Bending over, he poised the knife over Stearns’ leg. Then he cut deep.
Chapter 21
Private Stearns’ scream was immediately echoed by Kelly’s terrified shriek. The girl was standing, her eyes transfixed on the body lying on the table. A soldier moved to comfort her, but she ducked away from him and cried out again.
Sweat beaded on Stryker’s brow and his hands were crimson, slippery, slick, slimy with blood. Tears ran down the cheeks of the younger of the two soldiers holding down Stearns’ arching body, and his lips moved in what might have been a prayer.
Green bile rising in his throat, Stryker sliced deeper, deeper still. Blood spurted from the soldier’s leg, gushing fountains of red, splashing the front of the lieutenant’s shirt.
The firing had stopped. The Apache, as curious as deer, looked at one another, wondering what was going on inside the adobe.
There! Stryker saw the white of bone.
He set the knife aside and picked up the bone saw.
The saw bit into green bone, skidding, making a noise like grinding corn. Stearns was beyond screaming. His mouth was wide-open, but he made no sound.
Breathing heavily, Stryker worked the saw back and forth. He shook stinging salt sweat from his eyes.
My God, would the bone never cut?
Then he was through and he used the knife again. Now it was like cutting fatty pork, greasy and slick.
The leg was free. The stump was red, raw, pumping gore.
“Birchwood!” No time for the military courtesies. “Bring the cleaver.”
The young lieutenant tried the wood and steel handle of the cleaver, jerked his burned hand away, then wrapped a rag around his hand.
“The cleaver, goddamn you!” Stryker yelled.
Stearns was screaming again, bucking wildly against the strong hands of the soldiers holding him.
The boy was in mortal agony, Stryker knew. But worse was to come. He knew that too.
Gingerly taking the hot handle of the cleaver, he quickly shoved the cherry-red steel blade against the raw, scarlet meat of the stump.
Stearns screamed into the sizzling silence. Only once. Then a ringing quiet.
The youngster’s eyes were wide-open, filled with the memory of pain. The two soldiers, feeling the life go out of Stearns, lifted their hands off his shoulders.
Stryker opened his fingers and let the cleaver clang to the floor.
“Sir, his poor heart just give out,” the older of the two soldiers said. “It couldn’t take it no more.”
Lifting bleak eyes to the man, Stryker said nothing. Now the bitter gorge was rising in him and his mouth filled with saliva that tasted like acid.
He turned away, bent over and retched uncontrollably. He threw up everything that was in his stomach, then gagged convulsively on its emptiness.
“Try this, sir.” Birchwood was beside him, a cup of coffee in his hand. “It might help.”
Stryker took the cup and with bloodshot eyes looked over the room. “You men,” he said, “step careful over here. I made a real mess.”
His thoughts turned inward. A mess of everything.
The coffee cup in his hand, Stryker stepped back to Stearns’ body. Seemingly out of nowhere, slow black flies were angling above the bloody stump. He walked into a cell, dragged a blanket off the cot and spread it over the youngster’s body. The soldiers were watching him, their eyes neither accusing nor sympathetic. Just . . . watching.
He felt he had to say something, anything. In the end, all he could manage was “I’m sorry.” Words as inadequate as they sounded.
Stryker hadn’t really expected “You did your best, sir,” or “Sam was too far gone, sir,” but what he didn’t anticipate was total silence. It was not a hostile quiet and in its emptiness it did not apportion blame. Perhaps it was just dull resignation, that and the awareness that come night the moon would rise but they would not see it because they might all be as dead as Private Stearns.
Speaking into the vacuum, Stryker said, “I just wanted all of you to know that I tried.”
This time there was no answering silence. Soldiers shuffled their feet, lit their pipes or stepped to the stove for coffee. The men manning the windows found sudden interest outside. Flies droned and gorged under the table amid the blood puddles. Kelly was sobbing quietly, but Stryker, who did not know how to comfort himself, could do nothing for her.
He looked at his hands, crusted in rust red. There was no water to spare to wash them. Stryker smiled a bitter little smile. Yes, he’d been caught red-handed, demonstrating his lack as a leader and as a man.
The early morning brightened and hard sunlight bladed through the windows, catching up flickering dust motes. In the cruel illumination Stryker’s disfigured face was a fearsome parody of his once handsome features and men did not look at him, or, if they did, turned quickly away, shocked by what they’d seen.
He drank his coffee, his churning belly slowly settling.
Then the Apaches started firing again.
By noon, another soldier was dead and two were wounded, one with a sucking chest wound who could not live. As far as anyone could tell, since the sortie outside, not a single Apache had even been scratched.
The Apache fire was increasing as more warriors, coming up from the south, joined in the battle. As Indian confidence grew, Geronimo had sent in mounted attacks, the warriors boldly riding right up to the adobe. The soldier with the chest wound had been struck by a lance hurled through a window. And, as the whooping Apache rode away, he’d demonstrated his disdain for the marksmanship of those inside by showing them his bare ass.
Stryker could not fault Birchwood’s infantrymen. They were green troops, hastily recruited and trained for the Indian Wars, and this was their first taste of fighting Apaches, a deadly, ruthless enemy much their superior.
Joe Hogg could have made a difference, but Joe was dead. His Henry was propped in a corner and Stryker, ignoring the bullets zinging through the windows, crossed the room and picked up the rifle.
If he could get to one of the saloons, he could lay down a good fire and attack the Apaches from the rear. That would give Birchwood another chance to try a breakout and catch the Apaches off guard. It was a slim chance, but it was the only chance any of them had. If he made it to—
The Apache fire suddenly ceased.
A soldier at the window closest to him was staring outside, his eyes wide, his jaw slack. “What the hell?” the man said.
Stryker stepped to the window and saw what the soldier saw. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.
Chapter 22
A red-haired woman was walking across the dusty, sun-splashed ground toward the adobe.
Her dress was stained and torn and her hair hung over her shoulders in dirty tangles. She walked purposely, neither looking to the left nor right, her eyes fixed on the building.
All Indians, but especially the Apache and Navajo, had a superstitious dread of madness, believing that sufferers had been possessed by a powerful, malevolent demon. One by one they left cover and shrank back from the woman, watching her with black, wary eyes.
She was a nepotonje, a bear watcher, since all understood that the demon often reveals itself in that guise. The more pragmatic Sioux would call her simply, witkowin, crazy woman, but the Apache knew better than that.
The flaming red hair was unmistakable and Stryker recognized her immediately as the silent, staring woman he’d rescued from the Apaches. He assumed she’d have left with the other women from the post, but, deranged as she was, she must have run away and hidden in the hills.
But Jake Allen had found her in the hospital, tried to force himself on her, and she’d killed him. That would explain the gunman’s death, but it shed no light on what he was doing at the abandoned Fort Merit in the first place.