Trap Angel (Frank Angel Western #3) (11 page)

‘Your eventual
mission?’

‘Ah, yes,’ Denniston said,
his calm returning. ‘I promised you, did I not? Well, my digression
had point, although it may have puzzled you. Tonight my men and I
ride out of here. We will take the guns we — ah — liberated and the
ammunition. And, of course, the Gatling gun.’

He shook his head in
self-admiration. ‘A stroke of pure genius, that, I think. Well.
Tonight we march. We march to — a destination I think I shall not
reveal to you. Mister Angel, although it is not a long way away.
There we shall prepare for a battle. Along both sides of a canyon
my men will be lying in wait, those beautifully accurate Army
weapons aimed and ready, the Gatling gun loaded and carefully
located where its lethal firepower can do the most damage. And down
that canyon will come the man who gave the order to have me drummed
out of the camp at Chickamauga ten years ago — the man who is now
President of the United States, Ulysses Simpson Grant!’

His words hung in the still
air like some monstrous black bird. Angel reacted the only way he
knew how.

‘You’re insane,’ he
said.

just for a second the fires
of madness consumed the brain behind the glaring, iron-gray eyes.
Denniston’s hand swept across in a tight arc.

‘Damn your impudent soul,
sir!’ he screamed, as his open hand slapped Angel off the chair and
sent him sprawling on the floor. The door burst inwards and a guard
stood behind Denniston, revolver cocked, eyes taking in the whole
scene in one sweeping glance.

‘It’s all right,’ Denniston
panted, drawing himself upright. The man gawped at him and
Denniston’s voice went up a register. ‘Get out!’

‘Yessir,’ gasped the guard,
retreating hastily and closing the door behind him. Angel got
slowly to his feet, sitting on the bed and leaning against the
wall. The room slowly stopped spinning around and he focused on his
captor, realizing Denniston was talking again.

‘You will remember to whom
you are speaking, Angel!’ Denniston said coldly, his iron
self-control fully reasserted now. ‘I hold your life in this hand
—’ he held a clenched fist forward — ‘and should I order it, you
would die in the room right now. Hold on to your last few hours of
life, and savor them. As I shall do.’

He turned and knocked on the
door. The guard opened it and Denniston went out. As he did, he
turned. There was an ironic smile on his face.

‘Reflect upon the word
insane, Mister Angel,’ he said, flatly. ‘Am I insane who can and
will do exactly as I said I will? Or are you and your puny civil
service heroes insane to try and stop me?’ He looked at the guard,
who grinned obligingly, and then the door slammed into place. Frank
Angel sat on the cot in the stone prison room and stared at the
wall. In two hours it would be sundown. On present indications he
had almost twelve hours to live. Right now he was hardly strong
enough to knock down a self-respecting pigeon.

He looked at his trembling
hands and grimaced.

Twelve hours.

At around four in the
morning Angel made his move.

He had heard the
preparations for departure outside, the tinny sound of the bugles
blowing assembly and the men running to meet their horse-handlers,
taking the reins and swinging into the saddles moving out in a
solid phalanx with the Gatling gun swinging on its spindly-looking
wheels behind the team pulling it. Nightfall had brought a deep
silence to the compound, as if the very mountains around it were
huddled closer to shield it from prying outsiders. Once in a while
Angel heard the guard (guards?) outside his cell coughing, or
humming a few bars of ‘Lorena’. Towards midnight he could hear
someone snoring. He edged his chair towards the window and watched
the darkness outside until his eyes could make out the thicker,
blacker shapes of men moving in the compound. There were still
guards on the gates and in the vedettes above. How many? Were there
any patrols on the fence? If so, where? And again, how many? He
smiled grimly in the blackness. He’d find out soon
enough.

Now it was time. He sat down
on the cot and prepared his weapons. Although Denniston’s men had
taken his guns and searched him thoroughly, they had not discovered
the things which were the result of the hours Angel had spent alone
with the Armourer, discussing ways in which a man could carry
undetected weapons and what those weapons might be. They should,
preferably, be weapons which killed silently and efficiently. The
man should also have weapons which might double as tools. The tools
and weapons should be very light but enormously strong, and they
should be capable of concealment in places which would not normally
attract attention during a search. The Armourer in the justice
Department building had grinned at Angel’s insistence.

‘You don’t want much, do
you?’ he had said.

‘It’s my life,’ Angel had
reminded him. ‘I want the best there is.’

‘See what we can to,’ the
Armourer had promised. And a few days later, Angel had received a
message telling him to go down to the echoing basement on the Tenth
Street side of the building, and the Armourer had met him with a
wide grin.

‘Think I’ve got what you
want,’ he said, and held out a pair of ordinary riding boots and a
wide belt with a heavy brass buckle. Angel looked at them and then
at the Armourer.

‘They’re your size,’ the
Armourer said. ‘Try them on.’

And then he had seen the
weapons. Inside the belt lying neatly in a groove scoured into the
rough leather, looped a thin wire at both of whose ends were two
flat wooden pegs, perhaps two inches long.

‘Garrotte,’ the Armourer had
nodded. ‘Now the buckle.’

The buckle was in two pieces
which clipped together. When separated one of them became a
razor-edged knife whose wicked edge was covered by the overlaying
decorative buckle when placed back on the belt.

‘Pretty snaky,’ Angel said,
grinning. ‘How about the boots?’

They were straightforward
mule-ear boots with a stitched pattern that was in no way
unconventional. The Armourer showed him where on the outside flap —
the long strip used for pulling on the boots which gave them their
name of ‘mule-ears’ — the outer leather and the softer inner were
slightly separated. Inside each scabbard thus formed nestled two
flat—bladed throwing knives, perfectly balanced, their blades
widening into tulip-head shapes and then wicked points.

‘Solingen steel,’ the
Armourer said. ‘From Germany. Best there is. Just like you asked
for.’

He grinned mischievously and
then spent another hour or so with Angel showing him the best way
to use the knives, throwing over-handed or under, flicking them out
from the boot and up, until he pronounced himself
satisfied.

And these were the weapons
with which Angel must now make his desperate bid for
freedom.

The odds were enormous, he
knew. But there was no alternative. Somehow word had to be passed
through to the President. Whatever it was, whatever he was doing,
it must be something that would bring him within marching distance
of the mountain stronghold. Some canyon. But where,
where?

Angel stood up and flexed
his arms. His body still felt stiff and overused, but there was no
time to think of that any more. He slid on his boots and kicked the
door, hard, yelling wordlessly. And he went on kicking and yelling
until he saw the judas window slide back but now he was on the
floor at the foot of the door, still screaming mindlessly and
banging on the door with his boots.

‘Shut up in there!’ yelled
the man outside. ‘Shut up, damn you!’

Angel went on making as much
noise as his throat and lungs could manufacture, hammering his
heels against the door and ignoring the curses and commands of the
man on the other side of it.

After a few minutes he heard
the sound he had been hoping for, the man’s keys scrabbling in the
lock of the door, and as the door pushed inwards, he rolled away
from it and came up along its edge, hands looping the garrotte
neatly over the thick throat of the advancing guard. It was a nasty
way to kill a man but Angel closed his mind to that. He clamped the
man’s flailing arms with his own elbows, twisting the wire tighter,
tighter, tighter, choking with nausea as the dying man’s sphincter
muscle relaxed and his body voided itself, pulling the man back now
and down on to the dirty floor, all of this taking minutes, his
body drenched in sweat, lymphets of fatigue dancing before his
eyes.

‘Charlie?’ someone shouted.
Then ‘Charlie?’

Angel tore the biting wire
loose from the man’s throat and stepped over the body, his hand
ready as the man shouted ‘Charlie, what the hell?’

The man was a big, chunky
fellow who stepped into the corridor, his mouth full of apple, the
fruit in his hand. His jaws fell open at the sight of Angel in the
doorway and his brain flashed a command that the body never got a
chance to obey. Angel threw the flat-bladed knife in his right
hand, snapping the arm down on the last part of the throw to give
the weapon that penetration it would otherwise not have. The knife
winked once in the lamplighted corridor and buried itself to the
hilt in the throat of the man with the apple. He gave a horrible
choking cry and lurched back against the wall, bright red blood
spurting from the wound in his neck and splashing the ground and
the rough stones as the man fell silently, dead as he hit the
floor.

Angel was beside him even as
the man gave one long last sighing moan and slid all the way down
to deep and ending death, sliding the knife out with a rough flick
of the wrist, wiping it callously on the dead man’s clothing. He
was in the outer room of the ‘Punishment Block’ as he had heard
them jokingly call it. There were guns and carbines in a cabinet
behind the desk where the man with the apple had been sitting. Two
cups of coffee steamed on the table. Angel gulped one of them, the
hot liquid warming his chilled body. He opened the cupboard and
took out a new-looking Peacemaker, its 7" barrel nearest to the
kind of weight and balance he had gotten used to from using an old
Army Colt. Stuffing his pockets with ammunition, he scanned the
other weapons in the cabinet and finally took down a shotgun whose
barrels had been sawn off. It was a ten-gauge, and he found
ammunition in a box behind it. This wicked weapon gave him for the
first time hope that he might just make it out of the compound. The
sawn-off shotgun was a terrible weapon: eighteen 00 buckshot — blue
whistlers, some called them — could literally cut a man in half at
close range, and — Angel grinned wolfishly as he thought it — sure
as hell didn’t do anything for the health of anyone within twenty
or thirty yards of the barrel.

He broke the gun, loaded it,
sliding the Peacemaker into his belt. He didn’t want to start
shooting until he had to, and so he fashioned a loop for the
shotgun out of a thin leather strap that belonged to the case of a
pair of field glasses. With the shotgun now hanging from his left
shoulder, Angel eased back the door of the Punishment Block and
looked out on to the deserted parade ground. There were no lights
in the barracks, but one or two burned in the big building where he
had been exposed by the man who had killed Angus Wells. Angel’s
mouth went grim and thin at the thought: he would have a reckoning
with Mister Ed Reed in due course.

He eased silently across the
front of the cell building and then down the side furthest from the
gate, cutting in front of the tattered board cut-outs standing in
front of the sandbags on the firing range. He froze as he heard a
footfall crunch on loose stone somewhere near the perimeter fence.
He had kept his eyes half closed until now to hasten night vision.
Now he let them open wide and picked the man up quickly. He was
standing in the open, idling, not hurrying to complete his circuit
of the fence. Angel watched as the man scratched himself and
yawned. Then the man hoisted his Springfield off the ground and
with the weapon at trail walked dawdling towards the shadowed rear
of the Punishment Block. As soon as he reached the darkness, Angel
moved. It was literally only three yards from his hiding place to
where the man was walking, and Angel covered them before the man
had time to whirl around or cry out. The seeking knife held rigid
in Angel’s left hand found the lower ribs and slid upwards,
severing the aorta even as Angel’s right hand clamped on the man’s
mouth and racked his head back, Angel’s knee ramming into the base
of the man’s spine, smashing him back and down dead on the ground.
It hardly made a sound. Now Angel picked up the Springfield, and
with it at trail himself walked slowly along the perimeter fence,
turning left a he reached the right angle on the north-east corner,
coming up to the gates and beneath the vedette tower on the right
hand side. There were two men guarding the gate. One of them looked
up as Angel came nearer.

‘Hey, Tom,’ he said. Then,
‘Tom?’

That was all the warning
Angel was going to get and he knew it, so when the man’s hand
stabbed for the gun in its holster, he flicked the Peacemaker up
and shot the man through the head. The shot baroomed like thunder
in the darkness as the second guard got his gun into action, trying
to hit the now-rolling form of Angel, who had thrown himself to the
ground the moment after firing the shot which had killed the first.
Dust spurted up, and Angel felt the bullets slam into the ground
and he fired through the dusty darkness and saw the second guard go
backwards, clutching his belly, down over the edge of the bridge
across the ditch outside the gate. Now the two vedettes were at the
parapets, searching the ground below as Angel scuttled to the dark
shadows at the foot of the fence. He could hear men shouting at the
far side of the parade ground, and the dogs in the compound were
barking furiously at the noise.