by Tom Wood
‘You,’ Victor began, ‘are going to carry on with the exchange. I will go after the sniper. I don’t have time to go into details.’
‘How will I know if you have been successful?’
‘Because the Slovak’s guys will start dropping, one by one.’
‘And what if you aren’t successful?’
‘You’ll never know.’
Zoca said, ‘What does that mean?’
Rados explained for Victor, ‘It means I’ll be dead before I hear the crack of the shot. Then you’ll be next, dear Zoca.’
Zoca was caught in a moment of confusion as to how to react. He had set his boss up, no doubt with the intention of taking over the business, but now he was questioning whether the Slovak would spare him, or maybe he was worried about being killed in the crossfire or even scared that Victor might be successful and Rados would survive. Eventually, he made his decision and picked his side and offered Victor his AK.
Victor was fast enough to put a hand to Zoca’s arm to stop him – an innocent-looking gesture to a watching sniper. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Much as I would prefer your weapon, we can’t do anything to tip them off.’
‘Initiative,’ Rados said. ‘We only live through this if we keep it.’
Victor nodded. ‘The Slovak’s returning. Give him the women, but take your time about it.’
‘How long do you need?’
‘Every second you can give me without showing our hand.’
Rados understood. ‘You’ll have as much time as I can manage.’
Zoca said, ‘What do I do?’
‘You’ve done enough,’ Victor said. ‘For now, play along and do nothing. Then, when the time comes, don’t miss.’
‘Whatever you’re planning on doing,’ Rados said to Victor, ‘is it going to work?’
‘Do you remember what we talked about before?’ Victor began. ‘About who we are is defined by what we do?’
Rados nodded. ‘I remember.’
‘This is who I am.’
FORTY-TWO
Rados and Victor approached the Slovak together, but then Victor peeled away and gestured to the trees. ‘I need to take a leak.’
‘Be quick,’ Rados said with the perfect amount of irritation in his voice.
The Slovak didn’t comment. He didn’t react. He bought it.
Victor left them and veered off into the undergrowth. He went right because there were vehicles on that side of the track so more obstacles to interrupt lines of sight. It would be harder for the Slovak and his men to see his route into the trees. For privacy, they might deduce, if they even bothered to think about him or what he was doing.
He walked at a hurried pace – a man trying to be quick about answering the call of nature. Nothing unusual. Nothing suspicious. The bracken rustled. He had always liked the sound. It was damp and scratched against his clothes. He had his hands before him, as if he were unfastening his belt or unzipping his trousers, but he dropped the pretence when he was fifteen metres into the trees. At this distance, no one on the track watching would see more than his head and back. At twenty metres he changed direction and quickened his pace, knowing the mist would cover him from here.
If the sniper was on the borders of the track, thirty or forty metres from the exchange, Victor had a circular distance of seventy metres to traverse before he’d come up behind him. With no time pressure he would have extended that circle and approached him from even further away, but Victor didn’t know how long Rados could delay the exchange.
He wasn’t concerned about the sniper shooting before he was in position. If the Slovak’s brother succeeded, Victor’s contract would be fulfilled with no further effort on his part. Ahead, lay nothing but forest; he could make a clean escape without difficulty. But it was not an option.
There was no way of knowing how competent a marksman the sniper was, or the quality of his weapon. Anyone with a rifle could claim to be a sniper, and even if the guy had made a name for himself in the war, he might have lost his edge since then. Moreover, if the Slovakian’s maintenance of his firearm was on a par with the Varangians’, it could misfire at the crucial moment. There was too much that could go wrong if that first shot missed its target. Rados’ men would jump into their vehicles and rush to the scene, turning it into a drawn-out firefight – with no guarantees who’d come out alive. And if Rados did survive, Victor would never get close enough to him for another opportunity.
His best course of action was to take out the sniper and use the weapon himself. That way Rados was guaranteed to die. And if Victor was to continue living afterwards, he wanted to have a rifle in case he encountered any of the Varangians responding to the gunfire.
As the track came into view ahead of him, Victor slowed to a careful, quiet pace. It was impossible to be silent in a forest, but a forest wasn’t silent either. He reached the edge of the track and looked right: from this vantage point he had a clear view of the three women, guarded by Zoca and the single Varangian present. He could see Rados and the Slovak too, a few metres further away in the centre of the track.
Forty metres from them, and ten metres from Victor, was the sniper.
He was kneeling next to the track. Beneath the bracken, the ground was stony, but he had come prepared for that. Over his jeans, he wore the kind of kneepads skateboarders used for protection: hard plastic armour. Excessive for his purposes, maybe, but Victor knew as well as anyone it was better to be over-prepared than under.
He couldn’t make out the sniper’s weapon, but he could see the two fat magazines lying on the ground next to him. Victor recognised them. They were for the Dragunov he had asked Georg to supply. Soviet and Russian weapons had been common during the Balkan conflict. It wasn’t surprising the Slovak’s brother had opted for the same model he had used back then. Maybe it was the exact same weapon.
Victor didn’t draw the pistol from his waistband. Even if it had been suppressed it would have remained in place. Any gunfire would create chaos, with gunmen bursting out of the Slovaks’ van and Rados’ Varangians piling in two minutes later. Victor did not plan on any shots being fired until he was behind the Dragunov. The first shot would be the one that killed Rados. He could leave the Slovak and his guys to deal with Zoca and the Varangian, and then by the time that was over, Rados’ remaining men would turn up. Victor wanted to be long gone by then. He wanted to be out of the country by the time anyone started to question what had happened.
A choke would do it. The sniper, by kneeling, was at the perfect height for Victor to wrap an arm around his throat, locking his hands and squeezing the neck so hard, the blood pressure inside his head would make him think his skull was about to explode.
The sniper would have no more than five short seconds to save himself. The surprise of the attack, the incredible pain, and the sheer terror of breathlessness would cost him at least three of those. Two seconds was never going to be enough to loosen Victor’s hold on him, even if he maintained his composure in impossible circumstances to try and use the Dragunov in a desperate blind shot.
The sniper had no chance. He would be incapable of fighting back after five seconds; unconscious by seven; never waking up again by sixty.
Ten metres.
Each one more difficult to traverse than the last, with every footfall growing louder and the danger of a snapping twig or rustling branch growing at an exponential rate.
But the sniper was not watching his back. He had no spotter. He was alone. All his focus was on his target, and waiting for a prearranged signal to squeeze the trigger.
Victor crept towards his own target with footsteps so light the breeze rustling the bracken around him was louder. His heart beat at a slow, steady rhythm, his gaze locked on the back of the sniper’s neck, picturing the twin pulsing arteries.
Ahead along the track, Victor saw Zoca bringing the women forward. The sniper tensed in readiness. He couldn’t be more unaware. He couldn’t be more vulnerable. Victor could almost feel the man’s pulse as a t
remor in the air between them.
Victor, three metres away, opened his hands, ready.
Everything that could go wrong did.
FORTY-THREE
The sniper sensed him.
Maybe it was the sound of undergrowth crunching beneath Victor’s feet; maybe Victor’s extended absence had made him paranoid; maybe the sniper detected Victor’s scent on the breeze.
It didn’t matter why, but the sniper did a quick half-turn and glance that became a rapid twist when he saw for sure someone was behind him, switching with expert moves from one knee to the other, the Dragunov swinging through a 180-degree arc.
The sniper was fast and assured in his movements; there was no time for Victor to close the distance, but he was already snapping the Colt from his waistband and squeezing the trigger.
Click.
Misfire. A dud round; a bad primer, maybe. He racked the slide to eject the bullet and load another, and fired again. Nothing happened. The magazine spring, too long under tension, failed to push the .45 calibre round into the chamber.
Victor hurled the handgun.
The sniper lurched to avoid it striking his head, but in doing so lost his chance to take aim with the Dragunov.
Victor charged into him at full speed – too much distance to cover otherwise – and they hit the track together, wrestling for control of the rifle. Victor – bigger, stronger, faster – won, and tore it from the sniper’s hands.
Before Victor could turn the rifle around, the sniper, knowing he was outmatched, yelled, ‘POMOC.’
Victor didn’t speak Slovakian, but a frantic cry for help sounded the same in any language. Victor batted the sniper’s desperate grasp aside, pushed the muzzle into his mouth and fired.
The man’s head near enough disintegrated beneath him.
Victor jumped off the corpse and raised the Dragunov, peering down the scope as blood hissed and steamed along the barrel.
He saw chaos unfolding through the lens, blurred by a smear of the sniper’s blood –
– the three women panicking at the sound of the gunshot and the cry for help –
– Rados drawing his pistol and executing the Slovak with a double-tap to the head –
– Zoca and the single Varangian unleashing their weapons on the Slovak’s three men, taken by surprise like their boss –
Victor swung the reticle over Rados’ centre mass – not willing to risk a headshot with a scope he hadn’t zeroed himself, and through a bloodied scope lens at that – but didn’t fire because one of the women had made a run for it and Rados grabbed her as she passed him.
She fought him with everything she had, the two of them becoming a tumble of limbs in the centre of the crosshair, ruining any hope of a hit.
Get out of the way, Victor willed her.
More gunfire roared as five Slovakian reinforcements poured out of the back of the van.
Rados’ Varangian took down one before the other four gunmen, all armed with AKs, massacred him in a storm of gunfire.
Victor, on the track and in the line of fire, felt rounds burning the air around him, and darted into the treeline to avoid being hit by a stray bullet. He glimpsed Zoca doing the same, seeking cover off-track, and Rados too, having released the escaping woman to save himself.
The Slovakians were pumping rounds into the trees, shooting at everyone and no one because they didn’t know what was happening, only that the ambush had gone wrong.
No plan survives first contact with the enemy.
Victor ignored them, and went after Rados.
The problem was, so did three of the Slovakians. They knew who Rados was, knew he had killed their boss, and were after revenge or still following orders out of loyalty or simple conditioning. They darted through the trees, shooting and moving.
Rados had a narrow head start, enough to keep him alive for the time being, given the Slovakians’ inaccurate fire and the irregular distribution of trees interrupting line of sight.
The fourth Slovakian must have gone after Zoca or the escaping women. Victor couldn’t see him and didn’t have time to look because Rados was pulling away from the Slovakians.
He was older than his hunters, but he was fit and healthy whereas they were hard smokers and hard drinkers who ate junk while he ate well and played cards while he ran on the treadmill. Most importantly, he was running for his life and they could not replicate that sense of urgency.
Rados was making a mistake, however, because he was taking a curved route through the trees in the hope of making it back to the Range Rovers and his men. That let the Slovakians close the distance.
Victor converged fast. Speed and stamina were top of the list of requirements in his line of work. He was a league ahead of the Slovakians, and even though Rados was fit and fast himself, Victor was over a decade younger.
He veered, running towards where Rados was going to be, heading to where their paths would converge. Victor sprinted through the bracken, rounding trees and jumping fallen branches.
He stopped when he judged he was in the right place, and took up position in the undergrowth, a tree to his right and as clear a line of sight through the trees to where Rados would come as possible.
With a sleeve, Victor wiped some of the sniper’s blood from the lens and raised the scope to his eye. The lens now had a pink filter of blurred blood.
He saw Rados through the mist, moving fast and well – lots of lateral movements to make his pursuers’ shots more difficult. They weren’t far behind now. Rados’ curved path had let them close in; like Victor they had moved to intercept him. They were out of shape but they had some tactical awareness.
Victor lined up the reticle over Rados’ weaving centre mass and fired.
The Dragunov’s recoil thumped against his shoulder and the crack of the shot echoed through the forest.
A miss.
Victor slowed his breathing, followed Rados’ movements and took a second shot.
Another miss, but Victor saw the bullet strike a tree where Rados had been an instant before.
Rados was close now, only thirty metres away, and the Slovakians were all visible, coming out of the mist fifteen or twenty metres behind him, shooting as they moved.
A stray AK47 shot hit the tree trunk next to Victor. Bark pelted his face. Some found his eye. He blinked the bark away, adjusted his aim once again, peering through the flood of tears and smeared blood on the lens.
Rados didn’t see Victor, but he ran towards him, unaware he was running towards his death.
Victor fired.
A hit.
FORTY-FOUR
The bullet struck Rados high on the left shoulder and he dropped into the bracken below a mist of blood. It wasn’t a kill shot – Victor could tell that from the split-second glimpse of the impact he witnessed before Rados went out of sight.
Victor rose out of cover to create a better angle to finish off his target. He could only see swaying bracken where Rados had been. Blood glistened on bright green foliage.
Behind where Rados fell, came the Slovakians.
They didn’t see Rados drop, but the lead one saw Victor and didn’t hesitate. The Slovakian squeezed off a burst that shredded nearby leaves. Victor returned fire – a snapshot that had little chance of hitting – and ran, because the others had now seen him, and their guns were coming up.
Fire spat from the muzzle of the lead man’s AK in intermittent gouts of yellow. The shooter yelled as he tracked Victor, the war cry only audible in the brief pauses between squeezes of the trigger.
Victor kept running, concerned only with creating distance for the next few seconds. He was outgunned three-to-one; his enemies had fully automatic weapons while his was semi-automatic.
He twisted around to return inaccurate fire. There was no time to aim, but his enemies weren’t fearless. Even inaccurate rounds coming their way made them hesitant and increased the distance between them and Victor.
The sound of gunfire filled his ears. The thick canop
y above enhanced the roar of the AKs into a deafening hurricane of noise. If he survived, his ears would be ringing for days. He kept moving, ducking and weaving, hearing rounds zip and snap around him and crunch through foliage or thump into solid tree trunks.
He couldn’t run forever. He could outpace them, but what then? Rados was behind him, alive but injured and alone. Victor would never have a better chance of finishing the job. If he delayed, the Varangians would arrive.
The AKs stopped firing.
He had created enough distance to disappear into the mist. He positioned himself behind a tree to make sure he stayed out of sight and removed the scope from the Dragunov. It was no use for close quarters combat, even properly zeroed.
He breathed slow and steady to control his heart rate, elevated from the exertion. He noticed a small smear of blood on his trousers and realised the knife wound in his thigh had opened a little from all of the running. He waited. He couldn’t see them, but he knew they were coming. They were hurrying after him, crashing through the bracken, unconcerned because they were the aggressors, full of adrenaline and bloodlust and self-belief in their numbers and his place as the victim, running for his life.
He heard them slow down as they neared his position, realising they should see him running ahead, and if he wasn’t then he could be hiding. They exchanged a few words then split up to cover more ground.
One entered his peripheral vision some thirty metres to his right. He was too far away to engage with, so Victor waited.
Another gunman stalked right by him.
Victor waited a moment then slid out behind him. Five fast steps, noise deadened by the man’s own movements, and Victor was close enough to loop his right arm over the guy’s right, dragging and locking it behind his back with the AK pointed at the forest floor while Victor’s left snaked around the throat to apply a choke.
The man gasped and fought, but a kick to the back of his knee took his legs out from under him and increased the pressure on his carotids. He slackened long before his free arm could reach Victor’s eyes.