Strong Rain Falling: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Caitlin Strong Novels) (40 page)

They all remained at Ranger Company headquarters overnight, stealing what little sleep they could on cots in a ready room that had been a workout facility until it became clear no one was using it. At nine a.m. sharp everyone had gathered again in the conference room over doughnuts, bagels, and coffee, awaiting word from Jones on the results of the morning raids on Guajardo’s high-tech facilities in Guadalajara.

“Both facilities were abandoned,” he reported flatly, “cleaned out recently and fast by the look of things. We’re talking nothing left behind. I’m surprised they even left the floors and ceilings.”

“You think Guajardo’s wise to us?” Tepper wondered.

“Even if she was,” Caitlin replied before Jones could try, “it sounds like this must have happened before I paid her a visit yesterday. Which means the timing’s just coincidence and everything’s proceeding according to her plan.”

“So where’s that leave us exactly?” Cort Wesley posed to no one in particular.

“Up shit’s creek with a paddle we can’t use,” Jones told him. “The Mexican president is moving in troops to surround that game preserve of hers in Los Mochis, but there’s no sign of Guajardo or anybody else on the premises. Looks like it’s been abandoned too, except for the animals.”

“You have any recon satellite available?” Caitlin asked him.

“You got that look, Ranger.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Depends on what they’d be reconning.”

“Guajardo’s game preserve.”

*   *   *

Two more hours passed before Jones got the report from a satellite reconnaissance sweep that had used thermal imaging and density scans to survey Guajardo’s land in Los Mochis.

“Ever hear of Rio Secreto, Ranger?”

“Nope.”

“It’s a network of underground caves located near Mexico’s Playa del Carmen. Truly an amazing sight to behold, featuring a two-thousand-foot river that winds its way underground, with literally thousands of stalactites and stalagmites.”

“I appreciate the information, Jones, but what does that have to do with Los Mochis?”

“Well, it turns out Los Nachos,” he said, grinning at his purposeful mispronunciation of the name, “features a similar cave system, more limestone based in this case but also surrounding what is clearly an underground river even longer than Rio Secreto.”

“I’ll be sure to remember that next time I plan a vacation,” said Captain Tepper, the furrows and lines on his face exaggerated further by lack of sleep. His eyes drooped tiredly and the ashtray before him at the head of the table featured any number of Marlboros extinguished quickly so as not to set a bad example for Cort Wesley Masters’s oldest son. “But right now I’m more worried about all of us boarding an express train back to the dark ages.”

“There’s definitely a structure beneath the game preserve, people,” Jones elaborated. “But our initial satellite recon can’t determine whether it’s an extension of the underground cave system or a separate structure built to take advantage of the camouflage provided.”

“Nice things, your satellites,” snapped Cort Wesley, grumpy from worry and lack of sleep as well, his short coarse hair sticking up at one side thanks to a few hours spent twisting on a cot to no restful end. “They can tell what kind of vodka somebody’s drinking from five miles up, but not whether a megalomaniac Mexican has built herself a lair from which to launch an attack on America, or where she’s got my son stashed.”

“Well, the satellites did pick up some hot spots in the grid, temperature variations usually indicative of man-made structures carved out of the ground.”

“You mean like stairways, emergency escape routes, something like that?” Caitlin raised.

“That’s exactly what I mean. There are four of them pretty much equidistant from one another on the game preserve.”

“That’s good, right?” asked Tepper.

Jones nodded. “It sure is. But what isn’t good is the fact that our reconnaissance picked up no signature normally associated with a power source or any power in general. Now, boys and girls, it could be Guajardo reinforced her bunker with lead shielding to throw our birds off or is using propane to throw us off. But it could also be that there’s nothing down there at all but stalactites.”

Caitlin found herself staring at the remarkably detailed array of overhead shots of the game preserve taken from satellites miles up in the sky. “She’s there all right.”

“Why don’t I put you on the phone with President Villarreal and let you convince him to attack what might be no more than a fancy zoo?”

“Because his top cadre could be beholden to Ana Guajardo, maybe even on her payroll. Leave this in the hands of the Mexican army, Jones, and you might as well start stockpiling batteries and flashlights.”

Tepper shook his head and pressed out another cigarette without even puffing on it. “Oh boy, here we go.…”

Jones moved from the table to better face her. “Not gonna happen this time, Ranger. Mexico’s an ally last time I checked and you going gunfighter down there is the last thing we need.”

“Who said anything about going gunfighter? I’m going down there to serve an arrest warrant on the suspected killer of five children in Texas.”

“With a signature or a bullet?”

“Whatever it takes, Jones.”

“You better make it fast once you’re inside, Ranger,” Jones told her. “Because if you’re right, I don’t know how long I’ll be able to hold off the Mexican army.”

“You leave that to me,” Caitlin said, pulling her phone from her pocket.

“Who you calling now?”

Caitlin aimed her answer at Cort Wesley. “Couple new friends of mine named Rojas and Castillo, descendants of the generals who helped my great-grandfather bring down Esteban Cantú.”

Jones shook his head in disbelief, then shook it again. “You’re talking about the cartel leaders, public enemies one and two.”

“Not today,” Caitlin said to him, then immediately looked back at Cort Wesley. “Today they’re the only men who may be able to find out where Guajardo’s got Luke stashed.”

*   *   *

“I couldn’t reach Castillo,” Caitlin told Cort Wesley, after ending the call. “But Alejandro Rojas is calling me back as soon as he learns something. Turns out Guajardo’s brother killed a bunch of his druggers in a Juárez bar before crossing the border.”

Her cell beeped with an incoming text message, Caitlin lifting it back out of her pocket.

“It’s him,” she said.

*   *   *

“I need one thing from you, Ranger,” the head of the Juárez cartel said, so softly that Caitlin had to press the phone tighter against her ear. “A promise that the killer of my children dies tonight.”

Cort Wesley had slid over to her and Caitlin put the phone on speaker so he could hear. “You’ve got it, sir.”

“In that case, I believe I’ve found where this boy is being held.…”

*   *   *

“You gonna do this alone, Cort Wesley?” Caitlin asked him, sticking the phone back in her pocket.

“You bet,” Cort Wesley told her, his expression a mix of determination and renewed hope. “Just like you’re gonna handle Guajardo alone.”

“Not quite alone.”

“You reached Paz?”

“He was waiting for my call.”

“Then there’s something else you need to know about Ana Guajardo, Ranger,” Cort Wesley said, “something Jan McClellan-Townsend told me that I can’t believe myself.…”

101

L
OS
M
OCHIS,
M
EXICO

Just past midnight, the Blackhawk brought Paz and Caitlin right up to the edge of the game preserve, landing in a field mixed between saw grass and red clay that had hardened into a gravel-like texture. Not far away, Caitlin thought she caught a glimpse of wild grapefruit trees mixed with hibiscus and flowering pink camellias. The ground beyond the field was thick and rich, indicating an underwater source rare indeed for a country that was primarily composed of desert and brush.

Caitlin looked toward Paz, found him smiling tightly, prepared to do what he did best.

“We don’t get this done our way, Colonel, the Mexican army will move in and get it done theirs.”

“We’ll get it done, Ranger,” Paz said, even for him remarkably calm and self-assured. “We always do.”

*   *   *

While awaiting the logistics to be finalized, Young Roger had managed to extrapolate the satellite reconnaissance provided of the area to find an aboveground entrance to the cave system and river that ran beneath Ana Guajardo’s game preserve.

“Okay, Ranger,” Jones said, shaking his head, “if you’re right, Guajardo will have dozens of men with her. They will be well armed and likely drawn from the Mexican Special Forces, who tend to be pretty tough
hombres
themselves. And you intend to walk in there waving your gun and ask them to please not throw the switch that turns the lights out in the U.S., as you arrest their boss for murder. How am I doing so far?”

“Spot on.”

“So what am I missing here?” he asked her, face taut with exasperation.

“Something you need to do for me, Jones,” Caitlin told him. “Something you’ve done before.”

102

J
UÁREZ,
M
EXICO

Cort Wesley moved with the night. He was no stranger to the cartel-dominated streets of Juárez, but had never actually been to the
colonias
, slums that were home to thousands of peasants impoverished by a combination of the drug trade and the nearby factories that had basically enslaved them. The
colonias
lay literally in the shadow of the sprawling complexes boasting names like Delphi, RCA, and Hyundai. As he hid between two collapsed structures waiting for night to come, Cort Wesley had spotted any number of buses dropping off workers for the day shift and picking up those who would take their place in the factories overnight.

According to Juárez cartel head Alejandro Rojas, Luke was being held on a hillside of ramshackle structures in the Anapra slum by former prisoners from Cereso Prison both loyal to and terrified of Locaro. Rojas had no idea of their number, only their location on stench-riddled land built over an abandoned landfill. As night fell around him, Cort Wesley had continued to survey the squalor dominated by abandoned or burned-out cars and endless piles of trash rife with dogs and small pigs that were the only things moving by the time he slid out into the darkness. He passed a row of black crosses memorializing schoolchildren who’d been gunned down just a few months before while waiting for their bus, and angled for the hillside.

Minutes later Cort Wesley was skulking up the slight slope of the cluttered slum, squeezing through the narrow gaps between huts made of sheet metal and wood scraps with interior walls formed of corrugated cardboard duct-taped to salvaged plywood and rotted lumber. There was no power, no running water or utilities whatsoever. The ground layered over the old Anapra landfill was parched and dead, more scrub than soil. Clotheslines bent under the weight of clothes strung over them. Junk that looked like it had sprouted from the ground, seeded by the trash collected below, lay everywhere in the form of goods first salvaged and then rejected for being in too poor a condition to use even here.

Cort Wesley had an approximate location for where Luke was being held and nothing more. He’d geared up in the same fashion as he had for night raids back in the Gulf War, the biggest difference being the utterly flat land outside of Baghdad and the lack of any smell at all. He carried the Special Forces M1A4 version of the M16 with a cut-down stock, a sound suppressor, and a pair of magazines rigged together to allow for sixty shots instead of thirty with one simple flip. He wore a killing knife on one side of his belt and a holstered Glock on the other, the ammo vest worn over his flak jacket holding both smoke and fragmentary grenades. The air was thick, stale, and reminded him of the smell coming from the cesspools he’d pumped one summer as a teenager.

Cort Wesley stopped and rested his shoulders against an abandoned shanty to settle his breath. He’d avoided the rut-strewn roads formed of flattened mud to stay clear of any vehicles or gunmen. Slums like this were peaceful enough during the day, but dominated by armed roving gangs who ruled the streets at night. Last thing he needed was to find himself up close and personal with one of those before he found Luke.

“Here we are again, bubba,”
said Leroy Epps, leaning right alongside him.
“Business as usual.”

“You bring a gun?”

“Nope, just a good word.”

“Rather have an extra hand.”

“This one’s on you, and that’s just the way you want it. In your mind, you can’t provide for your boys with your wallet, try a currency you’re better with.”

“Bullets?”

“If they was dollars, bubba, you’d be a rich man for sure. Meantime, you let me work on the cash issues. I got things covered there and that’s a promise.”

“Thanks, champ.”

“Forget the thanks. Just kill some of those
hombres
for me tonight.”

Then he was gone and Cort Wesley started on again.

103

L
OS
M
OCHIS,
M
EXICO

Ana Guajardo grasped the handles of her father’s wheelchair and eased him along one of the hallways inside her underground bunker leading toward the control room. She’d wanted him here so any part of him that clung to conscious thought might witness these final hours leading up to the fateful moment when things would turn for once and for good. How wonderful it would be to see Mexico and the United States flip-flop in terms of technological superiority—the ultimate irony, in fact. All at the hand of a woman born to a migrant farmworker who’d grown up picking fruit.

The very definition of the American Dream.

Guajardo knew her father had disapproved of her hatred for the United States. So bringing him here was not about celebration so much as victory. From the day of his plunge off that fourth-story balcony, she only hoped that he’d live long enough to see her bring down the country to which he was so beholden. Ultimate vindication that her beliefs had triumphed over his, vindication of the vision she had enacted. Ana wanted him to see it, wanted him to know, so he could die with that implanted in his mind.