Relentless

by Brian Garfield

  “You’re learning. Come on.”

  Vickers was pleased to see the two prisoners. Watchman had a look at Buck Stevens and when Stevens grinned he said, “You’ll be all right, Buck.” Then he turned to Vickers: “Hargit might hide the money somewhere and think about coming back for these two, but he knows Baraclough’s been shot and he can’t drag an injured man with him. I can’t see him caring more about Burt than he cares about the money-I think he’ll try to get down in the foothills by morning. There are a lot of places he can disappear into. If he gets that far we may lose him for good.”

  “Then you want us to go after him.”

  “Not us. Buck can’t stay awake all night on guard with a hole in him. You’ll have to do that-and keep alert because Hargit may come back. I doubt it, but it could happen.”

  “One against one? So far he’s slipped you every time.”

  There was no point answering that. Vickers turned to stare past him at the prisoners. Baraclough had come to; he was looking on with a kind of self-disgusted bemusement Burt’s eyes glittered with steady anger. Without Hargit and the money the two of them weren’t much of a consolation prize: that was probably what Vickers was thinking when he turned back to Watchman. “We’ve played it your way so far and you’ve done a good job. All right, try it. In the meantime I think I can get through on the walkie-talkie. I’ll get helicopters up here first thing in the morning to pick up your partner and these two and the corpse up the stream there, and we’ll try to get another chopper up to the top to collect Mrs. Lansford and Walker. I’ll try to cordon the foothills north of here as well as I can, so that if Hargit gets down that far he may be driven back into your arms.”

  “Fine.”

  “Anything else?”

  “You’re doing all right so far,” Watchman said.

  “I’m beginning to learn my limitations.” Vickers smiled with white teeth, his features looking firm and frank and clean and fully in command, but underneath there was an absence of center: he had never found his own core. He was playing up to Watchman now because he saw Watchman as his only chance for redemption and if Watchman succeeded he wanted Watchman on his good side afterward. And if Watchman failed it wouldn’t have cost Vickers anything to cement relations beforehand. The rest was a lie: Vickers hadn’t learned anything; he didn’t have the capacity to learn. When this was over, if they nailed Hargit, Vickers was going to claim credit for the whole thing because he knew Watchman wouldn’t dispute him: Watchman didn’t care about glory.

  It wasn’t very fair. But Watchman had stopped expecting things to be fair when he was eight years old. If he nailed Hargit all he’d get out of it would be another citation. There wouldn’t be any promotion in it for him; there was never going to be a promotion as long as the old-line hairbags cops had control of the HP. Vickers would come up smelling like roses with a new job as district director back East somewhere.

  He’d already caught the man who’d killed Jasper, in a way at least: Hanratty was dead. Baraclough had killed the other cop and they had Baraclough too. The money was of no particular importance except to the men who stole it and the men from whom it had been stolen. Altogether, Watchman had very little to gain and a great deal to lose by going after Hargit, risking his neck when he didn’t have to, taking the chance when there were plenty of cops and FBI agents down on the Utah side of the mountains who could take the blame for losing Hargit if he got through.

  In the end it was a foolish thing that boosted him onto the saddle of Buck Stevens’ horse and sent him up into the woods after Major Leo Hargit. It was the fact that two people had told him Hargit was a better Indian than he was.

  Nobody was a better Indian than Sam Watchman. He didn’t know why, but it was necessary to prove that.

  CHAPTER 11

  1

  The temperature kept dropping sharply, well past midnight; Leo Hargit had everything buttoned and belted and wrapped around him but the cold was in his bones and he cursed it. It was the one thing he had never had to fight before. All his fighting had been in semitropics or along the barren slopes of the warm montagnard country of the Indochinese Central Highlands. Up here now it was probably ten or fifteen below; he knew it wouldn’t kill him but he couldn’t stop cursing it.

  He reached the end of this particular stretch of forest and stopped to scan the open slope above him before he put the horses out onto the packed snow and ran across the rocks into the farther pines, where he drew rein and hipped around to look back across the heaped-up mountains he had traveled. The moon was about halfway down; there was a surprising amount of light on the slopes, reflected back from the frozen surface of the snow that covered them.

  He had a faint sense of regret. Steve and the Sergeant had traveled a long way with him. But he had seen the way the bullet had smashed Steve’s shoulder and he knew Steve wasn’t going to survive a horseback ride out of these mountains. He’d be better off in a police chopper. Burt had been a good man, steadily loyal, but in warfare you had to be practical, you had to take your losses. The world was full of Eddie Burts, competent and reliable; it made no sense to risk sacrificing a Hargit for a Burt. The money on the two packhorses would be enough to hire a thousand Sergeant Burts.

  In a way being alone made it easier: Easier to disappear, easier to fade into the traffic and escape. There would be men looking for him at the foot of the range but that didn’t worry him. He would isolate one of them, kill the man and take the man’s uniform. He’d had plenty of experience infiltrating enemy lines. The only danger came from the rear. There was no way to conceal the tracks his three horses left in the crusted snow. And now, waiting at his vantage point and watching his backtrail, he saw a slow-moving dot detach itself from the shadows two or three miles back and advance down the slope like a crawling ant. But from the haze of kicked-up snow that drifted around the moving figure Hargit knew he was being deceived by mountain distance; the rider was coming along at high speed across the open there.

  He waited long enough to be sure there was only one rider and then he checked the packhorses’ lead-ropes and turned into the forest, and began to cast around for a good ambush spot.

  2

  Quarter past two. Watchman stopped and looked out across the ascending boulder field. The tracks went straight up and into the trees beyond. A good place to get whipsawed. He turned right and circled the boulder patch and came back along the upper timberline until he intersected the tracks. He studied them long enough to see what had happened here. Hargit had stopped and the horses had milled a little. Watching the backtrail. One of the horses had dropped a pile of manure marshmallows and Watchman got down to touch it. Still green and a little warmer than the frozen ground: forty-five minutes old, perhaps, no more.

  From here he looked back to see what Hargit had been able to see. He measured the distances with his eye and decided Hargit had watched him cross that saddle two and a half miles above this place. So Hargit knew how much of a lead he had and knew he was being followed by a solitary horseman.

  When Watchman put his horse into the trees he knew Hargit would be setting up the ambush somewhere very near and very soon.

  He began to think about how Hargit would set it up.

  A grenade, tied to a tree with a tripwire running across the trail. A likely possibility: and so instead of riding in Hargit’s tracks he rode parallel to them, a dozen feet to the right of them.

  The thing about this snow was that nobody could hide tracks in it and so what Hargit had to do was tie up his horses and backtrack on foot, either using rocks for stepping stones or trying to walk in the horse tracks to conceal his own passage. Then set up the ambush in a place where it looked as if he had merely ridden on through.

  Watchman had heard somewhere that in Vietnam the favorite mantrap was an elephant pit with pungi stakes, a big pit dug in the trail and covered over with a thin lattice of jungle twigs and vines, made to look like a regular part of the earth. When you trod on it the lattice gave way and you were pl
unged into the pit and impaled on the upthrust poisoned stakes. Well Hargit wasn’t going to try that kind of thing; no time for all that digging. That was no help.

  The tripwire idea was attractive but that had a weakness too: if the pursuer took the precaution Watchman was taking now, it would fail.

  Of course Hargit could simply be waiting alongside the trail to shoot him. But Hargit’s mind didn’t seem to work that way. He always set a boobytrap first and then waited to see who walked into it. If the boobytrap didn’t finish you the rifle would.

  A grenade didn’t make a positive trap, not against a man on horseback. The shrapnel might wound the man but the horse might absorb most of it and branches might deflect it too. A grenade was an intimate weapon designed for close quarters and indiscriminate mass targets; if you wanted to kill one man with a grenade you had to explode it very close to him. Hargit wouldn’t just sit up in a tree somewhere and throw a grenade at him; too much chance he’d miss.

  Stalking, Watchman moved slowly, constantly turning his head to catch sounds on the flats of his eardrums. A search for shadows: he keened every tree trunk before he passed. At frequent intervals he stopped the horse and listened to the night.

  The thin coat of frozen snow treacherously concealed an underlayer of loose granulations and it was hard to spot pits and gullies in the forest floor; once or twice the horse went in stirrup-high and floundered for footing.

  It was the old Mexican shell game: under which shell was the pea? And of what did the pea consist?

  He was on a downslope now, so steep it was almost sheer. Hargit’s horses had bucked the drifts hard, leaving great wallows. The track ran down to the sloping-off bottom and penetrated a district of ten-foot boulders and broken slabs of rock that stood upended and sometimes weirdly balanced on top of one another. From this elevation Watchman saw that the tracks went straight on through the boulder field and into the timber beyond.

  The air was still now, but earlier winds had blown most of the rocks clear of snow. You could walk around in there, jumping from rock to rock, and not leave a trace.

  If Hargit was waiting for him it was probably in there.

  He stopped in the trees and considered the alternatives. The slopes on either side of the canyon, going past the sides of the boulder field, were too steep to travel. If you wanted to get across to the far side you had to go through, or over the tops of, the boulders. Either that or go all the way back over the mountain and go around. That might take three hours. No, this was the place. Maybe Hargit could see him right now. Three hundred yards, uphill, the moon going down behind the mountains; it would be a tricky rifle shot and Hargit would want to wait for a better one.

  All right, assume he’s in there. Now how do I get at him?

  3

  Come on, Hargit thought impatiently.

  He could see by the length of time the horseman spent up there in the trees without moving that the horseman smelled the trap. That was expected. The man had already proved himself, whoever he was. He wasn’t anybody’s fool. Well that was all right too. There was no challenge in doing battle with fools.

  He’ll find a way in and I won’t see him when he comes. That was all right too. Right now he guessed the man was waiting for moonglow to fade out of the sky. There were a few clouds but the starlight was sufficient on the snow and on the pale boulders. The cop would leave his horse up in the trees, or maybe send it scooting down here to distract Hargit’s attention; the cop meanwhile would be slithering down inside the trees, keeping to cover, coming into the boulders on his belly.

  No, you won’t see him until he’s on top of you.

  He had wedged the grenade into a crevice at the foot of a boulder and tied the string to the pinloop. He had the end of the string tied around his arm. When he pulled it the grenade would go off. The grenade was about forty feet away and there was a rock for Hargit to hide behind when he pulled the string so he wouldn’t get hit by flying shrapnel. He didn’t expect to kill the cop with the grenade but the noise would distract the cop and that was when Hargit would put a bullet in him.

  If only it wasn’t so God damned cold. He was shivering in his clothes. His toes hurt with a bony kind of pain that was altogether different from the numbness he’d fought against when he was leading them through that hell of a blizzard. Then he’d been moving, making an active fight of it, and that was what he was best at.

  None of them knew how much it had taken out of him, breaking trail in that storm. At the end of it he’d been drunk in his legs, shaking with fatigue, an incredibly deep drained ache in all his fibers.

  This coldness wasn’t the blasting fury of the blizzard. It was still, soundless, clear; there was no way to fight it. Fifteen or twenty below, he judged. His lips were cracked, his eyes felt painful. It was hard to breathe. He kept clenching and unclenching his hands inside his gloves.

  The horse came plunging down the hillside and he watched it come. Nobody on board.

  He looked around in the trees for sign of movement and once he thought he saw something sliding between trees but he wasn’t sure and he just waited. He had good cover here. He squatted in a groined joining of two ice-split boulders. They formed a kind of cave, a right-angle corner with a flat shelf of rock lying across the top. Nobody could creep up behind him. The cop had to come at him from the front. Either the cop would come in sight between the boulders in front of him or the cop would come over the top. Probably the former; the cop wouldn’t expose himself on the skyline by climbing over the top. When the cop appeared, Hargit would yank the rope and the cop would hear the click of the grenade handle flying off; the cop would dive for cover and the grenade would explode and Hargit would know where the cop was but the cop wouldn’t know where Hargit was. That would give him his shot at the cop.

  Hargit squatted with one leg bent to run, and laid the rifle across his thigh. Carefully he bit into the fingertips of his right-hand glove and pulled his hand out of it, and put the glove in his pocket.

  The steel haft and trigger of the rifle were very cold to the touch. He wrapped his hand around them, deliberately disregarding the icy pain. Positioned his index finger on the trigger and lifted the rifle, braced his left elbow on his bent knee and snugged the stock into the hollow of his shoulder. He was ready to swivel toward any point within the range of his vision.

  He lifted his right arm until the rope tautened. That was good: one yank of his right arm and he’d pull the pin. He wouldn’t even have to take his hand off the trigger.

  He settled in to wait. His breath made a frosty film on the metal breechbolt of the rifle. The cold air sliced into the bare knuckles of his right hand and the steel conducted frigid chills into his bones but as soon as he’d shot the cop he’d rub his hand to warm it up and then he’d put his glove on again.

  He heard the horse clattering around in the rocks and he steadied his aim and waited for the cop to come to him.

  4

  Watchman wormed into the boulders on his elbows with his rifle in an infantryman’s carry across his forearms but when he got into the rocks he laid the rifle down and left it. If there was shooting in here it would be at close quarters and for that a pistol was more maneuverable. He stood up, flat against a boulder that towered above his head, and removed the service revolver from his holster and put the revolver in the pocket of his mackinaw. Then he removed his glove and put his hand on the grip of the revolver deep inside the sheepskin pocket.

  He moved very slowly through the rocks. He did not crawl; he walked, bent over in a crouch, because he wanted his legs under him in case he had to jump for cover fast. Every turning in the maze of tumbled passages was a potential ambush and he stopped at every pace to study the new contours that his progress revealed. Several times he turned into blind clotures and had to retrace his steps. Once he climbed onto a handy shelf and put his head up cautiously to look around. He saw only the piled-up rocks in a jumbled panorama. His horse was moving around a few yards away; he saw its ears and the sadd
le horn go past a rockpile. He backed down and circled the boulder and moved on.

  The shadows were deep and threatening. He moved very slowly and without sound. The pressure of time grated on the raw exposed ends of his nerves because there was always the chance Hargit wasn’t in here at all, the chance that Hargit had kept riding and was halfway to the flats by now, but Hargit was never going to find a better spot for an ambush than this one and Watchman had to rely on his own judgment of Hargit’s conceit.

  The adrenalin pumping through his body made his hands shake. He took a step forward, easing around the jutting shoulder of a house-size rock, and that was when he heard the snick and clack of the grenade handle flying free.

  He saw it spinning across the granite and he flung himself flat below the rock shelf.

  The blast was ear-splitting. Shrapnel clanged off rock facets above his head and a chipped rock splinter fell hot against his calf.

  He was still rolling, desperately spinning his head to catch sight of Hargit because Hargit had to be there somewhere drawing a bead on him; he tugged at the revolver in his pocket and it snagged, and he ripped the pocket wide open dragging the gun out, and now he saw Hargit in the dim shadows under a balanced-rock cave, the snow reflections pale against the graven face, the rifle muzzle black and steadying, and he knew he didn’t have nearly enough time to bring his revolver around before Hargit killed him but he had to make the try.

  The rifle bore was dead-aimed at him and he waited with his body braced for the bullet while his arm came up incredibly slowly with the revolver. And still Hargit wasn’t shooting, Hargit’s eyes went wide with alarm and terror and disbelief, and Watchman snapped a shot from the ground. It missed; the bullet whanged off the rocks; and the rifle stirred in Hargit’s arms but did not fire, and Watchman lifted the revolver at arm’s length and pulled the trigger and saw, vividly, the jump and puff of Hargit’s coat as the flesh received the bullet.