Rules of The Hunt

2

Fitzduane's Island, Ireland

January 29, 2011

Boots was giving Oona, the housekeeper, a hard time in the kitchen.

It was staggering, thought Fitzduane affectionately, how much time, effort, and emotional energy such a very small person could soak up. He imagined having twins or — he went pale at the thought — triplets. In fact, right now, he couldn't really contemplate looking after more than one child at a time.

How did women do it, and, as often as not these days, combine raising a family with a career? In truth, he had considerable sympathy for Etan, Boots's mother. It was partly her strength of character that he had initially found so attractive. It was scarcely surprising now that she wanted to make her mark on the world.

That was where the age difference came in. Fitzduane had personal wealth, and, after the army, had reached the top of his chosen profession of combat photographer, strange occupation though it was. He had been ready to settle down.

Etan still had to achieve some personal goal before she would be content. They hadn’t fallen out of love. It was more a case of being out of sync. How many relationships foundered on career conflicts and bad timing? But Etan had one her own way, and that was the way of it.

Fitzduane tried to convince himself that someday soon she would return and they would at last get married and be a family unit, but deep down he no longer believed it. He suddenly felt a terrible loneliness, and tears came to his eyes.

He was lost in thought, staring out the glass wall at a choppy green black sea, when Boots came tearing in hood up, garbed for the outdoors, bright red Wellington boots flashing. "Daddy! Daddy! Let's go! Let's go!" He skidded to a halt. "Daddy, why are you crying?"

Fitzduane smiled. Children were disconcertingly observant at times. "I've got a cold," he said, sniffing ostentatiously and wiping his eyes.

Boots reached into his anorak and explored a pocket. A small hand emerged, clutching a tissue that looked like it was beyond recycling. A half-eaten hard candy was stuck to it. He proffered the combination to Fitzduane. "Sharing is caring," he said, repeating Oona's carefully drummed-in propaganda. "Can I have a sweetie?"

Fitzduane laughed. "Three years old and working the angles," he said. He had read all the books about the importance of feeding children properly and not encouraging bad habits, but he was fighting a losing battle where Boots and candy were concerned. He tossed Boots an apple taken from the fruit bowl on the sideboard.

Boots made a face, then grabbed the apple with one hand and Fitzduane's arm with the other: "Daddy! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go!"

* * * * *

The sniper reflected that the vast majority of his fellow citizens had never even held a weapon, let alone fired one.

Japan had abjured war. An army, as such, was specifically forbidden by the constitution. There was no conscription. The self-defense forces were manned exclusively by volunteers. The police carried guns but almost never drew them, let alone used them. The streets were safe. Criminals threatened only each other, and even then mostly used swords.

The sniper spat. His country was degenerating, suborned by materialism and false values. The politicians were corrupt. The rulers of his country had lost direction. The warrior class had been contaminated by commerce and were effete. The true wishes of the Emperor — views he never communicated or expressed but which they knew he must, at heart, profess — were being ignored.

A new direction was required. As always in history, a few people of strong will and clear vision could change destiny.

The sniper emptied the magazine of his rifle and reloaded it with hand-loaded match-grade ammunition. He checked every round. Beside him, the spotter had placed his automatic weapon to hand and was sweeping the killing ground in front of them with binoculars.

The watcher was in position fifty meters above and to the left of them.

All three saw the portcullis of the castle rise, and horse, rider, and passenger emerge.

The killing team settled in to wait. It would be about an hour.

They could hear the sounds of the small waterfall flowing into the stream below them. The stream widened and became shallower at this point. It was a location where people had traditionally established a crossing point or ford. The name wasn't marked on any map, but it was known, by the Fitzduanes, as Battleford.

At that spot, centuries earlier, Hugo's ancestors had fought, held, and died.

* * * * *

It was a truism of special forces that nothing ever went entirely to plan.

In this case the objective was to test the air deployment of three Guntracks and nine personnel onto the ground at night via LAPES, then mount a simulated assault on the abandoned DrakerCastle, which was at the opposite end of the island to Duncleeve. Kilmara didn't want Fitzduane complaining about having his beauty sleep disturbed. He had longer-term plans for the island which depended on his retaining his friend's goodwill. Good training areas were in short supply.

The first two Guntracks had made an uneventful landing by the standards of this truly terrifying technique. The third Guntrack, mounted on its special shock-absorbing pallet, had its landing ever further cushioned by a flock of panic-stricken sheep. Seven seemed unlikely to wake up again. Kilmara winced. He knew Fitzduane, and was having nightmares of an outsized trophy board being delivered to Ranger headquarters. He was never going to live this down.

The second hitch was that they had misplaced three Rangers — actually Delta troopers on secondment from FortBragg. The Irish were well-practiced in jumping in the unusually windy and gusty conditions of the West of Ireland. The Delta team were at the start of the learning curve and were going to have to leg it, cross-country and at night, to catch up.

Still, they hadn't vanished into the Atlantic, as Kilmara had at first feared. He thanked the Great God of Special Forces they weren't keeping full radio silence, as would have been the case on a real operation. After more than thirty years of the military, he had never gotten used to losing men. The Texas drawl in his earpiece had reassured him. He had acknowledged briefly and caustically and was then able to meditate, with rather more equanimity, on the matter of the dead sheep.

The sun was well up when Kilmara suspended the exercise and they laid up and prepared food. It was only then that one of the Delta team mentioned the civilian helicopter he had seen land on the north side of the island. He had assumed it was connected with some local inhabitant, and, since it was away from the exercise area, he brought the subject up only in passing.

Kilmara knew the topography and the context. "A forced landing?" he said hopefully, a mug of tea in his hand.

"Maybe," said Lonsdale, the Texan, who as a reflex had examined the helicopter briefly with his night-vision binoculars.

He sounded unconvinced. There had been no smoke or erratic maneuvering. The flying had been purposeful, skilled.

"It came in low and fast." He thought again. "It was a civilian bird, but it was more like he was heading for a hot landing. Probably an army hotshot reliving his past."

Kilmara sipped his tea without tasting it. "What then?" he said.

"Three guys got out. They were dressed in vacation gear, you know, hats with flies and those sleeveless jackets with lots of pockets. They had fishing poles with them. They seemed to know where they were going. They headed toward Duncleeve, your friend's place. I guess they fucked up on their navigation and landed a little short. They wouldn’t have been able to see the castle from that height with the hills in the way."

"Fishing poles?" said Kilmara.

"I guess they call them rods over here," said Lonsdale. "They had them in those long bags you use when you're traveling. You know, kind of like a gun c—" It hit him. "Oh, shit!"

Kilmara's unfinished tea cut a glistening swath through the air as he flung the mug to one side. "It's not the fishing season," he snarled. His command echoed through the clearing. "RANGERS, MOUNT UP! THIS IS NO DRILL!"

They were at the wrong end of the island.

* * * * *

It had been Fitzduane's practice to ride the length of the island along the cliffs of the southern coastline and past DrakerCastle to the headland.

This pleasant routine had lost something of its attraction one morning when he had found young Rudivon Graffenlaub with a rope around his neck hanging from a tree. And it was that hanging that had brought him into the world of counterterrorism. It was a world that had no exit. That particular incident had ended with the destruction of the terrorist known as the Hangman, but the dead terrorist had been the linchpin of a worldwide network, and revenge by one of the surviving terrorist groups was no small possibility.

The memories of that incident and its consequences lingered on all too well without the added stimulus of the sight of the hanging tree. Also, Boots had a three-year-old's attention span. He liked shorter rides, more variety, and to finish up at the waterfall.

The cascading water at Battleford entertained him and distracted him sufficiently for Fitzduane to be able to enjoy his surroundings without having to answer a question every thirty seconds. Boots liked to splash and float sticks and throw stones into the water. The stream was shallow there and relatively safe.

That day, with Boots secure between his arms on a special seat on the saddle in front of him, Fitzduane first headed west toward Draker, as had been his old routine, but then turned inland, past a section of particularly treacherous bog, and veered north across the track that ended with Draker Castle and on toward the hills that guarded the northern coastline.

Fitzduane loved the feeling of the young body next to his. Boots's curiosity and sense of fun were contagious. His excitement and enthusiasm were total. From time to time, unconsciously, Fitzduane would pull Boots to him and caress the top of his head with his lips or stroke his cheek. He knew that this was a special age and a special closeness, and that this time would pass all too soon.

The center of the island was relatively flat by the standards of the terrain, and here, just north of the track, Fitzduane and Boots found a neat row of dead sheep. A note written on milspec paper was wired to a stick and fluttering in the wind.

It read: "Hugo —if you find these sheep before I have had a chance to hide them, I can explain everything! See you for dinner this evening." It was signed, "Shane (Colonel, soon to be General) Kilmara."

Fitzduane smiled. Kilmara tended toward the incorrigible. It was a miracle he was making general, given the number of enemies he had made, but occasionally talent will out.

He was curious about how Kilmara's exercise would work out. He had high hopes for the Guntrack concept, small light fast vehicles festooned with weaponry and capable of outrunning and destroying a tank, and costing a fraction of the amount.

There was evidence of several of the tracked vehicles around. The tracks seemed to have sprung out of nowhere and then headed north. He followed them, and behind a clump of rocks found the drop pallets and Kevlar restraining straps under a camouflage net. The tracks then headed in different directions. Well, he would find out the details that evening.

Boots was enjoying himself playing with the camouflage net and jumping from pallet to pallet. Fitzduane dismounted and let Pooka, their horse, nibble. Boots soon worked out a game whereby he would throw himself off a pallet and Fitzduane would have to catch him. Boots jumped fearlessly, utterly confident that his father would keep him from harm.

Boots suddenly screwed up his face, so Fitzduane pulled down the little boy's pants and let him pee away from the wind. The exercise was a success. They mounted up and headed due east, parallel more or less with the hills, and toward Battleford.

* * * * *

The watcher saw them first. He took no action. His main concern was guarding their rear and their escape route. It was all clear.

Below him, the spotter picked them up as they emerged around the base of a foothill and headed toward the waterfall. He spoke to the sniper.

The rifleman adjusted his point of aim in response to this information.

Seconds later, rider and son on horseback entered the limited field of vision of his telescopic sight.

* * * * *

Kilmara had often noticed there was a natural temptation to consider the movement in itself a positive result. In his opinion, this tendency had bedeviled maneuver warfare since Cain initiated the process by terminating Abel.

But Kilmara was an old hand. He went for the high ground — a protruding foothill — and there positioned himself on a reverse slope. He then spoke into his headset microphone, and a telescopic mast began to extend from the back of the Guntrack. It stopped when it was just over the brow of the hill. A higher slope behind them meant nothing was silhouetted against the skyline.

Kilmara could now view most of the low-lying terrain as far as Duncleeve and beyond. There was some dead ground due to natural variations in the fall of the land and there were hills on the north side of the island — to his left from where he was positioned — but it was the best he could do in the time available, and Kilmara rarely worried about the theoretical optimum. He wasn't an idealist; he was a pragmatist. He had learned over more than three decades that the profession of arms was a practical business.

Mounted on the extended mast was a FLIR — forward looking infrared observation unit. This operated like a variable, very-high-magnification telescope, but with the added advantage of a wider angle of vision linked with the ability to see through mist and rain and smoke and darkness. The image was transmitted to a high-resolution television screen which was built into the console in front of him.

Methodically, he began an area search, operating the FLIR head with a small joystick. Concurrently, he had ordered the other two Guntracks forward. One was following the line of the foothills. The other was advancing toward Duncleeve at high speed on the track that ran the length of the island.

Behind Kilmara, in the heavy-weapons gun position, a Ranger tried to link up with Duncleeve by radio. His satellite communications module was capable of bouncing a signal off a satellite orbiting in space and reaching around the world through a network of relay stations, but it could not get through to Duncleeve about three miles away. The satellite was connected to Ranger headquarters in Dublin, who had then patched the call into the Irish telephone system.

This was one link too far. Fitzduane's local telephone exchange was old and tired and low on the priority list for modernization. Some days it just seemed to need to rest up. And this was one of those days.

Master Sergeant Lonsdale sat in the driver's seat, irritated at himself for not reporting the helicopter sooner, despite the fact that the Colonel, when he had cooled down, had said there was no reason he could have known its significance. The Colonel was right, but that didn't make him feel any better. He had a strong sense of unit pride, and the U.S. Army's elite Delta Force was his world. He felt he had been shown up in front of the Irish, and he was determined to redeem himself.

The Irish were good — damn good, in fact — but nobody could touch the best of the best, and in Lonsdale's opinion that designation went to Delta. Beside him was a heavy piece of milspec green metal topped by a telescopic sight. The awesome-looking weapon looked oversize and brutal when placed beside a conventional sniper's piece. It was the newly developed Barrett .50 semiautomatic rifle. Each round was the size of a large cigar and could throw a 650-grain bullet over three and a half miles. That was the theoretical range. On a practical basis, given the limitations of the ten-power telescopic sight and human eyesight, the maximum in the hands of an absolute master was about one third of this, or 2,000 yards. The longest combat shot that Lonsdale had ever heard of was around 1,800 yards.

Hits in excess of 1,000 yards from even the best of sniper rifles were the stuff of myth and legend until the Barrett came on the scene. They still required extraordinary skill.

"I've got Fitzduane," said Kilmara, and tightened the focus on the FLIR. He passed the location to the two other Guntracks. One continued toward the castle. The other was in a side valley and out of sight of Fitzduane's location.

Kilmara put himself in the position of a killing team with unfriendly intentions toward Fitzduane and searched accordingly. The team would want to oversee their target and have good cover. They would have an escape route back to the helicopter. They would not wish to fire into the sun — not much of a risk in this part of Ireland.

With binoculars alone he would have seen nothing — the killing team was excellently positioned and concealed. The FLIR changed the ground rules. It could pick up body heat.

"Two hostiles," said Kilmara, and indicated the TV screen. He had activated the laser system. The target was now illuminated by a laser beam which was visible only if special goggles were worn. The range was also determined. On the screen it read 1,853 meters, well over a mile.

"It's yours," he said to Lonsdale. Supposedly they were on a training exercise. The Guntracks were not carrying longer-range standoff weapons.

Lonsdale had already moved when Kilmara spoke. He positioned himself on the brow of the hill, the Barrett extended on its bipod in front of him. In his heart he knew it was a near-impossible shot — and anyway they were almost certainly too late.

But he also knew, the way you do sometimes, when everything comes together, that this was a special time — and on this day he would shoot better than he ever had before in his life.

Through his goggles he could see the laser beam pinpoint the target. The 16x telescopic sight was calibrated to the ballistics of the .50 ammunition. He acquired the target. The sniper's body was totally concealed in a fold of ground. He could just see a burlap-wrapped line that was the rifle barrel and an indistinct blob that was the head.

Behind him, Kilmara fired off two red flares in a desperate attempt to distract the assassins and alert Fitzduane. The flares in this color sequence had been the abort signal twenty years earlier when they had fought together in the Congo. It was an inadequate gesture, but it was all he could think of.

* * * * *

As they approached the ford, Boots grew animated. The place he particularly liked to play in required crossing the stream, and he loved the sensation of traversing the water on high, perched safely on Pooka's back.

From this vantage point he could sometimes see minnows or even bigger fish darting through the water, and there were interesting-looking stones and dark, strange shapes. The hint of hidden danger that provided part of the excitement was nicely offset by the reassuring presence of his father.

They crossed at walking pace, the peat-brown water gurgling around Pooka's hooves. Halfway across, Boots shouted, "Stop! Stop!" He had pieces of stick he wanted to drop into the stream so that he could follow them as they bobbed in the rushing water.

Red blossomed in the sky. Fitzduane looked up at the flare, then leaned back slightly to see more easily, as the second flare exploded. A sense of imminent danger coursed through his body, and Pooka shifted uneasily.

The sniper fired.

His rifle had an integral silencer, and he was using subsonic ammunition.

Fitzduane heard nothing.

He just saw the back of Boots's head open up in a crimson line and felt his son grow limp. Stunned at first, he screamed in anguish and desperation as the horror of what he was seeing hit home.

Pooka reared up.

Distracted, the sniper fired again before fully reestablishing his aim. Blood spewed from Pooka's head as he collapsed, throwing Boots several feet away into the shallow water.

The sniper's third shot hit Fitzduane in the thigh, smashing the femur. Fitzduane was now partially caught under his dead horse. With a desperate effort he tried to roll free, but then his strength gave out.

"BOOTS!" Fitzduane cried, oblivious to his pain, his arms outstretched toward the boy, who lay face up in the water just out of arm's reach.

The horse was shielding his target, so the sniper had to rise for the killing shot. He had the luxury of a little time now. His victim was down and defenseless.

The spotter decided to help finish the business.

He fired a burst from his silenced submachine gun at the boy as he lay in the water. The rounds impacted in a ragged group around the boy's head, causing Fitzduane to make a superhuman effort to release himself and go to the assistance of his son. He pulled free and tried to rise, and as he did so, he exposed his upper body.

Two more shots for a certain kill, thought the sniper: one to the heart and one through the head. He didn't believe in relying on a one-shot kill. Subsonic ammunition might not inflict the massive trauma of a fully loaded round, but it did make for a silent kill and the corollary of extra time to make sure the job was properly done.

He and Master Sergeant AlLonsdale fired at the same time.

The sniper's round created a small entry wound as it entered Fitzduane's body one inch above his right nipple and two inches to its left at the fourth rib space.

Continuing its path of destruction, it pierced the chest wall, smashed the front of the fourth rib, and then — now combined with bone fragments — divided the fourth intercostal artery, vein, and neurovascular bundle. Fragments of rib became embedded in the right lung and the bullet plowed through it, damaging minor pulmonary arteries and veins.

The round missed the trachea, went slightly lateral to the esophagus, missed the vagus nerve and thoracic duct, grazed the skin of the heart, went to the right of the aorta, and entered the posterior chest wall. Traveling slightly downward, it then smashed the back of the fifth rib, went to the right of the vertebrae and exited out of the upper left side of the back, producing a large exit wound.

Fitzduane made a slight noise as the shock of the bullet drove the air from his body, and folded slowly, his arms stretched toward Boots.

Lonsdale's bullet had longer to travel. It was approximately five times the mass of a modern automatic-rifle projectile and had a muzzle velocity of 2,800 feet per second. Part of the mass consisted of explosives.

The spotter saw the center of the sniper's body explode as the corpse was flung back against the hillside. He could see no sign of threat ahead of them.

He was turning when Lonsdale's second round arrived and drilled through his right arm from the side before exploding inside his torso.

* * * * *

Kilmara watched his friend and his young son through the FLIR.

The image of Boots and then Fitzduane getting hit and tumbling into the rushing water was replaced by the sight of Fitzduane's desperate attempts to help his child. And then he lay still.

The Ranger Colonel continued to monitor developments and to issue orders, his face immobile. The Guntrack originally tasked for the castle was the first unit that could make it to the scene, and at full cross-country speed it arrived in less than two minutes.

Three Rangers — Newman, Hannigan, and Andrews — jumped out. All Rangers were BATLS, Battlefield Advanced Trauma Life Support, trained. BATLS was a combat version of the ATLS techniques pioneered in the U.S. The reasonable assumption, given the Rangers line of work, was that they would be under fire. The emphasis was on speed.

Newman and Hannigan ran to Fitzduane. Of the two, he was clearly the more seriously wounded. Drenched in blood, he was dying before their eyes. He was bluish, very agitated, in severe respiratory distress, and in deep shock. His wounded leg looked bent and visibly shorter. It was clear the femur was shattered.

"Chest and leg," said Newman into his helmet-mounted microphone. "Lung penetrated; leg looks bad; looks like the femoral."

Andrews went to Peter. The boy's wound looked like a graze. He was mildly concussed and the back of his head was bleeding, but he was very much alive. Within a few moments, he regained consciousness. "Boy grazed but OK," said Andrews.

Fitzduane was critical, however. "Hugo," Newman said, "can you hear me?" A reply would have meant that Fitzduane was conscious and his airway clear.

There was no reply. "Shit," said Newman. Their patient was dying. Newman gave him five minutes at best. He moved to check Fitzduane's airway. Satisfied, he inserted a hollow tube, a Guidel airway, which would act to maintain access.

The whole procedure took about twenty seconds. "Airways OK," said Newman.

Hannigan had been cutting open Fitzduane's clothing and assessing the two wounds. Blood was everywhere but was cascading from the thigh wound in a positive torrent. He estimated that the man had lost up to a liter of blood in the first minute, and though the pressure had now eased off slightly as the blood supply diminished, the flow was still major. The femoral artery was like a power shower.

Fitzduane's clothes were saturated and the ground was sticky with blood. Immediately, Hannigan wrapped a bandage above the area of the thigh wound and applied pressure on it. The flow diminished, though it did not stop.

Newman suspected a tension peumothorax. The man's lung was punctured. The likelihood was that air was leaking into the chest cavity and could not escape. Pressure was building and blocking blood flow to and from the heart. In addition, the pressure in his chest kept his ribs and diaphragm expanded, so he could not breathe in and out properly. Fitzduane was gasping. He was running out of oxygen.

Working very fast, Hannigan checked Fitzduane's trachea, then percussed his chest. The first dull sound confirmed the leakage of blood into the pleural space. The second sound, a booming resonance, confirmed the excess of air.

"Fuck it," he said. "We've got a tension."

Without hesitation, he thrust a wide-bore cannula into the front of the chest. The cannula looked like a slim ballpoint-pen refill and consisted of a hollow needle protruding slightly inside a hollow plastic tube.

As the needle penetrated, he heard a massive blow-off of trapped air. Immediately, Fitzduane's breathing improved. There was still blood and air in the space, but it was no longer under tension.

The procedure had taken one minute.

Fitzduane regained partial consciousness. "C-ca… brea…," he gasped faintly. "My son, look after…"

"Be my guest," said Hannigan and put a Ventimask over Fitzduane's mouth and connected it to a cylinder of compressed oxygen. At a rate of ten to twelve liters per minute, the oxygen would last only fifteen minutes or less. Time was still critical. As Hannigan slipped on cervical and neck collars, Newman secured the Ventimask tapes. Another minute had passed.

"I'll plug," said Newman. He would try to stop the bleeding while Hannigan worked at establishing intravenous access. There was no point to inserting drips if the liquid was immediately going to leak out, and yet Fitzduane needed extra liquid fast. He was in a state of shock. His normal blood volume was five and a half to six liters, and he looked close to losing half of that.

His brain was not getting enough oxygen. He was confused, extremely weak, his heart rate was fast, his eyes glazed.

His system was closing down. He was losing the physical strength to live.

The chest wound will just have to wait, thought Newman. The thigh wound still represented the main bleeding problem. He applied direct pressure against the leg, above the area of the wound. He knew he would have to maintain the pressure for at least five minutes, probably longer.

But there was now a plug in the bath.

"You can fill him up," said Newman.

Hannigan inserted a cannula into a vein of each arm, then connected the fluid bag. The solution would make it easier for the remaining blood to circulate and keep the vital organs supplied with adequate amounts of blood, and hence oxygenated. Lack of oxygen to the brain for ore than three minutes meant that parts of it would start to die: permanent brain damage.

Establishing intravenous drip access to each side had taken less than four minutes.

Fitzduane's blood pressure began to improve from sixty to seventy systolic. It was critical. Normal was around one-twenty.

Newman was still maintaining pressure on the thigh wound.

Keeping a close eye on Fitzduane's airway to make sure that the Guidel tube was not spit out, Hannigan applied a dressing to the entry and exit wounds, taking care to stick each dressing down on three sides only, while leaving the fourth open so that air could escape. Sealing the wound totally could once again cause a buildup of internal pressure.

Newman glanced at his watch. They had been working on Fitzduane for just over eleven minutes. He was now stabilized to the best of their ability, but he remained close to death.

As Hannigan began to administer small incremental doses of morphine intravenously to Fitzduane, Newman bandaged Fitzduane's legs together to from a splint, and together they slid him onto a ‘scoop’ stretcher and strapped him into place.

Master Sergeant Lonsdale, Barrett at the ready like a modern-day incarnation of an avenging angel, watched over the Rangers at the ford.

When it was over and the helicopter had departed, he rose and walked back the few paces to the command Guntrack. The Colonel looked up from the console, his expression unfathomable. He looked as if he was going to speak but said nothing.

The radio operator in the back of the Guntrack had the miniature folding satellite dish extended. There was a break in his arcane work and he looked up and shook his head. "It doesn't look good."

Lonsdale stood there, knowing he had shot better that day than ever before in his life, but that it still had not been good enough. Could he have been just a few seconds faster?

* * * * *

The watcher, higher up the hill, had a better overview of the terrain and was also less tightly focused.

He had first been alerted by the sight of a vehicle traveling at high speed toward the castle. He hadn't warned his people below, both because they were so close to achieving their goal and also because the vehicle did not seem to represent any threat. At first it did not appear to be heading toward them. Apart from its speed, there was nothing unusual about it that he could see from a distance. Then it turned toward them.

They had been warned to expect a Land-Rover and maybe a car or two. Nearer, this thing was unlike anything he had ever seen before. At first he thought it must be some piece of tracked farm machinery.

He watched it through his binoculars. As it got closer, his heart started to hammer as something close to panic gripped him. He could see a machine gun on a mounting by the front passenger, and he realized that he was looking at something designed solely for the purpose of killing.

The two flares went off in the sky.'

He looked up, then at the killing team below, and felt a sudden terrible fear.

He began to run. He had chosen his escape route well. He had found a slight dip in the ground between two hills, which was so angled that it could not be seen from the land below. In addition, there was cover from rocky outcrops and heather. He ran and ran, his very being telling him that whatever mysterious force had slaughtered his companions was now searching for him as well.

From time to time as he fled, the watcher waited for a few moments to see if he was being followed. As he grew more confident, he waited longer and it became clear that he had gotten away without being spotted. He started to relax. Soon he made it to the bowl in the hills where the helicopter lay.

He was halfway across the open ground to the helicopter when he heard a voice behind him. His automatic rifle was in his hand and it was cocked and loaded. He had practiced many times for this contingency and could turn and hit a target at fifty paces in a fraction of a second.

His practice nearly paid off. He might have been a shade faster than the Ranger behind him, though whether he would have got a shot off in time was entirely another matter. It was a moot point much debated thereafter.

As he turned, the remaining two crew of the Ranger Guntrack that had been tasked for the hills and redeployed to ambush the helicopter site double-tapped him twice each through the upper body, then through the head, with armor-piercing ammunition. Body armor was getting better and better and was turning up on the most undesirable people. It was best to be sure.

* * * * *

A regular army unit was ordered in to search the island, together with armed detectives.

The nearest mainland hospital, Connemara Regional, was alerted and an army trauma team experienced in gunshot wounds helicoptered to the hospital.

Other precautions and contingency plans were implemented. Nationwide, the Rangers and the various security organizations were put on full alert. Passengers and vehicles entering and leaving the country were suddenly subject to intense scrutiny. Such precautions were usually a massive waste of time, but not always. There were certain security advantages to Ireland's being an island with limited access and exit points.