Strong Light of Day (42 page)

D. W. Tepper parked his truck in a red zone and stepped out with Jim Strong into the teeth of the hurricane's mounting winds, rain hammering them in waves that soaked through their rain slickers. On top of everything else, the storm had already produced a series of tornadoes, and more were expected. Toppled trash cans rolled down the airport access road, the lighter ones lifted airborne by the increasing gales, one missing Jim's head by no more than in inch. Their former contents whipped about in a steady swirl, all manner of paper cups, plates, and food wrappers filling the air like snow. It was all the Rangers could do just to get inside the terminal through the still-functioning automatic sliding doors, even as a tornado warning alarm blared somewhere close by.

Jim Strong and D. W. Tepper shed their slickers, once inside, dropping them where they stood and spotting the airport security chief, who was waiting as instructed. He didn't notice the Rangers right away because he'd been deluged by passengers on the verge of panic, looking for any reassurance they could find—probably that the whole terminal building wasn't on the verge of blowing away itself. The sour smell of fear and anxiety hung in the air like dried sweat. The stranded passengers were pale, wide eyed, and not even seeming to blink, to the point where they looked like zombies.

The airport security chief, a tall, gaunt man with a thin mustache, finally spotted them and broke away from the crowd to approach.

“They're on the Pan Am concourse, waiting for a flight to New York,” he reported. “I've got two of my men watching from a distance, just like you said.”

“I said one man,” corrected Jim Strong, just before the shooting started.

*   *   *

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Jim Strong registered the tornado warning alarm blaring inside the airport now, as well Hurricane Alicia battering Hobby with such force that view beyond the wall-length windows was obliterated. Worse than night, because of the howling beyond and the occasional crash of something slamming up against the glass, as if hurled by some giant creature beyond. Thunder crackled. Lightning flared.

As he rushed down the Pan Am concourse toward the intermittent sounds of gunfire, Jim was also conscious of the world darkening beyond those windows. His ears had started popping and he felt a low rumble in the pit of his stomach. The drastic and sudden change in pressure told him a tornado must be bearing down on the airport now, certain to swallow up whatever aircraft remained on the tarmac, along with jetways, food trucks, and just about anything else that wasn't bolted down.

He and Tepper rushed through a stampede of already-panicked would-be passengers now running for their lives.

“Son of a bitch, son of a bitch!” Tepper kept saying.

“I warned them, D.W. I warned them!” Jim followed, drawing closer to the clatter of gunfire.

He spotted Kasputin first. He and five of his thugs, as opposed to the three they were expecting, were holed up in a terminal bar, making full use of both the counter and toppled tables for cover. Two of the gunmen were squeezed between one of those tables and the window glass itself, which looked like it was melting from the waves of rain running down it. Jim Strong knew there was no sense in wasting bullets trying for an impossible shot, especially with innocent bystanders clinging to cover they might abandon at any moment, so he decided to flush the Russians out instead.

He put three bullets into the glass over and behind them.

The big .45 shells exploded with a deafening roar and sent the bulk of bystanders scurrying away, their footsteps echoing in hollow fashion against the concourse tile in the sudden silence that followed. The bullets blew right through glass that spiderwebbed and blew inward behind the force of the storm, exposing the terminal to Hurricane Alicia's effects. Glasses, menus, mugs, plates, and all manner of silverware were hurled into the air, adding to the maelstrom and forcing the Rangers to duck or dodge to avoid being struck. But the storm's onslaught and entry had the dual effect of forcing the first two Russian gunmen from their perch. Jim Strong and Tepper opened up together, the big bullets blowing the Russians' bodies backwards until the wind pushed them back forward, ultimately holding them upright for a split second before catching them in a swirl that threw their corpses forward. Their blood whipped about with the loosed ice and contents of drinks abandoned on tabletops when the gunfight began.

An onslaught of fire erupted from behind the bar, forcing the Rangers behind the cover of toppled trash cans that had collected against a men's room entrance across the way. Jim recovered his senses just in time to spot Kasputin himself leading his three remaining men out a door marked Emergency Exit Only, which led out onto the tarmac. An alarm immediately began to squeal in insane counterpoint as the Rangers fought the buffeting winds toward the same door, emerging just as an almost preternatural calm fell over the field, accompanied by a hint of sunshine.

“Holy shit,” Tepper muttered, “is that a…”

“Yup,” Jim Strong picked up, “a funnel cloud.”

*   *   *

The tornado bred by Hurricane Alicia seemed to grow and widen as it swooped down over the airport tarmac, sucking up everything in its path while coughing out tires, food wagons, stray luggage, and signs ripped right out of the ground. The door had slammed behind the Rangers, denying them any thought of reentering the terminal, while bullets smacked off the concrete facing behind them. The howl of the approaching tornado drowned out the sounds both of the gunshots and of their impacts, making Jim Strong feel he was acting out a scene in some nightmarish silent movie, even as the funnel cloud sliced across the patchwork of runways like a black vortex, swallowing everything before it.

The world seemed to vanish in the tornado's wake, two of the Russian gunmen trying to flee its path too late. Jim Strong and D. W. Tepper watched the funnel draw the Russians in and spin them around, and then they were gone, as if merged into it and no longer visible. A final gunman had stayed with Kasputin, the two of them pinned against a toppled luggage cart, holding on to the restraining straps for dear life.

The Rangers approached, fighting the winds at the periphery of the funnel cloud, which kept twisting them one way and then back the other, firing shots silenced by the impossible crescendo of sound pitched enough to sting their ears. Jim realized he was having trouble finding breath amid the torrents of rain that seemed to provide no quarter for air.

Can you drown on land?

Crazy thought, he knew, but that's what it felt like.

“Ranger!”

He heard a portion of Tepper's desperate call and realized he was behind him, taking a firm hold of Jim's clothes and trying to pull him back. But Jim was hearing none of it, with Kasputin right there in his sights, the grasp of his final gunman the only thing keeping Kasputin from being vacuumed up. Then the funnel cloud grabbed that gunman in its grasp and seemed to pick him up by the boot strings, whipping him about upside down before the darkness swallowed him altogether.

Jim found himself propped up against a terminal bulkhead door, Tepper tying himself to the latch with a belt. The slide of Jim's .45 locked empty. Kasputin struggled to right his pistol on him while desperately clutching a strap with the other. Jim thought he recorded a final series of muzzle flashes before the pistol was lost to the vortex of wind sweeping it away. By then, Jim had gotten his own belt fastened tight through the latch, his body pressed up tight to the bulkhead door. He felt it rattle and buffet against him. He looked back toward Kasputin but could see nothing now, the world erased by the funnel cloud that was upon the terminal.

Jim Strong thought he might've been screaming, but he couldn't hear himself, couldn't hear anything. The tornado had stripped him of breath and pushed him into the air, the belt wrenching but holding. He saw D. W. Tepper's belt snap, and he latched a hand to Tepper's waistband and drew him in, with an arm tucked around his chest, battling the funnel cloud for him. He tried to find Kasputin through the black swirl, but it gave up nothing and seemed to be everywhere at once.

Jim pushed Tepper between him and the bulkhead door, pressing himself against it for dear life. The latch still wasn't giving, so he stripped Tepper's holstered .45 free and fired the final two rounds against it. Sparks flew, the wind swallowing everything, including his thoughts. But the latch gave and he jerked the bulkhead door open, feeling the sweep of the funnel cloud, just starting to tear both him and Tepper away, when Jim pushed both of them inside the terminal.

The door itself was torn free and whisked away as if weightless, leaving nothing beyond them but a swirling blackness that was everywhere at once. Jim forced his gaze through it, looking for Kasputin, but the Russian and everything around him looked to have been sucked up by the storm by the time the vortex finally cleared.

“We get him?” a still-dazed D. W. Tepper shouted from the floor, over the winds that continued to rage.

“Nope,” Jim Strong said, still gazing into the carnage the tornado had left behind on the tarmac. “Guess we didn't have to.”

 

100

S
AN
A
NTONIO

“Explains why Anton Kasputin needed to disappear, become another man entirely, after somehow surviving all that,” Caitlin said when Tepper had finished. A graveyard was an oddly appropriate place to hear the rest of the tale.

“In a hurricane yet,” Tepper followed, shaking his head. “Am I the only one who finds that about as fitting as it gets?”

“Might've been my father's most famous gunfight, the day he shot it out with a tornado,” Caitlin said, recalling parts of the tale now. “But I never could pin him down on exactly who he was shooting it out with. Guess I know why, now.”

“It was hushed up all the way from the White House,” Tepper told her. “Whole story was concocted that held up well enough, and when men get swept up by a tornado, there's not normally much evidence to process. What was left of their remains was found maybe ten miles away by a farmer, when he went to check on his herd, if you can believe that.”

Caitlin looked toward Cort Wesley. “After all this, I can believe anything.”

“It's your turn now, Ranger,” Tepper said to her. “What exactly did Calum Dane tell you about Zhirnosky and how we can finish this once and for all?”

“Well, Captain, it involves a trip to Russia on Homeland Security's dime. Jones is making the arrangements.”

“Russia got any idea what's headed their way?”

“There's one Russian in particular who does.…”

Before Caitlin could elaborate further, she spotted a dark-clad man heading toward them, skirting the grass in favor of the concrete walkway that sliced through the graveyard. All three whipped their guns out when he dipped a hand under his jacket, ready to shoot before the man took his next breath.

“Hold on! Hold on!” he cried out, terrified, jerking a pair of trembling hands into the air. “I'm just here to serve a subpoena! I'm not even armed!”

Tepper moved forward, still holding his .45 at the ready. He stripped a trifolded set of pages wrapped in a blue cover from the man's inside jacket pocket and regarded them quickly.

“Looks like it's for you, Ranger,” he said to Caitlin.

 

101

W
ASHINGTON,
DC
; TWO WEEKS LATER

“Raise your right hand, please,” Asa Fraley, chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said, his own hand in the air as he addressed Caitlin. “Do you swear the testimony you provide at this hearing shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God.”

Caitlin made sure to tip her mouth toward the microphone “I do.”.

“Please be seated, Ms. Strong.”

“It's Ranger, sir.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just like you like to be addressed as ‘Congressman' …
Mister
Fraley.”

“Acknowledged,
Ranger
Strong,” Fraley relented, clearly enjoying himself as cameras whirred, flashed, and clicked. “You have been called to testify for us today on the excesses of law enforcement and the tendency to expand the mandate of duties you are duly sworn to perform. In other words, how far is too far to go in the purported pursuit of justice, and how are we to hold our law enforcement officials responsible for exceeding their authority in that regard and taking innocent lives in the process of this excess.”

“Was that a question, sir,” Caitlin started, when Fraley lapsed into silence, “or just a mouthful?”

“Let me pose it as a question for you, Ranger: How many men have you shot?”

“I don't keep count of such things, Congressman.”

“Then maybe you should. Would you like to hear the number, Ranger Strong, before we enter it into the record?”

“That isn't necessary, and the number you're referring to likely isn't accurate.”

“Could you explain that last statement, please, for the record?”

“I've shot plenty more than shows up in the reports before you. For the record.”

Fraley banged his gavel dramatically when a murmur spread through the crowd. “And how many more would that be?”

“Like I said, sir, I don't keep count. It just comes with the territory.”

Fraley covered his microphone to confer briefly with the ranking member from the minority party. “Ranger Strong, we can't help but notice that no legal representative has accompanied you here today.”

Caitlin looked at the empty chairs on either side of her. “I'll stand behind everything I've done in service to the Rangers and the State of Texas,” she said into the microphone. “In my experience you only need a lawyer if you've done something wrong.”

Laughter and a brief ripple of applause filtered through the chamber, Fraley just short of rapping his gavel.