Strong As Steel Page 3

  The screaming intensified when she neared the door and caught the first glimpse of movement, as shadows or reflections off the jagged remnants of the glass double doors. Movement was what Caitlin had learned to key on from her grandfather, the great Earl Strong, from the time she was seven.

  “Little girl,” he would say, “if you wait to see the whites of a man’s eyes, they’ll be the last sight you ever see.”

  Inside the suite of offices, shadows swept across walls, seeming to merge into one another, as the acrid stench of gun smoke and muzzle powder pushed into Caitlin’s nostrils.

  Three shooters, four at most.…

  Just short of the shattered entrance to CTP, she managed to identify three separate fire streams, along with a potential fourth. Caitlin reached the entrance to find a gunman in black fatigues wearing a ski mask, angling what looked like an assault rifle she didn’t recognize over a desk, before firing a three-shot burst into whomever had taken cover there.

  She sidestepped through the steel frame that had supported the shattered glass, snaring her jacket on a jagged shard stubbornly clinging to a corner. She felt the fabric tear as she added a second hand to her SIG and put two bullets in the back of the gunman’s skull. Impact snapped his head backward, then violently back to the front, doubling the gunman over and slamming him face-first into the same desk behind which his final victim had taken cover.

  Caitlin cursed herself for not better familiarizing herself with the layout of Communications Technology Providers, gleaning now that it featured an L-shaped open floor plan dominated by floor-to-ceiling glass that splashed sunlight in all directions. She felt a breeze and realized that bullets had stitched a splotchy pattern of holes across the entire far wall. The stench of blood stung her nostrils. Too much was happening too fast to record the multitude of downed bodies and impressionistic blood patterns dripping down the sleek glass forming the walls.

  A second masked gunman spun out from the back side of the sprawling floor’s L-shaped design, alerted no doubt by the heavy boom of Caitlin’s SIG. She’d already trained her gun that way, and she fired five more shots the instant his dark shape flashed before her. Caitlin thought she recorded three hits, one and maybe two in the throat and the other dead center in the face, coughing bone, cartilage, skin, and blood into the air, nothing left recognizable where they had been.

  She hit the floor next, close enough to an automatic burst fired by the third gunman to feel the heat of the bullets sizzling over her. She landed with her legs straddling one body and her torso perched on another, ready with her SIG the instant she heard click.

  Even polished gunmen often forgot how quickly a magazine gets drained when firing on full auto. The third gunman had ejected the spent mag and was jamming home a replacement when Caitlin got him low, bullets in both ankles, enough to yank the world out from under him. He hit the floor, already draining his fresh mag, fibers of the drop ceiling showering the air.

  He managed to right his fire on Caitlin, just as she rolled off the two bodies that had cushioned her drop. No angle on him from where she found herself. The downed gunman was plenty the worse for wear, but his aim was still on mark. So she sighted in on a fire extinguisher bracketed to the wall, put two bullets into it, and heard the instant hiss of white, noxious gas escaping. Enough to force the third gunman to roll straight into her line of sight again.

  Caitlin was sighting in on him when a fresh stitch of fire chewed up floor tile and Lucite desk chips all around her—fired, it seemed, from nowhere at all.

  Four gunmen, indeed, not three.

  But Caitlin couldn’t find him. No choice but to roll and keep rolling. The loosed chemical from the punctured fire extinguisher had clouded the air in thick white patches, and she aimed her roll for the thickest one. The gunman she’d shot in both legs trailed her with his fire the whole way, draining his second magazine. Caitlin heard the distinctive thwack of yet another being shoved home. She emptied the rest of her mag in his general direction, slowing her roll enough to snap a fresh one into place and rack the slide to chamber a round.

  She tried to right her aim, but a burst of fire from origins she couldn’t identify—the fourth gunman again—chased her back down before she even got off a shot. Caitlin finally pinpointed his position as being behind a toppled desk with a black granite top that had cracked when it spilled over. She couldn’t see the unfamiliar assault rifle’s barrel, and she imagined its sleek, black, burning shape morphing with the granite and poking its way through. Perfect camouflage, under the circumstances, and Caitlin realized she was effectively pinned down between a pair of gunmen who knew their way around a gunfight. She was calculating her options when a dual stitch of fire blew the ceiling out and sent husks of its particleboard raining down upon her.

  4

  CARACAS, VENEZUELA

  Those first shots were mere spits, the heavy rounds muffled by silencers. General Vargas was hit first, dead center in the forehead, which forced his hands to snap reflexively upward off the lever that had been about to send Paz to his death.

  Paz, for his part, had stalled the whole process long enough to allow him to weaken the rope binding his wrists together behind him to at last tear his hands free. He stripped the noose off next, even as the next rounds of sniper fire tore the feet out from beneath more of the soldiers atop the platform.

  By then, Paz had yanked a Kalashnikov assault rifle from the grasp of a still-twitching soldier and angled it downward on a phalanx of soldiers charging for the ladder, at ground level. The fact that they could only climb single file made it the easiest shooting he’d ever done. Paz heard a rattle and spun around. A wounded soldier was feeling for his trigger in a trembling hand, certain to fire a burst before Paz could steady his Kalashnikov, when another pair of sniper shots showered the soldier’s blood, bone, and brain matter into the air.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley Masters cursed himself for not putting the man down in the first place. From his perch, camouflaged in a tree that looked down over the stockade yard from three hundred yards away, he’d let his attention stray briefly to the chaos erupting on the ground, redirecting his vision just in time.

  He owed the colonel this much for all the scrapes they’d gotten into together, along with Caitlin Strong. All the times they’d fought battles on Texas soil with so much at stake. One part of Cort Wesley believed Paz’s theory that the Lone Star State lay at some moral or metaphysical epicenter where all manner of evil gathered. Another part of him, though, figured Texas was simply so goddamn flat that all the shit running downhill naturally collected there.

  Either way, when Cort Wesley got the call about Paz’s plight, from their mutual benefactor at Homeland Security, he only asked how soon the travel arrangements could get made. Caracas felt like pretty much every other godforsaken place where he’d fought in an earlier phase of his life, starting with Iraq. Several other Special Forces tours had followed, until Cort Wesley ran afoul of an officer who got dropped into a hot zone with cold feet. More accurately, that officer had run afoul of Cort Wesley, who ended up leaving the service with what would have been a dishonorable discharge if any record of his actual exploits had existed.

  He returned home to San Antonio to become an enforcer for the Branca crime family, which paid him more than enough to ensure a good life for his former girlfriend, Maura Torres, and the two sons he hadn’t met. He might never have met them if the very Guillermo Paz, whose life he’d just saved, hadn’t been responsible for ending Maura’s. But that was another time, a thousand years ago, it seemed, and Paz had saved both his and Caitlin’s lives a dozen times over in the years since. A changed man, to say the least, certainly worthy of the considerable effort expended to rescue him from his own decision to risk returning home to Caracas for his mother’s funeral.

  So now Cort Wesley found himself up a tree in the steaming heat, racking a fresh magazine into his MK12 Special Purpose Rifle, a modified variant of the M16 family of weapons. The SPR grew out
of a requirement of the Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces for a compact, light sniper weapon. To fulfill that need, the SPR had been fitted with a threaded-muzzle, match-grade, free-floating stainless steel heavy barrel. It fired the MK 262 Mod 1 open-tipped match round, specifically developed for this gun, a semiautomatic fed from a twenty- or thirty-round STANAG magazine.

  Cort Wesley preferred the SPR for its modular design, which allowed it to be configured with a range of butt stocks, optics, and other accessories. The perfect sniper system, in other words, for engagements such as this, when speed and accuracy were more important than shot length and round weight. He felt right at home with the 5.56-millimeter rounds that had already dropped a pile of bodies onto the gallows platform.

  All because Guillermo Paz had to come home for his mother’s funeral.

  Good thing I didn’t come alone, Cort Wesley thought, as fresh fire erupted at ground level amid bodies rushing, fleeing, and falling in all directions.

  He started to resteady the rifle, settling himself anew with a series of deep breaths, when his right arm cramped up. Cort Wesley tried to stretch the life back into it, but the arm had locked solid and refused to bend. It felt as if air had flooded his veins all the way down from the shoulder, spreading numbness from his fingers to the socket itself.

  Damn, he thought, coming to grips, in that moment, with why not many army types past their midforties were out running around like Rambo. He should take this as a lesson, ease back on the throttle a bit.

  Not yet, though. Cort Wesley needed to finish what he’d started here, so he shifted the grasp on the sniper rifle to his left arm. Using his cramped-up right to balance the stock, he pressed his left eye against the sight and curled his left index finger over the trigger.

  * * *

  The gun in his grasp, the cold steel growing warm, made Guillermo Paz feel right at home. The irony of what his blessed mother might think of the bullets pouring downward toward the troops struggling to right their weapons was not lost on Paz. As he discarded a spent rifle in favor of a fresh one, he could hear her imagined voice in his head—or maybe it wasn’t so imagined, after all.

  “I warned you, Guillermo. This is what I saw in my vision that day you came home with blood drying on your clothes.”

  Paz wondered if his mother’s vision had included the seven men he called his own, disguised in their original form as Venezuelan military, catch the soldiers utterly by surprise in their cross fire. Almost instantly, resistance gave way to retreat. His home country’s poorly paid protectors were hardly about to risk their lives to lay siege to the man whose exploits had become the product of legend.

  “You can’t escape your nature any more than you can stop breathing, Guillermo. But a nature doesn’t define a person’s soul. Your penchant for killing is no different than my visions and my being born a witch. That defines what we are, not who we are.”

  His mother’s voice continued to sound in Paz’s head, battling the heavy cacophony of gunfire while somehow rising above it.

  “I know you have tried, Guillermo, and that you continue to try. I am proud of your efforts to awaken the good in your soul. I never mentioned the Texas Ranger to you, but I saw her in that original vision, how she would be your savior, just as you would be hers. Even now your Texas Ranger finds herself swallowed by the blood she has spent her years shedding. The two of you have needed each other since the first time your eyes met, Guillermo. But you are about to need each other more than ever.”

  Paz heard his mother say this as he flung his second Kalashnikov aside and picked up a third in its place.

  And his mother was never wrong.

  5

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  The clearly coordinated move threw Caitlin off, with both its bold nature and its effectiveness. She knew the man behind the toppled desk would be rushing her, even before she heard the thud of his steps. Just as she knew that using the next moments to push the ruptured ceiling tiles off of her was just what the gunman expected and wanted her to do.

  So Caitlin didn’t do it.

  She trained her ears instead of her eyes, focusing on the clamor of his footsteps, military-grade boots squeaking across the polished tile. Her pistol poked up and through the debris coating her, firing blindly on a slight arc from left to right and back again. She used up the whole mag, a wild spray of gunfire sounding just before the crash of the gunman’s body going down.

  Shedding the ceiling debris from her, feeling the chalky residue it left on her skin and clothes, Caitlin reclaimed her feet amid the warm soak of blood pooling around her. There had to be at least a dozen bodies on this side of the L-shaped floor alone.

  A fresh burst of fire from the man spilling blood from both his legs was waiting when Caitlin popped up over desk level. The advantage, strangely, belonged to him, thanks to the cover provided by the angle at which he’d fallen. Caitlin dropped back down behind the desk, not about to expose herself in a way that tempted his superior fire to find a next-to-impossible shot. This being her final magazine, she had to play it safe and smart. She regrouped behind a sleek and heavy black desk, with two more toppled ones separating her from the downed man.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Caitlin recognized the sound of fresh nine-millimeter fire that wasn’t her own.

  “Drop it! Drop it now!” she heard Bub McNelly of the Texas Criminal Investigations Division screech from the general area of the shattered entrance. “I said, drop it—”

  The rest of his words were swallowed by a burst of silenced gunfire from the automatic weapon that had been trained on her. She cursed McNelly, keenly aware that the man’s first-ever gunfight had pitted him against professionals packing special operations–grade ordnance.

  And his last.

  She heard his cries and screams, as she burst upward to find the 5.56-millimeter fire twisting him one way and then the other. The gunman she’d shot in both legs had managed to prop himself up on a desk and lean against a chair. Caitlin fired, and kept firing, the bullets left in the magazine draining as quickly as she could pull the trigger.

  The next image she recorded was the desk chair rolling across the floor as the final gunman toppled off the desk with his head lopped to the side at a strange angle from two bullets that had found his neck.

  Caitlin heard a clicking noise, thought it was coming from him, until she realized she had continued to pull her SIG Sauer’s trigger after the slide had locked open. She made herself stop and rushed to Bub McNelly, clinging to the hope that he’d managed to survive the brutal barrage that had turned him into a pincushion.

  But his eyes were fixed sightlessly on the ceiling, seeming to stare through it, toward something bigger and better beyond.

  6

  CARACAS, VENEZUELA

  The MK12 SPR resisted Cort Wesley’s every move, defying his efforts to find the same fluidity with the untrained left as had been the case with the right. It felt like learning the whole sniper process again from scratch, what he’d once heard a shooter far more expert than himself say was akin to trying to ride a bike backward. His first shots with his left eye calling the action and his left hand on the trigger missed badly. He quickly found his aim again, but at the expense of speed. Everything felt different, and the cramping in his right arm was showing no signs of letting up.

  I’m too old for this shit.…

  Just moments ago, wielding the MK12 SPR from such a safe distance had left him feeling invincible, godlike in the sense that he could take down anything his crosshairs painted, without the targets knowing where the fire had come from. Now, the slowing of his motions and inconsistency of his aim left him feeling vulnerable. He was barely managing to drop the machine gunners in the guard towers and the Venezuelan snipers placed squarely in the open atop the roofs of those buildings in the stockade complex that looked down over the gallows tower.

  Now that tower belonged squarely to Guillermo Paz, the colonel weaving his way about the spilled bodies in nimble, dance-like
fashion. Cort Wesley realized Paz was wielding two Kalashnikovs now, firing them in opposite directions as if his aim were the result of divine intervention, neither of his arms cramping up in the least.

  Even from this distance, Cort Wesley suddenly discerned through all the tumult the sound of breaking glass and swung his MK12 SPR back up and around, toward the buildings and the muzzle bores he knew he’d find protruding through the jagged shards left in the window glass.

  He rotated from one to the other, not even the length of a breath separating his shots, at last finding the rhythm with his left side that had been eluding him. The shots came so quickly as to seem the result of firing on full auto, his left index finger pulling so fast and hard on the trigger that he feared it too might seize up solid on him.

  Cort Wesley was still firing when a brisk wind like that kicked up by an approaching storm shook the heavy branch on which he was perched. The next moment revealed a familiar sound that deafened his hearing to all else, drowning out the remnants of gunfire, at the same time that a big, dark shadow crossed overhead.

  * * *

  Paz saw the Black Hawk coming, staged from a Venezuelan military airfield overseen by an officer who was desperate to flee the country with his family. It seemed to slice the air more than fly through it, twin M60 machine guns offering discouraging fire downward to keep its path forward clear.

  Paz was ready when a black rope ladder dropped down out of the hold, dangling for the platform. He shouldered one of the remaining Kalashnikovs and grabbed hold of the lowest rung as soon as it came within range. He felt himself swooped up and away, soaring weightlessly through the air and wondering if this might be what dropping through the trapdoor of the gallows platform would’ve felt like.