Rules of The Hunt f-2

by VICTOR O'REILLY

  It read: "Hugo —if you find these sheep before I have had a chance to hide them, I can explain everything! See you for dinner this evening." It was signed, "Shane (Colonel, soon to be General) Kilmara."

  Fitzduane smiled. Kilmara tended toward the incorrigible. It was a miracle he was making general, given the number of enemies he had made, but occasionally talent will out.

  He was curious about how Kilmara's exercise would work out. He had high hopes for the Guntrack concept, small light fast vehicles festooned with weaponry and capable of outrunning and destroying a tank, and costing a fraction of the amount.

  There was evidence of several of the tracked vehicles around. The tracks seemed to have sprung out of nowhere and then headed north. He followed them, and behind a clump of rocks found the drop pallets and Kevlar restraining straps under a camouflage net. The tracks then headed in different directions. Well, he would find out the details that evening.

  Boots was enjoying himself playing with the camouflage net and jumping from pallet to pallet. Fitzduane dismounted and let Pooka, their horse, nibble. Boots soon worked out a game whereby he would throw himself off a pallet and Fitzduane would have to catch him. Boots jumped fearlessly, utterly confident that his father would keep him from harm.

  Boots suddenly screwed up his face, so Fitzduane pulled down the little boy's pants and let him pee away from the wind. The exercise was a success. They mounted up and headed due east, parallel more or less with the hills, and toward Battleford.

  * * * * *

  The watcher saw them first. He took no action. His main concern was guarding their rear and their escape route. It was all clear.

  Below him, the spotter picked them up as they emerged around the base of a foothill and headed toward the waterfall. He spoke to the sniper.

  The rifleman adjusted his point of aim in response to this information.

  Seconds later, rider and son on horseback entered the limited field of vision of his telescopic sight.

  * * * * *

  Kilmara had often noticed there was a natural temptation to consider the movement in itself a positive result. In his opinion, this tendency had bedeviled maneuver warfare since Cain initiated the process by terminating Abel.

  But Kilmara was an old hand. He went for the high ground — a protruding foothill — and there positioned himself on a reverse slope. He then spoke into his headset microphone, and a telescopic mast began to extend from the back of the Guntrack. It stopped when it was just over the brow of the hill. A higher slope behind them meant nothing was silhouetted against the skyline.

  Kilmara could now view most of the low-lying terrain as far as Duncleeve and beyond. There was some dead ground due to natural variations in the fall of the land and there were hills on the north side of the island — to his left from where he was positioned — but it was the best he could do in the time available, and Kilmara rarely worried about the theoretical optimum. He wasn't an idealist; he was a pragmatist. He had learned over more than three decades that the profession of arms was a practical business.

  Mounted on the extended mast was a FLIR — forward looking infrared observation unit. This operated like a variable, very-high-magnification telescope, but with the added advantage of a wider angle of vision linked with the ability to see through mist and rain and smoke and darkness. The image was transmitted to a high-resolution television screen which was built into the console in front of him.

  Methodically, he began an area search, operating the FLIR head with a small joystick. Concurrently, he had ordered the other two Guntracks forward. One was following the line of the foothills. The other was advancing toward Duncleeve at high speed on the track that ran the length of the island.

  Behind Kilmara, in the heavy-weapons gun position, a Ranger tried to link up with Duncleeve by radio. His satellite communications module was capable of bouncing a signal off a satellite orbiting in space and reaching around the world through a network of relay stations, but it could not get through to Duncleeve about three miles away. The satellite was connected to Ranger headquarters in Dublin, who had then patched the call into the Irish telephone system.

  This was one link too far. Fitzduane's local telephone exchange was old and tired and low on the priority list for modernization. Some days it just seemed to need to rest up. And this was one of those days.

  Master Sergeant Lonsdale sat in the driver's seat, irritated at himself for not reporting the helicopter sooner, despite the fact that the Colonel, when he had cooled down, had said there was no reason he could have known its significance. The Colonel was right, but that didn't make him feel any better. He had a strong sense of unit pride, and the U.S. Army's elite Delta Force was his world. He felt he had been shown up in front of the Irish, and he was determined to redeem himself.

  The Irish were good — damn good, in fact — but nobody could touch the best of the best, and in Lonsdale's opinion that designation went to Delta. Beside him was a heavy piece of milspec green metal topped by a telescopic sight. The awesome-looking weapon looked oversize and brutal when placed beside a conventional sniper's piece. It was the newly developed Barrett .50 semiautomatic rifle. Each round was the size of a large cigar and could throw a 650-grain bullet over three and a half miles. That was the theoretical range. On a practical basis, given the limitations of the ten-power telescopic sight and human eyesight, the maximum in the hands of an absolute master was about one third of this, or 2,000 yards. The longest combat shot that Lonsdale had ever heard of was around 1,800 yards.

  Hits in excess of 1,000 yards from even the best of sniper rifles were the stuff of myth and legend until the Barrett came on the scene. They still required extraordinary skill.

  "I've got Fitzduane," said Kilmara, and tightened the focus on the FLIR. He passed the location to the two other Guntracks. One continued toward the castle. The other was in a side valley and out of sight of Fitzduane's location.

  Kilmara put himself in the position of a killing team with unfriendly intentions toward Fitzduane and searched accordingly. The team would want to oversee their target and have good cover. They would have an escape route back to the helicopter. They would not wish to fire into the sun — not much of a risk in this part of Ireland.

  With binoculars alone he would have seen nothing — the killing team was excellently positioned and concealed. The FLIR changed the ground rules. It could pick up body heat.

  "Two hostiles," said Kilmara, and indicated the TV screen. He had activated the laser system. The target was now illuminated by a laser beam which was visible only if special goggles were worn. The range was also determined. On the screen it read 1,853 meters, well over a mile.

  "It's yours," he said to Lonsdale. Supposedly they were on a training exercise. The Guntracks were not carrying longer-range standoff weapons.

  Lonsdale had already moved when Kilmara spoke. He positioned himself on the brow of the hill, the Barrett extended on its bipod in front of him. In his heart he knew it was a near-impossible shot — and anyway they were almost certainly too late.

  But he also knew, the way you do sometimes, when everything comes together, that this was a special time — and on this day he would shoot better than he ever had before in his life.

  Through his goggles he could see the laser beam pinpoint the target. The 16x telescopic sight was calibrated to the ballistics of the .50 ammunition. He acquired the target. The sniper's body was totally concealed in a fold of ground. He could just see a burlap-wrapped line that was the rifle barrel and an indistinct blob that was the head.

  Behind him, Kilmara fired off two red flares in a desperate attempt to distract the assassins and alert Fitzduane. The flares in this color sequence had been the abort signal twenty years earlier when they had fought together in the Congo. It was an inadequate gesture, but it was all he could think of.

  * * * * *

  As they approached the ford, Boots grew animated. The place he particularly liked to play in required crossing the stream, and
he loved the sensation of traversing the water on high, perched safely on Pooka's back.

  From this vantage point he could sometimes see minnows or even bigger fish darting through the water, and there were interesting-looking stones and dark, strange shapes. The hint of hidden danger that provided part of the excitement was nicely offset by the reassuring presence of his father.

  They crossed at walking pace, the peat-brown water gurgling around Pooka's hooves. Halfway across, Boots shouted, "Stop! Stop!" He had pieces of stick he wanted to drop into the stream so that he could follow them as they bobbed in the rushing water.

  Red blossomed in the sky. Fitzduane looked up at the flare, then leaned back slightly to see more easily, as the second flare exploded. A sense of imminent danger coursed through his body, and Pooka shifted uneasily.

  The sniper fired.

  His rifle had an integral silencer, and he was using subsonic ammunition.

  Fitzduane heard nothing.

  He just saw the back of Boots's head open up in a crimson line and felt his son grow limp. Stunned at first, he screamed in anguish and desperation as the horror of what he was seeing hit home.

  Pooka reared up.

  Distracted, the sniper fired again before fully reestablishing his aim. Blood spewed from Pooka's head as he collapsed, throwing Boots several feet away into the shallow water.

  The sniper's third shot hit Fitzduane in the thigh, smashing the femur. Fitzduane was now partially caught under his dead horse. With a desperate effort he tried to roll free, but then his strength gave out.

  "BOOTS!" Fitzduane cried, oblivious to his pain, his arms outstretched toward the boy, who lay face up in the water just out of arm's reach.

  The horse was shielding his target, so the sniper had to rise for the killing shot. He had the luxury of a little time now. His victim was down and defenseless.

  The spotter decided to help finish the business.

  He fired a burst from his silenced submachine gun at the boy as he lay in the water. The rounds impacted in a ragged group around the boy's head, causing Fitzduane to make a superhuman effort to release himself and go to the assistance of his son. He pulled free and tried to rise, and as he did so, he exposed his upper body.

  Two more shots for a certain kill, thought the sniper: one to the heart and one through the head. He didn't believe in relying on a one-shot kill. Subsonic ammunition might not inflict the massive trauma of a fully loaded round, but it did make for a silent kill and the corollary of extra time to make sure the job was properly done.

  He and Master Sergeant AlLonsdale fired at the same time.

  The sniper's round created a small entry wound as it entered Fitzduane's body one inch above his right nipple and two inches to its left at the fourth rib space.

  Continuing its path of destruction, it pierced the chest wall, smashed the front of the fourth rib, and then — now combined with bone fragments — divided the fourth intercostal artery, vein, and neurovascular bundle. Fragments of rib became embedded in the right lung and the bullet plowed through it, damaging minor pulmonary arteries and veins.

  The round missed the trachea, went slightly lateral to the esophagus, missed the vagus nerve and thoracic duct, grazed the skin of the heart, went to the right of the aorta, and entered the posterior chest wall. Traveling slightly downward, it then smashed the back of the fifth rib, went to the right of the vertebrae and exited out of the upper left side of the back, producing a large exit wound.

  Fitzduane made a slight noise as the shock of the bullet drove the air from his body, and folded slowly, his arms stretched toward Boots.

  Lonsdale's bullet had longer to travel. It was approximately five times the mass of a modern automatic-rifle projectile and had a muzzle velocity of 2,800 feet per second. Part of the mass consisted of explosives.

  The spotter saw the center of the sniper's body explode as the corpse was flung back against the hillside. He could see no sign of threat ahead of them.

  He was turning when Lonsdale's second round arrived and drilled through his right arm from the side before exploding inside his torso.

  * * * * *

  Kilmara watched his friend and his young son through the FLIR.

  The image of Boots and then Fitzduane getting hit and tumbling into the rushing water was replaced by the sight of Fitzduane's desperate attempts to help his child. And then he lay still.

  The Ranger Colonel continued to monitor developments and to issue orders, his face immobile. The Guntrack originally tasked for the castle was the first unit that could make it to the scene, and at full cross-country speed it arrived in less than two minutes.

  Three Rangers — Newman, Hannigan, and Andrews — jumped out. All Rangers were BATLS, Battlefield Advanced Trauma Life Support, trained. BATLS was a combat version of the ATLS techniques pioneered in the U.S. The reasonable assumption, given the Rangers line of work, was that they would be under fire. The emphasis was on speed.

  Newman and Hannigan ran to Fitzduane. Of the two, he was clearly the more seriously wounded. Drenched in blood, he was dying before their eyes. He was bluish, very agitated, in severe respiratory distress, and in deep shock. His wounded leg looked bent and visibly shorter. It was clear the femur was shattered.

  "Chest and leg," said Newman into his helmet-mounted microphone. "Lung penetrated; leg looks bad; looks like the femoral."

  Andrews went to Peter. The boy's wound looked like a graze. He was mildly concussed and the back of his head was bleeding, but he was very much alive. Within a few moments, he regained consciousness. "Boy grazed but OK," said Andrews.

  Fitzduane was critical, however. "Hugo," Newman said, "can you hear me?" A reply would have meant that Fitzduane was conscious and his airway clear.

  There was no reply. "Shit," said Newman. Their patient was dying. Newman gave him five minutes at best. He moved to check Fitzduane's airway. Satisfied, he inserted a hollow tube, a Guidel airway, which would act to maintain access.

  The whole procedure took about twenty seconds. "Airways OK," said Newman.

  Hannigan had been cutting open Fitzduane's clothing and assessing the two wounds. Blood was everywhere but was cascading from the thigh wound in a positive torrent. He estimated that the man had lost up to a liter of blood in the first minute, and though the pressure had now eased off slightly as the blood supply diminished, the flow was still major. The femoral artery was like a power shower.

  Fitzduane's clothes were saturated and the ground was sticky with blood. Immediately, Hannigan wrapped a bandage above the area of the thigh wound and applied pressure on it. The flow diminished, though it did not stop.

  Newman suspected a tension peumothorax. The man's lung was punctured. The likelihood was that air was leaking into the chest cavity and could not escape. Pressure was building and blocking blood flow to and from the heart. In addition, the pressure in his chest kept his ribs and diaphragm expanded, so he could not breathe in and out properly. Fitzduane was gasping. He was running out of oxygen.

  Working very fast, Hannigan checked Fitzduane's trachea, then percussed his chest. The first dull sound confirmed the leakage of blood into the pleural space. The second sound, a booming resonance, confirmed the excess of air.

  "Fuck it," he said. "We've got a tension."

  Without hesitation, he thrust a wide-bore cannula into the front of the chest. The cannula looked like a slim ballpoint-pen refill and consisted of a hollow needle protruding slightly inside a hollow plastic tube.

  As the needle penetrated, he heard a massive blow-off of trapped air. Immediately, Fitzduane's breathing improved. There was still blood and air in the space, but it was no longer under tension.

  The procedure had taken one minute.

  Fitzduane regained partial consciousness. "C-ca… brea…," he gasped faintly. "My son, look after…"

  "Be my guest," said Hannigan and put a Ventimask over Fitzduane's mouth and connected it to a cylinder of compressed oxygen. At a rate of ten to twelve liters per mi
nute, the oxygen would last only fifteen minutes or less. Time was still critical. As Hannigan slipped on cervical and neck collars, Newman secured the Ventimask tapes. Another minute had passed.

  "I'll plug," said Newman. He would try to stop the bleeding while Hannigan worked at establishing intravenous access. There was no point to inserting drips if the liquid was immediately going to leak out, and yet Fitzduane needed extra liquid fast. He was in a state of shock. His normal blood volume was five and a half to six liters, and he looked close to losing half of that.

  His brain was not getting enough oxygen. He was confused, extremely weak, his heart rate was fast, his eyes glazed.

  His system was closing down. He was losing the physical strength to live.

  The chest wound will just have to wait, thought Newman. The thigh wound still represented the main bleeding problem. He applied direct pressure against the leg, above the area of the wound. He knew he would have to maintain the pressure for at least five minutes, probably longer.

  But there was now a plug in the bath.

  "You can fill him up," said Newman.

  Hannigan inserted a cannula into a vein of each arm, then connected the fluid bag. The solution would make it easier for the remaining blood to circulate and keep the vital organs supplied with adequate amounts of blood, and hence oxygenated. Lack of oxygen to the brain for ore than three minutes meant that parts of it would start to die: permanent brain damage.

  Establishing intravenous drip access to each side had taken less than four minutes.

  Fitzduane's blood pressure began to improve from sixty to seventy systolic. It was critical. Normal was around one-twenty.

  Newman was still maintaining pressure on the thigh wound.

  Keeping a close eye on Fitzduane's airway to make sure that the Guidel tube was not spit out, Hannigan applied a dressing to the entry and exit wounds, taking care to stick each dressing down on three sides only, while leaving the fourth open so that air could escape. Sealing the wound totally could once again cause a buildup of internal pressure.