Stephen Leather - The Hunting

‘Still butt ugly,’ said Erol. ‘But yeah, you look just like the bastards that grabbed us.’

‘So we’re good?’ said Raj. ‘We head north towards the guy?’

‘Sounds like a plan,’ said Sid.

The three men set off north, back the way they’d come. They walked for ten minutes and then Raj stopped and switched on the GPS. The hunter had moved south-west and was now just over two hundred metres away. Raj switched off the unit and nodded at Sid and Erol. ‘We’re getting close,’ he said.

‘What’s the plan?’ asked Sid.

‘We’ll try to come up behind him,’ said Raj. He pointed ahead and off to the right. ‘We can cut across that way for about three hundred metres to move a bit further away from him, then we cut back and circle round behind him once we’re past him. We need to be quiet from here on. Erol, how’s your ankle?’

‘It hurts but I can live with it.’

‘Are you okay to drop the stick so that you can keep both hands on your weapon?’

Erol nodded. ‘Sure.’

‘Good man,’ said Raj, and he patted him on the back. They moved through the trees, keeping low and taking care not to step on any twigs. Raj’s eyes were constantly moving, sweeping the area ahead of them. It was definitely getting dark now; the vibrant greens were becoming greyer and there were no beams of light shafting through the branches overhead. Raj counted off his steps until he reached three hundred metres, then he cut left and slightly back on himself to head west. The redwoods were thinner now and further apart, and other trees had managed to stake their claim. There were willows, oaks and Jeffrey pines, interspersed with bushes and shrubs. Sid stayed to Raj’s left and Erol was on his right.

Raj heard a rustling sound off to their left and he signalled for Sid and Erol to stop. They had their carbines at the ready as they surveyed the area, but whatever was making the noise was small and moving away from them. They started moving again, skirting a cluster of rhododendron bushes and then wading through a patch of waist-high ferns.

Raj stopped at the edge of another clump of ferns and took out the GPS unit. He switched it on. The blue dot was two hundred metres away, to their left. He pointed at the dot, then pointed in the direction they were to go. Sid flashed him an ‘okay’ sign and Erol gave a thumbs up, and they all turned to face their target. Raj gestured for Erol to move further to the right and Sid to the left. Raj looked at the screen. ‘Looks like he’s stopped,’ he whispered. He switched off the unit, then put out his hand and pulled Sid’s Heckler towards him so that he could get a better look at the fire selector. ‘You don’t want to have it on fully automatic,’ he whispered. ‘Once you get beyond three shots it’ll start pulling away and you’ll be firing wildly. Set it to a three-shot burst. You can fire as many three-shot bursts as you want and you’ll stay on target.’

Sid nodded and flicked the fire selector switch.

‘Just remember, he’s probably only got the rifle he was carrying back at the hangar, so it’s harder for him to take down a moving target,’ whispered Raj. He looked over at Erol to make sure he was listening. ‘If you come under fire, get to cover if you can, but if you can’t you need to move fast and low, zig-zag as much as you can. And if I draw fire, you need to lay down covering fire. The gun he had looked like it was a variant of the M4. A lot of states in the US restrict the number of rounds that hunting guns can carry and the one he was using looked like a five-round magazine. So if he’s got the same weapon, he’s going to have to change his magazine after every five shots which means we’ve got the advantage in terms of fire power.’

‘I hear you, bruv,’ said Erol.

‘Let’s do it,’ said Sid.

‘Okay, here we go,’ said Raj. He patted Sid on the back, then straightened up and moved forward. Sid moved to the left. Erol moved right.

CHAPTER 60

Van der Sandt smiled as he watched the man walking slowly through a patch of ferns. They were so stupid, these people. That went without saying because anyone who truly believed that killing innocent civilians was somehow going to enable them to live in heaven with seventy-two sloe-eyed virgins was clearly borderline retarded. Did they seriously think he would have kept the GPS unit with him once he realised that they had killed Bell’s men? And did they think that he would be fooled by them turning off their unit? He chuckled quietly. ‘Fucking morons,’ he muttered to himself.

He had placed his GPS unit under a bush and set up behind a fallen log some fifty metres away. From his vantage point he could only see the one man, but he was sure that the others were nearby. The man was wearing a vest that he must have taken off one of Bell’s team. Van der Sandt would have preferred a body shot at that distance but he was more than capable of hitting him in the head. The downside of the headshot was that the man wouldn’t know what had happened. One second he would be alive, creeping through the undergrowth, the next he would be dead. It would be as quick as flicking a switch. Alive. Dead. Game over. There would be no time for the man to realise that he had been shot, that the man whose family he had killed had taken his revenge. He sighted on the man’s head and tightened his finger on the trigger. He had to fight the urge to shout to get the man’s attention, so that he would look in Van der Sandt’s direction. Part of him wanted to see the look of panic on the man’s face as he realised that he was about to die, but there were two other men out there and Van der Sandt only had eyes on one. Drawing attention to himself would be a fatal mistake.

The man stopped and looked over to his left. Presumably looking towards his companions. Then he slowly looked forward again. Van der Sandt’s stomach tightened as he realised that the man was looking straight at him. He smiled and gently squeezed the trigger. The man’s face imploded and he fell backwards, crashing into the ferns. Van der Sandt’s smile widened. One down, two to go.

CHAPTER 61

Raj heard the dull pop off to his right and then the crash of something falling into the ferns. He frowned. The last position on the GPS had been some fifty metres ahead of him, not off to the right. ‘Erol,’ he whispered. ‘Erol!’ There was no reply. Raj looked around, his carbine at the ready. It was a muffled gunshot he’d heard, he was sure of that. There had been a suppressor on the gun back in the hangar which would muffle the sound but not kill it completely. If the hunter was off to the right that meant he’d dumped the GPS and then taken up a firing position. Raj gritted his teeth in frustration. He had clearly underestimated the man. If he was dug in he probably wouldn’t move; he’d stay put until he got a shot at Raj and Sid. Raj knelt down, using the ferns as cover. He took off his backpack and took out two fresh magazines and shoved them in the back pockets of his trousers. He took a swig of water before shouldering the backpack again. He was going to have to move at some point, and the sooner the better. He looked to his left. There was no sign of Sid and Raj had no way of knowing if Sid had heard the shot.

He kept low until he was behind a redwood, then stood up. He peered over in the direction where Erol had been walking but he couldn’t see him. There had only been one shot which meant the hunter had been sure of his kill. Erol must be dead. Or so badly injured that a second shot wasn’t necessary. Raj peered slowly around the tree, just enough to see with his right eye. There was no sign of the hunter. Just trees and bushes and ferns. He moved back, then checked the other side of the tree. Still nothing. Erol had been about fifty metres away from Raj. The hunter’s gun was accurate up to a couple of hundred metres but most shooters would be happier with half that distance. So the hunter was somewhere between a hundred and fifty and two hundred metres away. It had been a few years since Raj had trained with a Heckler and that was too far to be sure he’d hit his target.