lieutenant, but we're getting close. Whoever was here left in a real hurry. We probably missed them,
him
even, by a couple hours at most. Maybe next time.”

“I don't give a shit about next time.”

The night smelled of a combination of soot and ash, a perpetual burned odor that hung in the air as if residue of bomb blasts that had torn these mountains apart had become a permanent fixture on the scene. Every shift of the breeze seemed to intensify the scent that reminded Grasso of driving through a burned-out forest, lingering long after the fire itself was done.

“That's the business I'm in, son,” the big man told the SEAL Team 3 leader, his tone abrasive and condescending. “Giving a shit about the next time, since I can't do anything about the last.”

“You need to see this, Lieutenant,” a voice called from inside the cave.

The SEALs had stormed the mountain just before dawn on intelligence that high-asset targets and large stores of munitions had been located in a cluster of caves hollowed out like entrances to a hive. But the SEALs had found no guns, no explosives, and no targets, high asset or otherwise.

Grasso entered the cave, followed by the big man, who moved, acted, and spoke like someone who hadn't always used his desk as a staging ground, to the far wall, where a collection of documents had been found inside a hole covered by a nest of rocks. Pages and pages of them; hundreds by the look of things.

“Like I said,” the big man noted. “They must've left in a hurry. Arabic,” he continued, scanning some of the pages.

Grasso handed him a fresh batch. “Not all of them.”

The next set of documents looked like some kind of field or technical manuals. The pages felt brittle and warped, smelling of musk and mold. At the bottom of that pile lay something else. Drawings, the big man noted; skilled and detailed. No, not drawings at all.

Schematics, plans. Whoever had been in this cave was apparently planning something in the very minutes before the raid descended on his lair. Bin Laden himself, maybe, or at least somebody high up the al-Qaeda organization food chain.

Damn!
the big man thought.
How close they'd been.…

He peeled back the drawings to find fresh documents, written not in Arabic at all but in English. Fresh with a familiar stamp and logo. And beneath them rested another set, in a third language.

Russian.

“You need to get on your sat phone, Lieutenant,” the big man said, studying these documents much more closely than he had the others. “You need to get me Washington on the line five minutes ago.”

Grasso freed the satellite phone from his vest. “Pentagon, sir?”

“No, Lieutenant, the White House. Let me give you the number.”

 

P
ART
O
NE

Charged with the mission of operating beyond the boundaries of civilization, with minimal support and no communication from higher authority, they lived and often died by the motto “Order first, then law will follow.”

—Thomas W. Knowles,
They Rode for the Lone Star: The Saga of the Texas Rangers, Volume 1

 

1

Z
AVALA
C
OUNTY,
T
EXAS

Caitlin Strong stopped her SUV at the checkpoint on Route 83 heading toward Crystal City. The sheriff's deputy approaching her vehicle seemed to recognize her as soon as she slid down her window, well before he could see her Texas Ranger badge. He was an older man, long and lean, with legs crimped inward from too much side-to-side stress on his knees while riding horses.

“You got no call to be here, Ranger,” the deputy said, having clearly been warned to expect her, his light complexion a rosy pink shade from the sun and heat.

“You mean driving on a public highway, Deputy?”

“I mean heading into the shit storm that's unfolding a few miles down it.” He had brownish-purple blotches on the exposed flesh of his right forearm, the kind of marks that cry out for a dermatologist's attention. Then she noticed the bandages swathed in patches on his other arm and realized they were probably already getting it. “We got enough problems without you sticking your nose in,” the deputy continued. “Wherever you go, bullets seem to follow, and the last thing we need is a shooting war.”

“You think that's what I came here for?”

The deputy folded his arms in front of his chest so the untreated one stuck out, the dark blotches seeming to widen as his forearm muscles tightened. “I think you've got no idea how Christoph Russell Ilg will react when a Texas Ranger shows up. You don't know these parts, Caitlin Strong, and no stranger known for her gun is gonna solve this problem the sheriff's department has already got under control.”

“Under control,” Caitlin repeated. “Is that what you call an armed standoff between sheriff's deputies, the highway patrol, and that militia backing Ilg? I heard they've been pouring in from as far away as Idaho. Might as well post a sign off the highway that reads, ‘Whack jobs, next exit.'”

“If the highway patrol had just left this to the sheriff's department,” the deputy groused, face wrinkling as if he'd swallowed something sour, “those militia men never would've had call to show up. We had the situation contained.”

“Was that before or after a rancher started defying the entire federal government?” Caitlin asked him, unable to help herself.

“The goddamn federal government can kiss my ass. This here's Texas, and this here's a local problem. A Zavala County problem that's got no need for the Texas Rangers.”

The deputy tilted his stare toward the ground, as if ready to spit some tobacco he wasn't currently chewing. Then he hitched up his gaze along with his shoulders and planted his hands on his hips, just standing there as if this was an extension of the standoff down the road.

“You should wear long sleeves,” Caitlin told him.

“Not in this heat.”

She let him see her focus trained on the dark blotches dotting his arm. The breeze picked up and blew her wavy black hair over her face. Caitlin brushed it aside, feeling the light sheen of the sunscreen she'd slathered on before setting out from San Antonio. She'd taken to using more of it lately, even though the dark tones that came courtesy of a Mexican grandmother she'd never met made her tan instead of burn.

“Better hot than dead, Deputy,” she told the man at her window. “You need me to tell you the rate of skin cancer in these parts?”

He let his arms dangle stiff by his sides. “You really do have a nasty habit of messing in other's people business.”

“You mean trying to keep them alive, sometimes from falling victim to their own stubbornness.”

“Who we talking about here, Ranger?”

“Christoph Russell Ilg. Who else would we be talking about?”

 

2

Z
AVALA
C
OUNTY,
T
EXAS

Caitlin reflected on what she'd learned about Christoph Russell Ilg, for the next two miles down the road. His second wife had just given him his ninth child, his sixth son, even though he was somewhere close to either side of seventy. His parents were German immigrants who came to Texas as migrant farmworkers. He'd been born on one of numerous farms they worked in the years immediately after World War II, when birth certificates were optional. Ilg himself swore he didn't even know his own birthday and, as a result, he celebrated his and all his children's on the same day in June, exactly six months after Christmas.

For more than a century, ranchers and feedlot operators had been grazing their cattle on South Texas grasslands. Then the Environmental Protection Agency, working in concert with the Army Corps of Engineers, interpreted the Clean Water Act as giving them the right to redefine cattle ponds, and even ponds formed over flooded land, into what they called “waterways of the United States.” The Bureau of Land Management then crafted a law requiring ranchers to get permits for land on which they once free grazed. Short of that, they could be fined for polluting or contaminating those newly proclaimed federal properties.