Chapter Eighteen
Now it was war.
Before this it had been a jaunt, a manhunt with a known ending of sadistic pleasure, but now it was more than that. Koh-eet-senko wanted vengeance, just as Nix had predicted he would, and he had brought thirty warriors with him, painted for war. Their lances caught fire from the bright sun as they streamed behind their leaders down the western side of the valley. Their warrior brothers were busy shepherding the rest of the Timber People out of their encampment, away from the leaping fire. Although they knew it would eventually burn itself out at the rim of the desert, they also knew there would be no life-support left in its wake. The animals had already fled, fleetly outstripping the humans. Behind the still raging flames lay only scorched earth, stunted roots, shriveled trees. The forest was destroyed, and a dozen Comanches had died fighting to save their homes and their horses. A number of warriors had died when they had dashed into the lake for water with which to fight the flames. Their comrades had watched in superstitious, uncomprehending terror as the men thrashed and screamed and bled and died in the water. Some ran to their rescue, only to fall prey to the razor fangs of the piranha themselves. Others had died beneath blazing, falling trees, and the panicked hoofs of terrified ponies. There would be much grief in the night camp of the Hoh’ees. The women would slash their arms and their breasts in ritual tribute to the dead, the men would cut short their hair to mourn their brothers. To avenge them Koh-eet-senko had called his best warriors to his side, and they streamed like cavalry in formation behind the knot of Nix’s men, faces painted in broad black stripes of war, outpacing the white men as they forged down the valley. They bore their best lances, their shining repeating rifles. They all wanted to count coup on the body of the man who had brought destruction upon them.
Nix, by subtle signals to his men, let the Indians draw ahead. He had bitter experience of Angel’s survival techniques, and anticipated that the man from the Justice Department might have some savage tricks waiting for them. Let Koh-eet-senko and his warriors trigger them. Then Nix would strike his own blow.
Angel watched them coming down the valley. He was on the lookout tower at the northwest corner of the stockade. Below him, inside it, Victoria stood near the window of the machinery room, between wall and stockade, two pieces of wire in her hand, bared of insulation. She stood in shadow, her face a pale blur, dressed in riding breeches and neat English-style jacket, looking for all the world as though she was awaiting the arrival of a groom with her horse, ready for the hunt. Angel grinned at the vanity: Victoria might be going hunting, but it was a larger fox than usual that she would pursue. No one would be happier than she to see the man who had built this valley of death destroyed.
He had pieced together the whole story now.
Nix had given him some clues, and she filled in the gaps. She told him of finding the almost-dead Ernie Hecatt on the trail, of riding for help and seeing that he was nursed back to health. When he recovered, Hecatt—who had told them his name was Nix—insisted on working at the ranch to pay off some of his indebtedness to them. He had gradually won the confidence of old Tom Stacey, Victoria’s father, and before long, was helping the old man at the bank in Waco. Gradually—he did everything carefully, without haste—Nix made himself indispensable to the old man. He was always on hand to pour the old man a stiff drink, followed by a stiffer one. Within a year, Tom Stacey couldn’t get through the day without at least a quart of whiskey, and his mind was so fuddled that he signed anything Nix put in front of him, did anything Nix wanted him to do. There was one thing Nix wanted more than anything else: and that was Victoria Stacey. When he was ready, he took her, too.
‘Then we came here,’ Victoria had told him while they worked. ‘He brought a builder in, hundreds of Mexicans. He worked them like a madman, like Pharaoh building a tomb. When it was finished, he had them all taken away.
Then he brought in the others, Elliott and his men. I was as much a prisoner as if I were in jail. He told me if I ever tried to leave the valley he would come after me, and when he caught me he would give me to the Comanches.’
‘It was probably just a threat,’ Angel said, more to fill in the silence than anything else. ‘No white man would give a white woman to an Indian.’
‘It was no threat, Frank,’ she said, without emphasis. ‘He would have done it. He has the soul of Satan himself: there is no foul thing he would not do.’
The Comanches were moving in battle formation as they came whooping down the valley, their line a long broken V with its point to the rear. In the narrowest arm of the V Angel saw a knot of riders and grinned mirthlessly: Nix might have the soul of Satan, but he also had his cunning. He was letting the Indians take the sting out of any surprises that his foe might have prepared. Well, it make no damned difference to Angel. He gave the signal to Victoria and she touched together the ends of the two wires.
It had been hardly any trouble to work out the way that the crude switches were linked to pump and filter and battery. There were diagrams on the walls to show the locations of the mines, and Angel had been surprised to discover that there was an inner ring of explosives within the stockade, a last-ditch defense of which Nix had said nothing. He had disconnected all the contacts, and then he and Victoria had gone outside and started digging. The buried bombs were simple, and probably brutally effective. Cast-iron canisters, about the size of a cowpat, maybe four inches deep and packed with explosive. A detonator linked to the battery circuit was made live when the switch was thrown. Above it was a springy steel plate which set off the detonator when it was depressed. Man or horse, whatever triggered the device would be blown to smithereens, and the shrapnel of the case would cut through anything nearby as it whickered into a killing spray. There was one of these devices every yard or so, harmless when disconnected, lethal otherwise. They dug all the ones on the northeastern and southern sides of the stockade and lugged them, sweating and dirty, across to the other side. There Angel buried them, making no real effort to conceal them properly. He didn’t have the time for finesse. He ran the wires back to the batteries and connected them up, bypassing the switches. All that was needed to set off the mines was a spark, and Victoria supplied that when she touched together the two bared copper wires.
The Indians were thundering toward the stockade, their ornaments and weapons flashing in the brilliant sun, an awesome line of primitive force. Magnificent, ugly, their bodies painted with ochre and vermillion, decorated with amulets and medicine signs, screaming their ululating attack cry, they were about twenty yards from the stockade when the world blew up in their faces.
There was unimaginable panic.
Horses were blown apart, their riders with them. Others were cut down by the terrible slicing force of fragmented metal, still others smashed to the ground by the sheer power of the blast. Horses stopped dead in their tracks, pitching their riders ten and fifteen feet ahead of them in tumbling, broken bundles. In the pattering descent of metal and stone and swirling dust were softer, wetter, warmer things, all that remained of the comrades of those who crawled on the broken ground life shattered insects, blood streaking the bright paint on their bodies. And now from the lookout tower, Angel poured a random hail of lead into the routed Comanche band, emptying the three preloaded Winchesters in a staccato roll of shots. The seeking rain of driving lead hard on the heels of the awful explosion was beyond resistance, and Koh-eet-senko gathered together what was left of his men, shouting at them to pull back to where Nix and his men had pulled their mounts to a safe stop, appalled by the slaughter before them. A couple of Elliott’s men yanked out their Winchesters and threw shots at the small figure in the look-out tower, but none of them came near Angel. There wasn’t a man in a thousand that could hit a mark at half a mile from the back of a horse, much less an animal made jumpy by the proximity of a huge explosion. He watched now through the same telescope that Hercules Nix had used to observe Angel’s entry into the valley. He could see Nix gesticulating furious
ly at the Indian leader, and the Comanche making angry, chopping movements with his hands. It wasn’t difficult to guess what they were arguing about, and Angel watched with grim satisfaction. He had won the first skirmish. The tattered things that lay bloodily broken on the smoking ground below were part of the price the Indians had to pay for their allegiance to Nix. But they were casualties only of the battle. The war was not yet over.
The war party had gathered itself again, and now the white men took the lead. Once again Angel grinned: Koh-eet-senko wasn’t buying the same trouble twice, and had insisted that Nix and his men took the van. That was what they’d been arguing about: and it suited Angel’s purposes admirably. He hoped he’d estimated Nix’s reaction correctly. As the riders regrouped and moved out of range, he saw that they were heading south again, and would come around the southern side of the stockade, between it and the mountains. Nix would know the area on the eastern side of the stockade was mined, including the ground in front of the main gates. He would therefore send his men at the walls on either side of the gates, where they could jump the line of mines, or take one of the corners. He had made his own bet. There were no longer any mines before the main gates. He and Victoria had dug them up and redistributed them among the walls, about four feet from the palisade itself.
‘Here we go again,’ he muttered, as the swiftly moving line of horsemen rounded the southwestern perimeter of the stockade, about half a mile away from it. He counted them: six white men and twenty-two Indians. It was clear that they had discussed and agreed upon some plan of attack. They wheeled to face the stockade in line abreast, each rider about six yards or so from the one next to him. A second line formed behind the first, slightly more men in it. Eighteen, Angel counted, understanding the ploy. The front line often was the fire-drawing line. In the days before repeating rifles, the Indians had always fought like this. They knew that even the best men with guns took almost half a minute to reload: pour in the powder, ram home; ball, ram it home; wadding, ram it; up and ready to fire. So they used to send in a screaming squad of a dozen trick riders to draw the fire of their victims. As these riders came within range of the rifles, they dropped to the defensive side of their thundering ponies avoiding, as often as not, the volley of shots aimed at them. Then, as the defenders fired their rifles, the main force of attacking Indians rolled down upon the target, smashing through its defenses before the men inside could reload.
Nix was trying a variation on the same tactic.
The front line would come in, daring Angel to set off his defensive ring, his counterattack, whatever he had. If he didn’t, they would keep on coming, take the wall and prepare the way for the second wave. If he did, the second line would come in like a wave over a safe beach, unscathed. The first line was a suicide squad, and Angel could hear snatches of Comanche death songs across the scorched and empty plain.
Only the earth lasts forever It is a good day for dying Only the sun lasts forever It’s a good day to die, brother.
Don’t worry, brother, he thought, I’ll do my best to oblige, and watched as they kicked their horses into movement. He had reloaded the three Winchesters now, and changed his vantage point to the tower overlooking the main gate. It was a well-built hut of logs, with notches for rifles. He laid the three guns out, ready, holding his fire as they came forward steadily, the horses picking up their feet from a walk into a trot, bright flashes of light glancing from the bits of glass and metal tied to their bits. Five hundred yards. Four. Three, and still Angel held his fire. The Winchester ‘73 was a good weapon, but anyone expecting accuracy from it at more than two hundred and fifty yards was not only an optimist but a fool due for sad disappointment. Two hundred yards, a hundred and fifty. He checked the lever of the first gun: there was a bullet up the spout. One hundred yards.
The Indians were moving at a canter now, yelling and screaming as they kicked the animals up into a gallop, working the levers of their own rifles. As they came in even closer, as if they had been rehearsing the movement for hours, they veered off, forming a looping, open wheel perhaps sixty or seventy yards in diameter, moving so that at any given moment only one or two of them was within rifle range. As the wheel revolved, it edged constantly closer to the wall of the stockade, a yard or so at a time. The Comanche wheel, they called it. It was one of the most effective tactics ever devised by the horseback Indians, the revolving wheel acting like the blade in a sawmill, edging inexorably closer to its target. At any moment, only a short fast-moving arc went close to the enemy, and as it did, the warriors slid down on the leeward side of their ponies, firing their rifles from beneath the neck of the galloping beasts. Angel dropped one horse, then another. Their riders rolled aside like acrobats, and within the space of moments, ran alongside another warrior, whirled up behind him, and dropped off on the safe far side of the circle. They would come in again on foot when the second wave attacked.
Nearer and nearer they came, until now they were no more than twenty yards from the gate, black charcoaled dust hanging like a gritty curtain above them as they yelled and screamed past. Still Nix held back his reserve, although through the dust Angel could see the Indian leader waving his arms as though to argue for attack.
When the short arc of the wheel was no more than ten yards from the gates, Angel turned loose. He emptied one full magazine and then another and then another as fast as he could pull the trigger, his bullets taking a terrible toll of the game little Comanche ponies. The meaty smacks as his bullets drove into their bodies were sickening, but Angel steeled himself against any semblance of pity. His was a war of total attrition, and he had to use every means at his disposal to reduce the strength of his foe. There were now five dead horses on the scorched ground, and Angel knew that two others had been hit badly enough to render them unserviceable. He also knew that the wheel was making its last few turns. He had seen it before; and he knew what came next.
The line straightened as the thought passed through his mind, and the remaining half-dozen warriors ran their horses straight at the gates, shouting their death songs.
There was no explosion, nothing, and after an infinitesimal faltering, they came on with renewed confidence. They reached the gates and wheeled their ponies around, unhitching saddle ropes and tossing them up to catch the pointed tops of the gateposts. Angel let them do it, holding his fire: he had other plans. The Comanches screeched their triumph and kicked their horses away from the gates. The ropes twanged tight, taut, and the thick gateposts rocked as the ponies threw their weight against the horsehair ropes. Slowly, like some ancient longbow, one of the posts bowed and then, suddenly, with a thunderous crack, it broke off about six feet from the ground. The Comanche ponies lurched away, trailing the broken post behind them, and as they did, the gatepost on the other side came down with a tremendous crash that raised a cloud of the black dust fifteen feet high.
The Comanches cast off the ropes and turned their ponies with savage cries of eagerness as their warrior brothers came up at the gallop, Koh-eet-senko at their head, and the long echoing war cry of the Timber People bouncing off the hills to the south. To their right and left came Hercules Nix’s men, reins in their teeth and holding their seat with steely leg thews, cocking the guns held in both ready hands. The dust sifted away from the broken gateway that yawned before them and as it did, the Comanches saw the figure of a man running across the courtyard and gave a screech of delight that was still at its height when Angel touched off the cannon.
Perhaps Koh-eet-senko and his warriors saw the cannon, and perhaps they even had one awful moment to realize what would come next. Even if they did, there was absolutely nothing that they could do. The charging mob of horsemen was forced to come closer together as it came through the broken aperture into the stockade, and even if the Comanche were the finest riders in the world, there were limits to their ability to stop and turn and take avoiding action. Angel had gauged those limits to an inch, making his run like a banderillero quartering across the face of the bull. Ra
mmed tight down the throat of the old cannon were as many bits of old metal, nails, screws, bolts, washers, nuts, screws, musket balls, and other hardware as Angel had been able to find. As he thrust the burning taper down its newly cleaned touchhole, the old cannon exploded with a stuttering boom and jumped backward on its carriage, collapsing on one wheel. The rushing mob of Comanches was obscured in a huge billowing cloud of powder smoke through which whistled the cutting, whispering, deadly load. The flying metal made a roaring WHooooooooommmmmmmmm! as it smashed into the packed bodies of the men in the gateway. Angel saw the war party torn apart as if it had been struck by some gigantic, invisible weapon wielded by God’s own hand. Horses and men were blown apart, cut down by the terrifying force of the close-range blast, torn to shreds without a moment to comprehend the manner of their awful death. The air was alive with the honey-on-herring stink of blood, and broken things that might have been part of men or animals twitched in the trammeled dirt.
Frank Angel had four shotguns ready.
He walked into the screaming, twisted vision of hell before the muzzle of the smoking cannon and emptied them into anything he saw that moved amid the smoking pall of death. As he emptied the guns he tossed them aside, his face as cold as that of the avenging messenger of Satan. He saw men go down beneath the irresistible smash of the buckshot, once heard the soft buzz of a slug going past his own head as someone tried to fight back. He fired the last barrel of the last gun and threw it down, then turned and ran, calling Victoria’s name.
The tattered survivors of the war party had fallen back in total disarray, broken by the jaws of hell into which they had ridden. Of the twenty-eight men who had advanced in the bright sunlight upon the stockade, only seven remained, four of them Comanches. They instinctively ran for the solid shelter of the stockade walls, flattening themselves on the outside of the perimeter. They were still moving away from the awesome shambles of the main gates when Angel’s shout to Victoria Nix signaled her to once more touch together two bared wires.
Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) Page 13
