by Matthew Dunn
Four men in two vehicles are onto you. The rest of them are staying with our lady. Good luck.
Will closed his phone and drove.
For fifteen kilometers he traveled west across the traffic-laden city. He drove within the speed limit and occasionally looked in his rearview mirror to search for anything out of the ordinary. But he was not yet worried about spotting the Iranian vehicles, which would have been difficult anyway, thanks to the density and movement of other cars around him. It was only when he turned northeast onto the hilly Route 2220 that traffic evaporated and just two sets of headlights remained behind, but at a moderate distance from, his vehicle.
It was dusk now, and snow began to hit the Audi’s windshield as Will drove steadily up the hilly route. He took the bends in the road slowly, hoping to appear to be a cautious driver looking for signs of ice. There were houses bordering the road for fourteen kilometers as he continued his gradual ascent. The houses then vanished, and Will’s observation of the two distant vehicles behind him significantly increased. Around him now were no residential or road lights, only forest. The road veered eastward just as the snowfall became heavier and more rapid. Will squinted to focus his eyes through the blizzard that was now striking his car. When he looked in his rearview mirror and saw one of the set of headlights become larger, he had to resist the urge to speed away and instead kept glancing ahead and behind.
The first set of lights moved rapidly toward Will’s car until they were directly behind him. He braced himself for an impact, but to his surprise the car passed him at speed and traveled rapidly up the hill before him. Will flashed his lights so as to appear annoyed with the careless maneuver of the other driver, then glanced back to see that the other vehicle had moved a little closer to him. As he looked ahead again, the first car disappeared up the road and into the rapid white dots of falling snow.
Will drove another three kilometers, and the whole time the vehicle behind remained at a distance of approximately two hundred yards. He knew that within ten minutes he would reach the vantage point he was supposedly aiming for, and he also knew that the isolated stretch of road he was now on was as good a place as any for the Iranians to hide an assault.
The forest on either side of the road had grown thick, and its trees acted as barriers to prevent vehicles from moving off their route. In warmer times, Will imagined, the place around him would contain idyllic walks for hikers and families, but right now it looked dark, lonely, and hostile.
He eased around yet another bend and saw that the road stretched straight ahead for several hundred yards. At that very instant a set of headlights turned up to full beam came driving toward him at high speed. He glanced in his mirror and saw that the rear vehicle was also now approaching him, but at a slower speed. He knew that the vehicles were being driven to trap Will’s car between them. He slowed his Audi to thirty miles per hour, downshifted, and placed his left hand on the right-hand side of the steering wheel. He moved the car into the center of the road, poised his right hand over the handbrake, eased off the accelerator while depressing the clutch fully, and then yanked the wheel hard to the left. A split second later, he pulled up the handbrake and felt his car spin around. As it did so, he moved the steering wheel in the opposite direction. He was now facing back down the hill and had come to a total halt. But the car that was now ahead of him had clearly increased its speed. Will knew he had no more than three seconds to get out of the Audi or be crushed.
He opened his door and dived out of the vehicle at the same time he heard the noise of impact behind him. He didn’t look back. Instead he ran straight into the forest ahead of him. He sprinted between trees while counting to ten in his head and then turned ninety degrees to continue sprinting to another count of ten. He spun around and crouched. Breathing rapidly but silently, he looked at everything near him. The forest was obviously wild, as trees grew naturally here—they were unevenly spaced, and some areas around him were dense while other areas were more open. Everywhere was covered in ankle-deep snow, although Will knew that the combination of blizzard and twilight would make it difficult for anyone to use the snow to track him. Nevertheless, there were four men after him, and he knew that if he stayed still for too long, he would be caught.
Will saw flashlights. They belonged to two of the Iranians, who were approximately seventy meters away from his position. The men stopped for a moment and then split up. One of them headed in Will’s direction, and the other moved off on a different route. Will inched very slowly backward into undergrowth and lowered himself so that he was prone on the ground; he heard the man’s footsteps crunching in the snow, and he saw the beam from his flashlight cover the ground just next to Will’s position. The Iranian walked past him at a fast pace and turned into a channel of open ground. Will was about to attack the man when he saw that at the head of the channel the other man was emerging with his flashlight. The men were obviously covering ground using search drills wherein they would separate and then rejoin before either of them was isolated for too long. Will cursed silently. This team knew what it was doing.
He watched the two men stay together for seconds and then split up again, with one man going to the right and the other directly onward. The light was fading fast now, and Will was grateful for the additional cover. He lifted himself up to follow the man who had traveled directly forward. Will moved into the trees using long, quick, but delicate strides while in a semicrouch stance. He placed himself prone on the snowy ground again and watched. As he had predicted, the man soon came to another stop and was rejoined by his colleague, who joined him from the right. Will was much closer to both men on this occasion, and he could see that in addition to flashlights, the men carried nightsticks. He presumed they also had concealed handguns, but the exposed batons were clearly an indication that they wanted to incapacitate and capture Will rather than kill him. The two men whispered, pointed in several directions, and separated again.
Will decided that he had a maximum of thirty seconds to get it done. He pushed himself up and moved silently toward the man who was nearest to him. He expected to have to sprint the last few meters, but the blizzard had grown even stronger and hid the sound of his movements. He came directly up behind the man and placed his right hand on the man’s chin while jamming his left hand hard against the back of the man’s skull. He deliberately fell backward with the man while twisting his head. The man’s arms and legs flailed wildly, but Will held him firmly while screwing the man’s head around until he was satisfied that his neck was broken. He pushed the dead body off him and quickly dragged it away from the track it was on. For a brief moment, Will looked at the body. The man’s build and light-colored clothing were similar to Will’s own frame and attire. An idea came to him, and he grabbed the dead man’s flashlight and nightstick. He continued on the route the man had been taking while moving the beam of his flashlight ahead of him. After walking for fifty meters, he stopped and looked around. He saw the other man coming toward him from his left. Will swept his beam over the ground and stayed still. He wondered how close he could let the man get to him before the man realized that he was not moving toward his colleague.
When the man came to within a few meters of Will’s position, Will swung his flashlight into the man’s face to momentarily blind him. The man uttered something harsh-sounding in Farsi and held the fist that was clutching his nightstick up to his face to shield it from the light. Will ran at him, dropped low, and swept his nightstick against the shinbone of one of the man’s legs. The man fell forward onto his knees, and Will seized the moment to jab the end of his weapon into the man’s gullet. He then struck the side of the man’s head and watched him slump to the ground. Will looked at the man, hesitated, wished that he had a better weapon to do his job cleanly, and then struck him another four times on the head until he was satisfied the Iranian was dead.
Will patted his hands against the corpse’s pockets and waistband. When he found what he was
looking for, he dropped the nightstick and flashlight and then proceeded ahead with his newly acquired CZ 75 pistol. It was nearly nighttime now, and Will had to move slowly while navigating his way through the trees. He headed toward the area to the left of his entrance into the forest, as it seemed to him to be the logical place for the other two team members to be searching. He moved several paces forward, stopped, crouched, listened, then moved a few paces more. He continued this routine until he had covered nearly three hundred meters. He had no particular plan, apart from keeping one of the men alive so that he could deliver a message of failure back to Megiddo.
Will was taking another step forward when a bullet struck him in the shoulder and sent searing pain down his arm and over his chest, bringing him to his knees. He saw a flashlight flicker on his left side, and he awkwardly pushed himself back up onto his feet to swing his gun toward the light. But as soon as he did so, the light was turned off and Will was back in blackness. He cursed and moved several steps away from the position where he’d been shot. He heard movement and rotated 360 degrees to try to identify its location. His left arm was now limp by his side, and he grabbed its wrist with his right hand and shoved the limb’s useless hand partway into a pocket to hold his arm still. He knew that the only reason he hadn’t been shot in the head was that the man who fired at him wanted him alive. But he also knew that the man would take no chances: if he had to shoot at Will again, he would shoot to kill.
Will thought rapidly. There was no more element of surprise, and the gunshot wound had significantly reduced his physical ability to hunt down his assailants. His hope lay in the fact that the men wanted to capture him. He decided that his only option was to bring them to him. He chose a random direction in the woods and ran.
Ahead of him the ground sloped down into a dip, and Will followed the route while tucking his gun into his belt. On the other side of the dip, the ground rose sharply, and he used his only capable hand to grab on to anything that would help him get up the slope and continue forward. He stumbled several times as his feet caught snow-hidden roots and bracken, but he managed to stay upright despite how hard his useless arm was making it to keep his balance. Occasional flashes hit the ground before him, and Will knew they came from the lights of the men behind him. He also knew that he needed sufficient distance from those lights as well as open space to do what he had to do.
He reached flat ground and pushed harder, even though he risked injury from running near-blindly toward trees. He broke left and right to make his route odd and unpredictable and then carried on fast, desperately hoping to reach some treeless ground that would give him a little more visibility than he currently had. He ran for what felt like thirty minutes while trying to ignore the pain of his wound and the pain in his lungs from constantly sucking in icy air. He ran even after he no longer saw the telltale signs of flashlights flickering behind him. He ran even as he finally emerged from woods into a tree-ringed meadow of snow. He crossed the meadow toward the tree line on the other side, and only then did he stop and turn to face the direction from which he’d just come. He pulled out his pistol, breathed deeply, and tried to calm his oxygen-starved and agonized body. Almost instantly the two men ran onto the meadow, looking around. They had discarded their batons in favor of their sidearms.
What little light there was from the night sky was casting a blue hue over the area before Will. He waited until the two men were nearly in the center of the meadow before he stepped away from the trees so that he stood exposed. The men stopped and could clearly see him. They were approximately 125 meters away, and as Will raised his pistol, he guessed that they had little to fear from his gun, given the effect his current condition would have on making a meaningful shot, not to mention the distance between them. It was a near-impossible shot, but nevertheless he inhaled three times and then half exhaled before holding his breath. He focused his mind and pulled the trigger. One of the men flipped backward and fell awkwardly as Will’s bullet hit him in the head.
The sole remaining member of the Iranian special operations team fired back at Will three times, but the bullets flew wide of their mark. Will ran toward him and saw the man turn and quickly race back across the snow-covered meadow in the direction of the trees. With all the energy he could muster, Will moved his legs as fast as he was able in order to close down the distance between him and his prey and to stop the man from escaping back into the darkness of the forest.
The Iranian was very fast, but Will still managed to get to within forty meters of him before firing two shots near the man’s feet and shouting, “Stop or I’ll kill you!”
The Iranian slowed and then stopped altogether. Will also slowed to a fast walk while pointing his gun at the man’s head. The Iranian held his arms outward and dropped his weapon to his side. Will moved cautiously up behind him, flicked the discarded gun away with his foot, and thrust the heel of his boot into the small of the man’s back. The Iranian immediately buckled under the impact and fell sideways, then onto his back. Will walked around the man, continuing to direct the muzzle of his pistol at the man’s head. He looked at the man’s face and saw no expression save that his eyes were blinking rapidly. The man had the look of a professional.
Will stomped on the man’s stomach and then dropped his knee onto the same spot, putting his full weight behind the position. He said, “I’m not going to kill you unless I have to. But I need to know why you attacked me.”
The man moaned softly, and Will knew that he was probably exaggerating his discomfort in order to minimize communication.
Will pressed harder with his knee. “Why?”
The man shook his head and spoke in a heavy accent. “I don’t know.”
Will smiled a little after he heard the lie. “You don’t know?” He said it slowly and deliberately. He punched the muzzle of his pistol into the man’s mouth and leaned in closer. The man writhed in agony, and Will knew he was no longer exaggerating his pain. “I want you to live so that you can take a message back to the man who most certainly does know. Tell him he underestimated me and will have to do much better than this if he wants me captured or dead.” Blood from the man’s broken teeth seeped onto Will’s gun. “One day I’ll meet him on my terms.” Will leaned in closer. “And when we do meet, I’ll kill him and everyone around him.”
Twenty-Four
“You were damn reckless!” Patrick was yelling. “I gave you an instruction not to engage them!”
“And I told you on our second meeting that your instructions may not always be correct.” Will looked at the medical dressing that had been expertly applied to his naked shoulder. Patrick was on the far side of Will’s hotel room in the Sheraton, and the man nearest to him was Ben Reed. Roger had sent over the former Green Beret and specialist in medicine as soon as he’d heard that Will was injured and back in his room. Will looked up at Ben. “Prognosis?”
Ben rose from his seat and started gathering up his battlefield medical kit. The blond Ivy League–looking paramilitary man smiled, exposing his immaculate teeth. “You were quite fortunate. The bullet glanced off the top of your humerus and then exited your body through flesh. There’s no muscle damage and only a minor fracture to your bone. You’ll have yet another scar on your body, but I can see from the rest of your torso that scars don’t bother you. Still, it was a nine-millimeter bullet that hit you, and it must have hurt like hell.”
Will smiled as he pulled on a T-shirt to cover his upper body. “What’s the latest?”
Ben shrugged. “It’s three A.M. Lana’s in her room and is no doubt asleep. I most certainly should be asleep. And Roger, Laith, and Julian are on duty around Lana’s hotel.”
“The Iranians?”
“One man and one woman are on watch at the Regent. The other is not around and so is either on rest or more likely is trying to work out what on earth happened to his colleagues six hours ago.”
Will nodded. “Thanks, Ben. You’d
better go get what sleep you can before you’re back on surveillance.”
Retaining his perpetual smile, Ben left. Will knew that Patrick was going to use his departure to launch into a full tirade, so he decided to get his in first. “I told you that we had to make Megiddo desperate and frustrated. I’m confident I have achieved that. And in killing three of his men and sending a taunting message back to him with the fourth, I’m fairly certain that I’ve also now pissed him off.”
Patrick walked across the room and pointed a finger at Will. “Well, you can be dead certain that you’ve pissed me off.”
Will narrowed his eyes. “You know that my course of action was right. You know that we have to get Megiddo’s thinking off kilter. And you know that to achieve such an objective requires me to take extraordinary risks.”
“You always have to take extraordinary risks. God, Alistair and I knew you were like that when you were a kid.” He grunted in frustration. “Even the Foreign Legion wasn’t dangerous enough for you, so you had to volunteer for their special operations unit so that you could be thrown into even more hazardous missions. If Alistair and I hadn’t stepped in when we did, you’d no doubt now be long dead.” Patrick grimaced as soon as he’d uttered that last sentence.