For some reason, he had the sense that Dylan had uncovered whatever Daniel Cross had found on the Comanche reservation while working for Sam Bob Jackson, whatever it was he’d used to kill two dozen people in an Austin diner and now intended to hand over to ISIS.
It was a beautiful day, the afternoon heat beginning to build outside his truck, just making its presence felt inside the cab. Cort Wesley realized he was sweating up a storm and that he’d neglected to turn on the air-conditioning after closing the truck’s windows. He slid them open again, needing to feel the real air and hear the sounds of the outside.
“’ Bout time, bubba,” the ghost of Leroy Epps told him. “I didn’t think I could sweat no more, but at two hundred degrees, I guess anything’s possible.”
“Why don’t you hitch a ride with somebody else, then?”
“And miss out on such wonderful company and conversation? You out of your mind?”
“I’m talking to a goddamn ghost.”
Cort Wesley could have sworn he heard the leather crackle as old Leroy leaned back in his seat and stuck his right hand out the window. “Your boy’s always one to finish what he starts, bubba.”
“The problem being, champ, maybe this is the time it finishes him instead.”
93
DALLAS, TEXAS
Jones had arranged for a pair of Black Hawk UH-60 helicopters out of Martindale, a Texas Army National Guard airfield in eastern San Antonio, ten miles from Texas Ranger Company F headquarters. Guillermo Paz’s seven men, along with their weapons, were squeezed into the trailing Black Hawk, while Jones’s chopper was running in the lead.
Caitlin had never ridden in a Black Hawk before, but her unhinged nerves settled a few minutes after takeoff. Across from her, Young Roger looked much the worse for wear, doing his best to compose himself with deep breath after deep breath. Guillermo Paz sat on the other side of her, with Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer Pierre Beauchamp seated next to Young Roger. Captain Tepper was along for the ride, too, just as Cort Wesley should have been, if he weren’t off somewhere else, not answering her calls.
Dylan …
Caitlin didn’t need Cort Wesley to call to tell her that much. The boy had an uncanny nose for trouble, but this time he may have finally found a Goliath he couldn’t drop with a slingshot. Something was going on for sure on that Indian reservation, and Dylan was right in the middle of all of it. Apple of his father’s eye, sticking that nose of his where it didn’t belong.
“We got twenty-seven minutes until we land at the Grand Prairie base on Mountain Creek Lake, Ranger,” Tepper said over his headset, which was just loud enough to be heard over the engine and rotor sounds. “That’s how long you got to tell us less fortunate souls what you figured out.”
“Comes down to fungus, Captain.”
“Fungus?”
“Corn fungus, specifically,” Caitlin told them all, recalling Cray Rawls’s revelations and ready to gauge Young Roger’s milk-white face for a reaction. “Also known by its Aztec name of cuitlacoche. Looks like a gray, stone-shaped growth when the corn’s picked, and turns into a gunky, tar-like mush when cooked.”
“Did I pass out from exhaustion, or did you just call a fungus the weapon of mass destruction that ISIS is after?” Tepper groused, shaking his head.
Young Roger answered him before Caitlin had the chance. “Mexican farmers also call it el oro negro, or black gold.”
“Thanks, son, I truly appreciate the agricultural perspective here.”
But Young Roger wasn’t finished yet. “The fungus grows inside corn husks. Cuitlacoche flourishes when droplets of rain seep into a stalk of corn and the kernels begin to rot. The fungus can grow over, or side by side with, the kernels themselves.”
“So just how,” Jones chimed in, “do we go from there to a genuine weapon of mass destruction?”
“I’d be guessing, without an actual specimen to analyze.”
“So guess, son.”
“A catalyst.” Young Roger shrugged, as if he wasn’t totally convinced himself. “Something that altered the genetic structure of the fungus to create a mutation that can be weaponized.”
“Forget can be,” Jones said. “Try has been and will be.”
“Not if we can help it,” Caitlin reminded him.
“Figure of speech, Ranger.”
“And you’re forgetting something, Jones, the wild card in all this: Cray Rawls wasn’t after what created that fungus because it’s a weapon; he was after it in the belief he’d found the cure for cancer.”
“So how can something be deadly and medicinal at the same time?” Jones wondered.