Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(100)
—Sheriff Jim Wilson, “Texas Ranger Tales” http://sheriffjimwilson.com/2011/10/14/texas-ranger-tales
98
KLYDE WARREN PARK, DALLAS, TEXAS
The SUVs were able to make spaces for themselves in a rear corner of a parking lot on the northbound Woodall Rodgers Freeway access road, normally reserved for the park’s Savor restaurant. They had no staging area per se and had to rely on the cover of the SUVs for their final weapons check and prep.
“What’d you tell the Dallas cops?” Caitlin asked Jones.
“What they need to know: nothing.”
“Come again?”
“You want to run the risk of them doing something stupid?”
“We could use the backup if this goes bad, Jones. To help with the evacuation, if nothing else.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said, and turned away.
The logistics necessitated that Paz and his men use only light weaponry, including submachine guns tucked under light jackets that fell just below their waists. Even without flak jackets, which Guillermo Paz never allowed his men to wear, that was sure to draw some attention to them. A necessary trade-off, and one that Jones was willing to accept, given that their targets were stationary and confined.
Both the sprawl and the clutter bred by the carnival would work in their favor, offering additional camouflage for Paz’s men. Jones never questioned Paz on how he handled such matters, just pointed the big man in a direction and let him off his leash.
“I hope you’re reading this right,” Caitlin said to him.
“Just keep your nose out of it, Ranger.”
“Be glad to, Jones, after you tell me why they’re meeting where thousands of people can see them?”
“Good question. Got an answer?”
“Only that maybe it was the fourth man’s idea,” Caitlin ventured, an instant before Jones’s iPad began chiming.
*
Daniel Cross had laid it all out for Hatim Abd al-Aziz. How he could make the weapon work in either an open or a confined space. How much it would take, and how long to handle the logistics. The ISIS commander drank his words in, almost giddy at the prospects and enamored by the supply his men would soon be returning to the Indian reservation to collect.
Al-Aziz seemed to bow his head slightly. “You said you were not a Muslim.”
“I’m not.”
“Perhaps not in this life. But in another you were a soldier of God, likely fighting by my side then as you are now. Perhaps then, too, you bestowed a great gift upon our movement, to enable us to realize God’s will. Tell me how it will happen. Tell me the instruments by which His plan will be realized.”
“Extreme temperatures, like when the stuff is cooked, release the aroma. That aroma indicates the neurotoxin has been activated. If you can smell it, you’re dead.”
“Extreme temperatures,” al-Aziz repeated. “That would, of course, include percussion, yes? I speak of spreading this toxin over a wider expanse through the use of explosives.”
“For sure,” said Cross, nodding enthusiastically, “if the results of the testing I’ve done is any indication. One thing to keep in mind is that the effects last only as long, and reach as far, as the aroma. Once the smell dissipates, it’s over.”
“But if such a blast were detonated over a city as crowded as, say, this place?” the ISIS commander wondered, spinning his gaze about Klyde Warren Park.
“You’d have close to a one hundred percent mortality rate,” Daniel Cross told him, imagining just that, on these premises in the coming days.
“One hundred percent.”
“No survivors. None whatsoever.”
“Bismillah,” al-Aziz said, closing his eyes. “In the name of Allah.”
The park had continued to fill up around them, only narrow gaps left between the various rides, booths, and attractions of the carnival stretched across the rolling, flat lawn. The result was to compress the crowd tighter and tighter.
If such a blast were detonated over a city …
Cross imagined it happening here, instead. Thousands dead, literally within seconds. Falling as they stood.
Wow, was all he could think.
99
BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS
“You really going to shoot us, Chief?” Cort Wesley asked White Eagle, buying the time he needed to ease Dylan all the way behind him. “Go ahead. We’ll say hello to your granddaughter, or whatever she is, for you.”
Doubt crossed White Eagle’s expression, not fitting him right.
“She’s dead down there,” Cort Wesley continued. “Her cousins, too. Killed by human monsters I intend to hunt down, if you’ll stand aside and get out of my way.”
The old man remained rigidly planted in place, but his expression wavered, its confidence gone.
“You don’t think I could take that gun away from you or shoot you dead right now? But I’m not going to do that, because it would be too easy. You put your crazy thoughts inside that girl’s head and never bothered to rein her in when she went too far.”
The shotgun began trembling in White Eagle’s grasp.
“You goaded her and those boys into pretending this was still the nineteenth century. You got them killed, old man. I don’t care if you’re a hundred and fifty years old or a thousand. You’re a self-centered asshole who didn’t take care of the people who needed him.”