Warn Angel! (A Frank Angel Western--Book 9) (2 page)

Gil Curtis had planted dynamite carefully in
the rock walls of the Sweetwater Cut at two marks about half a mile
apart. They went off now with a cracking boom and Grady, quite
instinctively, grabbed at the huge brake lever, throwing his full
weight against it as he saw the rock wall of the Cut ahead bulge
out, lean over, as if in some strange slow, arrested motion, then
roar down on to the track perhaps three hundred yards ahead of the
train.

The locked wheels gouged into the metal
tracks, making huge showers of sparks which arced outward from
beneath the locomotive as it yawed and screeched and rocked and
squealed, slowing and shuddering slower until it came to a panting
halt not fifty yards away from where the clattering pile of
boulders, with its corona of sifting rock dust, lay like a manmade
mountain across the right of way. Before they even had a chance to
regain their balance properly, before the train had come to a final
steaming stop, Willowfield’s men had shot the two guards off the
platforms of the express car.

‘
What in the name of all the saints is
goin’ on out there?’ roared Grady. He swung down from his cabin on
to the oily graveled right of way and glared up at the lip of the
defile above him as if it had personally insulted him. His gaze
shuttled toward the sprawled figures of the dead guards and then up
in puzzlement at Owney, who had come to the footstep of the engine,
eyes searching up, down, right, left, fear in them. Down behind
them, dust rose against the clear sky. The dull boom of the twin
explosions seemed still to be reverberating against the walls of
the cutting. The dead guards looked like discarded
dolls.

Nothing moved anywhere.

Two of the West Point cadets were coming
nervously out of the express car, Springfield bolt-action rifles
ported across their bodies in the regulation manner, scanning the
lip of the defile with frightened determination.

‘
Get back there!’ Grady yelled. ‘Get
back inside! Can’t you see it’s a—’

He never got the word ‘holdup’ out. A
fusillade of rifle shots thundered out from the lip of the defile,
and Grady was spun off his feet by the ambushers’ bullets, dead
before he stopped rolling down the banked incline alongside the
right of way. The two cadets who had emerged from the express car
recoiled in panic, scrambling for the safety of the steel-lined
doorway. One of them made it. The other threw up his hands as if in
despair as someone on the rim shot the top of his head off. The
Springfield rifle made a tinny scrabble on the gravel as it slid
down beside his body, and then there was an enormous silence,
broken only by the hiss of escaping steam beneath the big
wood-burners and the steady monotone of Harry Owney’s curses from
the dubious safety of the cabin of his locomotive.

The cadets in the express car slammed the
doors, bolting and barring them, taking their positions alongside
the specially constructed steel flaps through which they, like the
archers in medieval castles, had a field of vision through a
vertical slot with fluted sides on the inside. They looked at the
young officer standing in the center of the express car, sweat
beading his upper lip, awaiting his orders.

Outside, nothing moved that anyone on the
train could see. Willowfield sent just one man down, one man who
sneaked up to the rear of the train and wormed beneath it, working
his way on hands and knees over the oily ties, dragging a canvas
bag. When he reached the express car he withdrew bundled sticks of
dynamite from the bag, and then carefully and precisely wired them
first to the front wheel bogie and then to the rear. Each bundle
was of eight sticks, and he used three bundles for each bogie. Then
he attached the detonator caps and wires, and wormed back down the
length of the train, paying out wire behind him like a silkworm.
When he reached the end of the train he slid down the incline and
ran for the rim above where the end of the wire connected to the
plunger was lying. Connecting them quickly, he stood clear and gave
his signal.

Up on the rim, Willowfield acknowledged the
signal.

He nodded with satisfaction; everything was
going according to plan. He was a man of no more than medium height
but he was gross, jowly, clumsy, bathed in sweat as the glancing
sun boiled off the gargantuan rocks around him. He weighed almost
three hundred pounds, but nobody who had ever had any truck with
him would have said that he was soft. Just one look into his
reptilian eyes, eyes which hardly ever blinked, would have
immediately dispelled any such notion. His mouth was like a knife
wound, his nose as imperious and hooked as that of any Roman
emperor. He looked like what he was, a degenerate voluptuary who
would sacrifice any man or anything on the altar of his own
ambitions.

‘
You down there!’ he shouted from the
edge of the cut. His voice was harsh and impatient because he made
it so. Normally he spoke very softly. He believed you caught more
flies with honey than with vinegar.

‘
You down there!’ he yelled again. ‘Do
you hear me?’ His voice bounced off the rocky walls of the
Sweetwater Cut, echoing into infinity. A buzzard flapped squawking
in panic out of the pines below.

In the express car, Captain
Benedict Nicolson looked at the cadets standing to at their
loopholes, waiting for his command, waiting for his reaction to
Willowfield’s shout. They were all staring at him and he did not
know what to do. He could feel sweat trickling down his body
underneath the tailored uniform. He felt tricked, betrayed. After
all, this was supposed to have been an honor guard, not a combat
unit. He had been specially selected, and so had the cadets, not
for military duty, but for smartness, education, for—well, admit
it, for
class.
There had been no indication that anything like this was
going to happen and it wasn’t fair. They had promised him a minor
decoration at the conclusion of the tour. Now … ? Master Sergeant
Alex Wells looked at the young officer and grimaced. As was always
the case, the army had sent boys on men’s work. This young captain,
now: he looks as if he was going to wet his beautifully cut
infantry grays any moment, while these boy-soldiers probably
already have. Still, he thought, ’tis not the captain’s fault he’s
the son-in-law of the brigadier commanding the adjutant-general’s
department in Chicago. Nor could you blame him for grabbing a
featherbed number like the Freedom Train, seeing the country at the
country’s expense. After all, wasn’t every man on the train doing
the same? Not a one of them a fighting man, himself—alas—now
included. It was a dozen years since he’d heard the buzz of bullets
at Gettysburg, and a dozen years was a long time between fights.
These boy-soldiers, now: they could probably load and aim those
Springfields they were holding on to so grimly, but whether in a
real fight they’d be able to do much more than use up ammunition he
wouldn’t want to say. Commanded as they were by this whey-faced
popinjay who’d obviously never heard a shot fired in anger, he
didn’t rate their chances highly at all. None of what he was
thinking showed on his face when he spoke.

‘
Sir,’ he said, prompting Nicolson.
‘Sir?’

‘
Yes,’ said the captain. ‘Yes.’ Then,
as if waking from a reverie, he drew himself erect. ‘Tell them we
hear them, Master Sa’rnt,’ he said crisply. ‘Ask them—’

Wells was already elbowing one of the cadets
away from the slot nearest him. Putting his mouth to the aperture,
he pulled in a deep breath and then bellowed ‘You up there!’

‘
We hear you!’ came the
reply.

‘
Who are you?’ Wells shouted. ‘What do
you want?’

Willowfield told them.

He told them that he had a hundred men
behind him, which was a considerable exaggeration they were in no
position to challenge. He told them he was giving them a
five-minute truce in which to send a man to check his statement
that there was enough dynamite beneath the express car to blow it
the rest of the way to Cheyenne. After that, he told them, they had
two more minutes in which to throw their weapons out of the express
car, and come out with their hands on their heads. Then he waited
while Master-Sergeant Wells swung down from the express car, ducked
beneath it, and returned to report his findings to Captain
Nicolson.

‘
It,’ Captain Nicolson said. ‘He. It
can’t be. True, I mean. He couldn’t. Won’t. Sergeant, you don’t
think he’d blow the train up do you?’

He was thinking of the priceless treasures
which were, at least nominally, his responsibility, and about what
their loss would mean to his career. These bandits obviously
intended to steal them. There was little choice: he must die
heroically defending them. He drew himself erect again.

‘
I’ll go out there,’ he said, pulling
his tunic down. ‘I’ll talk—’

‘
Begging the captain’s pardon,’
Sergeant Wells said, sharply. He knew better than to actually lay a
hand on the officer, but he also knew that if he had to, he’d knock
the silly bastard unconscious before he let him step outside the
car.

‘
Meaning no disrespect, sir,’ he said
quickly as Nicolson paused. ‘But those bas—those people out there
have already killed three men. We’ll prove nothing by letting them
have you for a target.’

Nicolson blanched. It hadn’t occurred to him
that they would quite likely kill him out of hand.

He probably thinks they wouldn’t dare, Wells
thought, him being the brigadier’s son.

‘
Well,’ Nicolson said, as though
considering every aspect of what Wells had just said. ‘Well, then.
I think we may just let them sweat it out.’

‘
Sir?’ Wells said, aghast. What was
the stupid bastard up to now?

‘
Sergeant,’ Nicolson said, patiently,
using the tone that a grownup uses to explain a concept to a small
child. ‘They want what is in this baggage car. They cannot get it
with us in here.’

‘
Sir,’ Wells said, carefully. ‘The
dynamite … ’

‘
They’d never set it off,’ Nicolson
said, confidently. ‘Destroying the contents of the express car
would negate the purpose of the holdup.’

He looked defiantly at the cadets. Not one
of them would meet his eye. He was about to open his mouth again
when Willowfield shouted once more.

‘
You have exactly one minute left!’ he
yelled.

Nicolson heard the words and
broke like a reed. ‘Oh, my God,’ he groaned. ‘Sergeant ... ’
Master-Sergeant
Wells was already wrestling with the bolts of the express car
door.

By the time Willowfleld came down from the
rim with five heavily armed men to back him up, the cadets were on
the track, their weapons at their feet, hands on their heads.
Willowfield surveyed them with satisfaction, and their officer with
undisguised contempt. Leaving them to stand beneath the cold regard
of his men, he climbed awkwardly into the express car, and surveyed
the contents with a small smile playing on his face. No triumph:
not yet. There was still a very great deal to do. Yet he was
strangely elated. George Willowfield, he thought, you have come a
long way. A long way from the parade ground at Salisbury where they
had drummed him out of the Queen’s Own 17th Lancers, a long way
from the canebreaks of Missouri where he’d ridden on the coat-tails
of Quantrill’s cutthroats. What he had done here today would make
Jesse and Frank James look like the country louts they had always
been. George Willowfield had done the impossible.

The Freedom Train was his.

‘
You’re sure it’s not a
hoax.’

It wasn’t really a question, and the
speaker, a gray-haired man in his mid-fifties, didn’t really expect
an answer. Nevertheless, President Ulysses S. Grant gave him
one.

‘
It’s not a hoax,’ he said.

The two of them were sitting on opposite
sides of the president’s rosewood desk in the Oval Office of the
Executive Mansion. Through the window across the porch the rose
garden was still bright with nodding blooms and the scent of late
magnolia blossom came through the open windows. At this time of
year, squirrels would come down from the trees and eat from your
hand in the gardens. Grant looked drawn and tired, as well he
might, the visitor thought. 1876 had been a pretty bad year for the
president. Nobody had actually gone as far as to accuse Grant of
venery, but there’d been enough hinting to sink a battleship. The
Belknap scandal, the destruction of the 7th Cavalry at Little Big
Horn, everything from malfeasance to vote rigging had been laid at
Grant’s door, and there was no question that in the forthcoming
election he would leave the Executive Mansion forever. And if U.S.
(Unconditional Surrender) Grant’s year had been nothing but bad
news so far, the holdup of the Freedom Train was just about the
right weight of straw to break the camel’s back. ‘You’ve read the
letter,’ the president said.

‘
I have indeed.’

‘
And?’

‘
And I think we’d better make
arrangements to get the money together.’

‘
You’d pay?’

‘
There is no option, Mr. President. We
have to play for time.’

‘
Time,’ the president said, rolling
the word around his mouth as if he were tasting it. I could do with
a little of that myself, he thought. He leaned back in the big
brass-studded leather armchair and relit his cigar, waving at the
humidor on his desk by way of invitation.

‘
No, thank you,’ the attorney general
said. ‘I’ll smoke my own.’