The men outside the wood tried to react, but their comprehension was too little, too late – by the time they were moving, the flames had already reached the jeep, its fuel tank, and the extra gasoline in its jerry cans, causing it to explode in a huge fireball that took two more Vanguard men with it.
Garner and the remaining two men were left reeling, running in crazed circles from the flames, hands to their eyes to try and dissipate the pain and shock from the loud explosion.
It was an easy job to take them out with the HK417 and the TI scope. Aim – squeeze – Vanguard man down, head popping open like an overripe watermelon; aim – squeeze – second Vanguard man down, skull half-destroyed by the bullet’s impact.
Garner I let scrabble around in the dirt for a while, so he knew how it felt – if only for a short time – to be the hunted.
When I finally took the shot, I considered taking him in the gut, make him suffer a bit more; but in the end I decided that wasn’t me. Killing the man was one thing; wanton cruelty was another. And so I took out my third hunter of the evening, swiftly with a clean shot to the head that ended things instantly for the short, bespectacled banker.
I breathed out slowly.
Three hunting parties down, twelve people in total.
Not bad for an evening’s work.
I didn’t waste any time on guilt; I had already justified my actions to myself earlier, so I didn’t have to worry about it now.
The hunters wanted to pay to kill people – innocent people, who had done them no harm whatsoever. They were just animals to those rich men and women, like any other.
And the Vanguard men protecting them were complicit with the entire enterprise, and therefore just as guilty in my opinion. They facilitated the hunting of human beings, and protected those who did it, stacking the odds too far in the hunters’ favor.
There was simply nothing to feel guilty about.
I considered repeating my tactics here, just wait for the next group to show up and shoot them all with the HK.
But surely someone, somewhere, was going to start putting the picture together, and I doubted whether I could get away with it again.
If Badrock had any sense whatsoever, he would send men up this ridge to find me, would warn the others away from the wood.
It was time to leave and try my luck elsewhere.
A noise came from behind me and I was about to turn rapidly, go for my pistol or a knife for the short-range kill, when I recognized Kane’s low breathing and relaxed.
If I moved fast, that movement might give me away to anyone looking toward this ridge, and although I didn’t think there was anyone out there, I also knew that it wasn’t worth taking the risk and felt relieved I’d managed to stop myself in time.
Kane’s nose nuzzled me, and I knew he’d found something.
Talia.
He wanted to take me to Talia.
‘Okay,’ I whispered quietly as I maneuvered slowly to my knees. ‘Let’s go.’
I could only pray that she was still alive when we got there.
Chapter Four
The night seemed ever darker as we headed south through the park, but I knew it was just the contrast with the blinding explosions I’d just witnessed; I could still see the horizon lit up in flickering orange in the distance, the fires still burning. In comparison to that, all else was blackness.
Then I realized that it wasn’t just the fire; the moon was also in the process of being obscured, clouds moving across them, and I knew the storm that Badrock had promised was on its way. Soon everything would be dark, and the rain would start coming down hard.
Kane set a fast pace and I had to work hard to keep up; pretty soon my sweat was washing the mud right off me, and I knew that my heat signature was going to be coming through as clear as day. The rain couldn’t come fast enough.
My own optics were picking up plenty of heat signatures too. We skirted around a herd of zebra, standing but dozy; I wasn’t sure if they were awake or not. There were gazelle nearby too, and some of these were more obviously asleep, lying down in the long grass.
We even came within about thirty yards of a gigantic rhino, awake and happily chewing on the grass; but I could see no human heat signatures anywhere.
The rain started to fall then, suddenly and without warning, pelting down in perfectly straight lines like old-fashioned stair-rods and just as hard. One moment the night was still and calm, and the next the very air was electrified. Thunder cracked and, somewhere in the far distance, lightning flashed across the sky.
Eventually we started to follow an incline, which led toward what looked like a narrow gully, and I heard the noises for the first time and cursed; the sound of the rain had been covering them. They were men’s voices; a woman’s screams.
I felt the passage of hot air next to me, heard the suppressed crack of the bullet instants later; my brain relayed the message that someone was shooting at me, but my body had already responded and I was down on my belt buckle, hugging the dirt.
Dammit.
I was too late; Kane had brought me to the right place, but other people had found her first. Found her, and waited for me.
But where were they?
From the ground I checked left and right and barrel-rolled to a small copse of silver sage, seeking whatever cover I could find.
The round had swiped an inch over my right shoulder, and it had come from my diagonal left – possibly from the high ground on the left of the gully.
I looked around for Kane, but he was already gone.
Then my radio crackled to life, and whoever it was had obviously put their own handset back to its original frequency. ‘Mr. Ryder,’ came a deep, melodious voice that I recognized as Billy Johnson’s. ‘We have your woman.’ There was no need for him to confirm it; I could hear her terrified screams over both the radio and the open air. But I didn’t reply; best not to give anything away, I decided.
‘We’re gonna have a high old time with her,’ his voice came through again, ‘if you know what I’m sayin’. And you do know, right? Yeah,’ he chuckled, ‘of course you do, you know this piece of ass real well, don’t ya?’
Still I didn’t reply, just kept to my cover and scanned the view ahead of me as best I could.
‘Tell you what,’ Johnson continued. ‘You show yourself, and we’ll let the girl go, how about that?’
I didn’t believe the man for a second; if I showed myself, he would kill me and then take Talia as his prize, with her father’s blessing.
But I didn’t know how many people there were in that gully. One hunting party? Two? Or even more? Was Badrock there with them?
I just didn’t know, but every second that went by was another second wasted.
What was I going to do?
Screams rang out suddenly again, but this time they weren’t from Talia; they were the bloodcurdling screams of a man in extreme pain, coming from my diagonal left, up the side of the gully.
Kane was taking out the sharpshooter.
Once again, my body was responding before conscious thought could interfere with it, and I was up and charging forward, gaining ground while everyone’s attention would be on their colleague screaming in agony on the high ground.
I covered ten yards at a sprint, found cover and took it; then darted at an oblique angle another ten yards, pushing it to fifteen before diving for cover again, heat signatures finally showing up on my optics ahead of me; and if I could see them, they could see me, so I forced myself as low as I could go and stayed there, buried in the dirt underneath a thick-trunked Rio Grande Cottonwood.
I could see three men in a clearing up ahead, two of them aiming their rifles up the rise to their friend, looking for a clear shot; the other – and from his massive bulk I could see right away that it was Johnson – stood towering over the small frame of Talia, who cowered on her knees beneath him.
The screaming abruptly stopped and – probably thinking the man up there was dead – the two shooters in t
he gully unleashed their weapons on full-auto, blasting away at the hillside in the hopes of killing whatever creature had savaged their comrade.
I took the opportunity given to me, taking out both men with shots to center mass, single shots that hit them in the chest and put them down and out, permanently.
I hoped that they’d not hit Kane before I got them.
Johnson pulled Talia to her feet, a hunting knife to her throat. I could see that her clothes had been half-torn from her body, and I was glad that we’d arrived when we did. I only hoped that I could convince the man not to use the knife.
‘Don’t do it,’ I warned, close enough not to need the radio although I still needed to shout over the rain.
‘Fuck you!’ he shouted. ‘Come and fight me like a man!’
There was little chance of that, I thought as I centered the sight over his right eyebrow, just visible over Talia’s head; he was keeping himself low, but he was so much taller than the girl that it was a big effort.
‘I’m only gonna count to three!’ he shouted again. ‘Then I cut the bitch’s throat!’ A pause, then ‘One!’
I exhaled slowly, held my breath at the half-way point and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing.
‘Two!’ Johnson shouted over the hard-pounding rain, which was coming down so fast now that the little hollow my body was lying in was almost full of water.
The rifle had failed to fire, and I immediately checked the ejection port; then stopped myself, knowing I had no time to address the stoppage – three would be sounded any moment, along with the sickening sound of a jugular being sliced wide open.
I considered going for the Sig, but a pistol shot at this range, in these conditions, to so small a target was nowhere near a guaranteed hit.
And so I did the only thing I could do, and stood just as Johnson was going to call out the final number, my hands in the air. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You win. Let’s have it out the old fashioned way.’
A big smile broke out over the quarterback’s face as he tasted victory – at six foot eight and three hundred pounds, it was unlikely he’d been bested in a fist fight in a very long time.
‘Throw your other weapons away,’ he shouted over the din of the storm, and I did as he asked, casting away both the Sig and the hunting knife, along with the night vision goggles.
The gully was dark, lit only by the occasional lightning which showed that Johnson had also thrown away his own goggles; neither of us wanted the impact of them burying into our faces if the other caught us with a good shot.
‘Let her go,’ I shouted, and – close now – I saw the big man hit her on the head with the butt of his knife and cast her away, unconscious.
‘I prefer them alive anyway,’ he said with a grin. ‘They can tell me how much they like it.’
‘Throw the knife away,’ I told him, but he just laughed.
‘I never agreed to that,’ he said, and – just as I came into range – he launched himself forward, thrusting the long blade toward me.
I sidestepped with barely enough time, tried to lash out at his forward leg with my boot but missed in the dark, spinning wildly in the mud and nearly falling on my ass.
Maybe, I considered, I should have tried to take the shot with the Sig.
We circled each other in the gully, which was starting to fill with water, what had been dry ground – and then mud – now turning to a shallow lake beneath our feet.
It was so dark – except for the lightning that flashed every few seconds – that my only chance was to get even closer to the man. The occasional light only made the dark seem even blacker than before, rendering me all but blind.
But I knew the same would be true for Johnson as well, and – appearing to each other in a lightning flash at about six feet apart – I used the next bout of darkness to race forward through the rainwater.
When the next flash happened, I was suddenly right in front of him, catching him off-guard completely; he swung the knife instinctively but it was careless, and – in the pitch black – I chopped the edge of my hand down toward his forearm, hoping to force him to drop the weapon.
But he must have read my intention, and moved his arm quickly, swiping the blade horizontally across my body; I felt the searing, hot pain of a laceration opening up across my abdomen and prayed that it wasn’t deep. My hands shot out to try and disarm him again before I could stop them, and this time he reversed the blade and cut across one of my forearms.
I pulled back reflexively, adrenaline only just blocking the pain, while still knowing that I had to disarm the man; and then the lighting flashed as he was coming toward me with a killing stroke, a hard straight thrust to my chest, and in the darkness that followed I gave over to my training and allowed my body to do what it wanted; and so my own hands shot out to where I calculated his forearm would be and clapped together hard, one hand hitting high near the elbow, the other low by the wrist.
I heard a splash and the metallic clang as the knife hit the ground, and when the lightning flashed next, I could see that Johnson was finally unarmed.
In the next moment however, he was on me, having used the dark just as I had – to close the distance – and I felt his bear-like arms encircle me completely, pulling me in until my head was into his chest and his huge strength threatened to break my ribs, perhaps collapse my chest cavity. The pain in my abdomen erupted in earnest now, and I feared that he was going to force my stomach lining out of the cut he’d opened up.
My arms were helpless, pinned to my sides, and I had no leverage to use my knees; everything was so tight that I couldn’t move most of my body at all.
My head was free to a small extent though, and I turned my face to his massive chest and sunk my teeth into his pectoral muscle, biting down hard around a nipple, taking in all the flesh around it and thrashing about wildly.
He screamed in a high-pitched wail and released the hold enough for me to stamp on his foot then kick off in the reverse direction, sending a knee straight up into his groin. He grunted and released his arms even further, then lightning must have lit up my face like a Christmas gift for the man and he unleashed a big right hand that caught me flush on the cheekbone, putting me down hard.
He fell on me in the next instant, using his body weight to crushing effect. He fought like a typical football player – it was rough, without finesse, but damned effective.
His forehead came down hard onto the bridge of my nose, the force of the blow and the weight of his skull – not to mention the assistance of gravity – breaking it instantly, wracking my face with savage, nauseating pain.
He then pushed a massive forearm into my throat, forcing my head down into the pond-sized puddles that had engulfed the narrow gully, the water close to covering my face and drowning me.
But at such close range the darkness was no longer so much of an issue; everything was touch at this distance, and one of my hands instantly trapped down on the arm that was choking me, my other arm underhooking him on the opposite side. At the same time, my right foot fed onto the inside of his left thigh as my left foot trapped his right and I initiated a roll.
Trapped as he was on one side, he was forced to go with the rapid motion, and then our places were reversed, me on top now and instantly repaying the head-butt, his nose exploding across his face, gravity assisting me as it had Johnson just moments before.
He tried to throw me off with brute strength, but I had already secured my legs in a grapevine hold on his own, pressing my weight down through my hips and spreading him out, keeping him pinned securely. I let my head come down hard a second time, and with the next lightning flash I could see that he was dazed at last.
He tried to punch upward at me, but the blows lacked power and I let my own fists rain down on him, until he tried to turn away from the pain.
I instantly released my hold – just a little – to allow him to escape, to roll onto his front to get away from the punches to his unprotected face, and then resecured my po
sition, this time mounting from the back.
He tried to buck me off again, but I held him tight and my hands went straight for the neck. He responded by pulling his chin in tight to his chest to protect his throat, but that put his mouth and nose under the water of the rapidly rising gully-stream, and he soon pulled his head back up.
No sooner had he done so than my forearm snaked quickly around his neck, throat in the crook of my elbow, biceps and forearm tight across his carotid artery and jugular vein to cut off the blood supply to the brain. My other arm fed around the back of his head, hand securing itself to my own bicep and increasing the pressure by leaning my head onto that hand, everything so tight now that it was literally unbreakable.
The pain in my arm from the earlier cut was intense, the pressure of the strangle forcing blood to pump out of the wound, black in the lightning, but as Johnson’s body started to relax, I knew it wouldn’t last much longer.
Even with a neck as thickly muscled as Johnson’s, unconsciousness came over him in ten seconds; but still I kept the blood-choke on, starving his brain of oxygen now; and with his face in the water too, death came only a few more seconds later as I felt the warmth against the front of my pants as his bowels let go in his final release, life leaving him completely.
Four hunters down.
I sagged, exhausted, onto the big man’s back, wanting only to give into the desire to rest, to sleep, but I knew that if I gave into that desire I would be dead soon after; the other teams had surely been informed about Johnson’s plans, and would be on their way here now.
Perhaps even were here, watching our little fight to the death for their own sick amusement.
The thought made me move, fast.
Rolling off the big man’s body I was up and running for the nearside of the gully, diving into a thicket of bushes I’d spotted during the last lightning flash.
No bullets chased me there, but I couldn’t be sure that nobody was watching me.
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR HUNT: Colt Ryder is Back in Action! Page 12
