Apache Country (33 page)

But what kind of trap, and how best to spring
it?

“Okay, Bluebird,” he said into the
walkie-talkie. “I’m coming up through the scree now. You got me
yet?”

“Affirmative. You’re about fifty yards south
and maybe twenty five, thirty feet above the cave.”

Kuruk looked over the edge into the
blackness. “Any way I can get down to it from here?”

“Negative.”

“Can you land up here on the saddle?”

“No sweat,” the pilot said. “Why?”

“Just get down here!” Kuruk snapped. “And do
it now.”

He crouched among the huge boulders on the
saddle beneath the sheer south face of Chimney Rock. As the
helicopter came across the night sky he got a glimpse of the two
men inside, limned in the ghost glow of the instrument panels as it
banked away from the mountain. A storm of dust whirled and eddied
up around him as it landed, sifting sibilantly down as the rotors
slowed and finally ceased turning. As the two men clambered out of
the aircraft Kuruk went across to meet them.

“You guys packin’ iron?” he rasped.

Frank Dixon, the pilot, nodded and held up a
chromed .357 Magnum Mark III Lawman Colt. Short and dark haired,
with the wiry build of a jockey, he wore a bomber jacket and tan
chinos. The other man, Alvares, was taller and slimmer, with
receding hair and a worried expression. He wore a shooting vest
with empty ammo loops, a blue denim shirt and light striped
poly-cotton pants. He held up a Bodyguard Airweight .38 Smith &
Wesson so Kuruk could see it. Both of them looked edgy, green about
the gills. Coors men, Kuruk thought contemptuously. You ask for
good men and they send this shit.

He watched silently as Dixon walked over to
the edge of the saddle and stared down.

“Jesus,” the pilot said, turning to face
Kuruk. “Is there a way to get down there?”

“Trail leads down the gully to the canyon
floor,” Kuruk said. “Then we work our way up to the cave.”

“Holy shit,” Alvares protested, “Won’t that
be dangerous?”

“Nothing like as dangerous as trying to
chicken out,” Kuruk rasped.

Alvares eyes widened with alarm. “Hey, take
it easy, man, no problem,” he stuttered.

“Better not be,” Kuruk said, turning away so
they couldn’t see his contempt. “Come on, let’s get started.”

Levering a shell into the breech of his
Winchester, he led the way down into the trees. The ground sloped
sharply and although it was only about half a mile down to the
canyon floor, their progress was slow. It was cool and silent as
they moved around the curve of the hill in the pre-dawn darkness.
To Kuruk’s ears the two men behind him sounded like stampeding
elephants. Disturbed in its nocturnal prowling, a night owl
suddenly burst from a bush with a rush of wings and sped past Kuruk
through the trees.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Dixon breathed. “What was
that?”

“An owl, for Chrissake,” Kuruk rasped. “Keep
your mind on your job.”

They advanced maybe another hundred and fifty
yards. Kuruk could feel the ground sloping upward beneath his feet.
He hunkered down on his haunches and parted the brush in front of
him.

“Okay,” he whispered hoarsely. “There’s the
cave where you say you saw the fire. You guys ready?”

He could smell the fear coming off the bodies
of the two men crouched behind him as they stared up the
sharply-rising rock face at the entrance to the cave twenty feet
above. Was it his imagination, Kuruk wondered, or could he see a
faint flicker of light? In the same moment he scented the faint
ashy aroma of woodsmoke.

“Ko’,” he said, more to himself than anyone
else. “Fire.”

“They in there?” Alvares whispered
hoarsely.

Kuruk didn’t answer. His keen eyes studied
the trailing vegetation partially covering the entrance to the cave
and the compacted earth in front of it. He gave the two airmen a
hand signal, follow, and using every shred of cover he could find,
moved warily up the slope until he was maybe ten feet to the right
of the cave entrance. A sort of ledge ran upward away from it at an
angle. This close he could detect faint scuffs, tiny indentations
in the ground. Someone had been here. Was he – were they – still
inside?

Think like the enemy. Take nothing at its
face value. Maybe they wanted him to think they were in this cave
but in fact were in the one above waiting for him to make his
move.

“What now?” Alvares whispered.

“Get over to the left,” Kuruk told him,
pointing. “Dixon, you take the right.”

Dixon moved off toward the right, Alvares
peeling off to the other side. Kuruk waited, watching, wincing at
the racket they made moving through the undergrowth.

“Stay put while I check the other cave,” he
hissed when they were in position. “If I open fire, start shooting
into the cave. Got it?”

There was a faint hint of gray in the
darkness now. The two men nodded tensely, their faces pale and
drawn in the strengthening light. They’d have to do, Kuruk thought.
Placing his feet with infinite care, he moved soundlessly up the
long ledge of rock toward the cave higher up the slope, stopping as
the rock face broke away to his left. Screened by a straggling
branch of piñon, he was able to make out the entrance to the cave,
maybe ten yards ahead. Once again his keen nostrils detected the
faint sharp tang of woodsmoke: there had been a fire in this cave,
too.

So which was it – the cave below or this
one?

It didn’t make a damn bit of difference. The
roof of the cave would be low and sloping. When he opened fire and
the special rounds he had loaded hit it, the rock would
disintegrate into a murderous mist of shrapnel that would cut
anyone inside the cave to ribbons. His mouth set in a hard thin
line. He drew in a deep breath then let it out, firing the
Winchester as fast as he could operate the lever.

Its landing lights limning everything below a
ghostly yellow, the helicopter moved up around the side of the
mountain in a swirl of dust, then dropped out of sight as it
descended. Watching from the cave, Easton felt a surge of triumph
as the sound of the engine ebbed and died: the bird was on the
ground.

Touching Ironheel’s arm as a signal, he led
the way out of the cave, running flat out up a faint trail that led
through close-set trees toward the north face of Chimney Rock.
Daybreak was already lightening the sky and birds were rehearsing
the first notes of the dawn chorus. They scrambled along a ledge
that sloped upward to a rocky plateau littered with broken boulders
and jumbled piles of stone, heading from there in an imperfect
half-circle around the northern shoulder of the huge granite spire.
They had covered maybe half a mile when they heard the sudden
racket of gunfire, shockingly loud in the empty morning. Birds rose
chattering in panic from the trees as the explosions echoed off the
face of the rocks.

“Kuruk,” Ironheel said.

No comment was necessary. The Mescalero had
taken the bait. It wouldn’t be long before he realized he had been
duped. Once he knew they had not come downhill, he would come
looking for them. How many men were there? How long would it be?
Easton wondered. Half an hour? Twenty minutes?

He moved forward along the western face of
the mountain, slipping and scrambling on loose rock and shale,
Ironheel close behind. As they approached the open ground that
formed the saddle, he held up a hand and came to a stop, his back
flattened against the rough stone. Ironheel edged up alongside.

“There she is,” Easton whispered.

He had been right. The ‘copter was a Hughes
Defender, twenty three feet long, eight feet high, with rotors over
twenty-six feet in diameter, painted a matte dark blue. All
identifying insignia and registration plates had been removed. It
stood on a patch of open ground amid the rocky scree about twenty
yards back from the edge of the ragged arroyo down which the trail
led to the valley below. There was no sign of any crew.

“Wait here,” Ironheel said, handing him the
Winchester.

“Where are you going?” Easton frowned.

“Take a look,” Ironheel said and wormed his
way back among the big boulders behind them. It got very quiet
again. Nothing moved. Time passed, an invisible river flowing to an
unknown sea. As the sun moved a couple of notches up the sky and a
welcome warmth began to radiate from the rocks, Ironheel slipped
soundlessly back between the boulders with two pistols stuck in his
belt.

“Kuruk had only two men with him.”

“Had?”

“Found them down in the gully,” Ironheel
said. “Ndaldzid. Scared to death, making more noise than a herd of
buffalo.” He touched the weapons in his belt.

“You disarmed them?”

“No point killing them,” Ironheel said,
ejecting the shells from the Colt and the other handgun.

“And Kuruk?”

“He coppered his bet. Left them outside the
lower cave, went up to the cave where we were and hosed it down.
Told them to start blasting when he opened up. Whichever cave we
were in, we’d be dead.”

“That was what all the shooting was?”

“Ha’ah.”

“And now he knows we weren’t in either of
them.”

Easton took a quick look round. The rock
strewn saddle area was still as deserted as it had been since they
came upon it.

“You know where he is?”

“He’s coming,” Ironheel said. “But he’ll take
no chances. He doesn’t want to die any more than we do.”

“I’m going to disable that chopper before he
gets up here,” Easton said. “Cover me.”

He ran crouching across the open ground
toward the helicopter. During the ten or fifteen minutes Ironheel
had been away, he had abandoned his original intention of setting
fire to the helicopter: a pillar of smoke would very quickly
attract the attention of their other hunters. Now instead, he slid
back the door and using the barrel of his gun, smashed in the
monitor screens of the FLIR and the thermal imager, each imploding
satisfyingly with a sound like shattering light bulbs. Next he
smashed all the dials on the instrument panels and wrecked the
engine starter controls. You won’t come after me again in that, you
bastards, he thought with venomous satisfaction.

He ducked to back out of the cockpit and the
movement saved his life. With an enormous bang, a huge chunk of the
chopper’s canopy bubble disintegrated into whistling shards of
flying plastic. Half-turning he was just in time to see Mose Kuruk
fade back behind a slide of rock on the flank of the mountain,
pumping another round into the barrel of his weapon.

Throwing himself down, rolling behind the
chopper’s undercarriage, Easton desperately loosed off three hasty
shots. He heard the slugs whine off rock somewhere. Then Kuruk
fired again and the bullet blasted a fist-sized hole straight
through the metal fuselage of the chopper, sending tiny pieces of
metal whistling through the air above Easton’s head.

He recoiled as another shot whanged off one
of the struts and another tiny rain of metal, like iron filings,
burst in a cloud after the impact, stinging his eyes. What the hell
was the man using for ammunition?

The ten yards between his position and the
nearest scatter of boulders looked as vast and empty as a football
field. There was no sign of Ironheel. Emptying everything except
the sheer need to move as fast as he had ever moved in his life, he
turned and ran like a deer toward the tumble of rocks.

It was like everything was happening in ultra
slow-mo. Every sense was vivid. He could feel his feet pounding the
hard earth, hear the breath rushing through his lungs, the
adrenaline-fueled thunder of his heart. As he ran, weaving,
crouching, he clearly heard Mose Kuruk lever another round into the
magazine of his rifle and felt his skin crawl against the expected
shock of a bullet, but none came.

Diving behind the sheltering rocks,
frantically scrabbling around to get into some kind of shooting
position, he saw Ironheel step calmly out into the open to Kuruk’s
left, head up, the way a bullfighter steps proud into the ring, the
short Apache bow drawn full back. How he had gotten to where he was
from where he had been it was impossible to conceive.

Kuruk saw him and gave a jubilant shout,
pivoting to aim his weapon, but even with a bullet in the breech,
he was a heartbeat too slow. Easton’s eyes caught the flicker of
sunlight on the arrow as it sped across the clearing. It drove into
Kuruk’s throat just below his jaw and burst out of the back of his
neck. Transfixed, eyes bugging, Kuruk staggered back, dropping his
rifle. His clawed hands reached up to wrench the killing thing out
of his throat, but then the strength seemed to run out of him like
spilled water. He collapsed onto his knees, his forehead touching
the ground. He made a ghastly strangling sound and then a huge gout
of blood spurted from his mouth and he rolled over on to his side.
His legs kicked once or twice and then he was still. Across the
clearing, Ironheel stood like stone.

Easton quartered warily across to where Kuruk
lay, the arrow like a skewer through his throat, flies already
buzzing around his head. Ironheel soundlessly joined him and stood
looking down at his enemy, his expression dark and brooding.
Neither triumph nor sadness showed in his eyes.

“Aal bengonyáá,” he said quietly. “His power
was gone.”

For a moment Easton didn’t know what he was
talking about, then remembered what Grita had told him.

“I say it again, patrón. Apache is different.
He believes unearthly things are just as real as a horse or a tree.
Lightning, thunder. Love, hate. All these things have bigo’dih’ingó
– power. To deal with danger Apache need to draw upon this power.
If he does not have it, or if he loses it, he will die.”

“The bow,” Easton said, remembering how
Ironheel had looked when he saw it hanging on the wall in the
cabin. “I knew damned well there must be something special about
it.”