Immortal (35 page)

‘Funny,’ Lopez smirked, ‘that every time Ethan’s spoken to you we’ve later ended up being chased by the police or nearly blown sky-high. Trustworthiness
doesn’t exactly shine out of your ass, Saffron.’

‘That’s rich,’ Saffron shot back. ‘Thinking of taking your little bounty and hiking over the border?’

Lopez let a cold grin flicker across her features.

‘Sounds like you’re as paranoid as your dear old grandpa, little girl. I don’t need a lecture from a murderer who hasn’t got the guts to stand up to a
ninety-year-old.’

Lopez saw Saffron’s Bowie knife flash in the firelight as she swung it toward her face, but Lopez was already moving, stepping outside the arc of the blade and using her right hand to bat
it past her face with an inch to spare. Lopez darted in and closed her right hand round Saffron’s knife wrist as she shoved her left hand up inside her elbow, folding the arm on itself and
pointing the blade back at Saffron’s face. Saffron, startled by Lopez’s speed, wedged a foot behind her ankle and leaned in, trying to throw her off balance. Lopez went with the
movement, but spun on her heel and threw Saffron down into the dust. Saffron leapt to her feet with the Bowie knife still in her hand, circling like a wounded leopard.

‘What’s up, little girl?’ Lopez taunted her, realizing Saffron’s martial-arts skills were not quite up to Lopez’s street-fighting instinct. ‘Not used to
playing with the big girls?’

Lopez saw Saffron dart in toward her again, dodging into a quick left feint before stabbing out with a straight right, the blade flashing toward Lopez’s sternum. Lopez twisted aside from
the weapon, catching Saffron’s wrist again and this time jabbing her free elbow straight into Saffron’s face with a sharp crack. Saffron yanked her head away as Lopez twisted her blade
arm viciously round on itself at the wrist. Saffron spun around and cried out as the blade fell from her grasp, her arm cranked up high at an awkward angle in Lopez’s grasp.

Lopez leaned in behind her and whispered into her ear.

‘I don’t want you here anymore,’ she hissed. ‘Take off, or I’ll finish you for good.’

Lopez lifted her boot and shoved it into Saffron’s ass. Saffron stumbled forward and crashed onto the ground, her arm smashing through the glowing embers of the fire. Lopez winced as
Saffron’s shriek of pain wailed out across the desert night like the cry of an injured bird of prey, a shower of embers drifting down around her as she clambered to her feet. Cradling her
scorched arm, Saffron ran out into the darkness with a wounded, desperate gait and vanished into the night.

Ethan rushed into view at the edge of the firelight and stared at Lopez in alarm.

‘What the hell’s going on?’

Lopez gestured out into the night.

‘Saffron and I had a difference of opinion,’ she replied. ‘Mine was stronger.’

Ethan looked out into the darkness and Lopez felt an unexpected dismay as she noticed a disappointment in his expression.

‘Damn it, Nicola, we needed her help.’

‘She’s a liability,’ Lopez shot back. ‘We can’t trust her. For all we know she’s reporting everything that we do back to dear old Grandpa.’

Ethan sighed and rested his hands on his hips for a moment before speaking.

‘We need to get out of here and down to Carlsbad by dawn,’ he said. ‘DIA can’t help us right now, until Doug’s done some digging on who’s helping Oppenheimer
at USAMRIID.’

‘Can we make it that far by dawn on foot?’ Lopez asked.

‘It’s a fair way,’ Ethan admitted, ‘but we don’t have much choice.’

At that moment Ruby Lily appeared, her wide, dark eyes looking at Ethan as she held something out to him. Lopez watched as Ethan took a set of keys from her.

‘The van,’ Ruby said. ‘It’s an ancient beat-up old GMC Suburban, but it’ll get you there a lot quicker than walking.’

Lopez looked at her. ‘Must be the van they switched to after the attack on the Aspen Center. I thought the van was Saffron’s?’

‘It was,’ Ruby said softly, ‘but I don’t think she’s coming back after what Lopez did.’

Lopez caught Ethan’s questioning gaze.

‘We had a fight,’ she said. ‘She fell and grazed her arm in the fire, then took off. Wasn’t my fault. She’ll be okay. My guess is she’ll head for a hospital,
at which point the police will get involved and she’ll be forced to ’fess up.’

She saw Ethan almost laugh. ‘You serious?’

‘She’ll tell them where we are and where we’re going,’ Lopez said. ‘She’ll want revenge, on me. That way we get some support instead of USAMRIID on our ass,
but we’ll have to move fast. If they get to us before we reach the caverns it’s all over.’

Lopez watched Ethan weigh up the situation in his mind for a moment.

‘I hope to hell you’re right. Come on, let’s go.’

11.48 p.m.

Ellison Thorne stood beside the crumbling walls of an old powder magazine and scanned the darkness with his eyes and his ears for the sounds of his compatriots. Despite
the scratches of nesting animals in the rafters of ancient buildings, the whisper of the wind and the distant sounds of the desert beyond, a dozen decades of living out in the wilderness had tuned
his ear sufficiently to be able to pick out the sound of a human footstep from a hundred yards.

Which was just as well, because he was no longer in any condition to run far, should he be surprised by an enemy action. He yearned for the comfort of his pipe but refrained from lighting it
until the others arrived. The smell of burning tobacco would be detectable from a hundred yards, the light from the pipe twice that far.

He shifted his weight onto his other foot and felt a brief respite from the weariness aching through his bones. He was dying, of that he felt certain. Whatever blessing, or curse, God had
bestowed upon him was fading and his time was coming to an end. Not before time, some might say, but then . . .

‘Who goes there?’

Ellison aimed his rifle into the darkness. The sound was small, a shifting of weight on loose soil, but to Ellison’s ears it may as well have been a herd of cattle moving through the
ghostly silent town.

‘Copthorne, standing to!’

‘Come for’ard,’ Ellison called back, ‘make yourself known.’

From the night came Edward Copthorne, limping from a leg injury he’d sustained in 1936 when one of the newfangled automobiles had almost run him off the road near Mescalero. He would have
heard it coming, as the earliest vehicles clattered along like runaway horses, but he’d lost the use of one ear after a mortar had exploded alongside him in 1861. As Copthorne approached, he
called out.

‘Company, stand for’ard!’

From the darkness appeared three more men whom Ellison recognized from their shape and gait alone: Kip Wren, a forty-two-year-old sergeant during the conflict; John Cochrane, late thirties and a
corporal; and Nathaniel McQuire, a private aged twenty-nine. Each carried a long-barreled Springfield rifle at port-arms. Ellison himself had been a sergeant promoted to first lieutenant, and
commander of the small unit trapped into a fateful flight south after the Battle of Glorietta Pass in 1862.

‘I see you,’ Ellison called as the four men made their weary way up the steps of the powder magazine and stood in the darkness. ‘Anybody snoutin’ your trail?’

‘Not a soul out there,’ Copthorne said. ‘We diverged thrice south of the mountains since our encounter with the out of towners. We’re alone.’

Ellison nodded, and gestured to the men.

‘Stand down.’

They gratefully turned their rifles around and slung them over their shoulders before Ellison led them across the street to where the dilapidated remains of the Nannie Baird mine office crouched
against the darkness. He led the way in through the open doorway, the aged timbers creaking beneath their boots as they sought the relative concealment within the building.

Ellison sat on an old upturned barrel and lit his pipe, most of the others following suit or pulling tumblers of liquor from jacket pockets.

‘You got any spare Lucifers?’ Copthorne asked him, and Ellison tossed him his box of matches.

Kip Wren drew deeply on a cheroot, the glowing tip briefly lighting his rugged features and tight gray beard. He exhaled a cloud of smoke and coughed before speaking.

‘I take it we’re all still sufferin’ the same affliction?’

A murmur of agreement drifted through a darkness punctuated by brief flares of light from the pipes and cigars, ghoulishly illuminated spectral faces watching each other.

‘We were always on borrowed time,’ Ellison said. ‘We knew that to a man.’

‘But
this
way?’ Nathaniel McQuire, the youngest of their number, said in horror. ‘It ain’t natural. I don’t bear to think what might’n happen to us
next.’

John Cochrane, his drooping moustache framing his pipe, pointed at Ellison Thorne.

‘It weren’t right to shoot poor Carson neither. He was one of us, no regard to what you thought he might be doing in Santa Fe.’

‘Carson was likely to endanger us all,’ Ellison growled. ‘It wasn’t my desire to take his life but he left me no choice. You all saw who he was talkin’ with, the
police and those hired hands from out of town.’

‘He was as likely lookin’ for help as trouble,’ Copthorne pointed out reasonably.

‘So was poor old Hiram,’ Ellison replied, ‘and look what happened to him.’

‘He was the first with symptoms,’ Cochrane said. ‘Ain’t no surprise he was panicked. God knows, I’d have done the same if’n it were me.’

‘Which raises the point,’ Nathaniel said, ‘as to what the hell we’re going to do. We can’t keep runnin’, not like this. Every time I move I’m compelled
to look behind me in case somethin’s fallen off.’

A ripple of grim chuckles fluttered through the darkness, but Nathaniel shook his head.

‘I’m done jestin’. We need to do something.’

In the silence that followed the soldiers looked at Ellison Thorne, who drew thoughtfully on his pipe before speaking.

‘We do the only thing we know,’ he said finally. ‘We go back, and see if’n we can’t make it happen again.’

There was a long silence before Kip Wren spoke.

‘Ain’t no guarantee of that.’

‘Even if Lechuguilla’s still there,’ Nathaniel said, ‘Misery Hole could have been sealed off by now. Its location’s been protected by the government for
years.’

‘It’s well concealed,’ Ellison agreed. ‘The scientists that found it in 1986 are long gone. Nobody got no business snoutin’ around it.’

‘Nobody got no business hunting us down either,’ John Cochrane said, ‘but it’s happenin’. And what do we do now without our supplies? We can’t last more than
a day or two out here before this affliction takes a turn for th’worse.’

‘Not to mention those damned flying machines,’ Kip Wren said. ‘It’s getting’ harder to stay hidden out here, Ellison.’

Ellison nodded slowly. In the decades that had passed, they had seen remote frontier outposts become thriving towns and cities, empty wilderness skies filled with contrail streams from flying
coaches that seemed as big as entire cattle ranches, and all manner of computerized gadgets that seemed able to find a man in even the most remote corners of the desert. He himself had seen some
such devices: keypads attached to boxes of strange lights on the counters of stores in Santa Fe, and moving pictures on panels in shop windows that showed distant lands so realistic it seemed he
could reach out and touch them with his hand.

‘We stick together,’ he said finally.

The men nodded to themselves in the brief glows from their pipes, eyes fixed expectantly on his. It didn’t matter that the army was long gone, or that the war was long over. Maintaining
their discipline as a unit had kept them alive and their secret safe for well over a century, and Ellison had led them both by rank and by merit these long decades past. Only Hiram Conley’s
fear, his panic, had broken their seal of silence and started them on the path to destruction.

‘We’re on our own now, boys, just like before,’ Ellison added.

‘We’re even following the same trail,’ Cochrane noted. ‘That there’s irony for ya.’

Ellison stood up from the barrel, breathing deeply on the night air as he tapped the remaining embers from his clay pipe and slipped it into his jacket pocket. There was no other way, and
nowhere else to run.

‘Let’s move out.’

‘Hold on a second,’ Nathaniel said. ‘What about those two out of towners who followed us? They might’n be allies, not foes. They din’ shoot until we did.’

‘We don’t know who they are,’ Ellison said, ‘and they ain’t our concern.’

‘One of them moved like he was a soldier,’ Copthorne said, standing to join Ellison but his tone conceding Nathaniel’s point. ‘He kept our heads down with his pistol but
he din’ shoot to kill. The other one din’ shoot at all. It was only that damned fool girl who let fly with her shotgun, damned near blew my ass off.’

‘Yeah,’ Nathaniel said, ‘and did you see him out of Sedillo Park, ridin’ that goddamned horse like a bat outta hell? He almost had us but he never shot no gun. I
don’t reckon he was bearing arms at all.’

Ellison shook his head, picking up his rifle from where it was propped.

‘It’s too risky to talk to them.’

‘My guess, for what it’s worth,’ Cochrane said, ‘is that they’ll keep coming. Whoever they are, they were willing to trek out through the Pecos after us and that
ain’t something a tenderfoot does lightly.’

Ellison turned to face his men four-square, and his tone brooked no argument.

‘Either we reach the caves and are saved, or we reach the caves and we disappear. Whatever happens, as long as I’ve a breath left in my body I ain’t letting Jeb Oppenheimer or
anybody else touch my bones.’ He checked his weapon and gestured to the door. ‘An’ if anyone else comes after us, I’ll give ’em the good news from the end o’ my
rifle.’

17 May, 3.10 a.m.

Doug Jarvis stepped off the boarding ramp of a gigantic C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft onto the floodlit service ramp, listening to the huge aircraft’s engines whine
down as he sniffed the mixture of aviation fuel and desert air. The vapors reminded him of a dozen other similar airbases across the Middle East he had seen when serving with the Marines.