by Blake Banner
I was only a foot from her or less. I cupped the back of her head in my left hand, bent down and kissed her. It was unexpected and she went rigid. I was a difficult target, pressed up against her, and I figured, correctly as it turned out, that Samy and his two gunmen would be momentarily too astonished to react.
Momentarily was all I needed. Because while my left hand was holding her head, my right hand slipped past her bosom and slipped out again with the P226 in its grasp. It took less than a second, and with my mouth still engaged, I plugged the Latino and the Korean in the chest, one after the other.
Samy was not slow to react. He sprang forward, grabbed my arm under his armpit and levered the Sig out of my grasp. Miriam was sandwiched between us, screaming and pushing at me. I grabbed a fistful of her hair and slung her to one side so I could get at Samy before he turned my own gun on me.
The two nerds were transfixed, watching the fight to see which way it would go. Samy spun, with the Sig held in both hands, and for a split second it was trained on my chest. But he was too slow. I snatched the barrel, levered up and kicked savagely at his crotch.
He was fast. He sidestepped and delivered a stinging roundhouse to my thigh. It hurt bad and he followed up with a front kick to my belly. Our hands were still clasped on the Sig, above our heads. The kick to my belly hurt and I knew another would wind me. If that happened he would turn the gun on me and it would be curtains. I lashed out again and caught him on his knee. He gritted his teeth and grunted. It hurt, but he knew he was fighting for his life.
I lashed out again, but in that moment an express train collided with me and I was dragged, winded to the floor. When I opened my eyes, needles of pain were stabbing through my lungs, and the nerd with the dirty T-shirt was straddling me, reaching over to pummel my face with his fists. Past him I could see Samy on his hands and knees, reaching for something on the floor that I couldn’t see, but I knew what it was. He was reaching for my Sig, and in a few seconds he was going to shoot me, probably in the groin, while this asshole was sitting on me, punching at my face.
Sometimes, in moments of extreme stress, time can pass very slowly. I was gripping at the nerd’s wrists. Past his contorted, slavering face I could see Samy, getting to his feet, turning to look at me. In his hand was the P226. He smiled and stepped toward me.
I bucked and drew up my knees, pounding them into the nerd’s back. He laughed, leaning forward, trying to get through my guard with his fists. I let go my right hand and his left fist smacked my face. I tasted the blood in my mouth, expecting at any second the tearing, burning pain of a slug entering my belly. I thrashed and twisted savagely, reaching down to my right foot with my right hand. The hard metal handle of the Fairbairn and Sykes was in my fingers. I pulled and rammed the blade into the nerd’s ribcage.
He gave a small gasp of surprise. I pushed and rolled. He thudded to the floor with me on top. I kept rolling as the air exploded with flat, hard detonations. My left arm burned and gore sprayed in my face as the nerd’s head and face jerked, penetrated by two 9mm slugs that had been meant for me. The knife was still in my hand. Samy was snarling and screaming, following me with the Sig held out in front of him in both hands. He squeezed and a round smashed into the dirt beside me as I sat up and hurled the knife. It hammered home into his gut. But a second before it did his head whiplashed and a plume of blood and gore erupted from his temple. His knees folded and he fell, almost gracefully, to the floor.
She was standing, Miriam, with a Walther PPK in her hand. A small trail of smoke wound up from the barrel, illuminated by a leaning shaft of dusty light. For a moment there was utter stillness. Then the blond kid suddenly scrambled and ran, ricocheting through the barn door, vanishing into the midday glare.
I got to my feet and felt the warm ooze of blood down my left arm. It didn’t hurt. The pain would come later. I went and picked up my Sig, slipped it under my arm and turned to face her. She still had the PPK held out in front of her, trained on me now.
“You just saved my life. You going to ruin it all by shooting me now? Point that somewhere else, will you?”
She lowered it slowly, then slipped it into a small holster under her jacket. She didn’t say anything. I stepped up close to her.
“That’s a hell of a debriefing you have coming up this afternoon, sister. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”
She stared up into my face. “Who do you work for?”
I smiled. “The good guys.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“No. That would be rude, after you saved my life.”
“You know I’ll probably have to come after you.”
I nodded. “That’s something to look forward to.” I hesitated a moment. “You didn’t know what Samy was about…?”
“Would you believe me if I said I didn’t?”
“Yeah. I would.”
“What about Hartmann? Was he involved in this?”
She thought about it. “In retrospect, probably.” She handed me her keys. “You’d better go. Take my Mercedes. They’ll come and get me.”
Outside, I heard the roar of an engine. The blond nerd escaping. I took the keys.
“Where is Hussein Saleh?”
“They were supposed to arrive today, and Muller. But Samy postponed the meeting. Hartmann spoke to him, they told me to get you, to bring you here. I thought he was going to question you. I didn’t know…” She paused. “I suppose he would have killed me after he’d killed you.”
I walked to the door, then turned and looked back. “It’s an ugly game. Don’t forget who you are.”
She held my eye, and there was an urgency in hers that seemed to fade as quickly as it flared. She nodded. “Hazel,” she said. “I’m Hazel.”
I walked to her Mercedes and slid behind the wheel. The engine roared and I rolled out onto the blacktop, then turned west. As I accelerated toward Calexico I called the brigadier.
“Bauer, what’s happening?”
“I’m done.”
Silence, then, “What do you mean, you’re done?”
“Mohammed is dead. Samy Arain is dead, and his conspiracy is busted. This part of the job is done. I’ll brief you when I get to New York. But sir?”
“Yes.”
“Hussein Saleh, Jaden Abdullah and Bernardo Muller, and Captain Bill Hartmann, they are still at large, and I plan to take them down.”
“Ah,” he said. “Good. Welcome aboard, Bauer. Welcome aboard.”
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Chapter One
I hadn’t eaten for thirty-six hours. It’s one of the conditions I impose on myself if I go hunting. I eat what I kill, and if I don’t kill I don’t eat. Some people might think that’s a hollow gesture, or a pretentious one. I can’t say I care much, but I get mad at hunters who talk about being in nature, a predator pitched against his prey in a primal wilderness, when they’re carrying a camouflage tent, thermal sleeping bags, propane camping stoves and sniper’s rifles with telescopic sights.
I sleep in the open with a couple of woolen
blankets, I cook—if I cook—over an open fire, and I hunt with a sixty-five-pound Osage orange bow from James Easter up in Iowa. I also hunt with my six senses, and I listen: I listen to the hundreds of sounds that are woven into the breeze.
If you use a telescopic sight, you stop listening. The mountains and the forests are full of sounds that talk to you about the constant cycle of life and death in the woodlands: the animals that come and go on silent feet, that hunt in the shadows, that drink and fish in the creeks, streams and rivers which wind through the land. They tell you everything, from the twig that snaps under a deer’s hoof, to the murderous flapping of the falcon’s wing.
I listen and I look, not through a telescope, but with my eyes; and I look not for prey, but for movement. A bull elk at fifty yards, standing among trees, five feet inside the shade of a woodland, might be all but invisible to a man with a sniper’s rifle and a telescopic sight. Because that man will be looking for a bull elk, and at that distance, among tree trunks, a bull elk looks like part of the forest. So if you want to see it, you don’t look for it; you relax your gaze and you wait for movement.
You use all your senses. You listen, you smell the air, you taste the air, and you sense how the forest feels. You can’t do that if you insulate yourself in a tent, with your TV and your propane cooker. You can only do it if you’re in the forest, part of the forest. If you hide from the cold, moist night air, cushion yourself from the hard ground and the stones when you sleep, shut out the snuffling, howling and crying of the night, and rise only after the sun has burned away the chill dew of dawn, then you will be deaf to the whispering of the forest. Better stay at home and get your meat from the butcher.
So, I hadn’t eaten for thirty-six hours, and that kind of hunger sharpens your senses. I was lying beside a spruce at the edge of the sparse woodlands to the south of Big Red Hill and to the west of Greenhorn Mountain, in Eagle County, Colorado. I was watching the large clearing spread out before me. It was about half a mile to the nearest trees, over on my right. But a hundred yards away a bull elk stood alone, smelling the morning air.
I’m a good archer, but a hundred yards was a hell of a shot, and would depend as much on luck as on any skill I had. That’s OK in target practice, but when you are hunting a living, breathing animal, a bad shot can cause a lot of pain and unnecessary suffering. The animal can get away and it can take days to die. That is something you don’t want to happen.
So I waited, chose my moment, and moved forward on my belly, a yard at a time.
After ten minutes he had turned his back on me, grazing at the late summer grass and shrubs, and was moving a step at a time, toward the sparse woods that covered the foothills of the Greenhorn. I was downwind, and though I could hear and smell him, he could not hear or smell me. So I closed the gap with a couple of short, silent runs.
I had closed the distance to fifty yards and dropped to my belly beside a young cypress. He still had his rump to me, but I had moved slightly to my left, hoping to get an angle on his heart. Luck, as luck so often does, played into my hand, and then robbed me.
The bull grazed slowly toward his left, one slow step at a time while his mouth worked, gradually turning his left flank to me. With a sixty-five-pound bow I could make a fifty-yard shot with a fair degree of accuracy, but an arrow travels much slower than a bullet, and there is no guarantee your target will still be there by the time your arrow arrives where it’s going. If your target moves, instead of piercing its heart, your razor-sharp broadhead might slice clean through its belly, causing a slow, painful death. I needed to get at least twenty paces closer to take the shot.
I had a tall spruce maybe twenty yards to my left and, keeping flat on the ground, I crawled yard by yard, over the shrubs and stones, toward the cover of that tree. It took a long minute, but the burning hollow in my gut made it seem like an agonizing half hour.
The great beast had started moving slowly to its right now. I still had a shot, but if I was going to take it, it had to be now, because within seconds he would have turned his left side away from me.
I nocked the heavy, wooden broadhead, stepped out from behind the tree, leaned into the bow and drew till my thumb touched the angle of my jaw. I sensed, rather than saw, the trajectory of the arrow, and in that moment a rifle exploded into the still morning and the roar of the shot echoed across the valley, bouncing off the sides of the hills.
The elk looked up, its body tense as a spring. Next thing it had bounded and was racing across the plateau toward the cover of the trees, north and east. I didn’t hesitate. I sprinted after it, covered twenty paces until I could see where it was headed, and settled into a steady run.
A scared deer, gazelle or elk is fast, but they will rarely run for long periods of time. Instinctively they know that predators operate with explosive bursts of speed, which burn themselves out pretty fast. So when the elk’s run started to slow, after thirty seconds or a little more, he had covered over three hundred yards, but I was catching on him, staying downwind and out of sight. Man is one of the very few predators who will stay on a single prey relentlessly, sometimes for days on end, until he takes him down.
The bull elk had reached a gentle, wooded slope that rose to higher ground above. In the trees there was an opening that led to a kind of passage that wound up to the higher ground. There he stopped and sniffed the air, then started to graze again. I didn’t stop. I kept going at a gentle jog. At forty paces I slowed to a walk, but, as he was looking away from me, I didn’t seek cover. I kept walking. I still had the arrow nocked and drew it nine inches. After twelve paces I stopped, drew to my ear, sensed the trajectory and loosed the arrow.
A second shot rang out across the valley. I swore violently under my breath and broke into a sprint as the arrow struck home inches behind the heart. The bull sprang and kicked and bounded up the passage through the trees, with the barb buried deep in its side.
It took me fifteen or twenty seconds to cover the distance. A third shot rang out and I scrambled up the passage through the woodland.
When I got to the top, there was another plateau, smaller than the one below, and there, three paces from where I stood panting, was the bull, lying on its side, dead. Approaching down the slight hill at a slow, heavy run were two men dressed in camouflage. They carried high-powered rifles with telescopic sights. When they saw me, the only change to their demeanor was a complacent smile.
The one in the lead was in his fifties, well groomed, with permed gray hair and a slight paunch. He had a ranger’s camouflage hat and a sleeveless camouflage jacket that had probably cost him three hundred bucks. He was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, and touched the brim of his hat with two fingers as he approached.
“Howdy? Good morning to you!”
His pal, lagging slightly behind, was darker, more muscular. His haircut had cost him about five bucks, maybe less, about the same as his peaked camouflage cap. He was smiling, but the smile was for himself, and his eyes watched me with care. The guy with the perm came right up with his hand extended.
“Rex Trent, Trent Enterprises. That was a bold shot, shame it just missed the mark.” I shook the proffered hand with little enthusiasm.
“It was on target,” I said. “Your shot scared him and he bolted.”
His mouth smiled but his eyes leered. “Shoulda used a rifle. That’s the problem with a bow. Slow delivery. With this bad boy,” he held up his Seekins Pro Hunter, “I never miss a shot.” He pointed at my elk. “Got this baby clean between the eyes.”
I let my eyes travel over him and his pal, then looked past them at where they had come from. I let my eyebrows shrug.
“By my reckoning you should have two more elk lying somewhere.” He frowned at me, not catching my meaning. “I heard three shots,” I explained. “One of them hit my elk. Where did the other two go?”
He didn’t think that was funny and his face told me so. After a second he gave a laugh that was on the dry side of humorless.
“You c
all it your elk, but I’m afraid I’m gonna have to disabuse you, son. See, it was my shot that killed the animal, therefore my claim is good.”
I didn’t bother pretending to smile. I gave him the deadeye instead. “You said it was a bold shot, Mr. Trent, which means you were watching. And that means you fired deliberately to scare my prey. In spite of that,” I pointed at the feathers protruding from the animal’s chest, “the wound was fatal and the animal would have died within seconds. Your shot may even have been postmortem. The bull is mine.”
“You’re new to Sulfur Springs, ain’t ya, son?”
“I’m not your son, Mr. Trent. I’ve been here a few times, but I stay away from people.”
“Well folks round here know me, see? They know me because, well…” He turned to his pal and they both laughed. “Because I own the town, huh, Jacob?” He turned back to me. “Just about everything you see in and around Sulfur Springs is either mine or it’s a national park. So I guess you could say I’m like some kind of old-fashioned feudal lord. In the sense, like, that whatever I say goes.”
I gave a single nod and gazed around, wondering if I was going to have to hit them.
“So,” he smiled amiably, “I don’t want to get into a disagreement with you. We’ll just say that the damned elk is mine and leave it at that.” He cocked his rifle and turned to his pal. “Earl, go get the truck so we can load this bull in the back.”
I let my eyes rest on his and held them a moment. I spoke quietly. “The bull is mine.”
The smile faded and he jerked his chin at me. “You look like a city boy to me. Things ain’t changed around here for two hundred years. Still cowboy territory, and we don’t worry so much about the law as we do about what we say… And what I say, is the law.”
I went very still and held his eye for a long moment. “That bullshit might have worked back when Clint Eastwood still had hair. But things have changed since then. Different rules apply. So let me get something clear in my mind. Are you threatening to kill me?”
