tactical retreat to the safety of the nearest village, where I could have called Washington with the news. There was nothing I could do for the men in the cabin. Unfortunately that thought didn’t occur to me then.
I checked the pistol. There was a round in the chamber and the magazine was full. I put the safety on and, with the pistol in my hand, started off through the forest following the tracks.
The thought occurred to me that if I wasn’t real careful, I could end up like Fred and his colleague. Whoever shot them used an automatic weapon, and I was carrying a peashooter.
I’m no hero — far from it. I’ve been around long enough to know I’m not bulletproof. I also know that revenge is something people only get in movies — not in America in this day and age. I kept going anyway. I wanted this guy. Wanted to shoot him my very own self … as long as I could do it safely, without doing any serious bleeding. I liked Fred, but friendship has its limits.
I took my time walking through the woods, pausing frequently to look and listen. The sound of rain hitting the leaves and big drops falling off the trees masked all other sounds. With the leaves on the trees and brushy plants and the reduced visibility from fog, I couldn’t see far. Still, the depressions in the wet leaves were easy to follow — even for a city boy like me.
It took about twenty minutes at my slow pace to get to the edge of the main complex clearing. Using the trees as cover, I sneaked to a spot where I could see, right behind a large tree. Flat on my face, I inched my head around the trunk. The main complex consisted of a two-story log structure that functioned as a dormitory, a garage for vehicles, and the main building itself, a huge, two-story log house with a covered porch that wrapped all the way around it. There were no vehicles in the gravel driveway.
A body lay on the front porch. From the way he was sprawled I knew he was dead.
A muffled ripping reached me, a second or so of sound, then another burst. The sounds seemed to be coming from the main house. I knew what those sounds were — bursts from a silenced submachine gun. The killers were still hard at it, slaughtering people.
Killers. There had to be more than one. The pistol felt useless in my hand.
Only a suicidal fool would charge in there with a pistol to face an unknown number of men armed with submachine guns. I’d certainly played the fool on numerous occasions in my life, but I sure as hell wasn’t suicidal. Lying behind that tree on wet, soaking leaves, I knew there was simply nothing I could do. I checked my watch. It was seventeen minutes after twelve.
Several minutes passed. The shooting seemed to be over. After those two bursts I heard, there had been nothing else. Now black smoke began to waft from the chimney.
I had been in the main room of the house on several occasions and remembered the huge, cut-stone fireplace.
The smoke became a column.
Maybe the bastards were setting the place on fire.
At twenty-nine past the hour a man wearing a camo outfit came out onto the porch. He had a submachine gun cradled in his arms. He walked to the end of the porch and, facing in my direction, made a come-here motion with his arm.
I froze, holding my breath. Certainly he couldn’t be motioning to me!
That was when I had a bad shock. A bush near a solitary tree twenty yards in front of me suddenly stood up and began walking toward the porch! It was a man in a ghillie suit, a web of cord and leaves and strips of rag that covered him completely and allowed him to sink to the ground and mold himself into the landscape. I could see the round sausage-shaped silencer on his weapon protruding from the suit.
If I had moved in any direction from this tree, he would have spotted me and killed me.
Every Tom, Dick, and Harry wore camouflage clothes these days, but silenced submachine guns and a ghillie suit? These men had the look of professionals. Military snipers, perhaps. Uh-oh! Right then I thanked my stars that I was wearing a dark green jacket, not my yellow one. The air went out of me, and I seemed to sink into the earth in my attempt to disappear from view.
I was also doing some hard thinking. When I saw the man in the camo clothes glance at his watch and take a two-way radio from a holster on his belt, I knew I was in deep and serious shit. They might have hiked across the hills through the national forest to get here, but I was willing to bet my pension these dudes were now waiting for a ride. Someone was going to drive a vehicle up the only road, and that someone was going to see my car — and call these guys on their handheld radios, which would cause them to come looking hard for little old me.
Even as that thought shot across my synapses, I heard the radio in his hand come to life. In that still air the sound carried, although I could not distinguish the words. Yep, both of them took a quick glance around.
Uh-oh!
That was when I realized I should have taken the car to the village to telephone the cavalry.
The inadequacy of my hiding place also hit me hard. Stretched out behind a tree, I was invisible to these two as they stood in the yard, but if they began circling the perimeter of the clearing, they would see me easily.
I backed straight up, keeping the tree between them and me. When the ground permitted, I rose to a crouch and began waddling back the way I had come as fast as I could. They would see my tracks, of course, but I had a few minutes before they found them. I intended to see if I could get back to my car before they did.
Fifty yards into the woods I began jogging toward the guard cabin. I didn’t jog far — the tree trunks, dead limbs, fallen trees, rocks, and uneven ground made it impossible. The best I could manage was a fast walk, going over, under, and around obstacles, just as I had coming from the cabin. The heel marks and boot prints in the sodden forest carpet were nearly a path by now, plainly visible. And here I was trucking along this little highway, begging for someone to shoot me.
After about four minutes of this, I stopped and shucked my hiking boots, tied them together with the strings, and put them around my neck. The wetness went through my socks instantly, nearly freezing my feet.
Trying to disturb the leaves and dirt as little as possible, I climbed up the hill away from the path at right angles. When I had gone forty feet or so, I sat down to put my boots back on. My feet were already cold — there was no way I could walk very far without the boots.
I was tying the lace on the second one when I caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye. A rotten log partially concealed me on that side — the side toward the guard cabin. I ducked down, huddled against it, and waited.
Perhaps a minute went by. Then he came, following the tracks. He was wearing camo clothes and carried a silenced submachine gun in his hands, the butt braced against his right hip. I could see a slender boom mike across his face; the headset was under his camo hat. He moved slowly and steadily, scanning alternately the trail, then the woods right and left.
He must have had a lot of experience in the woods, because when he came to the place where I left the trail, he recognized the footprints going away and turned toward me, still scanning. I held the pistol sights dead center on his chest as I squeezed the trigger.
CHAPTER THREE
In the silence and gloom of the forest, the shot was the loudest noise I’d ever heard.
The man I fired at dropped instantly.
I didn’t wait to see how bad he was hit. I leaped up and ran at him, the pistol at the ready.
The guy never moved. Looked to me like the bullet went right though his heart and stopped it. Stopped it dead.
The man was a stranger. He was wearing a headset that contained an earpiece and a mike. A cord led from it to a radio in a holster on his belt. I helped myself — he didn’t need it anymore.
The submachine gun was an MP-5 with a red dot sight and a silencer. It had a doubled banana clip, each side holding forty rounds.
I slapped his pockets, found another double clip, and took it, found he had a pistol and pocketed that, too. No car keys. My hair was soaked, leaking water down my forehead into my eyes, so I wiped my face on my wet sleeve, then jammed his camo hat on my head.
The radio was on, but no one was saying anything.
