Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) (19 page)

‘
Here we
go again,’ he muttered, as the swiftly moving line of horsemen
rounded the southwestern perimeter of the stockade, about half a
mile away from it. He counted them: six white men and twenty-two
Indians. It was clear that they had discussed and agreed upon some
plan of attack. They wheeled to face the stockade in line abreast,
each rider about six yards or so from the one next to him. A second
line formed behind the first, slightly more men in it. Eighteen,
Angel counted, understanding the ploy. The front line often was the
fire-drawing line. In the days before repeating rifles, the Indians
had always fought like this. They knew that even the best men with
guns took almost half a minute to reload: pour in the powder, ram
home; ball, ram it home; wadding, ram it; up and ready to fire. So
they used to send in a screaming squad of a dozen trick riders to
draw the fire of their victims. As these riders came within range
of the rifles, they dropped to the defensive side of their
thundering ponies avoiding, as often as not, the volley of shots
aimed at them. Then, as the defenders fired their rifles, the main
force of attacking Indians rolled down upon the target, smashing
through its defenses before the men inside could reload.

Nix was trying a variation on the same
tactic.

The front line would come in,
daring Angel to set off his defensive ring, his counterattack,
whatever he had. If he didn
’t, they would keep on coming, take the wall and
prepare the way for the second wave. If he did, the second line
would come in like a wave over a safe beach, unscathed. The first
line was a suicide squad, and Angel could hear snatches of Comanche
death songs across the scorched and empty plain.

Only the earth lasts forever It
is a good day for dying Only the sun lasts forever
It
’s a good
day to die, brother.

Don
’t worry, brother, he thought, I’ll do my
best to oblige, and watched as they kicked their horses into
movement. He had reloaded the three Winchesters now, and changed
his vantage point to the tower overlooking the main gate. It was a
well-built hut of logs, with notches for rifles. He laid the three
guns out, ready, holding his fire as they came forward steadily,
the horses picking up their feet from a walk into a trot, bright
flashes of light glancing from the bits of glass and metal tied to
their bits. Five hundred yards. Four. Three, and still Angel held
his fire. The Winchester ‘73 was a good weapon, but anyone
expecting accuracy from it at more than two hundred and fifty yards
was not only an optimist but a fool due for sad disappointment. Two
hundred yards, a hundred and fifty. He checked the lever of the
first gun: there was a bullet up the spout. One hundred
yards.

The Indians were moving at a canter
now, yelling and screaming as they kicked the animals up into a
gallop, working the levers of their own rifles. As they came in
even closer, as if they had been rehearsing the movement for hours,
they veered off, forming a looping, open wheel perhaps sixty or
seventy yards in diameter, moving so that at any given moment only
one or two of them was within rifle range. As the wheel revolved,
it edged constantly closer to the wall of the stockade, a yard or
so at a time. The Comanche wheel, they called it. It was one of the
most effective tactics ever devised by the horseback Indians, the
revolving wheel acting like the blade in a sawmill, edging
inexorably closer to its target. At any moment, only a short
fast-moving arc went close to the enemy, and as it did, the
warriors slid down on the leeward side of their ponies, firing
their rifles from beneath the neck of the galloping beasts. Angel
dropped one horse, then another. Their riders rolled aside like
acrobats, and within the space of moments, ran alongside another
warrior, whirled up behind him, and dropped off on the safe far
side of the circle. They would come in again on foot when the
second wave attacked.

Nearer and nearer they came,
until now they were no more than twenty yards from the gate, black
charcoaled
dust hanging like a gritty curtain above them as they
yelled and screamed past. Still Nix held back his reserve, although
through the dust Angel could see the Indian leader waving his arms
as though to argue for attack.

When the short arc of the wheel was no
more than ten yards from the gates, Angel turned loose. He emptied
one full magazine and then another and then another as fast as he
could pull the trigger, his bullets taking a terrible toll of the
game little Comanche ponies. The meaty smacks as his bullets drove
into their bodies were sickening, but Angel steeled himself against
any semblance of pity. His was a war of total attrition, and he had
to use every means at his disposal to reduce the strength of his
foe. There were now five dead horses on the scorched ground, and
Angel knew that two others had been hit badly enough to render them
unserviceable. He also knew that the wheel was making its last few
turns. He had seen it before; and he knew what came
next.

The line straightened as the thought
passed through his mind, and the remaining half-dozen warriors ran
their horses straight at the gates, shouting their death
songs.

There was no explosion, nothing, and
after an infinitesimal faltering, they came on with renewed
confidence. They reached the gates and wheeled their ponies around,
unhitching saddle ropes and tossing them up to catch the pointed
tops of the gateposts. Angel let them do it, holding his fire: he
had other plans. The Comanches screeched their triumph and kicked
their horses away from the gates. The ropes twanged tight, taut,
and the thick gateposts rocked as the ponies threw their weight
against the horsehair ropes. Slowly, like some ancient longbow, one
of the posts bowed and then, suddenly, with a thunderous crack, it
broke off about six feet from the ground. The Comanche ponies
lurched away, trailing the broken post behind them, and as they
did, the gatepost on the other side came down with a tremendous
crash that raised a cloud of the black dust fifteen feet
high.

The Comanches cast off the ropes
and turned their ponies with savage cries of eagerness as their
warrior brothers came up at the gallop, Koh-eet-senko at their
head, and the long echoing
war cry of the Timber People bouncing off the
hills to the south. To their right and left came Hercules Nix’s
men, reins in their teeth and holding their seat with steely leg
thews, cocking the guns held in both ready hands. The dust sifted
away from the broken gateway that yawned before them and as it did,
the Comanches saw the figure of a man running across the courtyard
and gave a screech of delight that was still at its height when
Angel touched off the cannon.

Perhaps Koh-eet-senko and his
warriors saw the cannon, and perhaps they even had one awful moment
to realize what would come next. Even if they did, there was
absolutely nothing that they could do. The charging mob of horsemen
was forced to come closer together as it came through the broken
aperture into the stockade, and even if the Comanche were the
finest riders in the world, there were limits to their ability to
stop and turn and take avoiding action. Angel had gauged those
limits to an inch, making his run like a
banderillero
quartering across the face of the
bull. Rammed tight down the throat of the old cannon were as many
bits of old metal, nails, screws, bolts, washers, nuts, screws,
musket balls, and other hardware as Angel had been able to find. As
he thrust the burning taper down its newly cleaned touchhole, the
old cannon exploded with a stuttering boom and jumped backward on
its carriage, collapsing on one wheel. The rushing mob of Comanches
was obscured in a huge billowing cloud of powder smoke through
which whistled the cutting, whispering, deadly load. The flying
metal made a roaring
WHooooooooommmmmmmmm!
as it smashed into the packed bodies
of the men in the gateway. Angel saw the war party torn apart as if
it had been struck by some gigantic, invisible weapon wielded by
God’s own hand. Horses and men were blown apart, cut down by the
terrifying force of the close-range blast, torn to shreds without a
moment to comprehend the manner of their awful death. The air was
alive with the honey-on-herring stink of blood, and broken things
that might have been part of men or animals twitched in the
trammeled dirt.

Frank Angel had four shotguns
ready.

He walked into the screaming,
twisted vision of hell before the muzzle of the smoking cannon and
emptied them into anything he saw that moved amid the smoking pall
of death. As he emptied the guns he tossed them aside, his face as
cold as that of the avenging messenger of Satan. He saw men go down
beneath the irresistible smash of the buckshot, once heard the soft
buzz of a slug going past his own head as someone tried to fight
back. He fired the last barrel of the last gun and threw it down,
then turned and ran, calling Victoria
’s name.

The tattered survivors of the
war party had fallen back in total disarray, broken by the jaws of
hell into which they had ridden. Of the twenty-eight men who had
advanced in the bright sunlight upon the stockade, only seven
remained, four of them Comanches. They instinctively ran for the
solid shelter of the stockade walls, flattening themselves on the
outside of the perimeter. They were still moving away from the
awesome shambles of the main gates when Angel
’s shout to Victoria Nix
signaled her to once more touch together two bared
wires.

The explosives went off with a
stuttering series of bangs, like some enormous hammer striking an
equally huge anvil. Angel had wired the mines along the walls in
series, so that they went off perhaps half-a-second after each
other. Once more the air was filled with the awful whistling hail
of deadly metal, once more men fell screaming in gutted agony amid
smoke and flame. One of them was the Comanche, Koh-eet-senko. A
shard of metal about the size of a banana sliced through his neck
at a speed of about seven hundred miles an hour. He never even knew
he had been killed. The soft sibilant sound of dirt sifting back to
earth was followed by a
silence that was like the end of all life. Nothing
moved. The surviving men stood mute, paralyzed with fear and
horror. Smoke eddied on the vagrant breeze.

‘
Enough,
for Christ’s sake!’ Des Elliott whispered. His face was blackened
by smoke, and one of his arms was gashed where the fragment of
metal which had decapitated Koh-eet-senko had touched him in
passing. He looked at Hercules Nix with naked fear in his eyes.
Nix’s clothing hung on him in filthy tatters, blood smeared on his
face like Comanche war paint. His eyes were empty, insane. Saliva
dribbled from slack lips.

Elliott looked around him. There
were grisly dead everywhere the eye moved. The skull-faced Hisco,
one side of his face a raw pulp of broken flesh, touched his arm
and pointed with his chin at the only two Comanches left alive.
Their eyes were wide with terror, and they were already inching
away from the stinking pile of broken flesh that was all remaining
in this world of their warrior brothers. Elliott nodded: let them
go. There was nothing they could do, he could do, anyone could do.
Turning to the Indians, he held up his right hand, palm vertical,
bending all his fingers slightly forward. He pushed his hand out
and brought it back, the sign for
‘go.’ The Comanches needed no second
bidding. They nodded dumbly and ran to where some of the ponies had
stopped in a milling cluster. They caught up two and swung on to
their bare backs, moving away from the carnage without a backward
glance. They would keep going until they caught up with what was
left of the Timber People.

‘
Des,’
Hisco said.

Elliott turned and saw that
Hercules Nix was stumbling through the pile of corpses and dead
animals toward the
hacienda.
Elliott watched him narrowly. Had Nix gone mad? Nix was
standing in the center of the courtyard, his head to one side in a
listening position. Then it came up, and Nix thrust out an arm,
pointing to the north.

‘
There!’
he screeched. ‘There!’

Now Elliott heard it too, the muted
thunder of hoofs. He ran quickly up the wooden ladder to the
lookout post on the wall. Two figures on horseback were moving fast
up the far side of the river.

‘
Angel!’
Elliott said. ‘Angel—and—’

‘
Victoria!’ Nix shouted, and his voice was like a ghost in a
deep well. ‘Vic-to-ri-aaaaaaaaaaa!’

Elliott and Hisco ran back to where
they had left Nix, and as they came near they heard a strange,
broken, keening sound. They saw Hercules Nix walking around and
around in a tight circle on the patio, stamping his feet like a
spiteful child, spittle at the corners of his mouth. Each time he
passed the wall of the house he smashed his fist against it. The
metal claw was torn, the masking glove stripped off it. It looked
obscene.

‘
Nix!’
Elliott said, sharply, but Nix took no notice of him at all. Around
and around he went and as he went, he smashed the broken steel hand
on the wall, and mouthed something almost
unintelligible.

‘
Horrrrr!’ he growled, looking at the sky, the ground, the
man in front of him. He got hold of Hisco, who pulled free. ‘Errrr
I oh. Horrrrrrr!’