Chapter 3

This man Abner Hofmann is a gold mine! How did we get so lucky!?! Not only did he pick up the data point we were looking for, but he got us four more with no special preparation. If Hofmann can keep up this rate of production, we will have our data years ahead of our projection. I think that we should set him up and let him run. Let's give it a try, anyway.

Lars met me at the return portal. He was bubbling over with good spirits. "Abe, my friend, you have set a new record for pleasing upper management. You have even caught the attention of the Board of Directors! They want to change your mode of assignments to let you run free and pick your own targets. You seem to have an uncanny knack for running into bad guys, and they want to take advantage of that luck while it lasts. Are you up to an extended stay out on assignment?"

I knew I had done a good job on my first real task, but I was a little unsure of how the Organization would take my free lancing with the other four bad guys. It looked like I was in clover as far as management was concerned. It looked like they wanted me to emulate The Lone Ranger. OK, I would do it, but I wanted a few perks to go along with the assignment.

"Sure, I'll do whatever the bosses want, but I would like a few concessions from their side." Lars' face fell at that last announcement, but I didn't let that stop me. "I hate to go around from day to day covered in the same dirt I picked up a week before, so I want R&D to come up with a way for me to shower every night.

"The other thing I want is more comfortable body armor. I'm sure that R&D can come up with torso armor that is just as protective as what I have, but lighter in weight and not so damned hot. The way I sweat inside this armor, I need to scratch, but I can't reach the places that itch without taking the armor off. They have just got to come up with a solution to that problem!"

Lars said, "I'll present your requests through channels the first thing tomorrow. Your current high standing within the Organization (there's that capital O, again) should get you the maximum priority. I'm sure they will get on your requests right away. Meanwhile, I haven't had breakfast, yet, and you look like you could do with a cup of coffee."

Lars was right, by that evening I had added to my camping gear a portable shower. I have no idea how the weird thing works, but it is a marvel. It sets up in only a couple of minutes and produces a shower of water at any temperature I want. I have no idea where the water comes from or where it goes, since there are no pipes. It could be set up in a fancy living room and used without getting the floor wet or needing any sort of external connection! Not only that, just like magic, it folds up into a package about the size of a wad of chewing tobacco. I felt like I had won the lottery with that thing!

The next item on the agenda was the body armor. That took a couple of more days, but it was like wearing a tee-shirt, except that it could cool or heat me as needed. All I had to do was to set a temperature and the shirt would maintain my skin at that temperature! What more could one ask for? On top of that, the shirt had a long tail extending beyond my crotch, so that end of me was protected from bullets, knives, and the weather. Now, I was really in hog heaven! If this worked out as well as I expected, I was going to ask for a matching set of bottoms to go with the shirt. Oh, to hell with it, why wait? I suspected that somebody was playing with me, because the lower half of the ensemble appeared within about 10 minutes.

At the time, I couldn't think of anything else to ask for, so I was ready to begin my great adventure. There was a real need for somebody to clean up the territory around Laredo, Texas, so that was where I started out. Lars was exuberant as he saw me off; I think that he expected me to have the situation well in hand within a week. He was so happy that I did not make any effort to disillusion him.

As a hunting aid, I had been supplied with a sort of GPS device that would point out concentrations of demons for me so that I would not have to waste time hunting them down. It looked and functioned like a pocket watch, so I would have no trouble concealing it.

The GPS led me to a saloon in the seedier part of town, though it was a little hard to recognize the differences among the buildings. The GPS couldn't point out the individuals I was looking for, but it got me to within about 50 feet. From there, I was on my own.

I bought a beer, Mexican, of course, and wandered around the saloon to see what I could find. With my improved hearing, I had no trouble listening to the various conversations as I ambled by. Mostly, the conversations were about the scarcity of decent jobs or where to find the most willing whores. However, I did hear a couple of interesting tidbits.

The first was a plot for a train robbery, but the two men talking were very drunk and the plot they hatched up could never work, which I was sure that they would realize as soon as they sobered up. In fact, they were so drunk that I doubted that they would even remember the plot at that point.

On the other hand, four men were carefully going over, in low voices, a scheme to rob a stage coach and rape the women passengers. The plans for the rapes were rather vague, because they depended on the number of women, if any, that they found on the stage. The plans were to kill from ambush the crew and any of the men they found as passengers. The stage they wanted to rob was known to be carrying gold being transferred between banks. These men were determined, and this was a plot I had to take seriously.

I listened carefully to the plot being described and figured that they had a good chance of bringing it off if I didn't intervene. The robbery was scheduled for late the next day and I planned to be there.

I arrived at the site of the intended robbery in time to see the bandits drag a tree limb across the road to force the stage to stop. They tied their horses in an out of the way clump of trees and settled down in a ditch to be ready to shoot as soon as the stage showed up.

I had a new rifle along that I was anxious to try out. It used the same .50 caliber ammunition my pistols and Winchester did, so it did not have spectacular range. However, it looked like a recent Winchester lever action with the barrel in the longer rifle version, rather that the shorter carbine version, as most people used. This rifle was equipped with a device that looked like a contemporary telescopic sight, but actually was fitted with a laser device that spotted the rifle and automatically compensated for distance. This rifle literally could not miss at ranges up to 500 yards; beyond that, the ammunition just was not up to the optics, etc.

I settled into position about 200 yards from the bandits and got my rifle ready. For some perverse reason, I wanted the stage coach crew and passengers to see their rescue. I was going all the way with the Lone Ranger motif by wearing the same kind of mask that Clayton Moore used in all of the TV shows.

The bandits had planned to use their pistols, since they were close enough to the road, so I figured that I would let them get in the first shots. Most people cannot shot very accurately with pistols beyond about 40 feet, so I figured that I had time to act.

We didn't have very long to wait for the stage coach to show up. They had time to stop before the bandits started shooting. As soon as the bandits opened fire, I shot the first one. I went down the line, methodically picking off the bandits, one-by-one, until I had put a bullet between the shoulder blades of each crook. At that range with that rifle, four fired bullets equaled four dead bandits.