Blood Hunt

buck his body into the air, and his face slammed down hard into the dirt.

“Shit,” Jay said, not caring who heard him. Not caring because he knew, like Reeve knew, that there was no one around to hear: the patrols had been signaled to evacuate the area.

Another rocket landed, farther away this time. Then another, and another. Finally, a flare went up. Two blows on the whistle. Reeve guessed patrols were being sent into the freshly bombed area to look for bodies or fleeing survivors.

“What do you reckon?” Jay whispered.

“Lie doggo,” Reeve said. His mouth felt strange when it worked. “A rocket’s as likely to hit us up-and-running as lying still.”

“You think so?” Jay sounded unsure. Reeve nodded and resumed watch. There was sweat in the hollow of his spine, trickling down towards the trouser line. His heart was beating ever more loudly in his ears. Then he heard a distant megaphone, a voice speaking heavily accented English.

“Surrender or we will kill you. You have two minutes to decide.”

The two minutes passed all too quickly. Reeve flipped open the cover on his watch face and followed the sweep of the luminous dial.

“Very well,” the megaphone said. Then another single blow on the whistle. Reeve could feel Jay trying to burrow deeper into the scrape, pressing himself hard against the ground.

Rockets whistled past to their left and right, causing deafening explosions on impact. Great clumps of earth fell on both men. More missiles, more gut-wrenching explosions. Between impacts, Reeve could hear nothing but a loud buzzing in his ears. He’d been too late putting his hands over them, and was now suffering the consequence. He felt fingers tapping his leg, and half turned to see Jay starting to rise onto his knees.

“Get down!” Reeve hissed.

“Fuck this, let’s go!”

“No.”

More explosions caused them both to fall flat, but Jay scrambled up again straight after, dirt and grass and bits of bark falling like heavy dollops of rain.

“They send a patrol out to check this grid, they’re bound to spot us,” he spat.

“No.”

“I say we go.”

“No. We can’t lose our bottle now.”

The flare went up, the double whistle sounded, and Reeve pulled Jay to the ground. Jay started to struggle, giving Reeve two options: let him go, or slug him. Jay came to his own decision first, catching Reeve on the side of the head with his rifle butt. Reeve snatched at the rifle, letting go of Jay in the process, and Jay got to his feet, pulling the rifle out of Reeve’s hands.

Reeve risked a glance around. The patrols would be on their way. Smoke was being blown all around them, but when it cleared they’d be as visible as targets at the fairground.

Jay was pointing his M16 at Reeve, finger just shy of the trigger. He was grinning like a monkey, his face blackened, eyes wide and white. Reeve noticed that there was a 40mm missile in the 203 grenade launcher. Jay raised the rifle above Reeve’s head and fired the grenade into the sky. With the 203 there was no explosion or recoil, but a loud pop as the grenade was launched.

Reeve didn’t use up precious seconds on watching the gre-nade’s trajectory. He was up and moving. Jay had done it now; he’d let the enemy know they were there. They were fair game now for anything the Argentines threw at them. Reeve left his rucksack. He didn’t care whether Jay left his or not, or even if he left the transmitter. It was time to move-and quickly. Behind them, the grenade made impact and exploded.

With his rifle carried low in front of him, Reeve ran.

“Where are you going?” Jay yelled at him, pouring bullets from his M16 towards where the enemy would be hunkered down, waiting for him to expend the lot. Reeve knew his partner had cracked. He’d never been sure of Jay in the first place, and now his worst fears were being realized. Everything Jay was doing was against the standard operating procedure… or any other procedure. Reeve wondered if he’d be justified putting a bullet into Jay himself. He dismissed the thought in less than a second.

“See you in Chile!” Jay yelled. Reeve didn’t look back, but he knew from Jay’s voice that he was moving too, taking a different line from Reeve.

Which suited Reeve just fine.

He knew the first few hundred yards, could have run them blind. He’d been staring at the route for the past twelve or so hours, since switching directions with Jay. They’d changed position so they would stay fresh and alert. Staring at the same spot for too long, you could lose your concentration.

But Reeve had focused his mind on the route, his escape route. He didn’t know what was over the next rise, but the next rise was shelter from gunfire and night sights, and that was his primary objective: shelter. He knew from an earlier compass reading that he was running northeast. If he kept going, he’d reach the coastal road north of Rio Grande. He was taking a risk, since this direction meant he would have to skirt the northern perimeter of the airfield. Well, they wouldn’t be expecting him anywhere near there, would they? More crucial, he had two ob-stacles to cross: a main road and the Rio Grande itself.

He didn’t know why he’d set his sights on the coast, and if Jay was headed for Chile so be it. Jay would wait for him an hour or so at the ERV, then move off. Bloody good luck to him, too.

The bastard.

Reeve went over the rise on all fours, keeping low in case there were any nasty surprises waiting for him. But the Argentine bombing had done him a distinct favor by clearing out all the patrols. He scurried down the other side of the escarpment, sliding over loose rocks and pebbles. It didn’t seem to be man-made. It wasn’t a quarry or a dump for unwanted stone and shale, it was more like the scree Reeve had come across on the glacial slopes of the Scottish mountains. He ended up going down the slope on his arse. Just when he thought there was no end to the drop he found himself on a road and crossed it hurriedly, remembering to turn around first, in case they came hunting him with flashlights. His footprints led back the way he’d just come. The other side of the track, he turned on his heels again, hit another uphill slope at a run, and powered his way to the summit. There was gunfire behind him, gunfire and rockets and grenades. The sky was full of pink smoke, like a fireworks display. Gunpowder was in his nostrils.

That stupid bastard.

There was someone over to his right, about seventy or eighty yards away. It looked like Jay’s silhouette.

“Jay!” Reeve called.

Jay caught his breath. “Keep going!” he said.

So Reeve kept going. And the sky above him turned brilliant white. He couldn’t believe it. Jay had let off a WP grenade. White phos made a good smoke screen, but you didn’t use the stuff when you were already on your way out of a situation. Then Reeve realized what Jay had done, and his stomach did a flip. Jay had tossed the phos in Reeve’s direction, and had headed off the other way. He was using Reeve as his decoy, bringing the Ar-gentine troops over in Reeve’s direction while he made his own escape.

Bastard!

And now Reeve could hear whistling, a human whistle. A tune he recognized.

Row, row, row your boat,

Gently down the stream…

And then silence. Jay was gone. Reeve could have followed him, but that would mean running straight through the smoke into God knew what. Instead, he picked up his pace and kept running the direction he’d been going. He wondered how Jay could have set off one way yet come back around to meet up with Reeve. It was crazy, Jay’s sense of direction wasn’t that bad…

Unless… unless he’d come back on purpose. The enemy had heard only one yelled voice, come under fire from just one rifle, one grenade launcher.

They didn’t know there were two men out here!

Reeve saw it all. The safest way out of this was to lie low and let the enemy catch your partner. But that only worked if your partner was caught. Jay was just making sure. Back at Hereford, it would be one man’s word against the other’s… always supposing they both made it home.

Over the rise the ground seemed to level out, which meant he could move faster, but also that he could be