(eng) Patrick Tilley by Fade Out (retail)

Author:Fade Out (retail) [Out, Fade]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Wednesday/September 12

CROW RIDGE/MONTANA

Heartened by Friday’s apparent timidity, Max and Wedderkind hatched a kidnap plot. Now that the drilling was over, Max had reverted to his real job, which was to act as ‘front man’ in the Corporation’s dealings with outside contractors and local suppliers in nearby Miles City. Whenever possible, however, he preferred to stay up on the Ridge instead of down at the base camp, in the hope of seeing some action.

Connors had been surprised to learn from Wetherby that Max had graduated with honours in geology, and that two of the other Texans had degrees in mining engineering. Their erudition was buried beneath a hefty layer of brawn. Three of them were even bigger than Max, and they all looked as if they had been raised on a steady diet of Saturday-night fistfights.

When Connors had remarked on this one evening in the canteen, Gilligan, another of the engineers, had said, ‘You want to take a trip to Butte. The Swedes and the Irish there would make these guys look like marshmallows.’ The big mining town lay close up against the Rockies in western Montana. Gilligan had been born there, moving later to Seattle. Unless you were King Kong, Butte sounded like a good place to stay out of. Especially on a Saturday night.

Marshmallows or not, besides being experienced wildcatters, Max and his Texans were expert in handling a wide range of mechanical mining and earth-moving equipment. It was this skill that Wedderkind planned to make use of.

They waited until Friday came out for his morning walk. Then, when he was about two hundred yards from Crusoe, the Texans, under Max’s direction, surrounded him with four bulldozers. Friday shrank back to consider the situation, and his body slowly rotated through 360 degrees as his eye pod scanned the huge blades that had suddenly walled him in. There was a gap at each corner large enough for a man to slip through but too narrow for Friday. He clicked rapidly for about a minute, then attempted to climb up one of the blades. The move had been anticipated. The driver of the bulldozer jiggled the blade up and down and shook Friday off.

Wedderkind and Connors stood on the shaking roof of the cab to watch what was happening. Despite his revulsion, Connors couldn’t resist a feeling of sympathy for Friday now that he was hemmed in and apparently helpless.

Wedderkind called down to Max who was by the side of the cab, ‘Tell your boys to go easy, we don’t want to crush him.’

Max relayed the message through cupped hands.

Retreating from the first blade, Friday doggedly tried to climb the other three walls of his pen, and was shaken off. On the fourth attempt, he almost got over. The driver, a man called T-Bone, raised and lowered the blade in rapid succession as Friday balanced his body on top of the blade and tried to get his four left legs on to the hood of the bulldozer. His four right legs scrabbled over the blade, but each time it thumped back on the ground he lost his grip.

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