Close Quarters

TWENTY

I came to after a few seconds and found I was hanging upside down with the seat belt across my throat, slowly choking me. The interior of the car was clouded with dust from the airbag, and I could smell fuel in the air and the sourness of ingrained car dirt, and my mouth was gritty with God knew what accumulated crap thrown off the floor. I braced myself with one hand on the roof and pushed the belt release catch, rolling into a ball to cushion my impact. I kicked hard at the driver’s door, which was partially open. No go. It was wedged tight with a screen of coarse grass and dirt flattened against the outside of the glass.

I squirrelled round and looked through the windscreen. The view wasn’t great, and starred with a crazy network of cracks. I breathed deeply, fighting back a sense of panic. If the bang I’d heard was a tyre being shot out, and I couldn’t get out right now, I was in deep trouble.

I forced myself to apply cool logic. There was no way anybody could have got into a position ahead of me to shoot out a tyre this soon. They wouldn’t have known I was going to take this route because until I saw it, even I didn’t know. And if I had been shot at, there would have most likely been at least one follow-up shot to make sure of a kill. So far there hadn’t been any.

That left a simple blow-out; one of those things that happens on rough country roads, the inevitable result of sharp stones meeting worn tyre walls. Circumstance and randomness coming together to play games with the best-laid plans.

I found my overnight bag and checked my surroundings. I appeared to be in a gulley facing downhill. A fine mist was being blown from beneath the hood and ghosting across the cracked glass, feeding into the car through a couple of small holes. The smell raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

Smoke.

There was no way out through the front, so I checked the passenger door. It was badly buckled around the lock, but didn’t appear to have anything blocking my way out.

I swivelled my hips and smashed both feet against the passenger window. It took three attempts in the cramped space, and I prayed the vibration against the door wouldn’t cause the side pillar to buckle and collapse. The glass finally blew out with a crash and I followed fast, dragging myself through the hole and up the side of the car to the rear, where I rolled clear.

I lay on my back for a few seconds, winded and bruised, then rolled over again and prayed the Toyota didn’t blow, while I studied the road above me and the grassland below. If my logic was all wrong and the tyre had been shot out, rushing out into the open to avoid the car blowing could be the last thing I ever did.

But there was nothing. No vehicles, no voices, no sounds of anyone approaching. No shots. Just a vague sigh of wind ghosting across the grass, and high above me the innocent sound of a bird.

I got to my feet and checked myself over for breaks or cuts. I’d been lucky — or maybe the factory had turned out an especially good car that day. I’d come out of a major crash with nothing more than a couple of bruises and a hair full of someone else’s car crap.

I approached the car with caution to check it out. It was surrounded by a white veil of steam and smoke and the rank smell of burning rubber, but didn’t look in imminent danger of blowing up. I checked the tyres and saw the front left had a long tear in the sidewall where the fabric looked perished through age and neglect.

Just as I’d thought. Random.

I was moving away in case whatever was burning under the hood took hold and the tank blew, when I heard the growl of an engine being driven hard. It sounded high-performance, like the noise you get at a cross-country rally.

Which was all wrong for all kinds of reasons.

I dropped down off the road and ran at a crouch towards a large clump of rocks in dead ground two hundred yards away. Instinct told me the new arrival wasn’t going to be a local farmer willing to give me a ride out of here. In my limited experience, country farmers don’t drive hard and fast unless they have a prize pig to sell.

I watched as the car pulled to a stop a few yards before the top of a rise. It was precisely where I’d stopped to check the road and told me all I needed to know.

It was the Isuzu. Off-white and beat-up, it carried the clatter of a holed muffler and was streaked with mud down the sides. So much for sedans with aerials. This was too much of a coincidence.

I ignored what were merely outward signs; mufflers get broken all the time on bad roads and beat-up is a look nobody notices. And for some of us that’s the whole idea; it’s called blending in. But more than anything the speed he’d been travelling told me the car was no junkyard hand-me-down driven by a tanked-up kid on a joy ride. Pros don’t use tools that aren’t up to the job. And this one had been following me for a while now.

I watched the driver climb out of the car and ease his back. He walked once round the vehicle, stamping his feet to get the circulation going the way people do after a long session behind the wheel with nothing to do but drive and watch the road. He looked small and wiry, and was wearing a brown leather coat and a cap with ear flaps that hid his face, and moved like he was tired or old — maybe both. He might have been an ordinary traveller on this deserted back road who’d just happened on something he didn’t want to see.

When he got back level with the hood he held something up to his eye which caught the light. I knew then that he was trouble. Ordinary travellers don’t carry spyglasses — or what I guessed was more likely an optical gun-sight. He was checking out my dead Toyota and the surrounding landscape to see if I was out and in one piece.

When he got back to the driver’s door he leaned in and hauled something heavy out of the back seat, fiddled with it for a second, then positioned himself over the hood in a stance that I recognized only too well.

Sniper.

I eased down behind a large piece of moss-covered granite and waited. I didn’t need to stick my head up for a second look to see what he was doing; I’d seen all I needed to.

The man was holding what looked like an OSV-96 long-range sniper’s rifle. It was hard to be sure at that distance, but by its length and the way he hefted it, if I was correct it was capable of taking out man, beast or vehicle at anything up to a kilometre. And when fitted with the optical gun-sight he’d be able to shoot the pimples off a target’s face.

The target being me.

I looked across at the Toyota. From his elevated position the shooter would have a grand-stand view of the vehicle. He’d be asking himself if I was still inside, was I banged up and trapped. Or dead. Even as I thought it, he decided to check it out the only way he knew how.

The crack of a shot rolled across the open ground like small thunder.

I ducked involuntarily. But the shot wasn’t aimed at me; instead the rear window of the Toyota blew out in a spray of glass on the driver’s side, and a ragged piece of the radiator grill zinged off into the distance from the other end. Heavy gauge shells do that; they go right on through, mashing up whatever gets in their way. Fabric. Metal. Skin.

Another shot and the same thing happened, this time on the passenger side. He was playing now, but making sure at the same time, drilling the car on both sides. A third shot rang out and the car was toast.

Incendiary round. Intended for light-armoured vehicles and buildings, and certain death for a light-skinned 4WD, especially when aimed at the fuel tank.

I gave it a count of ten while I watched the burning car push a column of thickening black smoke into the air, accompanied by the popping of the three remaining tyres and the clank of overheated metal. Then I risked a quick look. The Isuzu was still in place on the rise.

But the shooter had disappeared.

I rolled away, keeping the rock between us, and slid into the gulley. There was no point going back to the car, so I grabbed my bag and began running up the gulley towards the rise. I had no massive plan in mind; this was all or nothing. But one way of facing off danger is to do what is least expected and run towards it. The man with the rifle had the upper hand at whatever distance he chose, and there was no way I could outrun him. So going out into open country was pointless. All I had was my overnight kit, a small pair of binoculars and a powerful desire to keep living.

It was tough going. I was still dizzy from the crash and found the rough ground difficult to navigate underfoot. And the need to bend forward at the waist to prevent breaking cover was enough to make me stop to catch my breath.

Which was lucky for me, because that’s when I heard him coming down towards me.

He’d reached a particularly steep part of the terrain and his momentum, coupled I guessed with the idea that I was being roasted in the upturned vehicle, had made him careless; he was also moving too fast and kicking up dirt underfoot which pinpointed his position and progress. He’d moved up on to higher ground at the side of the gulley to get a better view, so I hugged the ground beneath an overhang of earth and coarse grass and waited, counting the seconds to help me focus.

As his shadow appeared above me, I launched myself upwards over the lip of the gulley and hit him with my shoulder at waist level. It was all or nothing.

It took him by surprise. He gave a whoosh of expelled air and I felt him lift off his feet with the impact. But he had good instincts and I felt the butt of the heavy rifle slam into the small of my back. He was also fitter than he’d looked earlier, with the wiry strength of someone accustomed to extremes of exercise. I held on to him in desperation, my fingers curled into the soft leather of his coat. If he got free and stepped back with the rifle, I was dead meat. I did the only thing I could: I flipped backwards and dragged him down into the gulley, making him grunt as we crashed against a lump of granite. I tried rolling him beneath me to smother him with my weight, but he knew all the moves. He pushed the rifle clear and used the flat of his hands to keep himself level, before twisting violently sideways and getting one hand between us.

It didn’t matter whether he was reaching for a knife or a handgun; the outcome if he succeeded would be the same.

I let go with one hand and slammed my fist between the ear flaps. There was a crunch of cartilage giving way and he grunted, blowing out a gust of air and a splatter of blood. I hit him again, this time feeling him go limp against me. But I wasn’t taking chances. I rolled him on to his front and knelt on his back, pressing his body into the grass beneath and pulling his head back until he gurgled and began to kick violently as his throat became too constricted to breath. Another few seconds and he’d stop breathing altogether.

I eased off at the last moment and pushed his head down, and knelt on his back between his shoulder blades. Then I did a quick check of his pockets while he gulped for air. I found an ID card, some cash and a cheap cell phone. In his outside jacket pocket was a Grach 9mm semi-automatic pistol, and tucked in his waist was a knife in a sheath; commando-style, rubber handle grip, sharp as a razor.

But there was something else that almost threw me.

He was a woman.