Hunt at the Well of Eternity (12 page)

“Do you want me to try to pick him off?” Escalante asked quietly.

Gabriel shook his head. “Not with that gun to Mariella’s head. No matter how good a shot you are, we can’t risk him pulling the trigger.”

Mariella was no longer dressed in the evening wear she had sported in New York. Now she wore nondescript fatigues like the men. But she still managed to look beautiful in them, somehow, despite the look of fear etched on her face. Seeing her in person again, even from this distance, Gabriel was more convinced than ever that she was the same woman in the wedding photo he had seen in Villahermosa. Impossible or not.

He raised his voice and called, “You know you’re surrounded. We can kill every one of you, or we can let you live. It’s up to you.”

Broken-Nose laughed. “I knew you must be behind this, Hunt!”

“All you have to do,” Gabriel shouted, “is let the woman go.”

The man shook his head and kept the gun pressed to Mariella’s temple. “Oh, no,” he said. “If you want her so bad…you come and get her, Gabriel Hunt.”

Cierra clutched Gabriel’s arm as he started to stand up. “You can’t go out there!” she said. “They’ll kill you!”

“No they won’t,” Gabriel replied. “That won’t gain them anything except a quicker execution. These aren’t ideologues, they’re professionals. They don’t want to die. They’ll negotiate if they think that’s what it takes to get them out of this alive.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“Well, we’ll find out.”

Escalante said, “I’ll have the
bastardo
in my sights the whole time, Gabriel. If he takes the gun away from Señorita Montez’s head and points it at you, I will kill him in the blink of an eye.”

“You do that,” Gabriel agreed. He kissed Cierra quickly, then moved out from behind the boulder where the three of them had taken cover. He wrapped his right hand tightly around the butt of the Colt Peacemaker that hung at his side.

His skin crawled a little as he walked out onto the bridge. Fifty yards away stood his broken-nosed nemesis with the gun still pressed to Mariella’s head. Gabriel strode toward them. From this angle, he couldn’t see the other gunmen crouched behind the trucks, but he could feel their rifles trained on him.

He came to a stop about ten yards from Mariella. “All right, I’m here. Let her go.”

“Why should I do that?” the man asked with a sneer. “Now I have both of you in my power. I can kill you both before anyone can stop me.”

Gabriel shook his head. “You won’t kill either one of us. Señor Esparza wouldn’t be happy with you if you did.”

“Oh? And why is that?” He didn’t bother to deny that he worked for Esparza, Gabriel noted.

“You need Señorita Montez,” Gabriel said with a nod toward Mariella. “She might not have told you the truth about where you’re going, not the whole truth. And because she might not
ever
tell you the whole truth, you need me alive. Because I do know where your destination lies.”

The man frowned. “You try to confuse me with talk. But my orders are clear. I am to kill you, Gabriel Hunt, wherever and whenever I find you.” He raised his voice in a shout to his men. “Use the machine guns! Kill them all!”

Machine guns?
That didn’t sound good.

But Gabriel didn’t have time to worry about that threat, because the man jerked the gun barrel away from Mariella’s head and swung it toward Gabriel, leaping aside as he did so. He must have figured that at least one rifle was aimed at him. Escalante’s weapon cracked, but the bullet whipped past Gabriel and missed his enemy as well, smashing into the hood of the lead truck.

Gabriel raised his gun, but he couldn’t shoot without endangering Mariella. He plunged forward instead, ducking as the man fired his big revolver. Gabriel felt the wind-rip of the slug’s passage past his ear as he left his feet in a diving tackle that sent him crashing into both Mariella and her captor.

As they fell he caught a glimpse of men throwing aside the canvas on the back of the truck to reveal a belt-fed .50-caliber machine gun mounted on a swivel so that it could fire either over the top of the truck’s cab or back behind the vehicle. With a chattering roar it began spitting lead toward the rocks and brush where Escalante and his men were hidden. Cierra was over there, too, in the middle of that deathstorm, but there was nothing Gabriel could do to help her.

He had his hands full.

The collision had knocked Mariella free from the man’s grip. All three of them fell against the truck’s front bumper. Broken-Nose slashed at Gabriel’s head with the revolver. Gabriel ducked so that the blow landed on his left shoulder just inches from one of the cuts from Tomás’s whip. His arm went numb for a moment. He swung his own pistol at the other man’s head, but the man avoided the blow, grabbed Mariella again, and shoved her hard against Gabriel. She fell against his chest and both of them went down.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Gabriel said, sliding out from under her.

Snarling with hate, Broken-Nose jerked his gun toward Gabriel, who couldn’t stand up without risking getting his head chopped off by the machine gun fire. He grabbed Mariella and rolled instead. Broken-Nose’s revolver roared twice. Splinters leaped up and stung Gabriel’s face as the bullets slammed into the bridge planks. He did the only thing he could. He tightened his grip on Mariella and kept rolling.

Right under the railing and off the side of the bridge.

Mariella screamed as they plunged toward the river. Gabriel hung on to her and managed to turn their bodies so that they would hit the water feetfirst. He hoped the river was deep enough so that they wouldn’t break every bone in their bodies when they landed.

Despite the tropical climate, the streams that flowed through these highlands were cold, so the chilly water packed a breathtaking shock as Gabriel and Mariella plunged into it. They went under, deep. But their descent had slowed by the time Gabriel felt the rocky stream bed under his booted feet. He kicked off against it and sent them back toward the surface.

The swift current had them in its grip, sweeping them away from the bridge. As they broke the surface and Gabriel hauled air into his lungs, water geysered around them from bullets splashing into the river. Broken-Nose was still up there on the bridge shooting at them.

“Got your breath?” Gabriel shouted to Mariella. When she nodded, he added, “Well, hold it,” and went under again. Their clothes and boots helped hold them down as the current carried them along.

Gabriel kept them underwater until Mariella began to writhe and struggle in his arms. He figured she wouldn’t be able to hold her breath much longer, so he headed for the surface again. When they came up this time he saw that the current had carried them around a bend in the river. The bridge was no longer visible behind them.

“Hang on to me,” he told Mariella. “I’ll try to get us to shore.”

“I can swim,” she insisted.

Gabriel let go of her. The current was too strong for them to swim directly to shore, but they were able to angle in that direction and slowly make their way closer to the east bank as the river carried them along. Finally, they both grabbed vines that dangled from overhanging tree branches and pulled themselves onto dry land again.

As Gabriel lay there breathing heavily, he listened to the diminishing sounds of gunfire. The battle between the bandits and Esparza’s men seemed to be just about over. He didn’t know who had won…but the overpowering advantage the machine gun conveyed didn’t make him optimistic about the outcome.

Concern for Cierra gnawed at him. Even though she’d had good cover with Escalante, that machine gun had thrown so much lead that they would have been in considerable danger from ricochets alone. And those .50-caliber slugs would chew right through the brush where some of Escalante’s men had hidden. The odds, not in the bandits’ favor to start with, had gotten a lot worse once that big gun opened up.

But there was nothing he could do about that now, Gabriel told himself. He had his own worries, such as being stranded in the middle of the Guatemalan jungle with Mariella…and with only one gun. He was thankful he’d been able to hang on to the Colt, and he still had a box of ammunition in his pocket. Once the revolver dried out, it ought to work. It had been through worse.

If Broken-Nose and his friends had survived—and Gabriel had a feeling that was likely—they would come looking for him and Mariella. The two of them needed to get moving. He sat up and asked her, “Are you all right? Were you hit during all that shooting?”

She was breathing heavily, too, and it took a moment before she was able to struggle into a sitting position and give Gabriel a weak nod. “I’m fine,” she said. “I wasn’t hit.”

“How about before? Do you have any injuries from when Esparza and his men interrogated you?”

“How do you know about Esparza?”

“A friend introduced me to him. Hopefully you’ll get to meet her.”
If she’s still alive.
Gabriel thrust the thought away. “I knew he was involved because he matched the description of a man who’d come to the Olustee battlefield looking for information about General Fargo.”

She nodded as if what he’d said made perfect sense to her.

“Esparza tried to make me talk,” she said. “But I didn’t care what he did to me. I wasn’t going to betray my people.” A bitter tone came into her voice as she added, “In the end it didn’t matter. He found out what he needed to know another way.”

That statement puzzled Gabriel, but now wasn’t the time to probe deeper. He got to his feet. “We’d better get moving. We need to get away from the river before that bastard comes looking for us.”

“Podnemovitch,” Mariella said. “That’s his name. Alexei Podnemovitch. He’s some sort of distant cousin to Esparza. I think Esparza’s mother was Russian.”

Always good to put a name to a face, Gabriel thought. Even an ugly face.

He took Mariella’s hand and helped her to her feet. Heading east, they started into the thick jungle that lined the river.

Vines curled around their feet and brambles clung to their clothes, slowing their progress through the vegetation. Gabriel kept a close eye out for snakes. The birds that would normally be singing in the trees were quiet now, startled into silence by the thunderous gunfire that had filled the canyon just minutes before.

“Did you get the flag?” Mariella asked after a few minutes’ slow progress.

“The one you brought to New York? Yes, I have it, and the Fifth Georgia’s regimental flag as well.”

“The other flag isn’t important. What about the water?” Her voice caught a little. “Was…was any of it left?”

“You mean the water that was in that old whiskey bottle?” Gabriel shook his head. “Sorry. It all spilled when the bottle broke.”

Mariella winced. “I was afraid of that. Your brother didn’t think to try to collect any of it and have it analyzed?”

“We had other things on our minds. Should we have?”

“It would have been better if you had. The water was more important than the flag, although the flag does show the location of Cuchatlán.”

“Cuchatlán,” Gabriel repeated. “What’s that?”

“My home.”

He heard the wistfulness in her voice and would have asked her to tell him more about it, but at that moment he heard men’s voices coming from somewhere close by. He stopped short and held up a hand in a signal for Mariella to halt as well.

They stood there, motionless and silent, and listened for a moment. The voices were coming closer, so Gabriel motioned Mariella toward a jutting rock face covered with vines. She hurried over to it, grabbed hold of the vines, and started climbing.

The bluff was about ten feet high. When Mariella reached the top, she flattened on the surface and reached a hand down toward Gabriel. He realized she wanted him to toss the gun up to her. He did so, carefully. If it fell and discharged, the shot would bring Esparza’s men on the run.

Mariella caught the revolver’s barrel, and the ease with which she turned the Peacemaker around and wrapped her fingers around the walnut grips told Gabriel she had handled a gun before. While she covered him, he grabbed the vines and scrambled up the rock face.

He stretched out next to her and they waited. What they did next would depend on how many men were searching for them.

After a few more minutes of crashing through the brush, two men pushed their way into view. Each was carrying a rifle. Gabriel had held a slim hope that the searchers might turn out to be Escalante’s men, but he didn’t waste time being disappointed. He and Mariella held their breath as the men moved past beneath them.

Mariella still had the Colt. They would be a lot better armed, Gabriel reflected, if they could get their hands on those rifles. He tried to communicate by gestures what he planned to do, and was satisfied that Mariella understood. He also pointed to the gun and shook his head, so she’d know not to fire unless it was absolutely necessary.

Silently, Gabriel came up on his hands and knees and then pushed into a crouch at the edge of the bluff. Neither of the men had glanced in this direction yet, but they started to look up just as Gabriel launched himself off the bluff. One man had time to yell, but the shout was cut off as Gabriel crashed into him feetfirst.

Both of the men were bowled over by the impact, the first one knocking over the second. Gabriel landed beside them. One of the men had lost his rifle, but the other had held onto his weapon and tried to swing the barrel toward Gabriel. He grabbed it and twisted it aside, wrenching as hard as he could. The man’s finger, caught in the trigger guard, broke with a sharp snap. He opened his mouth to scream, but Gabriel drove the rifle butt into his face before he could. He collapsed—unconscious or dead, Gabriel didn’t know which.

That took care of one of them, but the other chose this moment to tackle Gabriel. They rolled on the ground as they struggled, smacking forcefully into the bole of one tree after another and getting whipped in the face by the underbrush. Esparza’s man wound up on top, reached back, and slugged Gabriel hard with a right cross to the jaw, then another. Rearing up, the man pulled a machete from a sheath at his waist. The blade hung in the air, poised to come sweeping down in a blow that would chop Gabriel’s head cleanly from his body.