Hunters: A Trilogy (100 page)

Ken didn’t waste any time whatsoever in showing the Hunters in how to play with them. For the rest of the afternoon he gave weapon-handling lessons and showed them how to put the new additions to best use. Everyone felt the hard recoil from the sniper rifle, and the teeth-loosening judder of the big machinegun – most of them holding its heavy trigger for too long, their error sending long arcs of tracer rounds heading into the air.

Ken laughed, saying: ‘That’ll be great if they’re bloody airborne, won’t it? But, in the meantime, just count to three and then release the trigger: ‘one - two - three’, and release. Keep your eyes open whilst you’re firing. Jane, watch where the rounds are landing, that’s it, that’s it – look at that!’ He pointed towards the patch of ground she was firing at and they all watched the vicious fountains of earth bursting into the air as her well-aimed shots sprayed across the target. Ken grinned, and said, ‘Nobody is gonna get through there if you can shoot like that – well done!’

He showed them how the gun’s ammunition was joined together by cleverly-designed metal links. They all had a go at firing the gun and also at re-linking some of the loose ammunition. Ken turned it into a competition, as usual, and they had soon added to the already considerable supply of belted ammunition.

Then they all fired one round each from the grenade launcher, the ammunition for the weapon came in the form of some deadly-looking, egg-shaped rounds, which were gold in colour. Ken showed them how the weird sight flipped up, and how to gauge the distance to their prospective target.

‘Just get the round to land near the target, within ten or twenty yards if you can, that’ll be enough to mess ‘em up a bit!’ he said, and then demonstrated by aiming at the rock that lay about two hundred and fifty yards away.

They all covered their ears, because, judging by the size of the weapon’s large barrel, the noise was set to be extremely loud. Once again, when it came to these things, they were wrong. The hollow ‘Bdoop’ noise the weapon made was, in comparison to the head-splitting racket of the machinegun, a mere whisper.

Ken was either lucky with his first shot…incredibly the grenade landed absolutely smack bang on top of the small grey rock…or once again he had shown them his absolute mastery of all such things. When they saw the small orange flash followed by the cloud of black smoke and grey dust, then heard the ‘whummpp’ noise of the explosion, they knew which one of the two they would be betting on.

‘Holy cow…did you guys just see that?’ Red said, looking at Ken in amazement. The rest of them cheered loudly.

Ken was so proud that he repeated the procedure; this time the round missed the shattered rock, but only by about six feet. It was an impressive display and they all agreed that it should be he, Ken, who must carry the launcher, or ‘Blooper’, as he affectionately called it. He laughed at their praise and then said something about ‘small things amusing small minds’. Jane gave him a slap across the shoulders whilst the rest of the gang then reversed their praise and began abusing him for being a show-off.

Finally, after some discussion on the various pros-and-cons of their new weapons, they decided to situate the sniper rifle in the Eagle’s Nest, placing a second person up there, armed with the machinegun. The position overlooked almost the whole farm, except for some dead ground, that’s what Ken had taught them to call any piece of land they couldn’t see into: ‘dead ground.’

There was a long run of it that only someone on top of the water tank would be able to see into, and was the primary reason why the sentry position had been sited on the tank in the first place – the blind gulley ran almost to the side of the farm. Ken had laid barbed wire down there in the hope it would force the attackers onto some more visible terrain.

Now, with the addition of some mines and grenades, he didn’t care so much. He spent hours in laying an intricate pattern of grenades and mines down in the area. Ken assured the others that should anyone decide to approach from that way, well… it would be the last decision they made for a while, a long, long while. He had grinned when he told them about the trap – the evil glint in his eye once again reminding them of just who it was that lay beneath the humorous coating of the everyday man, whom they had come to admire so much.

Those eyes had twinkled when, after returning from his task, he’d looked at the other men and said, ‘Don’t any of you guys be sneaking off down that little gulley for a sly piss, will you? I’ve seen you, Mikey!’ The young man blushed.

Ken became more serious. ‘Be careful, everyone must keep away from that area, and don’t let those bleeding dogs go anywhere near it, either, Jack will go nuts if one of them gets blown to pieces!’ He looked down at the large dogs who sat patiently at his feet; they had taken to following him around like shadows.

Rufus looked up at the sound of Ken’s last remark, sneezed, shook his head so violently that his baggy ears made loud clapping noises, and then gave Ken a look as if to say: ‘Excuse me…but do we appear to be stupid?’

The boys saw the exchange and burst into laughter.

Ken laughed, too, but when they had finished he reiterated his warning about the mines in the gulley, saying: ‘Watch out!’ He didn’t care about the other mines, which he’d lain amongst the various obstacles and gaps in the wire, as none of them were on trip fuses. No, those would only detonate upon his command. Using the little battery pack, which he had clipped to his belt, Ken would be able to get those mines to explode whenever he wanted. All he had to do was hook it up to the cables he’d laid, and it would be ‘bye-bye’ to whoever was standing anywhere near the mines.

Ken also spent a fair amount of time in zeroing the sniper rifle.

It was a toss-up between Junior and Michael as to who was the best shot. ‘Well…’ he said, ‘…let’s not get into a pissing match, one of you uses the rifle whilst the other one spots and then uses the machinegun when the bad guys bunch up, okay, how about that?’ The boys agreed and Ken smiled when he saw their fierce competitiveness, it was probably the most necessary thing right about now – the will to win.

He then showed them how to make the most of their weapons from the lofty shooting platform. ‘You guys can probably stop those fuckers in their tracks from this position alone,’ he said, with a wicked grin. ‘There’s only that dead ground by the water tank, but you should be able to get them before they manage to reach it.’ He pointed over in the other direction, to the left, saying: ‘We need to watch that place, too! See where the hedge thickens…’ The boys nodded.

Ken said, ‘Well, if it was me then I’d be looking at outflanking this position by using that direction, cause a distraction over here…’ he pointed back to the right, ‘…and then, when you’re not looking I’d get some guys around the back by using that hedge-line.’

The boys looked at him, then at each other, and then back to Ken. Junior grinned, saying: ‘Yeah, yeah…we get that – you’re a sneaky fucker, aren’t you, Ken?’ He laughed gently. ‘We’ll be watching, watching three-sixty with eyes up our arses! Just let ‘em try and come that way, we’ll smash ‘em!’

‘Let’s just hope you’re right, big guy!’ Ken whispered.

The three of them lay in the roof of the barn for a while and laughed amongst themselves. Eventually, Ken then brought them back to the serious business. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘We have two of our main weapons up here, so I want you to get some more sandbags and do plenty of work on the defences. I don’t need you guys getting whacked in the first two minutes, get some thick layers all around your firing positions, and make sure you do a good job of it, too!’

In their usual manner, the pair of tall young men set about the task without a word of complaint. Ken humped all the spare ammo for the weapons up into the position, cracked open the metal boxes and made sure the bullets were all readily accessible. Taking a last look around, he nodded in satisfaction, climbed down to ground level and then wandered off to find Red and the girls.

After checking in on them, to make sure they were managing with the final preparations, he grabbed his old rucksack and walked back over to the barn. A few minutes later, and with the pack now hanging weightily from his shoulders, he told Junior and Red, who were still working away up in the Nest, to keep an eye out for him. ‘Watch my back, guys, I’m just gonna wander down to the lake to have a check of that area, I’ll be about an hour,’ he said.

They waved their acknowledgement down from the rafters, watching him through the slits they had cut into the roof. Ken walked down to the lake, looking no more concerned than if he were just taking the hounds for a walk, which incidentally, he was. The boys in the roof heard his low whistle, and watched as the dogs fell in behind him. Junior grinned, saying: ‘That guy, he’s something else, ain’t he? He’s even managed to train those damned dogs to perfection…’ Michael nodded silently, grinning as he continued piling the sandbags.

By nightfall they had finished. All of the weapons were sited and all of the defences were laid. Medical kits had been checked and placed in handy locations around the house and barn. Every single corner of the house had been filled with buckets of water and wet towels, Red had fixed a hosepipe to the kitchen tap and then coiled it up neatly in the hallway. The interior walls were lined with filled sandbags, as were the exterior walls. Steel plate was in place by the windows and doors, trucks loaded with supplies and ready, weapons loaded with ammunition and ready. Hunters, themselves, loaded with food and adrenaline – and ready. Ken did one last test of the alert procedure, checked the sentry roster and then suggested they get some rest.

The complete lack of response to that last idea made him smile.

‘Yeah, well…I wasn’t planning on getting any kip either,’ he said, softly. ‘To be honest, I was just gonna sit up and keep my ears open, but I guess that six sets of ears are better than one, eh?’

Red chucked a pack of dog-eared playing cards onto the table.

‘Hell, if I’m gonna die…’ he said, sarcastically, ‘…then I’m gonna die with all of yo’ munny in my back pocket!’

The sound of scraping chairs, and of small change being rescued from pockets, was the only confirmation Ken needed to hear. They were ready, more than ready. Ken knew they were going to have to be – the time for death was upon them.

Just as they would have done in a movie, the enemy came at dawn. And when they came, they came in droves. There were dozens of them. However, unlike that wonderfully-heroic movie, one filled with brave people doing righteous deeds, the men bearing the Dark One’s message had, right from the start, managed to get their attack wrong. To be fair, which perhaps we shouldn’t be, the events starting to go badly for the attackers weren’t all of their own doing.

They had, after all, been given rather a large helping-hand.

It’s hardly fair to blame someone for not having the sense to avoid walking into a carefully-laid ‘Daisy-Chain’ of high-explosive grenades and Claymore mines, linked together in a lethal necklace of death, and then perfectly concealed by a master of camouflage. That’s a criticism that would hardly be fair at all, now would it? And, it’s no wonder the Dragon was so pissed off when Maggie severed the link between it and Kenneth Robinson. Because the one thing the Beast would have found extremely useful was a man with some decent soldiering skills. The use of such a man may well have made a difference to its carefully-laid plans – a critical difference.

***

Tori had been the one on sentry duty, standing in the cold morning air and watching the mist lifting off the fields. She had been on top of the water tank for slightly over an hour and was only now starting to feel the warmth of the early morning sun, it was mostly an imagined sensation, likely to have been caused by the psychological effect of seeing the first rays of a new day igniting the sky over behind those black woods to the east, but either way, it lifted her spirits. She yawned and blew some warm breath into her hands before returning their grip to the cold steel and wood of her rifle’s insensitive caress.

As the tall woman stood there, stamping her feet to beat the cold trying to seep into her bones, she caught the aroma of fresh coffee, along with the acidic and not entirely unpleasant whiff of a freshly-lit cigarette. Tori turned and watched Ken as he plodded over, kitchen door easing shut behind him.

He had two mugs of steaming coffee in his hands, a Kalashnikov assault rifle over one shoulder and the grenade launcher slung across his back – two rows of the launcher’s golden grenades, in bandoliers, criss-crossed his chest. Around Ken’s waist lay his fighting belt, bulging with ammunition and other paraphernalia.

There was a cigarette dangling from his smiling lips.

Ken reached the tank and passed one of the steaming mugs up to Tori – she raised the mug to her lips in gratitude, looked pointedly at his smoke, and then raised her eyebrows in the manner of a disapproving, older sister.

Ken saw her look, grinned like a kid and said, ‘Fuck it!’

There was no answer to that retort, none at all.

Tori watched as Ken placed his mug on the wooden platform, and then hoisted his large frame upwards to stand next to her. They stood together in the early morning light and sipped on their coffee, the feeling was upon them. They felt them, the enemy, coming like the heaviness of an onrushing thunder storm. The air had changed in some way, become heavier – it thickened and they felt it. Standing in the half-light of a misty dawn, the two Hunters felt their enemy arrive.

Ken broke the silence, whispering: ‘It’s going be soon, isn’t it?’

Tori looked at him with a wry smile. ‘Yes, it is – any minute now, I do believe…’ she said, dropping her coffee in that same instant. The mug bounced off the wood, somersaulted over the edge and shattered against the stone wall. The words had barely crossed those beautiful lips when the sound of an exploding Claymore, rushing through the stillness of dawn, reached their ears.

Tori looked at him and grinned. ‘Precisely
now
, is what I meant!’ she said, with a wicked glint shining in her eyes.