Canyon of the Long Shadows

by Carl Dane

  I spurred the Morgan and tore down the left-hand side of the passage as close to the wall as I could safely ride. There was no point in giving an ambusher distance to aim; if someone was hidden against the wall, I’d be on top of him in an instant and he wouldn’t be able to draw a bead.

  The nice thing about having plenty of guns and ammo is that you can fire indiscriminately, so I did. Knowing that I was headed for close action, I’d scabbarded the rifle and fired a double-action Colt with my left hand. One of the things Munro had drilled into us was the notion that if you practice, you can do anything as well with your left hand as with your right, and vice-versa if you’re naturally left-handed.

  I fired into each potential hiding spot, looking back as I passed.

  Gunfire erupted to my right, but that was not my concern at the moment and not my assignment, so I ignored it.

  Potential hidey-holes one and two were unoccupied.

  The narrow outcropping, the spot where I thought an ambusher could flatten and conceal himself, was a few feet ahead.

  He was armed with a rifle, and as I expected was pressed flat against the wall.

  He probably expected that I’d be an easy target. It would have been a simple matter for him to turn, lean out from behind the outcropping, and fire on me. The problem with his plan, though, was the thousand-pound cavalry horse bearing down on like a runaway train.

  He tried; I’ll give him that. The gunman moved as quickly as he could. He swung the rifle out an instant before I was upon him and didn’t even get it halfway to level before I dropped the reins, reached out, and snatched the barrel it with my free hand. The rifle tore out of his grip and fired in the air. The barrel scalded my hand. I dropped it and turned on the attacker.

  Carmody, who has a way with colorful back-woods dialogue – which I think he actually studies and memorizes, probably writing it down in a secret file to trot out while holding forth at the bar – says an agile horse can stop on a dime and give you nine cents change.

  The ambusher knew what was coming when he saw the smartness with which the mount turned on him. But he gave it one last try: His fingers had almost reached the butt of his sidearm when I shot him in the forehead.

  I made a mental note. Nine left.

  For the first time I looked to my right and didn’t like what I saw.

  There were, indeed, three cave openings. The one in the middle was taller than it was wide. On either side, maybe sixty feet in each direction, were two other openings that were smaller and had narrow, low arches cut into the rock-face. They looked like puckered, toothless mouths.

  Sickly trees and bushes sprouted in front of and beside the openings. Not a lot – just enough to provide possible distraction cover for a moving hostile. In combat, you learn to hide behind anything if you need to. Even a tree the size of your forearm can provide just enough distraction to throw your attacker’s aim off.

  Because of the complexity of the landscape, it took us a few seconds to figure out where the shots were coming from. Some emanated from the mouths of the caves, judging by the strange dampening of the sounds.

  But there was gunfire from above.

  “Shit,” Carmody said as he fired.

  I looked up and added my observation.

  “Shit.”

  Some bunch of bastards – either the present collection or a different group from some time in the past, maybe the Stone Age, for all I know – had actually carved out inlets in the mountainside. Maybe they’d been dwellings at one time. They were connected by narrow ledges, and for all I knew there could have been access from somewhere in the rear.

  But my job had been to clear the enemy from the left, and I had, so I shouted it out.

  “Then hug the right wall,” Munro said. “Carmody and Harbold, stay in the center and fire up at the ledges.”

  Munro made a good choice. Harbold and Carmody were probably the best rifle shots among us. Munro knew of Harbold’s eye from observing him in combat, and I’d told Munro that Carmody could shoot the stars out the sky on a cloudy night, which may in fact have been a phrase I’d borrowed from Carmody.

  It was an odd time to realize that I’d started talking like him, but I comforted myself with the fact that I’d probably caught it in time.

  Meanwhile, Miller was exchanging gunfire with someone inside the first cave. Whatever round Munro had packed for that German rifle Miller had taken a fancy to carried a wallop. We could hear the screaming ricochets from inside.

  Adam’s Apple was still tied to the horse, sitting directly in front of Miller. Miller had him by the hair and pulled him upright, using him as a shield.

  Adam’s Apple pleaded to his comrades in arms.

  “It’s me,” he shouted. “Don’t shoot. It’s me.”

  And with that, somebody shot him in the chest and he slumped forward.

  Miller swore and held the back of his left hand against his side. When he withdrew it, he noted the smear of crimson. The bullet had passed through the center of Adam’s Apple’s chest but only grazed Miller. Bullets take crazy turns inside a body, bouncing off this and that; I’ve seen a round hit a man in the hip and travel down the entire length of the thigh and lodge in a kneecap. Luckily for Miller, the bullet that killed Adam’s Apple took a zig and emerged at an angle that tore a slanting gash in his shirt and cut just deep enough to start some blood flowing.

  “Asshole,” Miller screamed in his piercing oboe voice, and grabbed what by now was probably the corpse of Adam’s Apple by the hair and yanked him upright. Miller spurred his horse and his human shield into the mouth of the cave.

  “Get flat against this wall,” Munro barked. “Right next to me.”

  It took a second, but we coaxed the horses into pasting their sides against the wall between the first and second cave opening.

  You hear and read about officers being “brilliant strategists” and the like, and in the abstract it sounds like praise for a clever chess player. But you only begin to understand the depth and significance of a strategy when it saves your life. I’d been caught up with the snipers from above, and Miller’s charge into the cave and hadn’t absorbed what Munro always called “the overall.”

  The overall, in this case, was that with us hugging the wall near him, a part where the rocks tapered inward just a few inches, the snipers from above would have to lean over the edges of the trails and inlets to fire down at us.

  It was just a matter of inches, but life and death is often a matter of inches, or fractions of an inch.

  Three men poked their heads over just far enough so they could see, scuttled forward a little more in order to give themselves room to brace their rifles against their shoulders, and immediately died.

  I killed one with my rifle butt resting on my thigh and the barrel pointed upward. It was a strange position from which to shoot, but it’s hard to aim directly overhead with the butt on your shoulder.

  The next couple minutes were like one of those carnival shooting games where metal outlines of heads and shoulders pop up in different locations. I never played that game but had a hunch I’d be good at it, because picking them off above my head was no challenge at all.

  Munro’s mind was on the next maneuver.

  “Carmody,” Munro said, “cover us from the fire above. Harbold, you cover anything from the mouths of the caves in that direction.”

  Munro pointed theatrically.

  “That direction,” he said, and pointed again.

  Harbold nodded and positioned his mount.

  You had to admire Munro’s command abilities, irrespective of how you viewed his penchant for casual brutality.

  I’d seen men die in combat because an officer screamed left or right when everybody was scrambling in different directions and had no common reference. Or they didn’t know if they were supposed to move to their right or the commander’s right.

  Now we knew exactly where Harbold was aiming, and it was a perfect strategy. Harbold would be facing away from us, but he had
caves two and three, of which we knew nothing concerning potential occupants, covered. If there were in there, they were pinned. Anyone so much as poking their head out would be target practice. Of course, that could include the woman we’d come to save, so Harbold needed to maintain a sharp eye and quick judgment.

  Carmody fired off a couple more shots and then yelled out a warning.

  “Watch out above.”

  I jerked my head and rifle upward, but the threat wasn’t from gunfire. A body thudded into the dust just a few inches from me, but not before his boot caught me on the shoulder and another slapped into the horse’s withers.

  I swore and grabbed where it hurt. The horse, who apparently had been better trained than I, remained stoic.

  Carmody hollered again.

  “More coming. It’s raining outlaws.”

  Another man pinwheeled by, a gruesomely choreographed swirl of arms and legs, and he landed in front of us with a nasty crunch. A split-second later his rifle hit butt-first and discharged, as cocked firearms are wont to do on impact with the ground. And then his hat fluttered down.

  In a macabre bit of animism, his hat landed neatly on his chest.

  I looked up again and could see a head and arm hanging over a ledge. This shooter was not going to fall. He wasn’t going to shoot again, either, because half his head was missing.

  I heard the creak of leather and glanced over to see Carmody struggling to right himself in the saddle. The stray shot when the airborne rifle hit the ground had caught him in the left arm and twisted him around, so far that he almost fell; he somehow held his rifle and the rim of the saddle pommel as he struggled to pull himself back up.

  “Cover above,” he snapped, irritated that I was looking at him and not the threat from the sky. He had a point.

  “Hawke is covering above,” I yelled. “Carmody’s down.”

  “Carmody is fucking well not down and is back to covering above,” he said. “Tend to your own business now.”

  My business was cave number two, reputed to be the temporary home of Lydia Davis. All I knew of the inside is what Carmody had relayed to me after a glance of only a few seconds. It was arch-shaped, with a flat floor and swirling patterns carved into the rock walls. The ceiling reached a height of maybe fifteen feet at the top and the room stretched back a considerable distance, perhaps sixty feet. Carmody was not able to tell if there were openings at the back that led to other passages.

  The cave, Carmody told me, had been lighted by candles and lanterns.

  If indeed there were kidnappers in there, unless they were extraordinarily stupid they would have extinguished all light by now. Presumably they had their weapons in-hand already, and understood that we would be at a considerable disadvantage entering the cave if we were framed in daylight and they lurked in darkness.

  And just to make things more difficult, we couldn’t go in there shooting blindly because the whole purpose was to come back with an intact and unventilated woman.

  And that’s where Miller came in.

  But right now he was occupied. Miller was inside cave number one and there was gunfire echoing inside.

  Chapter 35

  Munro held up a hand.

  I wanted to go in after Miller. Obviously, Munro thought differently.

  “Hawke, there’s nothing to be gained by riding in. If Miller rode into a deathtrap, then he’s dead and there’s no point in winding up the same way. If he can get out, he will, but we’ll just get in the way if we clog up the mouth of the cave.”

  “Damn it,” I said, “he’s an old man.”

  Munro shot me a hard glance and it occurred to me that he and Miller were probably about the same age. It seemed an odd occasion for Munro too take offense, but vanity has no boundaries.

  “Old men are smart,” Munro said. “And mean. Those are qualities that come with age, so right now I give him the advantage. I think he’ll be out any minute.”

  As if on cue, an oboe voice from inside shouted, “I’m coming out alone.”

  Miller was smart. I’d already known about the mean part.

  If Miller had ridden straight out without warning, we’d have had no idea whether it was him or a hostile and he could have gotten shot by accident. And by letting us know he was alone, he freed us to cover other threats rather than bracing for an attack from his pursuers.

  Maybe Munro was right about old-man smarts. I hope so. It’ll give me something to look forward to.

  Miller burst through the opening. He and the horse had to duck below the overhanging rock, and when the mount straightened up, the upper body of Adam’s Apple jerked upright and the back of his head smacked Miller in the mouth. Miller shoved him forward and told the dead body, without irony, to stay the fuck out of the way.

  Carmody had done an outstanding job tying the man in front of the saddle. Those country boys really know their knots.

  “There were two in there,” Miller said. “Accommodating hosts. Left the lights on for me.”

  “Hug the wall,” Munro said, and Miller understood and complied.

  “If this guy told us the truth,” Miller said, pointing to the body slumped in front of him, “there are three or four men left.”

  I took a look and listen. There was no active firing. No sounds of scurrying. No glints of metal in the jagged sunlight.

  Carmody continued to scan the outcroppings. He looked pale, though, and his left arm hung limp and looked as though it had been dipped in bright red paint up to the shoulder.

  Harbold kept his rifle trained on a line running in front of caves two and three.

  “I’m not optimistic about this guy telling us the whole truth,” I said, lowering my voice. “He had to tell us the truth about the caves because we’d see for ourselves soon enough, and if he lied, who knows what body parts Munro would shoot off. But we have no way of knowing how many more might be lurking in this complex. Come to think of it, lying would have been in his best interest because we’d get overconfident.”

  Miller grabbed a handful of hair and lifted the head.

  “Lying asshole,” he said, and shoved the head forward into the horse’s mane.

  “If the cave you just shot up is empty except for the men you just killed, let’s try to blow the mouth shut,” I said. My plan was to seal the caves so hostiles couldn’t retreat back into them, or, if they connected with passages from the rear, enter from some subterranean passage and ambush us.

  The dynamite had posed a powerful temptation. As appealing as it was to toss explosives back into the caves and kill everyone before entering, we knew we’d have no certainty as to where Lydia was, or if there were someone else besides hostiles in the caves, perhaps held there against their will.

  But my goodness, did we have enough dynamite to blow things up in a big way. Harbold knew a supplier and brought enough of the stuff for us to start our own mining company.

  “Let me do it,” Miller said. “All right?”

  I don’t know why I hesitated. All Miller wanted to do was blow the mouth shut, but I have mixed feelings about explosives.

  I had very little exposure to them during the war. Once, I’d seen troops throw black-powder grenades that looked like fat, overgrown darts. The needle on the front was supposed to trigger a percussion cap that would blow the whole thing up but it often failed to detonate, and occasionally the things would be thrown back at us.

  The Rebs had used bombs buried in the ground. We called that type of bomb “torpedoes” and generally thought of them as barbarous. That’s one of the contradictions of war: While it may seem strange to some to cast moral judgments on the means of killing when the whole point of the exercise is to kill, even the most hardened soldier at least has second thoughts about some methods of warfare.

  I didn’t like torpedoes. It always struck me that indiscriminate killing ran against some innate streak of decency.

  Taking a fort by invasion, for example, always seemed more decent an act than burning it down, even though I ca
n’t articulate exactly why, even though in the time before I became a soldier, my business was trying to explain things like that.

  On the other hand – and that’s the damn problem, problems like this have more hands than centipedes have legs – is it right to lose lives on your side when there is an efficient way to kill those who you know will kill you and your allies?

  All of us confront the issue of how far we’d go. Would I shoot a man in the knee to get life-saving information? Would I, like the 14th-century Mongols, catapult a body infected with the plague over castle walls and wait for the inhabitants to die?

  “Hawke,” Miller said, the oboe-drone insistent, snapping me back to the moment, “can I do it or not?”

  I spoke quickly, surprised at how I’d frozen.

  “Sure. Just light it and toss it a few feet in, I guess.”

  Miller shook his head as he fished out two sticks and a tin of matches.

  “That’ll accomplish nothing. All the energy will be dissipated front and back. You need to wedge at least two sticks into crevices.”

  Munro edged his horse over and cleared his throat.

  “Gentlemen, we are in an enemy stronghold and possibly surrounded by gunmen who are sighting on us at this moment. Could we discuss physics later, over a beer, maybe?”

  Miller dismounted, placed the charges, and was back on his horse in no more than ten seconds.

  “If I were you I’d move twenty feet toward the middle cave,” Miller said. “I’ve never used these new fuses and they–”

  I felt as much as heard the blast. The rumble of the sound slapped me first, and then came a rush of air.

  “…burn quicker than I expected,” he said, shaking his head and brushing the dust off his shoulders.

  The mouth of the cave had not been completely sealed, but enough debris had been blown down that it would take a man considerable and time-consuming effort to crawl through.