against elevation up the hill, and a slow target became a dead one fast. But he couldn’t stay where he was either. Not when every passing second gave the other gunman time to catch up and get into killing range.
Victor chose right, ran, keeping low. Rounds from the newly arrived attacker ripped through the undergrowth as he moved, but far enough away to tell him the shooter was either less adept than his partner or his accuracy was greatly suffering from a thumping heart and too much adrenalin. Victor pumped his legs as hard as he could, fighting gravity as he scrambled up the hill, knowing that if he tripped or slowed, his enemy wouldn’t keep missing. Victor almost slipped on a mossy stretch of rock, but kept sprinting until he reached a tree big enough to take cover behind. He stood side-on to maximise its protection while he took huge gulps of air. He’d out-manoeuvred one attacker, but couldn’t out-manoeuvre two capable of communicating with each other.
The tree had a trunk that split into two, protruding from the earth at a forty-five-degree angle. The twin trunks twisted over and under each other. Victor positioned himself behind the thickest part of the trunks and peered through the gap between them. A lizard scurried away.
He glimpsed the second gunman hurrying his way, closing while his target was cowering behind cover. The gunman was about thirty yards out, half-buried in the underbrush, weapon up and ready, pointing in Victor’s direction. He was camouflaged in a ghillie suit and had an MP5SD just like the other two. With his left shoulder against the tree trunks, Victor quickly leaned out of cover and squeezed off a burst. The guy dived from sight.
Victor turned around, knowing the first shooter would take the opportunity to close the distance. It took a second to spot him, moving from tree to tree, low but fast, rushing but composed. Victor fired just as the gunman went out of sight behind a mass of low-hanging branches. Armour-piercing rounds blasted through the foliage. Victor hadn’t expected to hit either man — hitting fast-moving targets in a heavy-cover environment was never going to be easy — but he knew they’d try and get nearer while they thought he was focused on hiding, and moving men in ghillie suits weren’t as hard to see as stationary ones.
Having gained a few extra seconds while they were taking cover, Victor used it to again sprint up the hill, once more getting behind a tree as soon as one big enough presented itself. He felt himself tiring, his chest heaving, the lactic acid in his muscles building. All it would take to get a bullet in the back was being in the open for a second too long.
Victor breathed heavily, tasting the dirt and sweat on his lips. He fought the instinct to entrench himself and fight back, knowing they were still too far apart to engage at the same time, and if he stayed in the one place for too long he would be outflanked. He had to keep moving, otherwise he’d never make it out of the woods alive. His only chance was to find a small cliff, some boulders or a crevasse — any terrain feature that he could use to even up the firefight. He steeled himself for another sprint.
Leaves crackled overhead. Branches swayed. He heard something hard clatter on a tree trunk and crash into the undergrowth further up the hill, maybe five yards east.
Victor threw himself to the ground an instant before the grenade exploded.
Soil and plant life flew through the air. Hot slivers of metal slammed into the tree trunk above where Victor lay. Bark sizzled.
He breathed in the acrid smell of high explosive. He wasn’t injured, despite his close proximity to the blast. Lethal radius for a modern fragmentation grenade was about five and a half yards, and injury radius around sixteen yards, but the path of shrapnel rises as it travels outwards and Victor had been lower than the grenade.
He lay still, hoping to convince the two gunmen he’d been killed and therefore draw them out of cover. He heard the clatter of another grenade sailing through the branches above him. He watched it fall out of sight three yards up the hill, and pressed himself prone, hands clamped over his ears. The grenade exploded and more soil and decimated foliage blasted outwards, more shrapnel ripped through the undergrowth. Smoke swirled in the air.
They weren’t going to be convinced of his death quite so easily. Another couple of yards closer and the elevation wouldn’t save him. The sound of a third grenade tearing through vegetation kept him from getting up and running. It sounded lower, closer.
It thumped into the ground two feet from Victor’s face.
A typical fragmentation grenade had a three- to five-second fuse. One second of flight time left two to four seconds before it shredded Victor’s skull with red-hot shards of steel moving at high velocity, and disintegrated what was left of his head with the overpressure wave. Two to four seconds, if the thrower hadn’t cooked it off first. Not enough time to get up and out of lethal radius.
Only one choice remained.
Victor grabbed the grenade and hurled it in the direction it had come from, snapped his arm back, heard the huge boom three seconds later, felt the whoosh of air from the concussion flow over him, and heard shrapnel pelt the tree shielding him. His ears rang.
He doubted either of his enemies had been caught in the blast, but their close proximity to it would have surprised, if not disorientated, them. And that was all the distraction he needed.
Victor jumped to his feet and ran, not up this time but to the south along the hillside, in the direction of the highpoint, a plan taking shape in his mind.
He ran for two seconds before he heard the muffled clicks of an MP5SD firing — probably the first gunman, who was to Victor’s right, to the west, with the second too far to the north to have a line of sight. Victor sprinted along the even gradient, another five yards, ten, his heart beating faster and faster, the burn in his legs growing more intense, fighting against the thick undergrowth, dodging around trees. The shooting stopped and he knew he’d disappeared out of the shooter’s line of sight. Both would give chase, but Victor wanted them to follow. After another twenty yards, he paused briefly behind a mossy boulder, blind-fired some rounds in the direction he’d come from to slow his pursuers, and sprinted again. He jumped over vines twisting their way along the ground. After forty yards, he threw himself down to the forest floor where clumps of woody shrubs grew among the taller trees, swivelled around and reloaded the MP7. He sucked in a lungful of warm air.
Now, to the east, twenty-five yards up the hillside, Victor could see the outcrop from which he’d fired the Longbow. He wasn’t interested in the rifle — at close range it was worthless — but the highpoint served as a perfect marker. He moved up into a crouch. He couldn’t hear the two guys rushing through the undergrowth, so they were coming after him at a cautious speed — expecting an ambush — which gave him some time. If they thought he was going back to his hide, even better.
He looked around, spotted blood glistening on a tree trunk where he’d expected to find it. At the foot of the tree, the guy he’d shot lay on his back, arms and legs splayed outwards. There were four tiny holes in his chest. Not a bad grouping, considering Victor’s limited time to aim. He stripped the corpse of the hooded poncho covered in burlap flaps and vegetation, and slipped it on. He then took the man’s headset and radio. Victor clipped the radio to his own harness, fitted the headset in place, flipped up the poncho’s hood and swapped his weapon for the dead guy’s MP5SD.
Now things were a little more even.
Victor crept forward, settled into a mass of shrubs, kneeling to the side of a tree and waited. He tipped his head forward to make best use of the hood. Five seconds went by, then ten. Twenty.
A gravelly voice whispered through his earpiece. He spoke in English: American, Southern accent. ‘This is Cowboy Daddy. I’m at his hide. He’s not here. Gamma, do you see anything? Over.’
The reply came a second later. Another Southern accent, more pronounced. ‘Cowboy Gamma. Negative. Over.’
‘What’s your position?’
There was a slight pause before the second guy said, ‘I’m about twenty metres to the west, coming up to the base of the outcrop. Over.’
Thank you very much.
‘Copy that. Keep ’em peeled. Out.’
Victor repositioned himself and stared into the undergrowth. He saw a slim branch tremble about fifteen yards to his eleven o’clock, near to the lowest point of the highpoint. The gunman moved slowly, keeping low, and would have been invisible in the ghillie suit had Victor not known exactly where to look. The guy’s head turned Victor’s way but he didn’t see him, thanks to the stolen poncho. It may not have been as effective as a full ghillie suit with burlap attached to legs and arms as well, but his enemies were expecting Victor to be far more visible. Victor lined up the MP5SD’s iron sights over the gunman’s centre mass and thumbed the selector to single shot.
Fired once. Twice. A double tap.
