The Hunter from the Woods

Death Of A Hunter

When he found the gray wolf dead with its throat cut and its eyes gouged out, Michael Gallatin knew they had come for him.

He sat in a brown leather chair in the front room of his house, which had once been a church and was to him still a holy place of solitude and reflection. The structure was made of dark red stones chinked together with white mortar. It had a narrow tower topped with a white spire and a walkway around it. Up in the tower were panes of stained glass colored crimson and dark blue.

Darkness was gathering outside, across the dense Welsh forest that shielded Michael Gallatin’s home from the rest of the world. It was the eleventh day of July in the year 1958. He was listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending on his record player. He knew that when the music was over and full darkness had fallen, he would get up from this chair in which he’d sat so many times, listening to music or reading before a polite fire, and he would go out to meet them.

Because they had come for him. And he doubted if he would ever return to this house the same as he’d left it, if he returned at all.

They were professionals. They were killers of the highest order. How many there would be, awaiting him out in the night-black forest, he didn’t know. But they had executed one of his wolves—one of his companions—and he knew that if he did not go out to meet them tonight another wolf would die in his place. They wouldn’t stop until all his companions were dead, murdered by the fast blade and then mutilated by some brutal Oriental instrument, and he could not—would not—allow that to happen.

So he sat in the company of the music, waiting for the dark.

He wore black shoes with soft soles, gray trousers and a dark blue cotton shirt. The air was warm outside, unseasonably warm even for the middle of summer in Wales.

The hunter’s moon would be shaped like a scythe tonight, perfect for cutting down old things that no longer had much use in this world.

He was a hard-used forty-eight years old. His thick hair had turned fully gray on the sides, with a small thatch of gray at the front. His face was still ruggedly handsome and his eyes were still luminously green, yet he knew how slow he’d become. He knew the onset of age. He knew what had been and what was to be, if he lived through this night. He was not the man he used to be, nor for that matter the wolf.

He thought of getting up and pouring himself a glass of Talisker, his favorite brand of Scotch whisky from the isle of Skye, but he decided against that. It had the salt taste of the sea in it, which he so enjoyed. One drink would be a pleasure, but one drink might give the killers a further advantage. No, if he lived through this night he would drink a toast to his miraculous survival at the dawn. But he doubted very seriously if he would ever taste Talisker again.

His left shoulder had been bothering him today. The shoulder he’d broken in the crash of a Westland Lysander aircraft in the North African desert in 1941. It was stiff and altogether unyielding to his will. His right leg today was also a traitor; it had been snapped in two places as he was caught in an avalanche on Monte Leone in 1952, when he’d been on the trail of the infamous professor of murder Dr. Shatterhand and his doxy of death Sabrina Neve. He had a headache that came and went, the nagging reminder of many fists, blackjacks and other items intended to knock his brains out. It was a wonder he still had any brains left at all.

He checked his Rolex. On the table next to him was a glass case that held a Breitling wristwatch with a plain brown leather band. He kept the watch working, though he never wore it. The watch was not his to wear.

The music ended, on its soft high lingering note.

He stood up. The darkness outside was almost complete. He took off the Rolex, took off his shoes, took off his socks, took off his trousers and underwear and shirt. He went out the door into the summer night, and drawing a long breath of fragrant pines and green moss he thought he might never come home again.

But he was certain he was going to kill at least one of them tonight. He would not go easy. He would not go without demanding a price be paid.

Opening the soul cage was more difficult than it used to be. The hinges creaked a little. The wolf balked, wanting to stay comfortable. It came when it was beckoned and it answered its call, but it was an older wolf, a slower wolf, and it had become a little bit hesitant of the pain of change.

Because the pain was the one thing that had not diminished. If anything, the pain had increased by many times. It was a hard birth for the wolf now, and a hard rebirth back to Michael Gallatin the man. Older bones for both wolf and man made the change slower, in each direction. The pain was exquisite. The pain that brought the scents, sounds, colors and forms in an explosion upon the senses unknown to ordinary men was almost too much to bear.

Almost…but then there always came the power, and though that had also diminished it was still the alpha and omega of the wolf, and it was still worth the journey from man to beast and back again.

He walked past his dark green Range Rover. He changed, as he stood in front of his church. He changed, in the dark with the yellow scythe of the moon hanging amid the clouds. He changed under a million million stars. Maybe he shuddered in pain and shed a few tears, but he changed.

He had never asked for this. Had never dreamed of it, when as an eight-year-old boy in Russia he’d followed a drifting white kite into a forest just like the one here in Wales he was about to penetrate. He’d never asked for this; it had been thrust upon him, whether he’d wanted it or not.

And now, as he contorted into a green-eyed wolf with more gray hair than black on its flanks and a certain injured stiffness in its stride, he thought how all these many years he had not been a hunter from the woods so much as he’d been a wanderer in the wilderness. It was the fate of all humans to wander in a wilderness, some made for them by others, some made by themselves. And the wilderness could be all of life, from beginning to end. A trackless wilderness that held no reference points nor easy places of rest. It was a place of hard demands and no acceptance of mistakes. It was a place that whittled a man of action down to a sleeper in a brown leather chair on a Sunday afternoon. And it was a place that could be so terribly lonely that the heart broke into a thousand pieces at the merest memory of a woman’s name and her touch in the night.

Michael could not go there. Not to that place. So he put his wolfen head down, and his wolfen body propelled itself forward, and though the old aches and agonies whispered through him and wanted to slow him down he loped onward into the woods, nearly soundlessly, his eyes seeking movement in the tangles of trees and folds of vegetation. They were here. They were close. Tonight there would be death.

Death had always been at his shoulder. It had always been leering at him, in the faces of many enemies. As he ran, searching, he thought of his trial by fire on the Caribbean island of Augustin Mireaux, the industrialist who had sold his soul and his nuclear missile plans to the Red Chinese. He thought of his battle against the drug-created assassin known as Chameleon that had begun in Paris, moved to Rio de Janeiro and ended in the Amazon jungle. He thought of his narrow escape with Aurore Bardot from Edward Wintergarden’s sinking submarine under the polar ice. He recalled Simon Tollemache’s barracuda pool, and the bloody massacre on the golf course at St. Andrews. He remembered Tragg, the killer with hypnotic eyes and two-tone shoes. He could trace in his memory every step through the deadly funhouse of Phaninath Po. All those and more remained in his head, though some he fervently wished he might forget. He wished he might forget about the Ginshi Kazoku—the Family of the Silver Thread—and the murder of the man he’d known as Mallory, but he could not.

This was why he was a hunter tonight. This was why he was ready to die, if he could kill at least one of them.

He loped onward at an easy pace, tasting the air for humans. These killers were careful. They were using an odor mask, which could be as simple as pine soap or as complex as a homeopathic drug. The Family of the Silver Thread was famous for its creation of exotic pharmaceuticals useful to the criminal underworld, as well as for its international trade in weapons and military secrets. It was said that the Silver Thread was woven through thousands of tapestries in dozens of countries, and trying to remove such a global intertwining of interests based on money and power was impossible and for the most part fatal. Last year Michael had succeeded in small part, by crippling a faction of the Silver Thread in Hong Kong. One of their weapons warehouses had gone up with an ear-splitting bang, a courier with a large suitcase full of money had found himself staring at a set of fangs just before they seized his throat, and the floating mansion of the jet-setting newspaper mogul and Silver Thread leader Anthony Tong had been sunk to the bottom of the bay with Tong’s body along as fishfood.

Something jumped in the brush as he approached. A rabbit, running for its life. It didn’t get very far before one of the other wolves emerged from the night to pounce on it, tear it to pieces and eat.

Michael went on, slinking close to the earth. There were many other wolves here. Real wolves, not questionable miracles such as himself. They came, stayed as long as they pleased, and then drifted away again. A few ran with him on a regular basis and seemed to see themselves as his ‘pack’ and he the alpha. Two days ago a new wolf had appeared in an area Michael thought of as the Four Brothers, which was a sloping meadow that held four huge granite boulders. The new wolf, coal black and smelling of maleness, had been lying up on one of the stones basking in the bright sunshine. When it saw him it sat upright, perhaps also recognizing the large black wolf with gray sides as the ruler of this domain. Michael noted that this new male had the rarity of ice-blue eyes, and the commanding way it held itself made him wonder if he wasn’t going to have to put up a fight to keep his kingdom.

Getting old was a bitch.

Michael suddenly stopped on his prowl through the woods. He had sensed something: a slow movement, a gliding from one patch of pure dark to another, a tensing of muscle before an action. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it was there. An owl hooted distantly and another answered. The noise of the night’s insects was a low susurrus.

He waited, all his senses on high alert.

When Valentine Vivian had retired six years ago to his estate in Wessex and begun writing paperback spy novels that no reader on earth could take seriously, a new hale and hearty boy had taken the reins of Special Operations. This one was straight out of Oxford, he wore natty tweeds and a regimental tie of the Royal Green Jackets, and he smoked a meerschaum pipe like a whorehouse chimney burning buggy bedsheets.

This new boy, by the name of Cordwainer, greeted Michael Gallatin one day in his office with the brusque statement I understand you’re quite the hero. Only at that early point Cordwainer had understood nothing. After a summoning to Valentine Vivian’s estate where the master of suspense interrupted his latest epic to inform Cordwainer of things that Cordwainer needed to know, from that point on Cordwainer had declined to have Michael anywhere near his office and peered around corners to make sure the hero wasn’t lurking in the shadow of the potted ficus tree.

Michael began moving again through the Welsh woods. Slowly…slowly…inch by inch. His left shoulder protested this movement, and his right hind leg felt on the verge of a cramp. His eyes ticked back and forth, measuring space and darkness and distance. His nose sniffed, searching the air. His ears were up, twitching.

After the scene in Hong Kong, Mallory had come to visit Michael in Wales. It seemed to Michael that Mallory had always looked like an elderly man, but maybe part of it had been stagecraft because Mallory in his dark blue suit and with his white hair combed and parted looked not much older to him than the day they’d sat drinking Guinness at a North African airstrip sixteen years before. Mallory had to be in his late seventies by now, yet perhaps he had against all odds retained the soul and spirit of a hale and hearty boy.

Valentine Vivian had been the head of Special Operations. Cordwainer What’sHisName was currently the head of Special Operations.

But Michael knew that this man sitting in his den, smoking a black briar pipe, was Special Operations, and it was a lifelong position.

The word, Mallory confided, was that the Silver Thread had taken photographs with a long-lensed Leica. That Michael had been trailed by their professionals and the pictures snapped at an unfortunate moment.

Michael had known what he meant. The Family of the Silver Thread had photographic proof of him changing from man to wolf, or back again.

Be very, very careful, Mallory had told him. They may want your skin, or your heart, or your head. Or they may want all of you. So be very, very careful. But not more than a month later, it was Mallory who had not been careful enough. Missing for more than a week, he was found in the trunk of an abandoned taxi in an East London junkyard with his throat cut and his eyes gouged out. Valentine Vivian hired a small army of bodyguards and went on an author’s tour of America, his author’s name being Evelyn Tedford, and Cordwainer the new boy bought an attack dog to patrol his recently-acquired electric fence.

Had something moved, or not?

Michael got still. He heard the owl hooting again, and another answering. It came to him that just possibly they were not owls after all.

The night hung on the edge of violence.

There was this hero thing, Michael had often thought in less troubled times. This concept of the man of action. After all this time, he realized Rolfe Gantt had been right.

Everyone loved the hero, but the hero walked alone. It was the nature of the hero, to be solitary. To live life on his own terms, and in his own time. To be neither rushed nor to rush toward oblivion, yet oblivion would claim the hero just as it claimed every ordinary man. And love? Ah, that. Love. What woman was it who could truly love the hero? Oh, they might wish to brush against the heroic flesh, or to have some fling in the heroic bed and make for themselves some memory of a heroic night, but love? No. When the chips were down and the night was cold, it was the ordinary man who won the heart. The man of meat-and-potatoes, the man who stayed fixed in place, the man who saw his destiny and future in a family, the man to whom wife and daughter or son transformed life into a hero’s dream.

But such was not to be, for a hunter from the woods.

The death of a hunter loomed large in Michael’s mind on this night, as it did on many nights. He was old and he was tired. He was hurting and he was slow. What was ahead for this hunter, who had already given everything? There was only one thing left to give: his life, in exchange for transfiguration from what was to what will be, as the lark ascends into the heavens and the last soft note fades slowly out.

But it was not a soft note he suddenly heard, that made his wolf-bones jump and his green eyes widen.

It was an explosion that cracked across the forest and echoed from every rock in the meadow of Four Brothers.

It was, he realized, the sound of his house being destroyed.

Several explosions followed the first. He saw the leap of fire through the trees and smelled the bitter tang of gunpowder in the concussive wind. They had blown his church to pieces so he might not find sanctuary there. They wanted him out in the open. They wanted him to know fear, because they moved as silently and swiftly as any wolves in the dark.

And then a shadow shifted before him, very near, and the black arrow from the black bow fired by the ninja in black came at him with a serpent’s hiss.

Even as he twisted his body to escape, Michael Gallatin knew the arrow would find its mark.

It did. It hit him on the right side. Its soft plastic tip, about the size of a ripe fig, burst open on contact. It splashed and streaked his gray hair with the bright green glow of chemical phosphorescence. He was well and truly marked.

The ninja moved again, in a blur. A gloved hand opened and closed.

A net of some fine and pliable metal caught moonlight as it bloomed in the air. It sailed toward the lycanthrope, expanding as it came.

Michael saw the fallen tree to his left and the narrow space between it and the earth. He flung himself into the opening, his claws digging into the ground for traction.

The net hit the tree above him, snagged on its stubs of dead branches, and the wolf pulled in his breath to flatten his ribcage and scrabbled under the trunk. Then he quickly turned to face his attacker. With a running start he took a powerful leap, pushed off with his hind legs against the treetrunk and fell upon the ninja.

It was not to be so simple. The ninja retreated. With incredible speed that turned the wolf’s leap into a slow-motion exercise, the assassin threw up a roundhouse kick that got Michael in the belly. As the wolf’s body twisted again, this time in pain, the ninja got his balance and drove a rock-knuckled fist into the center of the chest. He was gone as Michael crashed into the underbrush.

Michael drew a wounded breath and righted himself. He saw the ninja moving through the foliage on his left. With an instant’s pause to calculate distance and speed he took off in pursuit.

The ninja was fast and he was nimble, but this was the wolf’s world.

Michael caught the killer’s right ankle between his teeth and crushed it. The ninja suffered in silence, but would not go down; he gave a one-legged leap toward the nearest tree and began to climb it, using what Michael thought must be small metal pitons embedded in his bootsoles. Michael leaped up, caught the man’s left ankle and dragged him down. The ninja whirled around and like a cornered animal fought with everything he had: fists to the skull, a knee to the muzzle, stiffened fingers thrusting toward the eyes and the edge of the hand chopping for the throat. They did their deadly dance in silence, as flames crackled from the werewolf’s church and red sparks whirled to heaven.

Michael took a blow to the side of the head that made him whuff with pain. He dodged a strike meant to blind him. Then in a split-second calculation his animal instinct determined where the fist would be next and his jaws were there waiting for it. He crunched the fingers and torn human flesh to shreds. Blood sprayed into the air. The ninja gave a quiet noise not unlike a sigh of resignation. His remaining hand came at Michael with a slim-bladed knife in it and plunged the blade into the wolf’s left shoulder.

But Michael had his bloodlust at full charge now and the sharp bite of Japanese steel would not turn him aside. When the ninja withdrew the knife to strike again, the wolf gripped his arm at the elbow and with a ferocious thrash broke the bones and nearly tore the limb from its socket. The knife flew away from dead fingers. Michael seized the throat and ripped it open from ear-to-ear. A glistening black flood washed over his muzzle. Then something gave a small pop on the ground next to him and smoke welled up into his face. His eyes stung. He smelled an odor of bitter almonds. His lungs hitched and his heart was racing. He held his breath, even as the second gas grenade exploded behind him. A second ninja had joined the battle.

Michael let the first one slither to the earth and then he turned and ran. At full speed, or whatever speed he could manage. A third grenade popped to his right, spewing a noxious cloud. He squeezed his eyes shut and ran blindly. Even a half-breath of the stuff was strong enough to nearly knock him senseless. He thought this was how they must have subdued his companion, then slashed the throat and taken the eyes. Maybe the gas had worked its will on Mallory, too. He began to feel his usually innate sense of direction betraying him; where was he, and where was he going? He crashed through a thicket and fell through thorns and down an embankment into a hollow where a pool of water smelled green. He plunged his head into the pool and opened his eyes to wash them out. Then he shook his head to clear it as best he could and lapped up water with a tongue that felt burned.

He stood breathing hard through swollen lungs, his heart pounding. He saw the woods through a drugged mist. When he tried to move, he staggered. Wait, he told himself. He kept breathing, deeply and slowly. Maybe he could get his heartbeat regulated. He listened to the night and for the things that stalked in the night. How many ninjas there were, he had no way of knowing. He was going to have to get out of this hollow before they found him here, dazed and confused. And go where? he asked himself.

There was only one answer.

Go back to what had taken him to Octavius Zloy’s trailer in the dead of night. Go back to what had brought him out of the ruined church in the Russian village, when he’d seen Valentine Vivian being carried away by men with guns. Go back to what had made him ask Paul Wesshauser if he could make a torpedo. Go back to facing Rolfe Gantt’s pistol and saying he would let no man tell him what to do on the last day of his life. Go back to telling the Gestapo’s Ice Man to take his hand off Franziska Luxe’s arm.

Go back to being a man, even if he wore a wolf’s clothing. Go back to the fight.

Always, always…go back to the fight.

Michael Gallatin climbed up the embankment, pushed through the thorns and the thicket, and he was very much aware that his phosphorescent glow would bring them coming now, at any minute.

He was ready to kill, and he was ready to die. But he would go out as he had lived, and no fear would cripple his cause.

A wind moved through the trees. It stirred the new leaves on the old branches.

It was the zenith of summer, and looking up at the scythe of the moon Michael opened his mouth and howled for what life had meant to him. For the joy of it, and yes for the sorrows too. All were important, in the grand scheme of things. He had not chosen this path. It had chosen him. But he thought—he hoped—he had walked it well and with honor, as both wolf and man.

They fell upon him from the dark.

There were two. One whirled a chain around Michael’s throat and tightened it so hard the blood thundered in his head. The second had a baton in one hand and a net in the other, and Michael realized they meant not to kill him but to trap him. To take him on a drugged journey and place him before the Family of the Silver Thread, whose scientists would like to know what little boys who became wolves were made of.

Michael turned toward his attackers. With a snarl and show of fangs that would have dropped any ordinary man to his knees, Michael first lunged toward the ninja who chained him. He got a kick to the muzzle from a man who was as quick as a cobra, but Michael was not stopped nor was he slowed. He hit the ninja with all the power he had and slammed the man’s back against a tree. Then lifting up on his hind legs and pinning the ninja with his forepaws he tore into the masked face as one would scoop the flesh from an exotic fruit. He saw the wet terror in the man’s eyes as fangs tore meat and muscle away from bone, and in a frenzy of killing Michael shivered to his animal core.

He enjoyed it.

The chain loosened. Michael pulled it free from the ninja’s hand. The thing in front of him had no lower jaw but it was trying to scream. Something stabbed him on the left side. In the next instant he was lifted off his hind legs and thrown to the ground and he smelled the ozone of the electric shock after the searing pain had ripped through him. He struggled up to his knees, his muzzle dripping blood and his eyes full of red fire. He realized he was connected on the right side by a pair of wires to the baton in the remaining ninja’s grip.

A finger moved, a spark jumped, and the current delivered agony to Michael Gallatin.

As the shock tortured him, he changed back and forth. From wolf to man and back again, an involuntary reaction to the electricity. He fell again to his side, in wolf form, and tried to get up again but once more the finger moved and the current obeyed and the electrical shock coursed through his body in waves that took him from wolf to man and man to wolf in a matter of seconds. His mind felt blasted; he had no sense of abrupt change, but rather that he had always been both wolf and man at the same time all his life and he had never known it.

He told himself to get up. To keep fighting. He reached for the wires to yank their hooks out of his flesh.

But the next long and terrible shock told him to stay down, and to give up.

He lay as a man, weak and naked and bleeding. His strength was gone. He watched as the ninja came forward to throw the net, and then maybe there would be another gas grenade or a blow to the head and Michael Gallatin knew his freedom would be over.

The death of a hunter, he thought in his suffering and near-delirium. He tried to change back to his more powerful form. He couldn’t open the soul cage. Not this time.

The wolf was paralyzed by shock, and the door of the soul cage was sealed shut.

The ninja came forward, a graceful evil.

He never reached his destination.

For in the next instant a coal black wolf sprang at him from the side, and bearing him down to the earth it planted its paws upon his chest and took his throat between its jaws and with an explosion of power nearly ripped the head from the neck. Then it cracked the ninja’s breastbone like an eggshell and winnowed its muzzle in and plucked out the still-beating heart. It turned its head to show Michael Gallatin the prize, and Michael saw that the black wolf’s eyes were ice-blue. The wolf ate the ninja’s heart.

It licked the last of the blood from around its mouth.

Then it stood up on its hind legs, and with a shiver of anticipation it began to change.

As the black hair disappeared into white flesh, as the bones remade themselves and the spine drew its tail inward, as the ears became human and the face began to compose itself, the man walked toward Michael. He stood about two inches over six feet and he had a narrow-waisted body with wide strong shoulders. He moved with confidence, and Michael thought there was some arrogance in there as well. Fully revealed, the man was maybe in his mid-thirties, with thick black hair that tumbled over his forehead. He had a handsome, intelligent face with high cheekbones and the elegant nose of a lost aristocrat. A Russian face, Michael thought. The man’s intense blue eyes remained fixed on Michael, even as he knelt down and pulled the hooks out from Michael’s phosphorescent-streaked side.

Michael just stared in amazement at this walking miracle. But he realized he recognized the eyes. With a start, he remembered whose they were.

The younger man spoke with a distinctive Russian accent. A warmth came up in his eyes that melted all the ice away.

“My name is Peter,” he said.

And he added, “I think you are my father.”