by Matt Hilton
Stay in the red zone.
The thought struck at the same time as bullets singed the air around me. Caught off-guard, I stumbled and fell, rolling to avoid another volley of rounds churning the mud next to my body. A bullet struck the rifle and knocked it out of my hands. I let it lie and scrambled away, then came to my feet again and threw myself across the boardwalk and against the wall of the cabin, looking for targets as I snatched out my SIG. Movement flickered across the way and Gant rushed out from his hiding place in the cabin opposite. Gant fired as he ran causing me to jump for my life away from the bullets cutting into the wall beside me.
I fired in return.
One bullet was all I had left and it had to count.
Too many variables affected my aim, primarily the fact that Gant was moving while I was flinching from the bullets scoring the cabin wall next to my body. The bullet went wide and didn’t even slow Gant’s charge.
Well, this is it, Hunter. The thought echoed through my mind. This was the place I was going to die, a muddy, stinking hole in the middle of nowhere, just like I’d always imagined it would be.
My next thought: you’re not dead yet.
With my left hand I tugged out the 12-gauge and swung it on the advancing man, giving him both barrels.
The shotgun boomed like a canon.
Gant’s legs were thrown from under him and he went spread-eagled in the mud, his gun sliding away from him in the filth. In the mist above him I could see a distinct red haze.
Go to him. Finish the bastard once and for all.
I heard Beth howl.
Then another voice, feeble but close by.
Glancing at Don Griffiths, I saw him roll over on to his back. There was a large red stain on the front of his coat, another near his left hip. Don craned up so that he could see me, and his face was white.
‘The little ones, Hunter, check that my grandchildren are OK.’
Without further debate I raced to the cabin door and into the gloomy interior. Across the way Millie was shielding the two children, their eyes and mouths wide ovals. That was all I’d time to take in before something looped over my head, encircled my throat and was drawn tight. Blackness edged my vision immediately, followed a second later by the agony of savagely twisting flesh. A knee jammed into the small of my back.
Absurdly I thought: at least I’m not going to die in the mud.
Both my guns clattered on the floorboards. Empty, they were a hindrance, but that wasn’t why I dropped them; I simply lacked the strength to hold on to them any longer. I lifted my fingers to the loop around my throat, tried to dig my fingers under the constricting coil, but had no hope of that. My killer knew exactly what he was doing.
I sagged, strength failing completely as pressure built within my skull. This was how the rooster-crowing man must have felt as I throttled him to death in the Seven-Eleven car park.
My mind was a scarlet sea now, waves crashing against the insides of my skull. The scarlet darkened to black.
Suddenly I was face down on the floor with no memory of drifting from one place to the other. No transition occurred between space and time, just as if my body had been jumped to this new position by the click of a magician’s fingers. Gagging and retching, I sucked in life-giving oxygen. My throat was a circle of fire. I coughed and spluttered then heaved in a great gust of air.
Instinct made me grope for the KA-BAR, my only remaining weapon, but my fingers were crushed to the boards by the sole of a boot. I still didn’t have the strength, let alone the presence of mind, to fight back, and could only growl out in pain as the bones of my recently broken hand were ground under the pressure. A hand groped at my clothing and snatched the KA-BAR out of my grasp. Thankfully the pressure on my hand was relieved and finally I rolled over on to my back to blink up at my captor.
My eyes were streaming with tears, but even so I recognised the pompadour sticking out from the top of the young man’s head.
He gave me a lopsided grin. Then he said, ‘You, my friend, are under arrest.’
Chapter 26
‘You’re fucking kidding me! You’re a cop?’
The young greaser shook his head as he kicked away the shotgun and lifted my SIG from the ground. He waved it loosely in my direction. ‘Nope, I’m FBI. Special Agent Vincent at your service.’
Taking in the black leather, the jeans, the pompadour and his spare features, I snorted at the young man. ‘Tell me your first name is Gene if you dare.’
Vince’s lip turned up. ‘ “Be-Bop-A-Lula”? Ha, you made the connection, right? None of those skinhead assholes would have had a clue. They think I’m called Vince Everett, but, no, my real name’s Stephen Vincent.’
‘Vince Everett? You were taking a risk calling yourself that. Any Elvis fan knows his movie characters.’
‘Sounds like you know your music history,’ Vince said. ‘Gant and those other idiots had other things on their mind.’
‘So have I,’ I said, nodding over at the Griffiths children staring back at us.
Vince nodded in confirmation. ‘I’m with you, buddy.’
‘Hunter.’
‘Hunter?’
‘That’s my name. Joe Hunter. You said I was under arrest. That’s generally a cop’s next question, isn’t it?’ I massaged my throat, worked my aching fingers. Vince’s heels had taken skin off the knuckles. The garrotte still hung limp in his hands. ‘Strange equipment you carry, Special Agent.’
‘Just part of the cover, man.’ He stuffed the garrotte out of sight.
Gave me the opportunity to roll up on to my haunches.
‘Stay right there, Hunter. I don’t want to shoot you after all this.’
I shrugged. ‘Mind showing me some identification?’
‘Left it in my other jeans, I’m afraid.’ Vince looked over at Millie and the kids. ‘Everything is OK now. Relax. You’re going to be safe.’
‘You attacked me,’ Millie said in a small voice.
Vince straightened up a little, inhaling. ‘You didn’t give me a chance to explain, Millie. I was going to introduce myself when you threw that goddamn cat in my face. Well, after that, things just went a little haywire, didn’t they?’
‘You had that noose with you. You were about to strangle me.’
‘I was just keeping up the act. One of Gant’s people was outside watching. I was going to pull you away from the window with it. Get you out of the way.’
‘The girl with the spiky hair…’
‘Sonya Madden,’ Vince confirmed. His eyes pinched as he said the name.
‘Speaking of whom, what happened to her?’
Vince turned and saw that I’d come silently to my feet. He flinched, and lifted the gun. My hands were raised, a sign for Vince to relax.
Vince said, ‘She died. Or more rightly, you killed her when you made me swerve into that goddamn cabin down on the road.’
I lifted my eyebrows, pursed my lips. ‘I would’ve preferred it if that hadn’t happened. But she was shooting at us at the time.’
‘You’re pleading self-defence?’
I nodded at the children. ‘I was trying to save their lives. Seeing as the FBI was conspicuous by their absence.’
‘First opportunity I had I called for back-up. They’re on their way here now.’
‘So in the meantime it was down to me to do everything I could to save these children.’
‘Hell, you went through them like a one-man army.’
I just looked at the young man.
Vince stared back into my eyes, and said, ‘The thing that concerns me is that you don’t look like you give a good goddamn about any of them. Jesus, Hunter, how many of them have you taken down?’
‘I lost count,’ I admitted. ‘Not that I’ll put that on record.’
Vince scowled. ‘Don’t suppose I can use that against you seeing as I haven’t Mirandised you yet.’
‘Does that mean I’m still under arrest?’
‘You’re still under arrest, m
ake no mistake about it.’
My shoulders lifted in a shrug. ‘Does that stop me from helping a wounded man?’
Right on cue, Millie shrieked. ‘Dad?’
Nodded over my shoulder. ‘Out there. He’s been shot.’
Millie scrambled up, hushing the kids, then sprinted across the room and bumped by Vince like he wasn’t there. As she made to go round me, I grabbed hold of her and pulled her close. ‘Let me check, first,’ I said.
Before Millie or Vince could object, I went out on to the boardwalk. I had a horrible feeling what I would find. Don stared with the glazed-over eyes of someone who now looked on different vistas. I contained the groan rising in my chest, and was steeling myself to give Millie the terrible news when something else caught my eye. Stooping down, I pulled Don’s rifle from limp fingers.
‘The hell you doing?’ Vince demanded from the doorway. ‘You’re still under arrest, you can’t just…’
I indicated the place where Gant had fallen. The mud was churned up, mixed in with copious amounts of blood, but of the tattooed man there was no sign. Drag marks along the road surface showed where he’d been hauled away.
‘Son of a bitch!’ Vince breathed as he heard the black van burst to life.
His curse was echoed by mine as I took a couple of steps out into the road. I lifted the assault rifle and fired, but already the van was being reversed at speed through the camp and the bullets failed to slow it. After a couple hundred yards the driver hit a one-eighty skid then gunned the van away.
‘I hope your back-up’s coming up that mountainside or they’re going to escape,’ I said. Vince was too busy staring at the gun in my hands as though it was about to be turned on him. I grunted, and held out the assault rifle. ‘Relax, Agent Vincent. We’re both on the same side here.’ I pointed at the SIG in Vince’s hand. ‘Trade you? My gun’s no good to you anyway, not with no bullets in it.’
‘Son of a bitch,’ Vince said again.
The assault rifle was slipped on to the young FBI agent’s arm, at the same time as I plucked the SIG away and shoved it down the small of my back. ‘I’d like the knife, too, if you don’t mind?’
‘You’re my prisoner,’ Vince said, quite stupidly even to his own ears.
‘Am I?’
‘Aah, for God sakes!’ Vince handed over the KA-BAR.
Behind us, Millie hugged Don. The children had come to the door and Beth was cradling her sobbing brother in an echo of her older relatives’ pose. We shared a humiliated glance, and went to help them.
All of us were stunned to hear Don ask, ‘Is it over?’
Don’s eyelids fluttered and some lucidity came back into his face. Millie and the kids let out squeals of delight as they all threw themselves at the old man. I stepped back to give them clearance, smiling at them in turn when they glanced up at me in wonder. Between their hugs and questions and the general confusion Don’s gaze fell on me. ‘Is it over?’ he demanded again.
‘Over,’ I said with a curt nod. But I kept my next words to myself. Not by a long shot.
Vince was watching me. The young man had lost the cocky persona he’d carried as Vince Everett and I guessed that the agent was thinking the exact same thing. Both of us turned and scanned the area where the black van had disappeared moments before.
We were still watching twenty minutes later when the first FBI vehicles began entering the compound.
Two minutes later and I was again face down while men held me under guard. From this prone position, I heard Vince say, ‘Let him up, will you. He’s one of the good guys.’
Chapter 27
‘There’s a guy behind the third cabin along, another two out in the trees,’ I offered to the group of FBI agents tasked with making sense of the war zone. ‘Some others are down at the base of the hill where you turned off the road, and there’s more back at the Reynoldses’ house.’
‘Is that it?’ an agent asked, his face showing that he was actually serious.
‘Isn’t that enough to be getting on with?’ They didn’t know about the men from the Seven-Eleven yet, but it was best to let those two lie for a while. Everyone else I could put down to reaction under duress and argue self-defence. Some might see the first two as murder, albeit I was now thinking of them in terms of a pre-emptive strike. It eased my conscience that way.
‘It’s about twenty too many,’ the agent said.
‘I think you’ll find that’s an exaggeration.’
‘Is it?’ The agent looked me up and down, taking in the scraped knuckles. ‘You seem to have come out of this relatively unharmed. You sure you were the only one responsible for killing them all?’
‘Can’t claim them all,’ I admitted, rubbing at the red mark on my neck. ‘Don Griffiths bagged one of the arseholes. You’ll find him over by that flat-bed.’
The agent was scribbling on a clipboard, mapping the area and making notations with a black cross for where the bodies lay. He handed off the notes to one of his colleagues who ushered the others away to begin a more detailed search. The first agent looked at me again. ‘You said two of them got away.’
‘Sadly, yes. Two pricks who went by the name of Gant and Darley.’
The agent recognised the names, repeating them back to himself. ‘That would be Samuel Gant and Darley Adams.’
I filed both names away for later. ‘Are you going to tell me about them?’
‘No.’ The agent walked away. ‘You haven’t got clearance.’
Shaking my head, I sat on a stoop outside one of the abandoned cabins, away from the buzz of activity. I looked around, taking in the scene, reminded of when I took down the serial killer, Tubal Cain. On that occasion it was as if most of the available government agents in the South-West had turned up at the killer’s hidey-hole in the Mojave. Then, they were there to recover bones, whereas here in the Alleghenies the corpses were much fresher. The number of agents was on a par, though, as was the proliferation of vehicles turning up. A medi-vac chopper had arrived earlier, but with nowhere to land in the hills it had diverted to the wide space on the road below. Don had been rushed away in the rear compartment of a government SUV to meet the chopper, medics working furiously to keep him alive. Millie, Beth and Ryan kept him company down the mountainside. The others required medical assistance too, chilled to the core as they were and were suffering from shock.
I hadn’t been offered the same consideration.
Goes with the territory, I suppose. Some of the FBI personnel still weren’t sure that I should even be at liberty. My weapons had been taken from me, bagged and sealed, but I still caught the occasional suspicious glance as though I was about to go off on another killing spree. Thankfully Special Agent Vincent — or just plain Vince as he’d told me to call him — had a lot of clout and had won me my freedom. Maybe Vince was making up for almost taking my head off with that bloody garrotte.
Could’ve done with getting to a telephone. My first call would be to Rink, the next to Walter Hayes Conrad. On second thoughts, maybe I should call Walter first.
When I worked for Arrowsake I was part of an experimental coalition of Special Forces operatives. Due to their world-ranging scope, Arrowsake had controllers in each Allied country and on this side of the Atlantic Walter Conrad, a sub-division director of the CIA, was my handler. More importantly than that, he was my friend and confidant, sometimes a mentor and father figure. My real father died when I was a child, and though my stepdad, Bob Telfer, was a decent enough man, he just never seemed to gel with me the way he did with his own child, John. As a young soldier, fresh to Arrowsake, I had found the paternal replacement I’d been looking for in Walter.
In the time I’d been in the USA, Walter’s influence had meant that my violent retribution wreaked on a gamut of killers had been looked on favourably by certain high-powered government officials. In layman’s terms, Walter had kept me out of prison by calling in favours. He’d even wangled it so that I, along with Rink and our mutual friend, Harvey Lucas, was back o
n the government payroll when tracking and taking out Luke Rickard, the contract killer engaged in assassinating past members of Walter’s unit.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to earn special dispensation from Walter this time.
I looked for Vince, my only ally in the entire compound.
Last time I’d seen him, Vince was deep in conversation with the SAC who’d arrived to take charge of the investigation. By the way that SAC Birnbaum — who should have been Vince’s superior — deferred to the young agent, Vince had a little more clout than your average feebie behind him.
An FBI storm trooper strode by, dressed in tactical kit as though Gant and Darley might return for a second show. I waved the man over and he adjusted his Heckler and Koch MP5/10 as though readying to strafe me should I make any unwarranted move. I did my best to ignore the weapon pointing at me. ‘Have you seen Special Agent Vincent lately?’
The trooper sniffed. He regarded me with eyes that rolled like marbles in a storm drain. ‘I’ll tell him you were asking after him.’
‘If you just point out where he is, I’ll go tell him myself.’
‘No, buddy, you get to stay right there.’
The feebie strode away, leaving me with the impression that he’d no intention of finding Vince.
If you want something doing…
I stood up. My leg ached, my hand ached, my entire body ached, but that was what came from sitting on your backside after a burst of sustained activity. Got to get back in training, I promised, as I arched my lower back to loosen the kinks. I stretched and yawned, not even considering the fact that this was my second full day without sleep. As I went through the motions, I scanned the camp for any sign of Vince’s give-away pompadour hairstyle.
I spotted the young agent striding away from a hastily erected white tent near to the back of the camp. Already, now that his cover was no longer an issue, Vince had shed the trappings of his Southern racist persona. Instead of his leather jacket with its Confederate battle flag, he now wore a black windcheater emblazoned with the FBI motif. His hair was under a cap similarly marked.