Stephen Leather - The Hunting

Raj aimed his carbine at the closest of two jihadists who were firing at Kershaw but Malone beat him to it, putting three shots in the man’s chest. Cross got the second man, two rounds from his Glock hitting the fighter in the stomach. Then there was silence, broken only by the hissing of the radiator of the overturned truck.

Raj, McKee and Malone walked around the Mastiff, keeping their guns at the ready. Kershaw joined them from the rear. The two Marines who had taken cover behind the police vehicles stepped out, carbines at the ready. Ahmad climbed up to check on Belcher, though there was no doubt he was dead. Cross put his Glock back in his holster. ‘We were set up,’ said Cross. ‘They knew we were coming.’

‘It could be they were attacking the police station,’ said Raj. ‘We might just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

‘Lieutenant’s right,’ said Kershaw. ‘They would have come mob-handed if they’d known we were here.’ He looked down at the dead cops. ‘They panicked,’ he said. ‘Fucking Darwinian selection at work.’

The cop who had sought sanctuary in the police station appeared in the doorway. He was covered in dust but didn’t seem to be harmed. Kershaw sneered at him in disgust.

‘Call this in, Dave,’ Raj said to the Mastiff driver. ‘Everybody okay? Anybody hurt?’

‘Only Jimmy,’ said Kershaw.

Raj walked over to look at the dead jihadists. Two bullets thudded into the ground close to his feet. ‘Contact!’ shouted Kershaw.

A jihadist had appeared from behind the overturned truck and was running towards them, his gun blazing. Bullets thwacked into the Mastiff and Raj ducked. Kershaw brought up his carbine and put two shots in the jihadist’s chest. The man fell face first to the ground.

‘Cross, McKee – go and check there are no more surprises in store!’ shouted the sergeant. Kershaw looked over at Raj and nodded and Raj smiled thinly. He should have given the order and the sergeant knew it.

He walked over to the jihadists who had run from the middle of the three trucks. The first two were clearly dead but the third one was still alive, blood pouring from a leg wound and a hole in his shoulder. Raj reached for his medical pack and pulled out a technical tourniquet, emergency trauma bandages and wound-packing gauze. He pulled his knife from its scabbard and cut away the man’s shirt and the material around the injured leg.

‘What are you doing, Lieutenant?’

Raj looked up to see Kershaw standing over at him.

‘This one’s not dead,’ said Raj. ‘I need to get a tourniquet on the leg and pack the wound. Can you call for a medevac?’

‘Are you shitting me? Are you fucking shitting me?’

‘We need to get this man to a hospital, now,’ said Raj. He ripped open a pack of gauze and slapped it onto the shoulder wound. ‘And I mean now.’

‘Raj! RAJ!’

Raj frowned. Who was calling him?

‘RAJ!’

Raj woke up, his face bathed in sweat. Sid was looking down at him, a look of concern on his face. ‘You all right, bruv?’ he asked.

Raj wiped his mouth with his hand and sat up. ‘Yeah. I’m good.’

Sid bent down and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Sounded like you were having a nightmare.’

Raj looked at his watch. He had only been asleep for eight or nine minutes. He got to his feet and blinked his eyes. ‘Did you get any berries?’

Sid nodded. ‘Found what looks like hazelnuts, too.’ He held out his hand to reveal a dozen or so nuts.

‘Nice,’ said Raj.

‘Take a few,’ said Sid.

Raj took four of the nuts, peeled one and chewed on it.

‘There’s plenty more, I wasn’t sure how long we should stay here.’

‘Let’s gather some more, we can eat them on the move,’ said Raj.

CHAPTER 43

Van der Sandt stopped and looked around, taking everything in. There were footprints everywhere, moving in every direction, many of them overlapping. They had thrown the remains of their shelters into the undergrowth but that wasn’t a serious attempt to cover their tracks. It was the man in the boots who had destroyed the shelters, and Van der Sandt was fairly sure that he was the one who had built them in the first place. Boots had established himself as the alpha male and he spent most of the time leading the group as they moved through the forest. Some distance away from where the shelters had been was an area where four of the men, including the two who were injured, had knelt. They had prayed, Van der Sandt realised. Prayed to their god. Van der Sandt smiled to himself. God wasn’t going to help them. That’s not what gods did. In the whole history of human conflict, praying never stopped anything bad from happening. They could kneel and bow to Allah as many times as they wanted, it wouldn’t change the end result.

What interested Van der Sandt was that Boots hadn’t prayed. Why would that be? They were jihadists, they killed for their sick twisted religion, so why hadn’t Boots prayed with the others? If he had time, at the end, Van der Sandt would ask him the answer to that riddle.

Van der Sandt found the tracks of the men leaving the campsite and followed them for a while. Boots was leading the way again. The one with the crutch was walking alone and the others were supporting the one with an injured leg. After three kilometres, they had changed direction and begun to head due south. They had been walking due east, and Van der Sandt had wondered if they had chosen the direction at random. But the change of direction, and the fact that they had changed to due south, suggested they had a compass. If they carried on walking due south they would miss the house, so at some point they would probably move west.

After following the tracks for another few kilometres, Van der Sandt took off his backpack and switched on his GPS. Once he had established his position he switched it off and ripped open one of his energy bars. He chewed it as he looked around. The men had rested in a small clearing. Boots had walked into the forest and cut branches off a Scouler’s willow tree. The man clearly knew his trees. The inner bark of all willow varieties was a natural painkiller. That meant at least one of the injured men was having trouble.

He finished his energy bar and shoved the wrapper in his trouser pocket. Boots clearly had first-class survival skills. The shelter, the willow, the ability to navigate without GPS – it all suggested he had been very well trained, training that went above and beyond what Van der Sandt would have expected from an ISIS terrorist. They lived and fought in the desert, a totally different environment to the redwood forest.

He took his water bottle from his belt and took a couple of sips. The men hadn’t been born in Syria, of course. They were Europeans, so who knew what they had done before joining ISIS in Syria. He could never understand the ease with which Muslims born in the West could so easily turn against their home countries. It seemed to happen across Europe – the UK, Germany, Spain, France – countries that had opened their borders to asylum seekers were then betrayed by the children of the people they had rescued. It was something that Van der Sandt had struggled to understand ever since he had buried his wife and children. The killers who had taken the lives of his family hadn’t lived in poverty or hardship, they hadn’t had to struggle against oppression or fight for their homelands. They had lived in safe countries with first-class education and health systems, countries where they were free to grow and develop their interests, to become productive citizens. Instead they had chosen to join a group of terrorists who thought it acceptable to throw homosexuals off rooftops and to burn their enemies alive. What they had done in Cyprus was unforgivable. Van der Sandt could understand if they had attacked military or police targets, if they had assassinated government officials or politicians, but these animals had attacked holidaymakers, shooting dead men, women and children who were absolutely no threat to them.