feelings about light aircraft he did not know, and anyway he had heard the that the Medora airstrip was on top of a butte.
Since a butte, as best he could recall, was a sheer-sided mountain jutting out of the ground rather like a rocket, its top, even if flat, did not seem a terrific place to land. The pilot could miss or you could fall of the edge or something. Fitzduane preferred his airstrips on the ground, preferably very flat ground without things to bump into.
A few miles outside Phoenix, the highway climbed steadily. The rolling foothills stretched away on either side and the ground looked hard and arid. This was high desert dotted with scrub and mesquite and cacti. Some people found it harsh and forbidding. Fitzduane relished the contours of the land and the clear light and the sense of space, and found it achingly beautiful.
It was so different from his home country. Ireland's scenery was on an altogether smaller and more human scale. Here, the vistas were immense and mankind almost insignificant.
It was hard to imagine how anyone had survived in such a vast, rugged, water-starved landscape, yet this was the terrain that the Apaches had made their own and over which Geronimo had been hunted. Five thousand troops trying to find thirty men in an era before helicopters and radios and modern technology. Endless locations in the heavily contoured landscape to hide in. The difficulties and hardships overcome in the hunt were hard to comprehend.
Al Lonsdale's mother had been a full-blooded Apache. His father, the sheriff of a border town in Texas, had been of mixed English and Irish stock, and the combination had produced a striking-looking man. Al had thick black hair, a high forehead, deep-set thoughtful eyes, high cheekbones, and a strong nose and chin. He stood six feet three in his socks.
Lonsdale had followed in his father's profession and spent a few years as a sheriff's deputy, but then had joined the U.S. Army in search of wider horizons. He had grown up with weapons, and hunting was a family tradition, so the transition to U.S. Army Special Forces had been smooth. But Lonsdale wanted to be the best of the best, so he volunteered for the top-secret U.S. Army counterterrorist unit, Delta, which had been set up Colonel Charlie Beckwith on SAS lines. When he was accepted by Delta, Al Lonsdale felt he had arrived.
The Irish equivalent of Delta were the Rangers commanded by General Shane Kilmara. Master Sergeant Al Lonsdale had been on secondment to them, training on Fitzduane's island off the West of Ireland, when they had stumbled across a terrorist assassination attempt.
Superb long-range shooting by Lonsdale with a. 50 Barrett at over 1,800 meters had saved the lives of both Fitzduane and his son, Boots. Subsequently, Lonsdale had fought beside Fitzduane and Chifune Tanabu on a counterterrorist action in Japan.
It was a relationship born and tempered under fire, and as a consequence, Lonsdale was a natural choice for the Mexican mission. But whether he could be persuaded to join the team was another matter. Al's leaving Delta had been unexpected. His appointment as Chief of Police of the tiny city of Medora had compounded the surprise.
Fitzduane had tabbed Al Lonsdale as hard-core military through and through. A caliber soldier. A warrior. His reasons for abandoning a promising military career for the vicissitudes of the civilian world were unknown. Still, Fitzduane had faith in Al Lonsdale. There would be reasons, and they would be good. Well, he hoped they would be good.
People were people the world over. All were a little flaky. In its way, the consistency of the human factor was kind of reassuring.
'Mrs. Zanduski,' said Chief of Police Al Lonsdale patiently, 'what we're looking for here, ma'am is a certain dynamic tension. Simply put, your right hand holding the firearm pushes out and is braced against your left arm pulling in. The result is – or should be – a stable weapons platform.'
'I don't want a weapons platform, Chief,' said five-foot-two seventy-eight-year-old Mrs. Zanduski, her outstretched hands holding the. 357 Magnum with the six inch barrel hesitantly. 'I want to hit the goddamn target. I want to blow the motherfuckers away.'
'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 flechettes 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
