Sampson swung the barrel of the bear gun after the running man. He fired and missed, hitting a stump just behind the giant.
Ducking down, John ran the bolt on the .375 just before Goliath responded with another burst that chewed up the front of the hummock he was hiding behind.
When Sampson peeked again, Goliath was still running like hell and across the hill. When John had first seen the giant, he had been at Sampson’s eleven o’clock. Now he was at ten o’clock and showed no signs of slowing.
Sampson swung the gun after him, fired, and missed again. Nine o’clock.
What’s he doing? Where’s he going?
Sampson ran the bolt a third time, looking past the running Goliath all the way to seven o’clock, and understood. There was a ridge about seventy yards out that climbed and ran west toward the river. He was going for higher ground.
Sampson knew he’d have to reload after this next shot and wanted to make it count before Goliath could get the advantage and shoot down on him.
Keeping both eyes open, John swung the .375 after the running giant a third time, found the man’s left side in the sights, moved the crosshairs just ahead of Goliath, and tapped the trigger. The bear gun roared.
The heavy bullet hit the giant in the ribs below his shoulder.
Dead before he knew it, Goliath did a twisting somersault, bounced off the trunk of a burned tree at the base of the ridge, and crashed to the ground, unmoving.
Chapter 101
I pumped the action on the ten-gauge, got upright on wobbly legs, and looked over the top of the embankment at the dead guy on the trail. He was on his back and unrecognizable.
His eyes were gone. His face looked like hamburger ground by buckshot fired at point-blank range.
I climbed the embankment, trying to breathe slow and calm the adrenaline, and squatted by the dead man, meaning to search him for identification. But then I noticed he had an earbud in and a tiny bone-conduction mike taped to the hinge of his left jaw.
I rolled him over, found a small Motorola radio clipped to his belt at the small of his back, and took it. I popped out the earbud, wiped the blood off it, and stuck it in my own ear, hoping to listen in on whoever else was in the woods hunting us.
Across the river, an automatic weapon fired a short burst. A second later, a rifle shot went off. Another burst. A second rifle shot. Another burst.
The third rifle shot sounded different, abrupt, as if it had connected, and it went unanswered long enough that I allowed myself a smile. If that was the bear gun I’d heard, Sampson was still alive.
“Big DD? Do you copy?” came a male voice through the earbud. “Vincente? Do you copy? If you can’t talk, tap twice.”
Figuring the dead man at my feet was Vincente, I carefully peeled off the tape holding the microphone and tapped it twice.
“Good man,” the voice said. “Big DD? Come back?”
The radio stayed silent for several seconds before a woman answered, choking, “He’s gone, Butler. I saw him hit. I... I see Sampson! He’s moving in that open timber! He’s going to Dawkins’s body!”
“Where?” Butler demanded.
“Face the river, Cap. Two hundred vertical up, at your one o’clock, he’s heading toward the base of that ridge.”
“If you can see him, shoot him, Purdy!”
The big gun went off from downriver.
“Missed,” Purdy said, sounding disgusted.
“I have him now!” Butler said.
Three rapid shots went off from a lighter rifle, not far away, less than a hundred and fifty yards from me, over a brushy knoll toward the river, out there in the open where the fire must have burned hottest.
“All misses,” Purdy said. “He’s behind those trees now.”
“You take left. I’ll take right. He moves, kill him.”
“Roger that.”
I was already running; I went down the trail and out into the burn, then cut into the wet high grass and brush growing on the knoll. The rain picked up, giving me more sound cover as I lifted the shotgun and slowed.
“Send one, Purdy,” Butler said. “See if it spooks him out.”
I angled slightly to my right, crouched, and crept around the top of the knoll. The bigger gun went off a good four hundred yards to my left.
“Gonna move,” Butler said. “Get a better angle on him.”
I heard him in the earbud and also with my free ear. I took three quick steps and saw him below me, no more than thirty yards. Butler was facing away from me, lying prone behind a scoped AR rifle at the edge of a drop-off above the river bottom.
When he got to his feet and turned, I had the shotgun pointed at his head.
“Drop the gun or I’ll make your face look like Vincente’s,” I said.
Chapter 102
Butler stared at me in disbelief, then set his rifle down.
“The pistol too,” I said. “Remove it with your thumb and index finger. Slow.”
He straightened up and did as I asked, tossing the pistol.
“Hands behind your head and move away from the weapons, Mr. Butler,” I said, gesturing to his right with the shotgun.
Again, he complied, walking six feet to his left, his eyes never leaving mine. “How do you know my name?”
“I listen well. But it doesn’t matter. M sent you and your men to kill us.”
“I was against it, but he’s sick of you.”
“Is he, now?” I said. “Who is he, anyway? M? And what exactly is Maestro?”
Butler almost smiled. “That’s the beauty and brilliance of this movement. No one at my level of Maestro operations knows who he is. No one at my level wants to know.”
Before I could reply, the big gun downriver fired. The shotgun was blown from my hands.
Butler started to lunge for his weapons, but I was already going for my pistol on my right hip. But it was on the other hip!
I came up with the bear spray instead.
Rather than risk a cloud of pepper gas to the face, Butler spun and leaped over the drop-off. He disappeared before I could get the pistol out of the holster on my left hip.
I ran forward and saw he’d dropped a few yards, landed on his feet, and was now sprinting and weaving pell-mell down the mountainside away from me, heading northeast toward a ravine and the river a few hundred yards beyond it.
I thought about shooting at him but realized it would have been a Hail Mary at best with a pistol. And that sniper was still to my left somewhere, which caused me to go down on my belly behind some rocks. I watched Butler get farther and farther away from me, listened to him grunt and gasp with effort in my earbud.
“Bug out, Purdy,” he said. “Repeat, bug out.”
“I’m gone, Cap,” Purdy said.
I cringed, expecting one last shot from her in my direction. But none came and Butler put even more ground between us, still running at the same angle toward that cut in the mountainside.
And then I saw why through my binoculars. Beyond the ravine several hundred yards and pulled up on the far bank of the river, there was a blue raft just like ours, probably Durango’s. Butler was headed straight for it.
He was a solid two hundred and fifty yards from me when he disappeared over and into the draw. With no idea how deep or how brushy the ravine might have been, I kept my focus on the far side of it in direct line with the river and the raft.
Twenty seconds went by and then, to my shock, I saw M’s man sprinting up the other side of the draw, moving even faster than he’d gone down into it.
He got halfway up and twisted to look over his left shoulder, not back and up at me but down into the ravine.