Watchman took a chance: he whispered Vickers’ name, loudly enough to carry a good distance.
No answer. He scowled at the creek. The grenade had made a mess of Hanratty’s body. Moonlight made a silver shine on the snow-blanketed shale slide. It was very cold now; ice was forming quickly on the surface of the creek. Probably going down below zero. He wasn’t sure of the altitude here but it was at least seven thousand feet. The top layer of ground snow was freezing hard; his feet cracked through it when he moved.
He tried to put himself in Vickers’ boots but it was hard to do, hard to figure how the man would think. Time was going by too fast and it would take too long to find Vickers’ tracks and follow them. He didn’t want to leave Buck alone that long. He stopped to concentrate his thinking.
Vickers wasn’t here; so he’d gone somewhere. Where would he go? Then Watchman had it. He turned around and went back downstream through the aspens, angling to the right away from the stream, toward the little hill where they’d left Vickers’ horse. That was where Vickers would go because that was where the walkie-talkie was.
11
The tracks showed that Vickers had stood around for a while, probably trying to get through to somebody on the walkie-talkie, and then had led the horse up toward the top of the hill, maybe hoping to get out of the dead spot and pick up a signal.
He found Vickers at the top with his ear against the walkie-talkie. Vickers had his rifle and looked quite alert; Watchman put himself against a tree and spoke his name.
Vickers came wheeling around with the rifle and Watchman said, “Take it easy. I’m coming in.”
“All right. What’s happened?”
“We took two of them. Hargit’s gone with the money.”
“Two of them, hey? Not bad, Trooper.”
“You raise anybody?”
“I just heard Cunningham talking. I didn’t want to answer because I didn’t know who might be around here in earshot.”
“You’re learning. Come on.”
Vickers was pleased to see the two prisoners. Watchman had a look at Buck Stevens and when Stevens grinned he said, “You’ll be all right, Buck.” Then he turned to Vickers: “Hargit might hide the money somewhere and think about coming back for these two, but he knows Baraclough’s been shot and he can’t drag an injured man with him. I can’t see him caring more about Burt than he cares about the money-I think he’ll try to get down in the foothills by morning. There are a lot of places he can disappear into. If he gets that far we may lose him for good.”
“Then you want us to go after him.”
“Not us. Buck can’t stay awake all night on guard with a hole in him. You’ll have to do that-and keep alert because Hargit may come back. I doubt it, but it could happen.”
“One against one? So far he’s slipped you every time.”
There was no point answering that. Vickers turned to stare past him at the prisoners. Baraclough had come to; he was looking on with a kind of self-disgusted bemusement Burt’s eyes glittered with steady anger. Without Hargit and the money the two of them weren’t much of a consolation prize: that was probably what Vickers was thinking when he turned back to Watchman. “We’ve played it your way so far and you’ve done a good job. All right, try it. In the meantime I think I can get through on the walkie-talkie. I’ll get helicopters up here first thing in the morning to pick up your partner and these two and the corpse up the stream there, and we’ll try to get another chopper up to the top to collect Mrs. Lansford and Walker. I’ll try to cordon the foothills north of here as well as I can, so that if Hargit gets down that far he may be driven back into your arms.”
“Fine.”
“Anything else?”
“You’re doing all right so far,” Watchman said.
“I’m beginning to learn my limitations.” Vickers smiled with white teeth, his features looking firm and frank and clean and fully in command, but underneath there was an absence of center: he had never found his own core. He was playing up to Watchman now because he saw Watchman as his only chance for redemption and if Watchman succeeded he wanted Watchman on his good side afterward. And if Watchman failed it wouldn’t have cost Vickers anything to cement relations beforehand. The rest was a lie: Vickers hadn’t learned anything; he didn’t have the capacity to learn. When this was over, if they nailed Hargit, Vickers was going to claim credit for the whole thing because he knew Watchman wouldn’t dispute him: Watchman didn’t care about glory.
It wasn’t very fair. But Watchman had stopped expecting things to be fair when he was eight years old. If he nailed Hargit all he’d get out of it would be another citation. There wouldn’t be any promotion in it for him; there was never going to be a promotion as long as the old-line hairbags cops had control of the HP. Vickers would come up smelling like roses with a new job as district director back East somewhere.
He’d already caught the man who’d killed Jasper, in a way at least: Hanratty was dead. Baraclough had killed the other cop and they had Baraclough too. The money was of no particular importance except to the men who stole it and the men from whom it had been stolen. Altogether, Watchman had very little to gain and a great deal to lose by going after Hargit, risking his neck when he didn’t have to, taking the chance when there were plenty of cops and FBI agents down on the Utah side of the mountains who could take the blame for losing Hargit if he got through.
In the end it was a foolish thing that boosted him onto the saddle of Buck Stevens’ horse and sent him up into the woods after Major Leo Hargit. It was the fact that two people had told him Hargit was a better Indian than he was.
Nobody was a better Indian than Sam Watchman. He didn’t know why, but it was necessary to prove that.
CHAPTER 11
1
The temperature kept dropping sharply, well past midnight; Leo Hargit had everything buttoned and belted and wrapped around him but the cold was in his bones and he cursed it. It was the one thing he had never had to fight before. All his fighting had been in semitropics or along the barren slopes of the warm montagnard country of the Indochinese Central Highlands. Up here now it was probably ten or fifteen below; he knew it wouldn’t kill him but he couldn’t stop cursing it.
He reached the end of this particular stretch of forest and stopped to scan the open slope above him before he put the horses out onto the packed snow and ran across the rocks into the farther pines, where he drew rein and hipped around to look back across the heaped-up mountains he had traveled. The moon was about halfway down; there was a surprising amount of light on the slopes, reflected back from the frozen surface of the snow that covered them.
He had a faint sense of regret. Steve and the Sergeant had traveled a long way with him. But he had seen the way the bullet had smashed Steve’s shoulder and he knew Steve wasn’t going to survive a horseback ride out of these mountains. He’d be better off in a police chopper. Burt had been a good man, steadily loyal, but in warfare you had to be practical, you had to take your losses. The world was full of Eddie Burts, competent and reliable; it made no sense to risk sacrificing a Hargit for a Burt. The money on the two packhorses would be enough to hire a thousand Sergeant Burts.
In a way being alone made it easier: Easier to disappear, easier to fade into the traffic and escape. There would be men looking for him at the foot of the range but that didn’t worry him. He would isolate one of them, kill the man and take the man’s uniform. He’d had plenty of experience infiltrating enemy lines. The only danger came
