So, maybe this was payback for his payback. What better way to shut up the enemy than to pluck them out of their sleep and ship them off to someplace anonymous?
Sitting in the cold darkness — and now in the cold light — anger at Tony Darmond continued to be his most vicious inner demon. Worse, even, than his anger toward his jailers. At least they hadn’t hurt him yet, unless you counted the initial bruises, and in the warped logic of the moment, he was willing to write off those bruises as necessity.
The other dark demon was simply the unknown. Suppose the plan was to just leave them here — wherever here was — to starve to death or freeze? Suppose—
The unmistakable staccato beat of a machine gun made Nicholas and Josef jump in unison.
“Someone’s shooting,” Josef whined. He turned to look at his father. “Who’s shooting? What’s happening?”
Nicholas kissed the top of his son’s head. “I love you, Joey.”
The SUV disgorged five men, all armed with rifles affixed with flashlights. They rolled out of the vehicle quickly, and snapped their rifles up to their shoulders, ready to shoot anyone they saw. The formed a line, with maybe five feet separating each of them from the next nearest shooter, and rushed the tree line in a move that looked practiced.
David took advantage of the noise and dropped to the ground. Branches stabbed him on impact and snow jammed his mouth, but he wanted to make as small a silhouette as possible while still being able to see what they were up to.
Clearly, the driver had seen him, or had been spooked enough to sound an alarm. The spot to which they charged was precisely the one where he’d been standing when his radio had betrayed him. They scoured the area thoroughly, speaking in urgent, animated tones. He couldn’t hear the words, but the clipped syntax and the jerky movements of the muzzle lights made their meaning clear.
David pressed himself tighter to the ground and tried to maneuver his rifle for greatest mobility and flexibility, but he’d managed to tangle the sling as he fell, and between the tangle and the underbrush, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to aim at a target from his belly.
What was Scorpion’s phrase for that? Oh, yeah. Spray and slay. Or, in his case, spray and pray.
One member of the group apparently saw something that interested him. In the flare of the other muzzle lights, David watched the guy point to the ground, and then the lights all moved in unison. They’d found his tracks in the snow.
David’s heart jumped. If they followed the tracks, they’d find the truck. If they found the truck, they’d find the trailer and through the trailer, they’d know that someone was coming at them by boat. If that happened, they’d know everything, and then all of this will have been for nothing.
The group started moving away, following exactly the path that David had worried about. There was something frightening — nearly unnatural — about the way they moved as one organism, not quite in lockstep, but certainly in unison, and with each step, they disappeared farther into the tangle of tree limbs and winter scrub. Two of them were already gone from view.
If David was going to do something to stop them, he had to do it now. It was time to either grow a pair or surrender the set he’d brought with him.
He stood to his full height, untangled himself from the sling, and snapped his rifle to his shoulder. Without looking, his thumb moved the selector from safe to single-shot. He settled the red dot that only he could see on the silhouette of the last person in the line and he squeezed the trigger.
The muzzle flash was at least as bright as the gunshot was loud. It blinded him before he could see if his target dropped, but that didn’t matter. Hitting the guy would have been nice, but marksmanship was secondary at this point. The real point of the shot was to divert their attention.
And divert it he had.
As he dove for cover, the woods erupted in muzzle flashes, hundreds of lethal fireflies unleashing a swarm of projectiles that shredded the undergrowth.
In a flash of inspiration that might have been madness, David rationalized that the shooters were likewise blinded by their muzzle flashes, so he decided to capitalize on it. He threw himself on the ground and scrambled like a lizard on his stomach to displace himself by as far as possible from the spot where they’d last seen him. That meant arcing around to their left, his right, more or less following the shoreline.
He couldn’t imagine the number of shots they’d fired — it had to be hundreds — but by the time they ceased firing, David was easily forty feet away from where they imagined the kill zone to be. When the shooting stopped, so did David. In a stroke of great good fortune, he found himself at the base of a substantial tree, its trunk easily thick enough to conceal him from view.
The chatter among the men who were hunting him had morphed to shouting, and while he still couldn’t make out words, he didn’t think they were speaking English anymore. They sounded angry, and at least one voice among them sounded anguished. Did that mean his shot had hit its mark?
Instinctively, he knew it had, and intuitively he knew that he should feel terrible about it. But he didn’t. Instead, he felt fulfilled — satisfied that no matter what else happened in the next few minutes, the murder of a good cop and decent man named DeShawn Lincoln had been avenged.
Until that moment — until that thought floated through his mind — David hadn’t realized how important revenge was. DeShawn had been killed for doing the job he’d been hired to do. They’d murdered him because he was a good cop, and they’d tried to murder David because the good cop had a friend. The guy David had shot might not be the same man, but he was part of the same team, and for now, that was good enough.
David hid with his back pressed tightly against the tree, his legs stretched out straight, so as to be an invisible silhouette against the white background. It felt like the safest position for about five seconds, until he realized that he couldn’t see what was going on.
The chatter died suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped. In the silence that followed, he could hear movement in the dry and crunchy underbrush. They were coming for him. More precisely, they were searching for his body.
And when they didn’t find it, they would start hunting him again.
Since he’d shot one of theirs, they were as intent on retribution as he was, and with focused intent came focused effort. If he couldn’t see where they were and what they were doing, he was defenseless. If he merely hid in the shadows until they finally stumbled upon him, he’d be defenseless. That weird hive vibe meant that it would be many against him, and he’d die. Merely hiding was not a viable option.
They wouldn’t stop searching until they found him.
He needed to stack some odds in his favor. Drawing his legs up to achieve a kind of squat, he pushed himself to a standing position, his back never leaving the scouring surface of the tree trunk. He kept his rifle in front, parallel to the lines of his body, within its shadow. When he was fully standing, he rolled slowly to his left, at first exposing only his right eye to the downrange threat.
The hunters moved cautiously, two at a time, advancing from tree to tree. Two moved ahead and took cover, and then the two behind them moved ahead farther and took cover. There were indeed only four of them now. Their movement brought to mind a human inchworm that advanced maybe ten feet with each flex. As David watched, they were thirty feet away, and each of them presented their left profiles as they looked entirely in the wrong direction.
David moved slowly to bring his rifle horizontal and pressed the stock into his shoulder. He watched two of them advance and followed them with his sight. They were still merely black splotches against a white background, but the angles could not have been more perfect. When they took cover, they presented unobstructed profiles. As two of them waited for their teammates to leapfrog past, their heads were only a two-inch pivot for David’s sights.