by Jon Land
Arno felt a cold rush of icy air up his spine. “This has gone far enough.”
“Didn’t I just say that? You’ve got me thinking you’ve been too busy fooling around with little girls to notice what’s going on. You wanna talk patience? How about you wait six months for your next shipment from south of the border?”
Arno ran his tongue around his mouth, trying to relieve the pastiness that felt like cotton wedged along his gums. “Give me twenty-four hours. I’ve got an idea.”
“Sorry. Can’t wait that long. Wheels are already turning up here.”
“You’re playing right into her hands. This is just what she wants.”
“She ever take on the Angels in Texas?”
“Her father did, and from everything I’ve seen she’s even tougher than he was. And she won’t be alone either; Cort Wesley Masters will be with her.”
“That kid’s father?’
“That’s right.”
“So this shit storm is your fault. You insisting on playing things your own way.”
“I had my reasons,” Arno said, certain LaChance would never be able to understand them.
“But I still like our odds,” LaChance told him, absolutely no sense of doubt or apprehension in his voice. “Thirty guns against two. How’s that read to you?”
“Just wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“I’m sending something to you up there,” Arno said, studying the small package on his desk, chilled by the thought of what lay inside. “Something worth more than those thirty guns.”
“No such thing, boss.”
93
MOHAWK INDIAN RESERVATION; THE PRESENT
“Here they come.”
Caitlin watched the big trucks rolling along the frozen river from the Canadian side of the Mohawk land, near spitting images of the ones she’d spotted in the Patriot Sun parking lot. They rolled without lights, illuminated by the moon reflecting over the white surface. As they drew closer, Caitlin could hear the chains wrapped around their tires scratching atop the ice, casting the lower half of the two trucks in a frosty mist of snow and ice pellets.
“Look a bit familiar, don’t they?” Cort Wesley said, following their approach through the scope of his rifle. “You wanna tell me what that means exactly?”
Caitlin shrugged. “Guess we’re about to find out.”
The big trucks were running on double tires, forcing him to fire more shots than he’d planned. It had been a long time since he’d done any sniper shooting and even longer since his ability to fire, jack another round into the chamber, and then recalibrate the weapon for the next shot had been tested.
In Caitlin’s mind Cort Wesley had fired four times between a single of her breaths; an illusion of time, of course, but also a testament to his skill and resolve. The trucks were cruising slowly enough to leave their skids more controlled than the other vehicles they’d taken down that had been traveling faster.
The trucks had barely slid to a halt when automatic fire burst from both cabs, muzzle flashes erupting in the still night. The fire was concentrated in the general area from where Cort Wesley had fired. Only neither he nor Caitlin was there anymore, circling around the brief distance to the darkest point of the shore to launch their assault.
The gunmen shot up a storm toward the eastern bank of the river, while Caitlin and Cort Wesley launched their assault from the southwest. They fired high into the windshield, content to leave it at that unless more fire burned their way. It didn’t, as things turned out, their eyes having adjusted well enough to the darkness, ready to spot two sets of arms raised in both cabs.
Caitlin and Cort Wesley advanced with the steaming barrels of their M16s cutting twin swaths through the cold thin mist rising off the icy surface.
“Climb out with your hands showing!” Caitlin yelled, hearing her command echo through the cold and dark.
All four men complied, leaving their doors open after dropping down into the night.
“You boys might just live to see the morning now,” Cort Wesley picked up, starting toward them.
Both he and Caitlin could see their hands were empty, the weapons with which they’d sprayed the woods left in the cabs of both trucks.
“This is what happens from here,” Cort Wesley continued. “You turn around and walk back to the other side of the border. You don’t stop, you don’t turn around, and you keep your hands laced behind your heads the whole way. Any of you with kids I’d advise to make sure none of his buddies does something dumb, since automatic fire has a tendency to hit people it wasn’t necessarily aiming for.”
“Now get going,” Caitlin added.
When the men started off, she moved around to the rear of the nearest truck, while Cort Wesley held his gaze and his gun on the four men walking off down an illuminated stretch of ice that looked like a narrow ribbon of light. Caitlin slid back the bolt and hoisted up the rear hold, curious to see the contents of this load and, by connection, the previous ones that had surely made their way to the Patriot Sun in Texas aboard the trucks she’d glimpsed down there. The smells of oil and fresh metal struck her hard and fast, no flashlight needed to discern the contents.
“You need to have a look at this, Cort Wesley.”
94
MOHAWK INDIAN RESERVATION; THE PRESENT
The weapons were still in their original factory packing crates. Caitlin and Cort Wesley pictured the contents of assault rifles, extra magazines, 7.62mm and 5.56mm ammunition. The larger, more narrow crates held rocket launchers, the kind capable of taking down an airplane or laying waste to a small building.
“See those squatter crates stacked in the back?” Cort Wesley asked, aiming his flashlight that way. “Hand grenades.”
“Arno’s fixing to fight a war, all right.”
“Was there ever any doubt?”
“Only about his ability to acquire the means.”
“Well, not anymore.”
They heard a brief scratching on the ice, followed by a voice that split the night around them. “Two of you turn around very slowly or I’ll shoot you where you stand. Drop your weapons and keep your hands where I can see them.”
Caitlin and Cort Wesley did as they were told, coming face-to-face with a big man with a tattoo of an arrow pointing forward on his bald skull. He was holding a twelve-gauge pump shotgun amid a trio of Neanderthals wearing the same black colors and markings of the Hells Angels. Except their hair was crusted with flecks of ice and the back of their black jackets and pants looked like they’d been pelted by a crystal storm.
“Hello, LaChance,” said Caitlin.
“I don’t remember us being formally introduced.”
“I met your two brothers a while back in Quebec,” Caitlin started, leaving her sentence off in mid-thought long enough to notice some sort of platform jerry-rigged to the underside of the nearest truck spun round so its back end was facing her thirty yards away. She pictured LaChance and the others clinging to them while the trucks motored across the lake waiting to spring the trap Caitlin and Cort Wesley had dropped straight into. “Right before I killed them,” she finished.
Caitlin watched LaChance’s features tighten and eyes widen to exaggerate the size of the whites. The shotgun seemed to tremble in his grasp.
“It wasn’t the Mounties like you heard,” she continued. “I put a bullet in one, used a knife on the other. Can’t tell you which was which, of course.”
“You wanna die that bad?” LaChance asked her.
“You’re gonna kill us anyway,” Cort Wesley said.
“Right you are there,” LaChance said, acknowledging him for the first time. “But not before I give you a present.” He removed a small soft-wrapped package from his pocket and tossed it to Cort Wesley. “Little something from your son.”
Cort Wesley held the package uncomfortably in his grasp, as if it were hot or charged with electricity, while Caitlin let her eyes drift to the woods rimming the river on the east and south.
And that’s when the screaming started.
95
MOHAWK INDIAN RESERVATION; THAT MORNING
Charlie Charles was sitting in a lawn chair beneath the overhang when Caitlin and Cort Wesley exited their motel room fifteen miles from the Mohawk Reservation that morning.
“Something wrong, Charlie?” Caitlin asked him, noting the concern in his single working eye that looked sad in the sunlight.
“Back when I was like you, a real lawman, nobody talked. You never knew what was going on until it happened.”
“Doesn’t sound like things have changed much.”
“No, today people talk and, when you’re as old as I am, there’s a lot of people know where to find me when they got something to say.”
“You getting to the point anytime soon?” snapped Cort Wesley. Caitlin had watched his anxiety worsen almost by the hour, culminating the previous night when he slept not a single wink and spent most of it seated in a chair staring out the window at nothing at all. She knew that coming up here to take on the Hells Angels was the only thing keeping him sane, the strategy undertaken to get Dylan returned safe and sound.
Charlie Charles’s expression didn’t change, apparently in more of a rush than he was a moment before. “The motorcycle bikers who call themselves Angels first showed up on the Reservation when I was still young, sixty or thereabouts. They came to sell drugs and never stopped, even though I sugared plenty of their gas tanks and dropped Ex-Lax into their food while they were jailed before letting them go.”
“Look, Mr. Charles,” Cort Wesley started, stopping when Caitlin scolded him with her eyes.
The old Indian waited for him to continue and, when he didn’t, resumed on his own. “Angels got plenty of enemies too, on both sides of the border. One of them was a mother to one of them who detested her son for the filth he’d splattered on the family name. She’s a great grandmother now, spry woman of near ninety. We still talk from time to time, last night being the most recent.”
“What is it, Charlie?” Caitlin asked, after he stopped.
“She’s got a great nephew rides with the Angels these days. Hates him as much as she did her own boy the Mounties put in the grave after he robbed his eighth liquor store. This morning she called to tell me a bunch more Angels slept at the kid’s house last night, which is across the street from hers. Word is they got an army massed ready to come across the border.”
“Guess we know the war they’re fixing to fight,” Cort Wesley said, his tone more restrained.
“I’ve been up against them before.”
“Gonna take more than sugar in their gas tanks to win this time, Charlie.”
“I know, Ranger,” he told Caitlin. “That’s why I figured I’d come down here. We need to get an early start.”
* * *
Back on the shores of the frozen river, Caitlin and Cort Wesley spent the rest of the morning following his instructions in what implements to gather from the woods, a laundry list of sorts recited from ancient memory through lips formed into a reflective smile.
“You’ve done this before,” Caitlin noted, watching the old man’s arthritic, knobby hands suddenly seem to straighten again as he nimbly worked them through twinelike vines, branches whittled by Cort Wesley to a razor-sharp edge, and rocks packed in snow to be laid across low-hanging branches.
Charlie Charles didn’t miss a beat on his work as he replied. “When I was a boy, when the people of this land were even poorer, moonshining was our parents’ sole source of income. Some criminals from downstate took issue with that, thought we were cutting into their liquor business. We weren’t ready for them the first time they came, but we were the second.”
“I’ll bet there was no third,” said Cort Wesley, carving the ends of more shaved stakes into lethal wooden daggers.
Charlie Charles just grinned again, looking as serene and content as the first time Cort Wesley and Caitlin had glimpsed him fishing through a hole in the ice. They watched as he twisted various nooses and nets out of nettle fiber and basswood-fiber twine lifted from the seemingly bottomless pockets of his deerskin vest and old trousers that bagged on him like a sack.
“When I was a boy, to guarantee the success of a hunt,” he explained to Caitlin and Cort Wesley in a voice suddenly lacking in age, “we fasted and sacrificed before going into the forest. And we carried what we called hunting bundles on us that included charms shaped like animals, medicines, and talismen passed down from our ancestors.”
Charlie Charles paused long enough to remove a fresh spool of homemade twine from his vest. He rose to his full height, which seemed suddenly taller, and measured off some lengths against the distance from the base of a tree to its lowest hanging branch.
“My father preferred the more traditional techniques, such as moose and deer calls that imitated the sounds that fawns make, dangerous if a wolf or wildcat came instead of the doe. We also hunted deer at night, when they came to the stream or lake for water and to eat the pads and stems of water lilies. Used a jacklight, torch, or lantern set on a special wooden platform in the front of a canoe with a darkened backstop to freeze them as they stood. Later, ‘deer shining,’ as it was called, was outlawed by the U.S. government except for Indians on federal reservations.”
“With all due respect,” said Cort Wesley, “hunting’s not what this is about.”
Charlie Charles didn’t smile this time. “Isn’t it?”
96
MOHAWK INDIAN RESERVATION; THE PRESENT
In the moments that followed, the mere lapse of time between breaths and heartbeats, Caitlin saw it all happening in her mind in conjunction with the screaming. The first line of defense they’d laid in the woods were Charlie Charles’s own deadly version of the old deadfall traps used to snare game animals.
“How do you know they’ll be coming this way?” she’d asked him.
The old Indian had grinned at her. “Because I cut back the woods thirty years ago to make sure their fathers would.”
The traditional deadfall trap was a simple mechanism made of sticks supporting a heavy weight pivoting on the tip of the more upright one. A trigger would be planted at the base of the lower stick that, when jarred, would collapse the weight atop the animal. Charlie Charles’s more modern version used the identical principles with triggering branches instead of sticks and foot-long wood tips shaved to a thin, pointed edge instead of mere weight. Come that night, the Angels unfortunate enough to trip these outlying traps would send the others scurrying through the dark in shock and confusion.
The first series of screams told Caitlin that that was exactly what had happened an instant before a pair of arrows buzzed the air, seemingly within milliseconds of each other, downing the armed Hells Angels standing on either side of LaChance. One of them fell backward into a fourth man, his pistol jerked into the air and the shot he managed to get off was sent skyward.
Caitlin lurched toward him, as Cort Wesley charged LaChance, jerking his shotgun into the air. Caitlin saw him struggling with the bigger biker, the two men battling for leverage and control of the shotgun, while she pounced on the pistol-wielding Angel just lowering it into firing position.
The horrible screams of the men impaled by the deadfall traps continued to pierce the silence of the night. Fresh wails joined those as more Hells Angels, funneled into what was essentially a layered obstacle course of pain and death, fell victim to more of Charlie Charles’s old-fashioned traps.
Storm-downed limbs, lashed high between trees with heavy rope, dropped in a speed-gathering arc once the camouflaged rock holding them in place as a contact point was struck.
Buckets of road tar heated by open flame, and then nailed on a swivel atop branches, would spill their thick, oozing contents upon anyone who so much as jostled the lower hanging connected branches.
The hardness of the eart
h rendered the old covered hole trap infeasible, so Charlie Charles opted instead to hammer more razor-pointed wooden spikes into the ground camouflaged by brush and snow. Add to these what amounted to tripwire strung in tight strands of twine and tied between stakes. Those lucky enough to avoid that could still find their boots and feet pierced by the sharpened spikes, and those who fell victim to the tripwires were almost certain to fall forward into the deadly snare waiting to pierce flesh and muscle as if they were pudding.
Other than the deadfalls meant to inspire panic, Caitlin had seen no real rhyme or reason to the way Charlie Charles had set his traps. But she knew he had one all the same, just as she knew he’d be able to detect which traps had been sprung with every cry of agony or scream for help. The latter would come mostly with the simplest snares, basically just a wire noose suspended in the likely paths of the Hells Angels rushing desperately through the woods. Once a boot hit the center of the noose it would snap into place, tightening over the foot or ankle the more the man tried to free himself. Unless the victim decided to chew his own leg or foot off, the wire would hold him for as long as need be. Charlie Charles had also rigged some lifting snares that would actually jerk their victims into the air, but professed to have far less confidence in their functionality.
Caitlin took advantage of the screams that were coming with virtually no pause at all, glimpses at the edges of the woods caught in the moonlight of black-garbed figures caught by snares, impaled by spikes, slammed by heavy tree stumps, or covered in road tar that steamed over them. She struggled with the much bigger and heavier man, letting him think he had regained control of his pistol before jerking it around toward him and adding her finger to his over the trigger. He looked puzzled when the shot resounded, hitting him like a swift kick to the gut, before his eyes locked open, his weight collapsing atop her like a piano.
Cort Wesley and LaChance, meanwhile, continued to fight for control of the shotgun, the chambered shell exploding from the barrel with an ear-numbing roar and piercing the nearer truck’s fuel tank. Gasoline flooded out, first splashing and then rapidly spreading across the surface of the ice in a glistening pool.
