“If you observe carefully,” Krieg said, “there are other ways to tell where they are headed. See that…?” He pointed with the tip of his cane at something in the distance that looked like a large deer with a very small head. “That’s called a nilgai. It is an antelope species that comes all the way from Asia. We have six in total on the ranch, and they are quite skittish. If our prey had been through here, those animals would be much more stirred up.”
“So, which way then?” Sayid asked as he put the Land Rover into gear.
Krieg pointed off to their left and they set off again at a crawl down the dusty trail.
- 47 -
ARMED
STOPPING DEEP IN the shade of an overarching oak tree, Wolf said to the girl, “Stay with me and you will stay alive. Stray and you’re dead. They are planning to toy with us for a while. But if we get too far away or get too close to the fences, they will speed up their game or start using shortcuts to find us. We are being tracked already, I’m sure, so they are confident that we cannot get away. Not without them knowing.”
“You’re…being very honest about this,” she said meekly. “Are you sure…?”
“I am.”
“Maybe you should have just lied to me.”
“Never,” he said.
She grinned back a thin smile.
He growled slightly and gave a slight smile of his own. “I plan to use their own confidence against them.”
“Good.” She was breathing heavily beside him, but she nodded in agreement. “Just like The Hunger Games.”
“There are games about hunger?” he asked.
“It’s a movie. Or a book. You’ve never seen it, read it?”
He shook his head no. “You better understand right now that this is not a movie we are in. They will try to kill you the moment you show yourself. I suspect the others we have seen will not. Not yet. But if we go for the fences, they will do something.”
“So what should we do?”
“We need to keep eluding them. Maybe find something we can use against them. That means keeping your eyes open.”
She nodded. “Is it only the two that we need to worry about, right? What if…what if we hide and circle around and attack them when they pass? That would be a surprise, right? They would be thinking that we are going to keep running.”
He put his hand on her shoulder. “They are prepared for that, I am certain. And now is not the time to engage them. For now, we will continue to do what is expected, which is to keep running.”
Sniffing the air, he scanned his surroundings, detecting only the scents of the animals, hearing only faint whispers of the wind.
“Hear that?” he asked.
She stopped her panting to listen. “No, what did you hear?”
“Nothing,” he said. And he had heard nothing. Which was good.
She flexed her neck and rose from her knees, still almost out of breath. “When…do we start fighting back?”
“Soon, but not yet. I plan to disappoint them later. Are you ready?” When she acknowledged that she was, he took off with her trailing behind, crouching low and moving as silently as possible. She was able to keep up with him, which was also good, but his feet were already cut and bleeding, and through the rough terrain he now traveled, someone on foot would be able to easily track him. And with her pink T-shirt and brightly colored running shoes, she would be easy to spot from far off.
“Up there,” she said, pointing.
He slowed and glanced up. It was another one of the green boxes that seemed to be placed every few hundred feet. He figured they were some type of camera system, which was probably how they had found him earlier. The device was strapped to a tree and barely visible from below, and the girl had spotted it before he had, which gave him pause. But he did not hesitate. He grabbed a stone and threw it as hard as he could at the green box. The first stone missed its target and crashed into the branches of the tree. The noise could not be helped, and he thought he saw movement beyond.
He grabbed another stone and threw it even harder—and hit the camera and was rewarded with a solid crunch and bits of plastic raining down from the tree.
All went quiet again. Then, a few seconds later, a new movement beyond the trees demanded his attention.
Ducking low, he crept forward toward the tree line, staying in shadow. When he got near the transition to a grassy plain, he realized that it wasn’t an animal that he had seen through the trees. The unexpected movement had come from the non-organic shape of the chain-link fence that he had seen when he shifted his head.
A hundred-foot gap of cleared ground lay between the tree line and the fence. In the far distance, he picked out a man pacing beside a four-wheeled ATV painted in green and tan camouflage. The guy was wearing a brown cowboy hat and had a black rifle slung from his shoulder. The guy was also armed with binoculars, which he was using to scan the woods farther down the way.
To get to him, Wolf realized he would have to go about two hundred feet within the trees and then cross about a hundred feet of open terrain. He might be able to do it while the guy was busy scanning with the binoculars, but if the guy set them down, or picked up movement in his peripheral vision, or Wolf made any sound at all, he’d be spotted before he could creep close enough to do any damage.
But he had another idea.
He turned to the girl. “Here is what we must do. You need to go that direction. Run toward the fence as fast as you can, but do not touch it or even go near it. Just get close and go along it like you are looking for a way through.”
“Won’t he shoot me?”
“Only if you try to climb.”
“But I can’t.”
“You must.”
“And what’re you going to do?”
“Just do it. Slow when he starts yelling, but do not stop. Ignore whatever he says. Pretend you are scared.”
“You sure…?” she asked with apprehension.
“Yes.”
“Okay. But I’m trusting you. You’d better not be wrong.”
“I am not.”
The girl who called herself Melody left the security of the trees and jogged in the direction he had instructed her to do.
But she did not do exactly as he had asked. When she got maybe fifty feet out, she froze as soon as the guy with the hat and belt buckle set down his binoculars and pointed his rifle at her and yelled for her to stop.
Wolf chided himself for miscalculating just how the girl would react. He would not make the same mistake twice. He retooled his plan as he watched the man in the hat walk lazily toward her, keeping her covered with his weapon while saying something into a handheld radio. Wolf heard a bit of what was being said, but not everything, so he slowed down as much as he could and listened while he made his way through the cover of the trees.
“Let her go,” came a garbled response from the radio in the man’s hand. “Position?”
“Section C34, right at the fence line,” the guy said, then clipped the radio to his belt.
“Run,” the man with the hat said to the girl, threatening her with the barrel of the rifle. “Go on.”
She stood there blinking with her hands halfway raised.
“Run,” the guy repeated.
But she did not run. Instead, she approached the man.
“Help me,” she pleaded. “Please.”
The guy shook his head. “You’d better run, goddammit.”
“This is sick,” she said. “This is twisted. Demented. What sort of creep hunts people?”
“Not my problem,” the guy said, gesturing for her to run with the barrel of the gun again.
“Please,” she repeated. “You can’t allow this to happen. I don’t want to die. It’s not right.”
“I can’t stop it,” he said and lowered the barrel of his weapon.
And that’s when Wolf silently crossed the last twenty yards behind the guy. But the man with the brown hat must have heard the final approach. He spun and tried to bring hi
s weapon up to fire.
Wolf was already moving too fast to stop. He lunged and tackled the guy, driving them both to the ground, smothering the man with the full weight of an almost three-hundred-pound frame. The guy let out a woof of pain and his eyes flicked open in shock. Wolf shoved the rifle sideways and hard up against the guy’s throat, and the man tried to let go of the gun and bench press Wolf’s mass of meat and bone off of him.
It was a wasted effort.
Surprisingly, though, the guy was able to flip his legs up and get traction in the dirt with his boots. He spun sideways and his arm shot down to his side. His hand came back with a bone-handled hunting knife, and he let go of the gun with his other hand and tried to stab with the blade. Wolf shifted his weight and used his elbow to pin the guy’s wrist to the ground to keep the knife at bay, but his grip slipped and the guy wrenched himself free and squirmed out from under him.
The man regained his feet and crouched low into a knife-fighting stance. His hat was now gone and he had a red-ringed indentation on his forehead from where it had been. The guy widened his eyes and blinked purposefully. Unarmed, Wolf also rose to match the guy’s posture, and the two began to circle one another.
The rifle now hung limply from a strap around the guy’s shoulder, but it was still within reach. Though, if he went for the gun, Wolf would be on him before he could raise it and fire. The man seemed to sense this and instead kept circling, holding the knife out in front of him, waiting for Wolf to make the first move.
“It does not have to go like this,” Wolf said.
The guy said nothing in reply.
Wolf held his hands up slightly. “I do not wish to kill you.”
The guy said nothing.
“Put the knife down, and let us go.”
Once more, the guy said nothing.
“Then this is your choice, not mine,” Wolf said.
The guy nodded and the knife in his hand began to waver in small concentric circles. Wolf stepped forward and the guy reacted much faster than anticipated. But the move had only been a testing feint, and Wolf backed off without getting cut.
They kept circling.
The guy was still waiting for him to make a move, which was the smart play in a knife fight. Committing too early to an unknown opponent was what got most fighters killed. This guy knew how to battle with a blade, and he was demonstrating it well enough.
“Why can’t you just let us go?” the girl said from behind the guy. “This all ain’t right.”
The man seemed momentarily conflicted by her question. Maybe his conscious was surfacing. Maybe some part of his humanity was rebelling or his mother once told him it was wrong to shoot at teenage girls.
But it didn’t matter, much.
Every nerve in Wolf’s body remained on edge and was tingling brightly. Everything around him was sharper, more focused. And he recognized the sensation for what it was. Fight or flight. Which was why he also knew the time to strike had arrived. The whole situation would not get any better.
He lunged right then feinted quickly left, letting the man stab and commit left and extend his arm before grabbing it and spinning away from the blade and wrapping the arm that held the knife underneath his own before pushing forward. The guy twisted and ended up behind Wolf, who now controlled the blade completely. He gave a quick twist of the guy’s wrists and fingers broke free and the knife transferred into Wolf’s hand as easily as if it had been given over voluntarily.
Wolf made a slight readjustment and centered the handle in his fist, where it fit almost perfectly. He spun as he released the guy’s arm, bringing the blade up, knowing just how high he needed it to be and how far back he needed to be, and where the tip of the blade would end up. Then he let his arm extend, judging almost perfectly where it would go.
The tip of the blade lashed out and slid across the man’s upper shoulder and sliced a diagonal line through the man’s throat. The sharp steel made quick work of cutting flesh and ligaments. It was an uneven cut, sure, but it had done an adequate job and had opened up one side of the guy’s throat but hadn’t gone deep enough to slice into the pinky-sized artery that brought blood to the brain.
The guy backed off a staggering step and his eyes went wide with fright as his hands came up to his ruined throat. He gurgled as blood dribbled out, and he rasped as air leaked into his nicked windpipe when he breathed. The man tried to croak something, but it was unintelligible. A steady stream began to pump from the gash and ran down his white button-up shirt. The guy slid to his knees on the hardpan and remained there, wobbling, but not toppling over.
“Is he dead?” the girl asked.
“He will be,” Wolf admitted, “but he could still live if we act quickly.”
As the guy continued to drown in his own blood, Wolf rummaged through the man’s pockets and came back with a pack of gum, a wallet, and the walkie-talkie. But he did not find keys for the quad vehicle parked nearby.
“You should keep holding your throat closed,” he warned the guy. “You just might make it.”
He then stripped the man of the clip-on knife sheath, wiped the blade on a clean patch of the guy’s shirt, and then clipped the sheathed knife onto the waistband of his own jeans.
The guy barely moved an inch and continued to rasp and gurgle.
“Where are the keys for that thing?” Wolf asked.
He got no answer.
He asked again.
Nothing.
And again.
The guy was in shock and nothing seemed to register with him. In different circumstances, Wolf might have found the whole thing rather amusing. He was usually the one who did not speak. He leaned forward and grabbed the guy’s hand to pull it away from his throat. Before he could, the handheld radio chirped, and from the tiny speaker came Krieg’s smooth voice. “Almost to your position, Grant. Is she there still? Has there been any sign of him yet?”
The girl who called herself Melody touched Wolf on the arm. “Can we take that thing and drive it through the fence?”
He looked at her for a moment, then back at the quad. “He has not told me where the keys are yet.”
“Oh? What about the fence? Why not just climb over it?”
“We would not get halfway over before they arrived,” he stated grimly.
He had something else in mind.
“Let’s go,” he said, taking one last look at the panic-stricken cowboy.
Slinging the guy’s rifle over his shoulder, he trotted to the shelter of the trees, and the girl who called herself Melody followed closely behind.
- 48 -
GAME CHANGER
“THERE,” KRIEG SAID, pointing hastily with the tip of his cane.
Sayid raced the Land Rover toward the camouflaged ATV parked near the perimeter fencing while Krieg held onto the handle in front of him and winced as they seemingly hit every bump in the road possible. He could already see that his man Grant was down but still alive, or so it appeared.
As they drew alongside, Krieg saw the growing pool of blood at Grant’s feet. His man was holding one hand against his throat and pleading with the other, fingers flexing and pointing back at his throat while rasping unintelligibly.
Sayid turned to Krieg. “It appears our prey has drawn first blood. He taunts us now.”
“Perhaps we have underestimated him?” Krieg suggested. He then adjusted the buttons on the handheld radio in his palm, depressed the talk button, and said into the microphone, “To all who can hear me, we have one man down. Repeat. One man down. Use extreme caution henceforth. Target is possibly armed. Switch to agreed-upon frequency Zebra-Tango-Alpha and relay.” He lowered his arm as he let go of the button. The radio chirped a confirmation.
Sayid asked, “Why did he not just take that vehicle?”
Krieg thought about it while casually glancing at the wounded man he had hired almost a year ago. Grant had been an excellent hunting guide and could field-dress a deer in minutes, but now he was just so much useless meat.
It was good the guy did not have a family. That made things easier.
“What about the vehicle?” Sayid repeated.
“Sorry,” Krieg said, shaking his head to clear his stray thoughts. “My men have all been instructed to hide their keys for just this sort of eventuality.”
“Could they have gone over the fence?”
Krieg lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes and scanned the razor wire along the top. “It appears not.”
“Was this man armed?” Sayid asked.
The man on his knees continued to croak at them as Krieg lifted the binoculars again and rescanned the trees.
“Was he armed?” Sayid repeated with slightly more agitation in his voice.
“I am afraid so,” Krieg admitted.
“Then this man here has changed the game for us. And not in our favor.”
“It is unfortunate, I agree.” Krieg lifted his cane and jabbed it directly in Grant’s face. The brass-capped tip of the cane slipped off the man’s cheekbone and punched wetly into his eye socket. Krieg pulled back the dripping brass tip and tried to wipe it on the man’s shirt, but he could not reach him any longer because the man’s hands had gone to his ruined eye, and his throat had opened up again when he had let go of it. The guy toppled over sideways into the dirt and curled into a fetal position, alternating between moaning, gurgling, and coughing blood through the slit in his throat.
Krieg looked at his former employee with disgust. The man would—
A bullet pinged off the dashboard right where Krieg was about to place his hand. Reacting instantly, Sayid clunked the Land Rover into gear, raced the engine, and let up on the clutch with a jerk. Krieg, suddenly filled with fear, was thrown off balance and struggled to reaffirm his grip on the dashboard handle while still maintaining possession of his cane.
Tires spitting dirt and gravel, the Land Rover spun a tight circle, and they headed back toward the road on which they had arrived, ducking the gunfire that was coming from somewhere off in the trees.
“The game has indeed changed,” a crouched-over Sayid said a tiny bit louder than the growling roar of the engine.
Wolf Who Walks Alone: A Raymond Wolf Mystery Novel Page 20
