Bear paused and lay prone, the pungent smell of wet soil and the vastness of silence surrounding him. Another slow day in rural America to savor the sun, but for the hitters out to get them.
The hitters would know roughly where they were, and if their training was still with them, would search in sections, but keep each other in sight. Ten minutes, Bear reckoned and started counting down.
In the ninth minute, he heard something move, a long pause, and then another movement. The undergrowth wasn’t one thick wall, but patches of thick and thin, and occasional bare earth sections, though from a distance, it was one rolling green wall.
Bear was in one thick pocket of green next to a small bare earth space, and if the hitters were good, they’d be coming at him at an angle, about fifteen feet apart. Closer than that and they would be one target; farther than that and they wouldn’t be able to eye-signal effectively. They would come to brown earth and would be undecided which section to search. A slug crawled across slowly, came across the cold metal of his Glock, didn’t like it, reversed and ambled away, enjoying the day.
The smell came to him first, cigarette smoke and sweat, clinging to the clothes of the hitters, and then came a footfall and another, and then a couple more, and a shadow fell across the opening, and then a barrel poked through the green, and a face appeared behind it, thirty feet from where he lay.
He’ll be the more experienced; the second guy will be backing him up, or parallel to him, and to his right; the human eye tends to look to the right first.
Bear searched without moving and saw a slight darkening in the green, looked to the left of it, and through the edge of his eyes saw the shape of the other hitter. Another barrel poked out twenty feet away, and Bear and the two hitters made a crude upturned L, Bear the angling tail.
The hitters peered cautiously at the open space and at each other, and took a cautious step forward. Bear clicked his earbud, and Bwana, who was chasing Cruz and Diego, spun round in a full loop, firing blindly.
The hitters started and looked back, and Bear rose silently, a pillar amidst the foliage, and shot the nearest in the head. He snapped a shot at the other, missed, and dived in the thicket, ducking below the spray of bullets.
The second hitter ducked down, and silence and sunlight beat on them again. The hitter fired again blindly through the undergrowth in Bear’s direction.
Bear wasn’t there.
He had rolled and moved forward as soon as he’d landed and was now behind the hitter’s right shoulder.
The hitter stopped firing suddenly when he realized it would give him away. He crawled cautiously around the open space and through the stalks of grass, saw the undergrowth bend forward and straighten slowly as weight moved over and away from it.
He fired a long burst, directing his barrel in an arc to cover the shape of a man.
From behind him, Bear rose and tripled-tapped him.
He double-clicked his mic and got acknowledgements from the others, untied the long cord attached to the thicket, and waited for Roger.
The sun, the smell of grass, the stillness made it a good day for death to come visiting.
A bird flying across the blue sky swerved suddenly, and Roger knew where they were before they came in sight. Swarthy, unshaven, the two came abreast cautiously, and he saw that the taller man was the more experienced of the two and had good tradecraft.
His eyes were ceaselessly scanning left to right, then right to left, but his partner was jumpy. His partner kept drifting closer to the senior man and retreated jerkily when the tall man gestured angrily at him.
Roger slithered back slowly, sliding through the grass rather than over it, so that from the top, the grass looked as if it swayed with the wind.
A gnarled, stunted bush, its leafy shade stretching above the canopy of the field, trembled in the sun, drawing the attention of both.
They stopped. The tall one looked at it, then around it, trying to see through the depth of the growth, looking for patches of dark and light. The other nervously licked his lips, his barrel pointing straight at the shrub, finger on trigger.
The bush jerked forward suddenly toward them as if attacking them, and the nervous one fired his Uzi wildly at it till his magazine was empty.
The tall hood placed methodical shots ahead and behind the growth — and then his gun fell silent as Roger shot him, a double-tap through the chest and a third through the head. The nervous hood went down seconds later as Roger’s Kimber rolled thunder in a cloudless morning.
Roger went to the bush and freed the cord he had used to control it, rolled it up and jammed it deep in one of his pockets. He double-clicked to signal his companions and searched the bodies. He found one phone on the bodies, which he pocketed, and found no identities or papers of any kind.
Bwana and Broker were gaining on the three hoods when the last one, the driver, swung back and fired a spray-and-pray burst. They dived to the ground, and Broker raised himself to his elbow, grunted, ‘Go,’ and fired back at the hood. The range was too long for accurate handgun shooting, but it was enough to deter the driver, who stepped back and resumed running, ignoring Cruz’s curses.
Bwana covered ground rapidly, the undergrowth bending to his will; the driver looked back at him and gaped at the sight of the tall, big, black form speeding remorselessly after them.
One hundred feet away, the driver turned back again, his barrel coming up, and Bwana dived to his left, a long sail in the air, his gun coming straight, eye to the sight, sight to the driver, and punched a hole in his shoulder. The hitter stumbled and fell, losing his rifle, and Bwana circled him wide and took him out.
Two hundred yards to the tree line and Diego and Cruz, risking a quick glance behind them, coaxed more speed from their legs.
Bwana picked up the fallen man’s AK-47, looked over it swiftly, thumbed it to semi-auto, kneeled down in a classic shooter stance, and sighted. The first shot was for range, the second was range again, the third shot went into Diego’s thigh and brought him down sprawling.
Bwana shifted and fired a shot over Cruz’s shoulder; he kept on running still. He fired another, over his other shoulder, no effect. Cruz was weaving erratically to throw off his aim; Bwana waited and then creased his shoulder, more by luck. Cruz stumbled, recovered, and then hugged the ground and lay there when Bwana shot over his head.
Broker reached them, circling cautiously, keeping behind Diego’s back. His caution was justified when Diego whirled on his back and came up with his gun, pressing the trigger. Broker shot him in his right shoulder, shooting his other thigh for good measure.
Bwana had restrained Cruz, a knee on his back, one hand pressing Cruz’s right hand deep in the ground. Cruz thrashed on the ground, nearly unseating Bwana, a stream of curses filling the air. Bwana slashed his head with his gun barrel, and that drained his resistance. He removed plastic ties from his belt, and Cruz struck.
Using his grounded hand as a pivot, using the force Bwana was bearing down on him, Cruz twisted sideways and jerked back with his head, catching Bwana on the bridge of his nose. Bwana, his grip loosened, reared back as Cruz whipped a foot-long blade from an ankle sheath, twisted around on his right shoulder and slashed at Bwana.
Sharp, so sharp that it cut the light, the blade swept from left to right, a neat horizontal line appearing in Bwana’s shirt that turned crimson and then black. Using the twisting motion to free a leg and get it under him, gaining leverage, Cruz swept back the blade in a wicked arc, aiming for Bwana’s throat.