by Clay Martin
Mike crouched in his bush for what felt like hours, the light rain cascading against his bare skin. He had been here before, and reminded himself over and over that your mind loses track of time in situations like this. He had spent many nights on the ambush line, waiting for a worthy target to cross into the kill zone, often going home empty handed. That is just how the game was played. At first there was always the excitement of setting up, followed by the adrenaline buzz of watching, waiting, alert at every little noise of the forest for signs of the approaching enemy. Then came the dreaded sleep monster. No matter how well rested you are, it is against the human psyche to lay in the dark for hours and not want to close your eyes. In training, that meant failure, and possibly expulsion. In the real world, it meant death. Not just for you, but possibly your entire team. Then came the aches and pains, usually with an accompanying itch somewhere inconvenient. Laying perfectly still behind a rifle disagrees with your body very quickly, regardless of how many times you have done it before. Movement at the wrong time will also cost you your life, so you bear down and take it. Eat your bitter. The price of doing business. Fat chance of the sleeps taking over here. The icy rain stung like pin pricks all over. The heat in his engine from the exertion of getting here had faded fast, and he was feeling the trembling in his muscles that preceded real shivering. He was freezing, sore, and vaguely becoming aware that he had damaged his feet. Hopefully not badly. Adrenaline can carry you through an amazing level of pain, but not forever. As the rain ran down his back and sought the last dry bit of his pants, Mike thought of how much easier this was in Gore-tex. Or in the desert for that matter. He thought of the Baghdad sun, his nemesis at the time, and how he would never curse its rays again. He flexed and released his muscles from feet to neck, trying to coax out enough warmth to go a little longer. The weak part of his brain, the little voice that always reminded him of the easy path, tried desperately to convince him no one was coming. Just take off, it screamed, they won’t find you. You can find a road, or a Ranger Station, and be in a warm hotel by morning. Mike tamped that voice down. It was the same voice that wanted to quit when things got hard. The tiny little shard of cowardice that all warriors carry with them, the one that tells you to give up. It won’t be that bad. You’ll survive, everything will be fine. Courage was sticking that little voice back in its closet, and doing what needed to be done. Still, his practical mind was weighing the options. Maybe this crew had lost his trail, and they weren’t coming. Hell, maybe they were scared to chase him in the dark. If that was the case, his best option was to make as many miles tonight as he could. See if these weak sisters could run twenty miles across the mountains to find him. That, he seriously doubted. No one could keep up with his kind in terrain like this. Half the job of a recce troop was to be able to out run an assault force. Even in his current less than ideal state, he didn’t believe there were more than a handful of men on Earth that could keep pace with him across this terrain. Except for Afghans. They were definitely an exception to the rule.
Mike had very nearly convinced himself that he had lost his pursuers when he spotted the first rays of white light piercing the night. Coming from the direction he expected, a herd of elephants with flashlights bouncing willy nilly across the woods. He hadn’t even attempted to conceal his sign, or counter-track, but he was still a little surprised they were able to follow him. Drizzle isn’t the easiest thing to follow anyone in, regardless of how careless they are. Another forty inutes or so, and you would need a Malaysian on point to keep that trail. Lighting crashed again, offering him a snapshot look at the tribe. One man out front, flashlight down, slowly following his footprints. Not a professional by the look of it. His slow pace was due to his lack of skills, not the practiced caution a real tracker always exhibited. The trail does end somewhere, and it is best for you if that isn’t in a well-planned kill zone. The rest of the group, seven or eight of them, was bunched up right behind him, flashlights out like scared school children. It was really too bad, Mike thought, that he didn’t have a rifle. With his preferred weapon for this, a custom SAINT Edge AR-15 and its 2.5 pound trigger, coupled with an Aimpoint red dot on top, this would be over right now. Mike had been told, by the men who taught him and would know, that he had one of the fastest trigger fingers in the world. In under a second, he could unleash enough 77 grain killer bees to put every one of these men in the ground. The old Baghdad meat saw. A hurricane of lead and copper.
On they came. When they were within ten meters, Mike averted his gaze so that he could only see them out of his peripheral vision. The beam from multiple lights had fallen right on him, but he wasn’t worried about that. You are either camouflaged enough, or you aren’t. Low in a bush, he knew from experience that most people would walk right past. Without another clue, sitting still a man was almost impossible to detect in dense foliage. And human eyes don’t reflect light the same way as animal eyes, which was very fortunate in his current situation. Something science still can’t explain, humans often know when another human is looking at them. Mike looked away, just in case one of them was in tune enough with nature to feel it. At this range, his odds of survival if they detected him were zero.
The lead man came even with him, not three feet away. He had cut it a little close with his pace count apparently. He was so close, Mike could smell the beer on him. Mike started a cycle of short, slow, shallow breathes. He didn’t want to hold it, in case they stopped for some unknown reason. He would eventually have to exhale, and that was likely to be loud. The leader hesitated a moment, found another foot print, and moved past him. God, he hoped someone from the gaggle didn’t step away to take a leak. That had happened to him once in training. Some idiot bulk fueler, oblivious to his surroundings, pissed right on the leg of his ghillie suit. Mike stayed perfectly still, dumbfounded. It was harder for his spotter, three meters away. He later said it took every ounce of discipline beaten into him by their harsh school not to bust out laughing.
The gaggle of followers all looked roughly the same. Face masks of skull teeth pulled up, armed with a variety of hunting rifles, wearing a mix of earth tones and hunting gear. They were clearly pissed at being out in the rain, and at losing a prisoner. Whoever this Chief guy was, he was unhappy. Mike detected some fear, and that probably wasn’t all from being out in the dark woods. There was some colorful talk about “skinning this motherfucker when we find him” and how “fucking stupid Tim was.” Mike knew this kind of bluster from a lifetime of dealing with new guys and third world troops. Mostly it told him that this crew was undisciplined, weak, and had no idea who they were dealing with. Hell, a high capacity pistol would have been good enough to kill every one of them. He doubted they would even get a shot of return fire off they would be so surprised. Still, he wasn’t out of the woods yet. He was holding a rock and mostly his bare ass, which wasn’t near enough to flip the script. If they did find him, he had no illusions he wasn’t in for a long painful time before an agonizing death. Their blood was up, they would follow through with a skinning. Men in groups are always more dangerous, the pack mentality can drive more cruelty and savagery than normal men are capable of alone. Not that Mike would be an easy capture again. He would make damn sure he died right here, preferably taking at least one of them with him. The first rule the Arabs had taught his generation of warriors, save the last grenade for yourself. The unspoken rule had always been, if capture is imminent and rescue impossible snipers kill your own. Better a .308 to the skull right now, than hours of a power drill on your joints. Not one captured soldier from the entire GWOT had been rescued alive. After seeing the corpses first hand, it was an obvious conclusion that being taken alive was a fate no one deserved.
After the group moved out of sight, Mike counted to sixty in his head. It would be dumb luck to have them quit the trail right as he popped out of his hiding place, but that was the kind of chance you didn’t take when your life was on the line. He also prayed to the Old Gods for a straggler to come up
that had fallen behind. Eight men, that is a fight you are going to lose every time. But one man, that you can blindside as an opening salvo? Good luck brother, the ravens will be picking your eyes out come sun up.
After a full minute had passed, Mike bolted out of his hiding spot and back down the trail he had made on the way in. It was difficult and slow in the dark, but he needed to follow his exact path. The plethora of footprints made by his pursuers would mask his own, hopefully sowing enough doubt about his direction that they called it off completely. The rain started to pick up, thankfully, which should do the rest. At some point down the track he would just turn left, wipe his footsteps away for a few feet, and bolt into the night. Not good enough against world class, but these guys were far from world class. He was reasonably sure it would be good enough. Suddenly, a smile creased his face. Out of nowhere, all of his Christmas’s came at once. A lone flashlight beam shone through the trees, coming from the direction of the camp. And from the sounds of the heavy breathing behind it, the tribes least in shape man was trying to catch up to the big boys.
Mike spotted a large pine tree slightly off trail and quickly ducked behind it. This new comer wasn’t exactly following the tracks, but was coming close enough it should work. He crouched down with one eye peeking around the trunk. If it looked like the loner was coming straight at him, all he had to do was slide around until his body was out of view. And if he passed from too far out to grab, well, this worked equally well from behind. Gambling on percentages, he lined up with what he hoped was the stragglers right side. Only 10% of the world is left handed, which meant that a man carrying a rifle tends to point the muzzle left. Right hand on the trigger, it is the most natural way to do it. And if it was only carried in one hand, that also tended to be the dominate hand. Getting control of the gun was step number one. All the hand-to-hand skill in the world falls apart with a 7mm magnum in your chest. There are a number of ways to take out a sentry in the real world, none of which are likely to ever make it into a Hollywood movie. The preferred technique was ten rounds of suppressed rifle fire from extremely close range, followed by a coffin kill in the head to be sure. A 175 grain Sierra Match King from down the street was a close second, but neither was really an option right now.
His heart quickened as the light grew closer. He thought again of how much time he had to get this done. He was at least 500 meters from the main pack, unless they had doubled back. Possible if either they knew his trick, or just grew weary of following. He hoped he had a least a minute of separation, or this was likely to go bad. There absolutely wasn’t a better option though, he needed a weapon badly. And even without a weapon, he was likely to freeze to death tonight without clothing or a fire. He had checked his pockets on the ambush line, empty as the day they left the factory. It was now or never. The man was almost on him. He closed his left eye, so that at least one of them wouldn’t lose the adaptation to darkness. It took thirty minutes to fully adjust to the dark, one of the quirks of human vision. Painful after all the time in the gloom, he kept his right eye on the light so as not to lose track of its holder. He inched around the tree to fully conceal his body as the man came closer still. He felt naked with just the tree bark between him and an armed assailant, as the beam cut both sides of the big pine. This man was lost, which was making him move slower. Not what Mike needed at the moment, time was not on his side. This was not the kind of ambush you could spring from any distance but touching, and he needed this chump to hurry it up already. Incredulously, he stopped five feet from Mike’s tree, panning left to right trying to find the trail. Mikes heart was beating like a race horse, he didn’t have time for this.
The moment was on him. Sometimes fortune favors the bold, and he was running really low on alternatives. He sprang like jungle cat from his hiding place, moving in fast from the hunters left side, right arm raised for a downward plunge of the rock. The man turned his head, and froze like a deer in headlights. Two steps away, Mike realized with the perfect clarity of a mind honed in combat that his gamble was wrong. Left hander, muzzle pointed right at him. House always wins. Mike shoved the muzzle away with his left hand, right coming down with a chunk of granite he prayed would be a killing blow, but tangled in his own parry of the rifle barrel. The gun discharged, powder burning his tricep. A quarter second slower, and the trees would be wearing his brains as a decoration. The flash temporarily blinded his right eye as he processed that he had delivered a glancing blow with the stone. No time to worry about that now. Years of dealing with a world where everyone carried automatic weapons instinctively drove him to jerk the rifle free and toss it away. No one, in a life or death struggle with a lunatic on top of them, would have the presence of mind to cycle the bolt of a hunting rifle. But habits die hard. Even with a knife stuck through their skull, hadji was likely to lay on that trigger until he hit the ground. With an automatic weapon, that could be deadly. Mike had lost an XO that way one time, shot by a dead man in the streets of Karbala. Mike brought the rock around in a circular blow, but the man had covered his face with both forearms. The impact stopped with the crunch of bone, but not the ones he needed. His plan was turning to shit quickly. Mike slipped his right arm underneath the man’s forearm guard and grabbed the back of his head, at the same time raining left elbows as fast as he could muster. As the straggler tried to turn and fend those off, Mike slipped his heel up under his forward knee, dropping them both in a tumble to the forest floor. As they hit the ground, Mike drove his knees up under the man’s armpits, dropping his weight onto his chest. His left arm swept away the guard and pinned it to his own chest, as a howl escaped the lungs of the hunter pinned beneath him. Broken bones hurt like nothing else to move, and Mike used that to his advantage, holding them out of the way of the work he needed to do. He raised his stone over his head and delivered a savage strike to the orbital socket. It was a solid hit, but still the man struggled on. Short, sharp blows, Mike hammered the rock down as hard as he could. He felt bone break, the sickening crunch as the orbital socket gave way, and the mushy strikes that meant he had broken the skull. Mike was exhausted, and wanted to collapse on the man he had just fought. But the first rule of fights where he came from, make damn sure the other guy never gets up. Mike grabbed a fistful of hair on a limp neck, rolled the chin back, and smashed the stone one final time into the stragglers windpipe. If it wasn’t over before, it was absolutely over now.
Mike saw half a dozen flashlights bounding through the woods. The fight had taken much longer than he intended, and the rifle firing hadn’t help him any. He took a quick look around for the rifle, but knew there was no way he would get that lucky. To search for it in earnest was no doubt a death sentence. He could hear the pack yelling someone’s name, and they were almost on him. Reaching to the dead man’s belt, Mike located a hunting knife and pulled it free. Better than nothing. No time to be subtle, he cut the man’s boot laces and yanked his boots free. His prizes in hand, he took off into the night like a wraith.
CHAPTER NINE
The rain arrived in earnest as Mike slipped into the woods. He was moving as fast as he could, but that little tussle had taken a lot out of him. “ Jesus,” he thought to himself,” I’m in worse shape than I thought. Forty-five seconds of fighting and I’m wheezing like an old man.” He pressed on, though within a few minutes he was fairly certain he was no longer being pursued. Better safe than sorry. The knife in his hand at least felt like a weapon, though it was no match for a 30.06. Still, it gave him comfort to have something cold and steel, and it beat the hell out of a rock or a stick. As he was making his way deeper into the woods, he saw the flashlights searching frantically for a few minutes, and then stop at what he assumed was the corpse of the man he had just killed. There was some gnashing of teeth and wailing, followed by some sporadic gunfire. Not even close on that one, he didn’t even hear the bullets hit trees. Some of that would be anger, but he hoped a touch of fear too. He was guessing the local militia might be a tad more hesitant
to follow him into the darkness with one of their own rapidly assuming room temperature. That is how it usually worked. Everyone wants to play warrior until people start dying. And right now, he also knew he must look like a demon incarnate. Blood dripping off his knuckles from hitting his opponent, blood washing down his face from the spray of the rock meeting flesh at high impact velocity, and a chunk of razor sharp steel in his hand now.
Odds were good they were going to call it a night. Tracking him now would require some very real skills, and it was getting more difficult every second. It was also a fact that most cultures won’t leave their dead if they have a choice, and that generally also trumped pursuit. Outside of Africa at least. In the darkest Congo, best to just keep running, especially if the blood was up or the khat was flowing. He had never been to a place with less respect for human life, and suspected that if we found hostile life on Mars, it would retain its crown. He had been there as an “observer”, providing eyes and ears to another of the infamous African tribal genocides.