Matthew Dunn - Spycatcher

Will saw flashlights. They belonged to two of the Iranians, who were approximately seventy meters away from his position. The men stopped for a moment and then split up. One of them headed in Will’s direction, and the other moved off on a different route. Will inched very slowly backward into undergrowth and lowered himself so that he was prone on the ground; he heard the man’s footsteps crunching in the snow, and he saw the beam from his flashlight cover the ground just next to Will’s position. The Iranian walked past him at a fast pace and turned into a channel of open ground. Will was about to attack the man when he saw that at the head of the channel the other man was emerging with his flashlight. The men were obviously covering ground using search drills wherein they would separate and then rejoin before either of them was isolated for too long. Will cursed silently. This team knew what it was doing.

He watched the two men stay together for seconds and then split up again, with one man going to the right and the other directly onward. The light was fading fast now, and Will was grateful for the additional cover. He lifted himself up to follow the man who had traveled directly forward. Will moved into the trees using long, quick, but delicate strides while in a semicrouch stance. He placed himself prone on the snowy ground again and watched. As he had predicted, the man soon came to another stop and was rejoined by his colleague, who joined him from the right. Will was much closer to both men on this occasion, and he could see that in addition to flashlights, the men carried nightsticks. He presumed they also had concealed handguns, but the exposed batons were clearly an indication that they wanted to incapacitate and capture Will rather than kill him. The two men whispered, pointed in several directions, and separated again.

Will decided that he had a maximum of thirty seconds to get it done. He pushed himself up and moved silently toward the man who was nearest to him. He expected to have to sprint the last few meters, but the blizzard had grown even stronger and hid the sound of his movements. He came directly up behind the man and placed his right hand on the man’s chin while jamming his left hand hard against the back of the man’s skull. He deliberately fell backward with the man while twisting his head. The man’s arms and legs flailed wildly, but Will held him firmly while screwing the man’s head around until he was satisfied that his neck was broken. He pushed the dead body off him and quickly dragged it away from the track it was on. For a brief moment, Will looked at the body. The man’s build and light-colored clothing were similar to Will’s own frame and attire. An idea came to him, and he grabbed the dead man’s flashlight and nightstick. He continued on the route the man had been taking while moving the beam of his flashlight ahead of him. After walking for fifty meters, he stopped and looked around. He saw the other man coming toward him from his left. Will swept his beam over the ground and stayed still. He wondered how close he could let the man get to him before the man realized that he was not moving toward his colleague.

When the man came to within a few meters of Will’s position, Will swung his flashlight into the man’s face to momentarily blind him. The man uttered something harsh-sounding in Farsi and held the fist that was clutching his nightstick up to his face to shield it from the light. Will ran at him, dropped low, and swept his nightstick against the shinbone of one of the man’s legs. The man fell forward onto his knees, and Will seized the moment to jab the end of his weapon into the man’s gullet. He then struck the side of the man’s head and watched him slump to the ground. Will looked at the man, hesitated, wished that he had a better weapon to do his job cleanly, and then struck him another four times on the head until he was satisfied the Iranian was dead.

Will patted his hands against the corpse’s pockets and waistband. When he found what he was looking for, he dropped the nightstick and flashlight and then proceeded ahead with his newly acquired CZ 75 pistol. It was nearly nighttime now, and Will had to move slowly while navigating his way through the trees. He headed toward the area to the left of his entrance into the forest, as it seemed to him to be the logical place for the other two team members to be searching. He moved several paces forward, stopped, crouched, listened, then moved a few paces more. He continued this routine until he had covered nearly three hundred meters. He had no particular plan, apart from keeping one of the men alive so that he could deliver a message of failure back to Megiddo.

Will was taking another step forward when a bullet struck him in the shoulder and sent searing pain down his arm and over his chest, bringing him to his knees. He saw a flashlight flicker on his left side, and he awkwardly pushed himself back up onto his feet to swing his gun toward the light. But as soon as he did so, the light was turned off and Will was back in blackness. He cursed and moved several steps away from the position where he’d been shot. He heard movement and rotated 360 degrees to try to identify its location. His left arm was now limp by his side, and he grabbed its wrist with his right hand and shoved the limb’s useless hand partway into a pocket to hold his arm still. He knew that the only reason he hadn’t been shot in the head was that the man who fired at him wanted him alive. But he also knew that the man would take no chances: if he had to shoot at Will again, he would shoot to kill.

Will thought rapidly. There was no more element of surprise, and the gunshot wound had significantly reduced his physical ability to hunt down his assailants. His hope lay in the fact that the men wanted to capture him. He decided that his only option was to bring them to him. He chose a random direction in the woods and ran.

Ahead of him the ground sloped down into a dip, and Will followed the route while tucking his gun into his belt. On the other side of the dip, the ground rose sharply, and he used his only capable hand to grab on to anything that would help him get up the slope and continue forward. He stumbled several times as his feet caught snow-hidden roots and bracken, but he managed to stay upright despite how hard his useless arm was making it to keep his balance. Occasional flashes hit the ground before him, and Will knew they came from the lights of the men behind him. He also knew that he needed sufficient distance from those lights as well as open space to do what he had to do.

He reached flat ground and pushed harder, even though he risked injury from running near-blindly toward trees. He broke left and right to make his route odd and unpredictable and then carried on fast, desperately hoping to reach some treeless ground that would give him a little more visibility than he currently had. He ran for what felt like thirty minutes while trying to ignore the pain of his wound and the pain in his lungs from constantly sucking in icy air. He ran even after he no longer saw the telltale signs of flashlights flickering behind him. He ran even as he finally emerged from woods into a tree-ringed meadow of snow. He crossed the meadow toward the tree line on the other side, and only then did he stop and turn to face the direction from which he’d just come. He pulled out his pistol, breathed deeply, and tried to calm his oxygen-starved and agonized body. Almost instantly the two men ran onto the meadow, looking around. They had discarded their batons in favor of their sidearms.

What little light there was from the night sky was casting a blue hue over the area before Will. He waited until the two men were nearly in the center of the meadow before he stepped away from the trees so that he stood exposed. The men stopped and could clearly see him. They were approximately 125 meters away, and as Will raised his pistol, he guessed that they had little to fear from his gun, given the effect his current condition would have on making a meaningful shot, not to mention the distance between them. It was a near-impossible shot, but nevertheless he inhaled three times and then half exhaled before holding his breath. He focused his mind and pulled the trigger. One of the men flipped backward and fell awkwardly as Will’s bullet hit him in the head.