He had to risk it.
Beside him, King stirred.
And murmured, ‘Huh?’
Too loud.
Far too loud.
The beam swept towards them, and Slater heard grunts of curiosity.
He waited a beat longer so he could be sure he wasn’t about to massacre civilians who’d wandered astray.
Someone racked a handgun slide a half-second later.
Slater raised the P320, steadied his aim, and emptied the whole magazine.
Ten .45 ACP rounds ripped through the trees and riddled the group. The silhouettes jerked and twisted in the lowlight, and the torch beams twisted and spiralled away. One torch fell off the mountainside, and its glow emanated all the way down the slope. The other dropped to the trail and rolled back in the direction of the insurgents, illuminating their corpses laced with bullets. Slater had caught one man in the neck, two in the head, and another in his exposed chest. There were four bodies in the dirt.
Ten unsuppressed rounds on a quiet windy mountainside sounds like fireworks from a mile away.
To the person holding the gun, it’s a nightmare.
Slater couldn’t hear a thing. Tinnitus whined in his eardrums, preventing him from communicating with King. He was temporarily deaf as he shuffled out of his sleeping bag. He rose to his knees and his head swam. His head pounded and his heart throbbed and his muscles protested.
You’re in bad shape, he told himself. Real bad shape.
But that didn’t achieve anything, so he quashed that voice and focused on reloading the Sig.
When his hearing came back, King was yelling.
It gave him the fright of his life.
‘What?’ he said, still compromised. ‘What did you say?’
He was talking to thin air. The better his hearing returned, the more he could assess where he was in the woods. Without sight, all he had to rely on was his hearing, so the temporary deafness had tested his mettle. Fumbling based on touch alone proved horrifying, and now he realised King was a dozen feet further into the forest, and moving fast.
‘Follow me!’ King screamed, seeming to recognise that his comrade was compromised. ‘There’s more.’
Fuck.
Slater got up, kicked the sleeping bag away, and sprinted blind up the hill into the trees.
48
Well-trained combatants think there’s a way to adapt to any situation.
And usually there is.
But sometimes the stimuli becomes too much.
Sometimes you get overwhelmed.
Sometimes…
…it all falls apart.
King quickly realised that moving blind was a whole lot more debilitating than he thought. He put his bad foot down and it went straight into a pothole, which caused the heel to strike at an awkward angle, and suddenly his swollen ankle was on fire. He fought that aside and threw himself forward on his good leg, limping up the hillside into the brush.
Behind him, a cacophony of voices rose up the mountainside.
They were fucked. Completely, totally, utterly fucked.
No point downplaying it.
If you survive this, he found himself thinking, you can survive anything.
He yelled for Slater to move.
There was no response.
Then, a few moments later, a soft voice floated up the hill. ‘What? What did you say?’
King saw torch beams light up the trail like a series of beacons.
And then the first of the bullets whisked through the trees, a dozen feet to his left.
They know you’re here.
So he threw caution to the wind and screamed, ‘Follow me! There’s more.’
Slater seemed to get the message. There was a brief pause, and then someone whisked past King — a silhouette racing up the mountain.
King said, ‘Was that you?’
‘Yeah,’ Slater called from above, and ground to a halt.
It was impossible to coordinate in the dark.
They set up position between a pair of wide trunks spaced a few feet apart, leaving them a slim gap to fire potshots at the approaching cavalry.
King got down on one knee, taking weight off his ankle, and narrowed his focus. He found two beams heading into the tree line. He raised the P320, took careful aim, and pumped the trigger.
Once, twice, three times.
The light went out, struck by a bullet, and a guttural scream rose up the mountainside.
The other torchlight instantly shut off.
‘Oh, shit,’ King whispered under his breath.
One by one, the torches died.
Leaving utter darkness in its place.
Slater cursed too.
King dropped the volume of his voice back to less than a whisper and said, ‘How do we play this?’
‘I don’t know.’
The alpine wind rustled the treetops, and some of the undergrowth around them caught in the breeze. There were sounds all around them now. Shaking and rattling and, between it all, the odd scuffing of boots.
The rebels were in the forest.
Something primal took over, and he started gnashing his teeth together. Unable to control his impulses, he crouched lower and pressed his back to the tree trunk, losing clarity of the situation as adrenaline swamped him. He knew what was happening.
Desperation mode.
There would be no firefight out here — not in the dark, on an isolated mountainside, without night-vision goggles or a similar enhancement. And he highly doubted that rural Nepali Maoist insurgents had access to that sort of tech.
So there’d be close-quarters fumbling — running around in the dark until two parties stumbled into each other — and then it would all come down to reflexes. Who could get the first shot off, who could capitalise after the initial shock.
Which, of course, favoured King and Slater.
But that was a dangerous game to play, no matter your reaction speed.
So he whistled softly to Slater, and breathed, ‘Go left.’
Slater understood.
If they separated into different sides of the forest, they’d minimise the risk of running into each other and accidentally killing their only comrade.
King heard the rustle of khakis in the undergrowth heading in the other direction, and then Slater was gone.
He breathed in, and out.
Alone in the wilderness.
Then he peeled off to the right, taking his back off the tree.
Exposing himself to the unknown.
He kept quiet as a mouse. All those years of training came to the forefront, and he crept through the night without making so much as a peep. There were low-hanging branches on his face, and brushing against his shoulders, and
