Trap Angel (Frank Angel Western #3) (3 page)

He went down on one knee as
Angel whirled around with the stave cocked in both hands, but the
man rolled away before he could deliver a blow and came up smoothly
on his feet as if without effort, eyes hooded, circling, circling,
moving all the time.

‘Not bad,’ he said. There
was an ounce of respect in his voice but no more than
that.

They kept at it for almost
twenty minutes. By the time they were finished both men were
drenched with sweat. Angel never managed to get the knife away from
his opponent, but neither did the man get another chance, at
Angel’s body with the knife. Finally the man called a halt. His
shoulders were heaving from the exertion.

‘What’s your name, kid?’ he
asked.

‘Angel,’ the young man
replied. ‘Frank Angel.’

The man nodded. ‘You’ll do,’
he said, and pulling on a heavy woolen sweater went out of the
gymnasium. Angel never saw him again and when he asked Wells about
him, all Wells would say was that the man was known as ‘the Indian’
and was reputed to be the best knife fighter in the United
States.

Angel thought about coffee.
He wondered whether Mrs. Rissick, his landlady, would make him some
and send it up. He could use a cup of coffee. Before he went to bed
he would have to bone up on Blackstone again. There was another
written examination tomorrow.

Another day at the
gymnasium, the instructor had just patted him on the shoulder as he
went through the door and then stepped back. It was enough to make
Angel wary: by now he knew that the surprises were always sprung on
you without warning. He went into the room expecting anything and
was tense and ready, balanced on the balls of his feet. Then
someone took hold of him and threw him across the gymnasium. He hit
the mattresses with a thud that knocked him breathless and lay
there for a moment, cursing silently. They never told you what to
expect. They just tossed you in and left you to do whatever you
could. There were no rules. Only survival counted. He got to his
feet carefully, and saw the man coming at him. He just had time to
realize it was a Chinese or Japanese. The man made a short,
explosive sound, something like Haaaii! and then his feet came up
and Angel went over backwards again, every ounce of wind driven
from his lungs. The man was already coming after him again and
Angel let him take hold but this time he managed to throw a feinted
left jab and followed it with a very short, wicked and lethal right
cross. Fast as it was, Angel saw the little man grin as he avoided
the punch and then Angel went up and over and came down flat and
hard on the floor. The little man smiled and stepped back. There
was no humor at all in the slanting eyes which weighed Angel as if
was a leg of pork.

The little man
bowed.

‘Unarm combat,’ he said. ‘I
show.’

And every day for the next
five days he threw Angel all over the gymnasium, until Angel’s arms
felt like rags, and his body was one solid, throbbing mass of
aching, bruised flesh.

Demonstration followed
practice followed demonstration until finally each day the little
man, whom Angel had now discovered was Korean, would hold up one
hand in the peace sign and leave without a word. Next time, they
would meet in the gymnasium and Kee Lai would stand opposite Angel,
bow formally, and come at him again like a tiger. Each day Angel
learned a new defense, a new series of moves. They all had names,
but he remembered in the heat of the combat only the action, the
swift turning kick that took the man’s leg from under him, the
disabling chop across the carotid artery, the maiming smash of
knuckle to the Adam’s apple. How to fall. How to get up fast and
ready. How to choke. How to blind. How to break the brittle bones
of knee and shin and wrist and elbow. Once in a while he managed to
actually strike Kee Lai, and the dark slanted eyes would glow
briefly with something like pride, or pleasure, or both. But mostly
the little man simply let Angel attack him and then demonstrated a
throw, a hold, a riposte to the action which Angel knew would have
killed him had it been delivered. In their second week, Kee Lai
began to explain some of the things Angel was learning.

‘Judo is basic discipline,’
he said. ‘Now you learn karate.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Most dangerous,’ was the
succinct reply.

Angel groaned and the little
Korean grinned.

‘When you get to highest
level of karate then you will learn aikido,’ he said.

‘Don’t tell me,’ Angel said.
‘That’s even more dangerous, right?’

The Korean nodded. ‘In my
country man who know aikido never fight anyone. Never.’

‘Your county is in China,
isn’t it?’

Kee Lai nodded, his swarthy
face grim. ‘Very bad place my country.’ He would say no more about
it.

Now he taught Angel the
breathing exercises, and the internal disciplines that go with the
learning of karate. Because perhaps he sensed Angel’s genuine
interest, he told him about the great Chinese historians and
philosophers, Sun Tzu, Wu Ch’i, Lao Tzu.

‘To rise,’ Kee Lai told him,
‘a man must first fall. To grow, he must first become smaller. To
take, you must give. Taking of the strength of an adversary you are
given strength. You must control all of yourself here—’ he gestured
at his belly — ‘in the tan t’ien. There is a force, which we call
ch’i. If you can summon it at will, you are truly stronger than
ordinary man.’

And they went back to the
mattresses and Kee Lai again threw Angel all around the
room.

Slowly, slowly, the younger
man gained cunning and caution and knowledge. Gradually, Kee Lai
found it harder to throw him at will. Eventually, he was himself
thrown by Angel. And then their sessions were at an end. On the
last day, the Korean held up his hand for halt, and bowed, as
usual, to signal the end of their training. As Kee Lai straightened
up Angel hit him with an upper-cut as sweet as anything he had ever
put together.

The little man’s eyes bugged
with surprise as he went over and backwards and down, out for the
count. Angel got a wet cloth and slapped the high cheekbones until
the Korean’s eyes flickered and he came around.

‘Old American proverb,’
Angel grinned.

‘There’s more ways of
skinning a cat than one.’

Kee Lei sat up, rubbing his
jawbone ruefully, something in his eyes that Angel could not
define. It was the nearest he had ever seen Kee Lai to smiling, but
all the little man said was ‘Ha!’ as he got up and went out of the
gymnasium.

Although he had no more
sessions with the Korean, one day Wells brought in an envelope to
Angel. In it, beautifully scripted on fine rice paper, was
something written in Chinese. They got one of the Embassy people to
translate it for them. It said ‘Confucius says: what you do not
want others to do to you, do not do to others. Old Chinese
proverb.’ It was not signed.

Frank Angel got up from the
chair and went down the stairs to the street. There was a hash
house on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and he ate a steak and
two eggs with fried potatoes and drank about half a gallon of
coffee. He wondered what Angus Wells was doing.

It was a long haul from
Trinidad but most of it was downhill. Lieutenant Philip Evans, 9th
United States Cavalry, eased his backside into a more comfortable
spot on the McClellan saddle and turned to watch the wagons moving
down the snakelike trail off the Raton Pass. Ahead of them and
below the country lay like the landscape in your dreams, near
enough to touch but stretching so far into the distance that you
knew you could never traverse it. Off into the far blue distance
the dusty world unrolled, punctuated here and there by the purple
upthrust of flat-topped mesas darkening in the long light of
evening. Away off to the south-east he thought he could see the
sparkle of light touching the Canadian River. He still could not
get used to the idea that he was here, in the uniform of a
Lieutenant of the United States Army, commanding men in the
Territory of New Mexico, guarding wagons lurching dangerously in
the deep ruts of the Santa Fe Trail.

Evans felt the romance of
the past strongly — and here more than most places, he felt, one
could actually touch it. Across these very stones had rolled the
caravans of Bent and St Vrain and Becknell and Gregg. All the
panoply of history had passed this way: Philip St George Cooke and
Christopher Carson, Zebulon Pike and Kearney, they and thousands of
ordinary people heading for the bright land and the new future
promised at the end of the trail in the city of the Holy Faith of
St Francis. Even the place names had a magical, golden aura. When
he wrote home to his parents in Boston, he would tell them how he
had sat on his horse beside the Trail, commanding the troop that
was escorting the three lumbering wagons down the curving, winding
road and thought of them. He would perhaps embroider it all a
little, excite their staid Eastern imaginations with his word
pictures, and the exotic names of the rivers and mountains, the
Purgatoire and the Canadian and the Pecos — that would get his old
aunts chattering away in the ivy-covered Beacon Hill house. He
breathed in a deep draught of the clear mountains air. New Mexico
Territory. He had been here six weeks. Already he loved
it.

‘Straighten up there,
soldier!’ he shouted.

The wagon had drawn level
with the spot where he sat on his horse but the troopers had failed
to spot him and were slouching along in their saddles, letting the
animals do the work, sensibly relaxing while there was an
opportunity to do so.

They stiffened their backs
as he touched the spurs to his horse’s Hanks and cantered off to
the head of the column.

‘G.D.F.’ muttered Private
Frank Casey. He spat a gobbet of tobacco juice off to leeward,
making his horse shy violently. ‘Whoa, you bitch!’

‘What’s G.D.F. mean, Frank?
asked a trooper alongside him.

‘God Damned Fool!’ snapped
the older one.

‘Which is what that popinjay
is. I bet he never sweated in his life.’

There was an aggrieved tone
in his voice. Since Lieutenant Evans had joined the Regiment, he
had given none of them any pleasure. Old Campaigners like Casey
resented an officer who expected men to ride as if on parade when
all they were doing was wet-nursing a couple of wagons, and to
watch their tongues when the muleskinners driving the teams were
doing their best to invent a day-long dialogue of curses without
repeating themselves once.

‘How far to the Fort?’
someone asked.

‘Seventy miles, give or
take,’ another replied.

‘Shee-hit!’ growled Casey.
‘That’s three, four more days of eating dust and smellin’
muleshit.’

‘Take it easy, Frank,’ said
Private Barber, riding alongside him. ‘It sure beats haulin’ wood
back at the Fort.’

‘I ain’t so damned sure,’
Casey growled. ‘At least we ain’t expected to be little tin sojer
boys for some fancy-fuckin’ dude shavetail.’

‘That’ll be enough of that,
Casey!’ snapped a deeper voice. Cantering alongside the six-man
troop came its Sergeant, Eric Mackenzie.

Mackenzie was short, and
built as the old Army saying had it, like an adobe latrine. He had
fists like knots in a hawser and a temper that very few of his
troopers having experienced it ever cared to arouse. His face was
scoured a sandstone brown from the years in the saddle indicated by
the row of hashmarks on his uniform sleeve.

‘You heard what the
Lieutenant said,’ he growled. ‘Straighten them backs up, now. Try
to look like soldiers instead of bloody pisspot vendors. An’ keep
those bloody idle tongues still or ye’ll all end up policin’ the
parade ground until you’ve got curvature of the spine!’

‘Yes, sarge!’ shouted Casey,
snapping upright in the saddle as the other five troopers followed
suit.

‘You old bastard,’ he added
softly, but not until Mackenzie was out of earshot. They came on
down the Trail, the road more level now as they left the mountain
pass. There were huge boulders on both sides of the road, and heavy
timber clothed the slopes behind them. The sun slipped a few
thousand miles further down the sky and off to the right they could
hear wild turkeys gobbling.

It was at that moment that
the raiders hit them.

They had it all carefully
planned and the troopers never really had a chance. Three men on
each side of the road behind sheltering boulders laid down a
withering crossfire and repeating rifles that emptied three saddles
before Mackenzie could yell out the order that his surviving men
had already anticipated, falling out of their saddles and running
for shelter, any shelter from the scything hail of seeking death.
The ambushers now turned their attention to the wagons, and the
troopers, fumbling with their ammunition pouches and thumbing loads
into the clumsy Springfields saw first one and then two of the
wagon drivers whacked off their board seats as if they had been hit
with invisible clubs. One of them hit the ground in a tight bundle,
his legs driving him around in a circle that pushed up hillocks of
earth, slowing as the ground darkened with his blood until he
kicked twice and then stretched out as if for sleep.