Ethan crouched down onto one knee, then rested his left elbow on the top of his left knee to support the weapon as he aimed carefully at the approaching vehicle. The wind was blustering from his right sufficiently that it would affect the travel of the bullet, and at a hundred yards there would be a small amount of drop to the bullet due to the effect of gravity. Ethan had thirteen rounds remaining and he knew damn well the first one would probably not be a hit, but that was not what he needed.
The jeep closed in as Ethan arrested his breathing and squeezed the trigger.
Ethan fired five shots, each of them closely grouped in the hope that a couple of impacts would be enough to force the gunmen to fall back.
On the third shot the jeep suddenly swerved to the left and broke away from the climb as it sought to escape the salvo of gunfire. Instantly Ethan stopped firing and capitalised on his success as he turned and continued running up the hill, determined to put as much distance between the jeep and himself and Lucy.
Ethan ran up into the cloud cover, the incessant mist and drizzle drenching him and chilling his skin as he caught up with Lucy where she was waiting for him on the ridgeline, her breath coming in ragged gasps.
‘I can’t do that too many more times,’ she protested.
‘Me either,’ Ethan replied, ‘but we have to keep moving. Go, now!’
Ethan jogged down the hillside with Lucy close behind, but this time he could hear the jeep in the distance, its engine struggling and whining, and he realized that the gunmen had abandoned the track and instead had charged the hill directly.
‘They’re coming right for us!’ Lucy yelled as she realized what was happening.
‘Get down!’
Ethan grabbed Lucy as he dashed towards a particularly large tuft of grass and a mound of shiny black rocks jutting from the bleak hillside. He threw himself down behind them and huddled in with Lucy alongside him.
There was no way that they could outrun a vehicle, and Ethan knew that they had no chance of survival unless they stayed in the fog where they could not be seen. If you couldn’t run away then you could only hope to sneak away.
The jeep broke over the crest of the hill, its headlights on and casting dim beams through the foggy air as it began to descend toward the far side of the valley. It skidded to a halt and sat for a moment on the valley hillside, and then the two gunmen got out and began surveying the terrain around them.
‘They know we’re hiding,’ Lucy whispered.
‘But they don’t know where,’ Ethan replied. ‘We’ve got to hope they’re not any good at tracking and that they’ll go past us in the fog and give us a chance to escape.’
Ethan peered around the edge of the boulder behind which they were hiding and saw the two men ease away from the cover of their vehicle as one of them knelt down and studied the grass around them. Almost immediately he looked up directly toward Ethan’s hiding place.
‘You were saying?’ Lucy whispered urgently.
Ethan saw the two men jerk to their feet and aim their rifles at the boulder as they began marching across the open ground toward them. Faced with an impossible fight, Ethan knew that there was only one thing he could do.
Ethan leaped up and rested the pistol on the top of the boulder as the two gunmen exposed themselves and opened fire, several shots cracking out. The two gunmen threw themselves down onto the muddy wet grass.
‘Go, now!’
‘Go where?’ Lucy shouted as she leaped to her feet.
Ethan was about to answer when a fresh voice rang out loud above the gunshots.
‘Halt, stop where you are!’
Both Ethan and the two gunmen looked down the hill through the fog and saw figures running toward them, cradling their rifles and shouting commands as they advanced. The two gunmen whirled and opened fire on the advancing group of men as they began retreating back towards the jeep.
In an instant the shadowy figures dropped into prone positions and began returning fire up the hillside with a deafening clatter of SA-80 rifles as the British infantry began advancing by sections and rapidly closed on the fleeing gunmen. Ethan got up from behind the boulder as heard a vehicle’s engine start up, and he saw the jeep swing around and accelerate away back over the ridgeline and vanish from sight.
The British soldiers advanced on his position and he hurriedly slipped the pistol back into his jeans and showed his hands as empty as the troops rushed up to him and one of them grabbed his collar.
‘That was far too easy, sunshine,’ the infantry corporal said as he looked Ethan over. ‘And Major Wilkinson has a bone to pick with you.’
Ethan glanced at where the jeep had vanished over the ridgeline. ‘Good, he might be able to help us.’
X
‘You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.’
The cottage was filled once again with warmth and a rich orange glow from the crackling fire as Ethan sat down opposite Lucy Morgan.
‘I know,’ Lucy replied. ‘Being shot at kind of broke my flow.’
After the unexpected appearance and gunfight with the two masked men, and Ethan’s subsequent explanation to Major Wilkinson, the British officer had posted sentries all around Ethan’s cottage and agreed to provide protection for twenty four hours. Ethan had made some rapid repairs to the shattered window to seal out the bitter cold and Lucy had busied herself tidying up the debris from the bullet strikes before they had settled down to eat. It had been then that she had discovered that the files she had left inside the cottage had been stolen by the two gunmen, one of whom must have entered the building when Ethan and Lucy had fled up the hillside.
‘Major Wilkinson is pulling some strings with the Ministry of Defense to see if we can identify who the gunmen were or where they came from,’ Ethan said. ‘I didn’t manage to get any plates, but it’s possible they may be able to pick up the vehicle travelling through local towns and start identifying them from there.’
‘They must’ve followed me, despite everything,’ Lucy said. ‘You’re living out here in the middle of nowhere and suddenly they turn up on your doorstep. Whether they predicted I would come here or not I’ve dragged you into something and I had no idea it would become so dangerous.’
Ethan shrugged. ‘I can’t say that I’m happy about it, but it’s not like it’s the first time this has happened. You were telling me about something you found in the DNA from that bone of yours.’
Lucy leaned back in her chair, the firelight glowing on the features as she replied.
‘The strands of DNA that I extracted from the bone show clear evidence of human strains alongside them. The remains that we found in Israel are not those of an entirely alien species but of some kind of hybrid.’
Ethan stared at Lucy for a few moments in the silence as he digestive this new piece of information. He recalled that in Washington DC, pastor Kelvin Patterson had attempted to meld human and alien DNA in an attempt to create Angels to bring about the second coming. As insane as his plan had been, Patterson had had possession of alien bones and remains for some time all of which had been pilfered from the scientists he had hired to find the remains in the first place. It was not entirely impossible that he had come to the same conclusion as Lucy, and thus had his plan for the second coming been born.
‘How can you tell?’
‘It’s all to do with what we used to call junk DNA,’ Lucy explained patiently. ‘In the genetic sequence of DNA there were long strands that made no sense whatsoever and were simply termed junk because it was not believed they had any active processes ongoing. However, in recent years we’ve come to understand that even this supposedly junk DNA has a role to play. What’s become clear from my study of this bone segment is that within the semi-active DNA are strands that have a purpose other than guiding cellular division.’