by James Axler
“But how can we possibly get into the redoubt if a whole army is holding it?” Mildred asked.
“It is unlikely to be an entire army that actually uncovers it,” Doc said. “They will send out small parties of scouts, unless I miss my guess.”
“That’s how I see it, too,” Ryan said. “What we need to do is wait until they find it, then move in while they ride back to get the rest of their crew.”
His horse was starting to bob its head and step nervously in place. “Mount up, folks. I think my horse may sense others coming. We may’ve worn out our welcome here.”
“I still can’t believe we got away so lightly,” Ricky said as he clambered, quickly if not gracefully, onto the back of his mare.
“Don’t get too many ideas, kid,” Ryan said. “The last easy day was yesterday. Let’s ride.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“He still there?” Mildred asked.
Ryan lowered the navy longeyes from his face. “Yeah,” he said.
He made no move to pick up the Steyr Scout longblaster laid on the low knoll beside him. While it lacked the extreme range and accuracy of his last longblaster, it still gave reliable hits out to several hundred yards in the hands of a master marksman. Like Ryan Cawdor.
The problem was, their shadower knew that, and kept carefully just out of the range at which he judged Ryan would be willing to waste precious cartridges in hopes of a hit.
“One thing’s for sure,” Ryan muttered, glaring toward the distant figure sitting quite openly, silhouetted against a blue sky. “He wasn’t lying about knowing a lot about us. Too much.”
He had also managed to elude Jak when the long-haired albino youth—a master of stealth—had sought to sneak up on him, nor had he fallen for several of the cleverest explosive booby traps J.B., with the able assistance of his protégé Ricky, who had a gift for such things, had set for him.
“He is good,” Ryan said. “And that’s the bastard of the thing.”
“He’s smart and he’s sneaky, granted,” Mildred said. “That doesn’t mean he’s better than you, Ryan.”
Ryan shrugged and winced slightly at the pain that sent throbbing through his injured chest and shoulder. In the past few days of playing serial cat-and-mouse games—Ryan’s band stalking the search parties sent out by the Uplanders and the Protectors, Snake Eye stalking them—the infection that had initially dulled Ryan’s wits had faded.
“Don’t know,” he said. “He just about did for me back at that gaudy. And I can’t shake the feeling he deliberately cut me some slack.”
“One thing is certain,” Doc said, “he is not smarter and stronger and faster than all of us. As we shall demonstrate to him, in the fullness of time.”
“Why would he have held back with you, Ryan?” Mildred asked.
“He thinks we can do better finding the treasure than he can solo, just the way we reckon two whole armies can do a better job searching than us.”
Mildred shook her head. “I don’t understand how Baron Al could be so stupid, even if that asshole Jed is. Why on Earth are both sides restricting themselves to a single search party when they could have hundreds of men combing the countryside?”
Doc uttered a caw of laughter. “Never underestimate the power of baronial rapacity, dear lady,” he said. “Nor of baronial paranoia.”
“He’s right,” Ryan said. “Neither leader trusts his own men any farther than he can throw them. They’re each figuring they can keep closer tabs on a single search team than a bunch of them, so they’re holding back their armies as reserves, to storm in and grab the redoubt when its found—and keep the freelance looting to a minimum.”
He shook his head. “Which comes pretty close to convincing me Al’s out of the picture. Mebbe he’s really no less grabby than any other baron, but this kind of shortsightedness... I can’t see that from him, no way.”
“Does it matter?” Mildred asked.
Ryan frowned a moment, then shrugged.
“Reckon not,” he said. “Dead’s dead. All I care about is that none of us take the last train west anytime soon.”
He pulled back from the crest of the low rise to scan the countryside to north and south. He had Mildred and Doc to keep an eye out for patrols—in particular Uplander patrols, since the three of them were currently just a few miles west of the end of their lines.
As stupid as he thought both commanders were being for sending out only a single search team each, they weren’t equally stupid about everything. Since as far as Ryan knew they had no better idea than he and his friends did where the redoubt lay, it made decent sense to search the easier, safer zone first.
If the place happened to be hidden in the enemy’s region, well, that was one halfway sensible reason to keep the bulk of the armies together and ready to move out as one to grab and hold the objective.
“Ryan,” Mildred said as he scanned the flood plain to the south. “Something.”
He instantly swept his single gaze to the north. “What?” he asked.
“Jak and Krysty riding back like their hair’s on fire,” Mildred reported.
He caught dark specks, just moving down a shallow slope at least half a mile distant toward them. The two of them were making good time. A quick glance through the longeyes confirmed Mildred’s judgment.
“Stay sharp, people,” Ryan said. He swung the longeyes up to sweep the horizon behind them. “We still don’t know whether they found something, or if they’re riding flat-out because they got greencoats on their tails.”
“If they are pursued, it would seem by not many,” Doc said. “Inasmuch as they are leading them straight to us.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. If it was the pursuit scenario, that could only mean their pursuers were few enough to give the three waiting an opportunity to empty their saddles from ambush. Had it been a good-sized patrol after them they would likely have tried to lead them far afield and then give them the slip, then sneak back and join their friends.
Mildred shifted to skulk behind a grassy lump that was probably a predark car or even truck grown over. Doc took the reins of their three horses and led them behind a screen of trees growing along a creek.
Ryan put the longeyes away. Taking up his Steyr Scout, he stretched himself prone on the grass to wait. He didn’t bother looking through the telescopic sight. He could cover more ground quicker with his one unaided eye. And if anybody was chasing after Krysty and Jak, they weren’t exactly going to be sneaky about it.
But no other riders appeared anywhere along the northern skyline. Still, Krysty and Jak pushed their mounts hard. Both horses were wide-eyed, lathered and blowing hard when the pair approached. Ryan stood up out of the grass as they got within fifty yards. He still kept a hold on his longblaster, and a keen eye skinned, in case anybody joined the party late.
“Not getting chased?” he called as Krysty turned her mare’s head and galloped toward him.
She reined the horse in a few feet away. “No,” she said. “We got something.”
“Where?”
“Abandoned ville mebbe five miles west and a little south. Pretty sizable place.”
“Can find redoubt easy,” Jak said, pulling his paint to a stop. “Find sentries, find place.”
“Which side, my friend?” Doc called, leading the horses back toward the group.
“Greencoats.”
“We weren’t able to ambush them the way we hoped. They took off at an angle away from us. There’re six of them, so we couldn’t likely take them if we’d been able to catch up with them.”
“Good call. How many left behind?”
“Start day, twelve riders,” Jak said.
“Whoo,” Doc said. “They must have found the mother lode indeed, to leave half their number behind.”
Ryan nodded briskly. “Ace.”
“Mebbe not quite so ace,” Mildred called.
“What do you mean, Mildred?” Krysty asked.
Mildred pointed to the west. The skyline
lay empty. Unbroken, specifically, by the infuriating black blotch of horse and rider that had been there since the sun came up, a couple hours after Ryan had sent his two teams to shadow the search parties north and south.
“So our shadow appears to have deserted us.”
Ryan showed his teeth in a snarl.
“So the bastard learned all he needed to know. Fireblast!”
“Lover,” Krysty said, “I’m so sorry—”
He waved a hand to cut her off. “Not your fault,” he rasped. “No other way to play it.”
He went to take his horse’s reins from Doc.
“Jak,” he called, “go get J.B. and Ricky back from ghosting the Uplanders. The rest of us’ll join you outside the ville. Any decent cover there?”
“Hills west,” Jak said. “Go north and south.”
“Find us.”
Jak didn’t bother to answer. Instead he turned and nudged his horse into a gallop to the northwest.
“Well,” Ryan said, swinging into the saddle, “I’ve got good news as well as bad.”
“You mean good news other than finding a possible escape route from this debacle?” Doc asked.
“What good news do we have other than that?” Mildred asked suspiciously.
“Well,” Ryan said, “the good news is, I don’t think we’re going to have to take out six troopers to get to the mat-trans and get out.
“The bad news is, we’ll be going up against one man who’s worse.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“I suppose it’s truly no great surprise, Ryan,” Doc said with a resigned sigh.
Ryan grunted. “Not really a surprise at all. In fact, this is what I was counting on.”
He moved his face aside from the Leupold scope of his Scout longblaster. “Well, not this exactly, I’ll admit.”
Doc and Mildred, who were lying next to him on the top of the low hill, murmured their agreement. Though the ville lay a quarter mile to the southwest, no one needed vision enhancement to recognize what stood just outside the collection of buildings that had probably been little more than a collection of tumbledown shacks even before a few years of utter neglect had taken their toll.
It was a sizable two-wheeled cart that had been upended. The wooden bed had a man in a blue shirt pinned to it in a spread-eagle position by big nails through his wrists and ankles.
“The snaky guy sure went to a lot of trouble to do that,” Mildred said. “That took a lot of time, and it has to be purely to send us a message that’s he’s here and waiting on us. Cocky bastard, isn’t he?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “And that’s likely the lonesome edge we got.”
“Is he truly that formidable?” Doc asked.
“I hate to admit it,” Ryan said, “but my shoulder says yes. He’s not just triple-fast. He’s triple-smart, and that makes him dangerous.”
“So what now?” Doc asked.
Ryan sighed. “For now, we wait for our friends to do their jobs and hope like hell they survive. And that afterward, mebbe, we do, too.”
* * *
“SO THE KEY, here, boy,” J.B. said, “is to hide your trap in plain sight.”
“How so?” Ricky asked, hunkered down beside him by the road.
He actually reckoned he had a fair head start on the answer, but he wanted to hear it straight from the Armorer’s lips. A lover of tinkering and intricate mechanisms in general—and weapons and traps in particular—he recognized the awe-inspiring nature of an opportunity to learn from a true master of the craft.
“You know you don’t want them to spot the trap,” J.B. said. He had opened the uppermost of the heavy dispatch bags mounted tandem behind the saddle and spilled its contents onto the road. He was busily replacing them with messages of a different kind.
“Obvious-like. But in country like this, where it’s not that easy to hide the trigger, you need to bait your victims to draw them in. And to take the bait, they got to see it.”
“Ah.”
They had been riding toward the Uplander camp, looking for a promising site and keeping eyes skinned for the Alliance Army, when a lone rider had come pounding hell-for-leather toward them down the road. Ricky guessed he was taking a message to his comrades guarding the entrance to the lost redoubt, and that that message was the army was on its way.
J.B. had them ride straight on to meet him as if nothing unusual was happening. As they approached within forty feet, the Armorer said, “Now.”
He’d swung up his M-4000 scattergun, and Ricky had aimed his Webley at the man.
Unfortunately the trooper had recognized them—unfortunately for him. He yanked his horse’s head sideways, apparently intending to turn the animal broadside to block their path, and made a grab for his own handblaster in its flapped holster.
Ricky and J.B.’s first shots had hit the hapless horse. Even as the animal squealed and went over on its side, the cavalry trooper got his handblaster out and started blasting. The horse, wounded and flailing about to get to its feet, pinned his leg to the rutted road. With the same more-balls-than-brains valor that got him into this mess, the Uplander trooper kept blasting the air—until a couple close-range blasts of buckshot quieted him down for good.
A quick swipe of J.B.’s belt knife across the animal’s throat had stilled it, too.
* * *
“SON?” J.B. SAID after he’d worked in silence for a few minutes.
“Sir?”
The Armorer snorted. “No need to call me a thing like that. Not until I’m old enough to have a snow-white beard grown down to here.”
He snorted brief laughter. “Yeah. And while I’m talking about things that won’t ever happen, wait until I can fly by flapping my arms, too. Anyway, I been thinking some. About this sister of yours.”
“Yes... J.B.?”
“So, you do know the chances of us ever running into her, or even cutting sign of her are about the same as a solid diamond meteorite’s going to fall from the sky and land at your feet. Right?”
Ricky nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.
J.B. bared teeth in a grimace. “Fact is, odds are good she’s dead.”
“We are hard to kill, she and I.”
J.B. stopped. He looked up at his protégé, then flashed a grin.
“Good point,” he said, “if she’s like you. But don’t fill yourself up with hope so far you spring a leak and just collapse.”
“I manage to keep plenty busy thinking of other things,” Ricky said, gesturing at the open saddlebag.
J.B. nodded and got back to work.
“Why just one saddlebag?”
“Well,” J.B. said, working without looking around, “we’ve got to conserve our limited store of plas, which is why I’m packing the contents of our boy’s spare-powder flask in around the block of C-4, on the off chance it’ll detonate the black powder when it goes. Won’t add much to the actual blast, but could add some nice, showy smoke and fire.
“And, see, there’s no real need for much explosive anyway. Whoever’s in charge down this road has several hundred men. We’re not going to put a big enough dent in that without a lot more explosive than we could haul around with us.”
“Why are we doing this, then?”
“Delay,” J.B. said. “Put the fear into them. Buy some time for Krysty and Jak to do their part. And Ryan, Doc and Millie theirs.”
“So...”
Ricky paused. J.B. not only didn’t mind his questions, but he also encouraged them, just the way his uncle had. And when he didn’t want Ricky chattering he made it clear fast and plain. But Ricky was always self-consciously eager to avoid coming across like he thought he knew more than this small and not-very-imposing-looking man, whom he idolized almost as much as he did Ryan.
“Spit it out,” J.B. said.
“So I know we want them to see the bait,” Ricky said. “But isn’t this, well, too obvious?”
“Would be,” J.B. agreed, “if they had the least little reason to expec
t a booby, here and now. But that’s not the way they and the Protectors have been playing their little game for all these years. And even if they figured out it’s how we fight—dirty—what do you think the odds are they expect us to have done anything but hightailed it out of here fast as we could ride, after we settled accounts for a whole platoon of sec men?”
He closed the saddlebag gingerly and stood, waving absently at the flies that had already begun to swarm around the still-warm carcass.
“No,” he said. “They won’t suspect a thing. Not this time.”
He gazed east and frowned, then nodded. “Right on schedule.”
“What do you mean?”
“Check it out. Dust.”
Scrambling to his feet, Ricky stared down the road. Above the horizon rose a brown plume.
“But it just rained a day or two ago,” he said. “How can the road be so dusty already?”
“Stick around with us long enough,” J.B. said, “you’ll learn that’s how it always goes with armies. They always seem to march in either mud or dust. Don’t know why. Just is.”
He gestured at the chill, who lay on his side in the road, fortunately facing away.
“Time to roll up the road a ways,” he said. “Let’s load our dead friend here on the back of his horse and go.”
Ricky stared at him. He wasn’t superstitious about handling the dead. Much, anyway. Nor was he squeamish...not really.
“Why?” he asked. “What do we need him for?”
He stopped short of pointing out the man was dead. J.B. was a patient tutor, but had little use for simps and stupes. And pointing out the obvious tended to put a person in one or the other category, if not both.
J.B. already had the chill under the armpits and was dragging him toward where J.B.’s horse was tethered to a peg, eating weeds by the ditch.
“’Cause we got a use for him,” he grunted. “Now grab his rad-blasted boots and give me a hand. They don’t call it deadweight for nothin’!”
* * *
THE ROAD STRETCHED across mostly level land for a mile or two. Level enough for Colonel Cody Turnbull, riding at the head of the army of the Alliance, to spot the black shape of the horse lying sprawled across the road a good ways off.