Stop Angel! (A Frank Angel Western Book 8) (18 page)

Koh-eet-senko and his warriors
were the first to see the smoke and recognize its source. Every
prairie-
savvy
rider knows that the only way to fight a running prairie fire is to
get the hell away from it, and there are no more prairie-savvy
riders than the Comanches. They knew, even if Nix’s men did not,
that a slight increase in the strength of the wind would send those
flames searing across the land at the speed of a galloping horse.
They were far too much realists to take the chance of that.
Forgetting the promised rewards, forgetting the fugitive whose
tracks they had found, forgetting everything except the need to get
their families and their possessions out of the path of the fire,
the Comanche warriors racked the heads of their ponies around and
streamed away in the direction of the encampment. Behind them, in
front of Nix and his deserted riders, the long line of flames
marched on.

Nix stilled his
frightened,
curveting horse, cursing the fleeing Indians, cursing the
advancing flames and his own luck until he ran out of curses and
stopped, realizing the folly of cursing what was beyond his or any
man’s control. This fire was no accident. It was Angel, and that
meant Angel had seen them and knew they were coming. It meant other
things, too. It meant the man had somehow gained access to the
stockade. How he had done so without being killed by Yat Sen,
Hercules Nix could not imagine. Yet it looked as if there was no
other explanation, which in turn meant that somehow, Angel had
killed the Oriental, for Nix knew that Yat Sen would never have let
the American live.

‘
Boss?’
Des Elliott said anxiously. ‘That fire is gettin’ awful damned
close.’

Nix looked up, shaking off
thoughts of doom. Elliott was right. The flames were noticeably
nearer, and the sky was filled with tiny floating bits of burned
grass that fell like black snow. The flames were already close to
the
tree line
below the Comanche camp, and Nix thought he could see moving dots
amid the billowing smoke as the Indians fled the relentless fire.
He mantled himself with determination. If Angel had thought the
firing of the land a masterstroke, he might yet find it a two-edged
one. He turned to Dooley Watson.

‘
You!’
he snapped. ‘Get over there, to the Comanche camp. Find
Koh-eet-senko. Tell him that the man who started the fire is at the
stockade. Tell him I said if he wants vengeance, to meet me across
the river at the dry ford. Tell him I said if we take the man, he
can have him. He can do whatever he likes with him. Tell him
that!’

‘
You
think he’ll listen?’ Watson asked dubiously.

‘
He’ll
listen!’ Nix shouted, putting on a confident face he didn’t truly
believe in. ‘He’ll be as mad as a hornet. His horses will all be
stampeded. He’s lost his camp, his possessions, all his plunder
from the raid. Probably a few of his people as well. He’ll want
revenge for that, so we’ll tell him he can have our
Angel!’

‘
But I
thought you—?’ Elliott said.

‘
Of
course,’ Nix said. ‘But we won’t tell that black-faced bastard
that, will we?’

Elliott grinned and as he did,
Nix slapped Watson
’s horse across the haunch. The animal jumped into a run,
and thundered off at a tangent toward the Comanche camp. Nix
nodded, as if satisfied.

‘
All
right,’ he said. ‘We’ll pull back across the river. Wait for
Koh-eet-senko. Then with him, or without him, we hit the
hacienda.
With everything
we’ve got!’

‘
You
what?’ Elliott said, surprised. ‘Hit the
hacienda?’

‘
Yes!’
Nix said, his voice rising to a shout. ‘That’s where he is, so
that’s where we’ll take him. This time we’re not going to mess it
up! This time we’re going to stop Angel—dead!’

Now it was war.

Before this it had been a jaunt,
a manhunt with a known ending of sadistic pleasure, but now it was
more than that. Koh-eet-senko wanted vengeance, just as Nix had
predicted he would, and he had brought thirty warriors with him,
painted for war. Their lances caught fire from the bright sun as
they streamed behind their leaders down the western side of the
valley. Their warrior brothers were busy shepherding the rest of
the Timber People out of their encampment, away from the leaping
fire. Although they knew it would eventually burn itself out at the
rim of the desert, they also knew there would be no life-support
left in its wake. The animals had already fled, fleetly
outstripping the humans. Behind the still raging flames lay only
scorched earth, stunted roots, shriveled trees. The forest was
destroyed, and a dozen Comanches had died fighting to save their
homes and their horses. A number of warriors had died when they had
dashed into the lake for water with which to fight the flames.
Their comrades had watched in superstitious, uncomprehending terror
as the men thrashed and screamed and bled and died in the water.
Some ran to their rescue, only to fall prey to the razor fangs of
the piranha themselves. Others had died beneath blazing, falling
trees, and the panicked hoofs of terrified ponies. There would be
much grief in the night camp of the
Hoh’ees.
The women would slash their arms and their
breasts in ritual tribute to the dead, the men would cut short
their hair to mourn their brothers. To avenge them Koh-eet-senko
had called his best warriors to his side, and they streamed like
cavalry in formation behind the knot of Nix’s men, faces painted in
broad black stripes of war, outpacing the white men as they forged
down the valley. They bore their best lances, their shining
repeating rifles. They all wanted to count
coup
on the body of the man who had brought
destruction upon them.

Nix, by subtle signals to his
men, let the Indians draw ahead. He had bitter experience of
Angel
’s
survival techniques, and anticipated that the man from the Justice
Department might have some savage tricks waiting for them. Let
Koh-eet-senko and his warriors trigger them. Then Nix would strike
his own blow.

Angel watched them coming down the
valley. He was on the lookout tower at the northwest corner of the
stockade. Below him, inside it, Victoria stood near the window of
the machinery room, between wall and stockade, two pieces of wire
in her hand, bared of insulation. She stood in shadow, her face a
pale blur, dressed in riding breeches and neat English-style
jacket, looking for all the world as though she was awaiting the
arrival of a groom with her horse, ready for the hunt. Angel
grinned at the vanity: Victoria might be going hunting, but it was
a larger fox than usual that she would pursue. No one would be
happier than she to see the man who had built this valley of death
destroyed.

He had pieced together the whole story
now.

Nix had given him some clues,
and she filled in the gaps. She told him of finding the almost-dead
Ernie Hecatt on the trail, of riding for help and seeing that he
was nursed back to health. When he recovered,
Hecatt
—who
had told them his name was Nix—insisted on working at the ranch to
pay off some of his indebtedness to them. He had gradually won the
confidence of old Tom Stacey, Victoria’s father, and before long,
was helping the old man at the bank in Waco. Gradually—he did
everything carefully, without haste—Nix made himself indispensable
to the old man. He was always on hand to pour the old man a stiff
drink, followed by a stiffer one. Within a year, Tom Stacey
couldn’t get through the day without at least a quart of whiskey,
and his mind was so fuddled that he signed anything Nix put in
front of him, did anything Nix wanted him to do. There was one
thing Nix wanted more than anything else: and that was Victoria
Stacey. When he was ready, he took her, too.

‘
Then we
came here,’ Victoria had told him while they worked. ‘He brought a
builder in, hundreds of Mexicans. He worked them like a madman,
like Pharaoh building a tomb. When it was finished, he had them all
taken away.

Then he brought in the others,
Elliott and his men. I was as much a prisoner as if I were in jail.
He told me if I ever tried to leave the valley he would come after
me, and when he caught me he would give me to the
Comanches.
’

‘
It
was probably just a threat,’ Angel said, more to fill in
the silence than anything else. ‘No white man would give a white
woman to an Indian.’

‘
It was
no threat, Frank,’ she said, without emphasis. ‘He would have done
it. He has the soul of Satan himself: there is no foul thing he
would not do.’

The Comanches were moving in battle
formation as they came whooping down the valley, their line a long
broken V with its point to the rear. In the narrowest arm of the V
Angel saw a knot of riders and grinned mirthlessly: Nix might have
the soul of Satan, but he also had his cunning. He was letting the
Indians take the sting out of any surprises that his foe might have
prepared. Well, it make no damned difference to Angel. He gave the
signal to Victoria and she touched together the ends of the two
wires.

It had been hardly any trouble
to work out the way that the crude switches were linked to pump and
filter and battery. There were diagrams on the walls to show the
locations of the mines, and Angel had been surprised to discover
that there was an inner ring of explosives within the stockade, a
last-ditch defense of which Nix had said nothing. He had
disconnected all the contacts, and then he and Victoria had gone
outside and started digging. The buried bombs were simple, and
probably brutally effective. Cast-iron canisters, about the size of
a cowpat, maybe four inches deep and packed with explosive. A
detonator linked to the battery circuit was made live when the
switch was thrown. Above it was a springy steel plate which set off
the detonator when it was depressed. Man or horse, whatever
triggered the device would be blown to smithereens, and the
shrapnel of the case would cut through anything nearby as it
whickered into a killing spray. There was one of
these devices every
yard or so, harmless when disconnected, lethal otherwise. They dug
all the ones on the northeastern and southern sides of the stockade
and lugged them, sweating and dirty, across to the other side.
There Angel buried them, making no real effort to conceal them
properly. He didn’t have the time for finesse. He ran the wires
back to the batteries and connected them up, bypassing the
switches. All that was needed to set off the mines was a spark, and
Victoria supplied that when she touched together the two bared
copper wires.

The Indians were thundering
toward the stockade, their ornaments and weapons flashing in the
brilliant sun, an awesome line of primitive force. Magnificent,
ugly, their bodies painted with ochre and vermillion, decorated
with amulets and medicine signs, screaming their
ululating attack
cry, they were about twenty yards from the stockade when the world
blew up in their faces.

There was unimaginable
panic.

Horses were blown apart, their
riders with them. Others were cut down by the terrible slicing
force of fragmented metal, still others smashed to the ground by
the sheer power of the blast. Horses stopped dead in their tracks,
pitching their riders ten and fifteen feet ahead of them in
tumbling, broken bundles. In the pattering descent of metal and
stone and swirling dust were softer, wetter, warmer things, all
that remained of the comrades of those who crawled on the broken
ground life shattered insects, blood streaking the bright paint on
their bodies. And now from the lookout tower, Angel poured a random
hail of lead into the routed Comanche band, emptying the three
preloaded Winchesters in a staccato roll of shots. The seeking rain
of driving lead hard on the heels of the awful explosion was beyond
resistance, and Koh-eet-senko gathered together what was left of
his men, shouting at them to pull back to where Nix and his men had
pulled their mounts to a safe stop, appalled by the slaughter
before them. A couple of Elliott
’s men yanked out their Winchesters and
threw shots at the small figure in the look-out tower, but none of
them came near Angel. There wasn’t a man in a thousand that could
hit a mark at half a mile from the back of a horse, much less an
animal made jumpy by the proximity of a huge explosion. He watched
now through the same telescope that Hercules Nix had used to
observe Angel’s entry into the valley. He could see Nix
gesticulating furiously at the Indian leader, and the Comanche
making angry, chopping movements with his hands. It wasn’t
difficult to guess what they were arguing about, and Angel watched
with grim satisfaction. He had won the first skirmish. The tattered
things that lay bloodily broken on the smoking ground below were
part of the price the Indians had to pay for their allegiance to
Nix. But they were casualties only of the battle. The war was not
yet over.

The war party had gathered
itself again, and now the white men took the lead. Once again Angel
grinned: Koh-eet-senko wasn
’t buying the same trouble twice, and had insisted
that Nix and his men took the van. That was what they’d been
arguing about: and it suited Angel’s purposes admirably. He hoped
he’d estimated Nix’s reaction correctly. As the riders regrouped
and moved out of range, he saw that they were heading south again,
and would come around the southern side of the stockade, between it
and the mountains. Nix would know the area on the eastern side of
the stockade was mined, including the ground in front of the main
gates. He would therefore send his men at the walls on either side
of the gates, where they could jump the line of mines, or take one
of the corners. He had made his own bet. There were no longer any
mines before the main gates. He and Victoria had dug them up and
redistributed them among the walls, about four feet from the
palisade itself.