Читать книгу Anasazi Exile - Eric G. Swedin - Страница 10

CHAPTER FIVE

The morning air refreshed Harry as he went through his exercises. Thrust, kick, pause, deep breath through the nostrils, concentrating on finding his center. It was hard to keep his thoughts from intruding. He felt the heavy weight of acting like a fool and had slept poorly. Forty-four years old, a man of the world, his neurons laden with experience, and he had acted like a giddy teenager. How could he have agreed to go into the tomb with Brenda? What had possessed him?

If he was honest with himself, the kind of honesty that left a man bare before the bright glare of insight that came from not protecting the ego with platitudes or rationalization, he knew that sometimes he made self-destructive decisions. Drinking binges that left him puking blood, embarrassed by the flashes of memory of what he had done while his judgment was pickled by alcohol. Some people say that alcohol reveals your true nature. Harry was a happy drunk, always trying to have a good time, never violent, never hurting people.

His father had been a drinker too, an easygoing drunk, but able to support himself because he only drank on weekends, never on the job. Harry had not wanted to be like his father. He had wanted to find pride in being a responsible soldier, always reliable, who never let his superiors or his buddies down. Instead, he became a conscientious drunk, like his father; there had been mistakes, though he was never caught.

Like many of his Army buddies, on leave he had completely let himself go. It was really stupid. He had cheated on his wife while drunk—not often, but once too often. Sadly enough, he couldn’t even remember the face of the woman who had given him the disease. There is no cure for genital herpes. He couldn’t bring that home, not ever. That was how he had come to be divorced, the greatest failure of his life.

Maybe going into the tomb was like the drinking binges, a release from the restriction of always doing the right thing. Lord, he had been such a fool. He stopped, exhaling sharply, the meditative peace that came from his forms completely gone.

In the clear desert air, where sounds carry much farther than one might expect, he heard the sound of a car engine. That was curious. It came from the road that led down into the canyon—a restricted road, not to be used by anyone without a permit. A park ranger would not be coming up the road this early in the morning.

Must be an emergency of some sort.

Grateful for an excuse to quit exercising and flee the company of remembered failures, Harry made his way off the hill towards the road. Perhaps Dr. Bancroft had called the rangers and asked them to pass on an urgent message, since cell coverage did not reach Casa Ángeles. What kind of argument could Dr. Bancroft make that would compel a ranger to get up this early?

The sun still remained below the horizon, though the eastern sky glowed with promise and the stars had started to fade. A light breeze carried the scent of sagebrush and dust. Harry watched the ground carefully, wary of shadows that might hide rocks and tufts of grass.

The car engine noise died. Odd; he didn’t hear the sound of a door being slammed shut.

Instinctively he crouched behind a large bush and strained to listen. Voices came to him. Two men, accents from the east coast, breathing heavily as they climbed the hill. He heard one of the men stumble.

“Damn, I hate the outdoors!” The voice had a Boston twang to it. “Always tripping you up.”

“Shh, keep it down. And don’t fall into the tomb. It’s around here somewhere.”

“We putting the bodies in the tomb?”

“That’s the plan.”

Again the Boston voice. “I get to rape her first?”

“Hell, no, we don’t have time for that. Now do it right.”

Vomit rose in Harry’s throat, a bitter acidic taste mixed with cheese and lunch meat from last night’s dinner. He swallowed furiously, his eyes watering as the acid hit his nose. An image of Brenda, broken and lifeless, innocence taken, no more future, seared his mind. He caught the image and held it, provoking a flood of cool, cleansing anger.

His fingers wanted to crawl across the ground, searching for a rock or a stout stick. He clenched his fingers into fists to restrain himself—he might make a sound, and surprise was his best weapon. The men were maybe forty feet away.

“I’m going around to come in from the back. Don’t accidentally shoot me.”

“Fine by me,” the Boston voice agreed.

“Don’t shoot me on purpose either.”

The Boston man snorted.

Harry cursed silently. He wanted to take them together and keep the element of surprise, even if he was outnumbered. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on the sound of the other man moving away, a noisy clamor of stones. The tactic of coming into the camp from two sides was sound, perhaps even overcautious since they expected Harry and Brenda to be asleep.

The sounds of the other man grew more distant, but the Boston man sounded much closer now. Harry opened his eyes, straining to see in the darkness. Twenty-two years ago, when he had first gone into combat, he had pissed himself. With soggy pants he had rushed across the airfield runway in Panama, firing back at the gun flashes of National Guardsmen firing blindly at the American Rangers. It had been the dark before dawn then, just as now, and he had been glad that none of his squad mates could see his shame. Of course, perhaps they had done the same thing. He knew one tough sergeant in Delta, respected by everyone, who readily admitted that he stained his shorts during every firefight.

The Boston man walked noisily past, with no field craft, only about six feet away. Harry silently drew a deep breath and launched himself. He clamped his left hand over the man’s mouth and drove his right fist into his kidney, knowing the explosion of pain that came from such a blow. They tumbled to the ground and he heard the sharp exhalation. The man would not be able to cry out until he sucked in more air, and Harry intended for that to never happen.

Scrambling in the dark, Harry kept his left hand on the man’s mouth and searched with the fingers of his right hand. They found that man’s eyes, wide open, then quickly clenched tightly shut at Harry’s touch. The soldier-turned-archaeologist drove his middle finger past the eyeball and into the brain, pushing in as far as he could. He kept his hand there, growing sticky with blood.

The man thrashed wildly, banging Harry’s outstretched left elbow against a small rock protruding from the ground. Pain shot up Harry’s arm and down his side to his groin and he gasped. Why did they call that the funny bone? What a ridiculous name. Harry fell back, clenching his right fist as he did so, feeling the eye of the man come loose in his hand. His left arm was useless for the moment, and he heard the man inhale. Silence was absolutely necessary. Harry dropped the eye, grabbed a rock, no bigger than a small book, and brought it down.

He could not see well enough in the darkness to deliver more than a glancing blow and was not sure if he landed it on the man’s head or neck. He struck again and heard the crunch of skull. Sure now of his aim, he struck again with all the force that he could muster and this time he was sure that the man with the Boston accent would move no more.

Harry held his breath, listening intently. He could not hear the other man returning. Running his hands over the dead man, he found a pistol jammed in the man’s belt. The man from Boston had never gone for his weapon, instinctively protecting his eyes instead. Even though the sun had not yet peeked over the western ridge, the sky was getting lighter; only Venus, the morning star, was still visible.

Harry ran his hands over the gun. A small semi-automatic, with a silencer on the end. He rubbed his finger on the end of the silencer, gauging the opening to belong to a .22 or .25 caliber.

He hurried back to the camp, feeling more terrified than he ever had at any time in his life.

* * * *

Brenda came awake with a start. Wisps of a dream, of a desert tomb and a handsome stranger, jostled in her head. Why had she awakened?

She heard a rustling outside her tent.

“Harry, is that you?”

* * * *

Harry reached the camp, coming up the draw just in time to see the other man, standing only five or six feet from the front of Brenda’s tent, point his pistol down. Harry didn’t hear the shots, but saw the pistol jerk twice. Harry screamed, all his terror at the prospect of that young angel dying ripped from his throat. He dropped to one knee, braced his arm, aimed, and fired three quick shots, then burst to his feet and ran to his left, moving closer.

The assassin staggered back and dropped to the ground. Harry fired three more times as he rushed forward, cursing his unfamiliarity with the weapon, knowing that if somehow he had been given time to practice, he would have hit with every shot.

The assassin was twisting away, having lost his pistol, when Harry reached him. The archaeologist finished the bastard with a shot to the head, an unthinking act ingrained in him from hundreds of hours of hostage rescue drills. Always do the head in case the bad guy was a suicide bomber.