Hot Springs es-1

by Stephen Hunter

  "Stop it! Stop ity goddammit!" screamed Johnny.

  The firing stopped.

  "Jesus Christ, don't panic, boys. You'll make it easy on him."

  "Johnny, Johnny―"

  "Shut up, Vince, you've got―"

  "I been hit!"

  It was so. Vince the Hat de Palmo lay on his side, astounded that he was bleeding so profusely. He'd taken it at the ligature of thigh to hip, and the wound spurted wedy, the blood thick and black across his suit. He looked at Johnny as his eyes emptied of meaning and hope.

  "Take his magazines, boys," said Johnny. "We may need them yet."

  "Johnny, I―"

  "Easy, lad," said Johnny to the youngest of his men, shordy to be the deadest. "Don't fight Ding-Dong."

  In his last motions, Vince cooperated with Jack Bell as the older man rolled him over and grabbed the two flat drums that were wedged between his belt and his back.

  "You'll come back for me?"

  "Sure, kid," said Ding-Dong. "You can bet on it." He gave the kid a wink, which Vince may or may not have seen before he slipped irretrievably into blood-loss coma.

  In the interlude, Earl squirmed to the left, toward the low hill that rose at that side of the valley. He crawled and crawled and though he hated to crawl, this day it filled him with joy. The sun was now full on them, drying the dew from the stalks of grass.

  The grass at the hill was drier, somehow, for the hillside drained more fluently than the fladand. As he drew near, a plan formed in his mind. This grass was of a different texture, possibly of a different species. He could tell because unlike the soft grass of the valley floor which merely hissed as he crawled through it or the wind pressed rills into it, this grass crackled like dry old bones and sticks in the breeze.

  He stood.

  He could not see them, for they too had sunk into the grass, or taken up concealed positions behind the odd bushes on the floor of the valley. He chose one such, leaned into his gun and fired a long squirt of tracers into it.

  Then he ducked and squirmed away, as someone with a larger weapon than a Thompson brought fire to bear. These bullets whipcracked through the sound barrier as they passed overhead, their snap echoing against the wind. It had to be a Browning rifle. Someone had a Browning at the railyard too.

  He'll try and pin me, the others will work around and up the hill and the one other will go around me, yes. That's how it has to be.

  "Do you have him?"

  "Yes, he's in a gully at the edge of the hills, about two hundred yards off to the right. I saw the tracers come out."

  "You keep him pinned, Herman. Red, you and Ding-Dong go high. Try and get to that hillside above him to get the fire down on him. I'm circling around to the back. You'll drive him to me, boys, and if you don't get him, I'll get him square in the belly."

  "Let's do it."

  Johnny scuttled off, beginning his long arc around to the rear. For Jack and Ding-Dong, it was an easier journey, for theirs was the straight shot to the hillside, and then a climb to bend around and get above him. The grass here was high and it concealed them; they didn't have to crawl but could run, keeping low, particularly as more gullies opened up the closer they got to the hill itself.

  As for Herman, he waited a bit, then a bit more, and finally rose and began an exercise called walking fire, which was exactly what John M. Browning had designed his automatic rifle to accomplish. It was originally conceived as the answer to trench warfare and in this role it was the perfect instrument.

  Herman was a big man, strong and fearless, and he loved and knew the gun he carried passionately. He could do amazing things with it. Now he rose, wearing two bandoliers with loaded magazines Mexican style across his body over his suit coat, the gun locked into his side and pinned by his strong right forearm, which pressed it tightly against him. His reflexes were superb. He fired half a magazine and the burst sped exactly to the gully from which he'd seen the original tracers come. The burst lifted a stitch of dust. No man could do it better and the shame of Herman's life was that he'd not been a BAR man in Europe or the Pacific, for in that classification he'd have been a true genius. It wasn't that he hadn't tried; it was that he had too many felony convictions.

  He finished up the magazine, stitching a hem of lead where he wanted it exactly. He dropped the empty mag, neatly and deftly inserted a new one, all the while walking, and was back putting out his bursts in less than a second. If that's where the cowboy was, he wasn't going anywhere.

  Owney could hear the gunfire, but the men had disappeared into the grass. There seemed to be a lot of moving around. It was like chess with machine guns where you couldn't quite see the board.

  He was nervous, but not terrified. Johnny's crew was the best; they seemed calm and purposeful. They had succeeded at every enterprise they had tackled, often spectacularly. They were the best armed robbers in America, fearless, famous, quality people, stars in their own universe. They would get him. He knew it. They would get him.

  But they wouldn't.

  He knew that too, at least somewhere deep inside.

  Who was this guy? Where was he from? Why was he so good?

  It unnerved him. He had been hunted by Vincent Mad Dog Coll. He was the ace of aces, Owney Killer Maddox, from the East Side. He had shot it out with the Hudson Dusters in 1913, one man against eight, and walked out unhurt, leaving the dying and the wounded behind him. He, Owney, had walked out spry as a dancer, stopped to reset his carnation in his lapel, and gone out for a drink with some other fellows.

  Who could scare him? Who had the audacity? Who was this guy?

  The BAR bursts ripped up clouds of dust and dirt. The gully filled with grittiness, so that you almost could not breathe. If Earl had been where Herman thought he was, he would indeed have been one cooked fella. The noise, the ricochets, the grit, the supersonic bits of stone and vegetable matter, the sheer danger―all would have shaken even the toughest of individuals.

  But Earl had shimmied desperately forward only a matter of a few yards and found a rotted log behind which to hide, even if he knew it was wholly unable to stop the heavy.30s that might have flown his way.

  He now did the unthinkable. Instead of seizing the opportunity to put distance between himself and the shooters who were closing in from all sides, he did exactly what they expected him to do, which was nothing. That's what they wanted him to do. He did it. He just didn't do it where they wanted him to do it, not quite. He knew that as the BAR fire kept him nominally pinned, some others would be entering the dry, higher grass of the hillside, in order to get elevation on his position and bring even more killing power. That's exactly what he wanted.

  Methodically, he began to tug at the stem of a bush that had grown up just in front of the log.

  Jack Bell and Red Brown reached the edge of the hillside, still well hidden. They were rewarded for their efforts.

  "Will ya look at that," said Ding-Dong. "Just what the doctor ordered."

  "If it was a dame, I'd marry it," said Red, who actually had several wives, so one more wouldn't hurt a bit.

  What they saw was a kind of crest running vertically up the hill, one of those strange rills for which only a geologist could give an adequate explanation. What it meant for the two gunmen was a clear easy climb up to the top of the hill, well protected by the geographical impediment from the gunfire of their opponent.

  "Okay," said Jack, "you cover me. I'm going to make a dash, then I'll cover you and you make yours."

  "Gotcha," said Red.

  Both men rose. Jack clashed the twenty or so yards to the beginning of the spine of elevation, even as Red stood and hosepiped twenty-five rounds down the line of the hill, into the area where Herman's bullets had been striking. His too tore clouds of earth upward, and sent grit whistling through the air.

  As he fired the last, his partner made it, righted himself, set up close over the ridge, and fired a blast. Red rose under cover of the fire, and sprinted till he was safe.

  Both me
n drew back, breathing hard.

  They looked up the hill. Alongside the ridge, it was about two hundred feet up through tall yellow grass, though it was protected the whole way. About halfway was a small strange group of stunted trees, yellowed and sinewy, then another hundred feet to the crest.

  'Johnny/' Red cried. "We're going up."

  "Good move," said Ding-Dong. "He'll wait for us, we'll get up there, we'll have real good vision on the guy, we can take him or we can pin him while Johnny and Herman move in on him."

  "Johnny's a fuckin' genius."

  Herman couldn't be but a hundred or so feet from the edge of the field and the beginning of the hill. His BAR was almost too hot to touch. He'd sprayed steadily for the past five minutes, until he got close enough. He'd seen nothing.

  Maybe he's dead. Maybe I hit him. Maybe he's bled out. If he'd gone another way, he'd have rim into Johnny.

  Nah. He's in there. He got himself into a jam, he's scared, but he's waiting. He's a brave guy. He's a smart guy, but one on five was just too many. He's in there. He can't move. He's real close.

  He heard the gunfire from far to the right and judged that it was covering fire from Red and Ding-Dong. Red's yell came a second later.

  That was it. If they got above him, the guy was screwed. They could bring fire on him and if they didn't kill him, he'd have to move. Herman would bring him down if he moved.

  Herman snapped in a new magazine, waiting for the guy to move. He stood in a semicrouch and was so strong that the fourteen-pound automatic rifle felt light and feathery to the touch. He looked over its sights, through a screen of grass, searching for signs of movement.

  He saw nothing, but given the source of the fire, given the speedy response on his part and the volume of fire he had poured in, the man could not have gotten away, unless there were secret tunnels or something, but there were only secret tunnels in movies.

  Be patient, he told himself.

  * * *

  Johnny worked his way around in a wide arc to the base of the hill. He was possibly a hundred yards behind the cowboy's position. He squatted in the grass. He hadn't fired yet. He had a full drum, one of the big ones, with a hundred rounds. He could fire single shots, doubles, triples, even quadruples and quintuples if he had to, so exquisite was his trigger control. He could hold one hundred rounds in a four-inch circle in a fifty-yard silhouette if he had to. He could shoot skeet or trap with a Thompson if he had to. He was the best tommy-gunner in the world.

  He was a little anxious.

  This fellow was very good. He'd obviously used a Thompson well in the war and could make it do tricks. But Johnny knew if it came to shooting man-on-man, he'd take it. Nobody was faster, nobody was surer, nobody could make the gun do what he could make it do.

  He squirmed ahead, then heard the gunfire from Red and Ding-Dong. Red yelled something―he could not quite make it out―but knew what it signified. Red and Ding-Dong had reached the hill and were heading up it. When they got elevation, it was all over. It would be all over very shortly. It was just a question of waiting.

  Owney heard the firing. There was so much firing from the right-hand side of the field, and then there was nothing. But all the guns that fired had to be Johnny and his boys. He'd only heard one burst that seemed to come from elsewhere.

  He could see nothing. Though the floor of Hard Bargain Valley was relatively flat and hard, for some reason the grass grew at different heights upon its surface, and from where he was, it looked like a yellow ocean, a ripple with waves. Toward the edges of the valley, small stunted trees appeared in strange places, randomly.

  He thought the fighting was going on over there, maybe a half mile down, on the right side. He thought he could see dust rising from all the gunfire.

  Suddenly a long burst broke out, and his eye was drawn to what he took to be the position of the shooter. Another came in on top of the first. Each burst chattered for about two seconds, though from this distance the sound was dry, like a series of pops, like balloons exploding, something childlike and innocent.

  Then he saw movement. It was hard to make out, but he saw soon enough that two of Johnny's men, visible in their dark suits, were scrambling up the ridge. They seemed well under cover.

  Owney grasped the significance instantly. If they got above him, the cowboy was finished. They could hold him down while the others moved in on him.

  Johnny, you smart bastard, he thought. You are the goddamned best.

  Herman waited and waited. Nothing seemed to be happening. He decided to move on the oblique and come on the cowboy's position from another angle.

  Ever so slowly he moved out, angling wide, edging ever so gently through the high grass, keeping his eyes on the area where the man had to be. Once in a while he'd shoot a glance up the ridge that ran up the hill for signs of Red and Ding-Dong. But he saw nothing.

  The sxm was high now. A bit of wind sang in his ears, and the grass around him weaved as it pressed through, rubbing against itself with a soft hiss.

  The grass seemed to be thinning somewhat as he drew near to the beginning of the incline. He slowed, dropped to his knees, and looked intently ahead. He could see nothing.

  Where was the bastard?

  He wiggled a little farther out, staying low, ready to squeeze off a burst at any moment. The silence that greeted his ears was profound.

  He planted the gun's butt under his right arm, locking it in the pit, and stepped boldly out, its muzzle covering the beaten zone where haze still drifted. He expected to see a body or a blood trail or something. But he saw nothing. He saw a log ahead on the left and in the deeper grass some kind of bush and he directed his vision back, looking for―

  Something to the left flashed. In die instant that his peripheral vision caught the motion, Herman cranked hard to bring his muzzle to bear on the apparition; it was a living bush and as it rose, fluffs of grass fell off it, the bush itself fell away and then Herman saw it was a man.

  Earl fired five tracers into the big man in one second. They flew on a line and he absorbed them almost stoically in the center body, then sank to the earth, toppling forward, then trying to prevent his fall with the muzzle of the Browning Automatic Rifle, which he jammed into the ground. So sustained he paused, as if on the edge of a topple, his face gray and his eyes bulging, the blood running everywhere.

  Earl didn't have time for this shit. He put seven more into him, knocking him down. The tracers set his clothes aflame.

  Earl turned as fire broke out behind him. Two men with tommy guns lay at the crest of the ridge, and fired at him. But of course they had forgotten to adjust their Lyman peep sights for the proper distance, so while they aimed at him, the extreme trajectory of the.45s over two hundred downhill yards pulled their rounds into the ground fifty feet ahead of him.

  Earl slid back to the earth, making a range estimation as he went. Bracing the gun tight against himself, he hosed a short burst high in the air, watched as it arched out, trailing incandescence visible even in the bright air. At apogee the consecutive quality of the burst broke up and each bullet spiraled on a slightly different vector toward the earth. Earl watched them, and saw that they hit just fine for windage but too far back. He needed more elevation. He corrected in a second, fired two shots and watched them rise and fall like mortar shells. They fell where he wanted. He pressed the trigger and finished the magazine, dumped it, quickly slammed another one home, found the same position in his muscle memory and this time squeezed off the entire thirty rounds in about four seconds. The gun shuddered, spewing empties like a brass liquid pouring from its breech, and the tracers curved through the air, riding a bright rainbow. Where they struck, they started fires.

  It was Red who saw what was happening first. He felt okay, ducking back behind cover as a rainbow of bright slugs lofted high above him and descended, but without precision. It was absurdly raining light. Still, there was no real chance that any of the rounds could hit a target, as they dispersed widely as they plummeted.


  Then he felt a wall of heat crushing over him, and the heat's presence seemed to distend or twist the air itself. To the right a wall of flame seemed to explode from nowhere. He'd never understood how fast a brushfire can bum, particularly on a hillside where the wind blows continually and there is no shelter.

  The fire was a crackling enemy, advancing behind them in a human wave attack, throwing out fiery patrols of pure flame and crackling, popping menace. It sucked the air from them and its smoke closed on them quickly. They turned to run, but the fire was all around them and suddenly a lick of it lashed out and set Ding-Dong's sleeve afire.

  He screamed, dropped his weapon and went to his knees to beat it out. But more flame was on him and soon he was lit up like a Roman candle, and if the power of the fire would drive him to rim, the pain of it took his energy from him, and he fell back, his flesh burning.

  Red didn't want that happening to him. He had just a second to decide, and then he scrambled up the ridge and leaped over it, escaping the hungry flames, but before he could congratulate himself, a fleet of tracers rose from nowhere and crucified him to the ground.

  Earl spun, changed magazines again, and looked backward for another target. He could see nothing. If there was another man moving in on him from behind he was moving stealthily. Earl didn't have much cover here and in fact there was very little cover anywhere. He emptied another magazine, then another, hosing down the area where another man would be if he existed. That was sixty rounds in about ten seconds, and the tracers sprayed across the area before him like lightning bolts seeking the highest available target. They churned through the grass, setting small fires when they encountered dryness, but generally just ripping up earth and drawing a screen of dirt into the air.

  He changed magazines a third time, moved out a little for a slightly different angle and squirted another batch out in another bright fan of searching bullets.

  Johnny was too far to shoot when the thing started happening. Then it happened so fast and so unpredictably he was uncertain what to do. He watched the tracers arc out and descend behind the ridge. Smoke rose so fast in the aftermath it was astonishing. The ridgeline caught fire.