Tribal Ways (17 page)

The ever-present wind whistled through the long tan grass around them and tried to pluck the map of Harding County from the fingers of Eugenio Rocendo of Jemez Pueblo and whip it off the hood of the white Range Rover where Annja and her companions were studying it. Rocendo was seventy years old and vigorous, a former USAF security patrolman and LANL security officer. All around them Native American vets were unloading horses from trailers. And unlimbering a startling assortment of scoped bolt-action rifles, lever actions and even WWII-era Garands.

“Okay, there’s been activity at this old abandoned house here on the Rabbit Run Wash,” said Chuck Mason, a local Kiowa rancher, pointing at a spot near the tiny town of Roy a few miles south of the Kiowa National Grasslands. “Tends to kind of stand out. Harding’s the state’s least populous county. And New Mexico ain’t a populous state.”

The clans were gathering at a crossing of dirt roads. It was dry and forbidding grassland where the Great Plains met the Southwestern desert. As Tom Ten Bears had promised, his network, including its members’ extended families, had turned up results before the government did.

“There’ve been some strange Indians seen in the area,” Mason said. “Some threats made to locals.”

“Not too smart where all forty people in the county have a rifle rack in the back window of their pickup truck,” Billy White Bird said to Annja. He wore a ball cap and an Oklahoma Sooners blazer over his big paunch. He had his hands in his pockets.

She nodded, trying to take in the details of the terrain. The old Otero place seemed to lie in dead ground, with land swells surrounding. Like the training center outside Lawton it seemed to have been chosen for being hard to see at any distance, rather than defensibility. If the objective was to play hard to get, and then make a final stand that could never succeed, anyway—but the more bloodshed, the bigger the win—it made a twisted kind of sense.

She looked around. “What’s all this costing, anyway?”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Edgar Martínez, who’d come with them to be in at the kill. “Some of us are doing all right. We’re happy to help out a longtime comrade like Tom where his family’s concerned.”

“And we’ve shed a lot of blood, sweat and tears for this country,” Rocendo added. “These terrorist bastards are striking at that while giving us all a bad name.”

“And never underestimate the power of an old man’s vanity,” Mason said.

“The ‘last ride syndrome,’” Johnny said with a lopsided grin.

“Yeah, and in another forty years it’ll be biting your ass, too, Sonny. So you can just wipe that smirk off your smug mug.”

Johnny laughed. “Believe me, Mr. Mason, I understand. And I’m grateful for what you-all are doing.”

There were maybe a dozen of the oldsters, and nine Iron Horses in addition to Johnny, including his lieutenant and chief wrench, Billy, Snake, Ricky and Angel.

“The Bureau’s afraid we’ll do better at finding the Crazy Dogs than they will,” Angel had explained succinctly when she and Ricky arrived that morning. The others had trickled in since the word went out to the Iron Horse People the previous afternoon—get here if you can, quick as you can. “We’re off the bad-guy list but we’re still marginal social types. So they can get away with squatting on us. A lot of us are under surveillance and didn’t dare come here.”

Johnny’s mask of stoic good cheer slipped just a bit, giving him the momentary aspect of a skull, with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks.

The life of one single human being lay at stake. Sallie Ten Bears. Innocence personified and endangered, Annja thought.

“Something we need to think about,” Angel said. The wind whipped her long dark hair in front of her face. “The Dog Soldiers who were part of the SIU were connected with Federal antiterrorism efforts, right?”

“Yes,” Tom said.

“That means they’d have access to a lot of high-tech equipment. Such as radio direction-finding gear. So, is any of that missing?”

Tom Ten Bears looked uneasy. “The Feds don’t seem to want to talk about that. From what I hear from my buds back in Comanche County, the scuttlebutt around the Lawton PD and the Troop G barracks is that lots of stuff is missing.”

“So we can’t use walkie-talkies or cell phones too close to our objective,” the pretty young woman said. “We have to assume they’ll spot us. And that won’t be good.”

“So we can’t use electronics at all?” Johnny asked, looking alarmed. Every person on the scene carried at least a cell phone. Some of the old guys’ trucks fairly bristled with antennas, like FBI surveillance cars.

“We should be okay outside of maybe a mile,” Angel said. “They can’t get too twitchy about signals farther out than that. Even as sparsely populated as the area is, everybody’s got cell phones, radios, whatever. You’d be surprised how many transmitters you find even out in the boondocks these days.”

She bit her lip. “We might want to ask people who don’t absolutely need them to switch off their electronics, though. They spot too big a cluster, they’ll get antsy. And once we break up to start our approach, even outside the mile limit, probably only one person per group should have a live unit. They’re paranoid.”

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t plotting against you,” Frank said. “Evidence—us.”

Everybody laughed at that. Maybe a bit too readily. They’d gotten word from their own spies in the nearby regional U.S. Attorneys’ Offices that the FBI thought it had a fix on the hostage takers’ location and were expecting to strike soon.

Despite her distrust in Lamont Young’s competence, and general skepticism of the FBI, Annja hoped they got the right location. It would be beyond ironic if she and her friends took down the Dogs—only to have the goal of setting off a bloodbath fulfilled when the FBI landed hard on somebody else.

“What about satellite surveillance?” Annja asked.

“Any access to overhead observation would require passwords to get the tasking,” Tom said. “Those’ve been canceled by now. Even the Feds aren’t that dumb.”

Annja caught Snake lifting a skeptical eyebrow. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise me that a former DARPA wonk is conspiracy minded, she thought.

The old boys were discussing alternate communications methods. “We’ll just have to rely on a system of bird and animal calls,” Frank was saying. “Just like our ancestors did.”

“Wait,” said Mark Running Bull, a tall and spare Cheyenne. “I can’t do bird and animal calls.”

“What? Didn’t you learn how as a young man?” Frank asked.

“Did I go to some kind of school to learn how to be an Indian? My dad worked for AT&T. I grew up in Wichita.”

“No, not Indian school,” Frank insisted. “You know. Boy Scouts.”

“The rebels in Afghanistan always got the best results against us when they used the lowest tech,” Johnny said. “Not exactly hard in that godforsaken part of the world. For those who don’t know them, I can teach everybody a set of simple hand signals pretty fast.”

“What about different groups?” Tom asked, sounding as if his patience was straining. “How’ll we know when everybody’s in position? Send smoke signals?”

“Not a bad idea,” Frank said.

“I got a better one,” Juan Tenorio said. He held up a hand. Something winked dazzlingly. “Apache telegraph. Or as the white-eyes call it, heliograph.”

“You’d better get moving,” Mason said, holding his cell phone to his ear.

“Why’s that?” Johnny asked.

“FBI is rolling,” he said. “They’re estimating two hours from now to the target.”

Annja looked to Johnny, who shrugged.

“Wait,” the elderly Kiowa said. “There’s more. There’s
another
convoy, well on its way out of Albuquerque. Looks like somebody from the U.S. attorneys’ Office is trying to preempt the FBI, with a little help from the New Mexico State Police and Harding County Sheriff’s Department.”

He shrugged. “The sheriff’s my son-in-law. One of his deputies is my nephew. So let’s just say we got the word from inside.”

“Why would the U.S. Attorney be trying to steal a march on the FBI?” Annja asked.

“Two possible explanations I can think of,” former federal prosecutor Angel said. “Either they’re hoping to grab the credit themselves. Or they want to put a spoke in SAC Young’s and Abell’s mutual scheme to stage a massacre.”

“Humanitarian motives?” Billy asked. To Annja’s discomfort several of the senior posse—former lawmen or attorneys themselves almost to a man—laughed out loud at the notion.

Angel shrugged. “Not everybody in the justice system lacks a conscience.”

“Maybe,” Ricky said, hugging her. “But you’re here with us now, so who knows?”

“But let’s say some of that,” she suggested, “plus a desire to avoid the PR hit to the government if there’s major bloodshed.”

“Well,” Billy said, opening the lever action of a Marlin .44 Magnum carbine, “we’re planning on shedding some major blood ourselves, aren’t we?”

“In part precisely so it
won’t
be the government doing it.”

“I hate taking the government off the hook.” He slammed the lever home with a loud clack.

“Me, too,” Johnny said. “But my sister’s life’s at stake.”

Billy looked chagrined. “You’re right, John. Sorry.”

Men started leading over saddled horses. “Y’all best cut stick and go right now,” Mason said. “The bunch from Albuquerque will be here way ahead of the FBI.”

“What about you?” Annja asked. Eight of the elders would ride out with Annja, Johnny and the Iron Horses. The rest would stay behind with the vehicles blocking the closest access road to their target.

“We’re gonna keep the law at bay,” Mason said.

She looked around in alarm at the heavily armed old men. “You’re not planning to
fight
the authorities, are you?”

The men looked at one another and laughed. “Oh, hell, no,” Frank said. “We’re just human shields.”

“Violent terrorists are one thing, Ms. Creed,” Martínez said. “The federal government is not about to bulldoze a posse of well-respected Native American senior-citizen war heroes. Nor are the New Mexican authorities. And the Harding County Sheriff’s Department sure isn’t.”

“Better not,” Mason said. “Otherwise Sheriff Phil is cut off forever.”

“You kids go with good hearts,” Martínez said. “Us old farts should be able to keep the cops negotiating long enough for you to do what needs done.”

“Okay,” Johnny said, swinging aboard a palomino gelding. “We ride!”

A
NNJA CREPT THROUGH
tall grass. Along with Billy, Snake and a gangly Cheyenne kid named Cody Hawk, she was circling to the south of the abandoned adobe ranch house where George Abell and his Crazy Dogs were holed up with a captive Sallie Ten Bears. They hoped.

Annja carried a Ruger Mini-14, a handy, reliable carbine that fired the same .223-caliber cartridge as the M-16. She knew a shotgun usually served better for close-in work. But there was a major prospect they’d have to shoot it out with the hostage takers before busting into the house. She preferred something she could shoot accurately at range. Anyway, for infighting she carried the borrowed Glock.

And she always had the sword, of course.

Snake carried a Mossberg 500 combat-style shotgun in 20-gauge. When Annja cocked an eyebrow at her choosing that over the more conventional 12-gauge, the tall, tattooed woman had shrugged, smiled and said, “Three-quarters the killing power for two-thirds the recoil. I like the trade-off.”

Billy and Cody Hawk both carried lever-action carbines chambered in .44 Magnum. Billy claimed those served as well as a semiauto rifle like the Mini-14, even in close-quarters battle; and while the needlelike .223s had a lot of penetration, the big blunt Magnum had torque. Like Annja, the three Iron Horse People carried holstered handguns as well as long arms.

They had ridden horseback as close as they could get to their objective without being seen. Annja decided she wasn’t surprised that her biker buddies knew how to ride flesh-and-blood horses as well as iron ones. It fit perfectly with their philosophy of combining the best of the old with the best of the new.

When they had ridden as far as they were going to they dismounted. Four of the elder warriors stayed to tend their young horse herd well behind the line of fire. The other four had gone to position themselves under cover. They would provide long-range fire support for the younger people assaulting the ranch buildings.

“You wouldn’t think some of them would make it across the room,” Johnny said, shaking his head as the four snipers disappeared. “But they move like mist out here in the weeds.”

“Don’t underestimate your elders, cub,” Tom said gruffly. For a moment Annja worried the truce between him and his wayward son was about to break at the worst possible moment. But then Tom’s seamed face split in his engaging grin, showing he’d been kidding. And to her relief Johnny laughed.

They gave the old boys ten minutes. For Annja it was like squatting in boiling water, trying to contain her eagerness and awareness that the clock was running. Then they split themselves into three teams and moved out.

The lone road to the Otero place ran up and over a low ridge from the west. Annja’s group intended to take up station on the far side, covering the back of the house from the cover of dry Rabbit Run Wash; they had the farthest to go. Johnny’s quartet would approach from north of the drive, his father’s from the south. The three parties were positioning themselves in an approximate equilateral triangle, to allow them to catch their opponents from flank and rear while minimizing the danger they’d cross fire one another.

Annja had fretted about how willing Iron Horse bikers would be to put themselves under the command of a cop, much less their beloved chieftain’s until-recently estranged father. But Tom’s team, Angel and Ricky, plus a Kiowa named Satanta, seemed to respect the older man.

It’s all going so smoothly, Annja thought as she duck walked along with carbine in hand. That’s what worries me.

When they had reached a point Annja reckoned was due south of the house, she held up a hand to halt.

“Let’s take a look,” she said softly. “Get our bearings.”