Halfway back to Kinlochardaich, Ben pulled off the single-track road into a passing place, stopped the car and leaned back in his seat to light a Gauloise. He murmured, ‘Shit.’
It was only then, trying to steady the trembling flame against the tip of the cigarette, that he realised that his hands were shaking.
Chapter 22
It took two cigarettes to settle him down. As he sat and smoked quietly in the darkness of the car, watching the frozen rain slither down his windscreen, he was trying to understand what the hell had just happened back there.
There was little question in his mind that the men had come to the lochside for the same reason as him: to search for the poacher. Ben knew only that he was overweight and had a scar on his face. But the men hunting him clearly knew much more. The killers had somehow discovered the identity of the star witness and were closing in, intent on taking him out of the picture and thereby covering their tracks. Covering also the connection that Ben now understood existed between the killers and the men who’d tried to assault him in the Kinlochardaich Arms.
Ben flashed back to the events of earlier, and remembered how it had been the talk of Ross Campbell that had triggered Angus Baird’s aggressive reaction. It had been more than just bad blood and Baird being an angry moron who hated everybody, as Grace had said. It had been the behaviour of guilty men with something to hide. Knowing that, Ben was getting a strong urge to drive straight to the police station in Fort William, find his way inside the cells where Baird and his pal Mitchell were being held, and extract some truth out of them. Jails were generally easier to break into than out of, in Ben’s experience. But a little patience could save him the trouble. A simple affray case like this one, they’d probably be released after a couple of days, pending trial. Ben could catch up with them then.
As much as he was itching to talk to Baird and Mitchell, what he really wanted to know was the identity of the hidden sniper. The more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that the man was a world apart from his companions at the lochside. The goons with the torches and shotguns were noisy, clumsy and amateurish. The rifle shooter was anything but. The time interval between the bullet impact and the suppressed report told Ben that the guy had been some distance away, probably hunkered down in a sniper’s nest on higher ground with a decent view of the terrain below. Shooting in pitch black conditions meant he was certainly using some kind of infrared night-vision scope, Gen 2+ image intensifier technology or better. Expensive, professional kit. And the fact that he was capable of making accurate shots through thick cover hinted at skill and training that was far beyond that of the stooges he was with.
They might have been working together, but this guy wasn’t one of them. Ben was certain of it. Which suggested a hierarchy of command in operation. It was almost as though the sniper was using his lower-rank underlings as beaters to flush out his quarry so that he could execute him from a distance, clean and surgical.
And that fate had very nearly been Ben’s when the killers had mistaken him for the poacher. The first bullet had missed his head by maybe an inch and a half. In those conditions, such a near miss was still excellent marksmanship. The bullet’s trajectory might have been slightly deflected by a tree branch midway to the target; if it hadn’t, it would have struck exactly to point of aim and Ben would not have been sitting here wondering about it. He’d be a semi-headless corpse lying in the woods. And that was an unsettling thought. Sometimes you got a brush with death so up-close and personal that you could smell it. Ben was smelling it now. Get over it, he scolded himself.
One thing he couldn’t get over was his deepening worry about what might have happened to Boonzie. He remembered his words to Grace earlier: For someone to get the better of him, they’d have to be extremely skilled. And that’s what the rifleman was, for sure.
Ben vowed that he would find him, too. To get close enough to do that, he was going to have to equip himself appropriately. That would be tomorrow’s mission.
It was not yet dawn by the time he got back to his base, tired and aching and demoralised. The icy rain had turned the snow on the pavements rock-hard and slippery smooth. Inside the cottage, the fire had died and the rooms were cold. Ben relit the wood-burner, stripped off his damp clothes and hung them over the back of a chair to dry. He took a shower and changed, then drank a pint of hot black instant coffee and napped for an hour in the armchair by the fire. Feeling a little revitalised when he woke, he dropped to the floor and forced his weary muscles to pump out a hundred press-ups and a series of stretching exercises.
The double-barrelled shotgun he’d taken from his opponent last night was still in the car, tucked out of sight behind the front seats. He went outside with a blanket to roll it up in, then carried it around the side of the cottage to the shed, where he found an old hacksaw with a reasonably sharp blade hanging on a nail above the workbench. He clamped the shotgun in the bench vice and used the saw to chop the barrels off flush with the wooden fore-end, about twelve inches long. Then he did the same at the other end, removing the stock to leave just the pistol grip. He now had a twelve-bore hand cannon that was useless for most normal purposes a shotgun was good for. But if a man wanted a devastating close-range combat blaster that would fit unobtrusively into a bag, he need look no further.
Back in the cottage, Ben swallowed another pint of black coffee while he searched the internet for stores in the area dealing in hunting and outdoors equipment. He found one in Inverness, and the 140-mile round trip duly became his first task for the day.
The shop stood between a newsagent’s and a small restaurant on a narrow street opposite the sloping, sculpted rear lawns of Inverness Castle, seat of the city’s Sheriff Court. Ben was waiting outside when the owner opened the place up for business. A little bell jingled as he pushed through the door and was hit by the unique smell of outdoor clothing and hunting supplies stores: a scent of burnished leather and slightly musty waxed cotton, blended with the mixed aromas of boot polish and gun oil. The place was an Aladdin’s cave stacked from floor to ceiling with shelves and display units, stuffed and mounted deer heads and antlers occupying every area of unused wall space. The proprietor was a flabby middle-aged guy with a threadbare comb-over hairstyle and glasses thicker than pint-glass bottoms that magnified his eyes like a bush baby’s. Ben nodded him a polite good morning and set about threading his way through the maze of country wear, fishing tackle, camping equipment, hiking accessories and firearms-related apparel to pick out the items on his list.
Next to a rack of tartan-lined shooting jackets of the sort upper-class ladies and gents might wear to an exclusive pheasant massacre at a Scottish manor estate, Ben found something altogether more utilitarian and suited to his purpose. The two-piece ghillie suit was the kind of outfit used by deer stalkers and woodland hunters as well as military snipers, covering the wearer from head to toe in artificial mossy foliage like something that had just crawled out of a thicket: the best form of camouflage clothing ever devised. Ben pulled it down from its hanger, laid it on the counter and went on shopping.
He paused to gaze at a display rack of scoped hunting rifles, one of which would have nicely complemented the ghillie suit if he’d possessed the necessary UK firearms licensing paperwork. Instead he made do with something much quieter and just as deadly, a Ka-Bar survival knife with a razor-sharp black carbon steel blade. The last item on Ben’s list was the most expensive, a pair of infrared night-vision goggles. Several hundred pounds for a piece of kit indistinguishable from what Special Forces had been using fifteen years earlier, now available to the general public. Just the thing for prowlers, voyeurs, perverts and folks who needed to be able to stalk dangerous killers at night in a dark and remote forest.
The shop owner was all smiles as Ben dumped the rest of his purchases on the counter and took out his wallet to pay. ‘Don’t sell that many of the ghillie suits, even fewer of the night-vision goggles,’ he commented happily. ‘Then all of a sudden, that
’s two of each sold in the same week.’
Ben looked at him. The shop owner went on grinning and nodding. ‘Aye, sold the last pair to an older gentleman. In fact, strangely enough, he bought the exact same items as you. It’s almost uncanny, thinking about it.’
Ben felt something click inside his mind. He took out his phone and brought up the photo of Boonzie to show him, the way he’d done with Holly the barmaid and the old guy in the Kinlochardaich Stores the day before. ‘Would this be him?’
The shop owner peered over the rims of his glasses to get a focus on the photo, then looked up again, nodding in recognition. ‘That explains it. Friend of yours, then?’
‘My dad,’ Ben said. ‘We were planning on doing a bit of woodland stalking. Then maybe take a trip down to Glen Etive to see if we could bag a red deer.’
Dad. Boonzie would have killed him for this.
‘Och, that’s nice,’ the shop owner said. ‘Father and son. Just like the old times. How it ought to be.’
‘I thought we were going to get kitted up together, but the crafty old so-and-so’s very competitive. Always trying to get the jump on me, like he’s got something to prove.’ Ben smiled and shrugged. ‘Just his way, I suppose.’
‘I know what you mean. My father was just the same, God rest his soul.’ The bush-baby eyes clouded with tender nostalgia.
‘So you say he bought the exact same items?’ Ben asked.
‘As far as I remember.’
Great minds think alike, as the saying went. But trained minds think even more alike. Boonzie had been following the same trail as Ben, only he was several steps ahead. Ben had to hope he could race fast enough to catch up. He asked, ‘When he was in here?’
‘Two or three days, I think.’
‘Two? Three? Which? I’d be much obliged if you could tell me exactly.’
Maybe if Ben hadn’t been forking out several hundred pounds the shop owner might not have been so willing to help, but he reflected for a moment and then said with a smile, ‘My memory’s not what it used to be. Hold on, I can tell you exactly.’ He spent a few seconds tapping and prodding his computerised till with rectangular reflections of the screen showing on his lenses. ‘Here it is. It was four days back. I remember now. Your dad was the last customer of the day. He turned up just as I was about to close.’
Ben worked out the timeline. Four days ago meant that Boonzie had visited the shop on his first day in Scotland, just a couple of hours after he’d last spoken to Mirella.
The shop owner said, ‘And, my mistake, your dad did make one extra purchase that doesn’t appear to have been on your list.’
‘What?’
‘One of those.’ The shop owner waved at a hanging display above the counter. Ben looked up and saw that it contained an assortment of crossbows. Most of them were plasticky and toylike, but a couple of them looked like highly effective weaponry that could drive a razor-tipped bolt through the side of a rhino and penetrate a couple of brick walls on its way out.
Those were the ones the shop owner was squinting at through his glasses as he went on, ‘Excalibur, made in Canada. The most powerful of their kind on the market. No licence required. Your dad asked for the screw-on hunting arrow tips. I reminded him that it wasn’t legal to hunt live quarry with in the UK, but he bought it anyway. Said that wasn’t a problem.’
Ben pointed. ‘Could you take one down for me, please?’
The shop owner lit up. ‘You want to buy it too?’
‘I want to see it first.’
The shop owner took one down and passed it to Ben. You could feel the latent power flowing through the weapon like electric current. It felt light and balanced. Ben put it to his shoulder and trained the onboard telescope sight through the window onto the street. The scope was hi-tech stuff, with an inbuilt laser rangefinder and an electronic red-dot optical reticule that glowed brightly against the target for shooting in low-light conditions. Mil-dot elevation increments to show where to hold the aim for longer ranges, to compensate for the forces of gravity. Once skewered, nothing could survive. The bow was an eminently lethal piece of kit, even more so when placed in the hands of a warrior like Boonzie McCulloch.
Ben could see the methodical steps his friend had taken as he prepared for the task ahead. The camper van. The supplies. Now the ghillie camouflage suit, the combat knife, the NV goggles and the high-powered bow completed the picture. Boonzie wasn’t going after red deer. He knew the dangers; he was taking no chances. And since four days ago, he’d been actively in pursuit of his quarry.
But was Boonzie the predator in this hunt, or was he the prey?
Chapter 23
Four days earlier
The day before Boonzie is taken
Boonzie had almost forgotten how much he’d loved this game, once upon a time. The thrill of the hunt took him back decades to his military days, tempered only by the bitter ache in his heart every time he thought about Ewan lying in the hospital and the men who put him there.
On his return from Inverness he’d hidden the camper van deep in the shady heart of the forest near Loch Ardaich, where he’d spent two hours that afternoon diligently cutting pine branches with his new knife and laying them over the vehicle until it was virtually invisible. More work than draping camouflage netting, but far more effective.
He’d spent the rest of his day hunkered inside his concealed command centre, working out his strategy. By a process of logical elimination he’d come to the conclusion that his best chance of finding the poacher was at the end of the loch furthest from where Ross Campbell had been murdered. Unless, that was, the poacher had simply escaped the area after the incident. But Boonzie had to try, because if he failed to find this man he might never discover the truth.
He hadn’t spoken to Mirella since leaving Ewan’s house earlier that day, but he thought about her frequently and it hurt him to think about her sitting alone and fretting back home. When this was over, he promised himself, he would never leave her alone for another minute of his life.
Boonzie bided his time inside the camper until long after nightfall, consuming a simple meal of beans and coffee and keeping himself warm by the flame of his gas stove. Then, as midnight approached, he took the crossbow out of its bag and loaded six of his hunting bolts, with their shaving-sharp arrowheads fitted, into the weapon’s onboard quiver. Boonzie had little reason to think that the poacher would pose any significant threat to him, but under the circumstances he had no intention of going unarmed. Next he put on the ghillie suit, the trousers first and then the top, leaving the headgear until last so that he could wear it over the head harness of the night-vision goggles.
When he was ready, he slipped out of the camper van and began to make his stealthy, silent way through the dark forest towards the north-west shore of the loch. With the goggles over his eyes, his surroundings turned into a shimmery, watery-green world, as though he was walking on the ocean bed. It would have been easy to make too much noise crunching over the frosty ground, but Boonzie moved the way he’d trained men to move, back in the day. The skills he’d taught to his trainees were so deeply ingrained into his mind that the passing of the years had done nothing to dull them.
Quarter of a mile from the edge of Loch Ardaich, the snap of a twig nearby made him freeze, the mossy and leafy contours of the suit allowing him to merge into his environment so that he was just another patch of foliage in the darkness. A moment later the sea-green figure of a deer stepped into his field of vision. She was a young doe, foraging alone among the trees. Her eyes were two shining emeralds as she glanced around her, alert and ready to flee at the first sign of danger but perfectly oblivious of his presence.
Boonzie smiled at the sight of her. He’d hunted and killed many animals for survival during his military past, but the taking of any innocent life sickened him. He wouldn’t have dreamed of hurting this beautiful creature. She passed within a few feet of him, then moved on. Boonzie waited until she was gone before he continued on h
is way, so as not to alarm her with any sudden movements.
Forty more minutes passed before he reached the lochside. Beyond the fringe of the pine forest the waters were still and smooth, shrouded here and there with pockets of eerie drifting mist that the NV image made appear like a toxic fog. Boonzie slipped along the shoreline for half a mile. Then half a mile again. He saw nothing, but kept moving with the indefatigable patience that had served him so well in the SAS.
Then, just as he thought his night hunt would prove fruitless, he spotted the distant green beacon of light dancing on the edge of the water, and gut instinct told him with a glow of satisfaction that he’d found his man.
Boonzie edged closer, silent and unnoticed. If he could sneak up on a wild deer, then no human quarry had a chance of sensing the approach of the camouflaged figure creeping along the grassy shoreline. The poacher was a large and chubby individual, dressed in waders and a long waterproof winter coat. A wool cap covered his head. He appeared to be winding up his night-time fishing session and getting ready to leave. A few minutes later, and Boonzie would have missed him.
Boonzie halted and crouched rock-still in the frosty bushes, watching as the poacher packed up and tidied away his kit. From the shadows of the trees near the shoreline protruded the rear end of an old Subaru four-wheel-drive that had been backed down a track through the woods. The poacher had opened up the tailgate. Boonzie observed the greenlit figure going back and forth with bits and pieces of equipment to stow in the boot, taking his time, very much at home in his element and quite unaware he was being observed. He struggled up the bank to the 4x4 with a large oblong box that reminded Boonzie of a military ammo crate. Boonzie guessed it contained the poacher’s haul of fish. Judging by its weight, it looked like he’d had a successful night.
Soon the poacher would be ready to leave. Then would be the time for Boonzie to make his move.
After four hours of freezing his bollocks off out here, Jamie McGlashan was looking forward to getting back to the bothy, polishing off his quarter bottle of Bell’s with two or three slices of rabbit pie and crawling into his sleeping bag with a nice hot water bottle. Tired and cold and wet he might be, but satisfied in the knowledge that his night’s catch would put a couple of tasty meals in his belly and bring him in a few quid besides.
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