The Killing Game (3 page)

“Two Westerners? In these mountains? In the middle of the bloody night?” Baxter raised a skeptical brow. “They’re either up to no good or they’re bloody loonies.”

“And yet, here we are, in these mountains, in the middle of the bloody night,” Taz commented dryly.

“Aye, but we
are
up to no good,” said Baxter.

“And you’re a loony,” Cullen added. The Scots’ amusement faded as an oppressive silence swept around them.

“You really think we’re going to find this guy out here?” Baxter asked dubiously.

They had eyes in the sky, but in a wilderness this vast?

“That’s the mission,” Dempsey said, moving out.

The terrorist they were tracking had connections that gave politicians hard-ons the size of Cleopatra’s Needle. The brass said they were working on intelligence reports that this guy was heading to the Wakhan Corridor through the Boroghill Pass. In Dempsey’s experience “intelligence” was as trustworthy as a three-year-old with a Kalashnikov.

So far they’d found sweet FA.

“Tell us again what we’re doing here?” Baxter grumbled.

“Following orders.” Dempsey hadn’t failed a mission yet—a soldier with his background couldn’t afford failure of any kind, not if he hoped to stay in the Regiment. And although this part of Afghanistan was not a hot zone for terrorist activity, it might be the best hideout for bad guys avoiding the limelight. Men like their quarry who’d supposedly been dead for the past decade.

“What now?” Taz asked. Tariq Moheek was an Iraqi-born Christian who’d been forced into exile under Saddam Hussein’s regime. His grandmother had stayed in Iraq, enduring Saddam’s iron fist only to be killed in an American bombing raid during the liberation. The guy spoke eight languages and looked like a local—Taz was the best asset the Regiment had when it came to the Middle Eastern crises. Pity they couldn’t clone him.

Dempsey pulled his pack onto his back and looked at his squad. They wore gear suitable for high-altitude work, no identifying insignia. They were heavily armed, with webbed vests to keep vital supplies close at hand, and they could survive for weeks without resupply, even in this bleak sterile land.

He didn’t want to be in this high hostile arena for that long. “Let’s follow these clowns and set up OPs.” Observation posts were best constructed during the hours of darkness. “I want to know who they are and what they’re doing.” Good guys or bad?
Either way he could use them.

“What are the chances of finding one old bugger out here when we don’t even know which direction he took off in or if he’s really still alive?” Baxter griped.

Four-man teams had been dropped at each of the three mountain passes that joined Pakistan to the Wakhan Corridor. Twelve soldiers surveying an area the length of Wales. On the plus side, most of the peaks were too sheer to climb without equipment and most of the valleys were permanently blocked by snow.

Chances were they were following a man who only bore an unfortunate resemblance to a dead Russian terrorist who, a decade earlier, had left only a finger at the site of the British Embassy bombing in Yemen. And the poor bugger was in for a helluva shock when they found him.

“If he’s alive, we’ll find him.” Because those were his orders. At his signal they disappeared silently into the night like wraiths.

CHAPTER 2

Axelle slipped inside the yurt to find Anji cradling a tiny squalling snow leopard against his chest. Every muscle ached with fatigue, exhaustion scratched at her eyeballs, but she couldn’t help smile at the impossibly beautiful, totally improbable scrap of fur. Then it struck her. If the cubs were in a box in their yurt, then Sheba was unquestionably dead.

Everything she feared had come true. Except the cubs
were
alive…for now. “Do you have any yak’s milk we can feed them?” she asked.

He nodded. The cubs were thin and cold and wouldn’t survive long without nourishment.

“They were right here, in this box.” The Wakhi man tapped the cardboard box on the floor with his boot, his brown eyes shining as he jiggled the cub like a baby.

A mewling sound from inside the box had her reaching down and pulling out a soft tawny bundle covered in inky black spots. The bundle cuddled into her chest for warmth. Axelle’s eyes rose to Josef’s as he came in behind her. “I don’t get it. Who brought them here?”

He held out his hand and she passed him the cub. “I’ll get the fire going while you feed them.”

The cubs looked at her with bright blue eyes, and Axelle’s heart squeezed as she reached out a hand to stroke a tiny fluffy ear. They reminded her why the work was so important. There were so few of these creatures left on earth, and they were being forced into the narrowest, most unforgiving of margins.

“What kind of person kills the mother but saves the cubs?” Josef asked.

It wasn’t rational to destroy with one hand and save with another and yet humans did it all the time. She squatted and opened the door of the little cast-iron stove they’d dragged from Kabul two summers ago when they’d launched this project. She lit a match to the yak dung that was already set. It spluttered and caught, the orange flames flickering and dancing as they licked the pungent fuel.

She looked up to find both men staring her expectantly, awaiting instruction. She was one of the world’s foremost experts on conserving endangered cats. Poachers weren’t new to her. Death wasn’t new. But this was different. The location made finding the culprit extremely problematic. The remoteness of the area, the geographical and political factors all weighed heavily against their chances of stopping this sonofabitch.

Her eyes took in the bare walls of the tent. Normally the walls were plastered with territorial zones for each collared leopard. “At least we didn’t have the maps on display when he left the cubs here.”

“He doesn’t need them,” Josef tucked the cub inside his jacket and eyed her from beneath thick brows. “I think someone is using our collars to track the cats.”

Axelle opened her mouth to argue, but Josef didn’t let her.

“Think about it—to find Aslan and Sheba so quickly? Finding two of our collared cats in a couple of days when it took us nearly two months of constant trapping to even
see
any?” He sucked in a deep breath. “Someone is using our radio frequencies or the satellite feed and picking off our leopards like fairground ducks.”

“Impossible.” She considered Josef’s words.
Unthinkable, but not impossible
. “Aslan might not even be dead,” she pointed out.

Anji spoke hesitantly. “I found his collar today. There was blood on it.”

Her stomach flipped.

Josef settled next to the metal stove as the flames finally started to expel heat. “You know how hard it is to catch one snow leopard, let alone two, within forty-eight hours.”

She was intimately acquainted with the difficulties.

Most people who spent years living in the wilderness never saw one. It had taken a large team of big-cat experts weeks of careful observation and planning before they’d begun to have any success with their state-of-the-art snaring techniques. However, this poacher could have been here for months, or he could be a local, or he could be very, very lucky.

She wrapped her arms around herself as cold swept through her. Even though she wanted to reject Josef’s idea, he might be right. An ominous disquiet slid through her chest. “That means we’ve signed a death warrant for every cat we collared.”

Dread wove itself into a thick mass inside her lungs and she found it hard to draw in a full breath. The International Conservation Trust’s project had achieved unprecedented success when they’d collared ten individuals last fall. If a poacher targeted all their leopards, they could wipe out a significant proportion of the Afghan snow leopard population in a matter of weeks. It would be her fault. The Trust would never get a permit to work in Afghanistan again—and they might never be able to radio collar another animal in the wild. It would knock conservation efforts back thirty years. More important,
her
leopards were the ones in the firing line.

The lanterns flickered erratically as the wind started to howl.

“Why would this bastard shoot the mother but take the time to bring the cubs to safety?” Axelle shook her head. It didn’t make sense. Her head hurt trying to figure it out.

Josef held the cub high, its soft belly curved into his palm. It started to mewl as Anji handed him a small bowl of yak milk and a tiny medicine dispensing cup he’d dug from somewhere.

“These fellows would fetch good money on the black market,” Josef remarked.

“But he’d have had to feed them and transport them straight away,” Axelle added as comprehension dawned.

“And he didn’t have time…” Josef met her gaze.

“Because he isn’t finished yet. Oh, God.”

“Maybe someone else find the cubs?” Anji suggested hopefully. “Someone who knows about the project and saw the camp? Maybe they find them and bring them here?” He eyed her and Josef uncertainly. There weren’t exactly a lot of passersby, and the people who did travel this region could easily be drug dealers moving their opium hauls or arms dealers supplying the insurgents to the south.

“Perhaps,” she said doubtfully. She tried to reassure him with a smile but her face felt nerveless and numb. Maybe she smiled. Maybe she didn’t. She couldn’t tell anymore.

He looked away. The cub tried to crawl up his chest and Anji disengaged the needle-sharp claws that tore small holes in the fabric.

The poacher had stood right here and looked around this tent. It gave her the creeps to think that a killer—the antithesis of her life’s work—had been in her space. Saving these animals was what she did, it was an anathema to try to understand someone who’d take their lives—for something as inert and valueless as money.

She climbed slowly to her feet, her head pounding with a mixture of altitude, exhaustion, and anger.

“What are you going to do?” Josef asked.

She booted up her laptop and Sat Link device. “I need to inform the Trust’s HQ.” The unsettled feeling in her stomach refused to quit. All the months of hard work had to be sacrificed. Scientific knowledge did not trump survival of a species. The stakes were too high for her to falter.

Anji threw another piece of dried dung onto the fire. She felt as if she’d never be warm again.

“I’m going to email the Trust and see if they can send an expert to deal with the cubs with a view to future release.” It took eighteen months for a snow leopard mother to rear her cubs. The thought of these wild creatures stuffed into a zoo because of her research project was sickening.

“What else?” Josef gently placed the fat, content cub back in the box next to its sibling. His voice vibrated with emotion.

She narrowed her eyes. “I’ll email HQ about what we suspect is going on—”

“If we wait for their permission we’ll lose more animals.”

She met his anger with resolute calm. “We won’t be waiting for anything. We need to re-trap each leopard and remove the collars.” It might cost her the one thing in the world she cared about—her job—but there was no alternative.

The collars were programmed to drop off after two years. She rubbed her tired eyes. Why hadn’t she chosen an option where they could have blasted the collars off remotely? Those models were less reliable, but…
damn
. She’d never imagined a scenario where a sophisticated poacher would turn their technology against them.

“In the future we’ll get the collar company to figure out a way to encrypt the data so this can’t happen again.” In the meantime it was a race against time. Frustration wanted to force its way out of her throat in a scream. Instead she started typing. “Get some sleep, Josef. We begin at dawn.”

Clumsy with exhaustion, Josef and Anji got into their sleeping bags and curled up on bedrolls beside the box of kittens. The fire radiated a steady heat that tempered the fierce wind that shrieked down the mountains and rustled the heavy felt of the yurt.

She hoped the bastard hunting her leopards was caught out in this weather. She hoped the sonofabitch was freezing his ass off on the side of the mountain. She went and grabbed her sleeping bag and pulled it over her shoulders as she typed the message that might destroy her reputation as a conservation biologist.

Once that was gone, what the hell did she have left?

***

Wakhan Corridor, Afghanistan, July 1979

Through the scope of his Dragunov sniper rifle Dmitri tracked two Westerners on horseback followed by three local men leading Bactrian camels heavily loaded with supplies.

“
Kapitán
?” His lieutenant whispered into his ear. “If these are the men we are after do we kill them?”

“
Nyet
. I need to interrogate them.” Dmitri stared at their fresh round faces. It wouldn’t take long. His masters in Moscow would be pleased his unit had found definitive proof of agents spreading Western propaganda in this region. “Take them.”

His troops burst out of the ground and encircled the ragged caravan. The Westerners fumbled for their weapons as they were dragged from their horses and kicked to the ground. They quickly found themselves at the wrong end of a rifle. One of the guides ran for it. Dmitri almost shouted to let the man go but it was too late. He crumpled to the dirt as a bullet pierced his heart. Dmitri would have been content to let the man spread rumors of soldiers who appeared like ghosts out of the earth, but it was not to be. He strode down the hillside, his long stride rapidly covering the ground. The locals and Westerners were separated, stripped of weaponry, pockets emptied, contents laid out in front of them.

The men’s wrists were tied behind their backs.

“Comrade.” He tilted his head and smiled into a pair of furious blue eyes. From a distance Dmitri had thought the man younger, weaker, but the blond curls gave him a falsely angelic aspect. Up close there was something hard about that face. Something unexpectedly dangerous.