Apache Country (28 page)

He was wrong.

Forty minutes after they started up the trail
into the Marcials, the oncoming rattle of a chopper sent them
scrambling into the black shadow of an overhang of boulders,
huddling immobile and impotent as the whirlybird made passes
overhead.

Ironheel’s plan – to head through the Marcial
Gap using the cover of the forested north-facing slopes beyond it
to get unseen to the state road near Encierro – was as dead as
Methuselah. On those bare hillsides and in the Gap itself, they
would be as easy to spot as tarantulas on a whitewashed wall.
Worse, the fact they’d been sighted meant the hunter-killer
helicopter of two nights ago would probably be back in the hunt. It
wasn’t a cheerful thought.

“This where we switch to Plan B?” Easton
said.

“No need,” Ironheel said, staring at the
steeply sloping southern flank of the mountain rising before them.
“Get up there, take the summit trail over Marcial Peak and we’re
good.”

Easton called up the map in his head,
visualizing the jeep trail that ran along the divide. It might be a
way out, but just getting to it was going to be tough, a climb of
more than 2500 feet in less than two miles.

“Think we can make it?”

Ironheel shrugged. “You tell me.”

Don’t get mad, Easton told himself. It’s not
personal, it’s Apache.

The chopper quartering above them, a
two-seater Cayuse with tubular skid landing gear and 317 hp Alison
shaft turbine engines that made a noise like an angry buzz saw,
finally tilted sideways and soared away, checking the slopes lower
down. As the engine noise faded to a low drone, Ironheel nodded and
they made the break.

From get-go the climb was steep and rocky,
and at this altitude there wasn’t as much vegetation to provide
cover. Stumbling along behind the Apache, sometimes taking two
steps to make one on the sliding shale that covered the slope, or
laboring through tracts of heavy sand, Easton muttered his dogged
mantra: don’t think, just do it. One foot, other foot, one, two,
one, two. He lost track of time. The wound in his side throbbed
ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum and he remembered the dream.

As they got higher, the terrain became more
difficult, and the more difficult it became, the more Easton
wondered whether Ironheel’s plan was going to work. Was there
another way?

Think like the enemy.

What would I be considering doing if I were
in charge of the pursuit?

One option would be to fly in a SWAT team and
drop it on the summit ahead of the fugitives, another was to flood
the whole area with well-armed State shooters and just wait for the
fugitives to show. Either way, they would never know exactly where
their pursuers might be, or for that matter, how many men were out
hunting them, until they suddenly appeared. Timing was everything.
If he and Ironheel could make it to the high ground first, big
though the ‘if’ was, they’d have a fighting chance. But was a
fighting chance enough? Was there a better strategy?

Maybe two hundred feet below the summit ridge
they halted to rest in the shadow of a huge boulder. Even in its
shadow it was stifling hot: the big rocks that had soaked up the
morning sun were now reflecting heat outward like storage heaters.
Scorpions liked to hide under big warm boulders, Easton
remembered.

“Not bad,” Ironheel said. “Don’t think we
left much sign.”

Easton looked back down the slope at the
wilderness of tumbled scree and huge boulder, and wondered how much
sign was not much.

“Any is bad,” Ironheel replied. “Mescalero
tracker will spot things cops wouldn’t even notice,” Ironheel
replied.

Easton caught something in his intonation.
“You think they’ve got one?”

Ironheel pointed with his chin. Way on back
below, a knot of uniformed men was picking its way uphill. In the
lead was a big guy wearing a blue shirt and pants and a black
Stetson with a high crown.

“Mose Kuruk,” Ironheel said, and there was
contained anger in his voice.

Easton marveled he could identify Kuruk at
such a distance, then remembered Ironheel’s jibe in the Riverdale
jail cell. Apache got eye like eagle, remember? Maybe he hadn’t
been kidding about that, either.

“How come he’s in this? I thought the rule
was, Apache don’t betray other Apache?”

“Kuruk’s the exception to all the rules,”
Ironheel said. “He’s like one of those Apache scouts the US Army
used to hunt their own people: Peaches, Dutchy, Mickey Free.”

“For money, you mean?”

“That’s what the Army thought, but there was
always more to it than that. Apache call it itisgo. Being honored.
A pride thing, to prove he’s a better Apache than Apache he’s
chasing. Cleverer. Tougher.”

“Sounds like you know him pretty well.”

Ironheel nodded thoughtfully. His eyes were
dark and somber, and Easton knew he was sharing only a small part
of his inner thoughts.

“Kuruk knows Apache will only run so far.
Then he says dákogégo, no more. Here I stand. Die, if I must.”

“Is that what’s going to happen?”

Ironheel shook his head almost
impatiently.

“Apache always try to avoid going head to
head,” he said. “Better to out-think your enemy. But Kuruk wants to
boast to the old men that he hunted me down. That he is more
Apache.”

“Why?”

Ironheel shook his head. “Doesn’t
matter.”

“Does to me,” Easton said. “Or have you
forgotten why we’re out here in the first place?”

Ironheel looked away, his eyes fixed on the
men laboring doggedly up the slope way below. Then once again the
sudden roaring clatter of a helicopter overhead made them scramble
to find cover. The chopper flitted overhead like a huge mechanical
dragonfly, the throbbing roar of its engine hammering off the
rocks, then quartered off across the canyon. As the engine noise
faded, Ironheel stood up, but Easton stayed put.

“Hold it, Chief,” he said. “Tell me how you
think Kuruk is going to play this?”

Ironheel thought about it for a moment, his
lips pursed, twin lines of concentration between his brows.

“He’ll push,” he said. “Try to wear us
out.”

“Wear me out, you mean.”

Ironheel made one of his impatient gestures.
“It’s me he wants. Not you.”

Well, it was brutally honest, even if it
wasn’t particularly flattering. It might even prove to be pivotal.
Easton filed the thought away.

“And he thinks if I can’t cut it, you’ll take
off alone, is that it?”

“Ha’ah.”

“And will you?”

“Kuruk thinks so,” Ironheel said. The evasion
was unexpected.

“That being the case,” Easton said, as his
thinking came together, “maybe we need to turn the table.”

Squatting down on his haunches,
he
used a stick to draw a map in
the dust, a roughly D-shaped figure, sloping to the left at a
forty-five degree angle.

“What’s this?” Ironheel said impatiently.

“Kuruk thinks were fugitives, right? So if we
make it look like we’ve made a run for open country, he’ll probably
buy it.”

Ironheel lifted his chin. Go on.

“Here’s Marcial, here at the top end of the
D,” Easton said. “The vertical line is the highway. It goes through
Franklin and on down to Riverside, here on the bottom end of the
bow. The arch is the state road that runs up and around from
Marcial to Riverside. And we’re here, somewhere in the middle,
right?”

Ironheel nodded. “And?”

Easton drew a line in the dirt from the
highest arc of the bow that was the state road to the center of the
line representing the highway and made a cross in the dirt.

“Pacheco,” he said.

“What about it?”

“Change of plan. That’s where we’re
going.”

Ironheel’s expression hardened. “You
crazy?”

Easton ignored that one,

“Hear me out,” he said. “We’ve been lucky
this far. But once they get a sighting of us, not only will have
ever-increasing numbers of law enforcement coming after us, but
also that big chopper and whoever sent it breathing down our necks.
We need to disappear.”

Ironheel stared at nothing for maybe thirty
seconds. Then he spoke.

“I could do that now.”

“Alone.”

“N’juh,” he said. “Yes. Not with you.”

“And spend the rest of your life on the run.
Is that what you want?” Easton replied angrily. “Is that why I put
my life on the line for you?”

Ironheel shook his head, almost angrily. It
might even have been exasperation, Easton thought.

“Tell me the plan. Then I will decide.”

Easton let that one slide by as well. “We
give Kuruk what he wants,” he said. “Make him think we’re heading
west, then double back.”

“To Pacheco?” Ironheel said. “What’s in
Pacheco?”

“What we need most,” Easton said. “Time.”

Working their way yard by punishing yard up
to the summit trail was more brute hard work, fighting the sliding
shale, grabbing the gnarled trunks of mesquite for leverage, solid
heat coming at them off the rocks.

But now there was a difference.

Now they began to deliberately leave sign –
nothing too obvious, part of a footprint here, a head-high twig
snapped there, traces a skilled tracker would surely find. An hour
passed, and another. They moved purposefully, careful not to send
small slides of loosened earth and gravel skittering downhill to
raise dust spirals that would betray their position.

And then the slope began to level off; they
were nearing the summit. Keeping below the hogback, moving as
quickly as they could consistent with not being seen, and going to
ground every time they heard the mutter of a State Police chopper,
they moved eastward along the ridge.

The views were spectacular. To the north the
high plains stretched away into sun-blasted infinity. Below and to
the south it was possible to make out the ribbon of the road that
ran east through Franklin toward what they used to call La Junta,
where the Rio Lindo met the Alto to become the Brio. A marker told
them they were at 10, 179 feet.

Sliding, slipping, thrashing through knotted
undergrowth, ignoring the scratches and scrapes and welts and
insect bites, enduring it, doing it. It was hostile wilderness all
the way, over high crests and down into precipitously narrow
canyons, followed by steep uphill scrambles to another crest, but
each time moving further down the side of the mountains to a lower
elevation. They reached the head of Seven Cabins Canyon, with the
stark peak of El Marcial rearing above and behind them, around
mid-afternoon. Although they hadn’t covered much more than three
miles as the crow flies, it felt like they’d run a marathon.

Wild ducks fled in quacking alarm as Ironheel
called a halt in a clearing by a spring that bubbled up from the
rocks and formed a small, moss-lined pool. By now Easton was more
than ready to stop. The long painful pulse in his wounded side was
now a steady burn. Ironheel sat with his back against a rock, arms
around his knees, head down. Not tired, Easton decided, just deep
in his own thoughts. He wondered what it took to make the man admit
fatigue.

Ironheel’s silence provided a chance for
Easton to give some thought to the helicopter that had come after
them the previous night. The fact it had not appeared again in
daylight confirmed that the people in it were not law-enforcement.
Although he hadn’t gotten much more than a glimpse of the machine,
he was prepared to bet it was a Hughes Defender. Which was not good
news.

Powered by a 405shp Allison 250-C20 turbine,
fitted with a five-blade main rotor, four blade anti-torque rotor,
exhaust silencer and various noise-blanketing devices on the air
intakes, the Defender had a range of about 370 miles and a service
ceiling of over 14,000 feet. It wasn’t in the same sophisticated
class as the equipment the Army were using in Afghanistan and
elsewhere, but it could carry a pilot and up to four passengers,
which meant once the chopper located its quarry, it could put a
hunt team down close in. The thought did not cheer him up.

“You slowed up back there,” Ironheel
observed, breaking in on his thoughts. Probably as close to showing
concern as he got, Easton thought. He nodded, deciding against
mentioning his throbbing leg muscles or the slow pulse of the wound
in his side. Okay, it was what Ironheel had called itisgo, nothing
but stupid male pride. But it was his stupid male pride.

Ironheel stood up, made his signal. Time to
go.

As he filled the water canteen from the
spring Ironheel pointed at the pack trail sloping steeply downhill
away from where they were sitting. It looked like hard going.

“That the way down?”

Ironheel nodded. “It’ll be pretty rough the
first mile, drops about one foot every three. Further down it gets
a little easier.”

“Be still my heart,” Easton said.

“Dá’ándiihi,” Ironheel nodded agreement.
“Track leads into Peachtree Canyon and then there’s a track that
runs down to the road, with a Lutheran Church camp about halfway.
The next canyon but one east leads down to Pine Lodge and there’s a
fairly good road from there. My guess is they’ll figure us to take
one or the other.”

“Then let’s not disappoint them,” Easton said
and they started on down.

There really wasn’t any track worth the name,
only what might once have been a stream bed or a runoff. At one
point Easton lost his footing and slid about ten feet downhill on
his backside. Ironheel watched impassively as he got up.

A raised eyebrow: okay?

A wordless nod in reply: okay.

Then on, down again, Easton stoically
ignoring the throb of his bruised buttocks. I was right about one
thing, anyway, he told himself. It wasn’t any easier going down
than it had been coming up.