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  Wild Country

  ( Ted Quantrill - 3 )

  Dean Ing

  Ted Quantrill is a human weapon. He has been a soldier, a commando, and, finally a hit man for the United States government.

  But a man can grow tired of killing, and Quantrill has turned his back on the past. Here in the rugged wilderness of the Southwest, he plans to make a new life for himself and the woman he hopes to marry.

  But yesterday won't let him alone. To preserve his life, he'll have to kill again — and his target is a good friend, as well-trained and deadly as he is…

  Dean Ing

  Wild Country

  Chapter One

  Death minus three minutes and counting: Rawson squinted through yellow sundazzle and displayed his Mex dental work as the stranger neared maximum range. The scope of his wire-stocked assault rifle showed only a single, helmeted rider, straight and tall on the hovercycle, its caliche dust trail writhing behind.

  Had Rawson been a praying man, he might have prayed for this break. One well-placed round could mean the difference between Rawson afoot in Wild Country, with deputy marshals closing in. and Rawson sitting pretty in that hovercycle with a straight run to the Rio Grande.

  On the other hand, a clean miss might alert the silly bastard, and several hasty shots might render that cycle useless. From his cover among the blistering rocks of South Texas. Rawson judged that his prey would cross within a hundred meters of him. If he waited an extra few moments, he would have a good headshot, and time for more if the first round missed. Rawson flicked his fire selector to semiauto, wishing he had thought to drop his beltpac near the tracks his boots had made. A nice fat beltpac would've provided bait to halt an unwary traveler. Well, tough shit; Rawson concentrated on the world as it was — or rather, as he thought it was. It did not occur to him that the target in his crosshairs might be bait.

  Death minus two minutes and counting: For an instant, as the cycle passed below on its cushion of air, Rawson's imagination whacked him under the ribs. What if the rider gripped the throttlebar in his death agony? The hovercycle might just continue on out of sight, its whirr fading with the dust trail, a diesel-hearted horse with the bit in its teeth and a dead man in the saddle. The outlaw adjusted his aim to the base of the neck, let the crosshairs traverse to lead the target, and squeezed gently.

  The rifle's muzzle suppressor was a custom job, so that the muzzle scarcely moved and emitted only a flat, whistling pop. The slug flew a trifle high, catching the erect rider behind the ear. Rawson sent two more rounds after it; saw the helmet jerk again, saw shards of plastic spray bright sparkles against the sun.

  Death minus ninety seconds and counting: Rawson flung himself down from his prominence, bounding to flat, sunbaked soil, cursing the hovercycle as it continued. The damn thing had slowed a lot, but it was still under way, now wandering in a broad arc above the sparse brush of Uvalde County, Texas. The rider was well-zapped, but at this pace Rawson, carrying the heavy rifle, would never catch up. He made a snap decision, dropped the rifle, and sprinted hard. He willed his legs to pump harder. The goddamn rifle had done its job and in any case he still had his little Chink automatic, courtesy of World War IV, stowed in his breakaway hip pocket. In a long, gut-wrenching sprint he knew that he was gaining. And so, in a way, he was definitely losing.

  Death minus forty seconds and counting: The rider had not fallen, though his head lolled loosely on his neck. Both hands still gripped the handlebars of the cycle, a scruffy, two-place McCullough with a tarp over the rear saddle cowl. Rawson's thigh muscles told him he'd spent too many summer days in the cantinas of Hondo and Eagle Pass, waiting for word that Sorel needed him for a shipment. Trembling, gasping, he drew on his last reserves of stamina and stumbled, nearly fell. But now the diesel stammered too. Rawson hoped that didn't mean the effin' thing was out of fuel.

  He found out what it meant as he staggered forward, exulting. Everything became clear with the sudden emergence of the compact, green-eyed blond fellow from under the tarp. Rawson was only three-quarters surprised; in the smuggling biz, you learned to count on fuck-all.

  "Michael Rawson, you're under arrest," the younger man called. He wore the shoulder patch of a federal deputy marshal on his thin deerskin shirt, a shirt too nice to perforate, though Rawson fully intended to do that very thing.

  "Well — ain't you cute," Rawson puffed, stopping ten paces away, putting hands on hips while he fought for breath. Very 'cute indeed, wiring a cast-off android from Wild Country Safari into the front saddle and steering from under the tarp. The little deputy might be young but he had used guile, forcing Rawson to run from cover and tire himself with a long, exhausting sprint. Not cute enough to have a weapon in his hands, though. If he knew who Rawson was, he ought to know how fast Rawson was.

  Death minus eight seconds and counting: The broad-shouldered little deputy saw something in Rawson's face. "Don't do it," he said equably. But Rawson thought something in the man's face was pleading, do it. Rawson did it while the deputy's right hand was fishing out a card, probably to read him his rights.

  Rawson's rights ended with an impossibly liquid left-handed draw by the deputy, who flicked a seven-millimeter Chiller from its hidden armpit holster as he bounded from the cycle. Rawson got his sidearm out, began his trusted sidewinder maneuver, swung his weapon to intersect the spot where the deputy would land… and felt two paralyzing impacts in his torso.

  Rawson crumpled, the slugs hurling him back. He lay with one leg buckled, both arms flung wide, the little automatic a full pace from his nerveless fingers. He understood a great deal more, now. There were maybe a half dozen bad dudes in Wild Country who could draw with Rawson, but only one whose freakish reflexes were said to be absolutely lethal whether fiat-footed or airborne; a regular John Wesley Hardin.

  And the blond deputy was a wrong-hander. too. Ex-assassin for Search & Rescue, ex-rebel with Jim Street, now a part-time lawman in Wild Country: "You'd be Ted Quantrill." Rawson grimaced, now feeling thick fluid in his throat.

  "And you had to find out the hard way," said the blond, reseating his Chiller.

  Rawson's eyes were beginning to defocus, but he never lost his courage. "Well, I said you was cute." he said, dying.

  For the record, Quantrill noted that Michael Rawson's long countdown ended at 1:54 PM., central daylight time, on the seventeenth of September, A.D 2006.

  Chapter Two

  Quantrill finished rolling the body into a standard bodybag, spat caliche dust, hauled Rawson's bulk to the cycle, and retrieved his own Aussie hat, flopping it on his head after wiping a film of sweat and dust from his face. The old 'droid in the front seat had been emptied of its innards and was soon stowed in back with Rawson.

  After he disconnected the rear steering yoke, Quantrill stepped into the front cowl, then pulled a cold bulb of Pearl beer from the right-hand cargo pannier. With his other hand he toggled his VHP set. A moment later, he had Chief Deputy Stearns on-line.

  The complaints began almost immediately. "Nope, I never got a chance to read him his rights," Quantrill replied. "He went for a Chinese sidearm; I'm bringing it as evidence."

  He waited, pressing the earpiece with two fingers, meanwhile scanning the innocent horizon. Then, "It was Rawson's choice, not mine." Pause. "Sure. If my belt video was working, you'll see me with the chit in one hand and a handful of air in the other while he was drawing on me. I won't kill a man unless he forces me to." Pause; a flare of nostrils below his broken nose. "Well, I don't anymore, sir. You can tell Marshal Teague our Justice Department is still just. Anyway, you've got two more of Sorel's men for a nice showy trial. You'd never have gotten anything from Mike Rawson. Read his file."

  This time Quantrill waited longer. He was shaking his h
ead in disgust when he replied. "It's not my fault if they got sprung so fast. Did anybody plant a tracer bug on either of 'em?" Another pause. "I'm sorrier than you are, mister; Espinel was a friend of mine. Sometimes I think Teague is sorrier to see a fugitive come in horizontal than he is when one of us gets it. No, cancel that. I'm just hot and tired and pissed off — sir."

  As always, the "sir" sounded insincere. Marvin Stearns, grown sleek with inaction, could list a dozen men he would prefer over Quantrill. Ted Quantrill could list several friends who'd become casualties through the inaction of sleek men.

  Kent Ethridge, for example. Some men put the entire blame for that on Ethridge himself. Quantrill's reaction had been a deepening fury against those who had made Ethridge's death possible. Now he took a final pause and a gulp of Pearl before: "I'm near Dabney, just north of Zavala County. You want Rawson in SanTone Ringcity, or do I freight him back to you in Junction? Yeah, he's in a bodybag, he'll keep 'til tomorrow. Right. See you in Junction bright and early. A-a-and out," he drawled, putting away the tiny headset with relief.

  Ted Quantrill hadn't had a mastoid-implant radio in his noggin for four years, but he still hated any comm set that reminded him of a mastoid "critic," however faintly. An explosive critic had executed his lover, Marbrye Sanger, on command of the murderous Young administration. The postwar excesses of Young's people had driven Quantrill to rebellion; nearly to madness as well. They drove so many good people to the rebel ranks that the elections of 2004 had cut across the lines of Mormonism and federalism. Now it was President Ora McCarty whose cabinet struggled to reconstruct America. As long as the ex-rebel boss Jim Street was attorney general, there would be jobs for men like Quantrill.

  Like the American nation itself, old Jim Street had suffered systemic shock during the Sinolnd War. The grizzled, crippled old Texan rode herd on the Justice Department, including both the FBI and the Border Authority. Street had to let other folks wrangle over the new Capitol site, now abuilding in the District of Columbia, Missouri. He worried about foreign entanglements when they crossed American borders — for example, when the Ellfive colonies of New Israel helped Turkish drug merchants open conduits through Wild Country.

  Street knew in his chalky bones that America could not survive another reign of unjust rule, of government by terror. As long as he could climb into a wheelchair, he would prowl the corridors of law and order. If Wild Country and Oregon Territory were to be parts of the nation again, they must get fair-handed justice. With deputies like Ted Quantrill, Jim Street's justice reached a long way into lawless regions.

  On this day, Quantrill was far into the violent border region claimed by both Mexico and Reconstruction America. Here, whole families sometimes disappeared during a feud or a border raid from Mexican cimarrones, wild ones. It was truly no government's land, and it could not be reclaimed without rough justice. When it had to be, Quantrill's was as rough as it came.

  Quantrill could have chosen a shorter route back, but his years in the region had given him Wild Country wisdom. Back in the eighties and nineties, before the Sinolnd War, Texas ranchers and hoe men had wrestled chunks of this sun-broiled land into submission. In less than ten years after the war, most of those chunks had gone wild again, returned to the kind of new-world savagery that Francisco Vasquez de Coronado had fought in 1541. A few places, chiefly narrow creekbottoms defended by grit and gunfire, were still cultivated. Quantrill did not relish a mechanical breakdown, not with a deader ripening under the tarp behind him. and he also went wide of the cultivated areas. Only fools and desperadoes took chances in the trackless wild regions over soil that, locals claimed, was "hard as a whore's eye."

  Was Quantrill too cautious?

  Item: During the first cattle drive east from the Pecos, Coronado's men were forced to build pillars of dung and bones to post the way. Not even their herd of cattle could mark the cactus-dotted hardpan enough to let a man backtrack their path. When those cattle stumbled forward toward water, usually it was deadly alkali water and those cattle had to be whipped away from it. Now it was still possible to find a remnant of a buffalo wallow or a dry hole where a Spanish buckle and bones might gleam, burnished by the dusty winds of five centuries. This was a timeless land, and it would kill you for the slightest miscalculation.

  The most pitiless of that land lay far to Quantrill's left. His route was made interesting by deep, brush-choked arroyos and hills. Bit by bit. the stupefying violence of Texas weather had whittled those hills down from mountains to mounds. That weather was thought, by people who had never experienced it, to be just a part of Wild Country myth; but Quantrill kept an eye on his horizons. He knew that in any season, a hellbroth storm might fling hailstones the size of his fist so hard they dented the cowls of hovercycles, with a blazing cadenza of lightning tinted gold and mauve by dust hurled on gale-force winds.

  To outlanders, it was all mythology to be taken in good humor. If it were even half-true, they reasoned. Wild Country would be peopled exclusively by the insane. To Ted Quantrill, it was taken for granted — and in good humor. If you lived out here and said you liked it, people figured you'd been too long in the sun without your sombrero. So Quantrill cursed it as necessary and told no one but Sandra Grange that he had learned to love it.

  He put in a call to Sandy while sliding up into Edwards County but got no reply; expected none, really. Like as not, she'd be tending her truck garden, and there was no one else to take a call at her soddy. Nine-year-old Childe might hear the VHP beeper, but never answered. If you weren't standing in front of her where she could study your face, Childe saw no point in jawing with you.

  Quantrill tried again an hour from the soddy, then shrugged and popped open another cold Pearl. He told himself he wasn't worried about the two sisters; though they lived on the edge of Wild Country, they were rarely more than a whistle away from a mind-boggling mass of four-hoofed help.

  Reminded of Sandy's huge guardian, Quantrill slowed the cycle and began to scan overhangs of stone. Generally, Texas rattlers grew larger in regions with more rain. Quantrill knew the legend of Sowell's dragon, the nine-footer killed by mustangs in the old days, and discounted that legend by two feet. He was looking for any handy diamondback or prairie rattler that might serve as a snack.

  Chapter Three

  The unlucky rattler wasn't even coiled, merely stretched out enjoying a recent meal, when Quantrill spotted him. Moving quickly in the late afternoon heat, the ugly brute coiled a good honest warning to this interloper. Quantrill's ventilated boots and brush trousers were snakeproof, with leg panels that served as chaps; but his primary defense against rattlers was a combination of reflexes and untrembling control. That combination had stunned U.S. Army medics when they'd first tested him for lethal skills.

  Once in a human generation, a specimen with Quantrill's natural gifts might occur. Those gifts had been viciously misused until Quantrill turned rebel, pitting himself in single combat against his masters. Now that the rebels had won — and despite the best arguments by Sandy Grange — he still used his gifts in combat. He took them as much for granted as the rattler took its heat-seeking sensors.

  For another man, Quantrill's rapid right-handed pass before the snake might have been bravado, but for the deputy it was only a way to coax a snake into straightening out. The rattler lashed his triangular head forward, the S-curve of neck and one coil now the size and rigidity of a baseball bat. And now the yellow-white fangtips lanced for the tempting target, but now too the hand flicked out of range, which was roughly two-thirds the length of the rattler.

  And one-tenth of a human heartbeat later, the rattler hit caliche dirt, pinioned there by the treacherous hand while Quantrill's left hand grasped the rattler behind its anal opening to keep that cylinder of muscle from whipping around his arm.

  Vaqueros, locally teased by the term "buckaroos," had first learned the trick of whip-cracking a live rattler to remove its head. Once a Mexican cowpoke showed that trick to his Texas neighbors, it beca
me a well-known sport. Some said it separated the men from the boys; some said it separated the smarts from the plain stupids. Quantrill did it because it separated the snake from the sting, and he would not do it while anyone watched. Long ago he'd learned to avoid displays of his quickness. Why put an unknown enemy on guard? Word got around too soon as it was.

  A moment later, Quantrill hefted the headless rattler, smiled to himself. Sometimes he brought a toy for Childe, or a spray of wildflowers for Sandy. But this time he curried favor with Ba'al, an enormous Russian boar bred to Texas proportions by Texas A&M researchers before the war. One day when Wild Country was tamed, there would be no room for such a monster, a full five hundred kilos of tusk and gristle, standing tall as a Mex pony and bearing the scars of many encounters with men. It was hard to say if Ba'al accepted Ted Quantrill as a friend. The great animal loved Sandy and, especially, Childe; but Quantrill's odor was the hated mansmell, and the two males had never faced each other without a soothing female presence.

  If Ba'al loathed anything more than man, it was a live snake. A recently dead snake was something else again. His forelegs and snout were scarred from rattler punctures, and the boar dined as often from rattler nests as from wild goat, tender shoots, or stray animals from the nearby preserves of Wild Country Safari. Quantrill hoped that this quivering rattler carcass would be the equivalent of a sherbet for Sandy or a praline for Childe. If not — well, whatthehell, he'd tried to pacify the surly bastard…

  Less than an hour later, a few kilometers from Rocksprings, Quantrill topped a rise in view of Sandy Grange's soddy. He tried to deny the sense of relief spying the long, semisubmerged dwelling with its grassy sod roof and spiky agarita shrubs planted on the earth berm. Too many times he had seen roofs caved in by concussion grenades, smoke curling from burnt hulks, well-tended gardens ribboned to mulch by cimarron gangs hostile to settlers.