by Matt Hilton
We were surrounded on three sides, with only the option left to us of heading east into the wild mountains. Had I been alone I would have taken it, but not when accompanied by Billie. My order of play would be to outdistance the noose our hunters were attempting to tighten, flank them and then take the fight back to them from an unexpected direction. But with Billie along, I couldn’t do that. It would mean abandoning her while I went off to play seek and destroy, and I didn’t trust that she’d stay safely hidden for long enough: not while they had greater numbers and an eye in the sky. Plus, I’d no clue about the terrain. For all I knew we could run into a bottlenecked canyon, or to the lip of a precipice, and then where could we go? At the moment our best allies were the darkness and stealth. Stay quiet, stay down, and with luck we’d foil our pursuers.
Arriving at the outcrop of earth, I found it scattered with large boulders. Fallen twigs and needles drifted at their bases but there was no other cover. We could set our backs to the larger boulders, hidden from one side, but it wouldn’t put off a determined hunter who’d make a point of checking behind the rocks. Still, they offered momentary respite. I gestured at a huge boulder and Billie headed for it. She leaned against its mossy side while she again emptied her shoes of needles. Without asking I delved in her bag, and pulled out two T-shirts she’d packed. While she eyed me quizzically I knotted each at their necks, then crouched down, and pulled one after the other over her feet. I then bunched and tied off the tops around her ankles. She looked comical in her impromptu footwear, but it stopped her shoes being invaded at every step. ‘Looks weird,’ I whispered, ‘but they’ll help.’
I didn’t expect that we could travel far before the cloth became worn and shredded, but then again I didn’t think we’d be going much further in the meantime.
‘We have to find somewhere to hide until they go past.’
‘Then what?’ Billie asked.
‘We backtrack, try to avoid them until they give up.’
‘What if they don’t give up?’
‘They will. If we manage to evade them they’ll have no idea where we are and assume we’ve made it back to a road. If we stay hidden long enough they’ll abandon the search here and start looking further afield. Hopefully by then we’ll have found somewhere where we can get a signal and phone for help. If I can get hold of Rink I can organise extraction.’
Nearby was a storm-toppled tree. The trunk had snapped midway, and the upper half of the tree had fallen, and become wedged among its neighbours. The branches hung low to the ground; a pile of broken limbs and twigs lay scattered beneath. ‘Over there,’ I urged Billie.
The forest floor undulated like a series of waves on a balmy sea, and there was a natural depression beneath the fallen tree. I pulled aside some of the branches and Billie settled down in the hollow. I unhitched the bags off my shoulder and laid them next to her, then quickly rearranged the branches so that they were piled around her, concealing her from those coming up the trail. I moved to one side, crouching alongside an upright tree trunk, and took out my SIG just as the third vehicle came into view. I could tell from the shape that it was a large GMC Suburban, and through the backwash of its lights could see three figures inside. One of them was scanning the area with night vision binoculars.
I warned Billie to stay low and silent, and promised that I would protect her.
Everything went to hell in seconds.
When the shooter broke cover and we exchanged rounds, there was a small part of me that expected him to be one of the Jaeger brothers. Because he wasn’t wearing spectacles, I hoped it was the other one referred to as Danny. But it was neither. It was some guy I’d never seen before. That’s the way of many soldiers’ deaths: they don’t recognise the stranger behind the bullet that ends their life. I wondered briefly if he thought the same about me, but probably not.
He fell.
I fell too.
When I came round briefly I didn’t give him a second’s notice, but took it that he was lying dead or wounded beyond where Billie crouched over me with my knife. I lay on my back, peering up at her as she spat and screamed like a bobcat, cutting wildly at the air.
‘I . . . I’m done,’ I told her. ‘Get away before the others come.’
Of course it was already too late for that. Figures stood around us, pitiless men with guns in their hands.
Billie shrieked savagely, launching herself at them as if thinking she could cut a way through them.
One of them grabbed Billie by an elbow and yanked the knife away. She struggled to break loose of his hold and was struck in the face for her trouble. As she slumped, I tried to struggle up, but I wasn’t going anywhere. My extremities were numb. I felt crushed by an immense weight. Only my eyelids had the ability to move, but even that strength was fading.
Someone crouched, roughly patting me down.
‘So who the hell is this guy?’ someone asked.
‘Doesn’t matter now,’ said another. ‘Finish him, Danny.’
Those words sealed my fate. Death was coming and I tried to face it with resolution, but I could barely keep my eyes open.
A gun barrel caught a beam of moonlight, and it was enough to focus on.
A second flash blinded me.
Then there was nothing.
You don’t hear the bullet that kills you.
18
I wasn’t dead.
Part of me wished that I were because the pain was incredible, and I longed for release from it. It came in pulsing waves that wouldn’t diminish, and the agony went on for an eternity. That, at least, was how it seemed. I can’t be sure if it was hours or simply minutes, but after waking that next time and trying to roll over on to my belly, the effort only helped intensify the pain to a point where I felt as if molten magma was boiling from my every orifice. Scarlet flashes across my vision grew white, then blinked off and I knew nothing. When I next returned to some sort of cognisance I found myself at the edge of the muddy track, a dozen yards from where I’d fallen. I’d no recollection of having crawled there, but must have, and the trail of blood spatters and smears on the forest floor told that it had been a winding route. I was upright. No, on second thoughts I was only partly upright. My back was supported by a mossy rock, my legs splayed in an ungainly manner on the muddy verge, my boot heels digging into the hardpack of the trail.
The mist of last night was back, and my world was one that faded within a hundred yards on all sides. It was silvery grey. But a roseate glow overhead hinted that the sun was up. I’d no idea how long ago the sun had risen, but it can’t have been long because it hadn’t begun to burn off the mist or dew that clung to the grass my palms were pressed into. My arms propped me, but there was little feeling in them beyond pain. Blinking, I watched a trickle of blood run out of my left cuff and across the back of my hand. It was only one trickle of many that had previously dried on my hand. Hopefully the bleeding in my upper chest had stopped, and the movements I’d made on waking had only broken the scabby coagulation. I tried to lift my hands to check the wound, but couldn’t without swaying and threatening to fall on my side. I sat there, taking in air, fighting the stabbing ache throughout my entire body.
I must have passed out again, because when next I eased open my eyelids it was nearing noon. The mist had disappeared, and the sun was a ball of fire hovering over the down slope to my left. It wasn’t hot, but it seared my eyes when I tilted my head up. The tickling of its rays wasn’t what roused me, but the distant sound of an engine. I wondered if somehow the Jaegers had realised that I’d beaten the odds and were on their way back to finish the job. In my current state they wouldn’t have to try very hard.
I craned round as far as the pain would allow. There was no sign of the man I’d shot, so either he’d survived or his friends had taken him with them when they left. I decided it would be the latter because I was positive at least one of my bullets had hit his head. Then again . . .
I felt for the gun wound in my own skull.
There was no bullet hole, no gaping wound through which I could feel the mushy pulp that was left of my brain, just a sore spot and a large knot of swollen tissue. So I hadn’t been shot in the head at the end? Thinking my wounds mortal, the gunman had used the butt of his weapon to rap me unconscious. I doubted it had been an act of mercy, but an oversight. I was alive, but there were no guarantees things would stay that way for long.
Peering down the trail, I expected to see a bottle-green van appear from the dappled shadows. It didn’t, but then neither did any other vehicle. Something was there though, somewhere down the hill beyond where the road forked. Police perhaps, though I doubted it. My hope was that it was Rink, that somehow – beating odds in the billions – he’d managed to follow my trail from Baker’s Hole to this muddy hole in the ground I currently sat in. Of course it couldn’t be Rink: that was just my delirium offering false hope. The engine noise sounded as if it was getting closer, but who knew? The acoustics of the mountains had already proven unreliable, so it could be the last of Billie’s hunting party moving away.
Billie!
Hell, I hadn’t given the woman much thought throughout my misery of the last few hours.
Where was she?
I looked around, and being unable to find her didn’t exactly make me feel much better. If I had discovered her lying close by she’d be dead, and that would be bad. But the alternative was that she’d been taken and God alone knew what she’d have to go through before she was finally put to death. Of that there was no doubt. The Jaegers, or those they worked for, would torture answers from her, and once they’d learned what they wanted then there would be only one outcome. They couldn’t release her; she’d be buried in an unmarked grave in some desolate place.
Until then I’d been complacent about my lot. I’d sat, feeling the pain and the leaking blood, and it hadn’t been enough to get me moving. But now that I had someone else to focus on I struggled to get to my feet.
I didn’t make it
I ended up on my face in the road, and lay groaning at my inability to put one foot in front of the other.
‘Get up, goddamnit!’ The voice was Rink’s but it was only in my head. ‘Quit now and you die. You ready to die?’
If the question had been posed earlier, I wouldn’t have cared. I would have welcomed relief from the pain. But now I railed against death. It was more like frustration. I pawed at the dirt, tried to get my knees under me, and ended up rolling on my side. I blinked up at a patch of sky overhead. It was a narrow strip between the treetops.
‘I never took you for a quitter, Hunter.’ Rink’s voice again.
‘I’m not quitting. I just need to gather my strength.’ I have no idea if I spoke out loud, or that I merely answered the imaginary berating of my friend.
‘The longer you lie there, the weaker you’ll get. Now get your butt in gear, soldier. Move, see to your wounds, or you’ll bleed out like a goddamn frog on a gig.’
‘I’m up, I’m up, stop going on like an old woman.’ Surprisingly I had made it to my knees. I leaned forward, palms flat on the earth: the perfect position for purging my guts. It was many hours since I’d gorged myself on Billie’s homemade stew, but you wouldn’t think it. Perhaps through the chase and subsequent fight, followed by my hours of inactivity, my digestive system hadn’t been working effectively, because I vomited a huge puddle of meat and vegetables that looked little different to when I’d spooned them down. It was unpleasant, but I felt a small sense of relief. There was no blood in the sick. I’d probably escaped large-scale internal damage. I was sick a second time, and this time it was mainly liquid, which was rapidly replaced by stringy drools of bile. My head banged repeatedly, as if it was a tambourine being beaten on by an over-zealous Hari Krishna. I wiped my mouth on the back of my jacket sleeve, then lifted tremulous fingers to the lump on my head. I hadn’t been shot, but the whack of the gun butt had come close to cracking my skull.
‘You’ve survived worse injuries. Get up, lameass.’
I had been hurt worse in the past. I’d been shot before on a few occasions, one time to the point where I would have died if a colleague hadn’t dragged me out of the sniper’s sights and into the hands of the waiting medics. That time the bullet had gone right through my chest and out of my back, and there was no way I would have lived if not for the emergency surgery, blood transfusions and weeks in a hospital bed. Right there on the muddy trail there were no colleagues to drag me out of harm’s way, or to give even the most rudimentary first aid. If I wanted to live, I had to save myself.
The head wound could wait.
So could the one in my gut, and the nick on my shoulder. They didn’t trouble me the way the one in my chest did. The antiballistic vest I was wearing had stopped the bullet from entering my gut. The Kevlar had dispersed some of the kinetic force, but it still felt as if I’d been kicked in the belly by a horse due to the hydrostatic shock: if I lived, the next few days were going to be sore ones. I imagined that already I was sporting a black and blue bruise that would make even the slightest movement painful. I wasn’t bleeding into my stomach, and until I took a leak I wouldn’t know if the impact of the round had caused damage to my liver. I doubted it, because if I’d been bleeding internally I wouldn’t have wakened from my swoon, I’d have continued to fade and fallen into a coma.
Crawling to the edge of the road I found the same mossy boulder I’d woken against, but this time parked my butt on top of it. My left arm was numb, but it still had movement. I hooked my jacket collar, helping while I unzipped the front with my right. It hurt like hell to shrug the jacket off my left shoulder, but I persevered. Rink’s voice had faded, but had been replaced by my own self-berating. Jamming my jaw to my collarbone I could see the mess of blood on my shirt. Enough had leaked from me that it had darkened the vest in a wide ring extending from under my left armpit almost to my sternum. Above and to the left of my heart, there was a hole in the bulletproof vest – which in this case was somewhat of an oxymoron – and some of the internal padding had puffed out around the edge. It was wet with blood, but I caught a glint of a second colour and was happy to note that it was the copper alloy base of a jacketed round. The vest hadn’t saved me from injury, but had prevented full penetration of the bullet into my torso. The rear end of the bullet was wedged in the vest, and only a couple of millimetres of the tip must have made its way through to my flesh. Nevertheless, it still didn’t mean that I hadn’t suffered serious damage. If the bullet had fragmented, parts of the projectile could have penetrated deeper, spinning and tumbling and causing untold damage to soft tissue, bone and organs alike. But I thought that this bullet was a regular lead projectile jacketed in copper, and not an armour piercer containing tungsten or steel. It tells you something about the man when he’s happy that he has been shot with a full metal jacket round and not a high-density, soft nose or hollow point – any of those would have gone right through the vest and killed me, no question.
I struggled with the Velcro straps and unhitched the vest. It sucked off me, the wetness of my bodily fluids causing a vacuum. I swear I felt the tip of the bullet extracting from my flesh, and it was with mixed feelings. The relief was huge, but the pain was enormous. I almost blacked out again. Blood began to pulse anew. My shirt was sopping, and I didn’t bother pulling it off, just got my fingers in the bullet hole and yanked it apart. There was a shallow depression in my left pectoral muscle that looked far too small to have leaked all of that blood, but I knew that once I’d extracted the bullet the edges of the wound had puckered in on themselves, partly sealing it again. The flesh was sore and tender a good hand’s span all around it, and there was deeper pain in my ribs and even in my left lung when I concentrated on breathing. Thankfully the wound wasn’t mortal, the way I’d feared. I was lucky: those men that had taken Billie hadn’t realised I was wearing a vest. They just saw the hole in my jacket, the blood and likely the delirium in my face and decided I’d minutes to live at most. Their mistake. I was ha
ppy to note I wasn’t the only one to have made poor decisions last night.
Knowing that your next move won’t be your last has a placebo effect. Strength I hadn’t been aware of previously began to reach my hands. My numb legs began twitching in their urgency to get up and move. Not a bad idea, considering the engine noise had grown louder and was definitely approaching this time. Before I could do that I had to do something about the wound. If it opened again and I began bleeding then I’d be face-planting the ground again in no time. Our bags were gone, taken along with Billie and the guy I’d shot. I scratched through my jacket pockets but they’d been rifled, my wallet stolen. My outer clothing was filthy with mud and forest litter, none of it clean enough for a dressing. My shirt was saturated with blood. I pulled off my jacket, and checked the inner lining at the back. It was clean. My knife had been taken, so it was down to the strength of my fingers alone to rip the lining out. Ordinarily it would have been a task of seconds, but my limbs were still weak and the tough lining almost beat me. I had to nip the lining with my teeth – a painful job carrying a head wound – to get a hole opened up then insert my right fingers, stand on the sleeve with one foot and then throw myself backwards. A long strip of clean cloth came away. Once I’d got it going the rest ripped away with less effort. I tore off a clump of smaller strips and used them to dab away the blood from the chest wound. Once that was done, I folded a larger strip and pressed it over the bullet hole. Then came the difficult part. It took some contorting of my body, and much gritting of teeth to hold back the curses, but I managed to loop the impromptu bandage around my shoulder, back under my armpit and tie it off over the wadded cloth. With another rag I cleaned the blood from my shoulder wound, and found it was little more than a graze. I left that wound uncovered. It wasn’t ideal, but it was all I had.
The engine noise was nearby, but there was still no sign of a vehicle. The driver had gone up the other trail. Now that I was thinking clearer, I’d discarded the idea that the car belonged to either the Jaegers or Rink; it simply had to belong to someone else, hunters or perhaps someone out for a hike in the hills. I doubted those in the vehicle were enemies, and more likely people who could help, but I couldn’t take that chance. Leaving the vest unfastened down my left side in order to ease my breathing, I shrugged back into my jacket. Suffering from shock was still a firm possibility, and I needed the extra layer of clothing to keep warm, despite the sun being up now. I needed to replace fluids, too. Bleeding out, purging my stomach, all had conspired to dehydrate me, and helped weaken me, not to mention exacerbate my headache.
