“Even if you could,” said Clara, “I doubt you could round up all the necessary equipment without them catching on. Lord knows there’s enough of ’em to watch our every move, even when we make those rounds of the people they let us make today.”
“I counted a few over a hundred,” said eighty-two-year-old Isaac T. Hall. “Been counting for two days solid now. A hundred’s the number all right. Seventy to eighty always working on the hillside or the gulley and the rest watching the town.”
“Lots of men,” muttered Sheriff Junk. He brought his knees up to his chest and there was a crackling noise.
“Not so many in my eyes,” Ike T. Hall responded sharply. “Been through the two big wars myself. Seen things that’d turn your stomachs so far around you’d be shitting through your belly buttons. The Nazis were the worst. Rode over people ’cause people let ’em. The ones that fought, like in them ghettos, had a chance anyway. We could do the same,” Hall insisted, pushing his thin wispy hair from his forehead. “That’d be my suggestion. We got ’em outnumbered. Hell, there’s 700 of us. Was up to me, I’d strap on Uncle Wyatt’s six-guns and have a go at the bastards. I get three or four ’fore they get me, we’re ahead of the game.”
Isaac Hall had lived in Pamosa Springs all his eighty-two years, half of them served as marshall. His greatest claim to fame was a distant relationship with Wyatt Earp himself. How he was related varied from great-nephew to cousin to great-grandson. Ike’s flesh had been wrinkled and sagging for as long as most people could remember. The hair got thinner and wispier as the years went on.
“It ain’t just the numbers, Ike,” Sheriff Heep told him. “It’s the weapons. To have any chance at all we’d have to come up with plenty more than your six-guns, and the town’s armory’s not exactly well stocked.”
“What about their armory?” suggested Clara.
“Huh?”
“Their armory. If we can find out where they set it up, we could ‘borrow’ some of their weapons.”
“And assuming we do, how many people in this town you think could make ’em work to any decent degree?” challenged Dog-ear. “Nope, I’m thinking along different lines. We ain’t so isolated we couldn’t get one person out to bring back help.”
Junk’s arm went pop as he slapped his thigh in disdain. “You thought out in which direction to send this person, Dog-ear?” he challenged. “I mean, you can forget the road the way it’s guarded and the only walk that’s even conceivable is east over the San Juans. That’s five days in the best of conditions for someone who knows what they’re doing.”
“Gotta be someone like that in town.”
“Gotta be nuts to want to chance it. This time of year I’d wager his chances of making it across the San Juans alive were no better than fifty-fifty.”
“Which might be better than our chances if we sit around and do nothing.”
A large blast sounded on the hillside, silencing the town council’s voices and stilling their hearts.
“Might help if we knew what in hell it was that brought ’em here,” said the mayor.
“Seems obvious to me,” responded Heep. “There’s something in that hillside that’s plenty valuable and they’re here to steal it right from under us.”
“Yeah,” agreed Clara Buhl, “that explains their digging on the hillside. But anybody got an idea what they’re building in the gulley?”
The soldier was bored. He hadn’t known what to expect from this mission, but he was sure it would be better than patrolling an empty street by himself after midnight. The M-16 slung over his shoulder clapped against his hip, begging to be used. The soldier yawned. The prospects for action tonight, or anytime soon, were dismal. His walk had become mechanical now. The shift had been substantially reduced at midnight and the full moon proved a blessing for some, although the soldier would have preferred a fog-shrouded night when at least some of the local assholes would try to flee through his grid. Just let them try….
A flash of movement caught his eye, a tall, thin figure moving on the outskirts of town, keeping to the shadows. The soldier was about to shout out, then elected to remove the M-16 from his shoulder instead. He brought it up as he dashed silently forward to better his angle. Standing square against a building, he pushed his eye against the infrared night scope and recognized the man superimposed in the cross hairs as the town’s sheriff. No matter. His orders were open to interpretation in such situations. He would tell the commander he thought the man had a gun. The soldier started to reach for his trigger.
He didn’t hear the footsteps coming up behind him until it was too late. He swung, expecting to see one of his fellows, but what he saw was the face of death itself.
The soldier felt himself trying to scream, feeling a horrible burst of agony in his back as a smelly hand closed over his mouth. That was his last thought — that the hand was big and that it smelled bad. The creeping figure extracted its blade, pulled the corpse between a pair of buildings, and slipped off into the night.
Chapter 15
When McCracken woke up stiff and cold on the floor the next morning, Natalya was gone, the single blanket she had tossed over herself folded neatly at the foot of the bed.
“That antique dealer was right about Megilido Fass’s sexual tendencies,” she said when she returned twenty minutes later.
“What about taking advantage of those tendencies?”
“I’m not sure.” She shrugged. “Thursday is the day Fass’s contact makes his weekly delivery, but I’m not sure what we can do with this.”
Blaine felt sickened by the perverted world of the reclusive and powerful Fass. “Learn anything about this contact?”
“Plenty.”
Blaine smiled.
Two hours later, with Natalya’s help, the disguise required for Blaine’s impersonation was complete.
“Lucky this guy’s got a beard,” he said, rearranging his hair. “I really didn’t want to shave mine.” He looked to see Natalya gathering up her things. “Where you headed from here?”
“Bangkok,” she replied matter-of-factly, “to meet with an apparently desperate aide of Raskowski who seems eager to talk. I would have been there already, if not for the detour necessitated by your involvement.”
“Please accept my apologies.”
“Only if you’ll accept my hand in good luck. One of us has to succeed. Otherwise both our countries will pay.”
McCracken emerged from the run-down hotel dressed in baggy white trousers and a slightly soiled white, unstructured jacket. He had combed out his beard to give it an unkempt look and picked his wavy hair for the same effect. A series of makeup shades mixed together produced the necessary native flesh tone and hid his more noticeable scars nicely. He would have to be careful about smiling, though, for the man whose place he would be taking had a gold tooth in the front. Blaine had wedged a crinkled, floppy hat into his back pocket, ready for wear as the final element of his disguise. The real delivery man was not known to wear one but some improvisations were needed if he was to get close to Fass.
Natalya’s information had spotted Megilido Fass on a huge estate in the Khania section of the island of Crete, specifically in Sfakia. Every Thursday a man named Manolokis took a ferry from southern Greece across the Mediterranean to the port of Khania. He always drove a white van, the windows of which were darkened to keep the curious from observing the merchandise he was retained to deliver once a week. Blaine would be waiting for him to arrive in Khania after flying in from Athens. The switch would have to be made with a minimum of fuss and even then Blaine would still have his work cut out for him in gaining access to Fass.