Trap Angel (Frank Angel Western #3) Read online

  The Department had given him little time for sightseeing.

  Within two weeks, he was in New York, warily watching the fringes of the underworld with astonishment: Bowery boys and Dead Rabbits parading in their street gang finery and ready to cut the throat of any man for the price of a drink.

  At City Hall they filled him in on political fixing and corruption, on the ways and means of Tammany, on the social and sexual forces brought to bear by unscrupulous men on the make — all ‘good for the education’ they told him, and a necessary addition to the massive readings of Blackstone’s Commentaries, of Federal and Territorial laws, military and civil laws, laws governing Indian administration and land laws — Desert land and Homestead land and Indian land and pre-empted land, land in the public domain and Spanish grant land, water rights, rights of earlier occupation, criminal jurisprudence and contract law — leaving him alone for hours and hours in lofty echoing chambers lined with heavy leather bound books, reading until his eyes went sandy and grainy and he could not remember anything.

  Then the practical work. Basic survival. Tracking. How to stay alive in the desert, in the mountains, stranded alone in any wilderness. Disguises: how to alter the appearance by makeshift means, a smudge of boot blacking beneath the eyes, adding a limp to one’s walk, the wearing of eyeglasses, combing the hair differently, adopting a slight accent. Navigation by the sun, by the stars. And weapons, always more and more about weapons. Knives, guns, rifles, spears, bows, arrows, swords, clubs, staves, hatchets, explosives — their values, their uses, their limitations. Culminating in the tests: they took him on a train and then on horseback somewhere hours away from the city and turned him loose in a swampy wilderness without food, water or weapons. They gave him a one-hour start and then sent three trained men after him. He had to elude them and get back to a house in a clearing somewhere in the swamp. It took him four days and he lost eighteen pounds doing it, but he made it. En route he had learned how to find water when none seemed to exist, how to trap small wild things and subsist on their meager, strong tasting flesh. He had learned how to conceal his lair like any hunted thing, how to defend himself in any situation. How to stay alive.

  He went across the room and opened the window. The noise from the street drifted in.

  Somewhere he could hear a man selling newspapers and the smell of cooking food came to his nostrils. He felt hungry. Maybe he would go out and get a meal.

  ‘You’re stupid! ’ the instructor at ‘the College’ had shouted.

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Say it!’

  ‘I’m stupid, sir.’

  ‘You’re an insolent fool, Angel.’

  ‘That’s correct, sir.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know how to use that gun if your life depended on it.’

  ‘If you say so, sir.’

  ‘Damn you, Angel, don’t answer me back!’

  The unexpected searing shock of the slap across his face, and his own reflex action as the anger bit into his mind. He had stood there with the six-gun in his hand and the instructor had laughed.

  ‘Look at you,’ he had jeered. ‘You going to shoot me, Angel?’

  ‘I see,’ Angel said softly and slipped the gun back into its holster.

  ‘Good boy,’ the instructor said as if he were a dog.

  ‘Suppose I’d pulled the trigger,’ Angel said to him afterwards. The instructor had grinned like a cat with a fat mouse.

  ‘You don’t think I’d give you a loaded gun to play with, do you?’

  Angel had grinned as well. They were training him. Training him to kill if he had to, but not because someone had jockeyed him into a spot where emotion dictated the action and not reason. Let no man chose the killing ground, they told him. You select it. You decide what to do. And you will stay alive.

  He remembered the short squat man with the dark skin who had been waiting for him in the gymnasium one day. He never learned the man’s name. They were alone and the floor was covered with the mattresses as always. The man held out a thick stick, about two feet long.

  ‘No guns today,’ he had said. ‘This time it’s knives.’

  ‘Where’s mine?’ Angel asked.

  ‘Here,’ said the man and came at him with a wicked Bowie flat on his palm, hard and fast and without any kind of warning, a slicing cut that could have disemboweled a horse. Angel acted blindly, instinctively, smashing down on the man’s wrist with the heavy stick. The man grinned and fell back and Angel saw he had heavy leather bands strapped around his wrists. Then he came back in again, shifting the knife very fast to his left hand and lifting the blade towards Angel’s ribcage. Angel moved fast on his feet and brought the stick around and as he turned jerked backwards with it and the blunt end hit the man with the knife beneath the breastbone, bringing breath whooshing out of him with a great gust.

  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 An
gel 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.

  Chapter Four

  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 y
e’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.

  ‘Holy Mother of God!’ breathed Private Casey, ‘will ye look at that?’

  That was Lieutenant Philip Evans. After the first stunning shock of the deadly fusillade had startled his fractious horse, Evans had spent all his energy controlling the animal. Now he wheeled around and drew the revolver from his holster, pointing the pistol dead ahead of him over his horse’s ears, and jammed iron into the animal’s flanks. The horse erupted into a gallop dead straight towards the rocks where the ambushers were hidden, and as he swept past where Mackenzie and the other troopers lay hugging he yelled ‘Follow me, men!’ and bucketed up the hill away from them.