ADAM HALL - The Pekin Target

As soon as I had enough loose soil I began caking it over the buckles of the haversacks and the binocular case to take away the shine; then I smeared my face and hands, taking my time: he wouldn't come close yet, in case I had a gun.

He was using a long-distance rifle; its sound had been a heavy cough rather than a bark, and the chip in the rock was larger than a watch face. He knew I was still alive; to have placed the shot that close he must have seen enough of me to notice how I'd gone down, dropping voluntarily for cover, not spinning or toppling with an arm flung out. He would have reloaded by now, waiting to see what I did.

There were no real options. He was waiting for me to show him any one of the four most dangerous aspects of a hunted man: movement, reflection, colour and human shape. But I couldn't stay here; he wouldn't wait beyond a certain time; there would be the moment when he'd believe I was wounded, and then he'd come slowly, using all available cover until he could see I was either unconscious or unarmed. I had to be gone by then.

I checked the time at 06:17 and took my watch off and put it into my pocket before I moved. There was a wall of rock extending a long way to my left, so I covered fifty yards at a low crouch, scuffling my boots into the shale and dragging their toes across grasses to leave them bent; then as the terrain became firm rock I turned at right angles and went for a cleft running south at an angle and providing cover for twenty yards before it finished in a slope of fallen boulders. I would have to climb there, or come back if I had to climb too high.

He might be using a scope sight; that would change things a great deal; it could mean he was farther away than it seemed, and knew there was no real cover here for me, none that could lead me clear; he'd be content to use me for sport, and watch me go from rock to rock like a rat in a maze. If he were shooting from a great distance it meant he must be on higher ground, and could see beyond my immediate cover to flat terrain where he could finally bring me down.

He would try, in any case, to reach higher ground. That would take him towards the east, towards the ridge on the mountain; I must watch for him there.

Sound of a hammer blow and stone shards flew and I dropped flat. Close. That was close. He was higher than I'd thought, and could see more than I'd thought. I stayed motionless, not knowing whether he was so high that he could still see me, whether he was now swinging the long barrel down and moving the cross-hairs to centre on the back of my head, moving his finger inside the trigger-guard and starting to apply pressure to the spring. Time had slowed down, because I was at the frontier of existence and extinction, a place where, for all of us, man-made time loses its rhythm and real time does the reckoning; if the finger of the other creature out there moved by a further eighth of an inch, the intricate computer inside my skull would become a mess of nerve tissue of interest only to a carrion crow.

The sweet scent of pinewood on the air, and the sound of a bird calling from the lower ground where there was scrub for its habitat.

Perhaps he wasn't absolutely sure that this shape was the right one among the kaleidoscope of rock and shadow; he was waiting for me to move before he contracted his finger.

I suppose he was one of the perimeter guards, patrolling the monastery's environment. Or he could have come down from there, from the ridge, to hunt me.

I think I saw a light from the direction of the monastery; then either it went out or the mist hid it again. You know what I'm saying. They might have seen us.

He wasn't simply a hunter out for game; he'd seen enough of me to know I was human, a biped.

Hammer blow and rock splinters fluting through the air and I moved now and very fast while he was reloading and taking aim again: it was the only chance because the bullet had tugged at my dark woollen helmet and I'd heard the whine of its passage and if I went on lying there he'd put the next one into the back of my head. Scuttling like a crab, looking for lower ground, the stones scattering from under my hands and knees and boots, my breathing desperate and my eyes darting for shadow as his gun coughed again and rock chipped close to my face and a splinter cut into my cheek: I was in his sights and if I lay still he'd steady the aim and make the kill so I kept moving, sliding across shale and dragging my own weight forward with hands like claws, hooking at the ground and tearing stones away and hooking again as fast as I could while he was reloading and taking aim and the gun coughed and my leg twitched to the tug of the bullet and I got up and ran low, dodging from cover to cover in the few seconds he'd need to reload, now drop, there's a chance here and there's shadow.

Sweat running on me. Lie still.

Time slowing.

My eyes were shut, because death is a kind of sleep and I'd composed myself; then after a while they opened again without my willing them; I was aware of the stones in front of my face, and a tuft of grass where a small green spider was clinging, and the bright copper bullet. It had ricocheted and fallen well ahead of me as I'd made my run, and I picked it up; it had mushroomed a little after hitting something soft, perhaps a tree bole, but it still had the look of a 6 or 7mm projectile, long in proportion to its diameter and designed for high velocity at long range, with enough mass to counteract wind bucking; it was still warm from the friction of its impact, and nestled comfortably in my fingers, more comfortably than it would have nestled in my brain.

He was a confident man, and trained; this bullet wasn't from a hunter's gun: he was a professional marksman, a technician in death-dealing capable of placing one of these copper artifacts into the body of any man of Tung's choosing: a president, a general, an ambassador. Or into mine.

Blood on the stones from my ripped cheek, not black in the moonlight as hers had been, but crimson in the sun. I turned three of the stones over and picked up three more and went on, crawling towards a group of boulders where the sun threw shadow from the east as I noted incidentally that I was still alive, and must therefore be out of sight here. I left the three bloodied stones in my track and turned at right angles, moving for deeper shadow and at last turning to face the way I'd come, my back propped against a rock and my eyes narrowed to reduce their reflected light.

There was the mountain, and the encircling ridge, and a mass of rock below it where some ancient slide had tumbled it towards the foothills. I kept perfectly still now, moving only my eyes, because he should be there somewhere and I wanted to see him, or at least see the place where he was; I'd taken a risk in turning round to face him, and I wanted to profit. I was taking a risk now, even in keeping still, because if I could see him, or the place where he was, he could see me, or the shadow where I was sitting. But it was no good my trying to run from him blindly through these rocks; I could run into his fire whenever I changed direction. I had to know where he was, so that I could move accordingly, putting rock after rock across his line of vision until I was out of range and could wait for night.

"There isn't much of a choice," Ferris had told me in my final briefing. "There's only one man we want, and we can send only one man in to get him. London's quite adamant about risking innocent life, and there could be fifty monks at the monastery who know nothing about him except that he's asked for shelter."

The shadows up there were longer, vertically, as the sun climbed on the far side. Two birds were circling, predators, towards the north; so he wouldn't be there; they wouldn't have liked the noise of his rifle. There was an area of low bush nearer the south, and I watched it carefully for minutes because a man can miss his footing on a loose rock and disturb foliage. I couldn't hope to pick up the glint of his scope sight, if he was using one; the only reflection would come from the sides of the gun, at obtuse angles, because the sun was somewhere behind him.