Stephen Leather - The Hunting

‘What happens now?’ Jaffar asked.

‘That nutter with the rifle is going to come looking for us,’ said Sid. He held up the Glock. ‘But he’s got a fucking surprise coming.’

Raj shook his head. ‘How good are you with that?’ he asked. ‘Twenty feet? Thirty? On a good day I’m accurate up to about fifty feet with a Glock. I’m pretty sure the gun he was holding was some variant of an M4 carbine, which means with the right cartridge he can be accurate up to a couple of hundred metres. And it was fitted with a suppressor, which means at that distance you wouldn’t even know where he was.’

‘Suppressor?’ asked Sal. ‘What’s a suppressor?’

‘A silencer,’ said Raj. ‘It cuts down the noise the gun makes when it fires. The point I’m making is that we’re outgunned so the last thing we need is a shoot-out.’

Sid gestured at the carbine that Raj was holding. ‘That’s a Heckler, that can shoot a couple of hundred metres easily.’

‘Sure, but I’m out of practice and it’s not as if we can pop down to the range to hone our skills is it?’ He ejected the magazine and squinted at it. ‘I’ve got eighteen rounds left.’ He gestured at the Glock. ‘How many rounds have you got?’

Sid ejected the magazine. ‘It’s full.’

Raj nodded. ‘So fifteen rounds.’

‘Do you think he’s going to come after us on his own?’ asked Jaffar. ‘Or will he bring others with him?’

‘That’s a good question,’ said Raj. He stood up and cradled the Heckler. ‘He seems to be taking it all very personally.’ Raj looked at Sid. ‘He said you killed his family. What did he mean?’

‘How the fuck would I know, bruv?’

Raj smiled thinly. ‘Sid, mate, that guy, whoever he is, sent a team of former special forces mercenaries into Syria to kidnap us from an ISIS camp and then fly us halfway around the world in a private jet to fuck knows where. That couldn’t have cost him less than a million quid. And you saw that house? He’s loaded, obviously, and he seems to be holding you – and me – responsible for the death of his family. A guy like that wouldn’t be spending that sort of money unless he was sure of his facts, so you need to stop fucking around and tell me the truth. Who is he?’

Sid put his hand on his chest, above his heart. ‘Bruv, I don’t know the guy. Never seen him before in my life.’

Raj’s eyes narrowed. ‘But you know what happened to his family.’

Sid looked away and didn’t say anything.

‘We recently carried out a mission in Cyprus,’ said Jaffar quietly. ‘It’s possible that his family died there.’

‘Mission? What mission?’

‘We were tasked with killing kafirs at a luxury resort. We killed tourists, we did not harm the locals and we did not harm Muslims. We killed only kafirs.’

‘So it’s possible his family were there?’

Jaffar shrugged. ‘Yeah, it’s possible.’

‘So you killed women and children?’

‘We killed non-believers,’ snarled Jaffar.

Raj gritted his teeth in frustration. His life was on the line because a group of trigger-happy jihadists had thought it was somehow acceptable to kill innocent holidaymakers. To butcher women and children? For what? To prove that their religion was somehow superior? Raj didn’t have a wife or children, but if he did and if Faaz and his misguided moronic jihadists had harmed them, he’d probably not have thought twice about exacting his own revenge.

‘Bruv, what’s done is done,’ said Sid. ‘It doesn’t matter what set this guy off, does it? What matters is us getting the hell out of here.’

‘We don’t even know where “here” is,’ said Abdullah, waving his arm around. ‘We don’t even know what country we’re in.’

‘It’s the US, right?’ said Sal. ‘The guy’s a Yank. So were the men who brought us here.’ He nodded. ‘It’s America, for sure.’

‘Which means we have rights, here,’ said Jaffar. ‘We need to find the police. We need to get to a town or a city and there will be people who will help us.’

Mo groaned. Raj went over to the injured man and knelt down next to him. He put the Heckler on the ground as he examined the man’s leg. It was clearly broken below the knee. He heard movement behind him and as he turned, Abdullah was bending down, reaching for the weapon. Raj grabbed it and leapt to his feet. He aimed it at Abdullah’s chest and tightened his finger on the trigger. Abdullah threw his hands into the air. ‘I just wanted to look at it,’ he said.

Raj swung the gun around, covering them all. ‘Let’s make one thing clear right from the start,’ he said. ‘This is my gun. Mine. If anyone tries to take it from me, I’ll shoot them. Are we all absolutely clear on that?’ He glared at them defiantly but no one answered. ‘I said are we clear on that?’

One by one the men muttered that yes, they understood.

‘Back off, Abdullah,’ said Raj, gesturing with the gun.

Abdullah walked away, lowering his hands. ‘I only wanted a fucking look,’ he said.

Raj waited until Abdullah was well away from him before kneeling down and checking Mo’s leg. He was wearing sandals and Raj carefully removed them. He was conscious so was able to describe his pain, and after a few seconds of prodding and twisting Raj was pretty sure that the tibia and the fibula had both broken. Mo didn’t appear to be in shock – his skin wasn’t clammy or blue, and he didn’t appear to be confused or breathing rapidly. The breaks were clean and a decent splint would have him mobile if not exactly pain free. The problem was they were in a forest, so medical splints were out of the question. He grinned and patted Mo on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get this fixed,’ he said. He grabbed his gun and stood up. ‘Sid, we need something to tie a splint in place. Can you cut some lengths of material off the shirt you took from the guy.’ He pulled the survival knife from its scabbard and gave it to Sid.

Raj gestured at Abdullah. ‘Can you and Sal have a look around for something we can use as a splint? Two branches, each about eighteen inches long. They need to be about two or three inches wide. We might be able to cut one branch down the middle. See what you can find, yeah?’

Abdullah frowned as if he didn’t understand.

Raj let the Heckler hang from its sling so that he could use his hands to show Abdullah how long the piece of wood needed to be. ‘This long will do it.’

‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, bruv?’ asked Abdullah.

‘We’re going to fix Mo’s leg so that we can move.’

‘Fuck that. It’s his own fault for falling wrong. He’ll just slow us down.’ He waved at Sal. ‘Come on, Sal, let’s go.’

‘Go where?’ said Raj.

‘The hell away from here because here is where that guy’s going to come looking for us.’

Sid had sat down and was using the knife to cut strips of cloth from the sleeves of the fatigues. ‘That’s your plan?’ he asked Abdullah.

‘Do you have a better one?’ asked Sal. ‘Seems to me we need to get as far away from here as possible. And Abdullah’s right, he’ll just slow us down.’

‘Where are you going to go?’ asked Raj. ‘You’ve no idea where we are.’

‘That’s the way the helicopter went,’ said Abdullah, pointing over Sid’s head. ‘If we go that way, we’ll find the house. And a road. Once we find a road we can find a town.’

‘That’s a great plan, except I didn’t see any town when we were on the helicopter, and if you head towards the house you’ll run into the guy with the gun. Our best chance is to stay together and to work as a team.’

‘Yeah, well that’s easy for you to say because you’ve got a gun,’ said Abdullah. ‘Me and Sal have got fuck all and it looks to me like your plan is for you and Sid to carry the guns while me and Sal and the rest carry Mo and Erol.’