Conquistador (78 page)

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.