Stephen Leather: The Hunting

Contents

Also by Stephen Leather

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Also by Stephen Leather

Pay Off

The Fireman

Hungry Ghost

The Chinaman

The Vets

The Long Shot

The Birthday Girl

The Double Tap

The Solitary Man

The Tunnel Rats

The Bombmaker

The Stretch

Tango One

The Eyewitness

First Response

Takedown

The Shout

Last Man Standing

The Runner

Spider Shepherd thrillers

Hard Landing

Soft Target

Cold Kill

Hot Blood

Dead Men

Live Fire

Rough Justice

Fair Game

False Friends

True Colours

White Lies

Black Ops

Dark Forces

Light Touch

Tall Order

Short Range

Slow Burn

Jack Nightingale supernatural thrillers

Nightfall

Midnight

Nightmare

Nightshade

Lastnight

If you’d like to find out more about these and future titles, visit www.stephenleather.com.

THE HUNTING

Stephen Leather

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Stephen Leather 2021

The right of Stephen Leather to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 978 1 529 34523 0

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

For Alana Jane and Zula

CHAPTER 1

The overhead sun was relentless as it burnt down through the cloudless sky. Jon Van der Sandt had a wide-brimmed hat shielding his face and impenetrable Oakley sunglasses protecting his eyes but there was nothing he could do to make the air that he breathed any cooler. He stopped and took a swig from his water bottle.

‘Not far now,’ said his guide, as if reading his mind. The guide was in his late twenties, almost half Van der Sandt’s age, but he had been born in Botswana and knew every inch of the thirty thousand-acre game farm. His name was Paul Falkner and his family had owned the farm for three generations. He was a good six inches taller than Van der Sandt, lanky with barely an ounce of fat on him, his hair bleached blond by the sun and his skin the colour of polished mahogany. Like Van der Sandt he was sporting a wide-brimmed floppy hat, though there was a racy snakeskin band around his. Both men were wearing olive shirts and shorts and Timberland boots, and hunting vests loaded with ammunition.

‘I’m good,’ said Van der Sandt. He didn’t want the fact that he had stopped for a drink to suggest weakness. He was tired, but after five hours of walking through the bush, who wouldn’t be? He knew that many Russian hunters, and lately the Chinese, preferred to be helicoptered in close to their prey. He had even heard stories of them mowing down elephants and rhinos from the air, not even bothering to land. That wasn’t the way that Van der Sandt hunted. He went in on foot with only what he could carry. Man against beast and let the strong survive.

He placed the water bottle back in his belt and Falkner began walking again. They were on the track of a small herd of elephants: two males, five females and two juveniles. Falkner was following their trail and figured that they were a mile ahead, maybe less.

Van der Sandt was paying handsomely for the hunt, and he had already been rewarded with a white rhino and three buffaloes, one of which had the biggest spread of horns that he had ever seen. The three-day hunting holiday was costing twenty thousand dollars, which included the necessary licences, but each kill added to the bill. The rarer the animal, the higher the price, and in the case of the buffalo, the massive spread of the horns had meant the kill came with a thirty thousand-dollar price tag. The elephant they were tracking could easily cost more than twice that; it depended on the length of the tusks. According to Falkner, it was a fifty-five-year-old bull that weighed close to seven tons. If that were true, it would be the largest elephant Van der Sandt had killed, and Van der Sandt had killed dozens.

He was carrying his gun and ammunition. Some hunters had a bearer following behind with their gear in the way that golfers used caddies, but Van der Sandt was old school. If he could have done without Falkner he’d have gone into the bush alone, but he wasn’t familiar with the area and it would have been foolhardy in the extreme to go solo.

The rifle Van der Sandt was holding was a double-barrelled sidelock made by William Evans of London, and it was his pride and joy. It had been handmade to his requirements and was chambered for the .500 Nitro Express cartridge, the favourite ammunition of big game hunters around the world. The gun had taken almost three years to produce and the action plates and body were engraved with scenes from his favourite hunting grounds in Africa and Asia, with the initials of his wife and children incorporated into the design. He had never told his wife what he had paid for the gun – close to two hundred thousand dollars – but he considered it money well spent. It was perfectly balanced and the eleven-pound weight helped deal with some of the recoil. Not all of it, by any means, and firing the gun meant putting a lot of weight on the front foot and holding the stock tight against the shoulder. It wasn’t a gun for amateurs – if you weren’t careful you could pull the trigger and end up flat on your back. And if your shot had just missed a seven-ton elephant, a mistake like that could easily be fatal.

A double rifle was vital just in case the first shot wasn’t a killing shot. An elephant would charge if it wasn’t killed instantly and having the second cartridge ready to fire could be a life saver. The new breed of hunters tended to prefer pump-action guns with five or more cartridges in the magazine, but Van der Sandt was contemptuous of them. If two shots wasn’t enough to bring down your quarry, you had no business being a hunter. And it wasn’t unknown for pump-action guns to jam. A double never jammed. You pointed it, you braced yourself, and you pulled the trigger. Job done. And you had a back-up shot ready to go. Van der Sandt had requested double triggers. He could have gone with a single trigger but the mechanism was more complicated and more likely to fail.