Deathwatch (11 page)

The chain between them was hundreds of feet long now, stretching from high on the butte down the steep side, across the breccia and the smoother, sandier desert and over to the Jeep, locking at last to Madec.

For me to live, Ben thought, that chain must
be drawn shorter. It must be drawn in link by link until he and I are face to face.

And somehow when we do come face to face, he must be as naked as I am.

I cannot let Madec come to me, Ben thought. I cannot let him choose his place and his time and his method of coming.

I must either go to him or I must pull him to me.

Ben laid aside the slingshot and went over to a hole in the wall.

Madec was walking toward the butte.

He had the big gun slung over one shoulder and the coil of tow rope over the other and was carrying the heavy canvas bag in which Ben stowed tools and gear.

He’s coming to me, Ben thought. Coming at his choice of place and time and method.

Madec disappeared from view as he moved in close to the wall of the butte.

Ben went on to the end of the tunnel and waited there, not exposing himself.

The sound was clear but faint. Listening to it he could almost see what Madec was doing down there.

In the canvas bag there was a geological hammer with a flat peen on one end and a long, rock-breaking spike on the other. Madec was down there at the foot of the butte cutting a stairway up the side of it.

The sound ceased for a moment and then a new sound came up, clear and almost musical,
the sound of metal hammering metal.

Now he was driving a piton into a crack in the rock.

For a moment Ben wondered what Madec was using for a piton. Then he thought of the long steel pegs he carried in case he had to pitch a tent in stony ground with a high wind.

With the rope secured to the tent pegs driven into the face of the wall and with handholds and footholds hacked out of it, Madec was starting to climb the butte.

Although he knew that Madec probably could not see him, Ben took no chances as he left the tunnel and went out on the wide ledge. Staying low against the far side, which rose in a smooth wall, he hurried along, noticing as he went how the ledge not only slanted upward but was narrowing.

At last the ledge became so narrow that he could not walk on it and, a few feet farther on, faired back into the escarpment.

The escarpment was a wall of smooth stone, inclined outward. This leaning wall towered above him for more than fifty feet and formed, it appeared, the top of the butte.

About twenty feet beyond where he stood, but above him, was another ledge, wide and slanting upward; an easy path to the top of the butte.

No force in the world would hold him against that leaning wall long enough to cross those twenty feet to the wide avenue of stone going to the top.

Nor was there any way a naked man with no tools could scale the escarpment.

He was confined to this narrow ledge and the tunnel. He was imprisoned here.

And Madec knew that.

Ben could now see exactly what Madec was planning. About where Madec was, Ben remembered, there was a smooth, unclimbable wall from the breccia to a ledge about thirty feet up.

Ben had studied this place longingly, for once on that high ledge it had looked to him as though the rest of the way to the top would be no more than a stiff walk. Without tools and rope he hadn’t been able to conquer the first, smooth, vertical obstacle.

Madec had everything he needed.

Ben studiedthe stone butte, from where Madec would start on the first ledge to where he would end at the top.

Wherever Madec would be in sight he would be out of range of the slingshot.

And at those same places Ben would be an easy target for the gun.

He realized slowly and bitterly that he could not stop Madec from climbing. He could not even harass him and slow him down.

Ben looked across at the ledge twenty feet above him. He studied it for a moment and then slowly looked back along his own ledge and on into the deep shadows of the tunnel.

From the wide ledge toward which he was climbing Madec could stand—or even sit comfortably,
his elbows wedged down against his legs for firm support—and shoot him.

Ben could see from one end of the dark tunnel to the other. Not even the bend in the tunnel was enough to conceal him.

There was no place to hide.

Ben went back along the ledge and into the tunnel to where the slingshot lay beside the little pile of stones he had gathered.

The sound of the hammer seemed to beat against him as he sat beside the slingshot and idly fitted it into his hand.

Ben was listening so intently to the hammer that it was a long time before he realized he had also been hearing the sound above him.

It was a hollow, rattling, irritating noise. He ran to the mouth of the tunnel and looked up.

The helicopter was like transparent gold floating in the sky, coming nearer and nearer.

He could not make out the markings on it, but he was sure that it was the Game and Fish chopper on a routine patrol.

It was the most beautiful thing Ben had ever seen in his life.

B
EN COULDN’T BE SURE
, but when the chopper went into a sharp skid and floated gently to the ground not a hundred feet from the Jeep, he would have bet money that Denny O’Neil was flying it.

Ben felt so good he was jumping up and down on the ledge, yelling his lungs out as the dust of the chopper’s landing blew away and he saw a man get out of it and run, stooped, out from under the rotors.

He had expected to see a game warden and had hoped that it would be the supervisor, Les Stanton, but the man was in civilian clothes.

Ben calmed down, saving his breath and waiting for the chopper blades to stop but, as he waited, he realized that although the engine had slowed and the blades were just lazily turning, it hadn’t stopped.

It wasn’t going to stop. Not if Denny O’Neil were flying it. Denny had told him once, “Ben, the trouble with you is that you think engines
want
to run. Well, I got news for you—they don’t.
Any time they can get away with not running, believe me, they’ll do it. And engines are smart. And they’re mean. When everything’s going good up in that chopper and you can see forever, that engine’ll run, but you get in trouble in bad weather and get down in a gorge you
got
to
fly
out of and that engine’ll quit. Engines don’t like people and you better believe it.

“Out there on the desert,” Denny had told him, “in that chopper, I know that engine’s just waiting for me to get myself in a bind so it can quit. Well, I don’t let it. I start that booger up in the morning, and I don’t let it quit until I’m home again.”

Ben went to the edge of the cliff, cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled as loudly as he could. He kept on yelling and moving, jumping, swaying, waving his arms.

Denny O’Neil didn’t get out of the chopper. The other man walked over to Madec, who was now beside the Jeep, and Ben watched them as they talked.

They probably had to yell at each other to be heard over the sound of the engine.

The man looked like Les Stanton, but he had on a purple shirt outside his yellow trousers and he wasn’t wearing a hat.

When Ben saw the man’s shoes he knew it wasn’t Les. Les wouldn’t be caught dead in the desert in a pair of low-cut white shoes.

Still trying to attract their attention, Ben could feel something dying inside him.

This was where Madec would be good. His lies would be smooth, logical and convincing.

The man shook hands with Madec and went back to the chopper.

Still yelling and knowing that it was useless, Ben watched the chopper swirl up, emerge from its cloud of dust and go away.

It disappeared so fast, so fast, leaving only the fading sound of Denny’s always running engine to taunt him for a moment longer.

Ben walked slowly into the tunnel and stood at one of the biggest of the water-worn holes looking down.

Madec was walking briskly back toward the butte.

Ben watched him until he was out of sight under the overhang. For a long time he just stood there, defeated, listening to the hammer, hoping the chopper would come back, but knowing that it would not.

Then, finally, he wandered out of the tunnel, out onto the ledge and along it to the end. There he leaned out as far as he could, keeping one hand firmly on the cliff face, and looked down.

Whatever Madec did he did well. He was braced now, the rope around his waist, about fifteen feet above the ground, his boots firmly planted in the footholds he had chopped out, the rope secured around a tent peg driven into a crack in the rock.

He was chopping a new handhold, the hammer head glinting in the sunlight.

It would take Madec the rest of the day to chop his way up to the first ledge. From there the rest was just a stroll up the butte, no problem.

Madec wouldn’t come up there at night. He was too cautious to do that.

He would finish cutting his little holes in the rock and finish driving his spikes where he needed them and then, when all was ready, he would wait out the night and come in the morning.

Returning to the tunnel, Ben looked out through its stone mouth, which seemed to frame a picture and make it more vivid.

The far mountains were masses of purple, rugged and alive looking. These were not the old, worn, tree-covered mountains he had seen in other places. These were tough, young mountains, their peaks sharp and strong against the deep blue of the sky, their ridges full of vigor.

And the desert itself was not the bleak and arid place it seemed, but a place full of life. A place where a plant might lie dormant for years and then, with the first drops of rain, spring to full life, produce its flowers, cast its seed and die—all in twenty-four hours.

The hammer had stopped.

It was insulting; the thought of being killed here in the desert where he had always lived by this man from the city was insulting and outrageous.

Ben got to his feet slowly and walked down to the narrow end of the tunnel. As he did so, he made his decision.

Ben sat on the edge of the stone, his feet hanging down in the bisected funnel and leaned over, looking down at the steep, smooth surface of the funnel, studying it down and down until the top of the funnel spout, also bisected, narrowed sharply, going straight on down to the breccia. He noted every wrinkle in it, every rough patch, every stratum. He studied each change in the basalt’s texture and memorized every tiny fissure in the surface of the stone.

After an hour he got up and went back to the other end of the ledge. There, not exposing himself, he stood and looked down at the desert, his eyes ranging from the jumble of rock at the base of the butte out across a sandy area and then into a harder, rock-strewn stretch where the Jeep was parked.

During a few seconds in, perhaps, ten million years a slab of the butte had cracked off. Shaken by an earthquake or moved by the force of some great wind or shrunk by cold, the slab had fallen, one enormous solid slab of stone.

When it had hit the desert, it had broken all to pieces.

One piece, as big as a pickup truck, had apparently bounced or rolled out beyond the breccia and lay isolated on the floor of the desert.

Madec, going back and forth between the butte and the slab of stone, had skirted it, his tracks a clear path around one end.

Ben looked down at these tracks and at that
great chunk of stone for a long time and then carefully searched the other areas.

There were no other tracks, only those leading from the Jeep, around the slab, and onto the butte.

Judging from the mark of Madec’s feet, just traces on the hard surface, but deep prints in the sand, and almost invisible in the breccia, it looked to Ben as though the wind had piled up four or five feet of blow sand all around the slab.

Going back again to the narrow end of the tunnel, he resumed his study, noting now the position of the slab in relation to the spout of the funnel and the camp Madec had made around the Jeep.

The position, Ben decided, was very good.

The sun was setting now and Madec, evidently finished for the day, appeared walking back to the Jeep.

Ben sat there studying him, studying every step he took and what effort he had to exert to take it.

Madec carried the rope coiled on his shoulder; the canvas bag was in his hand; two canteens bounced on his hips; and the gun was cradled in his arm.

He walked where he had walked before, going around the eastern end of the slab and on toward the Jeep.

Ben watched some Gambel’s quail strolling into the tunnel for their evening drink. He did not move as they dipped and raised their heads,
murmuring to each other. The slingshot lay gleaming dully in the fading light but he did not reach for it.

The birds wandered out again and then, as though recess was over, gathered in an almost military fashion and suddenly, all together, took off in a small, soft explosion of wings.

Ben picked up the slingshot and began working with it. Strips of tough leather with slots in the ends held the rubber tubes to the yoke and pouch. It was easy to slide the leather back through the slots and release both ends of the tubes.

The hollow in the tubes was about three-eighths of an inch in diameter, the rubber a thick wall around it.

He blew through both tubes and then laid them down on the stone.

Putting the four little leather thongs and the leather shot-holder into the bullet pouch, he drew the drawstring tight and tied it to a sotol fiber.

With another fiber he bound the rubber tubes to the yoke and tied the yoke to the first fiber. Then, as the last light died, he strung four fibers together into a stout cord and tied the slingshot and pouch to it, putting the loop of it over his head so that his little kit of equipment hung down on his chest.

In the dark now, he went to the far end of the tunnel, got the still-warm carcasses of the birds and the lizard and, forcing himself not to think about it, sat beside the water and ate them all,
pulling the meat of the lizard away from the tough, sandy-feeling skin with his teeth.