Timpanogos (14 page)

“That’s our steam-truck,” Burton said in his lecturing way,
as if it wasn’t obvious.

“No wonder there weren’t any Pinkertons to welcome us,” Tam
answered, showing he was just as smart as the Englishman.
 
“They all went over to welcome the
truck.”

Burton shut the gate and jammed the control lever up to the
LAKE
slot.
 

This ride was short, but it felt extremely fast and violent
to Tam.
 
Burton looked unfazed, and
he glared down at Tam as the Irishman bent at the waist, leaned with one hand
against the wooden panels of the walls and breathed deeply.

“Are you well?”

Tam answered by throwing up, a thin stream of sour bile that
he spat into the corner of the lift.
 
The space well and truly reeked now, blood and sweat and bile, not to
mention the urine released by the Pinkerton who had died in the lift.

“Well enough.”
 
Tam straightened and wiped polluted spittle from his chin with the back
of his hand.
 
“Right fookin’
cheerful, in fact.
 
Now I’ve made
some room for them, I’m ready to eat me a Pinkerton or two.”

He grinned at the Englishman and opened the lift door.

They hobbled out into cold night, weapons first, and Tam
sucked in the freezing air to catch his breath.
 
It helped, though he still thought he might throw up again.
 

They stood outside, next to a large, long brick-shaped
building made of plascrete and fitted with few windows.
 
Of those few, even fewer showed any
light.
 
Before them was a sward of
wild meadow grass and flowers, silvery-gray in the light, that fell gently down
to a long, narrow lake, a shimmering silver pan.
 
Halfway down the meadow, a gaping hole that must be the ramp
into the Bay below lay at the end of a gravel road that led past the lake and
disappeared at its end, apparently dropping off a cliff.
 
The lake was fed by a glacier, a ribbon
of shining white that climbed up a boulder-strewn field to a jagged rocky ridge
above.
 

Tam followed the ridge around with his eyes.
 
The complex stood in a big
horseshoe-shaped bowl, and was lidded over with the most amazing field of stars
Tam had ever seen.
 
The sky looked
more star than void between, and though the moon was down, he felt he could see
perfectly.
 
Keep your wits about
you, me boy, he told himself, but he was still stunned by the sight.

Even more amazing than the stars, though, was the sight
directly above Tam.
 
The brickish
building was punctuated by a single tower, something like the steeple of a
village church.
 
It rose into the
darkness, gray and forbidden, and at its height it bulked out into some sort of
platform.
 
All along its length ran
metal rods.
 
The rods emerged from
the plascrete just above the ground and ran vertically up towards the top of
the tower.
 
They were the thickness
of Tam’s wrist, but they disappeared from sight before he could see any end of
them.
 
Smaller horizontal rods
linked them to each other at intervals (and what could those possibly be for,
then? they looked like the world’s biggest seamstress was building a hoop skirt
around the tower, and hadn’t yet got to the crinoline).

Clustered around the platform, hanging in mid-air…
flying
… were four enormous objects.
 
Air-ships, Tam thought.
 
Each bore four external pods like an
animal’s four feet, paws down, and a golden light glowed in a dim ring, cupped
into each paw.

“Hell and begorra.”

“Utnapishtim’s beard,” Burton added.

“They look like Viking ships.
 
They look like big bloody-damn-hell Viking ships with feet
out the sides that can
fly
.”

Burton harrumphed.
 
“I would have said Sumerian magur-boats, but in the essentials we’re
agreed.”

Tam chuckled.
 
“You smug English fook, with your queen and country.
 
We’ve done it, don’t you see?”
 
He pointed with a gun.
 
“That up there is the world’s one and
only flying air-ship fleet!”

Burton grinned, looking even more like a pirate.
 
“Let’s go up to the tower and take a
closer look, shall we?”
 
He slapped
Tam on the shoulder.
 
Tam would
have been embarrassed to admit how good the friendly smack felt.

They held their breaths and hobbled back into the lift.
 
Burton pressed the lever to
TOWER
.

Hishhhhhh!

Tam vomited again.
 

“Ach!” he spat on the lift floor.
 
“Anthony’s knuckles, I don’t know what’s wrong with me!”

“Injuries,” Burton promptly suggested.
 
“Sleep deprivation, physical
exertion.
 
Have you drunk enough
water?
 
You might be dehydrated.
 
Altitude sickness, of course.
 
We must be at eight or nine thousand
feet of elevation here, judging by the way my ears feel.”

“Fookin’ hell, you make me sound like a little girl.
 
Altitude sickness, really?”

“Really,” Burton affirmed, furrowing his brow.
 
“And, of course, you drank an entire
bottle of whisky in short order.
 
All things considered, it’s amazing you’ve made it as far as you have.”

“A single bottle is nothing,” Tam bluffed.
 
“I drank whisky from Mother
O’Shaughnessy’s breast.”
 
He leaned
against the wall and breathed deeply, spitting sour strings out of his
mouth.
 
His own tongue tasted like
he’d been cleaning a stable floor with it.

Hishhhh
—

the lift stopped moving.
 
The door still faced a solid sheet of plascrete.

“Damn!” Burton cursed.

“Lift broken?”

“Or we’re discovered.
 
Let’s hope it’s the lift.”
 
Burton jiggled the control lever out of the
TOWER
notch and back into it.
 
Nothing happened.

“We can’t stay here, we’ll be shot like rats.”
 
Tam shot his eyes around the lift and
spotted an indented square in the ceiling that looked like a trapdoor.
 
“Emergency exit, right there,” he said.

“I’ll go first,” Burton suggested.
 
“Maybe there’s a ladder in the lift shaft.
 
Or we can climb up the ropes.”

“Like hell,” Tam snapped.
 
“We’re both of us shot full of holes and I’m sick to boot,
but you’ve had it worse than I have.
 
Said so yourself.
 
Give me a
bloody-damn-hell hand, I’m going up.”
 
He grinned.
 
“For queen and
country.”

Burton made stirrups with his hands and hoisted Tam towards
the ceiling.
 
The mustached man
grunted and ground his teeth but didn’t complain or even wince as Tam pushed
open the trap door.
 
He snaked his
arms up through the open space and wedged his elbows into it, dragging his body
up.

He brushed aside loose cable and struggled to come to the
top of the lift carriage.
 
Taut
cables locked into the carriage top near him shot straight up, but not into
darkness as he had expected.

Tam stopped.
 
“Aw, shite,” he said.
 
“Harris.”

“Higley,” the Pinkerton corrected him.
 
“Hello, McNamara.
 
Top of the evening to you.”

“O’Shaughnessy,” Tam sighed.
 
“Listen, have you seen my friends?
 
I seem to have lost them all in this great bloody complex of
yours.”

The rooftop of the lift carriage was level with the exit
from the shaft.
 
Four men stood in
it, each holding a Henry rifle.
 
Three of the men pointed their guns down at the lift.
 
Higley held the muzzle of his weapon
pressed directly against the lift cable.

“Ah,” Higley chuckled, “you Irish are great liars.
 
Come out slowly with your hands up, and
tell your friend in the carriage he’s next.
 
You try any funny business, any delay, any sign of a weapon,
and I’ll squeeze the trigger and drop you both to the bottom of Timpanogos
Mountain.”

*
  
*
  
*

Sam Clemens regained consciousness to the sound of
gunfire.
 
Some of it came from
handguns, but there was bigger artillery in the mix, he could hear it.

It took him a moment to remember where he was, and then
another to realize why everything around him was dark.

He tried to move, and discovered that his arms were
free.
 
He pushed, shifted planks
away from his head, and found himself in a pile of rubble on the farmhouse
floor.
 
Yellow light from a
kerosene lantern overhead illuminated a scene Sam had not expected to see.

Jug-eared, square-headed John D. Lee held the Englishman
Fearnley-Standish hostage.
 
He
edged sideways towards Sam, facing off against an irate-looking bald man
holding a scattergun aimed straight at the center of Fearnley-Standish’s head,
as if he thought he could punch through both men in a single shot, and beside
him hunched a woman who looked the part of his wife and hefted a heavy iron
skillet in one fist.
 
Young Annie
Webb was with them, Annie who had been such a sweet conversationalist at
Bridger’s Saloon, but who now held her skirts and petticoats hiked up with both
fists clenched and gritted teeth, as if, of all things, she planned to
kick
Lee.
 
Poe’s dwarf stood at bay in the corner of the room with a knife up
defensively in front of him, apparently protecting a huddle of children.

“Anybody tries to stop me, I kill the Englishman.”

Lee’s grip on Fearnley-Standish was not the conventional
hostage-taking maneuver.
 
He held
the other man like one tired boxer clinches another, pinning
Fearnley-Standish’s head to his own clavicle, and holding a Bowie knife to the
side of the Englishman’s neck.

Sam clambered out, coughing at the splintered dust his
movements threw up.
 
Lee stepped
closer to him, and he saw what the other man was after.

A pistol lay on the floor between them.

Lee switched his knife to his other hand, pointing the tip
now against Fearnley-Standish’s collarbone, and reached for the gun—

Sam grabbed it—

Lee snatched the other end, and pulled.

Sam held tight and was hauled to his feet.

“Don’t let go!” Annie shouted.
 
Sam didn’t.

Sam sneezed, blowing sawdust out of his hair and
mustache.
 
To his relief, he found
he was holding the grip-end of the pistol, and Lee was holding the barrel.

“Let go, or I’ll stab him!” Lee barked.
 
He yanked again, but Sam held tight.

“I believe the threats customarily belong to the man with
the trigger end of the weapon,” Sam quipped.
 
He pulled at the gun too, but couldn’t wrest it from the
Danite chieftain’s grip.
 
They
tugged back and forth like children struggling with a knotted rope over a mud
puddle.
 
The loaded gun between
reminded Sam not to laugh at the thought.

Beside Sam on the floor, Brigham Young struggled to free
himself.
 
Heavier timbers lay
across him than had pinned Sam, and he was still stuck.
 
“Heber!” he roared.
 
“If you could stop trying to commit
murder for just a minute, you might free me!”

The farmer looked abashed.
 
He rushed to Young’s side and started heaving at the largest
of the beams.
 
His wife, though,
stayed right where she was.

“I think one of us should stick to the plan of committing
murder,” she grumbled, taking an experimental swipe at the air with her
skillet.
 
“Or at least battery.”

Brigham grunted, a sound that might have been agreement.

Sam and Lee struggled.

Bang!
 
Bang!
 
The
shooting outside continued.

“I’ll give you five hundred dollars,” Sam offered.
 
“Just let the Englishman go and leave
the Kingdom tonight.”
 
That would
be an expenditure he’d be happy to account for to the green eyeshade boys in
Washington.
 

Lee eyed the efforts to free Young like a wild horse
fighting the bridle.
 
“I’ll give
you all of Iron County!” he snapped back.
 
“Just let go of the gun!”
 
The Danite didn’t relinquish his hold on the English diplomat.

Sam really wished he could bring himself to pull the
trigger.
 
Any other man in the room
would have killed John D. Lee by now.
 
But Sam couldn’t do it.
 
His
brother Henry had died in government service, in a riverboat accident, of
course, but it was much too close to dying as a soldier in uniform for Sam ever
to feel cavalier about taking another man’s life.