Matt Helm--The Interlopers (29 page)

“I still say it’s all a big, bad joke. One side is as good as another, yours and that of the guy who just rode out of here. Or as bad. But I drove clear to Alaska to find some action, and your side happened to be where it was. I just took a piece of it, that’s all.”

“Sure,” I said again.

“Besides, I did owe you something for turning me loose back there. I don’t like being in anybody’s debt. Now we’re even… I’ll see if I can’t round up some of those nags.” She started to turn away.

“One more thing,” I said, and she stopped. “How much help was the pup, really? I’m curious.”

I saw her look back at me and grin. “Well, he found us two coveys of ptarmigan and one bull moose,” she said. “No, actually he did help, but it wasn’t a hard trail to follow, four horses in all that soft stuff. But he made a swell diversion when we got here, didn’t he? I kind of figured on that.”

She was quite a girl. I watched her go off toward the open meadow. Holz had taken the only horse that was tied. The rest had been hobbled and turned loose, and you’d be surprised at how well an experienced wilderness horse can get around with his forelegs roped together. Well, that was her problem.

I went back to mine, which was very simple. The big Magnum rifle held three cartridges in the magazine. It could have held a fourth in the chamber, but Jack hadn’t put one in. He’d been riding, and you don’t carry a rifle in a saddle scabbard with a live round under the firing pin unless you’re stupid, optimistic, or suicidal. Nor do you chamber a round in camp unless you’re planning to shoot something right away. Apparently, he hadn’t really expected trouble.

Three cartridges ought to be enough, with a properly sighted-in rifle. The question I had to answer was:
Had
Holz sighted in this gun carefully, and was it still on target? Presumably he had his number-one weapon with him. This was just his spare rifle, lent to Jack. Just how careful had he, or Jack, been about seeing that it shot where it looked? If I made the stalk and found a mark to aim at, would the bullet go where the cross hairs indicated?

I sighed. I was just kidding myself, trying to convince myself that I didn’t have to waste any of my precious three cartridges. There’s only one way to find out if a rifle is shooting right for you, and that is to shoot it, no matter what kind of a genius-marksman fired it before you. To go hunting a fellow specialist like Holz without first checking my weapon would be sheer lunacy on my part.

Waiting, I cooked some breakfast and listened absently to the wheedling and abuse put out by Libby, on the floor. It didn’t bother me, now that I knew what I had to do. When there was clear daylight at the tent door, I bent down and kissed her.

She said, “Damn you, Matt.”

“You’re a lovely thing,” I said. “You just talk too much. Be good.”

I took the rifle and went out, cut a round white blaze in the bark of a nearby tree, and paced off one hundred yards. I lay down and adjusted the rifle sling to my measurements, chambered one third of my ammunition supply, and took careful aim. When the cross hairs were absolutely steady on the improvised target, I let the piece fire. Then I walked over there and looked at the result: a little black hole just three inches above my point of aim, exactly where it should have been to keep the bullet on a man-sized target out to roughly three hundred yards. Well, now I knew.

I pulled the bolt to eject the empty case, worked a fresh cartridge into the chamber, and set the safety carefully, as Davis came running up with Pat right behind him.

“What is it?” Davis panted. “What’s the matter? Did you see Mr. Wood? Why did you shoot?”

“I was just checking the gun,” I said. “It shoots fine.”

“Just checking… but you only had three cartridges!”

“And now I have two, but I know what they’ll do when I fire them,” I said. “Well, it’s about time I was on my way.”

“Where are you going?”

“Up there.” I pointed. “That spot up there on the mountainside above the little lake we passed. You crossed the rockslide if you were following our trail. Mr. Wood is sitting right above it this minute. He’s got to be. From there he can watch this camp—he’s probably got his scope on us right now, and he’s wishing we were about a mile closer. But he’s not going to come after us, because we’re doing him no harm here. What he’s got to make sure of is that none of us gets back to civilization in time to pass the word about the plane that’s coming in this afternoon.”

Pat said, “You’re sure there’ll be a plane?”

“He was sure,” I said. “And that’s why he’s not going to play Indian in the brush; one of us might slip out while he was doing it. He’s just going to sit tight at the head of the rockslide where he can watch the camp and cover the only trail out of here—the only trail we know. From there, he can keep us from leaving, and at the same time he can pick us off if we try to interfere when the plane does come. At the last minute, he’ll scramble down the rocks, jump aboard, and fly off with the NCS material in his shirt pocket.”

Pat was watching me closely. She said, “So you’re standing in the open and waving your arms to tell him exactly what you’re going to do.”

I grinned. “He knows what I’m going to do, Skinny. He knows I’m coming after him. That is, he’s almost sure. But if I’m real obvious about it—sighting in my gun where he can see me, and pointing out my objective dramatically—he may get a few doubts. He may just start wondering if I’m being tricky, and if so, how. The suspense will do him good.” I looked at the two of them. “Stay here. Don’t take any chances with Mr. Wood. You can’t do a thing to help me with those damn little hundred-and-fifty-yard carbines, so don’t try. And don’t take any chances with the lady in the tent, either. She may just be the greatest, sweetest person in the world, but… wait a minute. Les, how well do you know your chief?”

“Mr. Ryerson? Ronnie’s dad? Well, he’s not the palsy-walsy type of boss. I wouldn’t say any of us really knows him, even Ronnie.”

“Ryerson, eh?” At last I could stop thinking of them as Smith, Junior, and Senior. “Then you wouldn’t be really startled to learn that he was running another organization parallel with yours, only much more secretive and uninhibited?”

Lester Davis frowned. “You mean… you mean you think he’s just using us as a screen, a cover, for another…?” He stopped, and considered the proposition. Then he shrugged. “I really couldn’t say, Mr. Helm. Of course if he were doing that, we’d be the last to know, wouldn’t we?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Well, Libby Meredith claims to be one of his super-secret, lower-level operatives. Or upper-level, depending on how you look at it. A colleague of yours, no less. Maybe she is. It remains to be proved. In the meantime, she stays tied. You get the horses rounded up and wait for me.”

Pat Bellman hesitated. “How long do we wait?”

I said, “Until you hear some shooting up there, and about half an hour longer. If I’m not back by then, I won’t be back, and you’ll be on your own…”

It was a beautiful morning, which was too bad. Yesterday’s rain and mist would have been useful, but what I had was a clear blue sky, bright sunshine, and endless visibility. Since I had it, there was nothing to do but make use of it. With my nose to the ground, like Hiawatha on the trail of his winter venison, I let myself be seen marching off on foot in the direction up the valley that Holz had taken on horseback some hours earlier.

If Holz was where I thought, watching from high above and far away, and if he wanted to think I was tracking him, that was all right. It was more or less what I was doing, and I couldn’t prevent him from anticipating it. But if he wanted to think I just wanted him to think I was tracking him, that was all right, too.

For instance, if he remembered the part of my dossier that said I was pretty good in the boondocks, he might start worrying about whether or not I could be trying to get back to civilization for official help by way of a different trail or no trail at all. A worried man can’t sit still nearly as well as an unworried one; and a moving man is easier to spot than one who holes up in a bunch of rocks and stays there. I’d rather play mountain tag with the man than try to dig him out of hiding.

It was pleasant to be walking, working the soreness out of the riding muscles that had taken a beating yesterday. I could have been better dressed for the work, particularly in the matter of footgear—the cowboy boots of my Nystrom role were a bit slick-soled for climbing and a bit noisy for stalking—but on the whole I didn’t feel that I was operating under any serious handicaps. At least I didn’t have a bullet in me, and Holz did. And I wasn’t brooding heavily about what a sad and lonely job I had, either, even though I’d once been a sucker for a dog in trouble.

I could hear the pup for a long time after I could no longer see the camp behind me. He didn’t like being tied up and ordered to stay put, and he was telling the world about it. Finally, a shoulder of the mountain cut off the sound, and I was alone with the whisper of the fitful early-morning breeze that would have caused me a lot of worry if I’d been after moose or caribou.

As a matter of fact, the first sign of life I encountered was the crashing and thumping of a big cow moose taking off through the timber ahead after catching my scent. I found that hard on the nerves; and a bunch of white-winged ptarmigan flushing noisily didn’t help my peace of mind either. Even my first glimpse of Holz’s horse, tied just at timberline, was mildly nerve-wracking. I mean, when you’re after game that can shoot back, you react violently to anything that moves, even a horse’s tail.

I considered the question of the horse for several minutes, crouching among the sparse trees halfway up the mountain. It could be bait for a trap, of course, but the likeliest explanation was that Holz had left the animal there simply because he was heading up into terrain no horse could handle. At last I moved forward cautiously. The big bay was happy to see a human being. I untied him and let him go. He’d probably wander into camp sooner or later, and Holz would probably see him and know I’d got this far. Then he would, I hoped, start wondering just why I’d made a point of advertising the fact.

There hadn’t been much of a trail to follow up to now. The ground had been frozen when Holz had come this way. I’d stumbled on the horse more or less by following the shape of the country and guessing at the route a rider bound for a certain spot might pick at night.

But now, heading upward from there, above timberline, I had nothing whatever to guide me: it was all rock and rubble on which no tracks showed. It took me an hour to work my way up to a notch that let me cut around behind the mountains overlooking the camp and the lake. The going was rough and steep, and the country was wide open. From up here I could see that what I’d thought, yesterday, to be autumn snow on the faraway peaks was actually a series of permanent glaciers.

Some small white spots on a mountainside ahead, that I also took for snow at first glance, turned out to be mountain sheep that scampered out of sight when they spotted me, moving as easily as if they’d been running across a level meadow instead of a forty-five-degree slope of loose rock. The bad part was, of course, the fact that, crossing the open slopes myself much less rapidly and gracefully, I made a beautiful target for a man with a scope-sighted rifle waiting anywhere above; but no shots came.

Playing it by ear, or by instinct, I made a very wide circle, much wider, I hoped, than Holz had made to reach his vantage point above the lake, if that’s where he’d really gone. Then I scrambled back across the rocky spine of the mountains into what I hoped would be the big valley I’d left. It turned out to be a small, steep side canyon instead and I had considerable trouble working my way down into it. I’m willing to hike all I have to, uphill or down, but I’m not much of a mountain climber, particularly in cowboy boots.

I finally got to the bottom of the gorge by sitting on, and sliding down, a steep sheet of rock, to the detriment of Grant Nystrom’s slacks. Picking myself up, I fought my way down a little stream, over fallen trees and jumbled boulders, until the country opened up ahead, and there was the pond for which I was looking, far below me and off to the right, just where I wanted it. I stopped to check the rifle and prayed that it had taken less of a beating than my hands and knees, not to mention my shins and tail-bone.

The rest of the approach just took time and caution. I stayed low, where the timber covered me, until I was directly under the point I’d decided to reach—as close to Holz’s probable hiding place as it seemed safe to go. I took off the high-heeled boots, kind of wedged them under my belt, and made the final climb through the rocks in my stocking feet—when I used my feet at all. Mostly I was on hands and knees and sometimes, when the terrain required, on my belly.

It was hard work, but when I got to the preselected spot, I found that I’d made a good choice. Sheltered in a little hollow there, with a scraggly bush and some tufts of tough-looking grass for additional cover, I could watch the lake and the rockslide and the crumbling stone outcropping at the head of it, near which I figured my target would appear sooner or later. It was about two hundred and fifty yards away, within easy range of my borrowed weapon. I couldn’t see the camp for the curve of the mountainside, but unlike Holz, I had no reason to watch that. At least I thought I didn’t.

Nevertheless, when the break came, after over two hours of motionless waiting, it came from the camp I couldn’t see: a single gunshot report, echoing off the mountainside. I reached for the rifle beside me, a futile gesture considering the range. I had a sickening sense of failure. Again, as with Libby, it seemed that my elaborate reasoning had been haywire. Apparently Holz hadn’t behaved the way he should have—the way I’d thought he should have.

Instead of waiting obligingly where I’d wanted him to, he must have sneaked back to camp as I’d been sure he wouldn’t. Now he was disposing of the easy part, of the opposition, secure in the knowledge that I wouldn’t be around to bother him.

I started to rise, but checked the movement. I’d made a certain investment of time and effort in this hiding place. To move now would be to throw it all away. I couldn’t reach the camp in time to be of any help anyway, so I just lay there listening, and heard more shooting: this time a rapid-fire fusillade of five reports so close together that they sounded like a burst from a submachine gun. That was no slow bolt-action rifle with a maximum capacity of four rounds, I realized; that was a lever-action carbine worked by an expert.