The Eye of Moloch

Chapter 4

A bullet whumped into the turf twenty-odd yards to Hollis’s side, distant enough to tell the shooter hadn’t yet drawn a solid bead on his position, but still far too close for comfort. A sensible man would’ve grabbed his gear and lit off for the high tree line, but self-preservation wasn’t the first thing on his mind.

Through the scope he saw a knot of nine tiny figures stumble through the lower-level door of the lodge, coming on at a run, led by a familiar young woman and her loping guide dog. Two in the back were supporting a hobbled man between them, and their burdened gait would set the pace for all the others. To his unaided eye the considerable distance made their progress toward freedom look painfully slow.

A man with a raised handgun emerged from the same porch-lit exit, firing rapidly but wildly off into the dusk. With a quick, deliberate shift of his aim Hollis took him out cleanly, then worked the bolt and heeled it home to shoot again into the center mass of a second gunman, who’d appeared just behind the first.

He scanned the unfolding situation as he chambered the last round in the well. There would shortly be many more where those two came from. Without a serious diversion this fight would soon take an unsurvivable turn.

The fire he’d started in the second story was only dimly visible; the wide, clear window he’d shot through before was hazed over like a shower door, no longer transparent. Safety glass. Edge to edge the pane was a brittle mosaic of a million cracks, but the shattered glaze was still holding its fragile integrity.

He eased his crosshairs to the bottom corner of the frame and took the shot. At impact a fist-sized ragged hole punched through there, the weakened window sagged, and then it buckled and collapsed in a sudden waterfall of glassy pebbles.

A rush of coal-black smoke and bright curling flames burst forth to meet the backdraft as the wind whipped in to feed the combustion. In seconds the enlivened inferno had spread to threaten the roof above and the unfinished balcony beyond.

That should do it; vengeance may be sweet but a four-alarm house fire in the wilderness trumps all other urgencies. All hands would be recalled to give up the chase and haul water to extinguish the spreading blaze.

All of them, that is, but three.

It was already half-past time to go. He stole a last look at the progress of the escapees; they were well on their way with no visible pursuit. As his thoughts finally turned to saving his own skin an extended volley of automatic gunfire tore up the ground around him on either side. He rolled and with a single sweep of his arm threw off his camouflage of underbrush and snagged his half-buried long duffel, then he crawled into the clear and headed out for the cover uphill. Crouched low, cutting right and left in no steady pattern, tracers hissing like hailstones through the canopy of trees ahead—in the unlikely event that he made it, these would surely be among the longest fifty yards he’d ever run.

• • •

A trio of sentries on their home field, presumably military-trained and well armed for their job, against a solitary man with a bolt-action deer rifle—on its face that scenario should grant unbeatable odds to the superior force. This is what they must have thought as they came for him, because they didn’t do what they should have done. They didn’t work their hunt as a unit, and with that rash oversight their tactical squad of three was diminished to one lone opponent at a time.

The moment he’d found a secluded spot to lay over, Hollis had traded out his Remington for weapons more suited to close work. A simple Springfield .45 was tucked into his belt in back. Slung over a shoulder was his old 12-bore semi-auto, loaded up with heavy rifled slugs. The rest of his gear was hidden in the brush for later retrieval, if such an opportunity should come.

The first one made it as easy as a kill can ever be.

With the sun fully set and no moonlight to speak of, the man hadn’t paused to allow his eyes or his methods to adjust to the gathering night. He broached the woods at the last known position of his enemy and strode in fast and loud, sweeping the terrain with a barrel-mounted flashlight on his weapon, firing at anything that moved and many things that did not. Though his meandering search finally brought him just a stone’s throw away, he never did see the man he came looking for. A single shot through the chest put him down, and then there were two.

The second was harder, and only a stroke of chance saved Thom Hollis from an early, shallow grave.

He’d taken up a cramped but hidden perch in the gnarled lower branches of a nearby cottonwood, on the premise that the earlier noise of combat might draw the others to the scene of their partner’s demise. He was correct in predicting the response, but dead wrong on the approach.

From the only narrow angle of view where Hollis had no cover at all—that was the unlikely direction from which the second man had come. Quiet as doom he’d stolen up close, his target not yet sighted.

With a single glance upward the hunt would have ended differently. At less than twenty paces, though, a hiss from the two-way radio on his belt gave the hunter away.

Prey and predator then met eyes at the same instant, each frozen in momentary disbelief at this unexpected turn of events.

Hollis was pinned among the branches in his hiding place; there was no room to swing the long barrel of the shotgun around. The man on the ground backed away, calling out for the others and firing wildly at full auto as he retreated. Amid a storm of flying lead and splinters Hollis drew his pistol from the back and fired into the heart of the fray until the magazine was emptied.

At length the echoes faded and the deep woods grew quiet once again. He climbed down, reloaded, and set out to see if their fight was really done.

The other man had succumbed to his wounds by the time Hollis found him, but he hadn’t died too quickly. He’d crawled to a sly lair in the heavy brush to lie in wait for the approach of his enemy. He’d lost consciousness just that way, still waiting, and bled out from the effects of a damned lucky shot in the dark.

And then, the third and last of them.

This last one was smart; he’d done his job right. Hollis had picked up the two-way handset from the second man’s body and listened for a while, until it became clear that the enemy had wisely gone to radio silence. His two compatriots would be directly tracking the sniper, the last man had likely reasoned, so in the event that they failed he would choose instead to find his quarry’s destination—his rendezvous point with the other, unarmed escapees—and then take them down all at once, by surprise.

The traces of a group bearing a wounded man were easy enough to follow, even at a prudent distance from their path. Still, the man hadn’t lapsed into carelessness. He was wary and took cunning precautions against pursuit, though he had little reason to suspect he was followed. It took hours, in fact, not only to find him, but to catch him briefly unprepared for a hostile confrontation.

Near to his goal, less than a mile from the dim glow of a sheltered campfire up ahead, he’d stopped to rest and drink some water. That’s when Thom Hollis stepped from the shadows behind him.

“I got you cold, son,” he said.

The man had begun to turn toward the voice before stopping himself, his weapon still hanging at his side. A half-moon had risen as the night progressed, and by its pale filtered light it was the youth of this man that was most immediately apparent. His features were strong in profile but not quite fully mature, with that first sparse attempt at a beard that some adolescent rebels will try on at their first opportunity.

For seconds more he didn’t move. Neither of them did; both knew well enough by then how this would end.

“I can’t let you go,” Hollis said quietly. “And I ain’t taking prisoners.”