The Devil's Footprint (32 page)

"There is a relationship, ma'am," said Lonsdale quietly.
 
"You point the weapon in the right
direction and the round goes more or less the same way.
 
It's a useful principle to keep in
mind."

"Don't patronize me, young man," said Mrs. Zanduski
sharply.
 
There was a flash from the
weapon's muzzle and a loud boom.
 
The
metal can she had been aiming at some twenty-five yards away was blasted off
the wooden plank against the wall of sandbags.

The crowd cheered and whistled and clapped.
 
"Way to go, Granny!" could be
heard.
 
Mrs. Zanduski looked up at Chief
Lonsdale triumphantly.

"Very nice, Mrs. Zanduski," said Lonsdale, "but don't you
think a smaller caliber might be better?"

Mrs. Zanduski's chin jutted out.
 
"Clint Eastwood uses a large-caliber weapon, young man, and I would
point out that he is now practically a senior citizen himself."

Chief Lonsdale sighed.
 
Life and
fantasy seemed to be getting increasingly intertwined these days.
 
"Next!" he called.

Hiram Albertsen was an eighty-two-year-old retired accountant.
 
He was not much taller than Mrs. Clara
Zanduski, and carried a bull pup High Standard Model 10B shotgun equipped with
a laser sight and a Choate magazine extension.

"Where is the target, young man?" he said.

Lonsdale pointed at the next can in a row of seven.
 
This was supposed to be a familiarization
lesson.
 
One shot each and they would
focus on weapons handling and get to serious shooting later.
 
He was already forming the view that he had
underestimated the senior citizens of Medora.

Mr. Albertsen adjusted his bifocals, held his weapon at his hip, and then
activated the laser sight.
 
A red dot
hovered unsteadily around the target.

"
BOOM!
 
BOOM!
 
The seven cans were
near-simultaneously propelled into the air, and the plank on which they had sat
reduced to matchwood.
 
Lonsdale looked on
in disbelief as slivers of wood and wood dust fluttered to the ground.
 
The cans were shredded, most split right
open.

Mr. Albertsen cackled.
 
"That
old hag's six-gun isn't worth spit."

The rivalry on all issues between Clara Zanduski and Hiram Albertsen was
legendary.
 
Rumor had it that it had
started at the bridge table but had speedily spread to just about every aspect
of life that could be remotely regarded as competitive.
 
The consensus was that both were thriving on
the endless confrontations.

"What in heavens are you firing, Mr. Albertsen?" said Lonsdale
weakly.

Mr. Albertsen held up his weapon.
 
The muzzle had been fitted with a duckbill diverter, which spread the
steel darts in an elliptical pattern.
 
"Loaded ‘em myself, young man," he said.
 
"Twenty fléchettes to a
twelve-gauge.
 
With the duckbill, at
twenty-five meters, they'll clear everyone in a pattern of twelve feet wide and
five feet high.
 
And deafen' ‘em,
too!
 
Hot damn!"

"Hot damn indeed!" agreed Lonsdale.
 
This police chief business was not working
out quite as he had expected.
 
The city
of
Medora
was
two-thirds a retirement community and loved being incorporated.
 
City politics was what kept the adrenaline of
the senior citizens flowing.
 
But for all
practical purposes there was no crime.
 
And the citizens, armed to the teeth, intended to keep it that way.

Apart from being a pawn to be argued over at weekly meetings of the city
council, Medora's four-man police department had almost nothing of substance to
do except traffic control during the season when hundreds of thousands of
tourists streamed through on the way to the
Grand Canyon
.
 
Ironically, thanks to fines resulting from
traffic violations, the police department even made a profit.

Pay and benefits were good, the scenery was superb, the air was clear,
and his golf handicap was coming down, but Chief of Police Al Lonsdale was
bored.

It was then that he saw Colonel Hugo Fitzduane standing apart from the
gun crowd, looking fit and tanned and a little thinner than he remembered.
 
And he knew things would start to happen the
way they normally did when the Irishman was around.

Fitzduane was a charming man, but he was a magnet for trouble.
 
Al Lonsdale knew he should know better, but
he was very pleased to see him.
 
He felt
a stirring in the blood, a lust for adventure, for life on the edge.
 
A mature man should have gotten over such
feelings.
 
The Chief was glad he still
had some way to go.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Lonsdale lived five miles out of town in a valley that the local Indians
considered sacred.
 
He had built his own
house in an as-yet-undeveloped area, but had consulted the local medicine men
before commencing construction.
 
They had
consulted the spirits and then recommended a series of purification ceremonies
that lasted on and off for a month.
 
The
rituals did not come free.
 
Lonsdale did
not break ground until they were completed.

"Did the ceremonies work?" said Fitzduane.

They were sitting on the raised deck of the house.
 
A bloodred sun was setting in the
V
formed by the walls of the
valley.
 
The red rock glowed as if on
fire.
 
It was not hard to see why the
Indians considered the location sacred.
 
There was a special, almost spiritual quality about the place, and it
was more than beautiful.
 
It was
spectacular.
 
It was also isolated.
 
The nearest neighbor was more than two miles
away in the next valley.

Lonsdale grinned.
 
"Sure.
"
Earlier on he had raised the subject of Kathleen, and
Fitzduane had frozen.
 
The look in the
man's eyes had said it all.
 
Now Lonsdale
steered the conversation to safer subjects.
 
The man was on autopilot.
 
He
could function as long as he did not think of her except when absolutely
necessary.

The Chief made a gesture encompassing the house.
 
It was a large two-story adobe dwelling
surrounded by a high wall that fit nearly perfectly into the landscape.
 
In terms of the basic comforts it was
completely modern, but externally it would not have seemed out of place when
Arizona
was part of
Mexico
.
 
In truth, it was more like a small fort than
a house.

"The last man to try building in this valley," continued Lonsdale,
"dismissed the Indians' objections as superstition and an attempt at
extortion.
 
Medicine men don't perform
their ceremonies for free."

"So what happened to him?" said Fitzduane.

"He was overseeing the clearing of the site when the bulldozer cut into
a nest of snakes.
 
One moment he was
standing there shouting directions, and the next he was flat on his back on the
ground under a whole mess of writhing snakes.
 
They had antitoxin, but he was way beyond that.
 
He was dead within minutes.
 
They say he was bitten more than fifty times
and most of his face was torn off.
 
He
had no eyes by the time they were finished and his skin was black from the
venom."

"Nice story," said Fitzduane dryly, looking out over the
unspoiled valley, "but I doubt it will do much for the real estate market
around here."

"I hope not," said Lonsdale.
 
"I like the solitude.
 
This
really is God's country.
 
I would surely
hate to see it spoiled.
 
Snakes are one
effective way to keep the crowds down."

"I hope you keep your medicine men sweet," said Fitzduane.
 
"And the local snakes.
 
I would not be at all surprised to find they
can be one and the same."

Lonsdale laughed.
 
"We have an
accommodation," he said.

As the sun sank, a line of shadow crept up the burning walls of the
valley until eventually only the rim
glowed
a fiery
red.
 
Fitzduane was reminded of the
contrast between molten lava as it emerged brilliant and glowing from the
earth's interior, and its appearance when it faded to a dull patina as it
cooled.

Then suddenly the sun was gone.
 
There was a brief afterglow, and then that was gone too.
 
The night skies of northern
Arizona
were, if anything, even more
dramatic.

Fitzduane thought of his thirteenth-century Norman ancestor and the
rain-sodden little Irish island he had made his own, and wondered why the man
hadn't taken ship and headed west for a modest five thousand miles.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

After they had eaten, Fitzduane went through the plan in some
detail.
 
Lonsdale listened intently.
 
Special operations had been his whole world
for most of his adult life, and it was part of the special-forces tradition
that a plan was rarely imposed.

The process was not so much democratic as pragmatic.
 
Enemy fire was no respecter of rank, and the
best special-forces troops were risk averse.
 
Unnecessary-risk averse.

"Why not helicopters?" said Lonsdale.
 
"You get in fast.
 
You get out fast.
 
And obstacles like perimeter fences and
minefields don't mean a fucking thing.
 
You envelop the enemy."

Fitzduane nodded.
 
Heliborne
operations were synonymous with the
U.S.
military, and since the
Iranian fiasco, many of the traditional objections to helicopters, such as
mechanical unreliability, had been overcome.
 
Still, they were not the only way to mount a raid.

"Quintana had organized his defenses based upon two threats,"
he said.
 
"An
attack by the Mexican Army or some kind of helicopter-borne raid.
 
Well, the Mexican army
could
try and invade.
 
Based
upon their strengths, that would almost certainly mean a traditional
ground-based attack spearheaded by armor and supported by artillery.
 
To counter that, Quintana has armor and
artillery of his own smuggled in from
Eastern Europe
,
and he has the terrain on his side.
 
You
can only get up to the plateau where the oil is through a small number of
passes, and they are easy to defend.

"Now, the Mexicans do have some paratroops, but not any quantity and
they suffer from the classic weakness of many airborne forces.
 
They are too lightly equipped.
 
If they drop onto the plateau, they are going
to be cut to pieces by Quintana's army.
 
Mexican airborne
are
not like the
U.S.
with their own built-in helicopter and other support — not to mention air
supremacy and the might of the U.S. Air Force.
 
These guys just don't have the firepower.
 
Further, they don't have the expertise.
 
Mexico
has not fought a modern
war."

"None of that is an argument against a heliborne raid by us,"
said Lonsdale.
 
He grinned.
 
"And we surely have the practice."

Fitzduane took note of
the
us
.
 
Reiko Oshima was
unfinished business and the Chief of Police, despite his beautiful
surroundings, was bored.
 
And there was another
element that would cement the deal.
 
Lonsdale had been much taken by Chifune.

"Quintana and his people are no fools," said Fitzduane.
 
"The other obvious threat is a helicopter
assault.
 
Indeed, that is exactly what
they are expecting and have already experienced.
 
The DEA mounted a black antinarcotic
operation there about a year ago and it went horribly wrong.
 
Quintana has invested heavily in radar and
handheld missiles.
 
There is perimeter
defense around the plateau and a second line of defense at the airfield and the
Devil's Footprint.
 
You've got to
remember that this kind of equipment is easy to get these days from the East,
and it is not even that expensive."