The Hunter

CHAPTER 21

14:34 CET

Victor waited, crouched in the far right corner from the door — diving distance from the bathroom if the assassin tried any more grenades. He had the FN reloaded, sights lined up to put bullets through his enemy’s skull the moment he showed himself. But nothing was happening. Victor watched the minutes tick by, glad of the chance to rest. The small wound in his chest had stopped bleeding. It hadn’t stopped hurting.

He was hoping the assassin’s wound was worse, but he couldn’t rely on it. He knew his enemy was doing exactly the same as he was, waiting, gun trained on the door, ready to fire the instant Victor revealed himself. If the sniper was playing a waiting game, Victor knew he could wait longer, but with each passing second the prospect of the assassin charging into the room seemed more unlikely.

The sound of an engine, coming from outside.

Victor sidestepped to the window, making no noise, gaze never leaving the door. He peered briefly through the glass, seeing two big SUVs with police markings heading up the steep track to his chalet. Smart, Victor thought.

He rushed over to the door, hooked his big toe under the bottom to pull it open. There was no shotgun blast. He stood shoulder to the frame and peered around quickly. No assassin. As he expected. A pair of boots sat unlaced on the floor, removed to aid a stealthy withdrawal.

Victor ran back into his bedroom, dressed quickly into khaki pants, fleece, winter jacket, waterproof hiking boots. He zipped the flash drive into a jacket pocket, opened the drawer by his bed, took the remaining magazines for the FN.

Downstairs, in the boiler room, he severed the pipe to the 250-gallon propane tank. Escaping gas hissed, quickly filling the room and drifting through the chalet. Victor entered the code for the high explosives. The timer began the three-minute countdown.

He saw through the front windows the police vehicles nearing. Possibly four officers in each, armed. The assassin must have notified them, told them some enticing story, trying to flush Victor out of the chalet. And it was going to work. But he couldn’t use the front door now. Eight against one and they had vehicles. If he started shooting it would only bring more cops. He moved to the opposite end of the chalet. The back door was hanging off its hinges, blown open by a shaped breaching charge. The noise that woke him. Somewhere on the other side the sniper would be lurking, crosshairs hovering over the back entrance, an easy shot when Victor was forced to rush out. Not a bad trap. Credit where it was due.

He couldn’t leave through the front. He couldn’t leave through the back.

He couldn’t stay.

The smell of propane was strong, urging him to move, reminding him if he hesitated too long there would be nothing left of him to need identifying. That was due to happen in all of two minutes.

The bright sun that found its way through the blinds made him squint. He looked into the light, blinking. He pictured his enemy, poised, waiting, oblivious to distractions, concentration absolute, one eye closed, one eye staring into the scope’s eyepiece, gaze fixed on the back doorway. Close to the rear of the chalet were dense pines that impeded line of sight. If the assassin was positioned to snipe him he could only do it from one place.

Victor turned around on the spot, catching his reflection in the mirror that hung near the back door. He approached it. Roughly two feet square, smooth, clean. Perfect. He lifted the mirror from its hooks.

McClury kept his breathing steady and regular despite the pain in his chest and his thumping heartbeat. He was in a crouch a hundred yards from the chalet, among the trees halfway up a gentle slope, the L96’s bipod resting on a fallen tree trunk. It was the only location that allowed a clear line of sight to the chalet’s back door. The sun was directly behind McClury so wouldn’t reflect off his scope and give away his position. The distance was good. The concealment was good. The trap was good.

He ignored the cold, the pain, everything but the image the scope provided. He had the door centred in his scope, the Schmidt and Bender calibrated for the distance, windage, and shallow downward angle. He couldn’t keep the reticule still — the pain caused his arm to tremble. But at this distance it wouldn’t matter. A bullet just above the eye would have the same effect as one between them. When the door opened and the target came running out, it would be over.

The rumble of the approaching police vehicles was close, almost outside the chalet. McClury’s prey would have to make a dash for it now.

He did. The wrecked door swung open and McClury held his breath, waiting for the target to emerge from the shadows of the doorway. McClury saw something move but stopped himself squeezing the trigger too early. It wasn’t him. It was shiny, moving erratically. Reflective. A mirror.

The target was still in cover but holding a large mirror through the doorway. McClury could see his arms but not his head, torso, or legs. McClury waited, staying calm, watching the mirror, wondering what the hell was going on. Was he trying to signal someone? It made no sense. McClury considered blowing off one of the target’s arms, but then he’d never come out, and the police would only keep him alive. Then the sun caught the mirror’s surface at just the right angle and the reflected light shone right into McClury’s eye, magnified by his scope to ten times intensity. He winced, dazzled, large opaque spots appearing in his vision. He instinctively pulled away from the scope and fired.

The bullet shattered the mirror into a thousand glittering shards.

McClury could barely see but he managed to make out the target sprinting away from the doorway. He was heading for the trees, head down, weaving from side to side. McClury cursed, wrenched up the rifle, put his left eye to the scope. He swung the rifle to the side, trying to track the target through the blinding spots, crosshairs hovering a little way in front of him to compensate for his speed.

He fired, the bullet kicking up snow near the target’s feet. The recoil from the unsupported rifle made McClury’s arms rise sharply. He worked the bolt action quickly, loading another bullet into the chamber, and fired again. This time blowing a chunk out of a tree. Goddamn.

McClury loaded another round, swept across with the scope, went to fire, but the target was in the trees.

Gone.

Victor ran, his chest burning. Each beat of his heart sent jolts of pain through him. The snow was ankle deep and slowed him down, but he was in the trees now, and the mass of pines would hamper the assassin’s line of sight. Hitting a moving target was hard enough without a forest in the way. Victor had cuts on his arms and hands from the shattered mirror. He ignored them.

It would only take a few seconds for the sniper to recover from any blindness, and Victor wanted to be well out of sight by that time. The only logical position to cover the back door was the small rise one hundred yards to the rear of the house. On the near side it was just a gentle slope, but at the far side the hill was a small cliff face, a stream at its base. Victor headed towards it. This was his home, his territory, and no one knew it better.

No more shots were fired. Good.

Now Victor had become the hunter.

In the boiler room the gas tank continued expelling propane, spreading it farther throughout the ground floor of the chalet. Near to it the electronic timer reached two, then one. Zero.

The shaped C-4 charges detonated, destroying structurally essential areas of the chalet’s load-bearing walls. The gas exploded an instant later, blowing out the front door and groundfloor windows, spewing huge clouds of flame through the openings. The concussion raced outwards, knocking snow from the surrounding trees.

At the front of the building the door sailed through the air, hitting the first police SUV, smashing the windshield. Shards of exploded armoured glass peppered the bodywork. Swiss police officers, taking cover behind their vehicles in response to the gunshots, dived to the ground while debris struck the snow around them.

Instinctively McClury dropped prone when he heard the explosion behind him. He looked back, saw the obliterated chalet burning fiercely as if it were made from nothing more than matchsticks. It collapsed in on itself. Fire and smoke mushroomed skyward. Cool.

He scrambled to his feet, slinging the L96 over his shoulders. He reloaded another five shells into the shotgun and gripped it tightly with both hands. The fact that he had failed to kill his prey three separate times burned more than the hole in his chest.

The target had been running to the south before McClury lost sight of him and so McClury set off in that direction. He’d taken his boots off to sneak out of the house without the target hearing, and his feet were cold in the snow despite the thick socks he wore. He moved quickly, eyes fixed forward, pausing at intervals to listen, pressing against trees for cover.

He wasn’t worried about the police. They would have their eyes glued to the burning chalet for the time being, all thoughts of gunshots forgotten. But if they did choose to stick their noses where they didn’t belong, McClury had no compunctions about blowing those noses off. Two years working Europe had made him hate the Continent and its self-important inhabitants with a passion. He welcomed the chance to pay back some of that hatred on idiot Swiss cops.

Tracks up ahead. He hurried over to them. Deep footprints a yard apart that continued south. The target was fleeing, trying to cover as much distance as possible. McClury followed them, moving fast. They led deeper into the trees, the ground sloping as they did. Idiot. The target was heading away from the higher ground. He evidently knew little about tactics in the field.

McClury started to breathe heavily, feeling the strain of the run. That he was shot was never far from his thoughts, but there would be time to get it looked at later. He’d been killing people professionally for as long as he could remember, and he hadn’t let a target escape before and he wasn’t about to start now.

The tracks veered off to the right, following the base of the hill until McClury found himself on its north side, where it was steep and rocky, the crest of the hill some thirty feet above him. He rushed across a narrow stream, continued to follow the tracks as they stuck to the contours of the hill. Again he considered his prey to be a fool. He should have used the stream to disguise his tracks. He was looking less good and more lucky by the second.

The tracks continued to follow around the small hill, and it seemed like the target was looping back in the direction of the house. That didn’t make any sense unless he was a coward and had decided giving himself up to the police was going to keep him alive. McClury smiled. Let him think that.

He heard the tumble of loose stones, saw from the corner of his eye small rocks land in the snow at the base of the cliff face. Something had disturbed them. McClury spun around, dropping to one knee. He looked up to the crest of the small cliff. A dark shape loomed at the top.

A shot rang out, echoing through the trees.

It felt like someone had whacked McClury on the arm with a baseball bat. He was bringing the Mossberg up to fire when a second bullet hit him in the shoulder and his right arm went limp. Blood splashed on the snow.

The shotgun landed at his feet. He felt himself wavering and reached his good arm out, pressing his palm flat against a tree trunk to prop himself up. He’d never been shot before today, and now he was shot three times. He almost laughed. McClury heard more stones clattering behind him, realized the target was scaling down the rocky face. Bastard had led him down here to the low ground so he could loop back to exploit the high ground.

Snow crunched underfoot.

A voice behind him said, ‘I’m going to ask you some questions.’

McClury’s reply was curt. ‘Fuck you.’

‘Now, that isn’t very polite.’

‘I won’t talk.’

The voice continued, ‘I’m going to ask them all the same, and you will answer.’

The Mossberg was right before McClury, no more than a couple of feet from his free hand. The hand he couldn’t move.

‘You’re going to die anyway,’ the voice continued. ‘If you answer me freely you won’t have to die screaming.’

McClury believed him. He knew through experience that under torture everyone talked. The shotgun, so close, yet it might as well be a mile away. If he tried to get to it with his other hand, he would just fall over into the snow with the gun trapped beneath him. He might be able to roll over, but not before the target had finished him off. His outstretched arm was already shaking. He didn’t know how much longer he could keep himself supported.

‘I was only doing my job,’ he wheezed.

‘Then you should have done it better.’

McClury nodded for a moment. Fucker had a point. He released the arm that was supporting him and fell forward, straight on top of the shotgun.

For a second McClury’s hand fumbled underneath his chest.

The shotgun’s blast blew half the American’s skull off, spreading a triangle of gore across the snow. Steam rose from the blood. Victor shook his head. Snow was falling. He searched the body, finding nothing useful. But he saw the assassin’s tracks clearly in the snow and followed them first back towards his burning chalet. He kept low, mindful of the police officers that were still around. He followed the tracks to the small rise where the assassin had been covering the back door. He found brass shell casings in the snow.

The footprints then split off, towards his former residence and also farther north. Victor followed them away from the chalet. The footprints were sharper, deeper, the sniper having moved swiftly through the snow. Before he had removed his boots.

They took a more or less straight line, veering off only for trees in the way. After ten minutes Victor stood at the base of a rocky outcrop. There were no more footprints, but he could see the fallen snow at the bottom of the steep slope, disturbed rocks, exposed earth. Victor made his way upward, using the trees for support. He noticed he was wheezing, the coarse sound of his breathing getting louder as he climbed. He’d already pushed himself more than he should. He was injured; he needed to rest, for a few days at least, to give his body time to heal. Soon, he told himself.

Just before the top of the hillock, Victor found the assassin’s hide. It looked like he had been there overnight. There was a discarded winter coat, a backpack, a two-litre bottle half-filled with urine, and a plastic bag full of excrement. The jacket was empty. Victor took the backpack, and slung it over one shoulder, his own bag over the other. He began following a second set of tracks, ones that came from the west, deeper into the forest. It had snowed in the last twelve hours, but no more than an inch. There still remained shallow depressions in the snow, more than deep enough for Victor to follow with ease.

He came upon the assassin’s vehicle after forty minutes. A Toyota SUV, parked off-road. Victor searched through the side pockets of the backpack, found the keys, and unlocked it.

He stopped suddenly, hand clutching his chest. He retched, tasting iron, coughing up blood. He stayed leaned over for a minute until the pain had subsided. He used a handful of snow to wash the blood from his mouth and used some more snow to hide the blood on the ground.

There was nothing in the vehicle to identify the man who’d tried to kill him. The Toyota had a rental sticker fixed to both front and rear windows and rental documents in the glove box. It would have been rented in a false name, Victor was sure. He threw the two bags onto the back seat and started the engine. He gave the vehicle a few minutes to warm up before he carefully reversed out onto the road.

He sighed heavily. Whoever wanted him dead had found out where he’d lived. An impossibility had it not just been dramatically proved. In the rear-view mirror Victor saw smoke from his burning chalet rising above the tree line. If whoever wanted him dead had found him here, they could find him anywhere.

Whatever semblance of a life he’d made for himself was over.