The Texan

by Joan Johnston

  “Stay down!” Owen ordered brusquely.

  “No problem.” Her legs felt like they were made of Jell-O.

  She watched as Owen crawled to the saddlebags at the back of the cave and pulled out the SIG P226 pistol the Texas Rangers had issued to him. Staying low, he made his way to the front of the cave, then stood with his back to the wall and said, “I’m throwing out my weapon.”

  When the SIG hit the ground, the hijacker said, “Don’t tell me that’s all you’ve got. I know better.”

  “I had a rifle in a scabbard on another horse—”

  “I’ve got that,” the hijacker said.

  Which answered for certain the question of what had happened to her horse, Bay thought.

  “I know you’ve got another handgun,” the hijacker said. “You cops always carry two.”

  Owen swore under his breath, then retrieved his Colt .45 automatic from its holster. “Here it comes.”

  Bay lifted her head enough to see he’d thrown it far beyond the hijacker. When the man’s head turned to see where it landed, Owen launched himself from the ten-foot-high cave opening like a panther.

  Bay scrambled to the cave entrance in time to see Owen come crashing down on top of the hijacker. His weight forced the man’s face into the ground, and the hijacker’s gun went flying. The hijacker twisted and slugged at Owen, who reeled backward and then took a jab of his own.

  The two men were evenly matched, and both were desperately trying to reach the hijacker’s machine gun. Bay realized she could help, if only she could get to the ground.

  She sat at the edge of the cave with her feet dangling, trying to decide if she could drop ten feet without breaking an ankle. Probably not. She quickly turned onto her hands and knees and slid over the ledge so her body hung down, and she only had half the distance to fall. She reminded herself to roll, and let go.

  She hit the ground harder than she’d expected, but bent her knees as she fell and rolled right onto her feet. The hijacker had his fingers on his weapon when Bay snatched it out of his reach and pointed it between his eyes.

  “Hold it right there,” she said.

  Owen hit the distracted hijacker on the chin and knocked him out. Then he stood and took the nine-millimeter Uzi from her trembling hands.

  “Thanks, Red,” he said, as he smoothed her auburn hair away from her face and pulled her into a one-armed embrace. “You did good.”

  “So did you.” She peered around his shoulder at the hijacker and exclaimed, “That’s one of the Dobermans!”

  “What?”

  “He’s one of the FBI agents who met us at the airport in Alpine with Paul Ridgeway. He reminded me of a Doberman pinscher,” she explained.

  “Yes, he is,” Owen said, turning with her to stare at the unconscious man. “And yes, he does.”

  “What’s he doing here?” Bay asked. “I mean, is he one of the hijackers? I think he must be. He knew what happened to my horse. How is that possible?”

  “Whoa,” Owen said. “Slow down. First things first.” He handed the Uzi back to her and said, “Be careful. When you pull the trigger, this shoots lots and lots of real bullets.”

  He crossed to the downed man, pulled the army web belt from his camouflage pants, turned him over on his stomach, and lashed his hands behind him.

  Bay looked around, but there was no one to be seen in any direction. “Where do you suppose he came from?”

  “He didn’t walk far today. His combat boots still have a spit shine.”

  Bay looked down at the boots, the bottoms of which matched the footprints they’d been following. “How did he get here? There aren’t any roads nearby where he could have driven in, are there?”

  “Helicopter,” Owen said.

  “Really? Why didn’t we hear it?”

  Owen shrugged. “Maybe it was one of those black helicopters, the quiet ones, or maybe the sound got baffled by the terrain. There’s plenty of room in this valley to land a bird. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “Then my brother must be somewhere nearby.”

  “Stands to reason.”

  If he’s still alive. And he won’t be for long, if he’s one of the hijackers. Bay heard the words, even if Owen didn’t speak them.

  The agent was rousing, and Owen jerked him onto his feet. “Where’s your camp?” he demanded.

  The Doberman just growled.

  Owen crossed to Bay and held out his hand for the Uzi. He took it and turned back to the agent. “I don’t need you. I can follow your tracks back to wherever you came from. It’s up to you whether you live or die.”

  “You’re not going to shoot me,” the Doberman snarled.

  Owen frowned. “No, you’re right. That would make too much noise. Bay, give me your knife.”

  Bay already had the jackknife out of her boot before she realized what Owen wanted it for. She hesitated, but his hand remained outstretched, so she opened the knife and laid it on his palm.

  She cried out in alarm when Owen pressed the edge of the razor-sharp blade against the agent’s throat. A stream of blood quickly stained the man’s army-green T-shirt. As a vet, Bay had made enough incisions that the sight of blood shouldn’t have bothered her. But she felt nauseated at the thought of watching a man get his throat cut.

  “Your choice,” Owen said, his gray eyes hard as flint. “I’d as soon kill you as not.”

  “I’ll show you where it is,” the agent croaked.

  Owen wiped the bloodied knife on the agent’s sleeve, folded it against his own thigh, and handed it back to Bay.

  She was panting with fear and forced herself to take several deep breaths to keep from hyperventilating. She’d been shocked by Owen’s unexpected savagery, appalled by his ruthless infliction of pain. Gone was the tender, passionate lover. In his place was a man who could kill, a dangerous predator.

  And her brother might very well become his prey.

  Suddenly, Bay wasn’t nearly so anxious to get to the hijackers’ camp. She’d come along on this journey in the first place because she’d feared Owen might make himself judge and jury and take revenge for his friend’s death without giving her brother a chance to defend himself. She’d naïvely believed that her mere presence would be sufficient to curb his violence. Obviously, that wasn’t the case.

  She realized the agent was still bleeding. “Do you have another handkerchief with you?” she asked Owen in a quavery voice.

  He pulled one from his jeans pocket and handed it to her.

  With hands that shook, she tied it around the wound in the agent’s neck. “You might want to get a tetanus shot, if you haven’t had one lately,” she told the wounded man.

  “That’s enough tender loving care, Red,” Owen said.

  He stepped between her and the FBI agent and reached into the man’s back pocket. “James Brophy,” he read aloud, as he held open a folder containing a badge and an ID. “Who are you working for, James?”

  “The FBI,” the agent replied with a smirk.

  “And who else?” Owen demanded as he snapped the agent’s FBI identification shut.

  The agent’s lips flattened into a thin, recalcitrant line.

  “Where’s your partner?” Owen asked.

  He spat at Owen’s feet.

  “He’s not going to tell us anything,” Owen said in disgust.

  “What have you done with my brother?” Bay asked anyway. “Where is he?”

  James Brophy remained mute.

  “We’d better get moving,” Owen said. “We want to find that camp before somebody misses their dog and comes looking for him.”

  It only took a matter of minutes to collect all the guns, repack the saddlebags, and tighten the cinch on the saddle. Owen gave his horse a drink, took a sip of water for himself, and offered one to Bay.

  His frugal use of their water supply told Bay that Owen didn’t think they were out of the woods—or rather, the desert—yet. She hadn’t really thought about what they would do when the
y found the hijackers.

  “Shouldn’t we contact the FBI now, and let them go find the bad guys?” she asked.

  “The satellite link only works in the morning,” Owen said. “We might as well find the exact location of their camp. That way I can send map coordinates and tell the cavalry where to land their helicopters.”

  Bay realized they were going to have to wait for the cavalry—FBI, ATF, National Guard, Texas Rangers, Park Rangers, she’d welcome any or all of them—to show up. Even if they flew in like bats-out-of-hell, there was going to be a window of time when she and Owen would have to survive on their wits.

  Of course, the Uzi would be a big help.

  Owen used the agent’s own bandanna, which had been tied around his head, to gag him. “I’ll be watching the trail, so don’t get any bright ideas about leading us in the wrong direction. Get moving.”

  Bay watched the ground ahead of them as the agent left the marked Strawhouse Trail and edged past a ten-foot-high lip of stone and made his way through a seemingly impenetrable wall of limestone.

  “There’s an opening in the rock,” Bay marveled.

  “Looks that way,” Owen said.

  The crack in the limestone was maybe five feet wide, tall enough for a man, and about twenty feet long. The bright sunlight that lit the entrance to the passageway was just dimming when it was replaced by bright sunlight marking the exit.

  Bay noticed Owen had a hand on the agent’s shoulder and a gun pointed at his back, to keep him from bolting as they reached the end of the tunnel. She touched Owen’s arm to get his attention. When he glanced back at her, Brophy tried to make a run for it.

  Owen instantly swung his Colt .45 in an arc that caught the hijacker on the temple and leveled him.

  “You didn’t have to hit him!”

  “Quiet,” he warned. “We must be close.”

  Bay dropped on one knee beside Brophy and checked his pulse. “He’s still alive.”

  The agent groaned as Bay probed at the knot growing where the barrel of Owen’s Colt had struck him. “He’s going to have a doozy of a headache.”

  Owen moved the groggy man close to the limestone wall and covered him with limbs from a creosote bush growing near the tunnel exit, then took the gag from his mouth and used the kerchief to tie his ankles together. He handed Bay his SIG and said, “Do you know how to use this?”

  “I’m not shooting anyone.”

  He made a disgusted sound in his throat. “Don’t be a fool. If it comes to a choice between you and—”

  “I don’t think I can do it,” she said. “I don’t think I could ever kill a human being.”

  She flushed as he searched her face. She wondered what he hoped to find. She’d hunted game with her father and brothers. She’d used a rifle to destroy animals that were too ill to be saved. But she was in territory she’d never traveled now, a dark place where she would never willingly have chosen to go.

  He held out the gun and said, “Take it.”

  “I won’t—”

  “Take the damned gun, Red. You can choose later whether you’re willing to kill someone or die yourself.”

  Bay took the pistol and stuck it gingerly in the front of her jeans. She could feel the cold metal through her cotton underwear.

  “Now, you wait here—”

  “No! I’m going with you.”

  He shook his head. “It’s too dangerous, Red. Wait here. I’m just going to take a look at their camp and—”

  “I don’t trust you,” she blurted.

  He flinched as though she’d struck him. “This is my job, Red. It’s what I do, and I’m good at it. Nobody’s going to get killed that doesn’t deserve it.”

  Her chin lifted. “There’s no telling who you might think deserves to get shot. I’m going with you.”

  “Damn it, Red. No.”

  “You can’t stop me. So you might as well tell me what I can do to help.”

  “Stay the hell out of my way!” His eyes were as dark as she’d ever seen them. “I want you behind me at all times,” he said brusquely. “Do what I say when I say it. No argument. Understood?”

  She nodded, because her heart was in her throat, and she couldn’t speak.

  Owen hobbled his horse, but he didn’t loosen the cinch. “We might need to get out of here in a hurry,” he explained.

  He stopped at the end of the tunnel and searched the terrain in front of them. The hijackers’ camp was nowhere to be seen. “It’s got to be there. Maybe beyond that wall,” he said, pointing to a curve in the limestone. “Stay close, and be ready to hit the ground.”

  There was nothing beyond the limestone wall but a large, open valley. Swiftly and quietly, Owen followed what seemed to Bay a nonexistent trail, as though it were written in neon arrows. They reached another limestone crevice, narrower than the first and barely tall enough for a man to stand upright.

  “I don’t like this,” he said. “It’s a natural place to set booby traps or an ambush.”

  Bay kept her hands balled up, so Owen wouldn’t see how much they were shaking. “Why don’t we wait for the cavalry to arrive?”

  “That agent’s going to be missed long before tomorrow morning.”

  “So what? It doesn’t follow that they have to find us,” Bay argued. “Couldn’t we hide somewhere?”

  She watched Owen consider her suggestion and saw the moment he rejected it.

  “I’d rather check things out first. If he did come in on a helicopter, it’s possible there’s only one other man, or maybe two, at the camp. If that’s the case, I might be able to manage the situation myself.”

  “What if there’s a dozen men or two dozen?” Bay asked.

  He shot her a crooked grin. “Then we find a shady spot and hide out till morning.”

  Bay realized that while she was shaking in her boots, Owen was enjoying himself. The prospect of danger didn’t seem to frighten him, as it did her. He relished it, maybe even invited it. She only hoped his confidence didn’t override his caution.

  “What kind of booby trap should I be looking for?” Bay asked. “Not a VX mine, right? One of those mines has a range of—what?—eight miles? They’d be in danger of poisoning themselves, too.”

  “Not in an enclosed space like this,” Owen said, his hands brushing the limestone walls on either side of him. “All they’d need to do is block off either end of this narrow passage, which they could do with a small explosive charge that’s triggered the same time as the mine.”

  “I wish you hadn’t told me that,” Bay said. “We don’t have any protective gear with us.”

  “I have the atropine-oxime autoinjectors right here,” Owen said as he patted his shirt pocket.

  “You do? Thank goodness for small favors. Although, I don’t know how much good it’ll do us to survive the nerve gas, if this passage is sealed at both ends like a tomb.”

  Owen laughed. “I’ll bet you love to tell scary stories by the campfire at night.”

  “I like to know my options. I like to plan ahead.”

  “You always seem to plan for the worst possible outcome,” he pointed out.

  “In my house, there was always more bad news than good.”

  It was a reminder of the differences between them that had brought them to this place. She had lived hand-to-mouth, sometimes not certain where the next meal was coming from. He had led a privileged life, where every meal was served on china plates and eaten with silver.

  “What’s that?” Bay asked, cocking her head.

  Owen stopped and listened. “Chopper.”

  “They’re getting away!” Bay said, as she ran past him, anxious to discover whether her brother was being flown away in the helicopter.

  “Stop! Don’t move!”

  Bay stopped, but not before she’d tripped a fragile wire that was stretched across the passage. “Oh, God.” She turned back to Owen and saw from his grim expression that she’d done something awful. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t
move,” he repeated.

  She waited for an explosion, but it didn’t come. “Why didn’t something explode?”

  “You might only have tripped a sensor somewhere that would let them know we’re here. Or the charge might be delayed.”

  “Delayed? Then shouldn’t we be trying to get out of here?”

  “I want to look around your feet before you make another move,” he said. “Stand still.”

  Bay had no idea what Owen was hunting for and didn’t like the “Aaah” sound he made. “What did you find?”

  “A timer.”

  Bay felt her heart begin to gallop. “How much time is on it?”

  “Twenty-nine seconds.”

  OWEN WISHED HE KNEW WHAT SUBSTANCE WAS ABOUT TO explode. Was it plain old TNT? A claymore? Or a VX nerve gas mine? He had less than thirty seconds to decide whether to give each of them a shot of the atropine-oxime antidote. He didn’t want to waste it now, if he was going to need it later.

  It made more sense to run.

  He grabbed Bay’s hand, and they dashed pell-mell for the sunlight they could see ahead of them. Owen was doing his best to keep an eye on the ground in front of them, but he missed seeing the second tripwire until he was right on top of it.

  “Jump!” he ordered, as he yanked Bay’s arm to lift her over it.

  The toe of her boot snagged the wire, and the limestone walls behind them exploded. The force of the blast threw them free of the cave, as crumbling limestone sealed the opening.

  Owen wrapped his arms around Bay while they were still in the air and used his body to protect hers as they hit the ground. He landed in lechuguilla, and the thorny spines pierced his back like knives.

  But they were both alive.

  Owen hugged Bay tight. “Are you all right?”

  “I think so. I … Owen, is it possible VX nerve gas exploded in there?”

  He lifted her chin and searched her eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  “I feel … odd. There’s something … I feel sick and …”

  Owen tensed. “Red? Are you all right?” In a matter of seconds, her eyes had become red-rimmed. Her nose had started to run. She was wheezing.

  “Jesus Christ.” It was definitely a prayer. Owen fumbled in his shirt pocket for the two atropine-oxime autoinjectors.