Deathwatch by Robb White Read Free Book Online Page A

up the sloping wall of the terrace and, once on it, turn the Jeep so that it was facing him. Madec got out and although Ben could not see exactly what he was doing, it appeared that he was slowly scanning the area ahead of him.
    Ben had studied that butte and cut terrace in the moonlight, realizing that its location made it a serious threat to anything he might want to do. He had hoped that Madec, without the panorama he had, would not recognize the advantage the terrace would give him.
    It depressed Ben to see the Jeep parked there; Madec now back under the shelter of the roof, invisible in the heavy shadow.
    From the terrace Madec could see the entire south side of Ben’s little mountain range, from the eastern to the western end. He could also see the wide stretch of open desert between Ben’s small range and the high ranges in the distance which surrounded this egg-shaped bowl of desert.
    From Madec’s vantage point the only area he could not see was to the north of the mountain range.
    A man with sufficient water and food, with clothing to protect him from the sun, with good boots on uninjured feet and sunglasses to keep his eyes from burning out, could escape from Madec by simply going down the north side of the mountains and hiking out across the desert, heading due north so as to keep the mountains between him and Madec.
    An injured man, almost naked, with no water and no food, could not venture into that northern area. For at least a hundred miles there was nothing but open desert, worn and gently rolling, the surface of the ground littered with small rocks and stones with, here and there, the sprouts of the tenacious and enduring desert plants.
    There would be no catch basins of water out there. There were not even any barrel cactus, the water-soaked flesh of which could keep a man alive—provided he could somehow cut through the leather-tough skin of the plant.
    To the north was the only route he could take and not be seen by Madec, but as things stood now with almost twenty-four of his forty-eight hours of life already gone, he could not survive ten of those hundred long miles.
    Ben realized that Madec must have come to the same conclusion, and so he sat watching through the binoculars, knowing that Ben had only three choices:
    To stay where he was, some water near him but made unavailable to him by the Hornet.
    To come down from the mountains and start walking across the desert to the east. (Madec would not even have to move the Jeep but could just sit up there on the cut terrace and watch Ben die somewhere out in those empty sixty-five miles.)
    Or to come down and walk to the west. (Naked and with no water there was small difference between sixty-five miles one way and thirty-five the other.)
    Almost numb to the aggravation of these flies walking around on his face, Ben looked across through the heat-shimmering air at the white Jeep. It seemed poised and ready to go—to follow him, grinding along slowly in four-wheel drive.
    Ben tried to remember how much water Madec had but gave up, realizing that he had far more than enough to outlast him.
    And there was gas enough to keep the Jeep roaming around for at least a hundred miles infour-wheel, two hundred in two-wheel.
    Mechanics, machines, supplies were not a part of this game. In the final analysis, even the guns were not a part of it.
    Sitting in the hot, still heat, the flies crawling endlessly on him, Ben felt everything dropping away.
    He thought of search parties he had been on looking for tourists who had left the main highways to do a little rock-hounding or have a picnic. People who had allowed some small accident like a stalled car or a broken axle to kill them.
    He remembered a little family of four, parents and two children, who had died on the desert within sight of the highway.
    That family had done everything wrong. When their car stalled and they couldn’t get it started again they had walked away from it, leaving five or six gallons of dirty