A shift in the pitch of the engines of the orbiting plane signified that enough light had arrived at last. Earl craned his head up a bit and saw the plane far off to the northwest, one wing tip high, the other low as it fluted in its approach to the landing path. It seemed to waver in the air as it turned, then straightened, then lowered itself. The gear was already down. It was some kind of low-winged twin-engine Beechcraft, a sturdy, prosaic aircraft. The pilot found his angle and seemed to come in on a string, bearing straight for Earl, coming faster and faster and lower and lower.
Earl’s fingers flew involuntarily to the weapon’s controls, to test them for the millionth time: the one lever was cranked fully forward to FIRE and the other fully forward to FULL. Then his fingers dipped under the weapon and touched the bolt handle on the other side, to check again that it was drawn back and cocked.
The gun seemed to rise to him and he rose from the grass. The butt plate found his shoulder and all ten pounds of the weapon clamped hard against himself as his vision reduced only to that narrow circle of visibility that was the peep sight. He saw: the flat of the receiver top, the diminishing blunt tube of the barrel and the single central blade of sight. The plane seemed to double, then double again in size as it roared at him, dropping ever lower. He knew that the increase in speed was a function of its closing the distance and it seemed to double again, its roar filling the air, and he pulled the gun up through it, sighting on the right-side engine, leading it, and when the computational machine in his brain so instructed, pulling the trigger and holding it down while running the gun on a smooth rotation from nine o’clock up to midnight and then over to two o’clock.
The gun emptied in one spasm, the sound lost in the roar of the plane. He could sense the empties tumbling, feel the liquid, almost hydraulic pressure of the recoil without a sense of the individual shots as it drove into his shoulder, but most of all he could see the tracers flicking out and extending his touch until he was an angry God destroying the world from afar. The arc of tracers flew into the engine and wing root and the plane trembled ever so slightly, then changed engine pitches again as it pulled up, banked right and flew out of the zone of fire. It seemed to dip, for flames poured from the engine, but then the pilot feathered it, and only a gush of smoke remained, a stain he pulled across the sky with him, and he waggled his wings and headed elsewhere.
• • •
Owney watched the plane come down. The pilot was good. He was very good. He had his course, his gear had been lowered, his flaps were down, he was coming lower and lower and seemed just a few feet from touching down.
Then a line of illumination cracked out of the darkness and lashed upward; it was so sustained that for just a second Owney thought it was a flashlight beam or some other form of light until he realized he was deluding himself. The streaking bullets caught the plane expertly, speared it, and the plane seemed to wobble. Owney thought it might explode. Smoke abruptly broke from the targeted engine and the plane quivered mightily as fire washed outward. Then the pilot yanked up and away and almost as if it had been a dream, the plane was gone. It reduced in size arithmetically as it sped away, trailing smoke.
“What the fuck was that?” asked Owney.
“It’s him.”
“Him?”
“The cowboy.”
“AGHHHH!” Owney bellowed, a great spurt of anger uncontaminated by comprehensibility. “That fucking fucker, that fucking dog!” His rage was absolute and immense.
But Johnny spoke calmly.
“You just saw some tommy-gunning, old man. Isn’t but one man in a thousand can hold the Thompson so perfectly on a moving target, leading perfectly, not letting it bounce off target. I suppose the tracers help some. They verify impact. But the bastard’s bloody good, I’ll tell you that. I know only one better. Fortunately it’s me.”
Around him the others had already unlimbered weapons and were quickly readying for action, the usual fitting of magazines and snapping of bolts. Hats and coats were coming off, automatics being checked for full loads.
“That fucking bastard,” said Owney. “Oh, that hick bastard! I should have settled his fucking hash at the railway station. Who the fuck does he think he is?”
“Right now, he thinks he’s going to kill all six of us, I should imagine. Owney, dear, you stay here. Johnny and his boys will take care of all this. Right, fellows?”
But there was no cheer from the boys. They had read the fine blast of sustained, controlled automatic fire just as surely as Johnny, and knew they were up against a professional.
“We’ve got the Ford,” called Vince the Hat. “We could just get the hell out of here.”
“He’d just ambush us. If he knows the way in, he’ll know it out. Anyhow, we’ve got to deal with him now, or look over our shoulders forever. Evidently that railyard business upset the fellow.”
“You bastard!” Owney yelled. “We’ll fuck you but good in a few minutes!”
“Feel better, now, Owney? There’s a good lad. You stay here while the men handle it.”
“Johnny, what’s your plan?” asked Herman Kreutzer, his BAR loaded and ready.
“He’s probably slithering toward us right now. I’d stay wide, separated so he can’t take more than one down with a single burst. I’d say let’s move now and fast, because if it’s only tracer he has, we’ll be able to track them back to him better before the light is full up. Herman, you’ve the heaviest weapon, you’ll provide sustaining fire. Take all your magazines. No point in saving them for a rainy day. It is the rainy day. Let’s form a line abreast and move in spurts. Stay low, keep moving. Look for the source of his fire. When you spot it, Herman, you must pressure him while we move in. Anybody have a better suggestion?”
No one did.
• • •
Earl knew they’d come quickly and they did. His every impulse told him to advance. Get among them, shoot fast from the hip, trusting instinct, their panic at his aggression, and luck. It never remotely occurred to him that he might die. His focus was entirely on destroying them.
All his voices were still. He did not think of the father who had failed him or the men he believed he had failed or the wife alone somewhere. He didn’t think of D. A. Parker ordering him to get out or the long run through the sewer or the rage that the raid-team tragedy had been turned into farce for the good of a politician. He had no sense of failure at all, but only a sort of battle joy, hard and pure, and the need to get in close, put the bursts into them and punish them for their transgressions and for his own.
He squirmed ahead, low, sliding through the grass. The blood sang in his ears. The air tasted magnificent, like a fine wine, a champagne. The gun was alive in his hands, marvelously supple and obedient. He had never felt this way in the islands or in any of his other fights. There, fear was always around. Now he was shorn of fear.
A burst of fire came. It was duplicated instantly by three others, as Johnny’s boys panicked, even though they were so professional. Bullets hurled through the grass, and where they struck, they raised a great destruction. Smoke and debris, liberated by their energy, rose in a fog, obscuring the field, but Earl saw his advantage. He quickly flicked the fire-control lever on his Thompson, setting it to single shot, rose slightly into a kneeling position even as the random bursts filled the air with a sleet of lead, found a good target and fired one round, its noise lost in the general thunder. He shot low, through the grass, so that his tracer might not be seen, and knew he’d made a good shot.
• • •
“Stop it! Stop it, goddammit!” screamed Johnny.
The firing stopped.
“Jesus Christ, don’t panic, boys. You’ll make it easy on him.”
“Johnny, Johnny—”
“Shut up, Vince, you’ve got—”
“I been hit!”
It was so. Vince the Hat de Palmo lay on his side, astounded that he was bleeding so profusely. He’d taken it at the ligature of thigh to hip, and the wound spurted wet
ly, the blood thick and black across his suit. He looked at Johnny as his eyes emptied of meaning and hope.
“Take his magazines, boys,” said Johnny. “We may need them yet.”
“Johnny, I—”
“Easy, lad,” said Johnny to the youngest of his men, shortly to be the deadest. “Don’t fight Ding-Dong.”
In his last motions, Vince cooperated with Jack Bell as the older man rolled him over and grabbed the two flat drums that were wedged between his belt and his back.
“You’ll come back for me?”
“Sure, kid,” said Ding-Dong. “You can bet on it.” He gave the kid a wink, which Vince may or may not have seen before he slipped irretrievably into blood-loss coma.
• • •
In the interlude, Earl squirmed to the left, toward the low hill that rose at that side of the valley. He crawled and crawled and though he hated to crawl, this day it filled him with joy. The sun was now full on them, drying the dew from the stalks of grass.
The grass at the hill was drier, somehow, for the hillside drained more fluently than the flatland. As he drew near, a plan formed in his mind. This grass was of a different texture, possibly of a different species. He could tell because unlike the soft grass of the valley floor which merely hissed as he crawled through it or the wind pressed rills into it, this grass crackled like dry old bones and sticks in the breeze.
He stood.
He could not see them, for they too had sunk into the grass, or taken up concealed positions behind the odd bushes on the floor of the valley. He chose one such, leaned into his gun and fired a long squirt of tracers into it.
Then he ducked and squirmed away, as someone with a larger weapon than a Thompson brought fire to bear. These bullets whipcracked through the sound barrier as they passed overhead, their snap echoing against the wind. It had to be a Browning rifle. Someone had a Browning at the railyard too.
He’ll try and pin me, the others will work around and up the hill and the one other will go around me, yes. That’s how it has to be.
• • •
“Do you have him?”
“Yes, he’s in a gully at the edge of the hills, about two hundred yards off to the right. I saw the tracers come out.”
“You keep him pinned, Herman. Red, you and Ding-Dong go high. Try and get to that hillside above him to get the fire down on him. I’m circling around to the back. You’ll drive him to me, boys, and if you don’t get him, I’ll get him square in the belly.”
“Let’s do it.”
Johnny scuttled off, beginning his long arc around to the rear. For Jack and Ding-Dong, it was an easier journey, for theirs was the straight shot to the hillside, and then a climb to bend around and get above him. The grass here was high and it concealed them; they didn’t have to crawl but could run, keeping low, particularly as more gullies opened up the closer they got to the hill itself.
As for Herman, he waited a bit, then a bit more, and finally rose and began an exercise called walking fire, which was exactly what John M. Browning had designed his automatic rifle to accomplish. It was originally conceived as the answer to trench warfare and in this role it was the perfect instrument.
Herman was a big man, strong and fearless, and he loved and knew the gun he carried passionately. He could do amazing things with it. Now he rose, wearing two bandoliers with loaded magazines Mexican style across his body over his suit coat, the gun locked into his side and pinned by his strong right forearm, which pressed it tightly against him. His reflexes were superb. He fired half a magazine and the burst sped exactly to the gully from which he’d seen the original tracers come. The burst lifted a stitch of dust. No man could do it better and the shame of Herman’s life was that he’d not been a BAR man in Europe or the Pacific, for in that classification he’d have been a true genius. It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried; it was that he had too many felony convictions.
He finished up the magazine, stitching a hem of lead where he wanted it exactly. He dropped the empty mag, neatly and deftly inserted a new one, all the while walking, and was back putting out his bursts in less than a second. If that’s where the cowboy was, he wasn’t going anywhere.
• • •
Owney could hear the gunfire, but the men had disappeared into the grass. There seemed to be a lot of moving around. It was like chess with machine guns where you couldn’t quite see the board.
He was nervous, but not terrified. Johnny’s crew was the best; they seemed calm and purposeful. They had succeeded at every enterprise they had tackled, often spectacularly. They were the best armed robbers in America, fearless, famous, quality people, stars in their own universe. They would get him. He knew it. They would get him.
But they wouldn’t.
He knew that too, at least somewhere deep inside.
Who was this guy? Where was he from? Why was he so good?
It unnerved him. He had been hunted by Vincent Mad Dog Coll. He was the ace of aces, Owney Killer Maddox, from the East Side. He had shot it out with the Hudson Dusters in 1913, one man against eight, and walked out unhurt, leaving the dying and the wounded behind him. He, Owney, had walked out spry as a dancer, stopped to reset his carnation in his lapel, and gone out for a drink with some other fellows.
Who could scare him? Who had the audacity? Who was this guy?
• • •
The BAR bursts ripped up clouds of dust and dirt. The gully filled with grittiness, so that you almost could not breathe. If Earl had been where Herman thought he was, he would indeed have been one cooked fella. The noise, the ricochets, the grit, the supersonic bits of stone and vegetable matter, the sheer danger—all would have shaken even the toughest of individuals.
But Earl had shimmied desperately forward only a matter of a few yards and found a rotted log behind which to hide, even if he knew it was wholly unable to stop the heavy .30s that might have flown his way.
He now did the unthinkable. Instead of seizing the opportunity to put distance between himself and the shooters who were closing in from all sides, he did exactly what they expected him to do, which was nothing. That’s what they wanted him to do. He did it. He just didn’t do it where they wanted him to do it, not quite. He knew that as the BAR fire kept him nominally pinned, some others would be entering the dry, higher grass of the hillside, in order to get elevation on his position and bring even more killing power. That’s exactly what he wanted.
Methodically, he began to tug at the stem of a bush that had grown up just in front of the log.
• • •
Jack Bell and Red Brown reached the edge of the hillside, still well hidden. They were rewarded for their efforts.
“Will ya look at that,” said Ding-Dong. “Just what the doctor ordered.”
“If it was a dame, I’d marry it,” said Red, who actually had several wives, so one more wouldn’t hurt a bit.
What they saw was a kind of crest running vertically up the hill, one of those strange rills for which only a geologist could give an adequate explanation. What it meant for the two gunmen was a clear easy climb up to the top of the hill, well protected by the geographical impediment from the gunfire of their opponent.
“Okay,” said Jack, “you cover me. I’m going to make a dash, then I’ll cover you and you make yours.”
“Gotcha,” said Red.
Both men rose. Jack dashed the twenty or so yards to the beginning of the spine of elevation, even as Red stood and hosepiped twenty-five rounds down the line of the hill, into the area where Herman’s bullets had been striking. His too tore clouds of earth upward, and sent grit whistling through the air.
As he fired the last, his partner made it, righted himself, set up close over the ridge, and fired a blast. Red rose under cover of the fire, and sprinted till he was safe.
Both men drew back, breathing hard.
They looked up the hill. Alongside the ridge, it was about two hundred feet up through tall yellow grass, though it was protected the whole way. About halfway wa
s a small strange group of stunted trees, yellowed and sinewy, then another hundred feet to the crest.
“Johnny,” Red cried. “We’re going up.”
“Good move,” said Ding-Dong. “He’ll wait for us, we’ll get up there, we’ll have real good vision on the guy, we can take him or we can pin him while Johnny and Herman move in on him.”
“Johnny’s a fuckin’ genius.”
• • •
Herman couldn’t be but a hundred or so feet from the edge of the field and the beginning of the hill. His BAR was almost too hot to touch. He’d sprayed steadily for the past five minutes, until he got close enough. He’d seen nothing.
Maybe he’s dead. Maybe I hit him. Maybe he’s bled out. If he’d gone another way, he’d have run into Johnny.
Nah. He’s in there. He got himself into a jam, he’s scared, but he’s waiting. He’s a brave guy. He’s a smart guy, but one on five was just too many. He’s in there. He can’t move. He’s real close.
He heard the gunfire from far to the right and judged that it was covering fire from Red and Ding-Dong. Red’s yell came a second later.
That was it. If they got above him, the guy was screwed. They could bring fire on him and if they didn’t kill him, he’d have to move. Herman would bring him down if he moved.
Herman snapped in a new magazine, waiting for the guy to move. He stood in a semicrouch and was so strong that the fourteen-pound automatic rifle felt light and feathery to the touch. He looked over its sights, through a screen of grass, searching for signs of movement.
He saw nothing, but given the source of the fire, given the speedy response on his part and the volume of fire he had poured in, the man could not have gotten away, unless there were secret tunnels or something, but there were only secret tunnels in movies.
Be patient, he told himself.
• • •
Johnny worked his way around in a wide arc to the base of the hill. He was possibly a hundred yards behind the cowboy’s position. He squatted in the grass. He hadn’t fired yet. He had a full drum, one of the big ones, with a hundred rounds. He could fire single shots, doubles, triples, even quadruples and quintuples if he had to, so exquisite was his trigger control. He could hold one hundred rounds in a four-inch circle in a fifty-yard silhouette if he had to. He could shoot skeet or trap with a Thompson if he had to. He was the best tommy-gunner in the world.