We hauled our luggage some distance off the trail and concealed it in a mess of brush and boulders after first making sure we weren't disturbing any rattlesnakes at their afternoon siestas. It looked like that kind of a place. Then, with the rifle and supplies, we hunted up a place where we could climb to the top of the cliff, unseen from the entrance to the canyon. The purpose of the operation was, if possible, to establish a marksman on the canyon rim above von Sachs' camp: an outside man-or girl-to support the two inside agents at the critical moment.
The approach reminded me, somehow, of Costa Verde. There was the hostile company, the danger ahead, the rifle banging my back as I climbed and hiked, and the wild, unfamiliar landscape. I found that my leg was giving me much less trouble; otherwise, the only real difference was in the humidity, and in the fact that instead of being accompanied by a score of trained fighting men, I had with me only one small, resentful girl.
"Well, that should be about it," I said at last, stopping to catch my breath. "If Gerda Landwehr's dope was correct, and Catherine transmitted it accurately, and the damn canyon doesn't wiggle around too much, we should be just about opposite those cliff dwellings. The canyon edge should be right up ahead. Wait here." I glanced at her. "Go easy on that water. It's all we have."
She gave me a look of annoyance, capped the canteen, and moved over to sit sulkily in the shade of a rock. Well, I hadn't come down into Mexico for love and affection. I moved ahead slowly toward where the canyon ought to be if I hadn't lost my bearings completely during the climb. One moment I was looking at what seemed to be just a continuous rocky mountainside, but when I took another step forward, the ground opened up practically at my feet.
I got down and crawled to the canyon edge and looked at the Caves of Copala as a hostile Indian scout might have, centuries before. But it wasn't the caves across the way that caught my attention first. It was the thing standing in the cottonwood grove upstream with a camouflage net over it to hide it from aerial observation: a thing that looked like a gigantic.300 Magnum cartridge.
I'd been wondering just what kind of heavy equipment von Sachs had been dragging up into his mountain stronghold. Now I knew.
XX
THERE WAS A SCUFFLING sound as Sheila crawled up beside me. She was silent for quite a long interval. When she spoke, the antagonism was completely gone from her voice, as if she'd realized at last that this was no time for personal grievances.
"What is it?" she whispered.
"You should know," I said. "You're the one who spotted it for us in the first place."
"Oh," she said. "That thing. I just saw it come through the village on a trailer. I never saw it set up. But that was over a thousand miles south. How did they get it here?"
"That," I said, "is a damn good question."
I studied the scene below. The caverns across the way had been elaborated by ancient masons working with rocks and mud mortar until they formed a kind of apartment complex in the face of the canyon wall, reached by crude wooden ladders. Men were obviously living up there now, perhaps for the first time in centuries. Below the cave dwellings, out in the open, was a tent, a campfire, a few men, a couple of pickup trucks, and a blue Volkswagen sedan. There was no sign of a blonde woman in shorts, and at the moment I wasn't interested except to note that she'd made it. At least the car had.
All the stuff in the clearing looked innocent enough for a scientific expedition. A plane flying over would spot nothing out of the ordinary. But there was the missile concealed among the trees upstream; and downstream, before the canyon narrowed again, in another bunch of cottonwoods, was a mass of vehicles disguised by matte camouflage paint. I could make out some vintage jeeps and six-by-six Army trucks, apparently old war-surplus stuff picked up somewhere at a bargain. Down there, also, was the chunky six-wheeled trailer that hauled and controlled the missile, with its antennas and oversized cab.
It wasn't very impressive, aside from the bird. Say at most a couple of hundred armed men and enough vehicles to transport them as far as the beat-up equipment could be made to run. Say, up in the States, small welcoming committees of people like those we'd investigated in Tucson: a surly unemployed mechanic who liked his beer, a knife-packing young pachuco, the fading former mistress of a former Nazi butcher-boy. On the face of it, always discounting the bird, you could hardly call it a menacing display of power.
But there was always the bird-and not only the bird but the fact that they'd got it here. There must have been a ship involved, a difficult embarkation and landing, and countless impossible miles at night over back roads and no roads at all, always under threat of discovery. Guile and bluff and incredible labor were represented by that missile standing in the cottonwoods. People who could accomplish that weren't to be dismissed easily.
"In case they didn't tell you in Washington or you weren't in condition to listen closely," I said, "it's a misplaced Russian toy known as the Rudovic III. It has a nuclear warhead and a twelve-hundred-mile range. That gives it a choice, from here, of any big U.S. city from Los Angeles, California, to Houston, Texas. Maybe farther. My geography is a little sketchy. And controlling this pleasant gadget is our scar-faced ex-Nazi general, with his pocket-sized army and his dreams of greatness, past and future."
"Did you know you were going to find it here?"
"No," I admitted. "Costa Verde reported it missing, but we didn't know whether to believe the report or not. President Avila might have bid it out for his own use and lied about it. I confess I didn't think of the possibility that von Sachs could have grabbed it."
"I suppose-" Sheila hesitated. "I suppose we have to do something about it."
I grimaced. "Well, we could just pop Heinrich from up here and beat it, leaving Catherine to the wolves and the firecracker to whoever wants it. It's a real temptation, now that I look at the setup. I didn't know it was going to be this pretty, like a target range, when I agreed to join our blonde friend inside."
Sheila said in a tentative voice, "Catherine would desert us in an instant if she saw anything to be gained by it."
"I know," I said. "It's just that damn Roman candle that keeps me honest. I caught hell for leaving it once, way down in Central America. This close to the U.S. I've got no choice. I've got to put it out of commission somehow, before some irresponsible jerk down there goes and pushes the wrong button. Come on, let's move back a bit, and get the operation lined up."
In the shade of a boulder well back from the rim I took a sparing drink from the canteen and slipped the rifle off. The leather sling hadn't done my burns any good, and I couldn't help remembering who'd given them to me. It wouldn't really have hurt my conscience greatly to leave Catherine down there in the hands of von Sachs. It was just as well, I guess, that I no longer had a choice.
I pulled the bolt out of the gun, checked the barrel, shoved five shells into the magazine, loaded one into the chamber, and handed the weapon to Sheila along with two boxes of ammunition.
"There you are, Skinny," I said. "You have forty rounds to play with. Well, you fired one back up the road. Thirty-nine."
She said, "Eric-.-"
I said, "The range is point-blank about two thirds of the way across the canyon, but you can't reach the tent or the campfire with hundred per cent accuracy so don't try. You know the man; you've studied the photographs. No matter what happens-I repeat, no matter what happens -don't fire a shot until you can take care of him with absolute certainty. That's your job. Once he's down and you're sure of him, you're on your own. But I'm counting on you to take out von Sachs the minute he wanders close enough. I'll steer him within range if I can. Or Catherine will. It depends on how things work out down there."