Cowboy Angels (14 page)

‘Judging by your new outfit, it’s somewhere out in the sticks,’ Linda said. ‘Some place where you expect to do some hiking.’

She was speaking slightly too loudly, as if there was someone else in the car.

Stone said, ‘See that gas station up ahead? We’ll stop there for a moment.’

‘We have a full tank.’

‘Stop anyway.’

Stone bought a sheaf of local maps, studied them while Linda drove, and told her they’d stick to the back roads as much as possible.

‘If we’re heading north, the Taconic will be faster. Or if we’re heading west or east, we should take the Interstate.’

‘We’re not in a hurry. And the back roads will be quieter.’

‘You don’t trust me,’ Linda said flatly, as if commenting about something incontrovertible, like a change in the weather.

‘It’s nothing personal.’

‘Do I sound like I’m taking it personally?’

‘As a matter of fact, you sound very calm.’

‘You don’t trust me, you don’t trust Mr Welch, but I guess you must trust my father, or you wouldn’t be here.’

‘I came here to help him. That’s what I’m doing.’

‘Because he saved your life, once upon a time.’

‘Because he’s my friend.’

A couple of miles passed.

Linda said, ‘Maybe you could tell me about it - the time my father saved your life.’

‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I had a weak moment.’

‘If you don’t want to talk about it, if it’s too embarrassing or whatever, I’ll understand. But I’d like it if you did, if only to fill in these awkward silences on this long drive to wherever it is we’re going.’

‘You remind me of your father,’ Stone said.

‘I do?’

‘When he wanted you to tell him something, he’d keep at it until you gave it up.’

‘Where was it he helped you out?’

‘The McBride sheaf. Do you know it?’

‘I hear it’s pretty bad. They had a cold war between America and the Soviets, just like here, but it blew up into a worldwide nuclear conflict, not a relatively limited exchange like they had here.’

‘Global spasm,’ Stone said. ‘Both sides threw everything they had at each other. Every large city in America was hit at least once. Three and a half billion people died. That was in 1968. Eight years later, when we opened a gate into the sheaf, there was nothing left anywhere but gangs fighting over rubble.’

‘And you guys went in to help bring back civilisation.’

‘Not exactly. We went in to eliminate the sworn enemy of a crazy man who’d become President of the United States by default.’

General E. Everett McBride had been inside Strategic Air Command’s command site at Colorado Springs when World War Three began. The Soviets dumped a stick of hydrogen bombs on the mountain under which the command site was buried, reducing its height by several hundred feet, turning a vast swathe of countryside to vitreous slag, and incidentally vaporising Denver. But the hardened command site survived, and so did most of its personnel: six months later, they emerged to take control of a country that now existed only in General McBride’s imagination.

McBride was an Air Force technocrat with no combat experience, and a Christian fundamentalist who was convinced that the nuclear war had been nothing less than Armageddon. All true believers and the risen dead had been translated directly into Heaven as a prelude to the Last Battle between Satan and the Risen Christ, and McBride and his soldiers and technicians had been left behind because they were of insufficient faith. Now they had to prove themselves worthy of redemption by destroying the enemies of the Lord; in particular, they had to identify and defeat the Antichrist, who even now would be plotting to take control of all the nations of the Earth, probably through the agency of the United Nations. And so, as soon as it was safe to quit the command site’s deep bunkers, McBride led his men on a crusade toward the eastern seaboard, but within days of setting out he ran into a ferocious and well-armed group of survivors. Most of his little army were slaughtered, and the survivors were chased back into the mountains. When the Company opened a Turing gate into his sheaf eight years later, he was no more than a petty warlord struggling to hold on to a few hundred square miles of territory. But despite his lowly status, and although he was suffering from tuberculosis and tertiary syphilis, and his soldiers were given to raping captured women and torturing and ritually cannibalising captured men who refused to convert to his cause, General E. Everett McBride was still, according to the rules of succession, President of the United States.

Aided by detailed scenarios provided by the Company’s supercomputer cluster, the National Foreign Intelligence Board decided that McBride would be a suitable figurehead for the reunification of the United States of America, and acted accordingly. Several hundred Special Forces troops took out McBride’s local rivals and established a form of government in the little city of Las Vegas, New Mexico, but attempts to open routes to the west and south (the territory to the north, covered by the footprint of the radioactive fallout from the massive nuclear strike on Colorado Springs, would be uninhabitable until the middle of the next century) were hindered by hit-and-run attacks on supply columns and assaults on settlements that received aid from the new government. The guerrillas even managed to shoot down several helicopters with modified rocket-propelled grenades. When hot interrogation of captured unfriendlies revealed that this resistance was controlled by one man, Adam Stone and Tom Waverly were sent into the McBride sheaf to take him out.

Two weeks later, Stone was taken prisoner by a guerrilla patrol while riding up into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to obtain intelligence from a Native American village. It was winter, and bitterly cold. A steady wind blew snow dry as polystyrene pellets into Stone’s face as he followed his two guides through a steep forest of aspen and ponderosa pine. He didn’t like to think what this northern bone-cutter might be carrying from the plateau around Colorado Springs and the multiple craters of what had once been Los Alamos, but it was good to get away from the squalid chaos of Las Vegas.

Although it had been declared the capital of the United States more than a year ago, the little city was still mostly in ruins. The historic city centre had been burned and looted in riots immediately after the war, and the extremes of post-nuclear weather had left its suburbs in little better condition. The army base that sprawled next to the railhead, with its runway and hangars, bunkers and razor-wire perimeter, was surrounded by growing camps of refugees. Trench sewers ran alongside mud roads, there was one standpipe for roughly every hundred people, and the only health clinic was regularly overwhelmed by epidemics of typhoid, yellow fever and dysentery. President McBride lived in a concrete bunker and spent most of his time drunk while his soldiers raced around the city in imported Jeeps. Although they were supposed to be keeping the peace, they routinely ransacked the refugee camps, stole medicines and food, and kidnapped women. Nights in Las Vegas crackled with gunfire, and every morning two or three mutilated corpses were discovered around the perimeter of the army camp.

In the mountains, the only vestiges of nuclear war were a few north-facing slopes where regrowth had not yet hidden the trunks of trees smashed flat by overpressure of the strike on Los Alamos. Everywhere else, pines and aspen thickened in every direction, half-buried in deep drifts. Snow hazed the sky and blew between the trees and muffled the hooves of the horses of Stone and his two taciturn guides as they followed an old road.

The ambush was sudden, swift, and ruthless. A horse snickered amongst trees to one side of the road, and before Stone or his guides could draw their pistols a quick burst of gunfire flamed through the blowing snow. Stone’s horse pranced and reared. By the time he had it under control, his guides lay dead and the guerrillas had ridden onto the road in front of him.

There were eight of them, mostly lean wolfish teenagers with long hair greased up in stiff spikes or tied back in pigtails stuck with feathers dyed red or yellow. They were mounted on nimble ponies with plaited manes and tails, wore a ragged motley of uniforms and furs and hides. Two of them went straight past Stone, their ponies kicking up puffs of snow as they galloped away down the trail; two more trained M-16 rifles on him as their leader caught at the snaffle of his horse and told him to climb down and take off his clothes; the rest dismounted and began to strip the bodies of the guides.

The leader was a black man whose face was a piebald patchwork of old burn scars. He wore a fur cap and a long coat stitched from a dozen dog hides. He watched closely, leaning on the pommel of his saddle, as two of his teenage soldiers searched Stone’s clothes and his saddlebag. He examined the radio transmitter one of them found and asked Stone if he could use it to talk to the people in Las Vegas.

‘Sure.’ Stone stood at the centre of a loose circle of ponies and riders, wearing only a T-shirt, thermal underpants, and wool socks. Frozen pellets blew in his eyes. He was trying not to shiver in the cutting wind. He was trying not to look at the bodies of his guides sprawled naked and bloody on the snow.

One of the teenagers said, ‘Ain’t it the rule we don’t bring back any electrical gear? Stuff can be used to track us.’

‘If it isn’t switched on, it can’t do anything. And Jack needs to talk to this man’s kin,’ the piebald man said, and told Stone to get dressed.

‘Where are you taking me?’

Stone’s fingers were white with cold. He was having trouble doing up the buttons of his shirt.

The piebald man’s grin showed toothless gums. ‘Into the mountains.’

The pair who had ridden down the trail came back and conferred briefly with their leader. Stone was allowed to climb back on his horse, and rode in the middle of the pack along a path of trampled snow that climbed through the forest. Each man rode as if alone, no sound but the muffled step of the ponies and the chink of bit rings. At some point it stopped snowing. The trees gave way to a bare rock ridge swept clean of snow by a tireless wind that blew into the faces of the riders as they mounted the crest and rode down into the valley beyond. They forded a swift-moving river and turned to follow it as light faded from the sky.

No fire was lit when the guerrillas at last made camp. In the iron dusk they drank water dipped from the river and ate cold K-rations taken from Stone’s saddlebag and twisted strings of dry deer meat tough and tasteless as bootlaces. Two men were posted to keep watch. The rest slept in a close huddle; slept as innocently as animals, as if they were the first men in a world where no sin had yet been committed.

Stone dozed fitfully, waking once to the plangent music of wolves, feeling cold to the marrow of his bones even though he was padded out in all his clothes and wrapped in his silvery thermal blanket. At daybreak, the guerrillas did not pay especial attention to him while they made ready to leave, and he rode with them unhindered as they followed the course of the river to the head of the valley, where water fell in a smooth rush from a steep notch in a tall cliff, thickly fringed with icicles taller than any man. They dismounted and followed a winding path through boulders capped with clear ice, walking in single file and leading their mounts like penitent pilgrims approaching a shrine. At the top, they remounted and rode on across a stony slope caught about with wind-sculpted drifts. Stripped and shattered trunks of dead trees all leaned south. In the far distance mountains stood against the edge of the pale sky, serene and remote as a celestial city.

At around noon, the piebald man rode up close on the left side of Stone’s horse and told him that he would have to travel the rest of the way blindfold. A hood of black cloth was pulled over his head and cinched tight around his neck. Breathing with difficulty through the hood’s clammy weave, Stone concentrated on trying to stay in the saddle as his horse was led down a steep slope through thick-growing trees, fragrant pine boughs slapping at his legs and chest and hooded face, sometimes riding though deep snow, sometimes clattering over rock. They crossed a swift river, the current pushing hard against the side of Stone’s horse as it stepped uneasily and tossed its head; Stone clutched its mane in a death-grip as bitterly cold water slopped into his boots. One of the young guerrillas said something that Stone couldn’t quite catch, two more laughed, and that was all the noise they made until the end of the journey. It was a discipline that Stone admired and feared.

At last, with the horses’ hooves thumping regularly on packed snow, the leader spoke up from behind and said that he reckoned it was safe for Stone to unmask. Stone pulled off the hood and took deep breaths of fresh cold air as he looked around. Sweat cooled on his face. The boy who had been leading his horse flipped the reins to him. He was in the middle of the file of mounted men, riding up a path with a wall of red sandstone on one side and on the other a steep drop to a box canyon in which the tops of leafless bushes showed like half-buried spiders amongst pure white untrodden snow. Then the path made a sharp turn and revealed a wide cliff face where a huddle of small, square, flat-roofed adobe houses of great age leaned in teetering stacks of three and four. Above these rude snow-capped huts, a long ledge cut deeply into the face of the cliff, sheltered by a bulging overhang. Ragged people stood along its edge; behind them, houses were scattered under the rock roof like the nests of swallows.