Apache Country (21 page)

“Tell me it’s just a campfire,” Easton
said.

“Dahoshkaah,” Ironheel breathed. “Pray
it.”

Hot, dry, late springtime was the high season
for forest fires; it was a rare year there wasn’t at least one big
one. Sometimes they were started by lightning or someone
accidentally kicking over a spirit stove, but more often than not
it was just some heat-torpid motorist unthinkingly flipping a
cigarette butt into the undergrowth.

The column of smoke seemed to be thickening,
but so far, there was no sign of flames threading upward through
the smoke.

“It doesn’t look bad,” he said.

“They never do,” Ironheel said darkly. “At
first.”

Once it gets started, a forest fire can
spread with astonishing speed, taking on a hideous life of its own
as it marches in a ragged line anywhere between five and ten miles
wide, generating heat that will sear a man’s skin at fifty yards.
The mountains become a battlefield, with hundreds of firefighters
deployed, property ruined, every kind of wildlife decimated.

Back in the late 50s, “bad ones” like the
Allen Canyon blaze had taken out sixteen thousand acres. The huge
Circle Cross fire two years later turned into a 25,000-acre brute
that ran fourteen miles in four hours ahead of a sixty mile-an-hour
gale. In the summer of the Millennium year there had been more: six
or seven fires was about the annual norm and the scale of the
devastation had been literally enormous. Even today, with much more
sophisticated firefighting techniques, there were still plenty of
bad ones. And no such thing as a good one.

Ironheel made a sound, pointed. There was no
doubt about it anymore. The smoke was darkening, thickening,
coiling menacingly.

“Looks like it might be over near the
Gallerito place,” he said edgily. “Wonder if they’ve called for
–?”

As if on cue, the huge throb of helicopter
engines overhead drowned out whatever he was saying, and a moment
later two aircraft racketed overhead in line astern. They looked
like non-military versions of Boeing-Sikorsky light attack
helicopters. Easton could clearly see the red Forest Service shield
and circle decals on their sides as they dipped down behind the
hill. The smoke was still coiling upwards, thicker now, blacker,
leaning away from their watching point. Thank God there was hardly
any wind, he thought. If the fire ran, it would not come this
way.

“Damn pickup had been here we could have lent
a hand,” Ironheel said. “Those guys need all the help they can
get.”

There were any number of reasons why they
couldn’t go down and help, of course; he knew them as well as
Easton did, so there was no point putting them into words. Apache
weren’t the only ones who knew when to keep their mouths shut.

They stood in tense silence, watching,
waiting. About ten minutes later, another helicopter chattered
over, and as the thunder of its passing ebbed, they heard the growl
of heavy diesel engines where the road ran between the trees below
where they were standing.

“Nalbiil ko’ nenltseesí,” Ironheel said. Fire
trucks. There was relief in his voice.

Now the column of smoke above the trees was
threaded with white, like the dark tresses of an aging woman.
Steam, Easton thought. The firefighters were already in action. The
black tower of smoke swayed and thinned, spread and whitened,
flattening out.

“Looks like maybe they’re getting it under
control,” Ironheel said. “Maybe we can still–”

He broke off without finishing the sentence
as a battered old Ford Mercury rattled into view and came to a stop
about twenty yards downhill from the cabin, a small whirl of dust
boiling briefly up. As he got out, Easton recognized the driver,
one of the young Mescaleros he had seen at the Gallerito place
earlier.

“Wait here,” Ironheel said and loped
downhill. Easton could hear them talking rapidly in guttural
Apache, the younger man making angry gestures. Once he pointed over
at Easton, and even at this distance Easton could discern the
hostility in his body language.

Now what?

As he watched, Ironheel put his hand on the
other man’s shoulder and said something that appeared to have a
calming effect. The young Mescalero looked up at Easton again and
then nodded reluctantly. He stood waiting as Ironheel came back up
the slope to the cabin, his face grim.

“Mack Gallerito is dead,” he said. “That’s
his son, John. He says a couple of hours after we were there, three
white guys drove up to the cabin. They showed some kind of official
ID, said they needed to ask Mack a few questions, it was just a
formality. One of the men stayed with the car, the other two took
Mack inside. They were there about half an hour. A couple of
minutes after they drove away there was an explosion and the place
went up like it had been napalmed.”

“Which agency were they from?”

“Good question.” Ironheel’s voice was harsh.
“Firefighters that found Mack’s body said it was tied to the bed
with baling wire.”

Easton was stunned. “They traced my calls,”
he said. “They must have bugged my home phone.”

Ironheel made an impatient gesture. “John is
waiting,” he said. “He has called my name. You know what that
means.”

“I know you want to go with him and I know he
needs your help, but you can’t,” Easton said emphatically. “Think,
damn it. Why did those men come up here, why did they kill the old
man?”

“You tell me,” Ironheel rasped, his eyes
narrowed with anger “You tell me.”

“They were looking for us. We’ve got to get
the hell away from here.”

Ironheel was still mad. “And that’s all you
care about, right?”

“What I care about is
staying alive,
” Easton said, spacing out
the words so they would sink in. “We don’t have time for
condolences. Try to make your friend John understand why.”

Ironheel glared at Easton angrily, then let
out his breath in a long soft sigh.

“Nahónlkid goláágo,” he growled. “You ask
much. It won’t be easy.”

Looked like Apache didn’t go in for apologies
either. Or maybe it was just Ironheel. And maybe not much maybe,
either.

“Ask him to take us down to Whitetail,”
Easton said as Ironheel strode away. “Tell him why.”

Throughout the time Ironheel talked to him,
John never once took his eyes off Easton. He made angry gestures,
clearly refusal. Ironheel talked some more, and finally John shook
his head in what looked like reluctant agreement. Breathing a
silent sigh of relief, Easton went into the cabin to get the
shotgun and his Glock. He walked down the hill, handed the
Winchester to Ironheel, and stuck the automatic into his own
waistband. Then they piled into the Plymouth and banged down the
hill to the Pine Tree Canyon trail, the two Apache up front and
Easton in back, nursing his wounded side and trying not to let the
anger he could feel coming off John Gallerito bother him.

He did some rapid mental arithmetic. Joanna
had left for Hondo around seven. It was maybe thirty miles away,
some of it on poor roads. Say an hour. Ten minutes tops to pick up
the package. An hour back. Everything else being equal, she should
be coming up the hill right about now.

Just above Whitetail Lake they saw lights
coming toward them. It was the pickup. John flashed his lights, and
Joanna Ironheel pulled over and got out of the vehicle, holding up
a plastic Wal-Mart shopping bag for them to see. John pulled over
alongside the pickup and they all got out.

“Everything all right?” Easton said. “Anyone
see you?”

She shook her head.

“And nobody followed you?”

She shook her head again. “If there’d been
anyone I’d have seen them.”

Something wrong, Easton thought. It was more
than an hour since the fire had started at the Gallerito place.
Their pursuers must know where they were. So why hadn’t they come
looking for them?

“Turn around and follow us down to the
Agency,” he told her.

“What’s happened?” she said, homing in
immediately on the tension in his voice.

“Ách’ít’ii,” Ironheel told her sharply, “Just
do like he says.”

For a moment she bristled, then shrugged and
handed the shopper to Easton. As he opened the door of the Plymouth
to put it on the backseat he heard a boom of thunder.

But it wasn’t thunder.

With shocking suddenness, a helicopter
blasted over the crest above them like a great swooping dinosaur,
its rotors stirring up a storm of wind and dust and detritus that
made it feel as if all the harpies in hell had suddenly descended
upon them. Through the battering roar of the chopper’s engine
Easton heard a shorter, jackhammer sound that could only be one
thing. A row of holes stitched itself across the roof of the
Plymouth and the vehicle rocked as if a giant had punched it.

“Nánlyeeg!” Ironheel yelled, “Run!”

Zig-zagging like a hare Easton stumbled
toward the shadowed shelter of the trees fringing the trail. The
pulsing thunder of engine noise fifty feet above his head was
punctuated again by the staccato chatter of an automatic weapon and
bullets tore up the ground in front of him.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw John
Gallerito fold at the knees and sink to the earth. Ironheel was off
to the right, running like a deer, his sister moving as fleetly at
his heels. Blundering blindly between the darkling trees, the
stuttering rattle of the automatic weapon pursuing him, Easton lost
sight of them. Chunks of bark exploded from the trunks of the
trees, and branches crashed down from above like wounded birds.

After he had gone maybe a hundred and fifty
yards Easton stopped, his back pressed against the rough bole of a
huge tree, heart pounding, his entire body slick with cold sweat.
The thundering growl of the helicopter’s rotors seemed to be
directly above his head. In the vast slipstream they generated the
treetops swayed like seaweed, and more branches tumbled noisily to
earth.

Suddenly the blinding beam of a
million-candlepower searchlight sliced like a scalpel through the
foliage, limning the trees with an unearthly radiance, momentarily
blanking his vision. Hunched beneath the interlaced overhang of
tree branches, pressed against the solid protection of huge pine,
Easton desperately assessed the situation. He had wondered why the
people who killed Mack Gallerito hadn’t come looking for them, and
this was the answer: a merciless hunt-and-kill mission using a
helicopter fitted with infra-red scanners, thermal imagers, and
high power parabolic sound-detectors.

That being so, regardless of how dark the
fast-advancing night, or how thick the sheltering cover of the
trees, the hunters would be able to see anything that moved, detect
anything that gave off heat, stalk anything that made a sound.

And kill it.

The mule deer burst out of the thicket in a
sudden, heart-stopping explosion of noise and movement. It was a
young buck, maybe a two hundred pounder, eyes shining yellow with
terror as it bounded past Easton, flickering through the intense
whiteness of the column of light from above to vanish among the
trees. As it did, the light above switched off with an audible
click, and the steady whupping beat of the helicopter engine
changed from hover to a whining roar, its dark bulk skimming away
above the trees in pursuit.

In the same moment, Ironheel materialized
soundlessly out of the undergrowth, his sister a smaller shape
behind his dark bulk.

“Shiké’ dahndáh!” he said. “Follow me.”

He pointed downhill and moved off at a
ground-eating lope, his sister effortlessly keeping pace. Sliding,
tripping, Easton followed blindly, weaving between the dark and
silent trees, trying hard not to make any more noise than he had
to.

After half a mile in this helter-skelter
fashion, they found themselves on a raggedly defined logging track.
Ironheel held up a hand, stop. His sister pulled up beside him, her
breasts rising and falling with exertion. Easton could hear the
harsh sound of his own breathing. In front of them was an eight
foot-high stack of cut logs, each log maybe fifteen feet long and
around eighteen inches in diameter. The whole stack was held in
place by six logs driven upright into the ground, three on each
side.

“Dig!” Ironheel hissed. “Fast as you
can!”

He pulled out his knife, hacking furiously at
the rank weeds growing out of the soft earth alongside the logs,
his sister and Easton kneeling beside him tearing out the rough
undergrowth with their bare hands, minds emptied of everything
except survival. After a couple of minutes, Ironheel grunted with
satisfaction.

“N’zhoo. There’s a gap.”

“Tight fit,” Easton said.

Slashing away at the weeds, Ironheel didn’t
bother to reply. Then all at once he held up a hand, his head
cocked to one side, listening.

“What?” Easton said. He could hear
nothing.

“Dahndáh!” Ironheel said urgently. “They’re
coming! Bitl’áh! Underneath!”

Scrambling to comply, Easton heard it now:
the beating throb of the chopper heading back toward them. As
Joanna Ironheel lay down on her back and reached up to get a grip
on the underside of the logs, shoving with her heels and
simultaneously pulling herself in and under the stack, the two men
lay flat alongside her and using shoulders, buttocks, heels and
hands, squirmed clumsily beneath the log stack. Then they were
underneath, buried in utter blackness.

The ground was soft and moist. Easton felt
the wound in his side throbbing and prayed it hadn’t reopened.
Above them in the night sky the helicopter engine was a solid
presence like rolling thunder, and they could hear the treetops
moving in the storm its rotors created, dead branches skittering
down like the sticks of burnt-out rockets.

Light touched them in the total darkness, and
through the tiny gaps between the logs they could see the icy white
finger of the searchlight lancing between the trees. They lay
perfectly still, huddled close together in the pitch darkness.
Their breathing was harsh and ragged and they smelled of sweat. And
maybe fear.