Strong at the Break Read online

  Serles figured he had no choice but to adjust to the constant change in his sleeping patterns, even that exacerbated by the regular mortar attacks that sent base personnel scurrying for the bunkers. He thought maybe the insurgents were timing the attacks for his sleep periods since they always seemed to come during those rare times when he finally slipped off soundly.

  The bunkers themselves, cement shelters about four feet high and maybe fifteen feet long, were scattered at strategic points on the grounds. Enough room inside for about twenty people and you quickly learned to program the location of the nearest one into your brain no matter where you were on the base.

  Serles got used to the percussion of the shells when they impacted, got so he could tell exactly where on the base they landed. Worst thing was being crammed into a bunker, after being roused from a rare deep sleep, and waiting for the all-clear signal. Sometimes it took more than an hour to come, and he would emerge bent, cramping, and with nerves too jangled to get back to sleep. It was a cycle of deprivation from which it proved impossible to find any semblance of rhythm or routine.

  Serles tried keeping a diary to maintain the track of time and keep himself sane, but it only made him more depressed. He had a girlfriend back home, but there were nights he couldn’t even keep her picture straight in his head. It kept dissolving to be replaced by a patient who died in the OR, gazing up at him in death, or the smirk of the incompetent asshole supervisor who reveled in making him miserable.

  Serles had been on duty for fourteen straight hours, looking forward only to completing his shift in two more, when the sniper victim was brought in. While the victim’s blood was being typed and the OR readied, Serles was alone with the man. He started to figure he worked for Blackwater or some competing outfit. Private military. Then the man’s eyes opened, filling with fear as they met Serles’s.

  “You’ve been shot, sir. You’ve lost a lot of blood but they brought you to the best field hospital in Baghdad and we’re gonna fix you up for sure.”

  The man tried to speak, but only a gurgle emerged. Then he moved his head slightly, Serles watching the man’s tongue switch from one side of his mouth to the other.

  “They shot me,” he wheezed in what barely passed for a whisper.

  “I know that, sir. An Iraqi insurgent sniper did the deed, but today’s your lucky day ’cause he didn’t kill you.”

  “No…”

  That and the terror plastered over the man’s face got Serles’s attention.

  “No,” the patient repeated, loud enough to be clear now. “Wasn’t an Iraqi.” He swallowed as best he could. “An American.”

  “An American shot you?”

  The semblance of a nod.

  Serles fished the notebook he’d been using for a diary from his pocket. “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Kirk … en … dale.”

  Serles wrote that down, spelling it phonetically. “What outfit you with, sir?”

  “American…”

  “I know that much.”

  “… intell—”

  That was as far as he got before a gurgling rasp sucked up the rest of his words.

  “Intelligence?”

  Kirkendale nodded.

  “All right, the OR’s almost ready. I want you to stop talking now. Save your strength.”

  Kirkendale shook his head very slowly, twice. His eyes beckoned Serles closer, close enough to smell his blood and the dry stench of his labored breath.

  “One-four-seven … eight-six-three.”

  “What was that, sir?”

  “One-four-seven-dash-eight-six-three. You need to write it down. Please.”

  Serles retrieved his notepad from the gurney where he’d laid it and jotted down the numbers. Easy sequence to remember, but he read them out loud again and Kirkendale nodded, spitting up some blood as he forced out his next words.

  “Alpha, Delta, Charlie … Operation … Rising … Dawn.”

  Serles wrote that down too, then looked back to see Kirkendale’s body had gone still and his eyes had locked open.

  “Oh shit…”

  11

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  “My notebook disappeared a couple days later,” Serles picked up. “I didn’t think much of it, not until…” The rest of his words got cut off in his throat, swallowed down like bile.

  “Take your time, sir,” Caitlin urged.

  The kid tried to smile. “I ain’t no ‘sir,’ Ranger.”

  “You are to me, Mark. You served your country and paid a terrible price for it.”

  His eyes lost all their gleam. “That’s what I need to get to now.”

  “The IED?”

  Serles half nodded, as close as he could come to completing the gesture. “They sent me on an errand, me and a guy named Donleavy who we called Donkey for short. Pick up some medical supplies at the airport that were late being delivered. Weird thing being that I’d just inventoried the supply closet and there was plenty of the very same stuff they’d sent us to get. I didn’t think too much of it at the time because there’s no figuring any rhyme or reason to the way the army does things. Halfway there, the IED got us on the freeway. Weird in itself, since the insurgents had started setting their IEDs in parked cars a while back, more effective that way.”

  Caitlin remained silent, no idea what to say to prod the kid on.

  “Now here’s where things get really strange,” he continued on his own. “We could see other Humvees up ahead of us cross the very same spot. Then we go over it and boom!”

  Serles began to tremble when he said that, his hands squeezing the armrests of his wheelchair while his mouth continued to quiver. He tried to swallow and ended up sighing instead.

  “Woke up with what was left of the Humvee turned on its side and I didn’t even think I was hurt. I mean, I didn’t feel any pain, just figured my legs were stuck instead of blown off, and was counting my lucky stars when I glanced over at Donkey and saw him cut clean in half in the driver’s seat. That’s when I looked down below my own waist.”

  The kid took some time to settle himself, starting to sob a bit, and Caitlin adjusted her chair so she could lay a hand over his arm. She felt him tense under her grasp and then relax slowly.

  “It’s all right, Mark. Take your time. Nowhere else I gotta be right now.”

  “Can you call me M.J.?”

  “Sure … M.J.”

  He met her gaze, his eyes frightened and detached, the horrors of that place all coming back to him. “You have any idea how many IED victims we treated in the OR?”

  “Quite a few, I’d imagine.”

  “Got so you could recognize the mark of the damn things. They were crude mostly, homemade and packed with whatever shit the damn insurgents could stick into them. No two victims were alike but the wounds were always, always, a jagged mess. But Donkey, like I said, had been cut clean in half, the wound half cauterized by the time I looked over at him. And my…” The kid couldn’t say it, couldn’t say “legs.” “The wounds were clean and symmetrical. Even left and right. That sound like a crude bomb to you?”

  “Not at all, M.J.”

  “No, it don’t. Sounds like a shaped charge. Strictly American military ordnance.”

  “No chance the insurgents could’ve gotten their hands on a few?”

  “If they did, Ranger, this was the only time I ever saw evidence of it. I don’t think anybody else saw what I was seeing, even the doc who saved my life. It all slipped out of my head, lost in a morphine fog. But then it started coming back soon as they weaned me off. Tried to tell myself that it was something I’d conjured up from the shock, except the more my mind cleared, the more I was certain it was a shaped charge that had killed Donkey and blown my legs off.”

  “Donkey just being along for the ride.”

  The kid tilted his head to the side. “Didn’t I tell you? He was working the same shift when they brought Kirkendale in. Donkey was the only one I told.”

  * * *
/>   Caitlin kept looking at the kid for what seemed like a long time after that. Didn’t need to write it down because it was something she was never going to forget.

  “Have you told anyone else about this since you’ve been back, M.J.?”

  “No, ma’am. Not even my counselor or PT—that’s physical therapist. Didn’t want either of them writing me up for a psyche evaluation.”

  Caitlin rose, the kid’s eyes following her as she felt her BlackBerry buzz in her pocket. “You mind if I take this?”

  Serles shook his head and Caitlin lifted the phone from her pocket, Cort Wesley Masters’s number flashing in the ID box.

  “Dylan’s gone,” Cort Wesley told her, before she had a chance to say hello.

  12

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  Through the lobby’s glass entry doors, Caitlin saw D. W. Tepper standing in the shade cast by the Intrepid building. She joined him outside in the early-spring heat and watched him stamp a cigarette out under his boot.

  “Captain?” she said, stopping just short of him, something all wrong about his being here.

  Tepper handed her a sheet of paper that was already dog-eared and smelled of tobacco. “This came in a few minutes after you left. No one else has seen it yet.” And then, as if feeling the need to say more, “It’s about your friend Masters.”

  Caitlin read the single-spaced type running nearly the whole page beneath Texas Department of Public Safety letterhead. The piece of paper shook in her hand, as if ruffled by the wind.

  “This can’t be right.”

  She looked up to see Tepper’s weary eyes boring into her. “Maybe so. But it’s gotta be handled all the same, Ranger. And that means by the book.” Tepper stopped and looked down at his crushed cigarette, shaking his head. “I figured you deserved a heads-up.”

  “Masters just called me. His oldest son’s missing.”

  She could see Tepper’s expression tighten, the deep furrows seeming to fill in a bit. “We talking foul play?”

  “Could be,” Caitlin told him, elaborating no further as thoughts churned in her head. “I just don’t know for sure yet.”

  Tepper smacked his lips, watched the piece of paper in her hand flapping about until she folded it back up. “Not a good idea you handling this, Ranger.”

  Caitlin stuffed the paper in her pocket, holding Tepper’s gaze the whole time. “It is if you want to avoid bloodshed, sir.”

  PART TWO

  They stood upon the western frontier like towers of strength. They fought whatever came in the shape of a foe to the Lone Star flag, no matter what the disparity in numbers.

  —The Austin Daily Statesman, 1874

  13

  MIDLAND, TEXAS; THE PRESENT

  “Latest arrivals are here, Mal,” the voice of Jed Kean told Malcolm Arno over his cell phone that doubled as a walkie-talkie.

  Arno rose from his desk, an exact replica of his dead father’s since the original had been confiscated by the FBI and never returned. That was back when the Church of the Redeemer had been based on a beautiful stretch of land not far from this very spot. But the government had seized that too and sold it off after charging his father with tax evasion and dumping all his worldly possessions for pennies on the dollar to raise what they falsely claimed he owed them.

  Arno was bigger than his father, broader too. The Church of the Redeemer was dead and gone all right. From its grave, though, had risen the group Arno had named the Patriot Sun, perfectly fitting for the circumstances of its background and founding. It hadn’t been the scope of Max Arno’s vision that had ultimately gotten him killed by a Texas Ranger, it was the lack of vision. He simply hadn’t gone far enough, probably because the times hadn’t called for it.

  But these did. Simple as that.

  Malcolm Arno came out from behind his desk in the Midland complex’s main office building. Spread out over the rest of his four-hundred-acre spread were expansive quarters for his men and their families, training facilities, an armory, athletic facilities, farm and grazing fields, shops, stores, a meeting hall that doubled as a church, even a movie theater. Arno had done it all on his own, picking up where his father had left off and then some. The seizure of Maxwell Arno’s possessions and property had left Malcolm penniless, a thirteen-year-old boy named a ward of the state and sentenced to life in a series of foster homes before ultimately landing in a juvenile detention facility. It was there, while he lay awake at night amid the stench of boy sweat, stale farts, and unwashed clothes, that he began planning for the day that was now within his reach. Not the specifics, mind you, just the broad parameters of a new world that would exceed even his father’s vision as it excised the very forces that had destroyed him.

  Located on the city’s outskirts, and far from view of the buildings stretching for the clouds on Midland’s skyline, the Patriot Sun had purchased the abandoned land of a mothballed air force base from the government for a princely, eight-figure sum in keeping with Texas real estate values. There wasn’t much left but crumbling pavement, scrub, and dilapidated buildings bracketed by shut-down oil fields with their rusted derricks still in place. Arno had gutted it all and erected a fortress encampment in its place, both self-contained and defensible; lessons learned from his father’s mistakes at the Church of the Redeemer.

  When they fled through the old root cellar, his father promised Malcolm they’d be coming back to reclaim what was theirs. They’d bide their time and grow stronger, he said. The Church of the Redeemer was just too far ahead of its time. The country wasn’t ready for them yet.

  But it was ready now.

  Malcolm Arno stepped into the dry scorching heat and walked along the cobblestone path inlaid amid the luscious grass fed by underground sprinklers. He’d brought in the same Israeli scientists who’d made a paradise out of parts of the Negev Desert to do the same here in the arid plains of West Texas. The buildings had a rough, unfinished hue about them, their simplicity belying the bulletproof glass and reinforced walls that could help the compound withstand even the most concentrated attack. The complex was also outfitted with a series of massive generators that could supply uninterrupted power for weeks at a time.

  The steady hum of air-conditioning compressors cooling the classrooms, meeting and training centers, living quarters, and offices sounded like music to Arno, testament to all he had built. The complex grew much of its own food and raised both live- and feedstock that were slaughtered right on the premises for meat. Only thing Arno cared about was being able to hole up here a long time if it came to that. Beat back anybody the State of Texas could throw at him, Rangers included. Succeed where his father had failed.

  He continued on toward the Intake Center, passing the fully stocked medical clinic behind which sat the single building on the grounds that was guarded twenty-four hours a day. Only Malcolm Arno’s most trusted advisers, captains of the Patriot Sun, knew the truth of what lay behind those walls. The many who worshipped him, the few who truly understood him, the media who tried to explain him had no clue of that building’s contents or purpose. The strange sounds that often emanated from within its double-thick concrete walls were ignored by the residents, Arno’s minions who accepted his word as dogma because he spoke for them. Offered them a voice amid a country that had stopped listening to their anger and protestations. This world was their refuge, their solace from that which had disowned and disavowed them by losing sight of all that was good and right. This world was their hope, just as it represented the hopes of millions more like them.

  A man who looked as wide as a beer keg and as tall as a telephone pole stood at the entrance to the Intake Center, his shadow thrown back against the door it nearly equaled in scope. At six-foot-two, Arno was only four inches shorter than the bigger man but only half as broad seemingly. This in spite of the fact that he had begun a ritual of push-ups and pull-ups to both pass the time in juvie and toughen himself up to the threats and attacks of the boys who thought they ran the place.


  Jed Kean’s jet-black hair was thick and greased back, which made Arno run a hand through the thin locks he combed straight forward to better disguise the gaps in his scalp. Jed’s father, a member of the Church of the Redeemer, had finally taken a sixteen-year-old Arno in to live with his family. From that point, he and Jed had been like brothers and Jed had stood by his side every step along the path not just to reclaim the Reverend Max Arno’s legacy but also to exceed it.

  He had joined Arno on the endless road of revival meetings and talks before groups that still displayed the Confederate flag. Kean had been with him in dark, dingy basements where he spoke to men sitting in folding chairs amid clouds of cigarette smoke and stale air that stank of mold and sweat. Arno building his base from the ground up, laying his foundation, learning to speak for a forgotten and disregarded segment of America. The building of funds came slowly, starting with a simple passing of a hat that came back empty as often as not. But the attention garnered was priceless and had led directly to the windfall that had allowed the Patriot Sun to be. Kean was also one of the few to be intimately aware of those details.

  “You’re gonna be real happy with this batch, Mal,” Kean said, grinning. “Cream of the crop and I don’t use the phrase lightly.”

  The big man led him through the door of the Intake Center and down a short hallway that opened into a single waiting room. Three Mexican girls sat inside on chairs, all between fifteen and sixteen just brimming with potential.

  “Once we get ’em cleaned up, they’ll be the best ones yet,” said Kean.

  Arno moved his eyes from one to the next and back again. “I do believe you’re right on that account,” he agreed, holding his gaze on the one he’d already decided to take first.

  “Doc’s checking out the fourth girl right now,” Kean told him. “But trust me, boss, these three are the pick of the litter. Goddamn sugar plum fairies dropped down from the sky. Don’t speak a word of English neither.”

  “News ain’t all good, Jed. Man we sent to Galveston missed his chance with that judge.”