“There was something of an altercation on board,” he began.
The general hooted. “An ‘altercation’? Is that British for a rowdydow?”
“An agent of the Russian Tsar was also looking to apprehend Vasquez and the map.”
“Hmm, and hoping to sell him to the Union, is my thinking.”
“Indeed. After the… rowdydow, we escaped on horses, taking the Russian with us.”
“This Russian fellow fell in with you?”
“I believe they had designs to lure us into the hands of the Unionist rebels.” For some reason, Lazarus was very reluctant to tell this man anything about Katarina. Or anything he absolutely didn’t have to, for that matter. “It certainly turned out that way. We took Vasquez’s balloon north and set down at a deserted outpost as the foot of the mountains where Vasquez had some supplies stored.”
“I know the one. I’ll obliterate that when I have the chance. Have to stop snakes like Vasquez from using our leftovers.”
“We set out to retrieve the map from the cave in which Vasquez had secreted it, and then found ourselves betrayed by the Russian and in the hands of the U.P.R.”
Lazarus did not give any details about the underground railroad or its location. But the information he had given seemed to satisfy the general, who leaned back in his chair, whistling through his teeth.
“Your story reads like a dime novel. Never trust a Russian, that’s what we can learn here.”
They had barely tasted their cognac when an eager young sergeant hammered on the door, before opening it and hurling up a salute. “An advance party of armed civilians are on the ground northwest from us.”
“Rebels?”
“They appear to be, Sir.”
Reynolds pounded his fist on the arm of his chair. “This will be your Unionist partisans, Longman. We’ll soon make short work of them!”
Lazarus’s stomach lurched as he thought of Katarina on their trail, wandering under the shadows of Reynolds’ balloon of terror.
“Follow me,” said the general, slamming his glass down on the desk corner as he bolted from the room.
They entered the bridge; a wide observation deck open on all sides. It had two tiers, both with a dizzying array of wheels, instruments, valves and pressure gauges. An officer let the general peer through a mounted telescope. “Has the Gabriel finished making its checks?” he asked.
“No sir.”
“Then send the Azrael. If they are rebels, then Captain Burke has his orders to decimate them.”
They watched the Azrael inflate its balloons and lift off, drifting away from the Fort Flagstaff II towards their target in the distance.
A vision of the smoking ruins of a bombed pueblo flashed through Lazarus’s mind. He thought of Katarina down there and her rebel companions; Captain Townsend and Lieutenant Thompson. He wanted to call a halt to the maneuver, but for the life of him couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation. Instead, he was forced to smile and laugh at the jokes of General Reynolds and his officers for the half an hour it took for the Azrael to reach its target. The atmosphere was jovial, and it sickened Lazarus to his stomach. He was a military man himself and knew all too well the desensitizing effect of exposure to constant slaughter, but having stood face to face with the people down there, it was a bitter pill to swallow.
They watched the Azrael discharge its bombs. From that distance they couldn’t see them fall, but they saw them impact; expanding explosions of fire and dust, decimating everything in a mile radius. Lazarus’s hands gripped the banister tight enough to make his wrists cramp.
“Well, that’s the last of them,” said General Reynolds. “Twenty or so less rebels for us to worry about.”
“General, I wonder if I may be excused,” said Lazarus. “I am tired from my journey and you clearly have much to keep you occupied. Is there a cabin that I may use?”
“Certainly. I’ll have a cadet show you to your room. Freshen up, sleep a little if you wish, and then join me at my table for dinner this evening. We must discuss your drop off point. I can arrange for you to take a train to Mississippi, or wherever you are planning to take a steamer back to England.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
Lazarus was shown to his cabin, where he found clean clothes and towels laid out for him. He opened the porthole to let a breeze in and stared at himself in the mirror. He looked a fright. Sweat and dust was plastered to his face, which had sprouted several days’ worth of unseemly growth. He looked worse than when Morton had found him reeling drunk in a gutter in Tombstone, shortly before he had been given the mission to track down Vasquez. It was a miracle that he had been recognized. Several months of hard drinking and only occasional washing on his journey from South America to the Northern continent had taken its toll. There was little left of the neat, professional Englishman who had left London.
Now, he had reverted to that picture of a derelict drifter, and it brought back bad associations. He decided to do something about it. He washed thoroughly and shaved away the prickly growth, but left a moustache that he trimmed with a little pair of gold handled scissors. He put on a clean shirt and collar, and glanced briefly at the bed. It looked painfully inviting, but he could not shake his thoughts of Vasquez and Hok’ee in the brig, in irons most likely, and the map to Cibola in the hands of General Reynolds; the terror of the Colorado Plateau.
He returned to the mirror and stared at himself some more as he thought things over. He was so very tired. The streets of London, with the scent of their pies and jellied eels beckoned him. But piercing through that comforting fug of memory was a vision of a lake in the jungle, its waters red, the light of burning homes reflected in its dark depths; reflecting his face, screaming and bloodied. The ruins of that bombed out pueblo flashed through his mind, a striking parallel to the slaughter he had witnessed on the shores of Lake Guatavita. He had no right to return home. Not while a man like General Reynolds was on his way to more slaughter, aided by him. No matter how he looked at it, he would never be done here, he would never be free of his guilt.
Not until he put some wrong things right.
Chapter Eight
In which a battle takes place in the clouds
Lazarus left his cabin and made his way down to the brig, asking for directions along the way. A plan was forming in his mind. He stopped off at the quartermasters and secured two Confederate uniforms in the largest sizes they had. He secreted these behind a boiler pipe in the gangway near the brig before entering.
The jailer was harder to convince than the quartermaster, and rightly so. He was responsible for some very dangerous prisoners, and told Lazarus this in no friendly terms. However, Lazarus was prepared for some resistance and his approach was firm from the beginning.
“General Reynolds and I conversed not ten minutes ago,” he insisted. “I am his friend and associate, and have orders to collect Vasquez and his savage companion personally and escort them to his office for interrogation. I’m sure you understand that they are no ordinary prisoners and this is no ordinary situation.”
“Yessir,” said the jailer. “They are exceedingly dangerous. A guard of no less than three men is required to transport them.”
“Three Americans, I have no doubt,” replied Lazarus with a smirk. “I, however, have been trained by the British Army and am more than a match for two greasy bandits.” He pulled the flap of his jacket to one side to reveal the Colt Starblazer in its holster.
The jailer gaped at it, and suddenly seemed more cooperative. Soon Lazarus was in the cell that held his companions, with a pair of manacles in one hand.
“While I appreciate the notion,” said Vasquez once Lazarus had explained his plan, “you can surely understand that I’m a little reserved in trusting you again.”
“I appreciate that, Vasquez,” said Lazarus. “I made a horrible mistake in bringing you here, and I’m sorry.”
“Tell me, did you know this man Reynolds before we arrived here?”
<
br /> “No. My orders were to turn you over to the nearest governmental fort so long as there was a man there who ranked higher than a captain. I had no idea that I would find a monster such as Reynolds.”
“He’s a monster, alright.”
“I take it you two have a history.”
“We three,” Vasquez corrected, nodding to Hok’ee, who sat in brooding silence. Lazarus could see the hate in the Navajo’s eyes at the mention of the general’s name. “It’s kind of a long story, but the skinny version is that Reynolds and I were both lieutenants in the corps under General Sibley. Baylor was governor of Arizona then, and he hated the natives with a passion. Once the Union had been pushed out after the victory of the New Mexico Campaign, we were given the job of keeping an eye on the Navajo and other tribes to make sure they didn’t get up to any raiding.
“Congress came up with the plan of relocating the Navajo and Mescalero Apaches to a reservation at Bosque Redondo in De Baca County. We, like they, were told that it was farmable land where they would live in peace and learn new methods of agriculture. Of course they didn’t want to go. They had their own lands and ways and didn’t give a damn what white man thought of their agricultural methods. So the orders came to move them forcibly. I didn’t much care for this myself and I wish to God that I had never played my part in it, but I was young and more liable to follow orders then than I am now. So we rounded them up, Reynolds and I and all the other lieutenants under that old drunk Sibley. Sibley wasn’t a bad sort really, but totally under the sway of Bastard Baylor. Baylor would have shot every last one of them had it been up to him.
“We could have taken them by airship—it certainly would have been quicker—but there were those who didn’t trust natives enough to let them onboard our precious dirigibles. So we walked. Or rather, the Navajo walked. We rode on horseback.
“Damn near nine thousand Navajo were marched at gunpoint for over four hundred miles. About eight hundred of them died on the way, mostly children and the sickly. We didn’t have time to bury them. In their language the Navajo call it the Long Walk. After eighteen days we reached Fort Sumner and the promised reservation.
“Right from the get-go I could see that it was never going to work. Navajos and Apaches living side by side? Only a damn-fool congressman from Virginia or Kentucky or some damn place could presume to think they’d put up with each other’s company. I’m from Arizona myself, and know that Navajo and Apache are more likely to bury each other than bunk with each other. There were near ten thousand on that reservation. Water was poor, firewood scarce and disease and starvation ran rampant. Not outside of the Bible have I heard tell of such a hellish place of the damned.
“Raids from the neighboring Comanche were occasional, and the Navajo and Apache raided them back, stirring up more trouble. We deployed the new Mecha-guards to enforce a perimeter around Bosque Redondo. There was no pretense of it being a reservation anymore. It was a prison, pure and simple. The mechanicals were early designs and liable to break down easily, so they needed more or less constant human supervision. We came under attack by a Comanche raiding party one afternoon and we fought them off pretty good, but it was then that I made my discovery. One of the mechanicals had been struck and pulled down by three Comanche. It still had the torn-off limb of one of them in his fist, and blood was plastered to its armor. It’d been pumped with a few shotgun rounds, but it was the tomahawk jammed in its neck that had killed the organic pilot and crippled the machine.
“One of our engineers popped the covering to remove the organic. These boys were expensive things and we couldn’t leave it to rust on the plains, but it was no use letting the dead pilot stink things up. We soldiers never really paid much mind to where they got the organics from, but when the engineer removed that scarred plating and we saw the dead Navajo strapped inside with his arms and legs lopped off to make him fit, plugs and tubes coming out of every hole, we realized the true reasoning behind the Long Walk and the hell-hole of Bosque Redondo.
“We rode back to Fort Sumner in silence. I had made up my mind to desert before we even stabled our horses. But I had to know the truth first. There was a laboratory in the bowels of the fort that was off limits to everybody except the eggheads Baylor employed to work on the mechanicals. When I got down there they were in the process of trying out a new procedure on a Navajo that left no misunderstanding as to why he was chosen for the job. He was huge, and was surely a formidable warrior in his own tribe. But Baylor’s fruitcakes wanted to ‘improve’ him. Make him stronger, faster and above all, utterly subservient; a blindly loyal killing machine.
“They had him strapped to a table and his right arm was already gone, sawed off at the elbow. Some mechanical doohickey was bolted onto the bone and they were clearly considering doing the same to his legs. This was the new generation mechanical, much more than an iron suit for a man, but an iron man. Hok’ee was the prototype for a whole new mechanical army. Thank God they lost the prototype.”
Lazarus gazed from Vasquez to Hok’ee, his eyes wide. “And so you broke him out?”
“That’s about the size of it. I shot two scientists and set a fire in that laboratory. There were other horrors there—failed prototypes—things I won’t go into ‘cause they are in my nightmares too often for me to spend words on them in my waking hours. I unstrapped Hok’ee and found a gun attachment for his arm. They’d given him some practice with his mechanics on the lab’s firing range, and he got a whole load more when we left the laboratory. The fire got going wildly, and after we had streaked the walls of the fort red with the blood of anybody who got in our way, we boarded an Interceptor-class balloon and took off to where we could watch the smoke from above. We had a full load of bombs on board, and you can bet we unloaded every last one of them on Fort Sumner.
“The Navajo and the Apaches no doubt saw the smoke from their reservation, and took that as the sign to return to their homes. Any mechanicals or humans that were guarding the perimeter were overcome and beaten to death. I might have felt sorry for the old comrades in my unit, but after I had learned what we were fighting for, I was too ashamed and felt I should be down there getting slaughtered with the rest of them. But we’d done our bit, Hok’ee and I, and the Bosque Redondo experiment was over in an afternoon.”
“By Jove, there’s more to you two than meets the eye,” said Lazarus. “So that’s how you got the Santa Bella and the prices on your heads.”
“Yup, the government were none too happy with us, I can tell you. But the damnedest thing is that their most deadly agent was once a friend of mine. Reynolds survived the bombing of Fort Sumner. God knows how he got out alive, but get out he did and has been dead set on stringing me up ever since. He was a ruthless son of a bitch when we were in the same unit, but he got even worse after the Bosque Redondo affair. I guess I’m partly to blame for that. Reynolds came from a family of bandits. They got out of the noose by hunting for treasure in Colorado to finance the South. Now Reynolds is playing the same old trick. And they even made him a damned general! He wants Cibola and knows we’re the only ones who can take him there.”
“Vasquez, you are more of a gentleman than I ever gave you credit for,” said Lazarus. “Your story is an inspiration. What do you say we pull off something similar to your antics at Bosque Redondo right now?”
“Well, I suppose you ain’t too bad for a limey! You got the guard’s palm all greased up?”
“The grease in my revolver was all he needed.”
“What’s the plan?”
“I have uniforms stowed nearby. You can walk out like Confederate soldiers and I’ll be your escort. I thought we might take a look at those dirigibles on deck. Maybe take one out to reconnoiter. Under the orders of General Reynolds of course.”
“I like your thinking, but what about Hok’ee? No uniform, no matter how fancy, will hide a seven foot Navajo with a metal elbow.”
Lazarus sheepishly admitted that he hadn’t thought of that. “I’m afraid that the onl
y way out for Hok’ee is as our prisoner,” he said. “We can claim he is accompanying us as he knows the layout of the land and can reveal useful landmarks.”
Hok’ee scowled. “No white man will ever put manacles on me again.”
“Take it easy, pal,” said Vasquez. “He’s right. There’s no other explanation we can use.”
“Then I’ll just hold them loosely on my wrists,” Hok’ee replied. “Unlocked. I don’t want to be chained up when the guns start firing.”
“Very well,” said Lazarus. “I hope you understand Hok’ee, that I would never wish to see you chained.”
Hok’ee grinned that wolfish smile of his. “You say that now, white man…”
The jailer stood well back as Lazarus brought them through, his hand resting on the butt of his pistol. Once they were out on the gangway, Lazarus released Vasquez and gave him his uniform to put on. They swanned out on deck with Hok’ee between them, drawing much more attention than Lazarus was comfortable with.
The Azrael had recently landed, and its furnace and boiler were still ticking over. Two soldiers were resupplying its bomb magazine.
“No need for that, my good fellows,” said Lazarus striding up to them.
They swiveled to gape at him. Their eyes quickly widened when they saw Hok’ee, whose elbow was gripped by Vasquez, who kept the brim of his cap pulled low to shield his eyes.
“We’ve the general’s orders to take her out again on a scouting run to the foot of the mountains,” Lazarus continued. “This native here is going to point out some useful landmarks.”
“We ain’t heard tell of these orders,” one of them said. “And only two armed men to pilot her? What if that Injun breaks loose?”
“I’m glad you’re so sensitive to the needs of safety,” said Lazarus. “It shows me I’ve picked the right two fellows for the job. My good friend, the general, told me to pick out whomever I wanted. Now, prepare this vessel for launch, or whatever you fellows would call it, and we’ll be off.”
Golden Heart (The Lazarus Longman Chronicles) Page 7