“Yesterday?”
“Yesterday.”
“Is there a shaft, a deep vertical shaft, or whatever it’s called in mining parlance?”
He hesitated. “Yes. End of main tunnel. I was told that years ago, when they were working it, they thought they had a rich strike in one of the lower strata, but it petered out.”
I watched him closely. “It sounds like a convenient place to dispose of her body if she happened to die on you.”
His eyes betrayed him again. “We weren’t going to harm her!”
“Twenty-four hours tied up in the dark with the rats doesn’t count as harm?” I stared at him grimly. “What were you supposed to do with me if you caught me up at that mountain cabin, Bennett?” He started to speak, and stopped, and looked away. I said, “Then you have a good idea what I’m supposed to do with you, once we’ve wrung you dry.”
His eyes widened fearfully. “But I’ve told you everything!”
“Not yet you haven’t,” I said. “But you will. And if you do, and if the boys don’t have to work too hard for it, and if we find Mrs. Ellershaw alive and not too badly damaged, thanks to your information, well, I’m allowed a certain amount of discretion in carrying out my orders. Keep it in mind.”
Leaving, I glanced at the equipment that cluttered up the inside of the van. Apparently they did most of their work electrically. The inside of the mobile torture chamber was covered with soundproofing, not too neatly applied. Outside, there was bright sunshine, and it was warmer than it had been. A cool morning had come and gone while we cleaned up the mess on the mountain and delivered the warm body in question to the I-team and let them work on it. The afternoon was now getting balmy; summer was obviously on its way. The van stood at the curb by the green strip of park that runs along the Santa Fe River. Three men were sitting at a nearby picnic table drinking beer. Seeing me emerge, one rose and came up to me.
The man in charge of the I-team looked quite ordinary. They usually do. Very few of them have werewolf fangs and pointed, tufted ears. This one was dressed in a faded, flowery sports shirt, frayed jeans, and the kind of tricky jogging shoes that have taken the country by storm. He was a somewhat older McCullough type, with the kind of boyish/girlish appearance the longish hairdos give the prettier ones these days, even into their thirties and forties. But I didn’t like his eyes. Well, hell, maybe he didn’t like mine. We all have our little specialties. Who was I to criticize?
“Satisfactory?” he asked.
“So far.” I told him what I wanted.
“No problem,” he said. “Not with this one. Very cooperative.”
“Meaning you had a problem with the last one I gave you?”
He shook his head. “He never got this far, friend. These damn suicidal types!”
I drew a long breath. “They lost him?”
“So I was told. I never saw him.”
I started to speak angrily, to say I’d warned them to be careful. Obviously Jackson, fearing pain as he did, had had an extra little dose of oblivion hidden out somewhere, and they’d missed it, searching him. Well, at least he’d had the satisfaction of outwitting us all in the end. In any case, it wasn’t this man’s fault.
“Well, try not to lose this one,” I said.
An hour later I was rolling down the four-lane highway in Bob Wills’ fancy FWD Eagle, which he’d been very reluctant to lend me, although it was in a sense a company car. Well, I’d been equally reluctant to let him, in return, use the Mazda, which wasn’t. God save us from all temperamental agents, present company excepted. I’d left Wills with careful instructions: he was to keep certain people covered, and act in certain ways if certain things happened, and he was not to come blundering after me helpfully under any circumstances. Until tomorrow. If I wasn’t back by then he could buy himself some shovels and hire a jeep and take a crew out to bury the bodies, if he could find them.
“Goddamn it, Helm,” Wills had said. “You talk as if the country out there—this Whatchamacallit Grant—is just crawling with war-painted Apaches, or Navajos, or whatever the hell kind of hostile Indians you used to grow out here! Bennett says he simply took the woman to the mine and left her tied up there unguarded, doesn’t he?”
I said, “He may even be telling the truth, as far as he knows it. But I’m not going to gamble my life, or Madeleine Ellershaw’s, on what Bennett thinks he knows. If you were in the same outfit with him, and had to use him, would you tell him any more than you had to? So remember what I told you: stay clear. If it’s easy, one man can do it. If it’s hard, maybe one man can still do it. But in either case a lot of superfluous characters raising dust all over the desert will surely get her killed, and me as well.”
Now, driving south along the freeway all by myself, I felt it all drop away. It was a lovely feeling. To hell with critical subordinates. To hell with tame torturers I’d had to use to save Madeleine’s life, because they were better at interrogation than I was, even though my conscience told me that if I had to get information by such means the least I could do was get my own hands bloody. This way I was like the kind of hypocritical creep who loves steak but wouldn’t dream of going out and murdering a poor little steer—or deer—himself. Or herself. And to hell with fantastic nationwide plots and science-fiction garbage and Advanced Human Managerial Studies.
I had a very good notion of what was waiting for me out there in the Gabaldon Hills. Who was waiting for me. The double-trap technique. He’d let me avoid the clumsy ambush arranged by Bennett—perhaps he’d even guessed that Admiral Lowery had suggested it under duress—and now he hoped I’d be feeling very self-satisfied and clever, and very safe, so I’d come marching boldly into the real trap, baited with a captive lady, that had been waiting for me right along.
I made the turn at the elaborate cloverleaf that seemed like a highway department overreaction to such a small state road. I drove the seventeen miles along the rough narrow pavement and found the gate in the barbed-wire fence—bobwahr, they call it over in Texas. I unlocked the padlock with one of the two keys that had been taken from Bennett’s collection. The other was supposed to unlock Madeleine’s handcuffs if she was still wearing them; but it seemed overoptimistic to think that far ahead yet.
I snapped the lock shut again conscientiously after driving through the gate. Range etiquette requires that you leave all gates as you found them; and it makes no allowance for battered ribs. This was wide-open country now, forty-acres-to-a-cow country, with the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where I’d spent the night, tall and sharp against the northern sky, and the Gabaldon Hills low and dark and rounded ahead. The road was two ruts across the dry land on which grew, out here on the flats, only scraggly tufts of grass and an occasional cactus. I passed two side roads, if you could call them roads—barely more than tire tracks—that Bennett had neglected to mention, and kept plugging towards the beckoning hills.
The Eagle promptly stuck itself in the sand in the first arroyo. I realized that I’d forgotten to lock the front hubs; hell, I’d even forgotten to get power to the front wheels, wherever that control might be. My own old go-anywhere vehicle, which I’d recently traded in on the Mazda, had had full-time four-wheel drive, a great institution, but it uses a little more gas in order to keep turning that forward drive-train even when you don’t need it, so they don’t go that route these economical days. But it had got me out of the habit of switching over when the going got tough. I struggled out of the car and found that there were no locking front hubs. Nor could I find an extra shift lever anywhere in the screwball machine. When all else fails, read the instructions. I got the manual out of the glove compartment, and it directed me to a simple little switch on the dashboard, to be operated a certain way under certain conditions…
With all four wheels pulling, she came right out; and the second arroyo was no problem at all, although it was a wide, sandy wash with a little trickle of water down the middle. There must have been a shower back in the hills. There were no permanent w
atercourses out here. Anyway, I knew where to come if my canteen ran dry.
I could now see my landmarks ahead: the two identical round hills known as the Dos Tetas. Well, some men will see two tits in practically any pair of rocky humps, particularly if they’ve been away from home for a while. That southwestern country is lousy with geological protrusions that reminded some lonely man of a woman’s breasts.
It was time to leave the road. I cut to the right across country along the base of the hills. After a couple of miles of broken-field running, or driving, I found a suitable valley going the right way and followed it upwards into the hills until it became an impassable little gorge and to hell with it. Hiking time had come. I got out of the car and discarded the black sling that had served its purpose as well as such tricky disguises usually do; well, I don’t suppose Mac had expected it to work miracles. I hung the canteen over my shoulder and struggled into the small nylon backpack that held some energy snacks, a flashlight and some patent light-sticks for cave exploration, and a change of clothes for the lady, in case over twenty-four hours of real bondage, as opposed to the porno variety, had left her in no condition to meet her public.
Then I picked up, and loaded, the 7mm Magnum rifle I’d inherited, kind of, from the man who’d used it to put a hole in my shoulder although that hadn’t been his real purpose. It was a plain-Jane Remington job off the shelf, but some work had been done to accurize it, to use the shooters’ jargon. The trigger pull, for instance, was lighter and crisper than they usually come from the factory; and the bolt worked very smoothly indeed.
The big telescopic sight on top was a 3X-9X Redfield variable. Being conservative where weapons are concerned, I’m not too fond of these slightly complicated zoom-type scopes. Although I’ll grant the tremendous advantages of optical sights in general, I still think the single-power jobs, having less glass and fewer adjustments, are less likely to shake apart under heavy recoil. But Maxie Reis had gone for flexibility, and I had to admit that there had been nothing wrong with his shooting that a motionless and unobstructed target wouldn’t have cured.
I climbed out of the cleft, leaving the station wagon at the bottom, and looked around to make sure—well, reasonably sure—that I’d know where to come to find it again. The altitude—over a mile, even out here away from the mountains—pulled at my lungs, accustomed to half that elevation at the Ranch. My side hurt and I still had a trace of a headache, not to mention a couple of noticeable knots on my skull; and I felt fine, just fine. It had been a long and not very direct trail we’d followed from Fort Ames, but the end wasn’t very far ahead now. This was what it was all about; and to hell with the pretty vine-covered cottage with the pretty wife waiting in the doorway to kiss me welcome home from my pretty, safe, dull job. I was a hunter again, in my own kind of country, not a male nurse or a bodyguard or a goddamn field marshal sending armies into battle. It was good to be back at work.
I slung the rifle over my uninjured shoulder and wondered if the other would take the recoil if it had to, but what the hell. It wasn’t as if I were planning to spend a week trapshooting at Vandalia or rifle shooting at Camp Perry, if they still held the big matches there. The 7mm Remington Magnum isn’t really a hard-kicking gun—not compared to the .30-caliber jobs and up—and if one or two or three shots didn’t do the job here, the job probably wouldn’t get done. I set off towards the bosomlike hills ahead at a deliberate gait; no sense in arriving all sweaty for the long wait that would probably follow.
When I got there, I scouted the approach very carefully in case some surprises had been left out there for me to fall over, or into, but I could find none. Easing myself to the top of the final ridge at last, I saw a kind of twisty little valley rising up to the cleft between the two stony breasts. The road ran up the valley to the two remaining ramshackle mine buildings—the wood was silvery with age—set among the heaps of stuff dug out of the mine all those years ago. Tailings is the word that comes to mind, but it doesn’t have to be right.
The mine itself was in the side of the hill to my right as I lay there studying the situation. I couldn’t really see into the tunnel entrance, but I could see the ancient timbers framing it. The thought of the woman lying helpless inside the hill somewhere, if nobody’d lied to me, was too disturbing to consider at the moment; nor did I allow myself to remember that I don’t really like crawling around in the bowels of the earth, as I’d have to if everything went well.
Nothing moved, except a little scraggly grass waving in the late-afternoon breeze. I would have liked to see a jackrabbit hopping around over there, or a prairie dog peeking out of a hole in friendly fashion. It was a hell of a bleak, dead place. I wondered how much gold they’d got for all their digging, if it was gold they were after. Silver? With a moderately long-range weapon, he might be waiting somewhere on the breast/hill to my left, covering the mine entrance in the opposite hillside. He could control half a mile of the approach road from there, and the whole little valley. He could probably arrange to have a good field of fire even if I circled and came in from the other side. I didn’t know what was over there and didn’t intend to find out; I’d had enough hiking for the day. Circling wouldn’t fool him. He knew his business; he’d be ready for me either way I came. Why wear out shoe leather, and myself, being fancy?
But the record didn’t make him a long-range man. So it was seventy-five to twenty-five, say, maybe even eighty-twenty, that he was waiting with an automatic weapon, M16 or equivalent, in the brush up on the right-hand hillside over the mine entrance. He couldn’t see as far from there, but he could take me anytime between the moment I hove into sight around the shoulder of the hill and the instant I disappeared into the tunnel below him. If he let me get that far, which wasn’t likely.
That was, of course, assuming that I was coming at all. I mean, coming the way he expected. He had a certain image of me: I was supposed to be a hell-for-leather guy, a Wild West character smashing through the batwing doors of the saloon with two six-guns blazing. Well, there were times for that kind of dramatic headlong stuff, and he’d certainly seen me indulging in it, but there was no law saying I had to make a habit of it. I’d waited out one man this morning; I could wait out another this evening.
I looked around and found that luck, and the shape of the terrain, had brought me to a perfectly suitable spot. Moving to any of the other little knobs or ridges around wouldn’t improve my position much and might warn the man awaiting me that company had arrived. I slid back cautiously to where I’d left my canteen and the little pack, and ate a chocolate bar washed down with water, and resumed my position just below the crest behind a convenient clump of brush. I slipped my arm into the rifle sling, which I’d already adjusted to my own dimensions, somewhat longer than those of the previous owner. Then I waited.
It was the deadest damn hollow in the hills I’d ever watched, and I’ve watched a few. There wasn’t even a hawk or buzzard in the sky above it. I’d arrived just before four o’clock. Five o’clock passed, and six. The sun approached the rounded Gabaldon Hills, and hung just above them for a while, turning larger and redder, and dropped behind them. The light started fading fast.
I picked up the rifle at last. I shouldered it, lying there, using the taut sling for rigidity, target fashion. The fancy variable sight had one big advantage: in order to provide light enough for the highest magnification it had an objective lens large enough to give fantastic illumination at the lowest. Set to 3X, it brightened up the darkening view remarkably when I peered through it. But, sold on my own clever deductions, convinced that he’d appear on the hillside above the mine because that was the logical place for him to be, I almost missed the first stir of movement on the opposite slope. I only caught it with my naked eye, when I took a momentary rest from squinting through the telescope.
But there he was, clear and sharp when I swung the gun that way and lined up the scope. He was taking some precautions but not many—hell, he’d been waiting all afternoon under the hot sun
, probably, and nothing had happened. Now, reluctant to give up but badly discouraged, he was moving in closer, to where he’d be in position in case I got tricky and made my approach in the dark. But it had been a long dry day and he really had no faith that the tiger would come to the helpless bait he’d staked out for it, not any longer. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but it just hadn’t worked and to hell with it.
He made his way downward with the care of a man who’s carrying a heavy weapon and too much personal weight. I put the cross-hairs on him and followed him down. He slipped, started to slide, caught himself by a scraggly bush, and stood there for a moment, panting. Maxie Reis’s rifle fired without my giving it any orders.
As I’d told Madeleine once, if you do it right, the gun always goes off kind of unexpectedly. There was a ringing pause; then the man four hundred yards away started rolling helplessly down the steep slope. I tracked him down, and he knew I was tracking him. He didn’t stop at the bottom to look for his lost weapon, or examine his wound, or catch his breath; he just got to hands and knees and started crawling desperately towards the cover of the nearest mine building, dragging one leg. To hell with Maxie Reis. To hell with Bob Wills. Handing me a rifle shooting damn near two feet low at four hundred!
Well, that’s why I try to make a point of sighting in my own guns; it just hadn’t been feasible in this case. I held the cross-hairs over the distant crawling figure by the requisite amount, and led it enough to compensate for its awkward forward movement, and fired again. The movement stopped. After a moment he fell over on his side and lay there. I fired a third time at the still target to make absolutely sure of it. The recoil hardly bothered my shoulder at all. Then I drew a long breath, and started to slide back down to where I’d left the pack and canteen, and checked myself. I asked myself uneasily why I’d figured it so wrong. Why had my man been parked on the wrong hillside?
The Infiltrators Page 33