Fear No Evil

Chapter 98

Alex pumped his fist at Sampson.

Big John’s heart slammed in his chest, and he grinned wildly as he started to lower the Ruger. A bullet smacked into the tree right next to him. It threw bark and splinters into the air before the report of the big-bore rifle came again from far downriver.

They’re onto me now!

Sampson spun around and ran deeper into the trees and shadows until he was sure he could not be seen. When he finally stopped and looked back with his binoculars, he could make out Durango’s corpse and the other narco struggling to sit up with his hands zip-tied behind his back.

Alex was nowhere in sight. He had to be moving north, hunting the sniper.

It’s a good thing, Sampson decided before starting north himself. We’re not hanging back. We’re taking the fight to them on our terms.

But that didn’t mean acting foolhardy. Sampson forced himself to move at a much slower pace, stopping constantly to scan the way ahead and peer downriver at the west flank of the canyon, trying to spot the sniper attempting to kill him.

As he walked on, he did simple subtraction and geometry.

The day before, there’d been five men with Durango. One died in the S below Big Salmon Lake, shot from the air by one of M’s men.

Another had died just a few minutes ago on Sampson’s side of the river, killed by the sniper. Alex had left one of them subdued on the ledge on the east bank. And Durango was dead. That meant there were at least two more narcos to deal with.

It also meant Maestro had sent men up here as well, the sniper, certainly, and probably more. There’d been three men in that helicopter both times they’d seen it.

Is one of them the sniper? Or is this a new player?

As Sampson kept pushing north, he realized he had to act as if there were two cartel gunmen and three or even four of M’s men in the six miles of rugged terrain between him and the trailhead and civilization.

When he was forced to cross open ground, Sampson hung back in the shadows until he could see exactly where the bridle trail met the far woods. Then he ducked down and sprinted in a straight line to that spot, getting back in the trees as quick as he could.

The first time he did it, he knew not even the best sniper in the world could hit a running man at that long a distance. But with every step he was getting closer, closing the gap on the shooter’s limits, making himself more and more a viable target.

Sampson had gone three hundred yards north when he looked down into the canyon and saw the wreckage of their raft, deflated and wrapped around a log that had fallen in the river. Downstream, a few of their brightly colored dry bags were floating north, along with their cooler.

Far ahead of the last of their gear, more than a mile off now, he made out the other raft with the young family in it, heading toward the takeout and the trailhead.

They had to have heard all the shooting. They’ll report it, won’t they?

From a thick patch of trees not a hundred yards in front of him, the air was split by a burst of machine-gun fire followed by a second burst from another angle. Sampson took cover in time to hear two men screaming in agony in Spanish.

Two pistol shots silenced their pain.