by Alex Archer
“Was he?”
“Are you kidding? The man’s a politician.”
He shrugged. “But Dad never could nail him. There were times he got close—some shady financial dealings were too big to keep covered up, some ugly incidents with hookers. Both Abells like hurting women. And Ron always had enough influence, not just within the Nation but with the city and county and state governments, to cover it all up. He did a lot of contracting for Sill, too, construction and such. He had pull. Even when my dad busted George for breaking his cheerleader girlfriend’s jaw, his senior year at school, he never spent a night in jail. Georgie was lifting weights and lettering in football and wrestling by then. And still a fat bully. Just a real strong one.”
“I’m surprised George was able to get into law enforcement, then,” Annja said.
“Are you really? Didn’t take you for that naive, Annja. Cops get away with that shit all the time. And politicians’ sons.”
“I guess you’re right. But why wasn’t Ron Abell able to get your father fired?”
“Not for lack of trying. But Dad was a good cop. He always felt he had to be twice as good as the white-eyes to get the same recognition they did. And we were well into the racial-preferences epoch when he joined the patrol. The Department of Public Safety has always been eager to recruit and keep on Native Americans. So Dad had political shielding, as well. Enough that all Ronnie’s plunder and pull couldn’t mess with him.”
He shook his head. “Dad always did have a gift for dealing with people. Making friends. And yes, I was way too quick to put that off on sucking up to the white man.”
“You both have a conspicuous talent for turning your charisma off when the other is concerned.”
“Ouch. Well played.”
“So about you and George—”
He laughed. “Yeah. Sorry—funny how everything seems to keep coming back to Dad and me.”
“But not surprising.”
“So George improved his school days by giving me noogies and making me eat dirt. Hell, I guess I have to credit the bastard for my getting into shape and getting into athletics. It was a matter of sheer survival.”
“And you did well,” Annja said.
“Yeah. Had a knack for it, I guess. Anyway, I did better in sports than on the academic side. I still loved my books. Loved learning stuff. But school bored the crap out of me.”
“No surprise there, either.”
“Problem was, George was always better. At least, he was stronger. I could run his fat butt into the dirt in track and field, eleven times out of ten. But he never got into that much. He turned out to have a knack for power lifting, and he liked sports where his brute strength gave him the edge. And, of course, where he got to hurt people. He’s always loved that.”
He went silent then. As they walked Annja felt a chill emanating from Johnny that had nothing to do with the wind that stirred the chaparral.
“You’re thinking about Sallie,” she guessed.
“Yeah. Great to think a sadistic freak on a terror rush has her completely in his power.” He ground his teeth so loud she could hear him above the restless rustle of the wind.
Annja pressed her lips together and exhaled forcefully. “This may be a really terrible way to comfort you, Johnny,” she said. “I know it’s awkward. But if Abell was hurting your sister—torturing her—he’d be showing that on YouTube, too. Until it got taken down. Right?”
He sucked in a deep breath. For a moment Annja feared she’d overstepped.
He exhaled explosively. “Yeah. You’re absolutely right. He understands the purpose of terror is to terrorize. If he was…hurting her, yeah, he’d be showing the world in gruesome detail. It’d be all over other sites even after YouTube yanked it.”
He frowned then, and looked at her. “Which begs the question—why isn’t he?”
“Well, you know him better than I do.”
But I’ve had extensive experience with terrorists, she thought, as well as serial killers and drug warlords and pirates and secret policemen and other such evil men. But she couldn’t exactly say that. Even to him.
And that was why she didn’t dare open up to Johnny Ten Bears the way she longed to. She had way too many secrets that had to stay that way.
“I think, for what it’s worth,” she continued, “that he’s saving her for later. Savoring it. The anticipation of—you know. And, I hate to say it, he’s probably enjoying her emotional and psychological distress.”
She watched him closely. But he nodded slowly. She knew her words caused him pain, but she respected the man too much to tell anything but the truth. Not all the truth, granted.
“So what role is your little pal the skinwalker playing in all this?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I wish I knew. He’s—well, a lone wolf, to use a cliché. But that’s what a Navajo wolf is—deliberately isolated from his people and his family.”
“Which the Athabascans are even more big on than most Indians.”
“Yes. Cutting yourself off from your clan is as huge and terrible a step as immersing yourself in ghost magic, I gather. Although I also suspect he may not be an actual Navajo.”
“Why?”
She shook her head. “Gut feeling. Also—all respect, but I’ve known a fair number of Navajos. The deep-res types, the ultratraditionalists—and you have to be really into the traditions to go to the lengths to violate them that a witch does—tend to be some of the most bigoted people I’ve met.”
“No kidding,” Johnny said. “They don’t like outsiders, period. White-eyes or Indian.”
“So our killer seems to care an awful lot about the ancestors of modern Pueblo and South Plains Indians, neither of whom the Navajos ever got along with real well.”
Since first talking to Johnny’s mother—who was recovering nicely and had been moved out of ICU, thank goodness—Annja had done some reading of her own.
“Yeah,” Johnny said. “You’re right. Navajos’d probably think whoever made that site on the Continental Divide were Anasazi—which I think’s an anglicized version of their term for the enemy people.”
Annja looked at him. He shrugged. “All right, so I always got along better with Mom, okay? I picked up on some of her interests.”
They both laughed. Annja found it surprisingly easy to do.
A drumbeat of horse hooves sounded behind them. As they whirled, their hands sought the handguns they each carried. Annja had her borrowed Glock in a Kydex holster on her right hip, beneath her puffy down jacket. Johnny wore his Glock in a holster of similar material, dropped well below his belt with its lower end strapped to his lean blue-jean-clad thigh.
Annja and Johnny each had the training and the presence of mind not to draw the pieces prematurely. Riding bareback toward them was a grandson of their host’s.
“Annja, Johnny,” he cried as soon as he saw them. “We need you back at the lodge. They got a hit!”
26
The ever-present wind whistled through the long tan grass around them and tried to pluck the map of Harding County from the fingers of Eugenio Rocendo of Jemez Pueblo and whip it off the hood of the white Range Rover where Annja and her companions were studying it. Rocendo was seventy years old and vigorous, a former USAF security patrolman and LANL security officer. All around them Native American vets were unloading horses from trailers. And unlimbering a startling assortment of scoped bolt-action rifles, lever actions and even WWII-era Garands.
“Okay, there’s been activity at this old abandoned house here on the Rabbit Run Wash,” said Chuck Mason, a local Kiowa rancher, pointing at a spot near the tiny town of Roy a few miles south of the Kiowa National Grasslands. “Tends to kind of stand out. Harding’s the state’s least populous county. And New Mexico ain’t a populous state.”
The clans were gathering at a crossing of dirt roads. It was dry and forbidding grassland where the Great Plains met the Southwestern desert. As Tom Ten Bears had promised, his network, including its memb
ers’ extended families, had turned up results before the government did.
“There’ve been some strange Indians seen in the area,” Mason said. “Some threats made to locals.”
“Not too smart where all forty people in the county have a rifle rack in the back window of their pickup truck,” Billy White Bird said to Annja. He wore a ball cap and an Oklahoma Sooners blazer over his big paunch. He had his hands in his pockets.
She nodded, trying to take in the details of the terrain. The old Otero place seemed to lie in dead ground, with land swells surrounding. Like the training center outside Lawton it seemed to have been chosen for being hard to see at any distance, rather than defensibility. If the objective was to play hard to get, and then make a final stand that could never succeed, anyway—but the more bloodshed, the bigger the win—it made a twisted kind of sense.
She looked around. “What’s all this costing, anyway?”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Edgar Martínez, who’d come with them to be in at the kill. “Some of us are doing all right. We’re happy to help out a longtime comrade like Tom where his family’s concerned.”
“And we’ve shed a lot of blood, sweat and tears for this country,” Rocendo added. “These terrorist bastards are striking at that while giving us all a bad name.”
“And never underestimate the power of an old man’s vanity,” Mason said.
“The ‘last ride syndrome,’” Johnny said with a lopsided grin.
“Yeah, and in another forty years it’ll be biting your ass, too, Sonny. So you can just wipe that smirk off your smug mug.”
Johnny laughed. “Believe me, Mr. Mason, I understand. And I’m grateful for what you-all are doing.”
There were maybe a dozen of the oldsters, and nine Iron Horses in addition to Johnny, including his lieutenant and chief wrench, Billy, Snake, Ricky and Angel.
“The Bureau’s afraid we’ll do better at finding the Crazy Dogs than they will,” Angel had explained succinctly when she and Ricky arrived that morning. The others had trickled in since the word went out to the Iron Horse People the previous afternoon—get here if you can, quick as you can. “We’re off the bad-guy list but we’re still marginal social types. So they can get away with squatting on us. A lot of us are under surveillance and didn’t dare come here.”
Johnny’s mask of stoic good cheer slipped just a bit, giving him the momentary aspect of a skull, with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks.
The life of one single human being lay at stake. Sallie Ten Bears. Innocence personified and endangered, Annja thought.
“Something we need to think about,” Angel said. The wind whipped her long dark hair in front of her face. “The Dog Soldiers who were part of the SIU were connected with Federal antiterrorism efforts, right?”
“Yes,” Tom said.
“That means they’d have access to a lot of high-tech equipment. Such as radio direction-finding gear. So, is any of that missing?”
Tom Ten Bears looked uneasy. “The Feds don’t seem to want to talk about that. From what I hear from my buds back in Comanche County, the scuttlebutt around the Lawton PD and the Troop G barracks is that lots of stuff is missing.”
“So we can’t use walkie-talkies or cell phones too close to our objective,” the pretty young woman said. “We have to assume they’ll spot us. And that won’t be good.”
“So we can’t use electronics at all?” Johnny asked, looking alarmed. Every person on the scene carried at least a cell phone. Some of the old guys’ trucks fairly bristled with antennas, like FBI surveillance cars.
“We should be okay outside of maybe a mile,” Angel said. “They can’t get too twitchy about signals farther out than that. Even as sparsely populated as the area is, everybody’s got cell phones, radios, whatever. You’d be surprised how many transmitters you find even out in the boondocks these days.”
She bit her lip. “We might want to ask people who don’t absolutely need them to switch off their electronics, though. They spot too big a cluster, they’ll get antsy. And once we break up to start our approach, even outside the mile limit, probably only one person per group should have a live unit. They’re paranoid.”
“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t plotting against you,” Frank said. “Evidence—us.”
Everybody laughed at that. Maybe a bit too readily. They’d gotten word from their own spies in the nearby regional U.S. Attorneys’ Offices that the FBI thought it had a fix on the hostage takers’ location and were expecting to strike soon.
Despite her distrust in Lamont Young’s competence, and general skepticism of the FBI, Annja hoped they got the right location. It would be beyond ironic if she and her friends took down the Dogs—only to have the goal of setting off a bloodbath fulfilled when the FBI landed hard on somebody else.
“What about satellite surveillance?” Annja asked.
“Any access to overhead observation would require passwords to get the tasking,” Tom said. “Those’ve been canceled by now. Even the Feds aren’t that dumb.”
Annja caught Snake lifting a skeptical eyebrow. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise me that a former DARPA wonk is conspiracy minded, she thought.
The old boys were discussing alternate communications methods. “We’ll just have to rely on a system of bird and animal calls,” Frank was saying. “Just like our ancestors did.”
“Wait,” said Mark Running Bull, a tall and spare Cheyenne. “I can’t do bird and animal calls.”
“What? Didn’t you learn how as a young man?” Frank asked.
“Did I go to some kind of school to learn how to be an Indian? My dad worked for AT&T. I grew up in Wichita.”
“No, not Indian school,” Frank insisted. “You know. Boy Scouts.”
“The rebels in Afghanistan always got the best results against us when they used the lowest tech,” Johnny said. “Not exactly hard in that godforsaken part of the world. For those who don’t know them, I can teach everybody a set of simple hand signals pretty fast.”
“What about different groups?” Tom asked, sounding as if his patience was straining. “How’ll we know when everybody’s in position? Send smoke signals?”
“Not a bad idea,” Frank said.
“I got a better one,” Juan Tenorio said. He held up a hand. Something winked dazzlingly. “Apache telegraph. Or as the white-eyes call it, heliograph.”
“You’d better get moving,” Mason said, holding his cell phone to his ear.
“Why’s that?” Johnny asked.
“FBI is rolling,” he said. “They’re estimating two hours from now to the target.”
Annja looked to Johnny, who shrugged.
“Wait,” the elderly Kiowa said. “There’s more. There’s another convoy, well on its way out of Albuquerque. Looks like somebody from the U.S. attorneys’ Office is trying to preempt the FBI, with a little help from the New Mexico State Police and Harding County Sheriff’s Department.”
He shrugged. “The sheriff’s my son-in-law. One of his deputies is my nephew. So let’s just say we got the word from inside.”
“Why would the U.S. Attorney be trying to steal a march on the FBI?” Annja asked.
“Two possible explanations I can think of,” former federal prosecutor Angel said. “Either they’re hoping to grab the credit themselves. Or they want to put a spoke in SAC Young’s and Abell’s mutual scheme to stage a massacre.”
“Humanitarian motives?” Billy asked. To Annja’s discomfort several of the senior posse—former lawmen or attorneys themselves almost to a man—laughed out loud at the notion.
Angel shrugged. “Not everybody in the justice system lacks a conscience.”
“Maybe,” Ricky said, hugging her. “But you’re here with us now, so who knows?”
“But let’s say some of that,” she suggested, “plus a desire to avoid the PR hit to the government if there’s major bloodshed.”
“Well,” Billy said, opening the lever action of a Marlin .44 Ma
gnum carbine, “we’re planning on shedding some major blood ourselves, aren’t we?”
“In part precisely so it won’t be the government doing it.”
“I hate taking the government off the hook.” He slammed the lever home with a loud clack.
“Me, too,” Johnny said. “But my sister’s life’s at stake.”
Billy looked chagrined. “You’re right, John. Sorry.”
Men started leading over saddled horses. “Y’all best cut stick and go right now,” Mason said. “The bunch from Albuquerque will be here way ahead of the FBI.”
“What about you?” Annja asked. Eight of the elders would ride out with Annja, Johnny and the Iron Horses. The rest would stay behind with the vehicles blocking the closest access road to their target.
“We’re gonna keep the law at bay,” Mason said.
She looked around in alarm at the heavily armed old men. “You’re not planning to fight the authorities, are you?”
The men looked at one another and laughed. “Oh, hell, no,” Frank said. “We’re just human shields.”
“Violent terrorists are one thing, Ms. Creed,” Martínez said. “The federal government is not about to bulldoze a posse of well-respected Native American senior-citizen war heroes. Nor are the New Mexican authorities. And the Harding County Sheriff’s Department sure isn’t.”
“Better not,” Mason said. “Otherwise Sheriff Phil is cut off forever.”
“You kids go with good hearts,” Martínez said. “Us old farts should be able to keep the cops negotiating long enough for you to do what needs done.”
“Okay,” Johnny said, swinging aboard a palomino gelding. “We ride!”
ANNJA CREPT THROUGH tall grass. Along with Billy, Snake and a gangly Cheyenne kid named Cody Hawk, she was circling to the south of the abandoned adobe ranch house where George Abell and his Crazy Dogs were holed up with a captive Sallie Ten Bears. They hoped.
Annja carried a Ruger Mini-14, a handy, reliable carbine that fired the same .223-caliber cartridge as the M-16. She knew a shotgun usually served better for close-in work. But there was a major prospect they’d have to shoot it out with the hostage takers before busting into the house. She preferred something she could shoot accurately at range. Anyway, for infighting she carried the borrowed Glock.