Trap Angel (Frank Angel Western #3)

Issuing classic fiction from
Yesterday and Today!

The renegades had hit three
Army posts. All they took were guns and ammunition: until the last
raid. That time they got away with a Gatling gun. Now, somewhere
out there, was a gang with enough firepower to take on the United
States Army. Find then, the Justice Department told Angel. And stop
them.

What they didn’t know was
that out of the empty, lawless land, every trigger-happy gunslick
in the territory had been given the word: when you see him coming,
trap Angel. And kill him.

TRAP ANGEL!

ANGEL 3:

By Frederick H.
Christian

Copyright © 1973, 2005 by
Frederick Nolan

Published by Piccadilly
Publishing at Smashwords: April 2013

Names, characters and
incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual
events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely
coincidental.

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This is a Piccadilly
Publishing Book

Published by Arrangement
with the Author.

The raid took exactly
seventeen minutes.

The men who executed it
worked with a precision that only comes from much training and
complete confidence. They knew how the Fort worked as accurately as
if they had seen the duty rosters. And they were completely,
utterly ruthless.

Two men took each sentry in
dark corners, knifing them with savage efficiency and in complete
silence. Three others took out the guard room and its occupants, a
sergeant and two soldiers who were having a quiet smoke before
checking the perimeter for the last time before Taps. The sergeant
managed to yell once before he was smashed to the ground by the
barrel of a six gun, his skull caved in from the force of the blow
but the two soldiers never even got to their feet. They just had
time to realize that the three men were intruders and the
questioning look was still in their eyes as they died beneath the
hungry knives. The three raiders stood in the bloody room, their
breath coming in ragged bursts and the tallest of them nodded
towards the wall, where a series of key rings hung in a row on
nails.

They lifted the ring labeled
‘Armory’ and sifted silently across the empty parade ground. The
four companions were waiting for them, eyes wary for movement. The
Fort McEwan Young Men’s Club was holding a dance, and from the
officers’ mess the brass band strain of ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’
thumped in unison with the stamp of soldier boots on the chalked
floor. Every man not physically on duty was there whirling his
favorite laundress around — or a bunkie if he was out of luck with
the ladies — and the little noise the raiders made hardly dented
the blast of sound from in there.

The raiders brought their
wagon on well-oiled wheels to the door of the Armory. There was a
heavy padlock on the door. The tall man who had killed the sergeant
nodded and one of the others put a strip of iron between the arm of
the lock and its body and then wrenched. There was the tensile
spang of breaking metal and the door was open. The seven men formed
a human chain passing the weapons out from the Armory. The leader
counted forty-two Springfield rifles, seventeen Army Colts and
three .50 Sharps’ breechloaders. After that those inside moved to
the shelves holding the cardboard boxes of ammunition. They had
shifted about two thousand rounds when the leader gave a signal and
they halted, sifting outside in the darkness.

The bright light across the
parade ground limned their position but made the shadows in which
they worked even deeper. They could see people on the porch of the
officers’ quarters.

Some of them were drinking
from punch cups. Once in a while the lighter ripple of a woman’s
laughter could be heard above the basso rumble of the male
voices.

‘The gate,’ the leader
said.

One of his men got aboard
the wagon and moved across towards the gate. There were half a
dozen tame Apache playing mumblety peg at the foot of the gatepost,
and they looked up dully as the wagon came to a halt and the two
guards walked idly across to check it. One of them was humming a
waltz the band was playing inside.

The man on the wagon said
something to the first guard, who grinned and, lifted the tarpaulin
on the wagon bed. He reeled back as the man beneath the tarp
planted a foot of Bowie knife into his throat. The second guard
shouted something, whirling to get his rifle which was leaning
against the stairs going up to the lookout. As he turned one of the
raiders hit him with the barrel of a six-gun and the young soldier
slid sideways into the dirt, one hand clawing for a moment in the
dust before he went rigid and then finally limp. The Indians
scattered as the wagon was whipped to a gallop, the horses lunging
against the traces as the phalanx moved out fast into the
night-shrouded plain. One of the Indians ran towards the parade
ground shouting the alarm and out of the night came the flat hard
sound of a carbine being fired. The Apache went cart-wheeling
forward, plunging into the dirt at the feet of the young officer
who had come running down the steps from the big wooden building
where the dance was going on. The young officer was very good, and
did all the right things. He rapped out orders, sending men
scurrying, bugles sounded across the empty Fort and lights sprang
up in the enlisted men’s barracks.

But by the time the patrol
was mounted and set in pursuit there was no sign of the raiders at
all.

The Attorney-General smacked
his palm flat on the desk.

‘Angus,’ he said, ‘we’re in
trouble.’ Angus Wells, sitting in the chair opposite the
Attorney-General’s desk, said nothing. He was a man who didn’t talk
any more than he had to. He liked that ‘we’ though. When you were
in trouble with the Old Man, you were in trouble right up to your
hairline. When he was getting a hard time from above, however, it
was ‘we’ who were in trouble. That old joke: we share the work — he
leaves it, and I do it.’

‘Trouble,’ the
Attorney-General repeated. He tossed some papers across the desk,
his lip curling with distaste.

‘You’ve read
these?’

Wells nodded. The report of
the Officer of the Day at Fort McEwen. The findings of a Court of
Inquiry to investigate the robbery of the Armory there — both
useless, since the men who had seen the raiders had all been killed
and everything else merely confirmed what any fool could
see.

‘What do you make of them?’
The Attorney-General asked.

‘Not a lot,’ Wells replied.
‘The most valuable thing in them is the list of what was
stolen.’

‘Sixty-two guns,’ fumed the
man behind the desk ‘Eighteen hundred rounds of
ammunition.’

‘Eighteen hundred and
sixty-five,’ Wells corrected him.

‘God damn it, eighteen
hundred and sixty-five, then,’ said the Attorney-General testily.
‘Stolen off a United States Army installation while they were
holding a dance. A dance!’

He savored the word, as if
in holding it the soldiers had been guilty of committing acts of
gross indecency in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue.

‘What’s your interest in
this, anyway?’ Wells asked. ‘Can’t the Army do its own
investigation? ‘Aye, they can. And they will, or Phil Sheridan is
going to have somebody’s guts for a watch fob. But that’s not all,
you see.’

Wells sat up in his chair.
‘What else?’ he said quietly.

‘I had a hunch,’ the
Attorney-General said. ‘Got Phil Sheridan to look into the records
for me. There was a similar raid at Fort Stanton in New Mexico
Territory two months ago. Nobody at the Army had connected
them.’

‘And…?’

‘That time they got
fifty-seven revolvers and twenty-four brand new Winchester
repeaters, not to mention fifteen hundred rounds of
ammunition.’

Wells did some rapid sums
and didn’t like the answer.

‘That’s a hell of an arsenal
someone’s putting together,’ he said.

‘I know it,’ came the reply.
‘And I want to know who. And why. Somebody out there is planning to
raise merry hell, or I’m a Dutchman. Somebody who knows everything
he needs to know about the Forts he raids and what’s in their
armories. Someone who has killed a dozen men or more getting what
he wants. The President talked about putting that charlatan Allan
Pinkerton on the case, but I talked him out of it. Says he wants it
all cleared up before July. Going out there for some political
convention, and doesn’t want any awkward questions thrown at him,
he says. Political necessity, those were the words he used.
Political necessity.’

Wells didn’t rise to that
one. The office of Attorney-General was a Presidential appointment
and even if the present incumbent didn’t have much truck for his
peers, he was just as much a politician as any of them.

‘These reports all we have?’
he asked.

‘That and the garbled
descriptions given by some Indians who saw the raiders at McEwen,’
the older man said. ‘You’ll get them all from Records, for what
they’re worth which isn’t much.’ He paused, then looked at Wells
shrewdly.

‘Any ideas?’

‘Not that I can think of,’
Wells admitted. ‘I’ll get on to it.’

‘You’ll put someone on
it?’

Wells looked up, allowing
his surprise to show. ‘I figured you wanted me to handle it
myself,’ he said.

The Attorney-General started
to speak, hesitated, and then busied himself lighting one of his
long black cigars. His head wreathed in pungent smoke, he shifted
uncomfortably in his leather-backed chair.

‘It’s — they — hell and
damnation, Angus!’ he burst out, ‘What I’m trying to say is I don’t
know whether I ought to let you go in your condition.’

‘That’s a hell of a thing
for you to say to me,’ Wells said.