by John Benteen
The Border Patrol and the Cavalry both ranged the frontier between Baja California and California itself, enforcing this edict as best it could, the horse soldiers sweltering in their heavy uniforms in the heat of the Imperial Valley. Fargo, knowing there was no hope of catching up with Clint and Sandy before they crossed the border, realizing they would have no trouble eluding the patrols, took his time on his southward ride, picking up information as he went. It was necessary to know the dispositions of the United States forces so he could slip past them; it was even more necessary to know the layout in Mexicali just below the line. There were certain things he thought he would need which he could have easily have gotten from his gunrunning contacts in El Paso, but which he would somehow have to get from the Army itself here.
Meanwhile, at every stopover, he listened to news from the north. Everyone was agog at the sensational explosion in San Bernardino.
El Centro swarmed with soldiers; two squadrons of cavalry were camped outside of town in heat that went up to more than a hundred and ten degrees at noon sometimes. When the soldiers had free time, they headed for town—and cold beer. Making the contact he needed cost Fargo two whole days, but it was worth it.
The sergeant’s name was Dillman, and he was an armorer. He had also served in the Philippines during the Insurrection, and he and Fargo knew a lot of the same people, had been in a lot of the same places. Fargo spoke Dillman’s language—but, since Dillman was a drunk and broke, anybody who would buy him beer spoke his language.
“Yeah, there’s a lot of Mexican soldiers in Mexicali,” Dillman told him thickly in the back room of a saloon. “Colonel’s named Otero, and he’s a real bastard, way I understand it. He ain’t really a colonel, he’s more a king, a dictator. Nobody wants Baja California, not the rebels, not even the Federales. So the rebels ain’t bothered him and he’s too far from Mexico City for the government to pay any attention to him. He’s built himself some barracks and a fancy headquarters and some fortifications southwest of town, finances himself by puttin’ the squeeze on all the Mexes, lives like a damn’ emperor, and nobody better cross him. He’s got a good thing and he knows it, and he’s all set to ride out the Revolution right there, and if his side loses, he’ll just step across the border into the States. Why you wanta know all this? You hirin’ out to him?”
“No,” Fargo said. “He’s got somethin’ I want. I aim to get it back from him.”
Dillman blinked. “By yourself?”
“I figured on that.”
The sergeant laughed. “Man, he’s got two hundred and fifty soldiers and plenty of ammo. I don’t know what it is you’re gonna try to take away from him, but—”
“You don’t have to know. Only, I need some things.”
“What kind of things?”
Fargo took out a fistful of double-eagles, let them spill, glinting dully, from one palm to the other. “Some things the Army’s got. Some things an old soldier like you could lay his hands on and maybe tamper a little with the records—”
“Keep on talkin’,” Dillman said and licked his lips.
~*~
Fargo crossed the border at night, east of Mexicali. He had no trouble dodging the patrols. The town lay flat on the dividing line, mated up with Calexico on the American side. Fargo passed by it, then came up on it from the southeast, through the low, dusty sink that spread for miles around it. Otero had found himself a real hiding place, all right. Anyone coming at him from the east would have to cross the Gran Desierto; the Sierras made a barrier to the west; and nothing but badlands lay to the south.
In darkness, Fargo moved along carefully, keeping off the skyline. He wore the Winchester bandolier across his torso, carried the rifle ready. Inside his sweaty shirt nestled six steel objects, heavy and the shape of eggs. Slung on the saddle of the dun were a pair of special scabbards containing more weight of steel. It was a massive burden for the animal to carry, but it would not have to take it far.
By two o’clock in the morning, Fargo was in position in a shallow draw southwest of town. From where he lay, he could see the belfry of the mission against the skyline; a few scattered lights. Between the town and himself, there were other structures: a long rambling wall of adobe bricks with watchtowers at its turning; inside it, on a vast, dusty parade ground, rows of adobe barracks with thatched roofs. Sitting among them and dwarfing them was a big house with a tile roof stuccoed over, shaded by palms. That, of course, was where Otero would be. And, presumably, Sandy and Clint. If they were not, he was in trouble.
He lay there for half an hour, his horse tethered, sizing up the place in the flood of silver moonlight. There were undoubtedly guards in the crude towers, and likely they had machine guns. Since, however, they had held this station for nearly five years now without incident or alarm, and since it was the time of night when human vitality was at its lowest ebb, Fargo did not think they would be very alert.
His lips pulled back in a wolfish grin. He’d wake them up, though.
He scuttled back from the rim of the draw. Working swiftly, deftly, he took the Colt machine gun from its saddle scabbard. By itself, the gun weighed forty pounds, but it could shoot four hundred rounds a minute. The tripod weighed another fifty-four pounds. He set it up, mounted the gun on it. He took a ball of heavy cord from his saddlebags, a hundred yards of it. He made a clove hitch in one end of it around the trigger of the gun. He had five steel picket pins, Army issue, each with an eye at the top to take a rope. He worked down the draw, sinking these at intervals of twenty yards, not daring to make the noise of hammering, screwing them into the ground will all his massive strength.
The ammunition feedbox held two thousand six-millimeter cartridges loaded with Troisdorf smokeless powder. Fargo put in the belt’s end, worked the loading lever. The breech closed, the hammer cocked. Gently, very gently, he went down the draw that swung closer to the fortifications at its far end. He threaded the cord through the eyes of the picket pins. Then he went back and got the horse. He led it down the draw.
When he reached the draw’s end, he reconnoitered once more. He was only three hundred yards from the wall now, on a different bend of it from that flank at which the machine gun was pointed. Nothing stirred; the only lights visible in the encampment were in the big house. Otero stayed up late...
Fargo grinned again. He bent down and seized the end of the cord, pulled it and quickly knotted it. In that instant, at the other end of the draw, the machine gun shattered the night with its flat, dry chatter. Its muzzle, above the draw’s lip, blasted a continuous tongue of flame.
Two thousand bullets, four hundred per minute; he had five minutes. He let one pass for the alarm to be given. Lead lanced across the flat, rapping into the adobe wall. Somebody yelled. The yell was caught up, echoed. Suddenly the whole encampment came alive. From two guard towers, bright flames winked and the chatter of the Colt was joined by that of a pair of Spandaus. To it was quickly added the roar of Mausers. The winking flame of the machine gun made a beautiful target.
Fargo hit the saddle without touching the stirrup. He slammed the dun hard with spurs, sent it at a dead run to the flank of the wall, bent low over its neck. The drumming of its hooves was lost in the roar of the machine guns, the slam of rifles, the shouting of men, the high pitched blatting of a bugle. All eyes, all attention, were riveted on the Colt with the tied-back trigger. Nobody even saw Fargo, much less shot at him.
He made it to the wall between two guard towers. The wall was high; he was laughing as he leaped to his feet, stood up in the saddle, and jumped to the top of it. The dun went thundering off; that, Fargo guessed, would be the last he’d see of it. He rolled over the wall, careful with the things in his shirt, landed on the hard packed dust of the parade.
Men were running everywhere; officers shouted orders. The hats of the Federal officers were much like Fargo’s own. Nobody noticed him as, khaki clad, white hair and face smeared with dust, he zigzagged through the parade.
Then a man caugh
t his arm as he neared the house. “Hey, Jorge. Jorge?” Dark eyes widened as the captain stared into Fargo’s face. “Who—?” The man opened his mouth to yell. Fargo brought up the butt of the Winchester under his jaw, hard. He heard teeth click and bone give; the man dropped without a sound. Fargo ran on, dodging into the swarm of soldiers erupting from the barracks, taking cover among them as their startled officers screamed orders.
Now the big house was ablaze with light. Close to its wall, Fargo ducked behind a palm, getting its layout fixed in his head. All this had taken no more than three minutes; the Colt still chattered on, but it would be still in another sixty seconds.
There was a veranda, and Fargo saw plenty of guards were ranked across it, guns up, alert. Otero’s personal bodyguard, he guessed. Likely there were more inside. The Colonel was not a man to take chances.
Fargo chuckled, a weird, off-beat sound. Only a crazy man, he knew, would have dared odds of two hundred and fifty to one; what filled him was a cold, insane determination to get to Clint Frost, somehow, and kill the man; and to find Sandy and get her out of here; and to kill anybody who got in his way, tried to stop him. His blood was up, he felt no fear, only exhilaration, a savage kind of joy, and a strange invulnerability, as if no bullet could kill him.
Nothing was going to stop him from doing what he had come to do. Nothing. He reached inside his shirt, pulled out one of the metal eggs. He yanked the grenade’s pin with his teeth, lobbed it overhand with the accuracy born of long practice.
It landed on the house’s porch. There were perhaps a dozen soldiers there; one heard it hit, turned to see, in the light spilling from the door, what it was. He saw the corrugated iron egg lying there, hissing. He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out. He stood, frozen, unable to give the alarm. The attention of the others was riveted on the sound of the machine guns.
The grenade exploded.
For a moment, the porch was obscured by a boil of dust and smoke and rubble and bits of bloody flesh. Fargo thought he heard someone scream. He heard, indeed, the whir of shrapnel; a chunk thudded into the palm. Then, rifle at the ready, he charged forward.
He was on the porch in a bound, headed for the door, clouds of pungent smoke whirling all about him. Bodies were scattered everywhere, like rag dolls thrown about by a careless child. Then he was in what was obviously an adjutant’s office containing a desk, a few chairs. Three officers stood behind the desk with drawn guns, staring at him stunned, incredulous. One, a captain, had been in conference with the other two, snapping orders, apparently; then the front of the building had seemed to blow up. The room billowed with smoke, was littered with shattered glass.
Fargo gave the three astonished men no time to recover. He fired the rifle from the hip, working its lever with lightning speed. It roared three times, reports blending into drawn-out thunder.
The captain was hurled back by the first bullet, fell behind the desk. One of the lieutenants yelled something, aimed his pistol, then crumpled as a slug caught him between the eyes. The other was just dropping to shelter behind the desk when Fargo shot him through the head.
Fargo took an instant to whirl toward the sagging door. Men were running across the parade toward the house. He snaked his hand inside his shirt, took out two more grenades, yanked the pins, one after the other. The deadly objects sailed in high arcs, right and left, through the moonlight, fuses hissing. They landed among the soldiers fifty yards away; then the night itself seemed jarred with their explosion; in two vast blossoms of smoke and flame, they went off, and then there were two great gaps in the oncoming mob. What few attackers were left scattered like frightened chickens, falling back in confusion. It had been not much more than seven minutes, maybe as much as eight, since Fargo had pulled the string that set off the machine gun. Too much had happened too fast. For the moment, the parade before the house was clear. But only for the moment. The officers would rally their men, close in on all sides, ringing the place. Fargo could not kill all two hundred of them. Not with a Winchester rifle and three grenades...
He grinned, fished out another grenade and pulled the pin. He turned, ran across the smoke-reeking room to another door. But before he reached it, it slammed open.
Fargo halted. Clint Frost stood there—and he held Fargo’s Fox carefully leveled, both barrels centered on Fargo’s belly, his fingers on the trigger; and there was no escape for Fargo—none.
Frost was barefooted, hair tousled; he had obviously been asleep, but Fargo’s bandolier of shells was draped across his chest. He rasped: “All right, hombre. Whoever you are, don’t move or I’ll blow you to rags.” And he could do it. A fraction of an ounce’s pressure more on those triggers and the room would be sprayed with a blast of spreading buckshot just as lethal as any grenade’s explosion. “Drop that rifle,” Frost rasped.
Fargo did so, backing across the room toward a corner. He raised his hands slowly, as Frost came toward him—and then Clint saw the object clutched in Fargo’s right hand. “What you got there? Drop it.”
Fargo grinned. “You better hope I don’t, Clint.” Frost thrust forward his black-bearded face, amazement raising his bushy brows. He stared at Fargo in the dim yellow light of the unbroken oil lamp on the adjutant’s desk. “It cain’t—” he whispered. “Cain’t be... You’re dead...”
“No. But Dorsey is. And Chad. And Roy. All three, Clint. And now you, it’s your turn.”
Clint shifted the gun, laughed. “I’ll—”
Fargo opened his hand. The lever flew off the grenade, its fuse began to hiss. “You see this, Clint? It’s a hand grenade. In ten seconds, it goes off. There’s no way to stop it now, unless I throw it out the window. Drop the gun, Clint, because if you shoot me, this thing’s gonna blow you all to hell. Can’t be more than six seconds left now.”
Clint stared at the thing. “You’ll blow yourself up.”
“But I’ll take you along with me, unless you drop that shotgun.”
“Fargo, you’re crazy.”
“Right. I’m on a spree, Clint, a real spree. Three seconds. You gonna drop it?”
The next second seemed to stretch out into an infinity of time. There was no chance of escape for either of them now, unless—Fargo saw the sweat on Clint’s face, the convulsive swallow. He himself felt nothing, although unless he threw that grenade almost at once, he was doomed along with Clint.
Then suddenly Clint gave a strangled cry and dropped the shotgun. The moment it left his hands, Fargo threw the grenade sideways. He had cut it close; it sailed through the broken window; its thunder on the porch was immediate, but the adobe walls protected them from the blast; and in the second that it went off, Fargo dived for the shotgun, which had just hit the floor.
But Clint was going for it, too, and he got his hands on it just as Fargo did. The two men wrestled for possession of the gun, Fargo on his knees, Clint bent above him.
Clint’s face was close to his, breath foul in Fargo’s nostrils. “Goddammit,” Clint snarled, “this time I’ll kill you once and for all.” He tried to get his knee up under Fargo’s chin. Fargo jerked his head aside, pulled backwards on the gun, yanking Clint off balance. Fargo landed on his spine, Clint on top of him, the gun between them. Then Clint’s fingers rammed through the trigger guard. Suddenly the gun roared thunderously, spouting lead from both barrels, whipping the opposite wall of the room.
Immediately, Fargo let go. Clint rolled aside, scrambling to his knees, one hand working the lever that broke the gun. His other gouged frantically at the ammunition bandolier. Fargo’s own hand whipped to his hip pocket, and when it came forward again, the blade of the Batangas knife glittered in the lamplight. He threw himself at Clint, and Clint brought up the shotgun to ward off the steel, but he was not fast enough. He was protecting his throat, but that was not where Fargo aimed.
The blade that Fargo could drive through a silver dollar with a single blow would also easily pierce the bone of a man’s skull. Fargo rammed it home, hard, between Clint�
�s eyes.
The man cried out, a sound that choked off instantly. His body fell back, with the knife’s split hilt protruding, vibrating, from his low, bulging forehead, just above his nose.
Then he was dead.
Too fast, Fargo thought bitterly. Too damned fast. He retrieved the knife.
Then there was no more time for thinking. They were rallying out there, coming after him. Bullets slashed through the broken windows, drummed into the wall. Fargo scooped up the shotgun, letting out a deep grunt of satisfaction as he had its familiar weight once more in his hands. He jerked the bandolier off Clint’s torso, shucked out two rounds, rammed them in the breeches, turned, pointed the weapon toward the window and pulled both triggers. The rush of shot sprayed out into the darkness, and Fargo heard men scream. He pulled out another grenade, yanked its pin, threw it through the window. Before it went off, he scooped up his rifle, whirled, and dodged through the door, jumping Clint’s body.
He was in a corridor, then. There were doors at its far end. Fargo ran to the first one, flung it open; the room was empty save for the rumpled bed Clint had just vacated. He leaped across the hall, tried the other. It gave way.
He was in another bedroom. Moonlight lanced through the window. He saw it gleam on the white body of a woman on the bed. With a sheet clutched across her bosom, she sat up, staring at the silhouetted figure with rifle in one hand, shotgun in the other.
“Sandy!” Fargo snapped. Outside, guns roared wildly, firing at nothing in the darkness beyond the fortress wall. “It’s me, Neal Fargo. Where—?”
