Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) (11 page)

‘
F
our,’ Frank Angel muttered, easing back below the fallen
log on which he had rested his left elbow for certain aim. He
glanced up at the patch of sky he could see through the screening
curtain of leaves. In another couple of hours it would be dark. The
air smelled soft, damp; there might be rain on the way.

He lay motionless as a hunting
puma.

There is enormous discipline in
remaining completely still, totally silent, especially when you are
being hunted. Not many men can do it. They fall prey to the
temptation to move slightly, to peer from their place of
concealment, see if anyone is coming, check that all is well. It is
often a fatal error, and Angel did not make it. He knew he was well
hidden, for he had chosen his hiding place with extreme care, using
the open space of the clearing to make a long leap into the center
of an abundant stand of chest-high ferns growing beneath the trees.
He landed like a cat, then
moved very carefully sideways about ten yards,
lost in the tangled profusion of the plants. He was to all intents
and purposes invisible, and he lay like a fallen tree,
concentrating upon inner silence as he had been taught by the
little Korean, Kee Lai.

You must learn to control
all of yourself, mind and body together. Once you have this
control, you can do anything. Observe the hunted things. See how
they protect themselves, watch how they hide. They become one with
the trees that shelter them, the earth that shields them, the
plants that surround them. Do this also. Listen to the turning of
the earth, the passing of the clouds, the coming and going of the
wind. When you truly hear all these, nothing else can escape your
ears.

The earth smelled strong and
rich. He heard birds moving in the branches overhead, the soft sigh
of the breeze amid the bright leaves. Small insects buzzed. Ants
marched erratically across his spread hands. Watching ants you feel
like God, he thought. Are we to them as God is to us? We casually
step on a cluster of ants, destroy with a casual swipe one which
dares to touch our precious flesh, drive our horses through their
intricately built nests. Are we to them what accidents, murders,
earthquakes are to us? Are God
’s moods as random as ours?

He heard a twig snap, off to his
right.

‘
Major!’
a voice hissed. ‘Major, you there?’

‘
Here,’
another voice whispered, somewhere behind Angel’s position. ‘That
you, Elliott?’

‘
Yeah,’
Elliott said. ‘You see anything?’

‘
No sign
of him. He killed Ricky, though.’

‘
I
seen it.’

Angel heard the thick, clumsy crackle
of a man moving through the undergrowth. About fifty yards away, he
reckoned, and off to the right. Too far, he thought, feeling
coolness in the air. Night was on its way.

‘
Where’s
the boss?’ he heard the one called Major hiss. In his mind’s eye,
he saw them hunkered together somewhere. That was the reason for
the crackle of movement, Elliot shifting his position to join
Major. They would be behind a tree or a big rock, eyes wary, nerves
tense, guns ready, sweating. Let them sweat: that was part of his
psychology. The first principal of guerilla fighting was to get
your enemy off balance, nervous. The guerilla fights the war of the
flea, and his larger enemy suffers the disadvantages of the dog:
too much to defend, too small, ubiquitous, and agile an enemy to
come to grips with. Most of Hercules Nix’s previous victims had
been hyped into playing the game by Nix’s rules: they had simply
run, and thus been easy to take. None had used Angel’s hit-and-run
technique, giving Nix’s killers no time to settle to their work.
They wouldn’t have the stomach for fighting the war of the flea.
Angel smiled in the dark coolness of his hiding place.

Hercules Nix was not a fool. He
knew about the war of the flea, and he knew, as soon as Elliott
gave him a situation report, that Angel had chosen to fight it. He
smiled at the man
’s determination and skill. He had badly underestimated his
quarry, and it had cost him four men. Hercules Nix cared less than
nothing about that, of course. He paid his killers to take risks.
The buzzards took care of those who fell. As for himself, he had
revised his plans, for he had no intention of playing into Angel’s
hands. He called his men back out of the trees, and sent the Major
across to the barracks at the Portal. There were half a dozen men
there, and Barnfleld and the skull-faced Hisco would have completed
their sweep of the western side of the valley by now. Two men would
be enough to hold the entrance road; the others could be here by
first light.

‘
What
you got in mind?’ Des Elliott asked.

Nix smiled, the smile of a man still
supremely confident. He waved his hand at the trees. Darkness was
coming slowly down from the San Miguels, spreading across the floor
of the valley, stealing away the distances.

‘
He’s in
there somewhere,’ he said. ‘Correct?’ Elliott nodded; it was hardly
a revelation.

‘
What
will he do? Lie low, or cut and run?’

‘
He
might run for it. Use darkness to make a break.’

‘
Not
this one,’ Nix said, emphatically. ‘He
wants
us to go in there and look for him. That
way he could take us one at a time. We’d never even see him. Our
advantages are numbers, firepower. In there we lose
them.’

‘
Agreed,’ Elliott said. ‘So how do we take him?’

‘
We have
to get him out in the open, where he can’t use that incredible bow
or crossbow or whatever it is. Where whatever other tricks he has
up his sleeve won’t work.’

‘
Terrific,’ Elliott said. ‘How do we pull that with a dozen
men?’

‘
We
don’t,’ Nix said dreamily. ‘Have you ever heard how they hunt
lion?’

‘
Uh?
Hunted what?’

‘
Lion,’
Nix repeated. ‘In Africa. It’s a very simple system, practically
infallible. They get all the people of the village to act as
beaters. They take drums and buckets and anything that will make a
noise, and they go into the long grass where the lion hides,
banging and shouting and whistling, dozens and dozens of them—far
too many for Simba to attack, even if he wanted to. He has no
choice left. If he lies where he is, one of them will find him, and
the hunters will come. He drops back to a new hiding place. But the
beaters move on, inexorably. Again, Simba moves, but now he is
running out of hiding places. What shall he do? Behind him are the
beaters, sounding like all the devils in hell on a holiday. Ahead
of him is the empty open plain, with no long grass to shield
him.’

‘
And
then?’

‘
He
moves out into the open. And the real hunters are waiting to kill
him.’

‘
I’m
beginnin’ to get your drift,’ Elliott grinned. ‘You’re goin’ to use
the Injuns as beaters, right?’

‘
Right,’
Nix said. ‘We’ll get all the women and kids at the southern side of
the woods. At first light, they move in, one long line of
them!’

‘
And
we’ll be waiting,’ Elliott said, showing his teeth in a feline
grin.

‘
Correct,’ Nix said. The way to combat the war of the flea
was to shear the dog. He saw himself sitting on the black stallion
at the northern edge of the forest as the Indians worked their way
through the woods. He imagined the panicked figure of the hunted
man bursting through the tangled undergrowth and then, left with no
choice, heading out into the open where the hunters waited. He saw
himself riding the man down, white glimpse of face beneath the
thundering hoofs, despairing shout of pain. Like shooting fish in a
barrel, he thought, with a wicked smile of anticipation. They had
Mister Angel on a plate.

Night fell like a
blanket.

Now, and only now, did Frank
Angel rise from his chilly lair to stretch cramped muscles, speed
slowed circulation. It was somewhere between unlikely and
impossible that Nix would send his men in after the quarry in the
dark, but he wasn
’t about to take that fact for granted. He tried to put
himself in Nix’s place, think what the big man might do
next.

When you
’re alone and hunted, there is nobody
to help.

You can guess what your pursuer
may do, hope you are right. It
’s not a lot of help, because you only get one
chance to be wrong. Your pursuer can make as many errors as he
likes, given an endless supply of men and money and time. He can
try again and again and again. Not you. One false step, one
overlooked factor, and you are dead meat. So Angel made no hasty
moves. Ignoring the gnawing pangs of hunger in his belly, he sat
beneath a tree and considered his options.

There was no easy way out of the
forest. It was big enough to hide in, but it was also small enough
to encircle. If he were Nix, he would use his men like a trail boss
would use them, treating the forest as the herd. The men would ride
around it in pairs, like
nightriders, always within earshot of each other.
In the night silence, any movement would be quite easy to detect.
He had long since abandoned the thought of using the horse, which
must still be loose somewhere in the woods. They would hear his
approach half a mile away if he tried to break out on horseback. So
what to do? He considered some other possibilities, rejecting them
as he did. Playing sniper; lying low and waiting to see what Nix
would do; even firing the woods and using the flames to conceal his
escape. None of them was feasible.

Attack, they said, was the best form
of defense.

He got to his feet and moved
silently through the trees, careful not to startle any foraging
night animal, moving northward until his nostrils were assailed by
the stink of the Comanche encampment. Then he paused to take his
bearings. A gently sloping declivity lay before him, at the bottom
of which lay a lapping pool of water, perhaps thirty feet across
and twice as many long. Its shelving banks were trampled clay,
denuded of bushes and grass by the endless procession of moccasined
feet to the water
’s edge. About fifty yards from the edge of the water was a
lazily flickering fire, near which several men slept on
blankets.

The stink was strong enough to
slice.

Comanches had no concept of
hygiene, and never washed except during ceremonial purifications.
Normally, they simply pulled up their stakes and quit a campsite
once it began to smell too badly. This protected haven was too good
to quit, but that did not mean they took care not to defoul it. A
long line of tee-pees faced the water, and behind that another and
then another. Between them was a wide space, like a street. The
teepees had a four-pole base,
twenty-two poles to a frame. Most of them were
about fifteen feet high, and of about the same diameter. They took
up a lot of space, and to a degree Angel was surprised to see them.
It must be the semi-permanent nature of the camp, he thought.
Comanches usually slept outdoors in the summer, on light bedding or
in brush arbors. They were a strange, outcast race, unlike any of
the other Indian tribes. They cared nothing for the symbols of
status and bravery that other Plains tribes prized. Comanch’ wore
no eagle feathers, no warbonnets, no beaded buckskin. Breechclout
and hip-high painted hunting boots were the standard garb of the
Comanche fighting man in summer. His status and deeds were recorded
upon his war shield, constructed of layered buffalo hide and
capable of deflecting a well-aimed arrow at fifty feet. War shields
were painted with magic symbols with special meaning for the
warrior who carried them; sometimes the teeth of slain bears,
horsetails, or human scalps were added. These also demonstrated
prowess. Horse tails advertised the owner’s skill in that most
admired of all Comanche arts, stealing horses.

The shields were a great help to
the hidden man, for they told him many things. No warrior ever took
his war shield into the teepee, where its medicine might be
lessened by contact with people
—especially unclean people like women. No woman
was allowed near a war shield, much less to touch it. Instead
warriors stored their shields at the edge of the camp, or in some
central spot. In a sloppy, polluted dump like this, they were
leaned against the sides of the teepees, and their presence made it
easy for Angel to assess the probable strength of the camp.
Fourteen fighting men, and these probably the dregs of the band.
The others must be out raiding, and those left behind would be the
sick, the wounded, the old. Mostly the sick, Angel thought, smiling
without humor. Comanch’ were more often out of commission because
of their complete ignorance of the most elementary rules of
sanitation than because of war wounds. He recalled what one
hard-bitten cavalryman he knew had called the complaint: the
Comanche Two-Step.

He estimated the total number of
teepees at around forty-five, moving around the perimeter under the
cover of night, using black pools of deeper shadow, ever wary of
sleeping curs. Rouse one of those yapping animals, and the camp
would be awake in moments. The women would kill you as readily as
the men, but they wouldn
’t be as merciful. He reached the northern edge of
the camp and found the horse herd without difficulty. There were
about twenty ponies in a rope corral that closed in a smaller, but
no less trampled clearing. Further evidence that the warriors in
this encampment were second class. Some top war leaders of the
Comanche owned as many as fifteen hundred horses, for horse-flesh
was the ultimate Comanche status symbol. With the real fighting men
away, what was left behind was a sorry-looking lot. He tested the
faint breeze and kept upwind of the horses for now. He was near
enough for the animals to see him if he moved, and he wanted to let
them get accustomed to his presence without detecting his alien
smell. If they caught his scent, they would react, and that would
bring someone running.