Cody's Army (6 page)

Richard Caine had been attached to Cody’s team in Vietnam and Cody knew of no better demolitions expert in the world than
the dour, hard-as-nails Englishman.

He experienced a renewal of some life force within him which his sorrow over the fate of those nuns—for all mankind—had dammed
up for too long, he now realized.

The lines were being drawn, Pete had said.

Damn right.

“And Rufe?”

Rufe Murphy. The black giant and best buddy who had piloted Cody’s unit in and out of more hot LZs in Nam than any grunts
had a right to survive.

Lund lost some of his enthusiasm.

“Uh, now there we could run into a real problem.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Rufe’s been running a one-man charter helicopter service in Mississippi, but at the moment he’s in a jail cell awaiting trial.”

“On what charge?”

“Grand theft, auto.”

“Anything to it?”

“Hell, no. You know Rufe. He was banging the mayor’s wife.”

“The mayor’s white?”

Lund nodded.

“And so’s the wife. And I think that cancels out your third choice. It’s like I said, John: Hawkins, Caine, Murphy…. unreachable,
all of them.”

“I’ll reach ’em,” Cody growled. He picked up the tumbler of scotch and pitched it into the fireplace, where it shattered ceremoniously;
the closing of one chapter in his life, the beginning of another. With no looking back. He grabbed up the Weatherby, which
was all he intended to take with him that he wasn’t carrying, and started toward the cabin doorway. “Let’s go, Pete. Let’s
do it.”

Lund hurried to catch up, murmuring to himself.

“Well, all goddamn right. Here we go again!”

FOUR

T
he road appeared to stretch into infinity in either direction across the lean, sun-burnt desert lands fissured here and there
by an empty riverbed with nothing else on the horizon except the occasional buttes—rosy pink now in the minutes after sunset.
The western sky was a warm red, with wispy traces of scudding clouds just beginning to take on a purple hue.

The only sign of life in the desert was the overworked engine whine of a four-wheel-drive vehicle eating up the two-lane blacktop
from Chihuahua, eighty kilometers to the south, toward the U.S. border crossing at Presidio, Texas, sixty kilometers to the
north.

Hawkeye Hawkins had his eyes pasted to the rearview mirror.

“Reckon this rodeo is about to pump into high gear,” he drawled over his shoulder to Richard Caine, in the back seat with
a third man. “Looks like some of Ruiz’s boys have found out the boss man ain’t among them.”

Caine, a sturdy, flat-muscled, handsome man, applied pressure to the 9mm Beretta he held pressed against Jesus Ruiz’s temple.

“That best not be your crew, El Gato. If any shooting starts, lad, you’re going to catch the second shot fired.”

Ruiz, who had been dubbed The Cat by drug agents on both sides of the border for his ability to walk away from death every
time it came looking for him, appeared, in his silk shirt and pressed slacks, cool as a guy out for a Sunday jaunt, or maybe
on his way to drop in on some border-town police chief with the month’s payoff.

“Certainly those are my men,” he purred with barely the trace of an accent, his pencil-line moustache curved upward at the
ends with his smile. “And you will not kill me, gringos. If I die, you most certainly will die. I suggest you pull this vehicle
over at once and allow me to rejoin my friends, or I am afraid—”

Caine rapped Ruiz sharply in the mouth with the butt of the Beretta.

“Shut the fuck up,” he said quietly.

Ruiz lost some of his composure, his hands flying to his mouth with a yip of pain. He spat out red-specked pieces of teeth,
cussing hotly in Spanish.

“Oh-oh,” said Hawkins. “Trouble up ahead too, if I read this right.” Caine looked over Hawkeye’s shoulder, out the front windshield
at what the Texan behind the wheel saw: a Jeep coming fast at them, growing from a dot on the horizon. A look over his shoulder
told him the same kind of vehicle, behind, was gaining, too.

“Trouble is right,” the Brit grumbled. “I thought this was going to be one of those easy ones, mate. I thought this whole
bloody bounty-hunter business was supposed to be a piece of cake.”

“There you go again,” Hawkins sighed, scanning either side of the road they roared down without slacking speed. “Always griping
about a little hard work. You got to earn your pay once in a while.”

Caine’s eyes followed Hawkeye’s.

“That high ground to the right,” he said as if reading the Texan’s mind. “Those rocks. We can make them if we’re lucky.”

“Luck’s got nothing to do with it, pard,” Hawkeye growled. “Hold onto your tea bags.”

He palmed the wheel. The four-wheel-drive vehicle bulleted off the blacktop toward an outcrop of rock at the base of an incline
toward one of the buttes, perhaps a quarter-klick away.

The vehicles closing in on them veered off the highway the moment those drivers ascertained what Hawkeye was up to and began
speeding in from different angles about one-half a kilometer behind, clouds of dust spiraling up behind all three vehicles
as the four-wheel-drive led the pack toward the base of the butte.

Ruiz watched his men closing in from behind.

“You have no chance,
Senors,”
he gurgled between broken teeth. Crimson spittle stained his shirt. “You are outnumbered. The Jeeps will be in radio contact
with others—”

“You just don’t take a hint, do you, hairbag,” Caine sighed. He whapped Ruiz across the temple with the butt of the Beretta.

El Gato’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he slid to the floor of the backseat of the bouncing vehicle.

“Now maybe we’ll have some peace and quiet,” said Hawkeye, glancing back out their vehicle’s rear window at the two Jeeps
closing in fast from different directions. “At least for a minute or two,” he added.

Felipe Gallegos set down the hand-held transceiver after having summoned reinforcements from the hacienda. He held onto the
frame of the Jeep to keep from being tossed from the vehicle as the driver kept the accelerator pressed to the floorboard.
His rifle rode between his legs, aimed up and out, and the three men in the back held on too as the Jeep bounced along off
the road in pursuit of that four-wheel-drive vehicle up ahead. It was like riding a bucking bronco, but Gallegos, as the man
in charge of security at
Casa
Ruiz, thought far more about what El Gato would do to him when this was over than the danger of being thrown from this vehicle,
or of having to deal with the bounty hunters who had the boss.

The two men could be nothing else, Gallegos reasoned as he cast a glance at the other vehicle, commanded by Sanchez, closing
in.

Bounty hunters.

They were the ones you had to fear, and somehow they had gotten to Jesus during the siesta and Gallegos had not learned of
it until the four-wheel-drive vehicle was seen racing away with a handcuffed Jesus Ruiz already in it.

Up ahead, the vehicle reached the cluster of rock where the bare ground began its incline to become one of the sporadic buttes
dotting the region.

It could be worse, Gallegos told himself. At least we will get El Gato from them. We outnumber them right now ten-to-two,
and it will be twenty-five-to-two when the others arrive shortly. The gringos would be promised safe passage. They would release
Jesus. They would, of course, be slain, their bodies left to the buzzards and the jackals.

Gallegos looked behind, to the west. The light of the western sky was fading but they still had another forty minutes of light.
Enough time, yes. And this would teach the boss to stay on this side of the border, Gallegos hoped, where El Gato would not
run the danger of having any more warrants sworn for his arrest in the States, which would bring more men like the two who
had him now.

He saw the four-wheel-drive skid to a stop and the two men alight from it.

Where was the boss?

The bounty hunters moved to one side of the car and pulled out what looked to Gallegos from this distance like a rolled-up
rug. Then as the two Jeep-loads of men closed in to within several hundred yards of that rock cluster, he saw with something
of a shock that it was the boss!

El Gato’s body landed roughly on the ground, and one of the men grabbed the unconscious Ruiz where the handcuffs linked his
hands and dragged Jesus behind the rocks.

The boss is going to be real pissed now, thought Gallegos, and the only way to get off El Gato’s shit list would be to fill
those two gringo bastards so full of holes that the buzzards and jackals wouldn’t even bother with what was left.

* * *

Hawkins dragged an unconscious Ruiz roughly across the rocky ground to behind the cluster of boulders, where a shelf of level
land, surrounded by brownish-green, bunchy shrubs, allowed him to look from higher ground down upon the converging Jeeps full
of gunmen—rifles poking into the air from each bouncing, speeding vehicle like antenna on some strange desert predator.

He dumped Ruiz against one of the boulders and turned to stretch flat across the ground, unholstering the .44 Magnum he wore
leathered cross-draw fashion on his left hip.

He called to Caine, “Better get a hotfoot on, limey. This here gunfight’s about to commence.”

Caine spun from the back of the four-wheel-drive. He gripped an Ml match rifle equipped with a rifle grenade attachment and
fitted with a Startron infrared telescopic sight. He shouldered a pack loaded heavy with grenades and ammo.

“Had to fetch the peashooter,” he called back, jogging toward the boulders on the higher ground. “How’s sleeping beauty?”

Hawkeye turned from eyeing the oncoming jeeps, now some five hundred yards out and zeroing in side by side.

Jesus Ruiz groaned and mumbled something groggily and started to open his eyes and sit up.

Hawkeye leaned over and cracked the drug dealer behind the right ear with the butt of the .44.

Ruiz settled back against the rock to resume snoring fitfully.

“A tad worse for the wear but still sawin’ ’em off,” he replied as Caine joined him. “Looks like we could be boxed in this
time, Richard, old chap.”

The Brit bellied out beside Hawkins, supporting himself on his elbows, sighting in on one of the Jeeps through the M1’s sniper
scope.

“Let’s see what some heavy artillery buys us, shall we?”

He sighted in on the Jeep of gunmen roaring in on the left, flicked the selector switch, and triggered, the M1’s report cracking
in the open desert air, the recoil jerking his body.

The Jeep on the right blossomed into a forward-moving rolling fireball intensified when the Jeep’s gas tank went as it turned
end-over-end, tossing flaming bodies this way and that.

“Not bad shooting,” Hawkeye commented, “for a limey.”

Gallegos could not believe his eyes. A heartbeat earlier the Jeep with Manuel and the four others had been racing along side-by-side
with his own vehicle, perhaps two yards away, toward the gringo bastards behind those rocks where they held Jesus.

And then—the explosion out of nowhere, death shrieks swallowed up into the ball of flame and now the earth behind his Jeep
littered with human and metal debris, aflame and lifeless.

“To the left, to the left!” he screamed at his driver. “The other side of those rocks!”

The driver careened the Jeep into a two-wheel turn that nearly tumbled every man out of the Jeep, as the vehicle dashed toward
the same butte before which the bounty hunters had sought cover, the Jeep heading toward their blind side; the far side of
the rising butte.

Gallegos worriedly eyed the horizon behind them but could not as yet discern any sign of the three Jeeps full of men that
should at this moment be racing here in response to his radio summons.

The hacienda was no more that ten kilometers from here, so they would be here soon, and then—

His thoughts were interrupted by another heaving explosion rocking the earth, one of the grenades fired by the gringo detonating
a shower of earth upon the racing Jeep, a near-miss.

Then they made it to behind the butte, disappearing from the line of vision of the two who had Ruiz on that high ground of
boulders.

“Stop here!” Gallegos ordered.

The driver obeyed, flooring the brake pedal, swinging the Jeep around in a 180-degree turn.

Gallegos wondered what he should do. He had never doubted the gringo’s expertise in these matters even before seeing his amigos
in the next Jeep getting blown to pieces. El Gato’s hacienda was a veritable desert fortress, and yet these bounty hunters
had somehow penetrated his defense perimeter and gotten away with the boss.

Then he saw the three Jeeps full of rifle-toting men turn off the highway, coming high speed in this direction. He recognized
the vehicles and laughed. He hopped from the Jeep.

“Come, muchachos! The gringos will have their hands and eyes full with those who approach.” He started hurrying up the incline,
gesturing for them to follow, which they did. “We shall outflank the gringos, kill them, save El Gato and the glory will be
ours. Let’s go!”