The Interlopers

5

WHEN YOU'RE HUNTING AN ANIMAL that can smell you, you've got to figure your approach very carefully according to the wind; when man is the quarry you can forget such refinements. The wind was right, anyway, blowing gently from the sniper to me, and there was good stalking cover the whole way-if I could only break away to take advantage of it without getting shot first.

I mean, if I could see him up there through the intervening brush, he could undoubtedly see me down here, and he was presumably doing his looking through the rifle-scope, with his finger on the trigger. I was gambling that he wouldn't try to drive a light, high-speed, easily deflected.243 bullet through a mess of twigs and branches as long as he had a good chance-or thought he had-of F catching me in the open if he waited. But the minute he guessed that I was aware of the trap and trying to get out of it, he'd undoubtedly shoot rather than risk losing me.

Of course, it didn't have to be a.243 and he didn't have to be the mysterious marksman who'd killed Nystrom and his dog with two well-placed shots for reasons still to be determined. But that sharpshooter was the most likely candidate, and I wanted badly to get out of his sights before he chalked up two Nystroms-one real and one phony-to his credit.

Luck helped me out, in the form of a rabbit that took off in front of Hank, who was too young to resist the temptation. He was gone in a flash, right on the bunny's heels. Running rabbits is a serious crime for a bird dog of any kind, and it gave me an excuse to blast fiercely on the whistle and shout loud imprecations that I hoped carried well against the wind to the man with the gun while I stumbled clumsily after the chase-until it carried me out of sight into a brushy gully.

Crouching there, I continued to whistle and yell until the pup came slinking back, very guilty and ashamed of himself. I spoke to him severely and used the leash to tie him to a tree, letting him think that was part of the punishment. Then I drew a long breath; I'd made it out of sight, and there were no bulletholes in me, and my adversary was not alerted. At least I hoped he wasn't. Leaving the pup tied, keeping low, I made a quick circle of the little knoll, slipping up behind the rifleman without further trouble. When I got within a couple of hundred yards of the spot, I could see that he was still there.

I had a good view of the sole of a boot sticking out of the brush, and from this angle I could see about half a bare head above the undergrowth. It had a lot of hair on it, but sexwise that means nothing these days, and as far as I'm concerned, no double standard applies to people who hide in bushes with rifles, anyway.

With a rifle of my own, I might have tried the shot, but all I had was Grant Nystrom's choice of sidearms: a short-barreled Colt.357 Magnum revolver with the butt trimmed down for concealment purposes. It wasn't a bad gun as revolvers go-it was a lot more gun than the.38 Specials we're usually issued-but it was no long-range weapon, and I'm not much of a long-range pistol-shooter, either. The long-range capabilities were all with the opposition, which made my problem clear if not simple: I had to get close enough for one good shot before he spotted me, since I probably wouldn't be given time for a second should the first one miss.

I looked around. The ground rose to the left toward another bare hillside-bare of brush, but there was some scraggy grass that I thought would give me at least partial cover. I worked my way up there, using my knees and elbows, until I was above the sniper and about eighty yards away. instinct warned me that was as close as I'd better go.

I slipped the.357 out of its trick holster inside my waistband, and cocked it, muffling the click under my jacket. I made myself steady and comfortable, flat on my stomach. Parting the screen of grass in front of me, I tried the square, target-type sights against the prone figure below me, with both elbows firmly on the ground and both hands on the gun. One-handed pistol shooting is mandatory in target matches, but this was simple homicide and there are no rules for that.

The man down there-if it was a man-stirred uneasily, obviously wondering where I'd disappeared to and what I was up to. Well, it was about time. He lifted his head from the rifle stock and glanced over his shoulder as if he'd sensed my presence, and it was nobody I'd ever seen before in real life or in photographs, just a hippie-looking youth sporting longish hair, a droopy moustache, and long fuzzy sideburns.

I drew a long breath, realizing that, hair or no hair, small rifle or big, I'd subconsciously been expecting to see a man I knew-well, a man whom I'd never actually met, but whose dossier I'd studied very carefully, a man who was supposed to be good both with knives and rifles. Without quite realizing it, I'd been looking forward to finishing right here the principal part of my mission, the part assigned me by Mac. Somehow I'd convinced myself it was Holz I was up against already, although why Holz should be shooting down Nystroms wholesale hadn't been quite clear in my mind.

Still, as Mac had pointed out, couriers had been eliminated before by the people for whom they'd worked. Mr. Smith's mysterious source of information to the contrary could be all wet. It still wasn't totally out of the question that this espionage ring we were after had first summoned their kill-specialist to handle a personnel problem, and then sent him on to deal with an obvious impostor. But the man in front of me was not Hans Holz.

I sighed and lowered the gun, wondering who the hell the young marksman was and what to do about him. Of course, he had been trying to kill me, which was naughty of him. It even prejudiced me against him rather strongly, but we're not supposed to act on prejudice. Dead men are awkward to have around. They tend to get the local police all upset, and I still had work to do in Pasco that would be more easily done without police interference. Reluctantly, I started to let down the hammer of the Colt. Regardless of their age or importance-or unimportance- I don't like leaving behind me, alive, people who've clearly indicated their eagerness to shoot me dead, but sometimes it has to be done.

The young man in the bushes stiffened suddenly, watching something out in front of him. He put his face to the stock of the rifle once more, peering through the big telescopic sight. I looked where he was aiming, and there came the black pup, loping across the hillside straight toward us, pausing every so often to check his radar. I mean, he wasn't tracking me; he wasn't following the roundabout way I'd come. He was no ground-sniffing hound. He had his nose in the air, as a bird-dog should, and he was reading my scent on the gentle breeze, and making straight for the source of it.

A foot and a half of chewed-off leash dangled from his collar. Well, nobody'd told him not to chew his leash in two. Nobody'd really told him to stay put, either. Orders, he might have obeyed, but a little leather string had been only a momentary hindrance to be disposed of with the nice, sharp, adult dental equipment that had recently replaced his puppy teeth. A couple of good chomps, and he'd been on his way to find the boss.

I looked bleakly at the boy in the brush below me: he had the rifle ready, he was preparing to shoot. I remembered that the real Hank had been shot, we still didn't know why. I knew a funny little stirring of anger: the juvenile son-of-a-bitch was going to shoot my dog. This was sentimental and irrelevant, but professionally I was just as concerned, because the pup was essential to my Grant Nystrom cover. It occurred to me that I might have got hold of an important idea here, but I had no time to develop it.

I just recocked the.357 and brought it back into line and put gentle pressure on the trigger. The drop-your-gun-and-stand-up-with-your-hands-above-your-head routine looks great on TV, but with a pistol at eighty yards I needed my target perfectly still. If I started shouting silly orders and gave him a chance to roll aside, I'd probably muff the shot, and that would give him a crack at me with his high-powered rifle. At this range, with that outfit, he couldn't possibly miss. So I just steadied the coarse revolver sights on the widest point of the target and increased the trigger pressure until the piece fired.

The.357 made an ear-splitting racket, rearing up in recoil in spite of the two-handed grip I had on the skimpy butt. For a moment, it blotted out the man in the bushes. When I got it recocked and lined up once more, he was lying exactly where he had been. The only difference was that all the sharpshooting tension had gone out of his body, and his head had dropped slightly, resting peacefully on the rifle stock as if on a pillow.