The Third Bullet (63 page)

He drove along at twenty, no rush, no hurry, controlled the whole way. The car followed the curve of the road, which followed the curve of the hill, and before him, he saw the darkness of the canopy give way to a blast of sunlight as the trees fell back from the road for a bit. About thirty yards out of that zone, he halted and took time to
precisely regulate the wheel, checking to see that the front wheels were locked straight ahead.

He climbed from the car and hunched beside it. He wedged the branch against the seat, saw that it was a little long, pulled it out, and snapped four inches off. He re-wedged it, lowered the unsecured end to the gas pedal, took a last look, and pushed the branch down against the pedal, driving it forward perhaps two inches and holding it there. The car accelerated as he spun away, and
whack,
caught the rear of the door-well across the back of his right shoulder, knocking him to the ground.

He rolled, found his feet, and began to race down the road as the car hurtled forward.

He heard the firing, one and then three more guns, so loud that they drowned out any sound of metal shearing or glass shattering. The guns roared on for a good three seconds, then quit abruptly.

Swagger turned left and slid through an opening in the trees, but before him, he saw only more trees, all of them vertical against the slope of the hill. Up was the only way to go.

“The seven-six-two did great,” said Blue Two, the first to reach the wreckage. “Unfortunately, there’s nobody here.”

“Shit,” said Blue Leader. “Any blood?”

“Don’t see any. Just blasted upholstery and a million pieces of glass. He set the accelerator with this.” He displayed the branch.

“Okay,” said Blue Leader. “The car couldn’t run far like that, so he set it up fifty or so yards down the road. He got off the road, he’s running hard; the question is up or down.”

“We going after him?” someone asked.

“I don’t know,” said Blue Leader. He pulled up his throat mike. “Blue Five, this is Blue Leader.”

“Roger, Blue Leader.”

“We have a running target. I want you to vector to our kill zone, then look to the south, and I will pop smoke. Orient on the smoke,
then deploy your FLIR. I have to know which way the bastard is running and if he’s got a team in there waiting for us.”

“Roger that, Blue Leader.”

“Okay, dump the ghillies, this is high-speed stuff.”

The team collectively shook itself free of the cumbersome branch-and-leaf constructions that had obliterated their human shapes. Now they were in digital cammo, sand-and-spinach-pattern, a weave of forest colors and shadows.

“I want intervals of thirty yards,” Blue Leader barked, “and if Five gets him nailed and it’s all clear, we will pursue. If there’s heavy opposition, we’ll bug out. This is a kill, not a war.”

“Roger that,” came the replies.

The four operators hustled down the road, fingers on triggers. Their equipment bounced as they ran, the MK48s dangling on slings, the M-6s light in hands, ready for return fire in an instant if ambush came, all red-dot optics on and set to ten, smoke canisters and shoulder holsters flopping on harnesses, body armor slopping up and down at each step.

“Fine here,” said Blue Leader. “Deploy into intervals.”

He pulled a smoker off his belt as the boys spread themselves out, went to knee, and began to eyeball at full intensity. Blue Leader pulled the pin and dumped the signal device on the ground. It fizzed, then began to produce copious volumes of roiling yellow smoke that drifted upward, and in an instant, the shadow cut into the sunlight as the helicopter swerved over them. The machine hovered there for seconds that seemed like minutes.

“Do you have anything in your green eye, Five?”

“Okay, okay, I have a fast mover uphill from you, maybe a hundred yards, he’s pulling himself over rocks, he’s twelve o’clock to your line, going straight up.”

“Anything else hot?”

“I have no other targets, I repeat, no other targets. Only the one fast, hot one; man, he’s moving for an old guy.”

“Can you azimuth us to him?”

“Zero-zero degrees. Just go up, baby, he’s dead on a line for the peak and not going much farther once he reaches it unless he finds a stairway to heaven.”

“That’s our job,” someone said, breaking radio protocol.

Blue Leader stood, pointed upward to the three other members of the ground team, who, having heard the conversation, were rising too, and made the whirlybird hand gesture to give them the order they’d been waiting on, which was to pursue and kill.

Swagger climbed. Jesus Christ, he was too old for this. The incline fought him, the trees fought him, the slipperiness of the pine needles and leaves sheathing the ground fought him, the boulders fought him, his hip fought him, gravity fought him, age fought him, everything fought him.

Fuck! A slip and he went hard to ground, slamming his knee against the inevitable rock, sending a flare of pain up through leg to body and brain.

I am way too old for this, he thought.

The sweat loaded in his eyebrows, then dumped to his eyes, stinging them, turning the world to blur. He tried to blink them clear. A gut ache came, bearing the news that he’d been so immersed in this quest over the past weeks, he’d lost a lot of his conditioning. Tremors slithered through arms, dizziness through vision, and he sought handholds, anything to pull him upward. Now and then he’d find a bare spot where his New Balances would find traction and give him a boost, and he’d gain a second or two, but he knew that four young athletes in superb condition, superbly armed, guided by the chopper that floated just over the canopy of the trees, were closing on him.

The hip. He tried to concentrate on it, to accommodate his mind to the pain, which was now severe, but in its time on Earth, that joint had been shattered by a bullet, replaced with a steel ball, then
cut deep and hard by a blade of legendary sharpness at full force, and finally, just recently, the whole mess had been shot again, though at a shallow angle, and was not fully healed.

It burned, it boiled, it seethed. It disrupted what coordination was left in his old limbs, and it eroded his will and stamina as he fought for gulps of dry air, wiped his soaking brow, ignored the dozens of raw abrasions his passage through bush and needle, over rock, and in thicket and copse, had inflicted upon him. How close were they? Should he zig? Should he zag? Was a red dot even now settling on his spine, about to sunder it and leave him flat and begging for the coup de grâce?

Suddenly, he broke into the light, and the slope lessened. He’d made it to the top.

Up here, the wind precluded the trees achieving any height, but the acre of hilltop was strewn with boulders, clumps of brush, patches of raw earth, and a few small, scabby trees that had managed, against all odds, to hang on.

Around him, the green state of Connecticut rolled away to far horizons, now and then throwing up a cluster of black roofs in trees to signify a town. Blue mountains blurred the edge of the Earth miles away.

Bob slipped, and at that moment a bullet came. Swagger’s luck, the shooter missed by inches, and Swagger felt the push of the atmosphere as the bullet knifed through. He dropped and began to slither.

Too old for this shit.

“Did you get him, Three?”

“No, dammit, he went down just as I fired. I had a real good sight pic on him; goddamn, he is a lucky sonovabitch.”

“Do you see him, Five?”

The chopper, hovering four hundred feet over the hilltop, floated this way and that. “I have a visual, Blue Leader. He’s low-crawling
among the boulders, maybe a hundred feet ahead of you. I don’t know where he’s going; there’s no place to go. If I were armed, I’d have the shot. But he’s stuck up here for sure.”

“All right, any police activity?”

“Negative. No reports, no dispatches. It’s all clear on that front, over.”

“Good. I need you to retire to point one now. We don’t need you hanging overhead, attracting attention.”

“Check and commencing.”

The chopper veered off, headed for an orbit a mile away, out of range.

“Blue Team, listen up, mates. You guys on the flanks, I want you to move laterally. Locate at each hard-ninety compass indicator and hold up. I want to come at him from four directions. I don’t want any chance of him evading us and making it off this hill alive, do you read?”

Affirmatives came back at him.

“You are cleared to fire if you get a clean shot. But I think this is shaping up like fire and movement and then an up-top rat hunt.”

“Got it, Blue Leader.”

The three high-speed operators scurried away to their holding spots. Blue Leader crouched, did an equipment check, then took out a smoke and lit up. Always time for a butt. He’d been doing hilltops for about twenty years, sometimes trying to hold them, sometimes trying to take them. It was all the same. Old hand, lots of war behind him, presumably lots of war ahead.

He waited, enjoying the cigarette, an English Oval, a thick blunt fag unlike the scrawny filtered candy tubes the Yanks smoked. When he was done, years of military experience in rank and officers’ mess demanded that he carefully peel the paper, rub the remaining tobacco and ash away between his fingers, crumple the paper, and put it in his pocket.

“Blue Leader, this is Blue Two, I am set at due east and ready to rock.”

“Three?”

“Due west, holding.”

“Visuals?”

“Got nothing but rock and brush. No movement. He’s hunkered down solid.”

“Ditto that.”

“Ditto again.”

“Okay. Let me try a thing.” Blue Leader rose. “Swagger, mate,” he shouted. “Make this easy, go out with dignity. No point in squealing like a pig in the bush as we hunt you down, shot a dozen times, bleeding out in pain. You’re an old bastard, you’ve seen this game a thousand times, you knew your day would come. Dignity, chum. A cigarette, a laugh, a sip on the canteen, I’ve even got some damn fine Scotch aboard, and it’s over clean and painless.”

No response. Of course not. Swagger wouldn’t give a location indicator. He’d play hard to get.

“All right.” Blue Leader spoke to his team via the throat mike. “One and Three, move out. Two, with me on the cover fire, do it.”

He rose, rocked a MK48 burst across his front, and watched the bullets blow lines of dust spasms and rock frags up where they hit. On the other side, Two put in his two cents’ worth.

Then it was Blue Leader’s turn to move, and he went low and hard, hearing the cover fire against the hilltop from the two other points on the compass, got to a nest of boulders, and slid in. He looked and, in the jumbled landscape ahead of him, saw nothing. There wasn’t much area left unpenetrated. Swagger was running out of hilltop.

“Okay, nice and easy, Blue Team, one at a time, you move in twenty or so feet, scan, and hold. He may have an ankle piece on him or a knife. Use your corner discipline, be aware of blind spots. I’d go to M-6, for better movement; he’s just a few feet ahead now.”

Blue Leader let the heavier MK48 fall to sling support, pushed it around to his backside, and deployed the shorter M-6 carbine, stock locked in short, cocked and unlocked, Eotech on and turned to ten
so a bright red circle displayed his aim point to either conscious or subconscious.