Relentless

CHAPTER 11
1

The temperature kept dropping sharply, well past midnight; Leo Hargit had everything buttoned and belted and wrapped around him but the cold was in his bones and he cursed it. It was the one thing he had never had to fight before. All his fighting had been in semitropics or along the barren slopes of the warm montagnard country of the Indochinese Central Highlands. Up here now it was probably ten or fifteen below; he knew it wouldn’t kill him but he couldn’t stop cursing it.

He reached the end of this particular stretch of forest and stopped to scan the open slope above him before he put the horses out onto the packed snow and ran across the rocks into the farther pines, where he drew rein and hipped around to look back across the heaped-up mountains he had traveled. The moon was about halfway down; there was a surprising amount of light on the slopes, reflected back from the frozen surface of the snow that covered them.

He had a faint sense of regret. Steve and the Sergeant had traveled a long way with him. But he had seen the way the bullet had smashed Steve’s shoulder and he knew Steve wasn’t going to survive a horseback ride out of these mountains. He’d be better off in a police chopper. Burt had been a good man, steadily loyal, but in warfare you had to be practical, you had to take your losses. The world was full of Eddie Burts, competent and reliable; it made no sense to risk sacrificing a Hargit for a Burt. The money on the two packhorses would be enough to hire a thousand Sergeant Burts.

In a way being alone made it easier: Easier to disappear, easier to fade into the traffic and escape. There would be men looking for him at the foot of the range but that didn’t worry him. He would isolate one of them, kill the man and take the man’s uniform. He’d had plenty of experience infiltrating enemy lines. The only danger came from the rear. There was no way to conceal the tracks his three horses left in the crusted snow. And now, waiting at his vantage point and watching his backtrail, he saw a slow-moving dot detach itself from the shadows two or three miles back and advance down the slope like a crawling ant. But from the haze of kicked-up snow that drifted around the moving figure Hargit knew he was being deceived by mountain distance; the rider was coming along at high speed across the open there.

He waited long enough to be sure there was only one rider and then he checked the packhorses’ lead-ropes and turned into the forest, and began to cast around for a good ambush spot.