Trap Angel (Frank Angel Western #3)

by Frederick H. Christian

  Issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!

  The renegades had hit three Army posts. All they took were guns and ammunition: until the last raid. That time they got away with a Gatling gun. Now, somewhere out there, was a gang with enough firepower to take on the United States Army. Find then, the Justice Department told Angel. And stop them.

  What they didn’t know was that out of the empty, lawless land, every trigger-happy gunslick in the territory had been given the word: when you see him coming, trap Angel. And kill him.

  TRAP ANGEL!

  ANGEL 3:

  By Frederick H. Christian

  Copyright © 1973, 2005 by Frederick Nolan

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: April 2013

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

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  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  Chapter One

  The raid took exactly seventeen minutes.

  The men who executed it worked with a precision that only comes from much training and complete confidence. They knew how the Fort worked as accurately as if they had seen the duty rosters. And they were completely, utterly ruthless.

  Two men took each sentry in dark corners, knifing them with savage efficiency and in complete silence. Three others took out the guard room and its occupants, a sergeant and two soldiers who were having a quiet smoke before checking the perimeter for the last time before Taps. The sergeant managed to yell once before he was smashed to the ground by the barrel of a six gun, his skull caved in from the force of the blow but the two soldiers never even got to their feet. They just had time to realize that the three men were intruders and the questioning look was still in their eyes as they died beneath the hungry knives. The three raiders stood in the bloody room, their breath coming in ragged bursts and the tallest of them nodded towards the wall, where a series of key rings hung in a row on nails.

  They lifted the ring labeled ‘Armory’ and sifted silently across the empty parade ground. The four companions were waiting for them, eyes wary for movement. The Fort McEwan Young Men’s Club was holding a dance, and from the officers’ mess the brass band strain of ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’ thumped in unison with the stamp of soldier boots on the chalked floor. Every man not physically on duty was there whirling his favorite laundress around — or a bunkie if he was out of luck with the ladies — and the little noise the raiders made hardly dented the blast of sound from in there.

  The raiders brought their wagon on well-oiled wheels to the door of the Armory. There was a heavy padlock on the door. The tall man who had killed the sergeant nodded and one of the others put a strip of iron between the arm of the lock and its body and then wrenched. There was the tensile spang of breaking metal and the door was open. The seven men formed a human chain passing the weapons out from the Armory. The leader counted forty-two Springfield rifles, seventeen Army Colts and three .50 Sharps’ breechloaders. After that those inside moved to the shelves holding the cardboard boxes of ammunition. They had shifted about two thousand rounds when the leader gave a signal and they halted, sifting outside in the darkness.

  The bright light across the parade ground limned their position but made the shadows in which they worked even deeper. They could see people on the porch of the officers’ quarters.

  Some of them were drinking from punch cups. Once in a while the lighter ripple of a woman’s laughter could be heard above the basso rumble of the male voices.

  ‘The gate,’ the leader said.

  One of his men got aboard the wagon and moved across towards the gate. There were half a dozen tame Apache playing mumblety peg at the foot of the gatepost, and they looked up dully as the wagon came to a halt and the two guards walked idly across to check it. One of them was humming a waltz the band was playing inside.

  The man on the wagon said something to the first guard, who grinned and, lifted the tarpaulin on the wagon bed. He reeled back as the man beneath the tarp planted a foot of Bowie knife into his throat. The second guard shouted something, whirling to get his rifle which was leaning against the stairs going up to the lookout. As he turned one of the raiders hit him with the barrel of a six-gun and the young soldier slid sideways into the dirt, one hand clawing for a moment in the dust before he went rigid and then finally limp. The Indians scattered as the wagon was whipped to a gallop, the horses lunging against the traces as the phalanx moved out fast into the night-shrouded plain. One of the Indians ran towards the parade ground shouting the alarm and out of the night came the flat hard sound of a carbine being fired. The Apache went cart-wheeling forward, plunging into the dirt at the feet of the young officer who had come running down the steps from the big wooden building where the dance was going on. The young officer was very good, and did all the right things. He rapped out orders, sending men scurrying, bugles sounded across the empty Fort and lights sprang up in the enlisted men’s barracks.

  But by the time the patrol was mounted and set in pursuit there was no sign of the raiders at all.

  Chapter Two

  The Attorney-General smacked his palm flat on the desk.

  ‘Angus,’ he said, ‘we’re in trouble.’ Angus Wells, sitting in the chair opposite the Attorney-General’s desk, said nothing. He was a man who didn’t talk any more than he had to. He liked that ‘we’ though. When you were in trouble with the Old Man, you were in trouble right up to your hairline. When he was getting a hard time from above, however, it was ‘we’ who were in trouble. That old joke: we share the work — he leaves it, and I do it.’

  ‘Trouble,’ the Attorney-General repeated. He tossed some papers across the desk, his lip curling with distaste.

  ‘You’ve read these?’

  Wells nodded. The report of the Officer of the Day at Fort McEwen. The findings of a Court of Inquiry to investigate the robbery of the Armory there — both useless, since the men who had seen the raiders had all been killed and everything else merely confirmed what any fool could see.

  ‘What do you make of them?’ The Attorney-General asked.

  ‘Not a lot,’ Wells replied. ‘The most valuable thing in them is the list of what was stolen.’

  ‘Sixty-two guns,’ fumed the man behind the desk ‘Eighteen hundred rounds of ammunition.’

  ‘Eighteen hundred and sixty-five,’ Wells corrected him.

  ‘God damn it, eighteen hundred and sixty-five, then,’ said the Attorney-General testily. ‘Stolen off a United States Army installation while they were holding a dance. A dance!’

  He savored the word, as if in holding it the soldiers had been guilty of committing acts of gross indecency in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue.

  ‘What’s your interest in this, anyway?’ Wells asked. ‘Can’t the Army do its own investigation? ‘Aye, they can. And they will, or Phil Sheridan is going to have somebody’s guts for a watch fob. But that’s not all, you see.’

  Wells sat up in his chair. ‘What else?’ he said quietly.

  ‘I had a hunch,’ the Attorney-General said. ‘Got Phil Sheridan to look into the records for me. There was a similar raid at Fort Stanton in New Mex
ico Territory two months ago. Nobody at the Army had connected them.’

  ‘And…?’

  ‘That time they got fifty-seven revolvers and twenty-four brand new Winchester repeaters, not to mention fifteen hundred rounds of ammunition.’

  Wells did some rapid sums and didn’t like the answer.

  ‘That’s a hell of an arsenal someone’s putting together,’ he said.

  ‘I know it,’ came the reply. ‘And I want to know who. And why. Somebody out there is planning to raise merry hell, or I’m a Dutchman. Somebody who knows everything he needs to know about the Forts he raids and what’s in their armories. Someone who has killed a dozen men or more getting what he wants. The President talked about putting that charlatan Allan Pinkerton on the case, but I talked him out of it. Says he wants it all cleared up before July. Going out there for some political convention, and doesn’t want any awkward questions thrown at him, he says. Political necessity, those were the words he used. Political necessity.’

  Wells didn’t rise to that one. The office of Attorney-General was a Presidential appointment and even if the present incumbent didn’t have much truck for his peers, he was just as much a politician as any of them.

  ‘These reports all we have?’ he asked.

  ‘That and the garbled descriptions given by some Indians who saw the raiders at McEwen,’ the older man said. ‘You’ll get them all from Records, for what they’re worth which isn’t much.’ He paused, then looked at Wells shrewdly.

  ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘Not that I can think of,’ Wells admitted. ‘I’ll get on to it.’

  ‘You’ll put someone on it?’

  Wells looked up, allowing his surprise to show. ‘I figured you wanted me to handle it myself,’ he said.

  The Attorney-General started to speak, hesitated, and then busied himself lighting one of his long black cigars. His head wreathed in pungent smoke, he shifted uncomfortably in his leather-backed chair.

  ‘It’s — they — hell and damnation, Angus!’ he burst out, ‘What I’m trying to say is I don’t know whether I ought to let you go in your condition.’

  ‘That’s a hell of a thing for you to say to me,’ Wells said.

  ‘Dammit, Angus, now don’t you go getting sulky on me,’ the Attorney-General said angrily. ‘You got yourself shot to pieces down Lordsburg and I — ’

  ‘ — just wondered if I could cut the mustard,’ Wells said quietly. ‘Havin’ only one hand and one good leg, like.’

  ‘You could send someone else,’ the older man said. ‘That new youngster, what’s his name — ?’

  ‘Angel,’ Wells said. ‘He’s not ready yet.’

  ‘One of the others, then,’ the Attorney-General said. ‘Maybe — ’

  ‘Sir.’

  Wells’ voice was flat and unemphatic. The man behind the desk stopped in mid-sentence and frowned. But he listened.

  ‘Every doctor in the District of Columbia has said I’m fit,’ Wells said. ‘I can ride as well as I ever could. I’ve learned to use my left hand as well as I ever used my right. They didn’t shoot me in the head. So what’s your objection to my going?’

  ‘Ahhhh.’ The Attorney-General waved his cigar. ‘I just thought…’

  ‘With respect, sir,’ Wells went on relentlessly. ‘You know we’re short staffed. You know this can’t wait. And you know I can handle it.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ came the testy answer. ‘You’ve made your point. Go get your fool head shot off again.’

  Wells grinned, his face becoming boyish. ‘Not hardly,’ he said.

  ‘Good. That’s all settled then,’ said the Attorney-General. ‘Will you need any help?’

  ‘If I do I’ll send for it.’

  ‘Where will you begin?’

  ‘Fort Stanton is the nearest, I’ll start there. I can be in Trinidad by Friday, and out at Stanton before the weekend’s over. I know some people out there. From last time.’

  ‘That youngster Angel knows that country, doesn’t he?’

  Wells nodded.

  ‘Why don’t you take him along, Angus?’

  Wells didn’t let his grin show this time. He knew what the Old Man was up to. But he also knew that he himself needed to go this one alone, perhaps to prove to himself that he was all the things he had just convinced his chief that he was: fit, and capable, and able to carry on as before in a very tough job, twisted leg and useless hand notwithstanding.

  ‘He’s in training, and I don’t want to interrupt that,’ was all he said.

  ‘Doing well?’

  ‘I think so,’ Wells replied, knowing the Attorney-General got a daily report on Frank Angel’s progress from his instructors at what the men who worked for the Justice Department unsmilingly called ‘the College’.

  ‘Don’t go taking any fool chance, Angus,’ the Attorney-General said, finally. ‘These men, whoever they are, are up to something that makes killing a sideline. Stealing guns from the Army is a hanging offence anywhere in the United States and they know it. They aren’t going to let themselves be taken easily.’

  ‘Show me anyone we’ve ever taken who was,’ Wells reminded him.

  ‘Let me know how you get on,’ the Attorney-General said gruffly. ‘And send Miss Rowe in here on your way out.’

  Wells got up. The Attorney-General watched him without speaking as he put his weight on the thick cane he always used and walked across to the door. Wells made a very big thing out of not fumbling over the door handles and the man behind him let a smile touch the austere mouth.

  They didn’t come any better than his Chief Investigator but he’d be damned uphill and down dale before he’d say it out loud.

  In the antechamber outside the big high-ceilinged office, Wells stopped at the desk of a tall honey-haired girl with a stunning smile. Annabel Rowe was the Attorney-General’s personal private secretary and there wasn’t a healthy male in the big, echoing building on Pennsylvania Avenue who had not at one time or another tried to invite her out for dinner, or the theatre, a carriage ride or a picnic. So far, no one had succeeded and there were those who referred to her as ‘the Fair Miss Hard to Get’.

  ‘The Old Man wants to see you,’ Wells told her.

  ‘Don’t you let him hear you calling him that,’ she said. ‘Or he’ll have you back shuffling papers in the basement.’

  ‘Not sure I wouldn’t prefer it,’ Wells grinned. ‘Nice quiet life.’

  Miss Rowe got up from behind her desk and went towards the doors which led into the Attorney-General’s office. She looked back as she went in. Wells was hobbling down the corridor like a man in a hurry to get somewhere. He didn’t look anything like a man who’d prefer to be shuffling papers.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Again,’ said the Armorer.

  He placed the gun on the concrete floor. It was one of the new Colt .45 Frontier models. He pulled two cotton bales in front of it then paced out seven steps.

  ‘Ready?’ he said.

  Frank Angel nodded.

  The Armorer went to the bank of levers at the side of the big counter which ran across the end of the range in the basement of the Justice Department building.

  ‘Go,’ he said quietly.

  Angel ran forward, diving headfirst over the two cotton bales and landing on his right shoulder, head tucked down as he rolled forward picking up the gun in one smooth sweeping movement as he came up, and as he did the Armorer jerked one of the levers. A target shaped like a crouched man popped up in the lighted section at the end of the range about thirty feet from Angel, who had come to rest kneeling with the hammer of the gun eared back. He fired and then fired again, rolling forward as he did to the bale of cotton placed about two yards to the right of where the gun had been laid. Again the Armorer jerked the lever and again the figure jerked upright. Angel fired twice more. The sounds of the shots slammed against the white-painted walls. He stood up, punching the used shells from the chamber as the Armorer turned a wheel which brought the target al
ong sagging wire towards the counter. He lifted it from its metal holders and looked at it with pursed lips.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said grudgingly and handed it to Angel.

  There were four holes in the target. Two were placed high on the shoulder of the cutout figure, while the other two had perforated it just above what would have been the line of the belt the man might have been wearing.

  ‘He could still be on his feet,’ the Armorer remarked.

  ‘Maybe,’ Angel grinned.

  ‘You wouldn’t want to find out the hard way,’ the Armorer said without any humor in his voice at all. ‘Let’s try it again.’

  He reloaded the gun and they started over.

  Frank Angel stretched out on the bed in his apartment on F Street. Every muscle in his body throbbed from the constant physical action. He felt the tug of fatigue from reflexes dulled by the unceasing demands upon them. He had been working with the Armorer for four days now, yet still the man professed himself dissatisfied, never once offered a word of encouragement. If — as had once happened — Angel suggested that shooting at a target under whatever difficulties the Armorer could dream up, was hardly comparable to shooting at a man who could shoot back and kill you, the only reaction he got was a grunt.

  And perhaps later some fiendish little test: four different revolvers stripped down and all the parts mixed up — ‘All right, Angel, put ’em together. You got just ten minutes.’

  The training program, as Wells had warned him when they first came to Washington, was rigorous and exhaustive and merely average performance was not tolerated.

  He went back over the last few months, recalling his disappointment when they came out of Union Station into the muddy thoroughfare of the capital city. The place was a clamor of building, everything either half erected or half torn down. The grandiose monument to Washington that had never been completed sat like a broken factory chimney on the Mall, pigs scavenging at its base. The President’s home, ‘the White House’, still had no toilets, Angel learned. He guessed you could figure out what L’Enfant had had in mind if you sat down and worked at it. Nobody would ever make him understand why they had decided to build the capital of the United States smack in the middle of a swamp.