Deathwatch (6 page)

The bullet knocked rocks out from under his fingers.

Madec was now standing on the hood of the Jeep, his arm in the rifle sling.

That was not as good as having the rifle barrel resting across the top of the Jeep. Not as steady. A little gust of wind, a little tremor from a heartbeat and, whether Madec wanted it to or not, the bullet would hit him.

A piece of quartz just in front of his eyes suddenly split open, showering him with bright crystals.

Even if he was not hit directly by a bullet these sharp slivers of rock flying around could take his eyes out.

Ben rolled over on his back and sat up, waving his arms around. Then he pushed himself up to his feet.

Ben made a helpless gesture with his arms and turned away from the basin, walking slowly, picking his way.

As he went back to the top of the range he studied the bighorn sign, hoping to find another trail that would lead him to another water hole but, except for the trail he had followed there was only sign of aimless wanderings.

Near the summit he sat down in the shade on the western side of an outcrop of stone.

He found with his fingers that his face had stopped bleeding. The flesh around the cut was painful now, and he could tell that it was swelling.

His feet were in bad shape, old cuts broken open, new cuts still bleeding.

The slow, small irritating desert flies arrived and swirled around him. They were so stupid, so suicidal, but killing them only seemed to make them increase in number. They wandered in and out of his wounds or sat and preened their wings or even bred, flitting in his blood, and there was very little he could do. They had made a home on him.

The Jeep was moving. To Ben it seemed as though the cloud of light brown dust was pushing the white body of the Jeep forward, bouncing it along on the desert.

About a mile from the mountains where he was, an old eroded butte rose at an angle from a low cut terrace. Ben watched Madec force the Jeep up the sloping wall of the terrace and, once on it, turn the Jeep so that it was facing him. Madec got out and although Ben could not see exactly what he was doing, it appeared that he was slowly scanning the area ahead of him.

Ben had studied that butte and cut terrace in the moonlight, realizing that its location made it a serious threat to anything he might want to do. He had hoped that Madec, without the panorama he had, would not recognize the advantage the terrace would give him.

It depressed Ben to see the Jeep parked there; Madec now back under the shelter of the roof, invisible in the heavy shadow.

From the terrace Madec could see the entire south side of Ben’s little mountain range, from the eastern to the western end. He could also see the wide stretch of open desert between Ben’s small range and the high ranges in the distance which surrounded this egg-shaped bowl of desert.

From Madec’s vantage point the only area he could not see was to the north of the mountain range.

A man with sufficient water and food, with clothing to protect him from the sun, with good boots on uninjured feet and sunglasses to keep his eyes from burning out, could escape from Madec by simply going down the north side of the mountains and hiking out across the desert, heading due north so as to keep the mountains between him and Madec.

An injured man, almost naked, with no water and no food, could not venture into that northern area. For at least a hundred miles there was nothing but open desert, worn and gently rolling, the surface of the ground littered with small rocks and stones with, here and there, the sprouts of the tenacious and enduring desert plants.

There would be no catch basins of water out there. There were not even any barrel cactus, the water-soaked flesh of which could keep a man alive—provided he could somehow cut through the leather-tough skin of the plant.

To the north was the only route he could take and not be seen by Madec, but as things stood now with almost twenty-four of his forty-eight hours of life already gone, he could not survive ten of those hundred long miles.

Ben realized that Madec must have come to the same conclusion, and so he sat watching through the binoculars, knowing that Ben had only three choices:

To stay where he was, some water near him but made unavailable to him by the Hornet.

To come down from the mountains and start walking across the desert to the east. (Madec would not even have to move the Jeep but could just sit up there on the cut terrace and watch Ben die somewhere out in those empty sixty-five miles.)

Or to come down and walk to the west. (Naked and with no water there was small difference between sixty-five miles one way and thirty-five the other.)

Almost numb to the aggravation of these flies walking around on his face, Ben looked across through the heat-shimmering air at the white Jeep. It seemed poised and ready to go—to follow him, grinding along slowly in four-wheel drive.

Ben tried to remember how much water Madec had but gave up, realizing that he had far more than enough to outlast him.

And there was gas enough to keep the Jeep roaming around for at least a hundred miles in
four-wheel, two hundred in two-wheel.

Mechanics, machines, supplies were not a part of this game. In the final analysis, even the guns were not a part of it.

Sitting in the hot, still heat, the flies crawling endlessly on him, Ben felt everything dropping away.

He thought of search parties he had been on looking for tourists who had left the main highways to do a little rock-hounding or have a picnic. People who had allowed some small accident like a stalled car or a broken axle to kill them.

He remembered a little family of four, parents and two children, who had died on the desert within sight of the highway.

That family had done everything wrong. When their car stalled and they couldn’t get it started again they had walked away from it, leaving five or six gallons of dirty but drinkable water in the radiator. They had walked away from the shade it could have given them, walked away from the evidence of trouble the search party would look for. And they had walked away in the daylight, in the sunlight, in the killing heat.

When Ben found them it had almost made him cry to see how the mother had smeared lipstick on the faces of her children in a futile effort to keep the sun from burning the flesh off them.…

Ben had always thought that he could survive in this desert he knew so well as long as he could move.

He could move, if you called stumbling on
those torn feet moving. He could move for about twenty-four hours more, and that was all.

All night long he had hoped that with the coming of day Madec would realize that he was making a fatal mistake. That to kill Ben out here would be far more dangerous than confessing the accident and taking his chances with a jury.

Now Ben admitted to himself that Madec, as intelligent as he was, was too vain to give up. Vain and conceited and sure of himself, sure that he could convince the authorities that Ben had killed a man.

Madec would tell a simple, convincing story. Ben had killed the man and when Madec had insisted on reporting it to the authorities had tried to kill him, too. But Madec had escaped to the Jeep and made his way back.

Madec would tell it well, Ben decided. All the details would fit; he might even go so far as to wound himself to make it more convincing.

Madec would see to it that all the evidence supported him. The old man, ruined by vultures by the time they found him, would be wearing his clothes again and his boots and hat. The two Hornet slugs would be easy to find.

Ben would also have his clothes on. Madec would find him where he had at last dropped and would dress him and equip him—with empty canteens and gun and food.

It was too late now for any reconciliation, too late to just walk off this mountain and go to Madec and beg for his life.

He fought back the fear. As long as there’s water on this mountain, he told himself, I’m not dead.

Tonight, he planned, when the moon goes down, I’ll go back to that catch basin. To keep Madec from seeing me I’ll crawl all the way there on my stomach.

But I’ll get there.

With the dry heat pressing in on him from every direction, Ben relaxed against the outcrop and forced himself to stop the squirrel cage thinking; to empty his mind and sleep.

A
T FIRST
Ben didn’t know what had waked him, but he awoke with dread, as though some enemy was close on him, threatening him.

His wounded cheek had swollen so badly that his left eye was completely closed and he could not, even with his fingers, open it enough to see out of it.

It was still daylight, the sun seeming to be squatting on the western mountains, no longer moving down but staying there, pouring its heat on him.

Then he heard the sound and realized that was what had waked him up. A tinkling sound. Of metal on rock.

Pushing himself up a little, his head toward the sound and turned far enough to see with his right eye, he looked down.

Ben could only see Madec’s head and shoulders and could not tell what he was doing.

Pushing himself on up, pain throbbing into his legs, he looked around the outcrop.

He could see Madec clearly now. The big
Magnum was propped not far from him against the cliff face, and Madec, his fancy bush jacket dark with sweat, was using the Jeep’s short-handled shovel.

It was insulting, infuriating. And Ben felt a strange, weak, childish thing. Don’t
do
that, he silently begged. Don’t do that.

Madec had shoveled most of the sand out of the catch basin and was sloshing out the rest, the sand-filled water looking dull and gray in the sunlight as it flew from the shovel and splashed down on the bare, sloping, hot stone. The water ran down the stone in a little shallow stream, vanishing as it ran.

Madec shoveled and scooped until the basin was empty, the sand all around it drying fast in the dying sunlight, turning from an almost black dampness to the faint brown of the dry sand.

Holding to the rock with his hands to keep the weight off his feet, Ben moved back behind the outcrop and slowly let himself down again.

Now all his hope for miracles was gone and Ben was left with a strange and chilling thought.

He and this man Madec were locked together, chained together in a struggle for life itself—a struggle with no niceties, no rules of behavior, no sportsmanship, no gentlemanly conduct.

Madec could not leave him. The struggle had gone too far for that. Nor, on the other hand, could Ben escape. Without water he could not make it across the miles of open desert, and, even if he had water, his feet could not endure that
distance. In ten miles the flesh of his feet would be worn away down to the bones.

The Jeep was the key to life. The man with the Jeep would live, the other man would die. There were water, protection, food, movement, communications, weapons and comfort with the Jeep. With the Jeep one man could kill the other.

Madec had the Jeep.

Ben sat watching Madec walking back to the Jeep, the gun over one shoulder, the shovel swinging in his hand. He looked so satisfied with himself, so jaunty in that cocked-up Australian hat.

Ben had been close to death a few times. On highways, on a high crag, once in a helicopter when the rotor clipped a treetop. The closeness could be measured in inches or seconds, and death had gone past him before he actually recognized how close it had been. At those times, the fear came after death had gone and he could, in safety, think back to what might have happened.

Now it was different. Death was close and he knew that, but now he had time; he could sit here and think about it; could feel it coming, slowly, minute by minute, hour by hour.

In his mouth and throat he could feel death as a strange, unwettable dryness which his saliva could not diminish. He could feel it in the swelling of his tongue which had started back in his throat and seemed about to choke him with its dry mass.

Twenty more hours?

Or was it only nineteen now?

The sun had finally started moving down behind those huge mountains to the west. Like a hand stretched out to help him a long, thin and almost rectangular shadow came steadily across the desert toward him. Ben followed the movement of the shadow with his eyes.

Three hundred million years ago the place where he now sat had been submerged beneath an inland sea, and the plateau at the foot of the mountains had been a great marsh covered with weird and enormous mosses and ferns. Then the first animals with backbones had appeared—strange fish—and later there were reptiles in the swamps.

At this time the great eruptions, the immense flowings of lava, the extrusion of mountains from the almost fluid surface of the earth had quieted, and the climate became cold. All the northern world lay under thousands of feet of solid ice.

Two hundred million years ago dinosaurs had walked where the Jeep now sat and six million years later tyrannosaurus, lizards that stood twenty feet high and had fearsome claws and teeth, roamed what was then almost all marshland, lying under a cool and rainy climate.

And then, about sixty million years ago, the earth here had become violent again. The whole chain of the Rocky Mountains was vomited up ward and volcanoes erupted and built themselves up and died and were eroded away by wind and water. At this time the climate was mild
and pleasant and the first horses had appeared, hardly as big as basset hounds, with toes rather than hooves.

At some point during all the violence of prehistory there had been a volcano about seven miles from where Ben sat. Rock, melted by the intense heat of the earth’s deep interior, had been pushed upward by unimaginable pressures and had broken through the cool crust of the earth at that place.

This molten rock, called magma, had been forced upward with great violence, filling the sky with a fountain of stone so hot it flowed like water. And, like water, the stone had fallen back around the hole in the earth, slowly forming a cone of cooling rock, building up layer by layer into the conical shape of a volcano.

Even as this mountain of once-molten rock was forming, magma continued to be pushed upward, not only through the hole in the earth but on up through the hole in the conical mountain.