Trap Angel (Frank Angel Western #3) (14 page)

Ten minutes after Angel was
brought to him and showed the President his identification, Grant
took command.

Within another ten, a team
of three troopers with six extra mounts was thrashing its way back
towards Las Animas with special instructions, told to kill the
horses if necessary. The encampment itself was on the banks of the
Picketwire, where the river, wider here and slower, purled onwards
towards its eventual meeting with the Arkansas. They were about ten
miles off the main Trail. Grant wasted no time on preliminaries.
Leaving his three political companions sitting on the steps of the
army ambulance, their faces white as chalk at the thought of the
ambush lying ahead of them in the mountains, Grant assembled his
staff in a semi—circle around him.

‘Now,’ he said. Angel
watched him, amazed at the enthusiasm in the man’s voice. It looked
as if the President was really enjoying himself. ‘In thirty-six
hours, or —’ he took a fob watch from his waistcoat pocket, —
‘roughly seven o’clock tomorrow evening, Colonel Whitenfield will
lead a force of picked men down the pass to attack this renegade
Denniston from the rear. At the same time, we — reinforced by the
men I have sent for from Las Animas — will go into the, ah, lion’s
jaws. Although with one small difference: we shall be ready for
him.’

Major Godwin stepped
forward. His face was ashen, the stricken Visage of a man who had
just been told he has an incurable disease.

‘But Mister President,’ he
said, ‘Denniston has a Gatling gun, enormous firepower up there.
We’ll be cut to ribbons.’

Grant smiled. ‘I doubt that,
Mister,’ he said.

‘I’ve requisitioned
explosives from the railroad at Animas. I propose to take that
renegade bastard with a variation on the theme of the wooden horse
of Troy.’

‘Sir?’ said
Godwin.

‘Later, Mister, later.
Gentlemen, Mister Angel believes — and I concur — that we are
probably being watched. Therefore I propose that we proceed on our
way, going perhaps a lot more slowly than we might heretofore have
done. We shall camp at the foot of the mountains tonight, and take
a very late breakfast. We might even go fishing,’ he grinned, his
yellow teeth showing under the bristling beard. ‘But we shall not
go into the pass until late afternoon, timing our arrival there for
as close to six-thirty as possible. Mister Angel — perhaps you
could draw us a rough map of the ambush, and the approaches to
it?’

Angel smoothed out the sandy
dirt and with a stick traced the major features of the Trail as it
curved through the timbered rocks where the ambush was planned.
Grant nodded, listening carefully, asking questions occasionally.
Godwin watched it all in silence, his eyes ever wary, flickering
from Angel to Grant and then out towards the mountains, never
still. Grant noticed the young soldier’s nervousness but dismissed
it as no more than that. Angel noticed it, too. They went on
talking long into the afternoon as Grant made suggestions, Angel
adding other ideas, varying them constantly until they came up with
the right way to do what Grant had in mind.

Grant’s eyes sparkled with
anticipation and Frank Angel found himself warming to the short,
blunt—spoken man. Grant might not have held command for many years,
but he had forgotten little about soldiering. It was a pleasure to
do business with him, and Angel found himself being caught up in
the President’s confident enthusiasm.

Later that night they camped
in a box canyon at the foot of the mountains, the campfires heaped
high with brush and the men encouraged to get a singsong going. In
truth, they felt as little like singing as any soldier does who
knows the morrow may see him dead, but Grant walked around the
encampment, stopping here and there to talk to a trooper, asking
questions about their homes, their families.

Later, he sent for Angel,
who went to the ambulance in which Grant was to sleep and knocked
on the door. He heard the gruff voice bid him enter.

Grant was sitting upon the
slatted seat which would later be his bed. He gestured with the
whiskey bottle in his hand towards a glass which Frank Angel picked
up and held out. Grant poured him a man-sized drink and raised his
glass.

‘I haven’t thanked you,
Frank,’ he said quietly.

‘No need of that, Mister
President,’ Angel said.

‘Probably not,’ Grant
huffed. ‘But thank you, anyway. Now tell me about this man
Denniston.’

So Angel sat there in the
dark ambulance and told the President the story of Denniston’s
dismissal from the Army. When he had finished, Grant
nodded.

‘I remember it now,’ he said
quietly. ‘I was stupid, sentimental. Overrode a recommendation to
have the man shot. I had doubts that he had run from the Johnny
Rebs the way his officers said. Always felt that it was nearer a
mutiny than anything. Denniston was a martinet.

Treated his men like dirt.
Always took the position most likely to be under heavy fire. A
glory hunter. We’ve got a few in the Army. Trouble, every one of
them. I’m foolish about it, I suppose. Hate to see a good soldier
ruined by a hasty decision. Cause me more pain before I die, I
shouldn’t wonder.’

‘What exactly happened,
sir?’

‘Denniston, you mean? Can’t
remember the details exactly. He took a forward position, tried to
carry a redoubt that was impossibly well-defended. Couldn’t be
done. Stood there trying to whip his men into the fight with the
flat of his saber, and when they ran he was left alone.

Johnny Rebs came out to get
him and the man turned tail and ran. Happened before.

Unfortunately for Denniston,
he ran smack into the arms of General Thomas, who was advancing
with reinforcements to relieve him. Nothing Thomas could
do.’

Angel nodded. As Grant had
said, it had happened before, and no one the wiser many times.
Denniston had suffered an extreme penalty for that one lapse. It
was no wonder that the hatred for Grant had rankled all those
years, festering until it became a mad ambition, revenge, revenge,
revenge the only force in the twisted mind.

He bade the President
goodnight and went out into the night. The stars wheeled in their
courses over the high terrain. Somewhere a horse whickered. He
stood for a long time looking up at the mountains.

Hours later, he
slept.

Late in the afternoon the
two ambulances toiled up the long mountain road. It was one of
those days you sometimes get in the high country, hot and still,
the sky a brazen white without a cloud anywhere and only the soft
sigh of the ever-present breeze to cool the sweating bodies of the
troopers riding escort. Denniston’s vedettes had signaled the
advance of the Presidential caravan, their prearranged Morse
signals winking from the high points. If the troopers escorting the
ambulances saw them, they gave no sign.

Denniston was waiting as he
had waited for almost two days, clamping down upon the burning
impatience that consumed him. He knew Grant’s reputation for
dawdling, knew the man would feel it a challenge to alter any
timetable with which he was presented; the faintest touch of cold
unease had once come to Denniston in the bleak cool of the mountain
night and he had wondered, wondered. But no. Godwin would have sent
word to him if there had been any change of plan, any possibility
that the final dénouement was to be denied him. And none had come.
What Denniston could not know was that Frank Angel had, without
ever seeming to do so, kept ever close to the young major, always
around when Godwin thought, for once, that he might be able to
sneak away from the encampment. Godwin had cursed the Justice
Department man silently many times, but it was no use his trying to
warn Denniston in any way. That was exactly what Angel was waiting
for — one man to try to leave the column. He would know
then.

And there was something in
Angel’s cold eyes that warned Godwin he would never deliver his
message if he tried. And so he had remained close to his men,
busying himself unnecessarily, always hopeful that the chance which
had never come might present itself.

Up the long, winding road
the wagons toiled.

The Army mules had their
ears laid back, their backs wet with sweat as they lunged against
the traces, hauling the ambulances over the rocky road, the
vehicles swaying dangerously on the deep ruts scoured into the
Trail by generations of heavy-laden Conestogas.

Frank Angel rode in the rear
of the procession, a bearded trooper alongside him. The trooper’s
eyes constantly moved across the rocky bluffs on either side of the
trail, ever alert for some movement, some indication that they were
closing in on their destination.

‘Goddammit, Angel,’ the
trooper said, ‘why can’t I have a cigar?’

‘Mr. President, you’d be the
first cavalryman in the history of the Army who was allowed to
smoke while escorting the President of the United States. No go.
Sorry.’

‘All right, all right,’
grumbled Grant. ‘Beats me how you can smoke one and I can’t, that’s
all.’

Angel grinned. ‘I’m a
civilian, remember?

They were on a fairly
straight stretch of the trail now, and Angel spurred the horse up
alongside the second ambulance, standing in the saddle to see
ahead. The troopers in the van, led by Godwin, were just
approaching a left-hand bend. Beyond it and above them the road
straightened up and then turned almost on itself to the
right.

There was a huge mound of
rocks and boulders screened by patches of brush where the trail
swung, and on the river side, heavy pines screened the
roadside.

Angel nodded, falling back
alongside Grant.

‘This it?’ Grant asked. His
face was set and tight. He shifted impatiently in the
McClellan.

‘This is it,’ Angel
confirmed.

‘Garry on, Mister Angel,’
Grant said curtly.

‘Good luck.’

‘Thanks,’ Angel said. He put
his heels into the horse’s ribs and kicked it to a run, coming up
alongside Godwin. He had his Stetson tugged down well over his eyes
and hunched his shoulders. If Denniston was up there with
field-glasses — and he surely was — Angel didn’t want him
recognizing the man he thought long since executed in the
compound.

‘Fall back nice and easy,
now,’ Angel said quietly to the soldiers flanking him, letting his
horse make its own pace. ‘Let the front ambulance come up on you a
little. That’s it, that’s fine. Easy, now.’

The driver of the leading
ambulance winked at Angel as he came level, his features tight with
anticipation. They were twenty, thirty yards from the bend, now,
and that was when Angel yelled ‘GO!’

The driver of the ambulance
laid the whip across the backs of the astonished mules, which bared
their teeth in shock and lunged against the traces, actually
starting to run up the steep slope as the troopers on both sides of
the ambulance scattered, falling sideways out of their saddles,
rifles in hand, scrabbling to find any cover they could. The driver
of the ambulance leaped to one side, landing running, then falling,
crashing into the trees, his body tumbling down to the edge of the
rushing river as the ambulance clattered into the bend, the short
fuse to which Angel had touched his cigar sputtering beneath the
seat.

The mules charged into the
corner with no hope at all of negotiating it, pulling back and
making the ambulance swing off to the left hand side of the track,
rolling on top of the hidden riflemen in the trees there and then
suddenly exploding, detonating with a cracking boom that hurled
splinters and tattered things that might have once been parts of
men high in a bloody melee.

Up on the rise overlooking
the curve Denniston screamed orders to his men, the Gatling gun
starting to pump shells down on to the road, the explosions
chattering like some enormous beast as the gunner wound the crank
handle. Great gouts of earth and rock smashed upwards as the line
of shells marched down the road, dropping the lead mules of the
second wagon, lifting upwards, shredding the woodwork of the
conveyance, tearing great chunks of it that whickered towards the
crouching, flinching men.

Now the riflemen on the
mound in the centre of the curve opened up, laying down a flat
screen of fire that ripped the thin slatted sides of the Army
ambulance into smithereens and finally, as Angel had expected, one
of them hit the explosives inside and the wagon went up with a
roar, a yellow tongue of flame licking twenty feet high as the
whirling pieces of timber, wagon bed, canvas, metal, dead mule,
filled the sky with heavy rain.

Now the Gatling gun had
nothing to shoot at because a dense cloud of black smoke hung over
the whole curve, yet still Denniston screamed at his gunner and
still the man cranked the handle, pouring an endless hail of shells
into the churning mess on the road below. Through the smashing roll
of firing, the troopers were getting the distance from their
position at the side of the road, their slugs whacking great chunks
off the rocks in the central mound. Then Angel, belly-down in the
trees between the river and the road, heard the clear, lovely sound
of a cavalry bugle and over the top of the rise, guidons flying,
came a double rank of United States Cavalry.