Conquistador

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“Damn the Akaka for running us so far off course,” Adrienne said, looking up from the map. “We’ve been zigzagging so much we’ve ridden more miles east and west than south to north.”

Westward the peaks of the southern Sierras towered, close now and looking closer in late afternoon; the snow-topped heights farther north were ethereally lovely, but they also made Tom think of iced drinks. The desert had sloped up for a week of hard night travel now, and Tom’s inner ear told him they were at well over a thousand feet. It was perceptibly cooler in daytime—just very hot, not a brutal wringing that made your eyes bulge as if someone were tightening a steel cable around your temples. The nights were positively cool, which made traveling a pleasure—particularly since they’d shaken the last of the Akaka warriors in the canyons of the Randburg mountains to the southeast. After that they’d seen an occasional dust plume or the wink of sunlight on steel, but nothing closer.

“The problem is Owens Lake,” Jim Simmons said, pointing. “It plugs the base of the valley like a cork. If we want to get to Cerro Gordo in the Inyos, we have to backtrack from here. That’s bad country, and we may run into more of Swift Lance’s men, too.”

“Whatever the Colletta is paying them, it isn’t enough,” Adrienne said. “Goddamned persistent bunch.”

Tom looked at the map, shaking his head. The basic geography of the area they were heading for was the same, a north-south trench between the eastern Sierras and the White-Inyo range. But back FirstSide, the Owens Lake area at its southern end was a waterless expanse of salts, empty since the 1920s. LA’s insatiable thirst had sucked the valley dry like a giant mosquito with a proboscis two hundred and fifty miles long.

Here the dry bed he knew was a real lake, over a hundred square miles of it—mostly shallow, salty as the ocean, but indubitably wet.

“Short of going even farther west and then climbing over one of the Sierra passes, I don’t think we’ve got any choice but this,” he said, pointing with one long strong finger.

He traced a route up along the flank of the mountains. “Up here, between the Sierras and the Coso mountains—through the Rose Valley. We go around the western shore of the lake, and once we’re past the narrows at Little Lake and the Haiwee reservoir—”

“Haiwee Meadows, here,” Simmons said. “Flat grassy area, with some marsh.”

“Haiwee Meadows, then, we can keep the Alabama Hills between us and Lone Pine.”

“The Colletta hunting lodge,” Adrienne corrected him absently. “Where the river meets a seasonal creek coming out of the Alabama Hills, just north of the lake. Officially”—she traced a circle on the map—“that and the mine are all there is.”

“When we get there, we can take a peek and see what’s what,” he said. “If they’re actually training troops, there’ll be indications of where. I suspect up east in the Inyos, the Cerrro Gordo site. It’s big enough, and out of the way, and they can explain away activity there as mining if anyone notices. We can swing east across the valley floor to the north of the lodge—it’s only five miles wide.”

“We’d better stick close to the mountains on the way north and keep an eye on a local canyon,” Tully put in. “Because we may need to do the Run away! Run away! thing really quick. The Owens is long, but it’s narrow. And the sides are nearly straight up and down—twelve thousand feet up and down; it’s like God’s bathtub. If the Bad Guys have somewhere near a battalion training there…”

“Yah, you betcha,” Tom said. “More crowded, so we’re a lot more likely to bump into someone.”

They finished their evening meal-cum-breakfast of roast rabbit, hardtack, and dried fruit and got under way; it wasn’t dark yet, strictly speaking, but the summer nights were short and they had to take some chances. Simmons and Kolo spread out to the front; the other four rode in a loose line abreast, someone swerving out now and then to keep their little herd of remounts and pack horses from scattering or spending too much time grazing. Tom noticed that he rode with utter naturalness now; his body adjusted to the motions of the horse as easily as it did walking, and controlled it without much more effort. That left his mind and senses free, the swaying and the hollow thudding sound of hooves on dirt like the beat of blood in his ears.

Of course, he thought with an inward chuckle, I’ve also learned to ignore the way I smell. Ah, well, that’s living in the field for you. At least we don’t have cooties. Yet.

The open land northward narrowed as the sky darkened; off to the right were piles of dark lava, rising into patterned columns farther north in a cliff eerily reminiscent of a giant rattlesnake lying on its side. The canyons to the left were familiar from the times he’d driven up U.S. 395….

No, they’re not, he thought suddenly. They don’t have the siphons for the LA Aqueduct crossing them.

Their path was still through desert except where a seasonal watercourse ran by. This lowland had about the same vegetation as the Mohave proper: creosote, silver-gray sagebrush, screwbean mesquite, clumps of pale yellow grass now and then. There was just a lot more of it for every square foot, and of other life in proportion. The mountains to the west were getting steadily higher and steeper, not the sheer wall they would be farther north around Mount Whitney, but pretty formidable; every couple of miles a canyon slashed back into the granite fortresses, U-shaped if cut by ancient glaciers, V-formed if made by streams that were trickles or dry now, in July.

The wildlife was changing, too. There was game, not an occasional beast but whole herds of browsers heading up into the Sierras for the summer, to feed off the mountain meadows. A mob of impala trotted by; occasionally one would pronk, leaping straight up a dozen feet or more as if they were propelled by springs, apparently just for the hell of it; the sight gave him a brief flash of melancholy about Piet Botha, something he’d never have believed when the man was alive. One canyon up—he thought it was Nine-Mile Canyon, which had a road over to the Kern River country on FirstSide—the game was pronghorn, moving along slowly. The pronghorn were nervous, flicking their tails and raising their heads. A forest of funny-looking little horns with backward-sloping tips bobbed as they looked around.

“Hey,” Tully said from behind him. “Lookit—they’re doing that searchlight-ass thing.”

That was an alarm gesture, making the white patch on their rumps bristle, visible for miles. A split second later they were all running westward for their lives—literally, because a golden-brown streak was after them from a jumping-off point behind a mesquite bush.

Cheetah! Tom thought; they all soothed their horses’ natural start of alarm at the sight and scent of an attacking carnivore.

Cat and antelope ignored them. The cheetah was accelerating as if it had rocket assist, its great hind paws landing as far forward as its ears, the long slender body flexing in a series of huge bounding leaps. The antelope were a little slower off the mark, but their top speed was a bit better than the cheetah’s—about seventy miles per hour as opposed to sixty-five—and they could keep it up a lot longer. One of the rearmost pronghorns nearly ran into the beast ahead of it, dodged to get around it, skidded sideways in a cloud of dust and thrashing of limbs, recovered…

…but not quite fast enough.

Got him! Tom thought.

The slender-limbed hunting cat rammed into the antelope, knocking it over in another puff of dust, then diving through the murk to clamp its jaws on its prey’s throat. Cheetahs killed by bunting their prey off its feet and then choking it; their doglike claws were too blunt to grip the way a lion’s did. By the time the riders went by, fifty or sixty yards to the east, the pronghorn’s limbs had stopped twitching, and the cheetah was settling in to feed. It raised its head and flattened its ears at the sound of the horses’ hooves but didn’t stir from its meal. Tom was slightly surprised; in his experience, predators were a lot more nervous around human beings.

“Cheetahs only got taken off the reserved list… oh, ten years ago,” Adrienne said, giving the little drama a glance. “They don’t breed as successfully as the other big cats—frankly, they’re too stupid to live. Inbred, and overspecialized.”

Tom chuckled. “Still, that one’s pretty calm with six people this close.”

“I don’t think the Collettas came hunting all that often, either, and there haven’t been any Indians to speak of around here for a generation or more. The game’s not man-wary.”

Tom nodded but didn’t speak; the sun was just dropping behind the Sierras, leaving the tremendous tawny granite cliff a few miles away in darkening purple, tinged with pink at the saw-edge ridge that topped it; night rolled over the valley floor toward them like a wall of shadow. He’d always found this the most magical time of day, tinged with an inexplicable sadness. It was getting cooler, too. He’d been riding in his T-shirt; now he pulled his bush jacket out of a saddlebag and put it on. That was more complicated than it sounded, since he had to undo his combat harness, adjust it, and put it on again over the heavier garment.

When he looked up he saw Kolo trotting in from the north, on foot. That raised his brows a little… and knotted his stomach a trifle, too. The main reason to travel by foot was to avoid kicking up conspicuous dust, which a horse did when you pushed the gait.

The Indian stopped in front of them; that let him address the air between Tom and Adrienne. He knew full well that the woman was in command, but it preserved his self-respect if he could pretend he was reporting to the Strong One, which was how he’d referred to Tom since the canyon fight.

“Camp—old camp, by lake. Many”—he opened and closed his hands several times—“men. On foot.”

“Better look into that,” Adrienne said.

Little Lake was a sickle-shaped piece of water with the blunt horns pointing westward, about half a mile long and a few hundred yards across; it was full dark by the time they arrived, with starlight glittering on the still surface of the water. Trees and grass surrounded it; water came from seasonal creeks flowing down from what he knew as Sequoia National Park to the west, and from springs that flowed year-round. Those were sweet water, cold and with only a pleasant mineral tang. Eastward were high volcanic hills, columns of black basalt solidified in a devil’s-pipe-organ pattern.

If they hadn’t found the campfires, Tom would have proposed a swim—the grime and crusted sweat of the Mohave was still thick on his skin. As it was…

“The Commonwealth militia use a twelve-man infantry squad, right?” he said.

“Yes,” Adrienne said. “Two fire teams of six—four riflemen, a Bren gunner, and his assistant—the assistant totes a machine pistol. Why?”

“This was a military marching camp, about platoon size,” Tom said. “Some mules…”

“Six,” Sandra put in. “And one horse, from the sign.”

Simmons nodded. “That’s standard, for an infantry platoon in unroaded country. Mules carry the heavy gear, and the horse’s for the officer or a messenger.”

Tom pointed out where the tents had been. “Those are about the size of your standard militia item, too, aren’t they?”

He indicated the other features—the regular spacing of the campfires, the sanitary slit trench filled in not far away. While he spoke, Simmons was quartering the grass, and Kolo crouched by one of the dead fires. They’d been put out with water and buried with a couple of shovelfuls of earth, standard practice. He sniffed, picked up a pinch of the ashes, tasted them.

“Cold for one day,” he said. “No more.” Then he held up a fragment of bone. “Deer.”

Simmons gave a little grunt of satisfaction and picked something up from the dirt. He flicked it up with his thumb like a man tossing a coin as he walked back to join the others, then held it out on an extended palm; an empty brass cartridge case.

“Thirty-aught-six,” Tom said.

He handed it to Adrienne. “Rolfeston Armory mark,” she said. “Couldn’t have been Colletta household troops. Not this many, this far from the lodge. A squad or two around their Prime, just in case—the desert tribes could raid here, if they were stupid enough to invite retaliation. But not a third of the whole guard company, fossicking around nowhere in particular…”

“It’s not legal proof I’m concerned with,” Tom said grimly. “Kolo, where did they come from? And where did they go?”

The Indian pointed northwest. “From there. Yesterday, leave this morning.” He pointed northeast. “Go that way at sunrise.”

“And no sign of them south of here,” Tom said. “At a guess, this the southern limit of the area they routinely patrol. Probably for training, mostly.”

Just then Tully grunted and straightened up. “Kemosabe,” he said, holding out a palm. “Take a look.”

Tom did; it was a rind of some kind of flat bread, about as long as his hand. The surface was brown and had bubbles, and it was stiff—not merely stale, but textured rather like a thin cracker. He took it and tasted an edge; the nutty flavor and grainy feel were unmistakable.

Corn tortilla. In fact, it’s exactly the sort that Dolorez used to make, back when I was stationed at Fort Hood, he thought—seized for a moment by nostalgia, for a young soldier away from home for the first time, bursting with excitement at the world opening up for him.

Adrienne touched him on the arm. “Tom?” she said.

“Ah,” he said, starting. And this is a lot wilder than anything I could imagine then! “It’s a tortilla. Who here eats ’em?”

“None of the local Indians,” she said. “Not west of the Pueblo tribes. The nahua do, of course—ah.”

“Yup, you betcha,” he said, tossing it away. “That style of cooking cornmeal is a lot older than Columbus. These soldiers weren’t New Virginians; from the look, they were armed and equipped and organized just the way the household troops of your Families are, but they’re Mexican. Mesoamerican. Nahua. Whatever.”

“Thank you,” she said, quietly but with a warmth underneath it. From her glance he knew that she’d just quietly thanked God he was there.

Then she went on briskly: “All right, we know where they’re going—I’d give odds it’ll be up the foot of the hills to the east, then around the east side of Owens Lake.” She looked at Tom and the others. “Suggestions?”

Tom tapped thumb and forefinger on his chin. “Well, why don’t we follow ’em a while to make sure? They won’t be moving at night, probably; too inconvenient when they don’t have night-sight equipment. Once we’re sure they’re going the way we think, then we can cut west like we planned.”

“Let’s do it,” she said, and glanced up. “We’ve got about another five hours of full dark. We’ll have to be careful not to actually run into them.”

“Whoa,” Tom said softly.

With night goggles, the track of the patrol was plain enough, and he’d been taking it at a slow canter. Now there was something else there. His horse caught the scent a few seconds after he saw the motionless lump, and sun-fished; Tom dismounted and walked over to it, leading the beast by the reins.

The lump was a man, spread-eagled, with his arms and legs lashed by rawhide thongs to wooden pegs driven deep into the ground. A short stocky muscular man, naked, and showing the marks of a bad beating—swollen eyes and lips, crusted blood, other bruises on his torso. His black hair was shaven to a bristle-cut of uniform length all over, and his dry tongue showed between his lips. If he’d been left here all day in the summer heat he’d be very thirsty, and very lucky—lucky that some enterprising predator hadn’t happened by and started chewing off bits. As it was, the ant bites were like a rash over most of his torso. His glazed eyes cleared a bit as he heard the hooves thudding near him—Tom and the others would be no more than looming shapes in the dark. The teeth that showed in a snarl of terrified defiance were even and white, although a few were missing. He looked more frightened still when Tom was close enough to see more details. Evidently his experiences with big white men in this uniform weren’t all that pleasant.

Tom made a warbling sound between his lips, one that carried well in the night without sounding too much like a signal. Then he unhooked the big canteen from his saddlebow, which woke desperate interest and an inarticulate grunt of need. He put his hand behind the bound man’s head and raised it so that he could drink without choking, giving the water in sips—after the first gulp the man cooperated, as if he knew that he could not afford to take too much.

“You speak English?” he asked the man.

The Indian shook his head—using the gesture in the manner of Western civilization, Tom noted, and evidently recognizing the name of the language at least.

Adrienne dismounted and went to one knee not far away; she pushed back her goggles and hat, and briefly switched on a flashlight with a cloth across the glass, illuminating her face. The Indian looked at her, said something in a harsh sibilant language, and seemed to relax a little.

Bravo, Adri, Tom thought. A woman makes it look less like a war party to him… hmmm, unless torturing captives is women’s work where he comes from. Guess not.

She said something in another language, and the man answered it in the same, but shook his head.

“He recognizes nahuatl but it isn’t his language,” she said thoughtfully. “A lot of our nahua are from other language groups, of course; we just use that term because the majority are nahuatl speakers. He could be a Zapotec—” The man nodded frantically. “Aha. There’s a potentate down that way we’ve dealt with a bit, named Seven Flower.”

“Russki?” the man said. “Govoroyu russki?”

That was an extremely ungrammatical way of asking if Tom spoke Russian. He did… sort of.

“Da,” he said, in that tongue. “A little. Speak slowly.” In English, to Adrienne Rolfe: “I speak a little Russian, badly, and so does he, even worse. Be prepared for communications problems.”

He continued the conversation, then noted out of the corner of his eye Kolo drawing his knife and nearly going for the bound man, until Simmons put an arm in front of him and spoke sharply.

“What’s that about?” Tom said.

“When we were ambushed in the Lake Tulare marshes, part of the opposition looked just like Mr. Bondage here,” Adrienne said thoughtfully. “Quite different from the swamp hostiles, and they had O’Brien rifles. Well maintained, and they knew how to use them. I’d guess they were deserters from right here; the working conditions don’t appear to be too good.”

“That fits,” Tom said. “So does the way he looks.”

He grinned lopsidedly when she raised her brows. “Officers and NCOs beating up and abusing recruits is an old tradition in the Russian armed forces; ditto senior enlisted men picking on younger, stealing their pay and rations. It’s really old, goes back to czarist times. They still have a scandal every once and a while, new guys getting killed or having all their food stolen until they collapse, that sort of thing. And if the Batyushkovs are old-fashioned, chances are the military types they recruited for this would be, too.”

“Sounds counterproductive,” Adrienne said; meanwhile she got the first-aid kit from the pack horse that carried it.

“Oh, it is,” Tom said. “But who abandons a tradition just because it’s stupid? Also, a lot of Russians have a really intense dislike of what they call ‘black-asses,’ by which they mean anyone brown with slanted eyes; that goes right back to the Mongol Khans. Get a bunch of unreconstructed Red Army men—I’d guess they used veterans of Afghanistan and Chechnya—and give ’em unlimited disciplinary authority and no overview, and this sort of thing is about what I’d expect.”

He turned back to the prisoner and spoke in halting Russian, with many pauses to clear up misunderstandings or search for a word.

While he did, the others were studying the prisoner. “Looks like he’s seen some action,” Tully commented, and Adrienne nodded.

“Lots of scars,” Adrienne said. She and Sandra cut the man’s feet free and began bandaging and patching from there up. “Old ones.”

“Cutting weapons,” Simmons said, pointing to the faded dusty-white and purple marks on the brown skin. “I’ve seen wounds like that, made with an obsidian-edged battle rake. And that one could be a bullet wound—musket ball. A couple of them look like they were infected before they healed.”

“Yah, you betcha,” Tom said, when the man allowed his head to loll back, too exhausted to speak further. The big man looked up at the others and gave them the gist:

“He’s a soldier of some sort back in his home country. His boss is a subordinate of this Seven Flower, and he and a lot of others have been training here for nearly a year.” He looked from face to face. “Standard training to start with, and then working over and over again on assaulting a mockup of a big building.”

He translated the man’s description. Adrienne and Simmons cursed.

“The Gate complex,” they said almost in chorus.

Tom smiled wryly, and began cutting the man’s hands free with swift jerks of his belt knife.

“And incidentally, he’s real disillusioned, and willing to cooperate.”

Tully nodded. “You know, there are times when being a son of a bitch is its own punishment. What’s this guy’s name?”

Tom put the question to him; he seemed a little surprised to be asked. “He says the Russians just called everyone by numbers or nicknames. His name…” They went back and forth on it for a while.

“It’s One Ocelot. That’s the name of the day of the month he was born on.”

“Maybe it should be One Lucky Cat, instead,” Tully said, and grinned. “After all, we got here before the coyotes.”

A day later, Tully took off his hat. “Do you realize where we are?” he said solemnly, pointing to the open country to the north of the creek whose bank they were following.

“No,” Tom sighed. “Where are we, exactly, Tonto?”

“This, Kemosabe, is Movie Flats.”

He swept a finger around the rolling sage-and-grass-covered circle, taking in the towering peaks of the high Sierras behind them to the west, and the rough upthrust slabs and boulders and wind-worn arches of the Alabama hills ahead. As he spoke the dawn broke over the Inyo Mountains still farther east; they were nearly as high as the Sierra Nevada, towering ten thousand feet above the Owens. The first spears of light hit the snow still lingering on Mount Whitney behind them, then ran down the sheer face of the sawtoothed granite range like a speeded-up film. A few seconds later it struck the tops of the Alabamas, only five thousand or so feet but still looking formidable in their scarred, tumbled, boulder-strewn steepness, turning them blood colored for an instant.

Tom felt a prickle of awe at the sheer bleak grandeur of the view, then thrust it aside. Tully continued:

“They filmed Gunga Din here. Springfield Rifle. And How the West Was Won. And Maverick… And pretty well all the Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix, B-movies, and all the Lone Ranger episodes…”

“You’re impossible,” Adrienne snorted.

“Naw, just highly improbable,” Tully said.

Tom grinned; sometimes Roy’s clowning got a little wearing, but it was also a welcome break in the tension at moments like this.

After a moment Tully went on more seriously: “It’s a lot prettier in real life, though.”

They urged their horses into a canter; they were heading down Lone Pine Creek, eastward toward the canyon it cut through the hills. There was no road along it on this side of the Gate, barely even a trail just north of the water, but there was plenty of cover—big Freemont cottonwood trees reaching up to nearly a hundred feet, their serrated-edged leaves clattering overhead; the dark cool damp-smelling air was thick with their downy seed fluff. Sycamores and willows formed the understory, hanging over the water; walnuts showed their furrowed, dark brown trunks. He heard something snort, grunt, and crash aside through the undergrowth as they passed—wild boar, by the tracks—and there were the broader cloven marks of feral cattle in the same wet sand, and the neat prints of deer.

Stone closed around the little stream, but not in unbroken walls; there were gaps between the tilted rock ledges. Tom counted them carefully; it was easy to get lost in this tangle, and easier still when the version he was familiar with was different in so many details. He’d been through here on Fish and Game business FirstSide, and on hiking trips, but… There was a lot more vegetation for starters, and no network of dirt roads, and that didn’t complete the list. Hundreds of years of difference in the details of the weather had made an impression even on the rocks—a boulder falling one way rather than another, or the shape of a wash.

“We turn north here,” he said at last.

The open sandy wash was as good as a road for horses; better, since it was easier on their hooves than a hard surface. It was also more open than the growth along the creek, which made him nervous. If he’d been in command of the conspirator’s forces, he’d have had more Scouts and lookouts combing the area. But there hadn’t been any sigh of humans or shod horses, even though the sandy dirt showed tracks well.

Well, that’s what you get for using untrustworthy troops, he thought, a little smugly.

Half a mile up the wash a ridge let up to the crest of the hills—and to a weird-looking loop of rock, a natural arch at the crest. They dismounted and handed their reins to One Ocelot; the Zapotec was almost pathetically grateful and eager to please, being even more completely isolated and lost than he’d been as one of the Batyushkov’s mercenaries. If he lost their help… well, it was a very long walk home. Until they told him, he hadn’t ever realized that there was an overland connection.

Together the three of them made their way up the steep ridge; Simmons and Kolo were off looking over Cerro Gordo, and Sandra had to stay with their horses at the base camp—you didn’t leave a hobbled horse alone in grizzly and leopard country.

The ascent took about ten minutes of hard climbing, enough to have them breathing deeply. They took the last bit before the crest very slowly. He felt the rock harsh and gritty under his hands, the smell dry and dusty in his nostrils; his rifle was across the crook of his elbows. Carefully they raised their heads until their eyes were over the ridge.

“Well, that’s not just a hunting lodge, by Jesus,” Tom said, looking at the settlement several miles away through the clear dry air.

The original building might be—it looked a lot like a fairly fancy dude ranch, complete with corrals and stables and barns, all in Western form and what looked at this distance to be adobe; the swimming pool added an appropriate touch….

“Marble?” he said.

“There’s a quarry of it a couple of miles that way,” Adrienne said, pointing southeast. Snidely: “I’m shocked the whole place isn’t built out of it.”

The patch of cultivated ground northward looked too large, several hundred acres… and so did the X-shaped airstrip south of the house and near the edge of the great lake. Each arm of the landing field was fifteen hundred feet at least. A Hercules stood on it, and several smaller two-engined planes he couldn’t identify at this range were parked slightly off it in earth revetments. There was an improvised-looking wooden control building with a radar pickup and broadcast antenna on its roof at one end, next to the wind sock. Southward at the edge of the water was a boathouse and a fair-sized sailboat tied up at a long wooden pier.

And east of the house was a tent camp. Several dozen big twelve-man tents were up, with more rising; he could see the unmistakable centipede of a column of marching men there, raising a trail of dust. So did vehicles heading south and east, along a rough dirt track around the lake and back toward the mountains. Guard towers stood at the four corners of the camp, even if it was still mainly empty space; they were tripods of lodgepole pine with a central ladder. The platforms had roofs and walls of thick logs squared and notched, and poking out through the slits were the barrels of heavy machine guns. Searchlights too…

“Well, that’s proof,” he said, softly.

“With a dollop of whipped cream and a maraschino cherry on top,” Tully said.

“And you know,” Tom said, “those guard towers would be absolutely useless for defending that camp. Against anyone with modern weapons, that is; and not even really useful against Indians. Shooting down at a steep angle like that, you don’t get a beaten zone. The bullets just hit the dirt and stay there. But they’d be crackerjack for keeping people from getting out.”

Adrienne hissed softly and began to level her binoculars. “Well, that’s of a piece with everything else we’ve seen.”

“Careful,” Tom said, adjusting the angle of the glasses with his hand. “Into the sun like that, even with nonglare lenses, you’re chancing a reflection.”

She nodded thanks, studied the scene, then handed them over to Tom. He used them in turn, noting details. “Those sunken bunkers… armory, I’d say; or explosives store; or both. Fuel blisters near the airstrip. HQ tent… yah, when they get that setup completed, it’ll be tentage for a battalion. Roy?”

He handed the glasses to the smaller man. Roy whistled softly as he worked the area over. “I’d say that bunch… looks to be about a company’s worth… marched in from somewhere about half a day’s shank’s-mare travel away. Looks like they don’t have enough trucks to move the men—I’d guess they were up around Cerro Gordo, like you thought, Kemosabe. Good place to train; you’d build endurance fast at eight thousand feet. And it’s out of the way. But they must be nearly ready to go.”

Tom looked over at Adrienne. She was looking calm enough, but there was a line of white around her tight-held mouth….

Of course, she was born here. It’s just an operational problem to me, and a personal risk. To her, it’s like me seeing some shaheed was about to nuke Chicago.

“What are those smaller aircraft?” he said.

They weren’t any type he was familiar with: sleek elongated teardrops with the wing mounted through the middle of the fuselage, bubble canopy forward, and two big piston engines.

“Mosquito fighter-bombers,” Adrienne said, her voice tightly controlled. “World War Two design, slightly modified and built here.”

“How many would the Collettas have?” Tom said. And this private-armies setup is insane, whatever your grandfather thinks, he added to himself.

“Mmmm… four. The Commission has a dozen, and about as many more are kept by some of the Families—they maintain them for the Commission’s use in lieu of taxes. Those are probably there to escort the transports with the troops. The swine!” she added with hissing malevolence. Then, flushing: “Sorry.”

“No problem,” he said sympathetically. “Well, Simmons and Kolo ought to be on their way back by now.”

“Right,” she said unemotionally. “Let’s get back to camp and settle what we can do.”

If anything, hung suspended on the air.

“Wait a second,” Tully said quietly, and threw up his hand.

They all reined in. Tom looked around; the steep canyon trail up the side of Mount Whitney seemed just the same as when they’d left a couple of hours ago, save for the fact that the sun was near noon and it was warmish rather than chilly. Water chuckled down the center, falling over smooth colored rocks; not far ahead was the little pool and U of meadow where they were camping. The air smelled of warm rock, pines, and water.

“Tonto think it maybe too quiet, Kemosabe,” Tully said—but his voice was soft and deadly serious; his hand went to the rifle riding in the scabbard by his knee.

A raven launched itself out of a lodgepole pine, giving a harsh gruk-grukgruk cry. Apart from that, there was nothing….

Sandra walked out from behind a rock; she was carrying her rifle, but she looked white around the mouth.

“It’s OK!” she called. “They’re friendly! Sort of.”

“Who are they?” Adrienne said.

“Ah—”

There was a rustling though the woods and canyon sides all around them, and figures were standing—figures whose heads loomed monstrous under headdresses of bear and wolf and tiger. For a heartstopping moment he thought the Akaka had caught up with them. But…

One head was topped by a lion with turquoise eyes.

“Hi!” Chief Good Star called. “Surprise!”

The moment stretched. Then another voice called, from upslope:

“Surprise to you too, and don’t move!”

Simmons, Tom thought with relief. Up there with his scope-sighted rifle… he got back and didn’t walk into a trap.

The same thought must have struck Good Star; beneath the demon-clown tattoos and paint, his grin went a little sickly.

“No trouble!” he said rapidly. “Hey, Shoots Fast—come out!”

Someone did; it was Henry Villers, unmistakable despite the bandages that covered most of the left side of his face.

“Hello, Warden Tom, boss lady,” he said. “What say we all catch up?”

“…so we heard the shooting and hit ’em where they weren’t looking,” Good Star said, puffing on his cigarette and leaning back against a log. “Some of the Akaka got away, but most didn’t.”

There were a number of fresh scalps at his belt, and his expression was like a contented cat’s as he went on: “Thanks, by the way. Swift Lance and his Dreaming aren’t going to look so hot any more, you know what I mean? Especially since one of you Deathwalkers dropped a boulder on his head.”

Villers looked at Tully, who was sitting close to Sandra Margolin; the little man had relaxed since she’d convinced him she’d come to no harm except a thorough fright. They were all grouped around a small smokeless fire, not far from the edge of the pond. The meadow was a little crowded, even though the Nyo-Ilcha hadn’t brought all their horses here. Adrienne’s party and the chieftain shared log seats around the fire, and many of the warriors were crouched outside that circle; others were attending to their animals, or camp chores. Two of them were butchering a brace of mule deer and an elk.

“That was your satchel charge, Tully,” the black man put in. “You really pissed them off with that.” Then he took up the story: “Yeah, Piet Botha’s dead.” He shook his head. “Got to hand it to the big Boer, he was one baaad badass. Right at the end, when I was out of it—some Akaka got me with a sling-stone”—he touched the bandaged side of his face and winced slightly—“he was standing over his kid in this fold of rock, and man, he used his rifle like a club till it broke and then he picked up two of them by their necks and smashed their heads together…. I looked at the body afterwards; must have been like three or four arrows in it, and a couple of knives.”

“And then our Nyo-Ilcha friends arrived like… if you’ll pardon the expression… the U.S. cavalry,” Tully said. “The kid make it?”

“Yeah, though he’s probably going to limp,” Villers said. “Over to you, chief.”

Good Star chuckled, a harsh sound. “I’d been following you on general principles, and because one of my people finked you out to Swift Lance.”

His right index finger traces a shallow crusted cut along his bare ribs. “The stool pigeon tried for me, too, and missed. I didn’t. But it peeved me some, I can tell you, my own people getting impressed by Swift Lance’s so-called Dreaming. And the chance to take a slap at the Akaka while they were bent over and showing their butts was just too good to pass up. Figured I’d catch up with you and have a talk, but you ran too fast—and we had to take care of a few Akaka on the way, you know?”

Adrienne hissed in vexation. “You mean we were killing ourselves and zigzagging over half the desert running away from you?”

“Yup, that’s about it, boss lady,” Good Star said. “Then I got wind of this setup here—”

Villers looked embarrassed and spread his hands. “Filling him in seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“—and decided to come check it out. Guess we Water People aren’t the only ones got our feuds within the tribe, hey?”

Adrienne and Tom exchanged a glance. He could see her thought: It’s an advantage, but it’s a threat, too. How to make use of it?

He guessed that she took Good Star’s professions of friendship just as seriously as he did; the Indian meant them, in a way… and would cheerfully throw them to the wolves, or the Collettas, if he saw an advantage in it for his people.

Which is only fair, Tom thought. He doesn’t owe the Rolfes or their New Virginia anything but a kick in the balls.

Silence stretched; Good Star poured himself a cup of coffee and waited—grinning, not in the proverbial Indian impassivity. At last Adrienne spoke:

“My name is Rolfe, by the way,” she said, holding up her left hand to show the ring. “Granddaughter of the Old Man.”

Good Star shaped a silent whistle. “Masthamo’s dick,” he swore obscurely. Tom winced; if things went wrong, he could see a ransom situation shaping up real quick.

“You’re Johnny Deathwalker’s kin?” he asked, pushing back the lion headdress to look at her more closely. “Yeah, that’s what the legends say. Hair like an angry sunset, and eyes green like river rocks and colder than glacier ice.”

She sketched out the situation in simple terms. Good Star listened, nodded, and said:

“OK. Now, why should we Water People care which clan of the Deathwalkers runs things down by the sea?”

“The Rolfes have mostly let your tribe alone,” she said. “The Collettas are more ambitious.”

The chief shrugged; muscle moved under dark brown skin like angular snakes, on a body the Mohave had stripped of everything that wasn’t essential to life.

“So you say,” he said. “Do you say you won’t take the Mohave when you want it?”

“No,” she said. “I do say it’s a big world. You were thinking of taking your people down south, weren’t you? Well, help me and I’ll push for the Old Man to give you permission—and help. You know the word of the Rolfes is good, if you know anything about us.”

Good Star showed yellow teeth: “Yeah, boss lady. I also know all you’re promising is to do your best. You can’t pledge Johnny Deathwalker’s word, can you?”

“Not absolutely.” She hesitated for a moment, then steeled herself and went on: “But I have a lot of influence with him. And he makes a point of always rewarding people who help us and punishing those who hurt. And… incidentally, Good Star of the Nyo-Ilcha… how would you like to get your hands on hundreds of O’Brien rifles? And machine guns, and mortars…”

The Indian froze with the cigarette halfway to his lips. “Son of a bitch,” he said after a long moment when their eyes met. “You mean that?”

“Word of a Rolfe,” she said. “They’re right there”—she pointed eastward towards the Colletta headquarters—“waiting for you.”

“Oh, sure, boss lady, all we have to do is to take ’em with our bows and smoke-poles!”

Adrienne smiled like a cat, and looked at Tom. Tom cleared his throat and pushed One Ocelot forward. The Zapotec firmed his shoulders and crossed his arms.

“Turns out,” Tom said, “that these particular… Deathwalkers… don’t trust their hired soldiers very much.” Good Star nodded. Tom went on: “In particular, they don’t trust them with any ammunition for their weapons, except when they’re on the firing range. It’s all under lock and key and separate guards—white men—until they launch their attack.”

Good Star’s smile matched that of the headdress he wore. It was an expression much like the one an antelope would see on the face of the very last lion it ever met.

“Tell me about this,” he said.

Overhead, light glinted on metal, and the throbbing roar of turboprop engines came insect-small through the clear sky. A Hercules transport was dropping down over the Sierras; the sound swelled as it approached, then it passed them only a few thousand feet overhead as it stooped for the valley floor. Another followed it, and another.