Conquistador (80 page)

Villers looked at Tully, who was sitting close to Sandra Margolin; the little man had relaxed since she'd convinced him she'd come to no harm except a thorough fright. They were all grouped around a small smokeless fire, not far from the edge of the pond. The meadow was a little crowded, even though the Nyo-Ilcha hadn't brought all their horses here. Adrienne's party and the chieftain shared log seats around the fire, and many of the warriors were crouched outside that circle; others were attending to their animals, or camp chores. Two of them were butchering a brace of mule deer and an elk.

“That was your satchel charge, Tully,” the black man put in. “You really pissed them off with that.” Then he took up the story: “Yeah, Piet Botha's dead.” He shook his head. “Got to hand it to the big Boer, he was one baaad badass. Right at the end, when I was out of it—some Akaka got me with a sling-stone”—he touched the bandaged side of his face and winced slightly—“he was standing over his kid in this fold of rock, and man, he used his rifle like a club till it broke and then he picked up two of them by their necks and smashed their heads together. . . . I looked at the body afterwards; must have been like three or four arrows in it, and a couple of knives.”

“And then our Nyo-Ilcha friends arrived like . . . if you'll pardon the expression . . . the U.S. cavalry,” Tully said. “The kid make it?”

“Yeah, though he's probably going to limp,” Villers said. “Over to you, chief.”

Good Star chuckled, a harsh sound. “I'd been following you on general principles, and because one of my people finked you out to Swift Lance.”

His right index finger traces a shallow crusted cut along his bare ribs. “The stool pigeon tried for me, too, and missed. I didn't. But it peeved me some, I can tell you, my own people getting impressed by Swift Lance's so-called Dreaming. And the chance to take a slap at the Akaka while they were bent over and showing their butts was just too good to pass up. Figured I'd catch up with you and have a talk, but you ran too fast—and we had to take care of a few Akaka on the way, you know?”

Adrienne hissed in vexation. “You mean we were killing ourselves and zigzagging over half the desert running away from
you?
”

“Yup, that's about it, boss lady,” Good Star said. “Then I got wind of this setup here—”

Villers looked embarrassed and spread his hands. “Filling him in seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“—and decided to come check it out. Guess we Water People aren't the only ones got our feuds within the tribe, hey?”

Adrienne and Tom exchanged a glance. He could see her thought:
It's an advantage, but it's a threat, too. How to make use of it?

He guessed that she took Good Star's professions of friendship just as seriously as he did; the Indian meant them, in a way . . . and would cheerfully throw them to the wolves, or the Collettas, if he saw an advantage in it for his people.

Which is only fair,
Tom thought.
He doesn't owe the Rolfes or their New Virginia anything but a kick in the balls.

Silence stretched; Good Star poured himself a cup of coffee and waited—grinning, not in the proverbial Indian impassivity. At last Adrienne spoke:

“My name is Rolfe, by the way,” she said, holding up her left hand to show the ring. “Granddaughter of the Old Man.”

Good Star shaped a silent whistle.
“Masthamo's dick,”
he swore obscurely. Tom winced; if things went wrong, he could see a ransom situation shaping up
real
quick.

“You're Johnny Deathwalker's kin?” he asked, pushing back the lion headdress to look at her more closely. “Yeah, that's what the legends say. Hair like an angry sunset, and eyes green like river rocks and colder than glacier ice.”

She sketched out the situation in simple terms. Good Star listened, nodded, and said:

“OK. Now, why should we Water People care which clan of the Deathwalkers runs things down by the sea?”

“The Rolfes have mostly let your tribe alone,” she said. “The Collettas are more ambitious.”

The chief shrugged; muscle moved under dark brown skin like angular snakes, on a body the Mohave had stripped of everything that wasn't essential to life.

“So you say,” he said. “Do you say you won't take the Mohave when you want it?”

“No,” she said. “I do say it's a big world. You were thinking of taking your people down south, weren't you? Well, help me and I'll push for the Old Man to give you permission—and help. You know the word of the Rolfes is good, if you know anything about us.”

Good Star showed yellow teeth: “Yeah, boss lady. I also know all you're promising is to do your best. You can't pledge Johnny Deathwalker's word, can you?”

“Not absolutely.” She hesitated for a moment, then steeled herself and went on: “But I have a lot of influence with him. And he makes a point of always rewarding people who help us and punishing those who hurt. And . . . incidentally, Good Star of the Nyo-Ilcha . . . how would you like to get your hands on hundreds of O'Brien rifles? And machine guns, and mortars . . .”

The Indian froze with the cigarette halfway to his lips. “Son of a bitch,” he said after a long moment when their eyes met. “You mean that?”

“Word of a Rolfe,” she said. “They're right there”—she pointed eastward towards the Colletta headquarters—“waiting for you.”

“Oh, sure, boss lady, all we have to do is to take 'em with our bows and smoke-poles!”

Adrienne smiled like a cat, and looked at Tom. Tom cleared his throat and pushed One Ocelot forward. The Zapotec firmed his shoulders and crossed his arms.

“Turns out,” Tom said, “that these particular . . . Deathwalkers . . . don't trust their hired soldiers very much.” Good Star nodded. Tom went on: “In particular, they don't trust them with any
ammunition
for their weapons, except when they're on the firing range. It's all under lock and key and separate guards—white men—until they launch their attack.”

Good Star's smile matched that of the headdress he wore. It was an expression much like the one an antelope would see on the face of the very last lion it ever met.

“Tell me about this,” he said.

Overhead, light glinted on metal, and the throbbing roar of turboprop engines came insect-small through the clear sky. A Hercules transport was dropping down over the Sierras; the sound swelled as it approached, then it passed them only a few thousand feet overhead as it stooped for the valley floor. Another followed it, and another.

I don't like the thought of splitting us up,
Tom mused, looking through the light-enhancing binoculars down toward the Colletta ranch house and the mushroom of military base that had sprung up around it.
The problem is, it's the only way I can see us having a chance of pulling this off at all.

A plan was coming to him, and if he could sell Adrienne on it . . .

On the other hand, it's a plan that requires a vastly inferior force to divide itself five ways from Sunday. A little . . . complicated. Too many point failure sources, as they said in the Rangers. If an officer had come up with something like this during the war, I'd have considered fragging the crazy son of a bitch unless he had a
real
good track record.

The binoculars gave the valley floor below an odd flat look, sharp-edged but carrying less information than his eyes would have taken in if the real level of light had been equivalent to what showed. It was oddly disconcerting, because his mind kept telling him the view was blurred, and objectively it wasn't.

The view was good enough for his purposes; he ignored the distortion as he did the chill cold seeping through his jacket and sweater from the rock ridge beneath him. Tom counted the big Hercules transports lined up beside the runways to the south of the ranch house.

“Still eleven,” he muttered to himself ironically. “C-130J-30s, the stretched model. Colletta Air has sent its very best.”

Then he scanned over to the tented camp. Another company column was marching in to it from Cerro Gordo up in the Inyo mountains; that made six, and according to Simmons that was the full complement from the “mine.” Getting in there and getting back with the information had been a damned fine bit of scouting—evidently the Frontier Scouts really meant their title—and he'd done it fast, too, covering forty miles round-trip in a single day.

The units were extremely spare even by the austere Ranger standards he was used to; a lot more riflemen, fewer technicians or support spots.

“My guess is that they'll load the troops in the morning,” he said quietly, glancing at his watch; just after sundown. The military reflexes were back in force . . .
and I'm remembering why I was so glad to get out of the army. Oh, well, the company's prettier this time.

Adrienne and the others lay on the ridge beside him; so did Good Star. He could barely see the Indian in the darkness, and he moved very quietly. . . .
But the smell gives him away at close range,
he thought.
On the other hand, I wouldn't wash the natural oils out of my skin either, if I had to live in the Mohave year-round.

The dryness and heat were bad enough, but the alkali dust was full of things that acted like chemical scouring powder—in fact, industrial abrasives and cleaning minerals like borax were the desert's main products, back FirstSide.

“When will they give them their ammunition?” Good Star asked, ruthlessly practical.

“When the aircraft take off, not before,” Tom said.

“But first, we have a little problem,” Adrienne put in, and pointed. Tiny boxy shapes at this distance; the glasses showed him the angular welded contours of light armor.

The Nyo-Ilcha chief grunted as she handed him the binoculars; he'd picked up on how to use them very quickly.

“Three of them. Killing Turtles. We know them—you Deathwalkers send them against us when you make reprisals. Bad medicine.”

Tom wasn't quite sure if that last phrase was a joke, or not: Good Star seemed to have a keen ear for what the local white men expected of Indians, and an ability to play off it. Tom
was
sure that the sight of the armored cars made the Nyo-Ilcha chieftain uneasy. Tom didn't blame him; none of the weapons his people had would make much impression on even thin steel plate, and armored cars were a lot faster than a horse.

Hmmm,
he thought, distracted for a fractional instant.
Of course, you could make a Molotov from alcohol and tallow, or lure one into a canyon, or put a lot of musket charges together into a satchel charge and throw it underneath.
Determined men always had
some
chance, even against superior weapons.
But that's all we-regret-to-inform-you and posthumous Medal of Honor stuff.

“Two Cheetahs and a Catamount,” Adrienne went on to Tom. “Two light armored cars with twin Browning fifties, or one and a grenade launcher. And a six-wheel heavy with a Bofors gun in the turret and a coaxial MG. Probably manned by Colletta household troops—there to keep the mercenaries in line until they get on the transports.”

“But available for other purposes,” Tom said.

Good Star's men were skilled and tough and brave, deadly dangerous killers in their own warrior's life of skirmish and ambush. His own brief experience with their Akaka cousins had vastly increased his respect for the Indian fighters of FirstSide history, who'd broken tribes like this with nothing better than single-shot rifles. But the Nyo-Ilcha war band weren't disciplined soldiers, and they had a well-founded dread of armored vehicles and aircraft and automatic weapons. They weren't going to do a kamikaze for the sake of the House of Rolfe, that was for sure, even if Good Star told them to. Which he wouldn't.

He'd worked with . . .
indigenous forces,
was the polite phrase . . . before, during the war back FirstSide. The trick was to use their strengths, and avoid situations where their weaknesses were important. You couldn't ask them to do too much.

“We'll have to take out the armor ourselves,” he said. “And those guard towers will be a problem. If we can do that, and Good Star's men can get stuck into the mercenaries before they're issued a combat load, we can do this.”