Strong Enough to Die: A Caitlin Strong Novel Read online

  STRONG ENOUGH TO DIE

  OTHER BOOKS BY JON LAND

  The Alpha Deception

  *Blood Diamonds

  *The Blue Widows

  The Council of Ten

  *Day of the Delphi

  *Dead Simple

  *Dolphin Key

  The Doomsday Spiral

  The Eighth Trumpet

  *The Fires of Midnight

  The Gamma Option

  *Hope Mountain

  *Keepers of the Gate

  *Kingdom of the Seven

  Labyrinth

  The Last Prophecy

  The Lucifer Directive

  The Ninth Dominion

  The Omega Command

  The Omicron Legion

  *The Pillars of Solomon

  *The Seven Sins: The Tyrant Ascending

  The Valhalla Testament

  The Vengeance of the Tau

  Vortex

  *A Walk in the Darkness

  *The Walls of Jericho

  *Published by Forge Books

  STRONG

  ENOUGH TO DIE

  Jon Land

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  STRONG ENOUGH TO DIE

  Copyright © 2009 by Jon Land

  All rights reserved.

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Land, Jon.

  Strong enough to die : a Caitlin Strong novel / Jon Land — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1258-7

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-1258-1

  1. Texas Rangers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3562.A469S77 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2008050419

  First Edition: May 2009

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For America’s booksellers, big and small.

  Thanks for being there.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We meet again, and much quicker this time than the last. A good thing because I’ve got a great story to tell you.

  But first there are people to thank for helping me to tell it better and for giving me the chance to tell it at all. That list starts with the Forge Books family headed by Tom Doherty and Linda Quinton. The kind of support they’ve given me on this one and all the others is what publishing should be all about. Paul Stevens and Patty Garcia are always there for me as well, along with Natalia Aponte, who has now proven herself to be as great an agent as she is an editor.

  An answer to any question, meanwhile, remains only a phone call away thanks to Emery Pineo, my former junior high science teacher and still the smartest man I know. Additional technical assistance on this one in the realm of computers came courtesy of Gabriel Porras (He’s also my website designer. You can check out his work firsthand at www.jonland.net.) and Micah Stevens. And if you’re wondering how I know so much about the various psychological conditions referenced in this book, it’s thanks to Dr. Ralph Montella.

  A final acknowledgment to the terrific books that encompassed the bulk of my research into the legendary Texas Rangers. As much as I’d heard about their story, the books noted below told it even better. And for those whose interest is captured by the Rangers’ mystique as much as mine was, I recommend visiting the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum either in person or online at www.texasranger.org.

  Speaking of stories, I’ve got one to tell myself, so let’s turn the page and begin.

  Texas Ranger Tales by Mike Cox, Republic of Texas Press, 1997.

  One Ranger by H. Joaquin Jackson and David Marion Wilkinson, University of Texas Press, 2005.

  One Ranger Returns by H. Joaquin Jackson and James L. Haley, University of Texas Press, 2008.

  Ranger’s Law: A Lone Star Saga by Elmer Kelton, Forge Books, 2006.

  The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense by Walter Prescott Webb, University of Texas Press, 1965.

  Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers by Robert M. Utley, Berkley Books, 2003.

  The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.

  —WILLIAM FAULKNER

  PROLOGUE

  No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a-comin’.

  —Texas Ranger Captain Bill McDonald to Albert Bigelow Paine

  EL PASO, TEXAS, NEAR THE MEXICAN BORDER, 2004

  “It’s bad, Caitlin,” Charlie Weeks said, head resting against the boulder they’d taken cover behind. He squeezed a hand against the spreading patch of red staining his khaki shirt, looking shiny in the night. His other hand held fast to his SIG P226R, standard-issue Texas Ranger pistol.

  Caitlin Strong ejected the spent magazine from her Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle and snapped a fresh one home. “You die on me, Charlie, and I’ll kill you myself, I swear,” she said, as a fresh barrage of gunfire chipped rock splinters out of the boulder. Sharp flecks showered over them, feeling like drizzle drops at the onset of a spring storm.

  “This one’s on me,” Charlie said. “This ends bad, everyone should know that.”

  “It ends when the last of those mules is down.”

  “Senior man,” Charlie resumed, paying her no heed. “I shoulda known better.” Charlie ran his tongue over his parched lips, his mouth crackling dryly. “Your dad be proud of you, your granddad too, first woman Ranger and a damn fine one to boot. I tell you that lately?”

  “Can’t hear it often enough.”

  Heat lightning lit up the sky, briefly illuminating the remaining gunmen firing from the other side of the arroyo. Then the night went black again, the mules visible only from their muzzle flashes taking brief bites out of the air in rhythm with the staccato clacking of their assault rifles. The stiff breeze carried the musky smell of chaparral and the sweet scent of mesquite, mixing uneasily with gun smoke.

  “Shit, what a mess,” Charlie Weeks said, trying to steady his SIG in a now trembling hand. His breaths were coming faster now and sounded soggy. At sixty, he was a dozen years younger to the day than Caitlin’s father would’ve been if he were alive, the two of them having shared a birthday and much more.

  Caitlin sighted on the muzzle flashes and fired off some rounds from the Ruger. Across the dry, water-carved gulley separating them from the drug mules, a yelp sounded, more animal than man. Even with two down now, that still left five more to contend with. Caitlin ran an ammo count in her head: fifteen shots left in her Ruger and eighteen, a magazine and a half, for her holstered SIG. Charlie’s 12 gauge had all eight shells primed and ready, but he was down to the last bullets for his sidearm.

  Caitlin tried to dab the sweat from her forehead with a shirtsleeve, but found it too soaked already. The blast-furnace heat of the day had given way to a windswept cool night that could do nothing to relieve the layers of perspiration gluing her shirt to her back and turning her jeans heavy with dampness.

  The Texas Rangers had been called in after border patrolmen had unearthed a massive tunnel beneath the Chihuahuan Desert running back to the Mexican border, big enough to drive a vehicle through. The kind of energy and organization required for such an effort strongly suggested drug as
opposed to people smuggling, later confirmed when Caitlin’s own forensic check of the tunnel revealed clear traces of marijuana and a powder later identified as black tar heroin. The border patrol had discovered another three comparable tunnels along the Texas-Mexican border, and Rangers were dispatched to stake out each one.

  Every night for the past eight, Charlie Weeks and Caitlin had parked their SUV behind the cover of a rock bed and hunkered low in the natural cover of the arroyo. They had positioned themselves a hundred feet across from each other in order to catch any emerging vehicle in their crossfire, if it came to that. As senior man, that had been Charlie’s call, although the positioning left their rear flanks exposed, making them prime for an ambush. Not shy, Caitlin had pointed this out to Charlie, only to be rebuked.

  She was eyeballing the culvert dug out of the desert floor from her position opposite Charlie’s when chips of stone suddenly burst into the air around them. Caitlin recognized the gunfire an instant before there was a heavy whump followed by a sound like air being let out of a balloon, as Charlie Weeks hit the rock face hard and slumped, clutching his side.

  Caitlin returned the fire blindly with her SIG, not on mark but enough to buy her the time she needed to reach Charlie and drag him back behind the trio of boulders beyond the arroyo. He collapsed just as they got there, Caitlin with gun in one hand and radio in the other.

  “Officer down!” she told the nearest highway patrol dispatch, following with her call number and location. Except there wasn’t a responding vehicle anywhere within hours of them, so unless the Rangers or highway patrol could get a chopper scrambled fast, she and Charlie Weeks would be fighting this battle alone.

  The heat lightning and cool breeze meant storms would be dotting the air all the way across southwest Texas, playing hell with any chopper pilot crazy enough to fly into a gunfight to begin with. The gunfire from across the arroyo ratcheted up again, and Caitlin knew it was only a matter of time before the mules used their superior numbers of men and bullets to circle around to her exposed rear flank. That meant if she and Charlie were going to get the most out of their remaining ammo, it had to be now.

  “Ready to get a move on, Charlie?” she asked the Texas Ranger who had fought battles like this a dozen times alongside her father.

  “I think I just dreamed you saying that.”

  He took a deep breath that shook his chest when he let it back out. Caitlin propped him up higher against the boulder, the smell of his blood heavier now, its coating leaving a thick sheen across his midsection.

  “We’re gonna make a run for the vehicle, old man.”

  “Old man? Anyone calls me ‘old man’ better be able to take me in a bar fight and that includes you, Caitlin Strong.”

  “I’m buying soon as we get home.”

  Charlie Weeks gazed down past his waist. “I can’t walk. My legs went dull a pint ago.”

  “I’ll carry you.”

  “Good plan, if you had an extra pair of hands.”

  “I do,” Caitlin told him.

  “That’s nuts.”

  “Alternative’s worse.”

  “We use our ammo. Wait ’em out.”

  “They’ll circle round and take us in a crossfire, soon as they realize we’re down to our last shells. Better we take it to them, than wait for ’em to come.”

  “Who taught you that, your dad or your grandpa?”

  “You, Charlie.”

  Charlie Weeks smiled through his own pain. “They ever tell you about the time we went after those moonshiners? Christ on a crutch, I don’t think I was much older than you then, a damn rookie riding into trouble alongside two Ranger legends. Know what I remember thinking?”

  “No.”

  “We was all wearing the same badge, theirs being a bit more scuffed and dulled than mine the only difference.”

  “Stop changing the subject, Charlie.”

  Caitlin took the 12 gauge in one hand, the Ruger in the other, testing their heft. Then she handed her SIG to Charlie Weeks.

  “Ready, Ranger?”

  “As I’ll ever be,” Charlie sighed, grimacing in pain as he pulled his knees into his chest.

  Caitlin slid in against him so her shoulders were square with his chest. Charlie Weeks wrapped both his arms around her neck, a SIG clutched in either hand as Caitlin reached to take the 12 gauge in her left and Ruger in her right. Charlie’s weight bent her spine inward when she tried to rise up. Their SUV was two hundred yards away, an interminable distance considering the pace at which it’d be covered.

  Still, no choice.

  Caitlin felt the warmth of Charlie’s blood soaking through her damp shirt and hoisted the 12 gauge and Ruger into position.

  “It’s time, old man.”

  “I warned you not to call me that.”

  Caitlin visualized Charlie’s smile dissolving into a pained grimace and lit out from behind the boulders. The drug mules’ fire roared at them, answered immediately by the twin pistols in Charlie’s grasp. The reports deafened Caitlin even before she started firing alternately with the 12 gauge and Ruger. The shotgun was semiauto with a cut-down barrel, but it was also little more than a gaudy noisemaker at this distance. Her shots from the Ruger stayed on line, though still serving more as distraction than anything else.

  Bullets whizzed past her, the sensation curiously like mosquitoes buzzing near on a hot summer night. Caitlin felt something like a kick to her side just over her hip and knew she’d been hit, at least grazed, but kept going with the SUV just a hundred yards away now, fifty beyond the west bank of the arroyo.

  One of Charlie Weeks’s pistols clicked empty, the other on its last shells with the SUV still barely in sight and Caitlin’s left leg beginning to stiffen.

  “Put me down, for God’s sake,” he rasped at her.

  “The hell you say,” Caitlin shot back, still firing through the dark blanket of night.

  A thin ribbon of moonlight opened up between the clouds, allowing her to spot the mules who’d emerged from their cover.

  “Kill the fuckers!” one of them screamed in perfect English.

  An American giving the orders to Mexican drug mules. . . . What the hell was this?

  Caitlin saw motion flash against the dark landscape, the mules opting for an all-out charge. She fired off rounds from the 12 gauge and Ruger to chase them back, slowing their attack. The same shaft of moonlight revealed the SUV to be closer than she thought. She was angling for it when something sharp bit into her back and sent the hard ground up to meet her.

  BAHRAIN, 2008

  The man stood before the plate-glass window in a place the signs, in both English and Arabic, called City Gardens. Squinting through the painful glare of light, he studied the reflection looking back at him, trying to place it. It had been so long since he’d seen a reflection of anything; the room he had known as home from the beginning of his memory had no windows or mirrors. There was a bowl of water to both wash and brush his teeth with twice a day. It would be there and then it would be gone, the man left trying to reconstruct the time in between.

  He shuddered with fear, the sensation nearly paralyzing him even though he could not remember what it was that scared him. There had been another life before the new memories and the man wondered if it belonged to the face looking back at him in the window glass. Often the men who came to him in his room addressed him by name. But it wasn’t his name. It may have been once, but it wasn’t anymore.

  He had no name. He told them that, but they never believed him.

  The man noticed the reflection in the glass was shuddering too. He started to twist away, felt a bolt of searing pain rack his spine, and saw the reflection wince.

  He started on again. His aching feet felt heavier, dragging across the road, the man too weak to lift them. His eyes hurt from the sunlight, telling him it was daytime. Night and day had ceased to have meaning long before, the distinctions between them as blurred as his very existence. More signs told him he was in a place called
Bab Al Bahrain, surrounded by strangers in an outdoor market where handicrafts and brass coffeepots were on display amid elegantly woven carpets. Sharp-smelling spices roasted beneath the blazing sun.

  His legs throbbed terribly, hot jabs rising through them with each step. His arms hung limp by his side, the slightest movement causing his shoulder joints to feel disconnected from the muscles around them.

  The man was aware of puzzled stares being cast upon him and swung round painfully, half expecting to find the reflection in the window glass staring back again. Words were being thrust his way in languages he did not understand until he passed under the shade of an overhang that turned the ache in his skin to a dull throb.

  “Would you like some?”

  The man turned to see a robe-clad merchant extending a glass that smelled like mint toward him.

  “Yes,” the man said, not recognizing his own voice. “Thank you.”

  He took the glass, sipped, and then drank the sweet brown tea. He could not remember drinking anything other than water, often tasting like soap or something worse.

  The man handed his glass to the merchant who refilled it with a smile and handed it back.

  “You have money?” the merchant asked him.

  “Money?”

  “Cash? Credit cards?”

  The man touched his pockets, sank his hands in. “No.”

  The merchant winked, playing the game. “You like the tea?”

  “Very much.”

  “You wish to see my wares. I have beautiful Bahrain pearls, wonderful pieces of jewelry for your woman. Is she with you?”

  “Who?”

  “Your woman.”

  “I don’t have a woman.”

  “A man, boy perhaps?”