White Wolf McLeod Page 17

  He then retraced his steps and walked down the corridors through which his adversary had just advanced and found himself in an area that he recalled from the first time he entered the house. Within moments, he was at the door of the inner sanctum, but the door’s thickness prevented him from discovering if anyone remained inside. He put the earpiece back into his ear and turned on the radio. He heard not a sound.

  The door was unlocked, and he entered cautiously. A single lamp on Michael’s desk poorly illuminated the room, just enough for someone to turn on the additional lights. For McLeod, it was all the light he needed.

  The folder that had been given to him to read was lying on the desk, and it still contained the incriminating evidence he had sought against both Andrew Prescott and Senator Laughlin. He removed the contents, folded them up, and put them in his pocket. He then reached for a pen sitting in a gold-plated stand and scribbled a note for Michael: “A deal is a deal. You’ll be hearing from us, as promised.”

  Then he had one more task to accomplish: the retrieval of his hat and coat before making good his exit.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MARY’S RESCUE

  “HE WAS HERE!” Michael exploded in front of his assembled men in the inner sanctum. “One gawd-damned fricking Indian! And none of you guys saw him! How did he get by you, I wanna know? How the devil did he get into my house? What the hell am I paying you bastards for?”

  McLeod could sense the intense anger in the man as he listened over the radio. He could not help but smile.

  “He pulled the simplest trick out of the book!” Michael continued his tirade. “And you idiots fell for it!”

  “He’s uncanny, sir!” an unidentified henchman remarked. “He didn’t leave any footprints! It was like the guy could fly!”

  “You moron! Don’t give me that shit!” Michael screamed at him. “He’s just one man, and already he’s killed four of you! Somebody tell me what you’re going to do!” McLeod pictured the Don turning on Kazinsky. “And don’t you go telling me that he’s an Indian, gawd-damn it! We kicked their collective asses from coast to coast, and there was a whole bunch of them then! So don’t you go telling me that we can’t track down one man!”

  “We will find him,” Kazinsky replied in a tired and strained voice.

  “You had gawd-damned better find him!” Michael shot back. “He’s got those papers! Our original papers! Do you know how damning those can be in the wrong hands?”

  “If we can figure out where he might be headed, we can cut him off at the pass, so to speak,” Kazinsky stated lamely.

  “I’m not interested in any cowboy-and-Indian talk right now, Ronald. There are only a few ways out of this country: the roads and the airport. If he tries backpacking it across the mountains or the desert, he’s going to die either of cold, hunger, or thirst. And we still won’t have those papers!”

  “He might try to reach the woman,” Kazinsky suggested, trying to be more helpful.

  “Why?” Michael demanded irritably.

  “I can come up with two possibilities,” the lawyer answered. “One, he might try to use her as protection. Second, as you suggested earlier, he might be working with the Feds and brought her in as security. Either way, he’s tied to her. He needs her.”

  “Where is the woman now?”

  “Our police have her at the cabin.”

  “Good. Leave her there for now,” Michael decided. “If he decides to go there, O’Reilly and Sandinista will take care of him. Telephone them and warn them that Wolf is on the loose.” He paused in his planning. “How do we know that Wolf knows where the cabin is?”

  “We don’t,” Kazinsky admitted, warming up to an idea. “That could work in our favor, actually. Maybe we should lead him to it. That way, we can have an ambush ready for him when he arrives.”

  The silence that followed impressed McLeod that Michael was mulling the idea over. Finally, he concurred. “Do it. In the meantime, I want these woods scoured. And don’t forget the dogs.”

  McLeod heard the war-meeting break up and turned off the radio. He was going to have to think up some counter strategy to keep his edge on his adversaries. He wondered if he should leave a trail for them to find. “Divide and conquer,” his favorite general used to say. What he would not give to have Sitting Bull’s cavalry right now at his beck and call.

  In the heat of battle, even the most well-laid plans of men will go astray. That is why contingencies were invented. It would be nice if the adversary were stupid enough to blunder exactly when and where you wanted him to, but generally the enemy was just as smart and clever as you. And he had his own agenda and contingency plans to not only thwart your own plans but trip you up as well. That meant that other factors had to be considered and used to your best advantage in an attempt to tilt the scales in your favor. McLeod was out-manned, outgunned, and lacked a supply train. However, he was an Indian, which meant that he could live off the land almost indefinitely, and he could use the land to his advantage to at least even the odds. He was confident that his affinity with the land would overcome any disadvantage he had in numbers and weapons.

  Four teams of men were sent out to track him. Three were comprised of four henchmen. The fourth added three hunting dogs as a complement. Three more thugs piled into one of the family-owned cars and drove out of the compound, their destination the cabin. McLeod witnessed their chess moves from his vantage point and began to play out his counter strategy. Since neither team had any idea where he had gone, they decided to each take a cardinal point leading away from the compound. As luck would have it, the team with the dogs headed towards him.

  The dogs were howling and baying as the team pursuing him started out. At first they were confused, since McLeod had virtually stepped all around the area as well as inside the compound. But they soon caught his scent leading away from the wall and strained at their leashes, pulling their handler deeper into the woods.

  “You sure the dogs know where they are going?” one of the goons asked.

  “These dogs are born killers,” their handler answered back. “He either came this way or went this way. We’ll know soon enough.”

  The dogs could have been a problem for any ordinary fugitive. McLeod knew that he could not outrun them. He would have to deal with them when the time came, but he preferred to separate them from the men. He could handle himself with either, but the combination was probably more than even he could manage. He had to convince the trainer to release them, so he removed his snowshoes and walked three paces, allowing his feet to sink into the deep snow. Then he put his shoes back on and started running towards higher ground.

  “He’s been here!” one of the trackers exclaimed, when they had all reached the deep impressions in the snow.

  “So, how did he make those tracks there and nowhere else?” another of the goons asked, his voice unsteady and a little fearful.

  “I don’t care,” the handler spat. “But he can’t be too far ahead. I think it’s time for the dogs to do their work.” He released the restraining clips on the straps, and the dogs scampered eagerly towards their prey, yelping and braying in anticipation.

  McLeod met them calmly just over a natural rise in the terrain. One moment the dogs were clawing their way through the impeding snow, foam and spittle dripping from their jagged jaws. The next, they were standing stock still facing the Marshal, their jaws shut, and their tails tucked between their legs.

  “Don’t follow me,” McLeod told them, his voice gravelly like a hound’s growl, “and you live. Go back home. Forget you even saw me.”

  What the dogs saw could not have been detected by the human eye. They recognized the power accompanied by an immense projection of the she-wolf’s spirit hovering around McLeod, and fear gripped their hearts. Most White Men consider animals to be dumb, easily trained to submit to domestication or to become killing machines. Their trainer thought he could control these animals to carry out his wishes at any given moment. But an animal is not stupid,
and he will bite the hand that feeds him if he feels that the human attempting to control him acts stupid. Also, they recognize the spirits that form the land and sit at the hearts of all the land’s creatures. They bow to the will of these spirits because they are akin to these spirits, and no human being, White or Red, can contravene the will of these spirits once it is made known to the animal. The dogs felt and heard the she-wolf’s commands, and crying as if they had just been physically whipped, they turned and fled in the opposite direction. And they did not stop running until they had reached their kennels back at the mansion.

  The trainer cursed at them as they passed by him at a lope and even threw the leashes at them in an attempt to get them to stop. Then he started running after them, shouting obscenities until he was red in the face, and reducing the posse to three.

  The other three men laughed at the sight and cussed alternately, but they had no other option than to continue forward. They did not know what had turned the dogs, but they surmised that a mere man could not have accomplished the fact. It had to be a bear or some sort, they reasoned, not realizing that in the dead of winter all the bears were still deep in hibernation. They finally reached the rise where the dogs had gained and then retreated, gauging from the muddled tracks in the snow that they had left. They looked down into the gully, but they could not detect any telltale sign of McLeod or the supposed animal that had spooked the dogs.

  “Must have been a ghost!” one of the men joked.

  “Come on,” the self-appointed leader of the three said gruffly. “Let’s get atop that other rise. Maybe we’ll see something up there.”

  As they descended into the gully and scampered up the other side, none of them realized that they had just stepped on McLeod’s hiding place where he had buried himself in the snow. He could hear them talking and walking. He even heard one of them light up a cigarette and coughing as the warm smoke filled his lungs. He waited until they had climbed the rise and moved further away before he sat up, wiped the snow from his face, and began to follow after them.

  PART OF WHITE Wolf’s airborne military training included survival training should he ever have to bail out over unfriendly territory. After a day with the instructors in the middle of the snow-covered wilderness of Washington State, he realized that they knew but half of what he did about surviving in and living off the land. The other trainees were city boys, as he called them, even the ones who had grown up on a farm. Like his two brothers, they were all afraid of grass.

  He suffered the two days of hands-on survival training and looked forward to putting his instructors to the test. He was handed a pair of snowshoes, as was each trainee, but only he, along with the instructors, knew how to properly use them. In fact, he had grown up with them, and he doubted that any one of his instructors could keep up with him in a race, for he could run in these snowshoes about as fast as a rabbit in the snow.

  Instructions were given to four leaders picked from among the trainees as to their destination, the safehouse where “friendly forces” would be waiting to take them out of the wilderness and “unfriendly” territory. The instructors would act as aggressor to pick them up one by one as prisoners, simulating an actual situation. They boasted that no one had successfully evaded them and completed the course without getting caught.

  White Wolf knew right off that he would have to make the trek by himself, for if he remained with any of the other trainees, he would be caught for sure. He was in the training area for four days, and he was never spotted. He watched his instructors catch the other trainees and load them into a truck, which ferried them to the safehouse, all in the space of the first day. For four days, then, he led the instructors on a merry chase, and they began to worry about having lost a trainee for the first time on their watch. Little did they realize that in their search, they had often stood right on top of him, wondering where he had disappeared.

  Not knowing the exact location of the destination where they were all supposed to meet and finally tiring of his game, he decided to follow two of the instructors back to a group of wooden houses set inside a clearing. Just when they were about to give up on him and report an accident to their superior, he opened the door to the building where they had gathered and announced himself.

  “Just where the hell have you been,” the senior instructor demanded.

  “Following you,” he replied with a grin.

  “How did you survive out there for four days without any food or water?” another queried him suspiciously.

  ‘I lived off the land. The rabbits were pretty good. Sorry I didn’t bring back any to share.”

  “You’re lying! You cheated somehow!” the senior instructor accused hotly.

  “You White Men couldn’t find an elephant out there, even if he jumped down on you from the trees!” White Wolf shot back.

  “I’m gonna kill the son of a bitch,” one of the younger instructors threatened.

  “You can try,” White Wolf warned and prepared himself for some fun. Unfortunately, none of the instructors followed up their sentiment with any action.

  THE FOREST’S TRANQUILITY was shattered by three gunshots. The other teams, as well as Michael and the others remaining at the mansion, perked up at the unnatural sounds and stopped whatever they were doing. The eerie silence that followed seemed even more deafening than the shots, for the forest was filled with uncertainty. Then as one, the other three teams began to move back towards the mansion to discover what had just happened, each hoping that one of them had found their man.

  McLeod rifled the pockets of the three dead men and relieved them of their weapons. He was beginning to assemble quite a small arsenal. He now had four pistols, all .38’s, and two shotguns, and he had been able to scrounge a fair amount of ammunition to keep him amply supplied for a short time. He decided that one shotgun was sufficient and used the other to inscribe a message in the snow: “this way” with four arrows in opposite directions to further frustrate his enemy. Then he began walking in the same general direction he had been originally heading, which more or less paralleled the road he searched for that he hoped would lead him to the cabin.

  By the time the other three teams met at the mansion, he had already covered a great deal of ground. More importantly, he had given himself a head start of at least two hours against another search. The problem was, he did not know where he wanted to go. He knew that he had to reach the cabin Michael had indicated, but he did not know its location. That it could be reached by car meant that it had to be close to a road. If he was following the right road, he might be disadvantaging himself from the natural defenses of the terrain. Then again, time was running against him: the longer it took him to find Mary, the smaller the chance he would find her alive.

  He turned on the radio to see if he could pick up any signal. But the listening device was a low-powered bug, and he was too far away from the house. He turned it off and put it back in his pocket. The last thing he wanted to do was litter the landscape with something that a White Man had made.

  He heard the car long before he saw the road. It seemed to be chugging slowly along, fighting a lack of solid traction on the road’s surface because of the ice and snow. He crawled amongst the trees to a point where he could look down with relative obscurity onto the road. The car was coming up the road towards him. He had trekked through the forest for about three hours, taking time to catch a fat rabbit unawares with his shoelaces as a snare. He had built a small smokeless fire and enjoyed the roasted rabbit as his lunch, washing it down with a couple handfuls of snow that slowly melted and warmed in his mouth. His belly satisfied, he was ready for action. He remembered his Grandfather telling him that an Indian with a full stomach is not only a slow Indian but also one who cannot run very far.

  Four of Michael’s henchmen rode in the car, just as McLeod suspected. Three of them, riding as passengers, seemed intent on peering out windows heavily tainted by condensation at the countryside as the driver slowly maneuvered up the road. McLeod lau
ghed to himself at the absurdity of the White Men. They certainly were not going to find him while they kept themselves all snug and warm in a noisy automobile. His Indian nature wondered whether or not he should keep a few White Men around just for laughs after his people retook the land. Nah! he quickly decided. Too much trouble. The upkeep would be too expensive. Besides, when you know something can pollute the land, you get rid of it.

  At least McLeod knew now that he was on the right track. He waited for the car to pass beyond his hiding place before moving away from the road. All he had to do now was keep the road to his left and let the bad guys lead him to the cabin. He started jogging just to keep the car close. Sometimes he ran apace with the sound of the vehicle; other times, he found himself ahead of it, and he had to slow down and wait for it to catch up. Once, McLeod’s self-confidence almost led him into trouble. He found himself too close to the road and almost leaped into a tiny gorge carved out by the combination of running water and the construction of the road. He stopped himself just in time from falling into it, but the timing of the mishap coincided with the car passing the same spot. He flung himself backwards and rolled several times before stopping to listen.

  Car doors opened, and at least three of the occupants got out, so his ears told him.

  “I could have sworn I saw something,” one of them said apprehensively.

  “It could have been anything,” another man remarked disdainfully.

  “How could you have seen anything?” a third man complained. “I can’t see a damned thing. The windows keep getting all fogged up.”

  “I told you, I saw something!” the first speaker insisted.

  “Cork it!” the second speaker spat. “We’ll be at the cabin soon enough. And if he hasn’t been there, fine. At least we’ll get a chance to prepare a warm welcome for him.”

  “Maybe we ought to go up there and check?” the first man suggested, although by the tone of his voice he was not volunteering.