The Hunt

14

Having reached the dead end, Jaeger had turned around and decided to investigate the second tunnel. But something didn’t feel right. Absence of the normal; presence of the abnormal: the phrase had crept unbidden into his mind.

But why? Why now? What had triggered it?

He paused. Old habits died hard, and he’d been counting out his paces as he moved. Two hundred and fifty steps at roughly eighty centimetres per step; he was around two hundred yards in.

But what ‘normals’ were lacking?

What ‘abnormals’ were present that shouldn’t be?

He flashed his torch around. Nothing jumped out at him.

Then the answer hit him. It was the silence.

If there was a team in this tunnel carrying out excavations, why couldn’t he hear anything? And there would be a film crew with them, making all the usual noise. He strained his ears. Nothing. You could hear the proverbial pin drop.

This tunnel seemed even quieter than the first. Plus there was something else, something that creeped Jaeger out, his sixth sense screaming danger at him. No way was this some throwback to the past; to seventy years ago.

This was danger now. Present, immediate, life-threatening.

Jaeger considered his options. He had no weapons apart from his bare hands. In the pitch dark he needed his head torch to find his way, which meant that anyone out there was bound to see him coming. He could turn back, but he felt driven to continue.

He made a decision: he’d give it another hundred yards; one hundred and ten paces. That should take him to the dead end, if this tunnel had the same configuration as the first.

One hundred yards: no more.

Jaeger needed out of here. He needed to see the sky and to breathe clean, fresh air. Plus he needed to make his way back to Uncle Joe, who would be wondering what had kept him.

He pushed on for another eighty paces, creeping forward, moving silently on the balls of his feet, trying to stick to the cover of the walls. It was then that he spotted it, almost at the limit of his head torch’s reach: a shapeless bundle lying on the floor.

He knew instantly what it was. He’d seen such things too many times before. Plus he caught the faint tang on the air: a sharp iron scent.

Too familiar.

Blood.

There was a body in the tunnel, and this was no World War II-era corpse; no musty, desiccated skeleton. From what Jaeger could make out, this one was but a matter of hours old.

He approached with infinite care. As he moved closer, he could make out a horrifying scene: other bodies, a half-dozen scattered around the floor, and lying amongst them the smashed-up remains of the tools of their trade – video cameras, tripods, sound-recording gear.

He came to a halt. The first corpse was more or less at his feet. He swept his torch around the space. Not thirty yards away, the tunnel ended in a jumbled wall of rock and debris. This was as far as the excavations seemed to have reached.

No immediate sign of whoever had done this.

No movement.

No noise.

He switched off his torch. He waited. Utter darkness. Utter silence. The stench of death in his nostrils. There wasn’t the faintest hint of any light, apart from that thrown down by the ventilation shaft a good hundred yards to his rear.

If the killers were here, they were doing a fine job of hiding.

Jaeger flicked his torch back on and inspected the first corpse. A young woman, probably in her late twenties, executed with a single shot to the head. The muzzle had been so close, he could see the scorch mark around the entry wound.

The bullet had made a tiny hole. It hardly seemed enough to kill a human, but Jaeger knew better. Whoever had done this was a true professional. They’d used .22 pistols – far smaller than your average calibre handgun.

The .22 was fairly useless at any kind of range, but up close and personal it was a hugely efficient killer. A heavier round would tear through a human skull, leaving an exit wound. Jaeger didn’t need to check: this round hadn’t done that. It didn’t have the mass to break through.

Instead it had bounced around inside the victim’s skull, ripping her grey matter to shreds.

The .22 had other advantages as an assassin’s weapon. It was small and lightweight. Being a sportsman’s and huntsman’s weapon, it was readily available on the open market.

Easy to get hold of; easy to dispose of.

Jaeger checked the other bodies. Each had been killed in the same way. He had an image in his mind’s eye now: the victims kneeling on the floor of the tunnel as their executioner stood before them firing shot after shot.

A terrifying way to go.

Whoever had done this had also indulged in a frenzy of destruction, either before or after the executions, smashing the filming kit to smithereens.

But why? To what purpose? To what end?

It just didn’t make any sense.

Jaeger had to presume that they’d wanted to destroy all record of whatever the film crew had recorded. But surely nothing of any great significance had been found. Just a long and very ghostly set of tunnels.

He flicked his light back to the mound of earth at the far end. It was then that he spied it. Footprints ran up the near side. It wasn’t just one set of boots that had made that climb: scores had.

But why, if it was a dead end?

Jaeger moved closer. He followed the same path up the hillock of dirt. As he neared the top, he felt it. The pile beneath his feet began to shift. All of a sudden the wall of debris before him collapsed in a mini landslide.

The noise in this enclosed space was deafening.

He flicked off his light, and froze.