chinks in their armor. Before he could scramble forward to grasp the lance, the boar performed a prodigious leap over the linger prominence and into the crevice bridged by the lance. Wardrop ducked and rolled away, seeing the boar come down with the lance shaft crosswise in its mouth, hearing the dry, splintering crack as the shaft failed.
Wardrop saw Rose heaving herself up as the boar almost disappeared; saw her stumble, one foreleg entering the mouth of a small burrow that might have been that of fox or armadillo. He abandoned any hope of remounting as the terror-stricken mare crashed to the ground, screaming. He began to run then and almost immediately fell hard, his helmet bouncing away. With Rose's mortal screams keening in his ears, he did not lose consciousness, but he had taken a monumental wallop in falling on the uneven ground. Wardrop thanked God as he felt for the long- bladed dirk in its boot sheath; it hadn't come loose, and now he had
The boar came up from the depression as though fired from a trench mortar, looking back toward Wardrop but trotting toward Rose. She was trying to rise, still screaming, her right foreleg thrashing, fractured terribly just above the pastern. Wardrop shambled off, running as hard as he could, searching for a scrub oak high enough to climb as the breath whistled in his windpipe. He did not realize exactly when Rose's screaming stopped. But when he risked a look backward, he knew why Rose would never scream again.
The huge boar stood over her, staring in Wardrop's direction, making no attempt to run him down before he found something climbable. The upthrusting tusks ran crimson with blood from a huge rent torn in the mare's throat. Ba'al waited for the mare to die, now respectful of his victim, and Wardrop had the chilling sensation that the boar had acted honorably. Wardrop himself would have had to shoot Rose, had he brought a firearm. Severing the great artery in her throat was the only kindness possible under the circumstances. Without realizing that he did so, Wardrop paused fifty meters away — long enough to find that his eyes were now wet, not with perspiration, but with tears. Briefly, for perhaps five seconds, man and boar stood immobile in requiem for Rose.
When Ba'al began to trot forward, Wardrop took flight again, the dirk flashing in his hand as he ran for the tallest of the scrubby little oaks nearby. He was in error to think Ba'al could not climb after him or cut down the little oak as he had been taught to remove mesquite from around the soddy. Wardrop soon saw that the boar would reach the oaks first, instead of simply running him down in a vicious charge. Well, maybe he could squeeze into one of those little ravines far enough to present only his steel dirk to the boar. Gasping, stumbling as he ran, Wardrop turned back. For some reason, the great boar was giving him time to do it, following at a leisurely trot.
Inexorably, Wardrop found himself herded back toward the dead mare, back to his broken lance. He was nearing the limits of his reserve strength and fell again, tumbling into the crevice and slicing the calf of his leg badly against the razor edge of that lancehead. He rolled onto his back, grasping the fore end of the shattered lance, and whirled it upward. Not in time. The boar was much too close, parrying the lance just behind its steel with a sudden, almost contemptuous toss of the great head, flinging the weapon down the ravine with an empty clatter, the scarlet pennant still tied fluttering on the shaft.
Wardrop wormed his way up the narrow declivity on his back, presenting the dirk, watching the boar, which was now so near that he could count scars through the coarse secondary hair on the shoulders and flanks of Ba'al. He struck the back of his head against an outcrop, shook himself groggily. He knew the old stories of the raj; knew that Maharajah Jai Singh of Alwar had actually taken boar with a dagger, from the back of a polo pony. But he, Wardrop, was not mounted and could not even stand. He tried anyway, sitting up to try a last valiant lunge, and the effort drew too much blood from his head. Feeling the whiteout on its way, he made one desperate sweep of the dirk, which thudded harmlessly into the embankment. His eyes were still open, but the sensations of color, then outline, fled as Alec Wardrop rolled onto his stomach, semiconscious. A moment later he felt the hot breath of Ba'al on his unprotected neck…
Chapter Fifty
Not far from where Alec Wardrop engaged his last boar, another engagement took place to the south. The rundown headquarters at the old south homestead were, as Jer Garner said, plenty roomy to hide a hovervan, along with the cycles that flanked the van like the outriders for gold shipments of a century earlier. But the street value of Sorel's cargo, gram for gram, was currently more dear than gold. Its price would drop sharply as soon as Sorel got far enough north to begin dumping it, at unheard-of low prices, to one buyer after another. And then the strategy would be tested when, and if, stupid Americans consumed a thousand kilos of cheap, top-quality skag every month.
Now, Felix Sorel had a problem. He could have bought a small European country for the heroin that rested in cartons carefully repacked and labeled 'Light Crust Flour' in the cargo section behind him. But the stuff wasn't worth a peso if he couldn't get it to market, and he would never get it out of Wild Country if the van's diesel kept acting up like this. Two of the men. Reeve and Billy Ray, were passable shade-tree mechanics, but they were unable to trace the problem that made the supercharged van engine chuff and misfire. They had found the fuel filter choked with the kind of crud that often went with Mexican fuel, and after a good flushing they pronounced the problem solved.
It wasn't solved as long as tiny particles were clogging the injectors. Further, every time the engine was hard to start, the starting procedure put extra loads on the individual diesel glow plugs, which required a contortionist midget to replace. By the time Sorel decided he must make serious repairs before going farther, he was roughly halfway between the south homestead and the shanty on the north end that Garner's men had thrown together from old lumber. For the umpteenth time, the diesel staggered so severely that the van threatened to rub its skirts on caliche dirt. 'This damnable thing will not take us much farther,' Sorel grumbled to Jerome Garner, who sat with an assault rifle near the right-hand window and watched the head of a cycle rider bob in and out of sight some distance away on their right flank.
'It'll have to, Sorrel. There's no place else on the spread.'
'Are you denying the obvious? Your own ranch headquarters is the place to pull a big engine. It will be quicker and safer than—'
'You don't know the old man. Way he is now, an outfit like this would purely bring out the border guard in him.'
The diesel chuffed again and nearly died, the van bouncing its tough forward skirt from the dirt. Sorel cursed and made a hard decision. 'What is the shortest distance to your headquarters from here?'
'Goddammit, I told you we can't—' Jer began with some heat, then saw Sorel's face and decided maybe they could. He pointed several points to the right. 'Straight over there about seven, eight miles. You got any bright ideas what to tell my old man?'
'That is your problem, which you will solve,' said Sorel tightly, steering across open country from which most of the trees had been removed a generation before. 'You have always,
It went without saying that Sorel himself was the one man in that region whom young Garner should not even attempt to command-who would, in fact, command the commander. Jer looked out the window so that he would not have to look at the driver. This was the second time in a row that Jer had been faced down by a self- assured little hardass on his own spread. Come to think of it. Sorrel and Ted Quantrill seemed to have a lot in common. Both blonds, compact, graceful in movement, going about their business with minimum fuss — and augering holes through anything that tried to box them in. Jer wished he could put the two of them in a pit together like roosters so he could watch the feathers fly. Briefly, he thought of mentioning Quantrill to the Mex, then thought better of it. Jer was not about to recount his dust-up with Quantrill, and his men knew better than to talk about it if they wanted to remain on Garner land. He was still enjoying thoughts of eventual revenge when the distant rooftops of the Garner headquarters poked up over the horizon.
Sorel took the VHP handset and, using its scrambler, advised the outriders to fall in line behind his dust trail. Here in the heart of the Garner spread, they had little to worry about as long as Jer exercised the control he bragged so much about. That control would be a lot easier to maintain if they managed somehow to get into the equipment bam without Mul Garner noticing.
Jer seemed nervous as a virgin in a cantina as Sorel guided the van to the equipment bam, Jer leaping out to
