Strong Light of Day (35 page)

“Hey, Congressman?”

“Yes, Ranger.”

“Boom!”

 

P
ART
N
INE

Since their inception the Texas Rangers have been shaped by the times in which they lived. In frontier Texas they were schooled by Jack Hays in irregular warfare against the Comanche. Under the leadership of John Jones, commandant of the Frontier Battalion, they gained a reputation as intrepid—and brutal—law enforcement officers. And in contemporary Texas, as amply demonstrated in the career of M. T. “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas, who chased killers, tamed oil boomtowns, and became a specialist in forensic science, they have earned a reputation as shrewd detectives.

—“Texas Rangers,” in
Violence in America: An Encyclopedia,
Ronald Gottesman and Richard Maxell Brown, eds.

 

82

M
IDLAND,
T
EXAS

“We have these all over our country, too,” Yanko Zhirnosky, head of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, told Calum Dane.

“I know. We sold you the technology.”

“Your company?”

“My country, Mr. Zhirnosky.”

Zhirnosky smiled, his clothes as stiff as the burly frame they concealed. “Call me Yanko, Calum. After all, we're associates now.”

“It's
Cay
-lum,
Yank
-o.”

Zhirnosky grinned again. “There's an old Russian saying,
Cay
-lum: ‘Little thieves are hanged, but great ones escape.'”

“I prefer the American one about people willing to buy oil from anyone, including Satan.” Dane turned back to the drilling derrick that towered toward the growing night, the top of it almost lost to the dark. “Of course, that was before we became the world's largest producer of crude.”

“A good thing,
Ca
y-lum, because you're going to be needing every ounce of it very soon,” Zhirnosky grinned, raising his voice over the loudening grind of the drill works. “To save what's left of your economy.”

*   *   *

“Why don't you let me show you how this works?” Dane offered.

Zhirnosky turned his focus on the drilling operation, the steady
thunk, thunk, thunk
as a dozen workers labored in seemingly frenetic fashion about various stations. “I would like that very much, comrade,” he said to Dane, an edge of suspicion creeping into his voice.

“Looks chaotic to you, I imagine.”

“It does indeed.”

“Well, my friend, for a long time, people figured this land was tapped out, the wells gone bone dry. Then we came up with new technology that allowed us to drill down deep enough to uncover new reserves that dwarfed what the Permian Basin had produced before. You're standing in what plenty say is the biggest oil field in the world,” Dane explained, capturing all of Zhirnosky's attention. “Virtual armies of oil workers have flooded the area, since these new techniques in deep drilling fostered a fresh oil boom. Cheap roadside motels in Midland now fetch three hundred dollars per night, thanks to the blocks of rooms rented out on a permanent basis to drilling and oil companies boasting unlimited budgets to sap as much crude from the ground as they can. Rooms are at such a premium, in fact, that crews often have to double up in them—as one pair of men is leaving for the fields, another pair is returning from them. And that's even with oil prices going as low as they did.”

“Others shut down or reduced their operations, I believe.”

“They did, indeed, with an eye on the short term instead of the long. Those prices will come back up; they always do. And when that happens I'll be poised to control the market.”

Zhirnosky smiled thinly. “I like the way you think.”

“I've purchased tens of thousands of additional acres
since
prices sank. It's all about the future, and I can afford to wait.”

“For just the kind of economic crisis that would force oil prices to spike, perhaps?”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” Dane told him. “Real recently, in fact,” he added, leaving it there.

“I must say, comrade,” Zhirnosky responded, seeming to hold the breath in his cheeks, until they puckered with a sound like air escaping from a balloon, “I'm very impressed.”

Dane let his eyes stray back to the derrick. “I believe I'm on the right track, given whatever that crack about us needing every drop of our oil was referring to.”

The Russian's cheeks inflated again, joining Dane in looking back toward the derrick. “How deep are you drilling here?”

“Oh, we're probably down fifteen thousand feet by now. According to the seismic studies, we should hit soon. At that point, the well is capped and a pumping rig is brought in to replace the derrick.”

“How many of these do you own and operate?”

“I couldn't tell you. And even if I could, it varies by the day, as some drilling stations pull up stakes because the oil wasn't there and others set up shop over fresh finds.” Dane joined the Russian's gaze toward the derrick. “So tell me what brings you over here, what makes you so impressed with what I'm about?”

“Oil is only one precious commodity, comrade, and your country is about to lose another: food.”

*   *   *

“Pretty big commodity,” Dane managed

“What do you think brought me here?” Zhirnosky continued.

“I was waiting for you to tell me.”

“A plot thirty-five years in the making, dating all the way back to the height of the Cold War. We couldn't win an arms race with you, so we tried a different track. A team was sent here with a compound capable of destroying crops and eroding the soil across your heartland.”

“Obviously you fucked it up.”

Zhirnosky bristled at Dane's use of profanity, the disrespect it showed. Dane was glad the big man named Beriya was hovering out of earshot, along with the other guards who'd accompanied Zhirnosky.

“Circumstances worked against us, yes,” he conceded. “But the head of the team managed to survive and has been lying in wait all these years. Then, what does he learn? He learns someone else is suddenly doing our work for us. Someone else is killing America's crops.”

“Me.”

“Inadvertent, I'm sure, but impressive nonetheless. When our agent informed us of what was transpiring here, we did … how you say?… our due diligence and learned about the fertilizer your company withdrew from the market. The rest you know.”

“You mean the part about how your ape over there killed my bodyguards?”

“Ape?”

“Zool,”
Dane repeated in Russian.

“You speak Russian,” Zhirnosky grinned.

“I've got substantial business interests over here. And it sounds to me like that's what you're suggesting, a business proposition.”

“Am I?”

“I don't think you understand how useful we can be to each other.”

Zhirnosky remained silent, waiting for Dane to continue.

Dane did, finally. “The worse this gets, the deeper the economic crisis across the globe, the more money my stockpiled oil will be worth.”

“Just the thinking I'd expect from a man with the proper ambitions and resources.”

“I've got plenty of both, Yanko,” Dane said, pronouncing Zhirnosky's first name correctly this time. “And I'll tell you what else I've got: stores and stores of that fertilizer, hidden away, just in case I have use for it again down the road.”

“Well, comrade,” said a beaming Zhirnosky, “it appears you now do. You will become richer than your wildest dreams and I will get my country back.”

Dane extended his hand. “Guess we've got ourselves a deal.”

Zhirnosky took it. “A marriage of mutual convenience.”

Dane smiled at him. “In that case, there's something else I'd like to show you.”

 

83

G
LASSCOCK
C
OUNTY,
T
EXAS

“What the hell is this place?” Jones groused, as they slid forward under the canopy of a moonless night.

Before them was the overgrown refuse of what had once been a farm—cotton, specifically—recognizable from the buildings that had collapsed in on themselves. They'd landed at a military airfield twenty miles from the site, kept open just to service their flight, evidence of Jones's return to the good graces of Homeland Security.

“The last farm Calum Dane's family sharecropped,” Caitlin said, just loud enough for Jones and Cort Wesley to hear. Guillermo Paz lingered a bit further back to secure their rear. “We're just a few miles from the grave where Dane smelled oil when he buried his father, the site of the first well he ever dug.”

She went on to detail briefly how Austin had confirmed her suspicions, Captain Tepper learning that Dane had indeed bought this land five years ago, in cash, through a shell company he created just for that purpose, to avoid any connection whatsoever to Dane Corp. And the ruse held everywhere except the land record office, where the paper trail was clear enough for anybody who knew where to look.

The land was overgrown and likely riddled with varmints, though the only thing visible right now was a herd of wild horses that had appropriated the farm as its private pasture. Caitlin continued to lead the way up toward what had once been a fence line, judging by the remnants of stray posts rotting in the ground. She stopped when she saw a thin flicker of light through the trees and overgrowth, in the area of a barn that remained whole amid the collapsed buildings toppled by wind, storms, and disuse.

“You can see that shack line back over to the east,” she said, even softer. “Dane and his family must've lived in one of those.”

“That still doesn't tell us what we're doing here, Ranger,” Jones said again.

Caitlin looked at him and then at Cort Wesley, but she waited for Paz to draw even before she responded. “I think it was Dane who snatched those kids from the Village School, Jones. And I think this is where he's holding them.”

*   *   *

More flickers of light flashed from the area of the barn. Someone lighting a cigarette, maybe, or sweeping a narrow-beam flashlight about.

Guards watching the perimeter. Just as she expected.

“Remember those lights Luke said he saw?” Caitlin whispered to Cort Wesley, after they'd ducked down to stay out of sight of the guards. “I think Dane's men came by boat and used flashlights like the ones we see now to find the camp. I think Dane knew the bugs were coming and got the kids out before they got there.”

“And brought them here,” Cort Wesley whispered back. “I get that much. What I don't get is what he figured on doing with them at that point. Hell, seems like he'd have been better off just letting the bugs do their thing.”

“Yeah,” Caitlin acknowledged, “I'm still working that part out.”

Jones looked over at them, shaking his head. “How the hell do you it, Ranger?” he asked.

“Just lucky, I guess. I also think Calum Dane burned his own petrochemical plant in Waco to eliminate any trace of the pesticide that turned these beetles into monsters.”

“Wait a minute,” Cort Wesley said suddenly, “where's Paz?”

Caitlin fixed her gaze ahead toward the wild horses and patches of scrub between them and the barn. “Getting things started.”

 

84

G
LASSCOCK
C
OUNTY,
T
EXAS

Moving about without detection, especially in the dark, was a skill Guillermo Paz had mastered as a boy, when he needed to steal food for his brothers and sisters and escape the gangs who wished to enlist him in their ranks. To this day, he wondered if the
bruja
vision and witchlike foresight he'd inherited from his mother also enabled him to move like a ghost, a
sombra,
immune to detection.

Paz barely registered the kills, just as he never even considered merely incapacitating the guards as an alternative. Killing them was much easier and less complicated; the number of lives he took was as meaningless as the lives of those men themselves, in his mind. They were nothing to him, soulless creatures who sealed their own fate by being party to doing harm to children. Paz never bought into the pass-down effect of acting under orders, believing above all else now that man was the master of his own fate, as opposed to the other way around.

His vast size and bulk, moving through space lacking sufficient cover, should have rendered a stealthy approach an exercise in futility. Yet Paz stalked his prey with ease. Even when the guards seemed to be looking straight at him, they indicated no acknowledgment whatsoever of his presence or existence. With each snap of a neck or twist of a blade through bone and cartilage, he again pondered the level of magic he'd inherited from his mother.

The psychic Madam Caterina had offered to bring his mother forward so he could speak to her as an adult for the first time. Paz had declined, because the truth was that the prospect of such a conversation frightened him, especially if his mother expressed displeasure with the man he'd become. He regretted that decision now and, since he'd turned away from such things in favor of his priest again, had likely squandered the opportunity for good.

Look at me now, Mamá.…

Paz began to wonder in earnest if perhaps the tales his mother had told him had more credence than he had let himself believe. Beyond the visions he was convinced were true, maybe there was something to be said for some having been blessed with phantomlike abilities, to be both man and
sombra
at the same time.

Paz approached the next guard from the rear, massive hands swallowing his head in the last moment before a crack that sounded like a thunderclap resonated through the air.

*   *   *

“The guards are gone,” Cort Wesley said, sweeping the mini binoculars about the now-weed-infested cotton fields that Calum Dane had worked as a boy. “I can't see a single one.”