Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Below and to the south, the supply camp had erupted. Riders were mounting, kicking their horses into a gallop toward the wash where the Rangers had been spotted.
Cook fires were left behind as men scrambled for weapons. The thick dust of the mobilization rose in a yellow-brown cloud against the late afternoon light, and the bugle sounded again, two short blasts that Danny translated without being asked.
“Pursuit. All riders.”
The ridge curved west, and Maddox followed it, staying below the skyline, using the broken rock for cover.
A trail cut down the north face of the ridge into a narrow arroyo choked with mesquite and catclaw.
He dropped into it without hesitating, and the others followed, sliding down the loose scree on their heels.
The arroyo ran north, twisting between walls of packed earth and stone.
They moved fast, the sound of pursuit growing behind them: hoofbeats and shouting and the occasional crack of a rifle fired blind.
The bullets hit nothing. The arroyo’s curves kept them out of the line of fire, and the riders could not follow on horseback through the narrow, brush-choked channel.
They emerged from the arroyo onto open ground, a flat expanse of pale caliche broken by scattered boulders and the dry channel of a seasonal wash. The sun was dropping fast now; the shadows lengthening across the desert floor, and the air had lost its worst heat.
Maddox dropped behind the nearest boulder, a head-high chunk of sandstone worn smooth by wind, and brought his Winchester up, covering the arroyo mouth. The rock was warm against his back and smelled of dust and lichens baked dry by decades of sunshine.
Danny took a position ten yards to the right, wedged between two smaller rocks with a clean line of fire back to the arroyo.
Boone and Cobb came behind him, breathing hard, sweat running down their faces.
Cobb had his hand pressed to his calf, the old graze reopened by the run, fresh blood darkening his boot.
Two riders burst from the arroyo at a gallop.
Maddox put a round into the ground in front of the lead horse.
The animal reared and threw its rider, who hit the dirt and rolled.
The second rider hauled up, fighting his horse, and Danny fired a shot that clipped the brim of his hat.
Both men scrambled for cover behind the arroyo walls.
More riders appeared at the mouth of the arroyo, saw the boulder field, and pulled back. Angry shouts echoed as they reorganized, voices raised. The pursuit had stalled. For the moment.
“They’ll flank us,” Danny said. “Give them ten minutes and they’ll have riders on both sides of this wash.”
“Then we don’t give them ten minutes.” Maddox scanned the ground to the north. Rolling hills, scattered brush, the terrain broken enough to offer concealment if they moved fast. “Boone, Cobb, go north along the wash. Danny and I will cover.”
Boone grabbed Cobb, and they moved, running low along the dry wash bed. The man who had been thrown from his horse was trying to crawl back toward the arroyo. He was young, dark-haired, wearing a leather vest over a cotton shirt that was too big for him. Not a soldier’s clothes. A farmer’s clothes.
More riders were coming around the west side of the ridge. Danny counted five, spread wide, moving at a canter. They had flanked faster than expected.
“Time to go,” Maddox said.
They ran. Danny’s lungs burned and his legs ached from days of walking and short rations and the relentless, grinding heat. Behind them, riders closed the distance. Rifles cracked. Bullets kicked up dust around their feet.
Then Boone appeared at the top of the next rise, firing over their heads at the pursuers.
His Winchester barked three times in rapid succession; controlled shots aimed at the lead riders.
The first round struck the ground under the lead horse’s hooves, and the animal shied hard left, throwing its rider into the path of the horse behind.
The second round took a hat off a man’s head while the third punched into a saddle with a sound like a hammer striking leather.
The column swerved and slowed. Riders pulled up, their horses dancing sideways, uncertain now, the confidence of the pursuit replaced by the sudden awareness that someone ahead was shooting straight.
In that moment of hesitation, Maddox and Danny covered the last fifty yards and threw themselves behind the rise, sliding down the reverse slope on loose gravel and coming to rest beside Cobb, who was already prone with his rifle trained south.
Boone was grinning behind the rise. Not a pleasant grin. The grin a man wore when the odds were desperate, and the fight was simple and the only thing left to do was the work he had trained a lifetime for.
Beside him, on the ground, face-down in the dirt with his hands tied behind his back, lay a man.
Not a farmer. This one wore cavalry boots and a pistol belt with a well-oiled holster.
His shirt was clean, and his beard was trimmed, and when Boone rolled him over, the man’s eyes were sharp and furious.
“Caught him coming around the west flank,” Boone said. “Riding separate from the others, giving orders. Officer’s horse, officer’s gear. Pulled him right off the saddle.”
“A lieutenant,” Danny said, recognizing the rank.
The man spat into the dust and said something in Spanish that Danny translated without emotion.
“He says Calderon will kill us all.”
“Calderon can try.” Maddox crouched beside the prisoner. The sounds of pursuit were fading. The riders had lost their momentum, and the broken terrain was working against them. They had minutes, no more, before the next push.
“Tell him we don’t have time for threats. No patience for them either. If he wants to live through the next hour, he talks.”
Danny translated, keeping his voice flat and neutral, the words stripped of everything except the message.
The lieutenant stared at Maddox with open contempt.
Then his eyes moved to the empty desert around them, to the dark ridgeline where his comrades had lost the trail, to the four Rangers with their dirty faces and their steady rifles.
Something in that calculation shifted his expression. The contempt faded. What replaced it was not fear, exactly, but a pragmatic reassessment of the situation. He was a man who understood leverage, and he had none.
He talked. Slowly at first, grudgingly, and then faster, the words poured out as if a dam had broken.
The supply camp they had scouted was one of three positioned along Calderon’s supply line, each one feeding the main force with food, ammunition, and fresh horses. The camps were spaced a day’s ride apart, and runners carried messages between them.
Camped at a ruined Spanish mission ten miles south in the valley between the twin buttes was the main force. Calderon lived there. He had made the mission his headquarters, his throne room, the center of his growing kingdom.
And he planned to move north within three days. Not another raid. Not another burned village. He intended to seize an American town, hold it, and declare it the northern capital of his kingdom. The target was a settlement called Rio Seco, forty miles north of the border.
Danny translated, and the words fell like stones.
“A town seizure,” Maddox said. “Not a raid. An occupation.”
The lieutenant confirmed. Calderon had been planning this for months. The raids, the supply seizures, the recruitment, all of it had been a preparation for this moment.
He would cross the Rio Grande with his full force, take Rio Seco, fortify it, and dare the American government to remove him. By the time Washington responded, he would be dug in with two hundred men and enough supplies to hold for weeks.
Danny felt the weight of the translation settle over the group. These were not words he had expected to speak. No raids. Not burned villages. A planned seizure of American territory by a foreign army.
The stakes had just jumped from pursuing a bandit to preventing an invasion, and the four men who stood between Calderon and his aim were sunburned, half-starved, and on foot in a desert that wanted them dead.
Maddox stood. His face gave away nothing, but his body had gone still in a way that told Danny the captain’s mind was working at full speed, turning the information over, testing it against what they knew, calculating what it meant for what to do next.
“The mission,” Maddox said. “That’s where Calderon is now?”
The lieutenant nodded.
“How far?”
“Ten miles south. In the valley between the twin buttes. You cannot miss it. The walls still stand.”
Maddox looked at Danny, at Boone, at Cobb. Four men on foot in a foreign country, being hunted by riders who knew the ground, with a prisoner they could not release, and a timeline measured in days.
“We need to see that mission,” he said.
They bound the lieutenant’s hands with rawhide and moved north first, putting distance between themselves and the supply camp.
The lieutenant walked between Boone and Cobb, stumbling on the rocky ground, his fury replaced by a sullen, watchful silence.
When the sounds of pursuit had faded to nothing and the desert lay quiet and empty around them, Maddox called a halt on a low rise that offered a view in every direction.
To the south, through the fading light, they could see the twin buttes the lieutenant had described. Two flat-topped hills rising from the desert floor, dark against the orange sky. Between them, barely visible at this distance, were the outlines of walls and a tower.
The ruined mission. Calderon’s base.
And around it, spread across the valley floor, the glow of cook fires. Dozens of them, maybe a hundred, each one marking a cluster of men and horses, and weapons. The fires stretched from the base of one butte to the other, filling the valley with flickering points of light.
The encampment was real. The threat was real. And three days from now, if nothing had changed, that army would ford the Rio Grande and plant Calderon’s gold crown on American soil.
Maddox looked at the fire for a long time. The wind had picked up, carrying the faint sound of voices and the smell of cooking smoke from the valley below. A horse whinnied. A man laughed. The sounds of an army at ease, confident in its numbers, confident in its king.
Then he looked at his men. Boone, solid and patient, waited for orders. Danny, reading the terrain with those sharp, dark eyes. Cobb, standing straight despite the pain in his leg, his freckled face set with a determination that had not been there a week ago.
“We’re not going north,” he said. “We’re going closer. I want to see that mission. I want to see Calderon. And then we’re going to figure out how to stop him.”
Nobody asked how. Not yet. How was a problem for tomorrow. Tonight, the mission’s walls glowed in the firelight, and the man who called himself a king slept inside them.
Maddox intended to ensure he never slept soundly again.